This week, we explore Velvet Goldmine, a fictionalized version of the 70s glam scene that was made popular by artists like Bowie, Iggy, Reed, Slade, and Gary Glitter
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick:
1998’s exploration of the glam rock scene sees filmmaker Todd Haynes riffing on the backstage legends of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and others using a non-linear style and a killer soundtrack. In the star studded affair, journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) looks back at the 70s glam rock scene exploring the disappearance of the scene’s central figure, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Myers). Through the flashbacks and interviews, we learn all about the scene that was, while getting to experience the importance of the scene in helping Stuart come out as a gay man.
Featured Guests
Drew Tinnin is a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic, a member of the Austin Film Critics Association, and a Rondo Award nominated entertainment journalist. With nearly 15 years of experience, Drew has contributed to numerous print and digital publications, including Fangoria magazine, /Film, Dazed, and Dread Central.
Set inside a dreamlike alt-history that holds up a cocaine-streaked mirror of our own glam rock past where Bowie reigned supreme, Velvet Goldmine feels like it exists inside its own sparkling little snowglobe. Director Todd Haynes (I’m Not There, May December) travels from the nightclub energy of the 70s into the rolled up white jacket sleeves of the Reagan 80s to catch up with a crest-fallen rock star named Brian Slade aka Maxwell Demon (played by Jonanthan Rhys-Myers in his androgynous prime). The story, and the blistering soundtrack, dovetail beautifully to document the flamboyant rise of lad-rock that eventually gives way to the disenfranchised angst of UK Punk.
Kicking off with Brian Eno’s “Needle in the Camel’s Eye” as dozens of glitter kids run wild in the streets, Velvet Goldmine’s first needle drop signals that change is in the air. Glam rock disciples Shudder to Think carry the weight of the soundtrack, singing about the pitfalls of fleeting fame with a transcendent cover of Roxy Music’s “2HB.” The show-stopper, of course, is their recording of “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon” that sends Velvet Goldmine hurtling into space opera territory. Once Haynes’s cinematic ode to T. Rex ventures into the 1980s, Ewan McGregor pogos up and down on a grimy stage doing his best impression of Iggy Pop howling “TV Eye” by The Stooges.
Premiering just before Halloween in 1998, Velvet Goldmine boasts one of the best soundtracks of the 90s. Those tracks were a much needed reprieve from the nu-metal scene that was quickly taking over the Z generation. To this day, every song seems to whisper that it’s still perfectly fine to play dress up, even if the sun’s about to come up.
Faith Johnson is a former film work and lifetime film enthusiast who hopes to get through her Letterboxd watchlist sometime in the next century, give or take.
Cribbing heavily from Citizen Kane’s structure, Todd Haynes’ film Velvet Goldmine searches for the soul of an enigmatic figure, rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Ostensibly a newspaper puff piece assigned to Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), it becomes a deeply personal journey for him as he revisits his own experiences as a former fan of Slade, through interviews with people like Slade’s ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and his musical collaborator and former lover Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor).
The film’s opulent visuals (cinematography by Maryse Alberti, sets by Christopher Hobbs, and costumes which earned Sandy Powell an Oscar nomination that she lost to herself) do not obscure the thematic depth. It’s an odyssey of identity and self-discovery through the lens of 1970s glam rock and its progenitors like Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet. (While the title comes from a David Bowie song, none of his music is featured and the story was changed due to his objections to similarities to his career. Though Bowie is certainly one of the most talented and innovative artists of this era, the compelled shift in focus away from the figurehead seems in keeping with its theme.)
Velvet Goldmine was the first time I ever heard the word “bisexual” in a movie. I was a closeted teen in suburban Maryland when I first saw this in 2003, still trying to come to terms with my own identity. Arthur proudly shouting “That’s me, that’s me, Dad, that’s me!” while his working-class British parents watch a televised press conference of Brian Slade discussing his bisexuality mirrored what I yearned to do to the world.
What does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be understood? This sort of exploration tends to get messy, especially if you’re queer in today’s society. Much like real society, this movie offers no clear answers. Some characters come to terms with being a changed version of themselves as the years go by while others burrow deeper under layers of artifice. But life is not a single resolution, it’s a path. Velvet Goldmine showed me a path to exploring myself at a time when I needed it most, and it will certainly be the most impactful work of art on my whole life.
The Team
Julian Singleton
While I’d previously seen Velvet Goldmine as an impressionable guy in his twenties, it was a different and crushing experience entirely seeing this as an out bi polyam guy in his mid-thirties.
Todd Haynes’ defiantly flamboyant and brutally honest love letter/eulogy to 70s glam rock began as a loose David Bowie biopic in the vein of his infamous (and still buried) Karen Carpenter biopic Superstar. In losing the rights to do so, however, Haynes’ film becomes something so much more. In the tempestuous landscape of post-hypocritical-Hippie pop culture, the Glam scene gives so many lost and misunderstood spirits the visual and social language to unlock deeper parts of themselves. For Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Myers), surrendering to persona Maxwell Demon–and all the glittery, heteronormative-bucking fabulous furor within–grants him a riotous artistic freedom that gives fans like Arthur (Christian Bale) the courage to explore their own bisexuality and social nonconformity.
Feverishly blending highlights of Bowie, Marc Bolan, and more, Myers’ pop idol is an elusive, gorgeous force to be reckoned with, an alluring strength that reveals its own crippling insecurities and weaknesses as his sparkle fades with time. Goldmine itself, told through others’ perspectives, reveal how Slade’s seeming openness proved to be anything but. In adopting his persona as a way of pursuing deeper freedom, Slade constructed his own opulent prison–especially when caught between the self-destructive natures of his own idol/romantic partner Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and the building identity-stripping pressures of fame.
Slade’s attempt at escape via staged suicide torches his career and public goodwill–and, by strange cultural osmosis, Maxwell Demon’s death causes an entire generation to doubt the identities they finally seized for themselves. The result: the Reagan–I mean Reynolds years.
Haynes seizes upon the era’s deliberate artifice and camp, fusing it with the words of Oscar Wilde, the eye-popping sets of Christopher Hobbs, and the jaw-dropping costumes of Sandy Powell. While the setting and style may be gaudy as fuck, it all brims with a dazzling sincerity; it’s all fake, but that in no way invalidates how real and immediate these experiences were. In the context of this series, Velvet Goldmine feels like such a clarion call to return to an era of anarchic emotional honesty and shake off the bookending decades of rigid repression. Haynes urges us to embrace this freedom with the knowledge that part of the beauty of living our sexual, gendered, artistic truth has as much to do with accepting the consequences of that freedom as much as the freedom itself.
Also, this film runs rings around the Almost Famous test–I could listen to this soundtrack forever.
Justin Harlan
As a 17 year old punk rock kid, this movie hit me right away when I saw it upon its released on VHS and continues to rock 26 years later. While I’ve always considered myself straight and am not generally all that attracted to men, the idea of what we now called genderfluidness and pansexuality was never alarmign or disgusting to me, as it was many of the young men in the 90s that I grew up around, especially in the Evangelical youth group circles I ran in around this time. Of course, the punk scene that I was as much engrossed in as the church was likely part of my ability to maintain an openness to all types of ideas and diverse lifestyles – well, that and the radical love of Jesus that so many int he church don’t seem to understand or even want to understand… but I digress.
Films with great soundtracks are always top of the list for me. This was true in 1999 when I saw the film and it remains true now. Like Julian notes above, there’s a baseline for this in movies like Almost Famous, which I rewatch yearly to this day. What’s different in Velvet Goldmine, though, is that it is not only clearly a drama fueled by a great soundtrack – but, it is also a powerful story of fighting against normal society and doing what you love, even if it paints you as a weirdo. And, of course, I gravitate towards the Iggy Pop-modeled Curt Wild, as portrayed by the stellar Ewan McGregor.
This all said, I remain as enamored with this film at I was in 1999 – seeing its importance and its place in queer cinema far more now than I did back then. While Ed was too busy to join in this week, I chose it in part for him, so he better watch it soon… but even if he doesn’t, it is never a bad thing to have an excuse to revisit this gem.
Two Cents Celebrates the month of June with Pride/Riot
Join us all month long for a collection of titles that spotlight the LGBTQ+ community with a mix of heart, edge, and defiance.
June 23 – Stranger By The Lake– (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
June 30 – BPM (Kanopy, Pluto)
