celebration
by Douglas Messerli
Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Velvet
Goldmine / 1998
It is rather intimidating, I must admit, to
write about a film that pretends it is not portraying what it truly is. You’d
think that having written on dozens of pre-1960s movies in which LGBTQ behavior
was hidden underneath and within narratives that claimed to be about
heterosexual behavior I’d find no difficultly about speaking of gay director
Todd Haynes’ 1998 extravaganza, Velvet Goldmine, in which
sexuality—whether gay, bisexual, lesbian, transsexual, or undetermined—is quite
openly portrayed—would be a simple matter.
In
this case, however, director Haynes, having planned to celebrate the glam rock
scene of the early 1970s through a character very loosely based on David Bowie
and his friends, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed, was stymied in his attempt by Bowie’s
threaten to sue if he went through with it.
Bowie, as we all know, had long since passed on to several other
personae and was surely disinterested in his more than indiscriminate past. By
1984, the time in which this movie is set, Bowie had moved far away from his
flamboyant and androgynous Ziggy Stardust alter ego to become a serious film
star and to collaborate with yet another gay icon, Queen, in his 1981 album Under
Pressure. By 1998, the time of the release of Haynes’ film Bowie had
shifted to soul, jazz, hip-hop and, most importantly, electronic music of Black
Tie White Noise and The Buddha of Suburbia (both 1993), and “Let’s
Dance,” before working with Brian Eno on Outside (1995) and was quickly
moving on to aging celebrity status by being in inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame in 1996 and “awarded” a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in
1997.
How would it help him to now be reminded of his crossdressing jumps into
the sack with Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, and god knows how many others, as well as
his drug addiction and his declaration in 1972 of being gay (in an interview
with Michael Watts in Melody Maker) and his reassertion of the fact in
his 1976 interview in Playboy: "It's true—I am a bisexual. But I
can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing
that ever happened to me."? By 1983 Bowie had rethought the whole issue,
suggesting in an interview in Rolling Stone that his public admission of
bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made"; "I was always
a closet heterosexual."
Just a few weeks before the shoot, according to actor Jonathan Rhys
Meyers, his character was transformed from a Bowie-like figure to an amalgam
character, Brian Slade, patterned after Bowie, Jobriath and, to a lesser
extent, Marc Bolan. Moreover, there would no longer be any music by Bowie
accompanying the story.
Yes, Slade, like Bowie shacks up in Berlin with his now favorite singer,
Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor)—a character now incorporating elements of both Iggy
Pop (who like Wild grew up in a trailer park) and Lou Reed (who was sent by his
homophobic parents to get “cured” through electroshock therapy)—totally
unphased by dropping to the ground, going nude, having sex, and taking drugs in
the middle of his concerts, who totally wowed the as yet unestablished Slade,
whose dropped-jaw appreciation of Wild’s on-stage nudity he expressed to his
wife: "I just wish it had been me. I wish I'd thought of it.”
Slade, still seeking a persona for himself develops almost a worshipful
relationship with Wild, while, in reverse, by taking on the Iggy/Lou figure
helps to return some sense of stability to Wild’s life—even if it ends with
Slade’s ultimate rejection.
But
then Slade eventually feels the need (just as Bowie obviously had) to reject
himself, hiring a mock murderer, Jack Fairy (Micko Westmoreland) to assassinate
him at the height of his career. Is it any wonder than ten years later, when
the truth comes out, Slade’s fans have nearly all forgotten him?
Enter British reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), now working for a
US music rag, whose editor suddenly assigns Stuart to dig into Slade’s past in
an attempt to discover whatever happened to the dead man who still, apparently,
is living—which might be read almost as an enchiridion or even a method book on
how to read Haynes’ film, which, like its characters, in turn is itself beholden
to the books of Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet, both pleasure-seekers who help to
destroy themselves.
At first simply irked that he has been yanked away from another story to
write about Slade, perhaps simply because he is British and younger that the
rest of the staff and is expected to know all about “that stuff,” the reporter
sets out on a journey paralleling Orson Welles’ character Jerry Thompson in Citizen
Kane. Like Thompson on the trail of the meaning of “Rosebud,” Charles
Foster Kane’s last word, Stuart sets out to interview the figures closest to
Slade, including his wheel-chair bound manager Jerry Devine (Eddie Izard),
reminding us of Joseph Cotton, Slade’s performer friends such as Jack Fairy,
and Slade’s former wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), who like Kane’s wife, Susan
Alexander Kane, is now an alcoholic willing to spill her guts in a nightclub
where she sings.
Through these interviews we gradually get a vague kind of portrait of
Slade and his alter-persona Maxwell Demon, accompanied by a soundtrack
featuring a lot a great music from numerous musicians with whom Bowie worked
and by whom he was influenced (Little Richard, T. Rex, Venus in Furs, Roxy
Music, The Stooges, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Steve Harley and more), while also
gradually coming to the recognition that behind Slade, just as Ziggy Stardust,
there was no real person dressed up in the outrageous costumes, dancing out the
sexually charged motions, and plaintively singing those anthems.
Slade-Demon-Ziggy, perhaps even the Iggy of those days had to die because they
never truly existed. Like the glam heroes of Haynes’ film, they were all
fictions.
Yet what these celebratory chimeras accomplished was a complete sexual
and social revolution for their audiences. In this film the sexual energy
behind those performances is conveyed in Slade’s and Wild’s—as well as the
fictional duo and Meyers’ and McGregor’s—18 second on screen kiss (others, not
me, have timed this), not to ignore their playing out of their newly-discovered
emotional relationship, as in Haynes’ film The Karen Carpenter Story,
with Barbie dolls.
But the “real” action so to speak, was always on the other side of the
stage, screen, or whatever other world they momentarily inhabited: in the
nubile bodies and newly opened-minds of their fans, represented by the
“Rosebud” of this picture, the reporter Stuart himself, who we gradually
discover, as a homosexual kid dared to purchase a Slade record and dress up in
glam-like drag, awkwardly entering his private real world as a transformed being
instead of the weak faggot his father assessed him to be.
Stuart’s later encounters with Wild, his adult meeting with the
washed-up singer who insists upon presenting him with a ring given him by Slade
that once belonged to Oscar Wilde, and a brief youthful sexual coupling with
the same man—may or may not be fantasy.
It
doesn’t matter, figures like Wild and Slade have long ago passed into his body.
By the time he realizes what happened to Brian Slade, his New York editor has
nixed the essay, reassigning him to follow the new singing sensation Tommy
Stone (Alastair Cumming), who Stuart has come to recognize is a lesser version
of the man from which he has been reincarnated.
Los Angeles, September 21, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).
