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Stop! Glamour Time
by Ben Thompson
from Neon magazine, 1998

Rock buffs have slammed Todd Haynes' long-awaited glam rock extravaganza as a travesty of the truth. But the director doesn't care. Because like the stars it salutes, Velvet Goldmine is artfully and outrageously made up ...

The big West End cinema echoes with the kind of hush you only get in a large room that's completely full. A sound suddenly punctures the silence. It's the sound of footsteps -- which must be a good 30 yards away -- getting louder even as the stepper gets further away. Why is it that someone's diffident progress to the toilet should seem as intrusive as a builder demolishing a bathroom next door?

You don't have to look too far to find the cause of this sudden shift in sensory perception. It's up there on the screen, where those two men are kissing. With tongues and everything. And people are finding it difficult. Perhaps because one of the men, Ewan McGregor, is very famous. Perhaps because the other -- a chiseled fop named Jonathan Rhys Meyers -- looks so desperate to be.

The film they are in, Todd Haynes' long-awaited Velvet Goldmine, is supposed to be the kind everyone makes so much fuss about beforehand that by the time it's released, the audience are already sick of it. But Goldmine is not one of those films. It's half an hour too long. It's a bit confusing. There are so many different time frames that the first viewing is like looking down a hall of mirrors. But after you've seen it once, you might want to see it again. And then you will start to notice things that will surprise you.

Like the fact that this is a film in which Eddie Izzard's acting performance as flamboyant manager Jerry Devine can honestly be said to be quite good. Like how most of the people in the streets and tube station doorways in the opening scenes -- seemingly in warped tribute to the title sequence of the TV series Budgie -- turn out to be characters in the film. Like the way being plucked out of a crowd and made an individual is the perfect representation of what Velvet Goldmine is saying pop music can do for people.

The extent to which Velvet Goldmine seems to have been designed for repeated viewing reinforces an obvious comparison with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But whereas Richard O'Brien's legendary transvestite musical was a complete one-off whose enduring allure can be attributed as much to its distance from actual pop culture as its proximity to it, Velvet Goldmine slots instantly into the lineage of great pop films that includes The Girl Can't Help It, Quadrophenia, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, and Breaking Glass (oh alright then, maybe not Breaking Glass) -- films that are actually a part of the tradition from which they feed, not just a draughty cinematic adjunct.

A soundtrack featuring such late-90's luminaries as Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Placebo's Brian Molko, Donna Matthews of Elastica -- all of whom appear in the film to varying degrees of recognisability -- is not the only thing that gives Goldmine the power to grip a generation too young to know Mud from Cockney Rebel. Where it might have been a dreary docu-style history lesson -- a sort of dramatised TOTP2 -- Goldmine instead succeeds in bringing to life a vital pop heritage, a tradition that informs contemporary pop legends from the Manic Street Preachers to Marilyn Manson and, best of all, somehow makes it just as alien and unexpected as it was first time around.

Velvet Goldmine's writer-director Todd Haynes is a sweet-natured 37-year-old American, who looks rather like Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, and talks as Moore would were he gay and a nicer person. How does he feel about the people -- and there are quite a few -- who hate his film with a passion? "I know they're out there," Haynes says cheerfully, "but I'm not too bothered about them. This is the first glam rock movie; it doesn't have to be the last."

If films were like real life, there would be no point in their existence, and Haynes is nobody's dirty realist. "I guess the pedestrian nature of the biopic just doesn't suit this material," he grins wryly. "I wanted the film to be glam rock rather than be about glam rock."

Velvet Goldmine sets out not so much to capture the glam spirit of making something out of nothing and nothing out of something as to hammer the point home. The film's basic structure -- in which journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) digs back into his past, and everyone else's, to find out the truth about a glam star who faked his own death -- self-consciously echoes Citizen Kane, just as its backdrop (grim '70s Britain, terrible clothes, badly applied make-up) unself-consciously echoes Citizen Smith.

The contrast between the glamour of the centre and the bleakness of the hinterland is very dear to Haynes' heart, maybe because he grew up in the outskirts of LA. One of the most striking things about Velvet Goldmine is the way it imagines the British urban landscape of the '70s as effectively as Haynes' last film, Safe (1995), conjured up America's. "I wanted that bland industrial landscape to be a backdrop for this bright, shiny pop moment," he says. "In a way that's where it was most vivid, because that's where the kids really needed it."

Velvet Goldmine's two main characters -- Rhys Meyers' fey UK overlord Brian Slade and McGregor's manic American libertine Curt Wild -- bear more than a passing resemblance to David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Except they don't. McGregor's Wild has Lou Reed's history of electroshock treatment, Iggy Pop's trailer-park upbringing and Kurt Cobain's face. Rhys Meyers' Slade borrows from the lives of two Brians -- Eno and Ferry -- as well as Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Noddy Holder of the actual Slade doesn't get a look-in though -- this is a film about the art-school glam that started it all, not the football-terrace glam that followed.

Usually when someone mixes fact and fiction in this way, it's because they don't have the imagination to make something up for themselves. Anyone who has seen Todd Haynes' earlier films -- Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), in which the anorexic singer's tragic story is enacted by Barbie-style dolls, or the weird, tripartite Poison (1991), in which a seven-year-old boy kills his father then flies out the window, or Safe, in which Julianne Moore plays a woman is allergic to her furniture -- will know that imagination deficit is not a problem here.

Velvet Goldmine intertwines fact and fiction for a reason -- because glam rock was all about mixing up things that were real and things that weren't until no-one could remember which was which. That's why the musical interludes feature made-up bands doing New York Dolls songs in the style of Suzi Quatro or Roxy Music songs in the style of T Rex. That's why the finest moment of David Bowie's much-derided film career was basically when he played himself in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) -- sections of which were inspired, Haynes points out gleefully, by Alan Yentob's '70s BBC documentary Cracked Author, which caught the singer on the brink of cocaine-addled self-destruction.

The strange thing about Velvet Goldmine is not how much of it is made up but how little. The film's most obvious historical inspiration, for example, is Bowie's legendary, debauched 'final' live performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973. And the title Velvet Goldmine comes from an old Bowie song intended for side two of 'Ziggy Stardust' -- the album whose motif was a suicidal rock persona. The track was dropped, however, because, by its author's own admission, "the lyrics were a little bit too provocative". On investigating such random snippets as "Let my sea wash your face... Ooooh put your mink on," it's hard to know what Mr Bowie was so worried about.

Much has been made of Bowie's refusal to let Todd Haynes use any of his songs on Velvet Goldmine's soundtrack, but given his own rumoured plans for a film and stage version of 'Ziggy Stardust' (which will surely be far more of a travesty of the original spirit of the proceedings than anything Haynes could ever come up with), his reluctance to pre-empt himself is hardly surprising. And, as was the case when Courtney Love stopped Nick Broomfield using any Nirvana songs on Kurt & Courtney, this apparent setback eventually worked to the film's advantage, forcing the filmmakers to be more imaginative with their background music -- in this case by including great early Roxy Music and solo Brian Eno material.

"There would be something ultimately ludricrous," Haynes insists, "about trying to make an 'authentic' [and you can really hear those inverted commas] history of glam rock, because glam rock was so clearly aimed at destroying the whole idea of authenticity -- or at least taking it to task with a great deal of wit and flair."
In one important way, though, this film is an authentic history, in that the film's characters are more like the creations they aspired to be than people just striving to create a persona. One interpretation of the film -- especially in the light of Haynes' former standing as a pioneer of New Queer Cinema -- is as a revenge attack on glam stars for not being as gay as they pretended to be. The director, however, is not happy with this suggestion: "It wasn't my ambition to queer the glam rock movement," Haynes says, rather strictly.

But surely it is impossible not to read Slade's later incarnation -- he is 'reborn' as a fascistic, heterosexual pop idol in an Orwellian 1984 -- as a swipe at Bowie's '80s identity? "That's inevitable, yes, but my only response is that I can't blame individuals for what happened in the '80s. Well, it might be fun to single some of them out, but Reagan and Thatcher would have to be at the top of your list. Almost everyone involved in the glam era, which the possible exception of Gary Glitter, retreated to something very different in the '80s. Most, Bowie included, have come out the other end with some regrets about what happened."

Velvet Goldmine's pseudo-historical timeframe -- the way the story ends not in the present but in an '80s drawn from David Bowie's '70s imaginings -- is one of the hardest aspects of the film to get to grips with (not counting, of course, the scene in which an infant Oscar Wilde is delivered to Earth by a space ship). The key to it lies in Haynes' own life. "The story begins for me when in ends in the movie," the director explains.

Haynes was too young -- he was ten in 1971 -- and perhaps more importantly, too conventional to 'get' glam the first time round. At high school he was "into Dylan and Neil Young like everyone else -- that American ideal of the singer-songwriter who wears blue jeans and communicates directly with the audience". This 'authenticity' is, of course, the opposite of glam. And it's partly this sense of longing for what he might have missed out on that gives Velvet Goldmine its passion. Haynes' perspective as a young American looking into British pop history is also intriguing.

For all its American influences, from Iggy Pop to Little Richard to the Velvet Underground, glam basically embodied everything about British pop music -- the glitter, the artifice, the androgyny -- that mainstream America hated. "I remember when girls in the smoking section in high school started wearing bright red nail polish and lipstick and new clothes and talking about Bowie and being 'bi'," Haynes laughs. "It was weird and it was creepy. All these new names -- Bowie, Iggy, Ziggy -- represented this threatening other world that I wasn't ready for. I was threatened and scared by it, but at the same time fascinated."

Haynes got the hang of glam ten years too late, at university in New York in the early '80s. He explored the contradiction between the sense of personal liberation that accompanied his coming out and the repressive atmosphere of the Reagan presidency -- particularly as expressed in conservative responses to the onset of AIDS -- in the virulent, sometimes shocking, stylistic experiments of Poison and Safe. "In some ways, Velvet Goldmine is the opposite of Safe," Haynes explains, "but both films are about developing a sense of identity -- one from a sad, closed-down, negative point of view, the other by looking at a time when things really opened up and life could be seen as subject to your own whim."

Now that Hollywood release schedules are awash with audience-friendly representations of gayness -- from the Noble Victim in As Good As It Gets to My Best Friend's Wedding's stereotyped Asexual Best Friend -- the outsider shock tactics of New Queer Cinema no longer seem appropriate. For reasons that will become clear later on, glam rock offered Haynes the perfect way forward. If Goldmine is, as Haynes claims, a reaction to cinematic 'domestication' of homosexuality, the virulence of some of the negative reactions to his film -- like the writer from Select magazine who thought it would be a good thing if he never made another one -- is a sure sign of its success.

Haynes is adamant that the affair he imagined between Slade and Wild shouldn't be interpreted as implying a similar relationship between Bowie and Iggy Pop. "There's no evidence that there was anything sexual going on between them. Bowie had romances with other people -- there was a strong suggestion that something was going on with Lou Reed, for example, though whether it was consummated in the bedroom we will never know. All we know is there are photos of the two of them snogging at parties and there was a great romantic climate that they exploited consciously as artists. In a way, that's more concrete than anything that really happened in private, because no-one would know. And in a way, why should you care? What's done publicly is more real because the fans can build on it in their imaginations."

If Velvet Goldmine can be said to be 'about' anything, it is probably about the line between memory and fantasy. "The idea," says Haynes, "was to create a world in which reality, fantasy and memory each have equal weight. Because all are essential components in the way certain moments of pop culture can affect the imagination."

That impact is something Goldmine captures brilliantly. The traumas of adolescent sexuality have had few better cinematic representations than the moment when Christian Bale's character gets caught by his parents masturbating to a photo in a music paper of Curt and Brian kissing.

"There was something in the idea of that photograph of the kiss that moves through the machinery of the marketplace and ends up in the sweaty palms of some teenager in his bedroom," Haynes explains. "There is this passage of desire through society that somehow remains intact -- something going on in these pop stars' lives that has a relationship to what's going on in the privacy of some teenager's bedroom."

It's almost like a mains system of sexual electricity that people can plug into depending on how they're feeling -- an idea that is picked up in Haynes' description of the films that had a similarly dramatic impact on his own formative years. He cites A Clockwork Orange, 2001 and Performance as "films that took you somewhere else. They were inspired by drug culture and made with a truly hallucinogenic sensibility. That's what I was aspiring to with Goldmine, because those types of movies just don't happen now. These days movies are very carefully assembled to be the same as the last movie like them, just with a different special-effects strategy."

This of course is the sort of thing directors always say, but that doesn't make it true. Maybe because we're now far enough removed from the reactionary '80s for people to think they can get away with it, we are currently in the midst of a new golden age of great drugs-and-music movies -- and in the new psychedelic vanguard Velvet Goldmine stands alongside Trainspotting, Boogie Nights and the brilliant forthcoming Terry Gilliam film of Hunter S Thompson's novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

Haynes, though, has more old-fashioned examples on his mind, waxing nostalgic about the heady days of 1968, when queues lined up three times around the block to see Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls open in New York. "When so much curiosity could be generated by that experimental a film," he says, "that this was what teenagers flocked to -- that is so cool to me."

The only problem with this rose-tinted reminiscence is that Chelsea Girls was crap. One of the things that makes Goldmine so intriguing is the way it tries to make a compromise between Haynes' hardcore art-film background and something more populist. And the inspiration for this endeavour yet again turns out to have been -- yes, you've guessed it -- glam rock itself.

"The fact that 'Virginia Plain' by Roxy Music should have been at the top of the pop charts when it still sounds so demented and experimental today blows my mind," says Haynes excitedly. "The way their highly posed, costumed approach didn't negate the emotion of the music... It was a conceptually whole endeavour -- the form and the content were blurred and they reflected each other in a sophisticated way, despite it being a pop construction that was meant to chart. That was my best model for the stylistic experiment I wanted the film to be. The exciting thing was to take that duality of being very self-conscious and referential but also emotionally strong, and try to apply it in a narrative."

But will Velvet Goldmine have the same disturbing effect on today's teenagers as those girls wearing nail varnish had on the young Todd Haynes in the early '70s? "Something the film lacks," says Haynes, "and it's OK that it lacks it, is the thing about Bowie that was so amazing: the disturbing quality of his look. Jonathan's interpretation is actually more sympathetic than the images of Ziggy Stardust -- his skeletal androgyny was so extreme that it's still shocking."

It's funny that for a large section of Velvet Goldmine's audience, the crossover between Brian Slade's fact and David Bowie's fiction will mean much less than Ewan McGregor's remarkable resemblance to Kurt Cobain. Had Haynes considered this before casting him?

"It seems hard to believe, but no," he says. "It didn't even occur to us on set; we were so caught up in what we doing, and it was only when we saw stills that we realised. At an early early meeting I had with Ewan, he mentioned that someone once confused him with Kurt Cobain -- soon after he died, some girl was tripping and she kept telling him how much he looked like Kurt, so he said, 'When I have long hair I can kind of look like that' -- but I just didn't think about it. The character already had the name Curt Wild, and it had nothing to do with Kurt -- it was based on this guy Curt Davis who was a friend of Jim Lyons's, the story's co-writer. He was this amazing proto-punk figure and a sweet, smart, crazy guy: that was the spirit of Kurt Cobain...
"I mean Curt Wild."

The link between the two characters is actually quite appropriate, given how much Kurt's look was influenced by Iggy. In fact, Michael Stipe, the film's executive producer, told Haynes that Kurt actually dyed his own hair silver as a direct result of seeing Iggy. This connection perfectly illustrates the cyclical nature of pop history and the way the glam rock virus endures and mutates within it, but Velvet Goldmine contains another equally intriguing bit of cinematic circuitry. Having made his name as lithe junkie misfit Renton in Trainspotting, Ewan McGregor now gets to play a mythical figure based on Iggy Pop -- the real-life founding father of that film's controversial school of urban heroin chic.

One of the fiercest of the many battles Todd Haynes had to fight to get his film to turn out the way he wanted was his struggle to keep Ewan McGregor off the lager. If the fun-loving Scot was going to look like a junkie rock god with his shirt off rather than a Glaswegian wedding singer, action would have to be taken. In a desperate quest to maintain the requisite degree of emaciation, Haynes found himself following his star around on the set hissing, "No beer! No beer!"

"Ewan's so charismatic, and part of that comes from a devil-may-care attitude about his looks," says the American, almost regretfully. "Because he's so handsome he doesn't have to worry. He's probably about as sexy in this movie as in anything else he's done, but it's pretty bad that a director whose first film was about anorexia should end up turning his stars anorexic."

Basically, when it comes to looking really skinny and wasted, there's no substitute for a chronic heroin habit.
"I know," Haynes says, rolling his eyes. "I did try to encourage him..."

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