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Fables Of The Self-Construction
A user's guide to Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes's dense,
hallucinatory, hyper-referential homage to glam rock.
by Joshua Clover
from Spin magazine, November 1998

Prologue

Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes's screen kiss to glam rock, opens in the childhood of Oscar Wilde (author, wit, queer theory icon, and conscripted of all that is glam). Before leaping a century forward to swinging London, the movie shows the eight-year-old Oscar announcing his career ambition: "I want to be a pop idol."

Oscar Wilde never said that. But David Bowie did, during the graduation ritual for Bromley Polytechnical High School. This was years before the press and the dresses, before makeup and space suits and all that. Years before the rise and fall of glam, the all-too-brief revolution that said not just "be all you can be" but be everything that's ever been, cut up and reconfigured to your own whims, fetishes, and dreams.

Glam rock itself occupies less than half a decade of musical history, bridging the collapse of the hippie dream and the furious insurrection of punk. An elegantly complex, vision-charged film, Velvet Goldmine captures much of the story that was glam, and brings it to an American audience that largely missed the meteoric movement during its first pass. "Glam rock [in America] was nowhere near the teen-driven phenomenon it was in the U.K.," says director Haynes. "I was aware of Bowie, didn't have his records, and was actually rather spooked by those unbelievable images of him on the covers of the records in the record stores and at friend's houses. I sensed it was something I was going to want to know more about, but at that time I knew I wasn't ready."

Most Americans weren't. The New York Dolls might've been ultracool, and glam might have influenced heavy hitsters like Kiss, as well as imports Elton John and Queen. But the original glam acts made barely a ripple on the sea of American cheese that was Top 40 radio. In England, however, glam was a pop culture extravaganza: From 1971 to 1974, such acts as Roxy Music, Slade, Gary Glitter, and the Sweet charged the pop charts with supershiny, gender-bendy electricity.
If musical revolutions involve the leap from a sound to a lifestyle, vive la glam. As with every rock revolution worth the vinyl it was pressed in, glam was loud, cheap, and out of control. But it was also literate and witty, a counterculture without being anti-culture. And like nothing that came before, it was freaky. Bowie was the superfreak.

Nonetheless, Bowie wasn't the inventor of glam: T. Rex's Marc Bolan had a better claim (yet Bolan's act, which sold an estimated 37 million records in three years, has been all but obliterated from popular consciousness). Meanwhile, Roxy musicians Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno interwove the ultracool cabaret decadence and wildly androgynous showtime that defined the glam style. Bowie was, quite simply, the genius who arrived to make it all mean something. He was the grand artificer of a movement that celebrated artifice above all. "The genius of glam," says chronicler Barney Hoskyns, "is that is was all about stardom." And Bowie played it to the hilt, helping to popularize the avant-garde and ultimately changing the way people thought about pop music.

From the moment Bowie announced to Melody Maker "I'm gay and always have been" (even as he was calling his mum to deny it), he became the force glam rode into the public consciousness. When he invented Ziggy Stardust, the stakes of rock'n'roll as a spectacle of self-creation were raised forever. But it wasn't the space-age end-of-the-world obsessions that were ahead of their time; it was a much deeper idea. Glam co-opted fashion before fashion could co-opt it, making the idea of "the real" seem ridiculous. And this was way before postmodernism became coffee talk.

In a time when half the flicks made concern the end of the '70s musical moments, Velvet Goldmine out-glitters The Last Days Of Disco, out-debauches 54, and out-sexes Boogie Nights. And it easily out-outs any of the queer inroads into mainstream cinema. Formally, the movie is a Citizen Kane-style search for identity wrapped around a loopy, love/hate Bowie biopic. But it's most importantly an allegory about inventing yourself and the freedom such artifice has provided for generations of showy outcasts. For all its historical matchups, Velvet Goldmine isn't merely the life stories of glam, but the Glamourous life as envisioned by a fanboy dreaming his way in. "It takes me into a world," says music supervisor Randall Poster, "I remember imagining as a kid." For the film, Poster copped a squad of supermod glitterati who must've been similarily magnetized as kids: Radiohead's Thom Yorke and ex-Suede guitar hero Bernard Butler, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley, and indie icon Mike Watt (to name just a few). But Bowie, whom Haynes calls the film's "structuring absence", withheld the rights to his songs. How do you make a Bowie movie without Bowie songs? "I sat down with 'All The Young Dudes,'" says Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think (who penned the gem "Ballad of Maxwell Demon"). "It's that sort of achy-breaky, glammy thing, in four piece mode, and sexy. And then you put space aliens in it."

There's no doubt that glam is racing back into vogue (a trend Velvet Goldmine is sure to accelerate). But it's been there all along. It was there when Queen chose opera and Malcolm McLaren chose wardrobes; it was still there when Madonna and Prince made themselves up out of nothing and rags. It's in the kiss-my-glitz excess of Puffy Combs and, perhaps most of all, the calculated androgyny of Marilyn Manson's new look. The resurgence of end-of-the-century decadence, over-the-top theatricality, and cabaret culture - each are branches on the glam family tree. Even hip-hopper Foxy Brown (of the lipstick so glam it's absurd) busts with the word "glamalicious" just to endorse some beverage or another.

How is it that the ghosts of glam have come to speak so alluringly today? Wilde tried to answer that question more than a century ago: "Every great century that produces art is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems the most natural and simple of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort." For everyone exhausted by keeping it real, glam turns the other direction and goes way beyond fake. Though glam ideas date back to previous centuries, it was made for modern filmistry: Glam is about image assembly, and so are movies. If glam reaches past boundaries of time, place, class, and gender to cobble together a shimmering performance of one's own life, Velvet Goldmine itself borrows bits and pieces of film, literature, philosophy, and musical history. Though the characters don't shine as brightly as the originals and the plot gets overly twisty, the film is still a glittery, ambitious, and lush dream-so-real. Director Haynes imagines that the movie can be a participatory experience, taking from glam "the ideas that you could dress up and become whatever you wanted. You took and active, creative role in the subtext."

Toward that end, here's a Spin user's guide to help unfold the many layers of Velvet Goldmine and to revisit the fleeting historical moment it celebrates.

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The Characters

One of the glammest things about Velvet Goldmine is how it borrows from history and gives it a twist. This includes the cast of characters: inventions based on real people who were inventions and inventors themselves. Though the film is far more about the flux of identity than the precision of equal signs, knowing which characters are drawn from where helps greatly in deciphering the action.

Oscar Wilde = Oscar Wilde: Except in this version, Wilde is delivered to Earth by a glowing spaceship and found with a mysterious green brooch tucked into his swaddling clothes.

Brian Slade = David Bowie: Straight up. From Slade's hippie-folk comeuppance to his disappearance into the Ziggy Stardusted "Maxwell Demon," the character of Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) bears the greatest historical burden.

Curt Wilde = A mess of uniquely American glitterology: Wild (Ewan McGregor) is Iggy Pop's histrionics with some of Lou Reed's history (and a little of Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson). Plus: a striking similarity to a certain grunge icon.

Jack Fairy = A strange brew: Fairy (Micko Westmoreland) is the film's most liberal invention, with elements of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, and '60s avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith. Fairy's trip inside the Goldmine begins and ends the era of glam.

Mandy Slade = Angela Bowie: Dutiful wife and latter-day tell-all. Angela (Toni Collette) helps reconstruct who was who and what was what.

Jerry Devine = Tony Defries: Slade's main manager (played brilliantly by Eddie Izzard) is dissimilar to the real-life operator of MainMan, the management company that represented Bowie, Pop, and Reed.

Arthur Stuart = The secret glam fan in all of us: Stuart (Christian Bale), the film's glitterboy-turned-newspaper-reported, is set loose to uncover the secrets of Brian Slade's mysterious disappearance.

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The Scenes

The narrative of Velvet Goldmine builds on the bones of David Bowie's glam years; what he knew, who he did. A documentary would have left it at that and maybe a tag about how only the names had been changed to protect the beautiful. But in the spirit of the glam revolution, Velvet Goldmine (which was meticulously researched by Haynes and editor James Lyons) remakes and remodels the stories of Bowie and the rest of its own performance. Likewise, Haynes and Lyons heavily alter the chronology of Velvet Goldmine, flashing it forward and back along the timeline of glam, as if history were at once utterly elusive and as shapable as celluloid.

Getting Ziggy With It
1) The final concert of Brian Slade's space-agey Maxwell Demon persona comes mere minutes into the movie. What happens (or doesn't happen) onstage - Maxwell Demon appears to get shot during his show - sets loose the central story of Velvet Goldmine: an attempt to piece together the events leading up to this early climax.
Many of the shots from the scene echo D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. This famous documentary is a record of Bowie's last few concerts before the famed onstage "retirement" of his Ziggy Stardust persona. In real life it was only Ziggy who called it quits; in Velvet Goldmine, Brian Slade and his alter ego Maxwell Demon go down together. The slip here between film and life gets elegantly at the all-too-difficult dream of dying young and staying pretty.

A Crash Course For The Raver
2) After bombing at a music festival, Brian - at this point, still in his long-haired, flower-powered incarnation - catches his first site of Curt Wild. The image of Curt, bathed in glitter and stripped to the skin, hits Brian like a double vision: a glimpse of his own as-yet-unimagined rock future, and love at first sight. This is probably actor Jonathan Rhys Meyer's finest moment. More a lip model than a great deliverer of lines, he's a genius at capturing vulnerability, confused desire, and calculation in a single expression.
Though Wild embodies at least three crucial glam figures, his stage performance is pure Iggy Pop: the audience-confronting, exhibitionist, self-mutilation raw power plant. McGregor didn't pump (or diet) enough to match the famously ripped Pop, but in fact his puffiness makes him a good cross between Iggy and the less-than-chiseled Lou Reed. Curt Wild is given Iggy's working-class Detroit background and gets Reed's back story too: particularly how young Lou was sent off for electroshock therapy to "cure" him of homosexual tendencies. But if Iggy and Lou are the two most famous sources for Curt Wild, they are not the only ones. Curt's band, for example, is called the Rats - as was the original band of Bowie guitarist and collaborator Mick Ronson. In another scene Slade will be photographed going down on Curt's guitar: a re-creation of a infamous Bowie/Ronson stage moment.

Kane And Babel
3) In scenes set ten year after glam has faded (an exceedingly grim, Reagan-esque 1984), Arthur tracks down Mandy at the dive where she's performing nightly as "the Divine Miss Mandy Slade." Wan and wasted, she's drawn reluctantly into recounting her life with Brian following their meeting in 1969. Acted brilliantly by Australian Toni Collette, the half-soused Mandy swings between her obviously contrived Brit accent and the shade of her character's original American - the inevitable ruin of self-invention.
This is clearly borrows from a scene in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, in which the reporter Thompson corners a broken-down, boozed-up Susan Alexander in the club where she's performing, and interviews her about Kane. Like the movie, Velvet Goldmine is built of supposedly "actual" interviews, documentary clips, newsreels, and recollected scenes.

Do Make Me Over
4) Trying to break Slade in America, manager Devine enlists beautiful freaks to simulate the trappings of big-time, crypto-Hollywood-style celebrity. "Because the secret of becoming a star," says Devine, "is knowing how to behave like one." And voila! Maxwell Demon is born - the ultimate role for the ultimate star.
For 1972 Ziggy Stardust tour, Tony Defries's American strategy was simple, unheard-of, and to the point: "They had to act like stars so they would be treated like stars. That had to learn to spend money, and spend it in the right way." Needless to say, it worked.

The Glamour Twins
5) When Slade and Wild meet for the first time, it's pure sex & drugs & rock'n'roll - the archetypal collision of the super-aesthete. Brit and the real American wild child. After Slade is introduced to a profoundly wasted Wild in a New York nightclub, Slade and Devine make an offer. Wild is bewildered by Devine's biz-speak until Brian breaks in and invites him to make a record. "Oh yeah. Cool," answers Wild. "See, heroin was my main man. But I'm on the methadone. I'm getting my act together. And you come here and say you wanna help? I say, far out. You can be my main man." And so begins the romance at the heart of the movie, which will set worlds spinning and eventually bring them tumbling down.
Though Iggy Pop and Lou reed had already made names for themselves by 1970, it was Bowie who introduced them to British glam culture - and Britain to them. They all ended up under the parasol of Tony Defries's MainMan management company.
The club in which Slade and Wild first meet is modeled after Max's Kansas City in New York, hangout to the ultimate hipoisie where Bowie first met Iggy. It's here we catch our only glimpse of Andy Warhol - whose effect on Bowie was so profound Bowie titled a song after him and later played Warhol in the 1996 film Basquiat.

The Wilde Life
6) "The first duty in life is to assume a pose," says one of Slade's quote-spewing retinue. "What the second duty is, no one has yet found out." In a staged press performance, Brian Slade follows a series of archly recited quotations with an interview in which both the reporters' questions and his answers are read from cue cards - laying bare the manipulations of the music-media spectacle and yukking it up over the conspiracy of performers and the press.
Taking costumes from here, set designs from there, and quotations from everywhere (playwright Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, newspaper accounts of Wilde's famous trial), this is the most cinematically glam moment of the movie. If the archness is in keeping with the sense of beautiful illusion, it also makes everyone seem canned, or at best canny. Lost in this cultural commentary is the wicked intelligence and conversational wit of many actual glamsters - especially Bowie. His real words might best describe the essence of glam's mission. "As a medium, [music] should not be questioned, analyzed or taken so seriously. I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself."

Celebrity Skin
7) In the midst of a decadent free-for-all, Brian and Curt fall into bed together...and run off to a recording studio. It's there that things start to go wrong.
Did Bowie and Iggy ever do it? Or for that matter, Bowie and Lou? Rumors abounded, but the world may never know - and it's really not the point. This is the romantic fantasy of rock stars making it and rushing off to cut a record, and the terrible fallout: Love + Art = Tragedy. In real life, Bowie successfully collaborated with both Reed and Pop, producing Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" single and remixing Pop's Raw Power, both in the magical year of 1972.
"People are very preoccupied with the sources behind the relationship of Brian and Curt," syas Haynes, "To me it's not ultimately about the relationship of Bowie and Iggy Pop. It's a distillation of the truly British element that inspired glam rock - the androgynous, self-conscious, ironic poseur, incredibly alluring to look at but dangerous at the same time - and that element's attraction to the American element: visceral, sexually, violent, raw. That's what glam rock is - a romance between that British element and that American element, and an infatuation that didn't last, didn't work, but produced something really resonant."
"Bowie may not have been gay, but Ziggy was - and a lot more besides," writes Barny Hoskyns in his new book Glam! "Above all, Ziggy enabled Bowie to turn himself into an icon of deviance fit to stand alongside the Lou Reeds and Iggy Pops.

Party Like It's 1999
8) In a wild, hallucinatory cut-up of images, the various participants get ready for a concert called the Death of Glitter Show, which is intended to lay glam in its grave. By now Arthur the reporter of 1984 is revealed as the glam scenester of 1975 and flatmate of glam rockers the Flaming Creatures. Shots of the fan and band going through identical preparations for the night show how glam's public performance included both the musicians and the audience. "The music was about inviting you to enter these fantastic worlds and imaginary landscapes with exotic alien creatures," says Haynes, "But it also suggested we could all dress up into these things ourselves. We could become what we wanted to become just like Bowie. The fan is as much a participant."
There were at least two actual "Death of Glitter" concerts held in the 1970s. The Los Angeles version starred Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. In the eloquent phrase of participant and famous husband Michael Des Barres, "The sequins were lying in the gutter."

Close Encounters
9) On the roof of the concert hall after the Death of Glitter show, Curt and Arthur get as close as a star and a fanboy can ever get - maybe closer. As stardust falls from the sky, the spaceship that originally delivered Oscar Wilde to Earth reappears. "Make a wish," says Curt, "and see yourself, onstage, inside out!" This redeems one of the film's most central faiths: that embracing your queer self and putting your inversion on display promises not just truth but a transcendent freedom. This isn't the last coming together for Arthur and Curt. Nine years later, after the Tommy Stone concert, Arthur ducks into a bar to discover Curt - just another anonymous denizen of 1984. Ducking out, Curt sticks Arthur with the brooch passed down from Wilde to Jack Fairy to Slade to Wild. Curt's double-edged closer: "A man's life is his image."
The alien craft that originally appears to take culture to the next level is akin to the alien intervention that starts 2001: A Space Odyssey. "A lot of Velvet Goldmine was inspired by films that came out of late-'60s experimentation," says Haynes. "The films were trips that were gonna take you somewhere unknown. You had to go with it and trust it and want to be on a journey."

Bleak Out
10) In the film's 1984, the musical scene - represented by animotronic stadium god Tommy Stone - is as grim as the social atmosphere. After rocking Madison Square Garden, he takes the opportunity to wax smug about his tour's lumbering largeness. "Tommy!" yells a reporter at a post-concert press briefing. "Where did you get the idea for such a spectacular show?" "Tell you the truth," he replies, "it's a bloody pain in the ass. The whole thing takes six full-size rigs or three chartered planes to transport. What can I say? I think big!"
It's the Orwellian bleakness of the film's "present" that sets off the desperation of Arthur's voyage into the past. Tommy Stone may have learned a little something about spectacle from the days of glam, but the lesson has been lost on the corporate rocker. (Sound familiar?) Now it's size rather than experimentation; Reaganite regression rather than anarchy. The crushing weight of Stone's money-makin' circus is inevitably similar to the big-biz, top of Bowie's 1983 Serious Moonlight tour and his famously bad, globally telecast Live Aid performance.
"The music [of glam] was very much about a lost moment even before it started," says Haynes. "That made it easier to approach the film surrounded by the repressive '80s that had thrust all this into denial, have glam be something we could learn from but that maybe wasn't completely available to us." Ironically, punk rock - in many ways a direct response to glam (which was a direct response to hippie rock) - ended up being much more famous for bridging the gap between the band and the crowd. But if the lesson of punk's musical primitivism was that anyone could be the band, the lesson of glam's pop art self-invention was that anyone could be the star.

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