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Weaving Velvet Threads: Todd Haynes talks about Velvet Goldmine
by Venice Buhain
November 5, 1998
University of Washington Daily\

In the first scenes of Velvet Goldmine American director Todd Haynes attempts to explain the origin of British glam rock - the theatrical music played by glittery space alien-like rock stars like David Bowie. In Victorian England, a space ship deposits Oscar Wilde and a beautiful emerald brooch that glows with an eerie interior light.

That must have been exactly how it happened.

Although it gives a nod of gratitude toward Wilde, who exemplifies the image of the ostentatious dandy, Haynes' Velvet Goldmine is an homage to glam rock, the last popular continuation of the dandy tradition. David Bowie was perhaps the most influential of these performers, literally turning himself into the iconic caricature of the ultimate image of pop star, Ziggy Stardust.

In Britain, dandies from Oscar Wilde to Marc Bolan of T-Rex are part of the cultural landscape, but other than the ridiculous Yankee Doodle, there are few American dandies.

Haynes describes the dandy as that "ironic, androgynous spokesperson for Englishness that has existed through different points through their history in a very popular way, but at the same time in a very subversive way. It's particular to England. I don't think that it's possible in America."

Perhaps because of the silently enforced denial of difference in America, or the unspoken American fear of sexuality and ambiguity, America is where Haynes sets the framing story of the transplanted English reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale). In the Reaganomic/Thatcherite New York City of 1984, Arthur, is assigned to discover what has happened to glam rocker Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).

Eleven years earlier, Slade had been Arthur's beautiful ideal of sexual, aesthetic and emotional liberation from his staid middle class household. Slade, at the height of his popularity, transforms himself into the mythical blue-haired pouty-lipped space creature/rock star Maxwell Demon. The teenage Arthur is just one of the many fans who idolizes and emulates Slade. However, Slade and the glam aesthetic fall from grace after Slade fakes his own assassination onstage in front of dozens of fans, including Arthur.

Haynes describes the lost Englishman in his bleak New York as "just all the more displaced from himself. Just one more step away from what meant everything in his life."

Arthur's search for truth in the desolate black and grey palate of Haynes' America contrasts with his earlier enthusiasm for the dandified artifice of glam rock. Velvet Goldmine is plea to love the artificial again.

Glam musicians purposely stole myriad looks and influences in order to create their onstage characters. Haynes admires this "incredibly radical sensibility. There's almost no parallel that I can think of. Rock and roll's always been about authenticity and trying to be really real - sort of out-real the last guy., be more down to earth and gritty."

There is something so absolutely sincere about admitting and celebrating pretension instead of hypocritically rejecting it. The dandy understands, and lives for his image. Velvet Goldmine is an attempt to recreate that beautiful, but all too brief, time when self-reinvention into anything had become acceptable.

Velvet Goldmine is much more like a mythical image of an era passed than a direct documentary of it. Haynes explains, "While imitating [the glam rock] thrift-store shopping through culture in a way, I knew that it wouldn't be about any objective truth or reality and it was completely subject to imitation and should be treated that way."

Haynes elaborates, "I took that whole era, the raw material of that period as I think it should be taken: as a fiction already, as already a result of a very complicated process of multiple references and key associations."

The character in Velvet Goldmine that epitomizes this ideal is Mandy Slade, Brian's American wife. Actress Toni Collette's purposely fake-sounding British affectations, which makes reference to Liza Minelli and the glamorous early film actresses of the 1940s, is a brilliant detail to a character who has reinvented herself as the perfect embodiment of the artificial identity.

Perhaps because of that widespread cultural thievery, Haynes accidentally pre-figured another contemporary blond, greasy and heroin-addicted American pop icon in his character Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor).

Haynes explains, "To be quite honest, the Kurt Cobain reference was not intended. It became this uncanny result of Ewan's particular looks. We wanted to have sort of Iggy Pop-style silver hair, that Kurt Cobain had gotten ˆ la Iggy Pop; black fingernails ˆ la Lou Reed, so it wouldn't be just Iggy for Ewan's interpretation, which of course looked more like Kurt Cobain, who wore black nail polish, probably ˆ la Lou Reed as well.

"So it's almost the history rock and roll borrowing from each other that is, I think, the culprit in the confusion that [there are] any intentional 'This should be read as Kurt Cobain; you should be reading a lot of Kurt Cobain references here.'"

Despite the assumptions that a younger audience might make about Curt Wild, Haynes isn't critical of it. "It's fine," he says. "I like it in that it blurs the pure Iggy-ness of Curt Wild in the movie."

Intentional or not, the '90s pre-references that pollute the landscape of Velvet Goldmine - such as McGregor's resemblance to Cobain and Rhys-Meyers' resemblance to nearly every contemporary Brit-pop artist - elevates Haynes' vision of the 1970s from staid fictionalized docudrama to contemporary pop culture relevance. The infection of contemporary pop culture gives Velvet Goldmine an element of deja vu, even for those who were not there.

He adds, "I think that some young people who are aware of this period but didn't live through it can see its influences on other subsequent generations and artists are much more in line with what I'm doing with the film."

Like a collective memory, the bigger context of Velvet Goldmine is perhaps less important than the individual images. The plot device of Arthur's search for the truth is laughably weak, but by the end of the film, no one really cares. It's eclipsed by the vivid episodic memories of the 1970s from the down-and-out players in Slade's drama, which Haynes films in gorgeous costumes and with dramatic camera angles.

Haynes' reverent spin on the artistic and cultural decadence of glam rock is much more interesting than any search for the truth. Just ask Oscar Wilde.

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