Glammy fun with Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes

By Alex Patterson

Early-'70s London, and pop's making one of its periodic great leaps forward. After a half-decade of hairy hippiedom, David Bowie styles his hair into an orange shag(adelic), paints his face and begins his career's golden years with Ziggy Stardust. A small army of pretty things follows in the androgynous starman's mincing footsteps, and good ol' rawk's rigidly enforced heterosexuality is thrown a gender-fuck called glam. North American high schoolers -- including a California teenager named Todd Haynes -- didn't dig the glittery beat the way their British counterparts did. In the years since, however, glam has been surprisingly enduring, and Haynes has come around. In fact, the filmmaker's become such a glam fanatic that he's written and directed Velvet Goldmine, which combines fact with fiction in ways that are fanciful, philosophical and, where gay identity politics are concerned, positively polemical. Virtually a valentine to the era, Velvet Goldmine is a fictionalization of the relationship -- musical and otherwise -- between Bowie and Iggy Pop. Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a pale young boy with a hitmaking band called Venus in Furs, an annoying American wife (Toni Collette) and a crush on his more masculine mentor, a Motor City madman named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). At the height of his fame in 1974, Slade stages his own suicide -- much as Bowie killed off Ziggy -- and goes into seclusion. Ten years later, a British journalist with gender issues of his own (a handsome but morose and enervated Christian Bale) working in a fascistic New York (unpersuasively played by postwar parts of London) is assigned to track down the real story through a clumsy Citizen Kane device. As Haynes sits across from me, he's still sporting the crimson metalflake eye shadow from his Village Voice cover shoot. "I've never been in drag before," he confesses with embarrassment. "Not even on Halloween, which is amazing for a gay man." Haynes has been unfailingly polite and charming on every occasion I've met him -- beginning with an interview for his 1995 release, Safe, which I consider one of the masterpieces of our decade -- that I haven't the heart to tell him I think Goldmine has serious flaws. We'll get to those later, but here's Haynes' side of the story: "Velvet Goldmine is a really bizarre, unorthodox film. It's not like anything that people can say they've seen before -- whether they like it or not. I almost feel like I've snuck something out in a very wide, splashy way that's actually very experimental. I'm just happy this film got made and is out there. It's got the color and energy and music to potentially attract a wider audience, but people expecting a mainstream experience are going to be disappointed. Or maybe opened up. "I was very influenced by how daring films were in the late '60s and early '70s -- things like 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Performance [the acting debut of Mick Jagger, and Goldmine's only known cinematic relative]. It was a time when film, rock 'n' roll, underground scenes, drugs and gay dandyism all kind of merged. This weird hybrid produced some of the most influential and interesting popular art. It was a time when people would line up three times around the block to see a three-hour Warhol movie like Chelsea Girls. We've lost an openness to interesting film since then. I'm trying to rekindle that with Velvet Goldmine. Going to places like the NuArt Cinema in Los Angeles when I was a teenager [he's 37 now], that was my glam rock." (I tell Todd Toronto has eight repertory cinemas programming different double bills each night. He's astonished. "That is absolutely amazing to me. There's nothing like that left in New York or L.A.!") Haynes has characterized Velvet Goldmine as "a dream of glam rock," and it's an accurate description. Trouble is, dreams are notorious for their unsatisfying narratives and logical lapses, and this one's no exception. Further aggravating its dramatic shortcomings is the general lack of charisma of Rhys-Meyers. He's a penis in furs, all right, but if the real rockers of the '70s had been this anemic, nobody in 1998 would even remember glam, let alone celebrate it on celluloid. Plus, the U.S.$7-million budget was clearly inadequate: if this music is, as we're told, sweeping the nation, how come the superstar Slade's audience seems to consist of 20 kids milling about in front of the amps? Were these all the young dudes the production could afford? Such financial pressures made Goldmine "an incredibly tough and demanding shoot," Haynes reports. "I would've saved money by cutting scenes, but the script was such an intricate jigsaw that I couldn't." Unless, of course, he had dumped the entire section set in the Orwellian 1984, thereby saving enough to hire some more extras and ridding the picture of Bale's baleful presence. Part of the problem, I'm convinced, is Haynes was a semiotics major at Brown University, kind of a Marxist re-education camp for the sons and daughters of the American ruling class. Although all that theory served him well for his brilliant Karen-Carpenter-as-Barbie-Doll Superstar ('87) and Poison ('90), it's not what's needed in a period musical. Yes, glam's great moments get lovingly re-created, and the tunes, it should go without saying, are terrific. But that's all just so many needles in the camel's eye if your concept is essentially unsound. If there's one thing you can't fake, it's artifice.   Where's Ziggy? In the case of Velvet Goldmine, as goes the film, so goes the soundtrack. As long as the little magnetic strip running up the sides of the celluloid is cranking out Original Hits by the Original Artists (Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love," T. Rex's "Diamond Meadows," Steve Harley's "Make Me Smile," Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain," Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye"), it's pure bliss. When it's playing old songs sung by '90s acts (Radiohead's Thom Yorke taking on Roxy's "2HB," Teenage Fanclub reworking the New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis") or the movie's actors (Eno's "Baby's On Fire" interpreted by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and the Venus in Furs, Ewan McGregor and the Wylde Ratttz grinding out the Stooges' "TV Eye"), it's less reliable. (This has not, however, prevented the Wylde Ratttz -- a band assembled strictly for the film -- from becoming a real band and hatching plots to tour and make records.) And when it comes to the new compositions written in the glam style (Shudder to Think's "Ballad of Maxwell Demon," Grant Lee Buffalo's "The Whole Shebang"), well, it's time to duck and cover. Glam was usually a remarkable balancing act between macho metal and effeminate cabaret; the material commissioned specially for this soundtrack has a tendency toward the latter. Ironically, what you won't find is a single song by David Bowie. He declined Haynes' request for co-operation, claiming he was saving the material for a Ziggy Stardust movie project of his own -- presumably not starring the 52-year-old Bowie himself. Fortunately, the Velvet Goldmine album is long enough that you can skip all the young duds and still get one vinyl elpee's worth of glittery goodness -- if, unlike me, you don't already own most of this stuff on other compilations.