Stuart Klawans Is Todd Haynes the Scarecorw, the Tin Man or the Cowardly Lon? The question presses itself on me, now that he's once again stumbed while on the road to OzÐthe ideal toward which his movies tend at their best. So it is with his new feature, Velvet Goldmine, a revivification of London's Glitter Rock era that's so often magical, inventive, rousing and smart that I winced at each loss of brain, heart or courage. Of course you should see the movie anyway. See it three or four times-at least once for each color of eyeshadow you own, or can borrow (if you're cheap). You'll come upon wonders in Velvet Goldmine, beginning with a glorious opening shot of clustered rooftops unfolding into the distance: probably the most beautiful such image to come along since 101 Dalmations. A shooting star (or something) flashes above the buidlings, and in its wake Haynes adds an intellectual sparkle to the visual pleasure. It seems this city is Dublin, not London, and the date is about a century before the coming of Glitter Rock. The occasion: the birth (or something) of the movement's true progenitor, who in Hayne's account was Oscar Wilde. It's an ingenious proposition, presented in just the right "once upon a time" spirit, which Haynes manages to sustain for, oh, five minutes at a stretch. Before the initial five run out, he succedds in jumping ecstatically from Wilde's time to the early seventies: from the age of green carnations to that of sequins, feathers and skintight slacks, as worn by pop idol Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Never mind the yes-buts. There are useful distinctions to be drawn between Wilde and David Bowie (who, in his Ziggy Stardust guise, is Hayne's obvious model for Slade), but the fine points of cultural history may not matter that much to adolescent boys who long to wear lipstick, who linger voluptuously over Brian Slade's photo in the solitude of their bedrooms, who want to point when they see the pouty-lipped androgyne strutting on TV and shout to their parents, "That's me!" To fans such as Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), the meaning of Slade is clear enough, and it's clear enough to make Velvet Goldmine spring to life whenever Arthur (or Haynes) gets stars in his eyes. Too bad Haynes can't love Arthur as much as he loves Brian Slade. By minute six or thereabouts, the movie has jumped forward again, from the seventies to 1984, from a candy-colored London to grim and gray New York, where Arthur, now terribly dimmed, works as a newspaper writer. This seems to me punishment enough for the poor character, who must go about with gritted teeth, like the sensitive tough guy in a film noir, and Try to Forget. The love of his youth has betrayed him; ten years ago Brian Slade staged his own demise in a Death of Glitter Rock concert, and ever since, it seems, Arthur and the rest of civilization just haven't been the same. But Arthur won't be allowed to forget. Haynes has decided that the wretch must be assigned to write a nostalgia piece on Brian Slade. Such is Arthur's comeuppance for once having adored the meaning embodied by his idol. Now he'll have to grovel before the facts. Why is Haynes so tough on Arthur? Why, through the character, is he so tough on himself? It's apparent everywhere in Velvet Goldmine that Haynes, like Arthur, loves Glitter Rock. He, too, fell for a mass-marketed product, which was no more likely than Mr. Clean to carry out a world-transforming promise. But instead of honoring the truth of his enthusiasm, so that he might look back on its object with a smile and a sigh (as did Joe Danted in Matinee, or Allan Arkush in Get Crazy), Haynes does penance for being a sap. He condemns himself (and his audience) to the hard labor of the rest of Velvet Goldmine. If you've been following Hayne's career, you'll recognize this method as standard operating procedure. Before choosing Glitter Rock as a subject, Haynes had his way with many other artifacts of our media culture: fifties horror movies and nineties TV news (Poison), cable infomercials (Safe), the collected works of Lucille Ball (Dottie Gets Spanked), the world of Barbie (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story). In general, Haynes has imitated the form of these artifacts (flaunting a virtuosity he doesn't always have) while toying with their contents, the better to perform demonstrations of queer-activist semiotics. Let me state for the record that I like the queer-activist part. What I can't stand is the art-school semiotics, which Haynes shares with many others who came of age in the eighties. To this day, the art galleries are jammed with jumbles of appropriations, pseuded up as dummy versions of Brecht and Barthes, the Situationists and Lacan. That's bad enough. Far worse is to see an artist of Hayne's great abilities cut off his own best energies. Just as the filmmaking in Poison was at its freest in the scenes of jailhouse sex, staged in a patently artificial set, so is the freest part of Velvet Goldmine the wide-eyed re-creation of seventies excess, whether in high style (as with Brian Slade) or low (the Iggy-like thrashings of American madman Curt Wild, played with mosh-pit abandon by Ewan McGregor). But then, like Poison, the movie chains itself to all sorts of other styles and materials, which were dead from the start. Velvet Goldmine hobbles along, bearing the weight of parodies of Citizen Kane (used neither consistently nor well), recitations of Wildean epigrams (in case you missed a point that was made earlier and better), clumsy hints at conspiracies (just to add more scrap metal to the assemblage). Haynes piles on these encumbrances in the name of a critical cinema. But unlike real film intellectuals, such as Sue Friedrich and Mark Rappaport, he doesn't do any thinking in his movies; he just delivers prefabricated opinions. For all his brains, he behaves like the Scarecrow. For all his love of pop culture, and all his passion as an activist, he shies away from the emotional core of his films, as if he were the Tin Man. And though he's brave enough to take a nonconventional path in filmmaking, he isn't lion enough to head without shame or apology toward that Emerald City he so clearly longs for-no matter that it's a profit-making mirage.