As visually lush as its title promises, Goldmine delivers the glam-rock era a clef-style. A journalist (Christian Bale) is sent to uncover, 10 years after he disappeared, what happened to singer Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, embodying a slinky amalgam of David Bowie and Brian Ferry), who fled the spotlight at the apex of his and glam-rock's popularity. (Likewise, Ewan McGregor, as feral American rocker Curt Wild, channels absolute Iggyness even as he eerily evokes, with his blond tresses, a Kurt of a different, grungier moment.)It's a headturning journey through 70's Londong at its most resplendent, when boys could be boys in high heels, sequins, and feathers. Goldimine's denizens are Cabaret's grandchildren frolicking and fucking (up) beneath the long (eye)shadow of history.
For all its big-budget beauty, Velvet Goldmine remains resolutely a Todd Haynes film. As in his other movies, identity--sexual and otherwise--is interrogated; narrative pleasure is seduced and thwarted and engaged again. Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax films and a burly and charismatic spinner of fine and effective buzz, recently copared Haynes to Martin Scorcese. Sure, Weinstein hopes Goldmine , like its title, reaps one at the box office, but he's on to something. Haynes has an abiding love for film language, and like Scorcese, who's worked for years with producer Barbara De Fina, Haynes has a tenacious and visionary partner in Vachon.
TODD HAYNES: What I hope is that those kinds of questions would ulimately reflect back on what those artists were trying to do at the time. Bowie was already constructing himself as David Bowie before he began a series of other changes that define, really, what made him Bowie. Similarly, Iggy Pop constructed himself, named himself. ALthough it was a much more raw, violent performance (than Bowie's), it was still an act of theatrical excess.
OUT: But you weren't even a teen when glam rock, well, rocked. Why the fascination with that point in time?
HAYNES:What I love about that period is that the notions of authenticity and truth were really the first things to go. It really was an examination of surface. Unfortunately, in our culture that sounds like such an evasion. But in fact, if you read Oscar Wilde, surface can also liberate us. If anything speaks to the changes that teenagers go through on a minute-to-minute basis, this era was such a brilliant articulation of that: It's all right to dress up, find what's right for you, experiment.
OUT: Do either of you feel any pressure, as original mavens of what has been dubbed the New Queer Cinema?
CHRISTINE VACHON: I don't make movies with an agenda in mind, although a movie might have its own independent agenda.
But you have to acknowledge, looking at all the films you've produced, that your work almost constitutes a chapter-by-chapter examination of gay history--from Genet to Stonewall to (activist artist) David Wojnarowicz to glam rock to Halston.
OUT: But you no longer have to be voices of a community?
VACHON: No, especially now. If you want to go see a so-called gay movie, there's so much more choice than there used to be.
HAYNES: Or less choice. (pauses) Sorry. Though it's sort of an accident, I'm happy that Velvet Goldmine poses some of the same questions being asked in queer theory, some of the healthy antigay ideas that have been coming out both in the U.K. and in the States; questions targeting the complacency of a very comfortable gay culture, which is now reflected in mainstream Hollywood films. The whole question of a fixed sexual orientation was definitely being explored in the '70's, and there are echoes of that going on today.
OUT: How so?
VACHON: Like, the kids who work for me. They call themselves queer, which ends up being a catchword for a kind of fluid sexuality. But friends of outs, closer to our age, have dared to transgress and go out with a member of the opposite sex.
OUT: Speaking of transgression, Velvet Goldmine is not that easy a film, narratively.
HAYNES: I watched it last night, and it really does operate like a musical. Although there are ideas in the film that I feel are provocative and resonant, I feel like they're couched in something that makes them not completely sensible. Musicals can be incredibly moving, but not really because of the plot. They become emblematic of something else--though they're often kind of silly.
OUT: Do you have a favorite musical?
HAYNES: I know Christine does.
VACHON: What's mine?
HAYNES: Jesus Christ Superstar.
VACHON: Oh yeah, but that's more of a rock opera.
HAYNES: What about The Sound of Music? Or Mary Poppins?
OUT: There's something about Mary Poppins...
HAYNES: It was the first movie most of us saw. It probably made me want to make films.
VACHON: I tried to watch Mary Poppins with a bunch of nieces and nephews, and they were fine. But those bank scenes. I was like, Okaaaaaay! Dick Van--what's his name?
HAYNES: Uh...Dyke.
VACHON:...is really really irritating.
OUT: Not to reduce you to the sum of your parts, but as a lesbian and a gay man collaborating...
VACHON: Well, I wasn't a lesbian when Todd and I started working together.
HAYNES: And I wasn't a fag. (with mock seriousness) We found our identities working together, and we're sticking with them. Actually, the thing I'm proudest of is how incredibly independent we've stayed. I never felt that I had to compromise my work to get it made, which is really unheard of today.
OUT: One last thing: What's the deal with Ewan McGregor's pecker, which pops up yet again in Velvet Goldmine? He's fast becoming the Harvey Keitel of his generation.
HAYNES: And thank God for him.