Velvet Goldmine

Dir. Todd Haynes
1998
8.1

At what point does a life become absurd? When does a person quit being a human and become a persona or a personality, incapable of dissociating between their surrealist lifestyle and the likelihood that they are addicted to their own sense of escapism? In his brilliant 2007 fiopic on Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, director Todd Haynes theorized that this happens only when some kind of trauma forcibly slices and bleeds through into an existence that has evolved into a social and cultural lifestyle: forcibly crippling the gaping hugeness of exterior recklessness and waking an interior humanity that can be covered up but never entirely forgotten about. What made that film incomparable was its blending of realities, its fractal poster of one of the best, and at the same time in a more literal sense, least, known figures in contemporary music, and its ungodly collision of pure fantasy and debilitating reality. Stepping back 10 years we see the roots of Haynes' unique vision of personality and his theme of identity that he would further develop in the 21st century with Far From Heaven and I'm Not There. Velvet Goldmine, which centers around the life of David Bowie (known as “Brian Slade” in the film and played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his relationship with Iggy Pop (“Curt Wilde” played by Ewan McGregor), does not pulsate as far out or as deeply as I'm Not There, but instead tries to unearth (and in a manner highly reminiscent of Citizen Kane's detective-esque narrative about uncovering the truth behind an infamous and controversial pseudo-historical figure) some kind of truth behind the glittery facade of the 70s glam rock movement in England and its affect on two of its most well known icons.

As with I'm Not There, Velvet Goldmine utilizes healthy doses of fiction and fantasy. Haynes' masterful and amazingly careful control over the artifacts in his films allows for these fables to blend with the written and oral history he is essentially remaking to create a picture that is almost entirely aware of itself in ways that its protagonists can never be. Velvet Goldmine understands its own mythology, and uses that knowledge (in the form of UFOs, pearls from Oscar Wilde, and impossibly well-timed meetings and introductions) to both undercut and underscore its own vicious and amoral landscape. Haynes designs Brian Slade as a gawky, awkward and troubled youth who, after discovering a passion for music, is inspired by an early performance by Curt Wilde in which the singer is seen jumping around the stage, removing his clothes, being aggressively sexual (in general, not towards a particular gender), and causing a scene that would ultimately lead to the basis of his character, Iggy Pop, being called the Godfather of Punk. It is the late 60s and Slade decides to take that idea and transform it into something mostly unseen before. As the film progresses Slade falls further into the deep, dark passages of his alter ego and stage persona “Maxwell Demon”, based heavily on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust image, and as he does so becomes further infatuated with himself and his status as the penultimate pop icon of the time.

The film cuts between retroactive memories of Slade, as told by former lovers (his wife, one-time manager, and Curt Wilde himself) in order to, in 1984, discover “what became of Brian Slade?” Christian Bale plays an English rock journalist, Arthur Stuart, and Glam Rock devotee on a quest to discover, in the ten years since Slade faked his own shooting at a concert, who or what he is now. It's hard to tell whether Bale is remarkable in this role or entirely miscast, especially during his flashbacks as a sexually repressed teen in 70s England, working himself up to embrace the glam trend by buying Slade's records and dressing in a mostly asexual manner. It is revealed that through traumatic childhood experiences, which find a mirror in the experiences of Slade (beaten up at school, early exposure to vaudeville and homosexuality) and Wilde (electroshock therapy to “cure” him of his early signs of homosexuality), Stuart developed an entirely confused notion of sexuality and its relation to popular culture. In dual explorations of Slade's past and his own, he finds that their paths, both physically and psychologically, have met before and continue in a bizarre sort of parallelism. The film vaguely resolves its extrinsic plot line by concluding that androgenuous sex icon Brian Slade has transformed into a generic 80s arena lounge-ish star Tommy Stone, who falls somewhere between Rod Stewart and Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry.

If this all sounds very confusing, bordering on esoteric, that's because it is. Velvet Goldmine turns in on itself a few too many times and there are certainly moments where it is difficult to maintain a static concept of time and identity. While the film is, like all the films of Haynes' that I've had the pleasure of seeing, chock full of personality and iconography (Velvet Goldmine's version of the early 70s is one of the best and most authentic since Kubrick brainstormed what the future would look like in Clockwork Orange) and brings together a daunting number of literary (Oscar Wilde is quoted continuously) and cultural (was that Alice Cooper?) influences, the fact remains that it is too much for an audience to handle. It is not that the film loses focus, but more that its focus is so wide that it's difficult to see anything very clearly and instead the viewer is left with memorable scenes and impressions of the characters, rather than cleaving at the grit of the characters themselves. In retrospect I can safely say that Haynes perfected this unique film style, the fiopic, in I'm Not There; tightening up potential lose ends and further embracing duplicity and confusion to make a picture that was more wholly organic. I'm Not There embraced a viewer perspective of not only the history of its central character, Dylan, but also of the film's narrative, leaving mysteries to be solved independently rather than explained. That film was more a character study and less an attempt at a linear tribute to highly personalized concepts of historic events. Velvet Goldmine paved the way for this sometimes indulgent, but immaculately exceptional film style, but ultimately could not decide between embracing its own curious and occasionally confounding nature or attempting to explain away what it spent painstaking amounts of time building up to be enigma.

I'm Not There

Dir. Todd Haynes
2007
9.7

The crime of the century was committed last year at the Academy Awards when Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton beat out Cate Blanchett for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. That year Blanchett portrayed one of the many faces of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, a fictional biopic based on the singer's fragmented life. Blanchett stars as Jude Quinn or middle 60s era Dylan, full of vicious snarkiness and contempt for humanity. Along side her are various other incarnations of Dylan including a young black boy who's named himself after his hero, folk icon Woody Guthrie, a vain Hollywood actor who falls in love with a beautiful but notoriously unselfish French painter, and a young folk songwriter turned bible thumper, among others. While Blanchett's role is the most obvious and literal recreation of Dylan, the trickle down effect finds the viewer searching, sometimes desperately, for pieces of Dylan they recognize in the ensemble players. For those of us, such as myself, who know little about Dylan, the film in a way constructs a very true image: chaos. With so many different images, ideas, and emotions passing by at a lightning pace we are forced to conclude that all of the film, every tiny piece of it, makes up some integral part of the universal understanding of Bob Dylan. Which, in a far more daunting way, points to how we understand each other and ourselves. Every piece of contradictory evidence, every remote possibility, every muttered phrase are all cogs that grind towards the bigger picture. The truth.

While Jude Quinn was my favorite character in the film, or I should favorite version of one character in the film, s/he was also the most difficult to grasp. Along with Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Wishaw), who's scenes were more like philosophized interpretations of previously witnessed events with other characters, a sort of oblique narrative, Quinn seems almost inhuman at times. There is something so exquisitely pleasurable about self destruction and Quinn rolls in the thick mud of decay, delighting in its filth. Haynes' screenplay, which he wrote with Oren Moverman, is simply brilliant. It captures a callous youth, an arrogant aging, and graceful decline, each represented with equal care and thought throughout the film's effortless 135 minutes. There's a hugeness to I'm Not There, one that actively refuses to be understood. Its not in the obviousness of the film's refracted narrative, or the intentional slurring of reality and fiction, but rather in the way it painfully reflects how little we know each other. We hardly know ourselves and as Robbie (Heath Leger), the Hollywood actor, tells his soon to be girlfriend and wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) we are at the center of our own world. So intrinsically focused on ourselves that we forget that it is cultural appropriation, more often than not, or manners that cause us to give the facade of being interested about other people. Ideas are one thing, when they're divorced from the people who create them, but people come with so much baggage. This caring is translated into never being entirely honest, thinking that we're doing some kind of good because we aren't telling people how we really feel. Quinn tears down the idol (or idle) giant, and suffers for it. He almost seems to want to cause as much pain to others as he has caused himself. It was one of the more detailed and gross portrayals of the breaking of a man's spirit that's been captured on film. Quinn is Haynes' archetype, the truest of the Dylan's on screen, which is, of course, ironic since there is little truth to Quinn. Like a man dressed all in mirrors, you only see what you want to in Quinn.

I'm Not There is not an easy film. It's narrative is told in piecemeal, making digetic and visual leaps from one decade to another. It runs the gauntlet of complex emotions and occasionally dips into surrealism. But as one of the pioneering directors of the 21st century, Haynes is not satisfied by simply telling a story. If I'm Not There fully represents anything it's how stories can be entirely misleading, and that the story beneath the story (which some might call truth, or a purer form of it at least) is far more interesting. Haynes gets at the guts of what it means to be alive; to be growing and evolving and changing your mind, changing it back and insulting your friends and taking too many drugs, and loving, and fighting, and fucking, and, at the end of it all, accepting it for what it was. Life is not crystalline. It's not a diamond. There is really no guarantee that you're ever going to get it; that you're going to understand a thing. You can read all the books you want. What I'm Not There theorizes is that knowing would take all the fun out of living, and all the hardship. It begs you to keep in mind that there is nothing more vivacious then dropping everything and starting all over again, while you still have time.