Assume a Pose: Oscar Wilde and Glam Rock

"Velvet Goldmine"
1998 Goldwyn Films
Audience: Readers of an alternative weekly(eg: City pages or The Village Voice)

Most anyone can relate to the crude glamor of performing self. In his 1998 film ¨Velvet Goldmine”, director and writer Todd Hayes weaves together performance, identity, and the desire to evoke social change in a succulent eroticism of stardom. Mr Hayes frames a journalist's literal manhunt, and reconnection with personal history as a lurid, sickeningly appropriate metaphor for the hedonistic invention and reinvention of public image, and the unintended consequences of these deliberate images on his characters.

Mr. Hayes is no stranger to examining complex, public characters in a given moment and well outside of their comfort zone; one of his short films (“Superstar”) chronicles Karen Carpenter's traverse through fame. He does not give his audience any answers, but instead endeavors to take them on a journey that entangles them in the perspective of each character. He does this by creating a sort of surreal fairy-tale documentary that compresses time, immerses us to saturation in every scene, and fragments the narrative in such a way that we make every discovery along with the characters. Mr. Hayes capitalizes on the effectiveness of using old forms to explore and dissect new, difficult material, he employs “Citizen Kane” as a template which serves to makes his own work more readily digestible.

“Velvet Goldmine” is opulent, the soundtrack carries its own Glam Rock subplot as well as serving to punctuate specific moments with drowning force. It dances around a powerful trifecta of popular culture's marginalized heroes: Oscar Wilde, Kurt Cobain, and David Bowie. It resists being biographical (which was, admittedly, Mr. Hayes' original intent), and instead covers more varied, allegorical ground. Oscar Wilde saturates the film with innumerable quotations (mostly from “Pictures of Dorian Grey”) woven into dialogue (often with absurd hilarity), and with more stylistic inclusions like the Victorian roots that show in costumes of the Glam Stars. Wilde's presence in the film gives the glam rock era in London and its relationship to the scene in the US awesome depth, and historical context.

The audience is bombarded with image and style, but this is really a film about individuals and the circumstances that created (and destroyed) them. The characters in “Velvet Goldmine” are magnificent, and aptly cast. Eddy Izzard, in particular, gives a scintillating performance as the manager who is primarily responsible for the greedy success of a revolution that might otherwise have avoided such commercial success, and also, perhaps for the pressure that caused pop idols Curt Wild and Brian Slade. Wild is performed by Ewan McGregor and modeled after various elements Kurt Cobain and Lou Reed, and Slade is a specific portrait of David Bowie and performed by Jonathan Rhis Meyers. Slades wife, Mandy Slade is played by Toni Collete and mirrors Angela Bowie.

It is Mandy who finally brings the elements together and begins to show us that in a creation so precarious as stardom, even the burning out is a lavish undertaking. She speaks with resignation, but there is a cheap grandeur to her memories which illuminates how in the process of changing the world, it is the self that is revolutionized.

We seem to arrive at the end of the film unexpectedly, after several false conclusions, exhausted by a backwards game of clue and a hurtling, mysterious journey to nowhere, but perhaps that is the point; what more is growing up, after all? What more is self discovery than the creation and recreation of possibilities?

Sources and awesome links:

Theauteurs (you can view some of Haynes' harder to find films here)

Sense of Cinema (Todd Haynes and Social Criticism)

http://www.velvetgoldmine.com.ar/info.php (quirky fan site with lots of information)