Day Twenty: Velvet Goldmine

Until now the only Todd Haynes film I'd seen was I'm Not There, his pseudo-biopic of Bob Dylan. I thought that film was brilliant, beautifully shot and the only way a proper film could have been made about a towering and enigmatic figure like Dylan. This film, also a dreamlike meditation on an almost mythical performing artist (this one fictional but certainly based at least partly on David Bowie), is a clear precursor to that one. Both depict how both the glamor and destruction of being a musician can be beautiful. Both blur the line between dream and reality, largely with long, loose musical interludes.

Velvet Goldmine reminded me distinctly of two older films. One is Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's depiction of swinging London in the sixties. The images of mod culture in Velvet Goldmine were very reminiscent of those from Blow Up. I've always been interested in the 1960s--folk music, civil rights, the Beatles, antiwar protests, the New Wave, etc.--but I often forget about the extreme trendiness of London in that period, which always seems both glamorous and stilted in movies. The other, which I'm sure was a conscious source of inspiration for Todd Haynes, is Citizen Kane. This film follows the same structure of a young reporter assigned to tell the story of a now-fallen famous person. The stretches of his interviews with figures from the man's life alternating with flashbacks are almost identical to those in Kane. This movie even mirrors the shot where a blast of thunder and lighting punctuates a sign advertising the man's ex-wife at a nightclub before moving inside the club to hear her bitter story.

Although I wouldn't dare suggest that this film goes Citizen Kane one better, I do like how it fleshes out the reporter character--who is sort of a faceless everyman in Kane--and makes him part of the scene, personally affected by and involved in the events he's reporting on and hearing about. He was into glam-rock; he saw star Brian Slade's faked assassination in person; his struggle to find himself and come to terms with his homosexuality in the face of stern conservative parents parallels Slade's rise and fall. We may never really get at the heart of Brian Slade, but we learn quite a lot about the reporter, and what music meant to him. Movies about the rock'n'roll lifestyle are best, I think, when they acknowledge and capture that beauty and intensity and importance of the music, even amid all the drugs and feuds and infidelity that are always a part of such movies (I'm thinking mostly of Almost Famous). When you're young and confused like Christian Bale's character, music is everything, and your idols become as real to you as anyone you've met in person.

One last thing: although I like a lot of different music, and although a lot of my cool, trustworthy friends love Bowie, I've never gotten into glam-rock. I've kind of felt for a while that I should at some point have my Bowie phase. Maybe watching Velvet Goldmine will push me into actually downloading Ziggy Stardust.