Velvet Goldmine

Is a mess.  A film that appears to completely come apart, ripping at the seams as the reels unspool before us.  The whole Citizen Kane parallel structure, the seemingly willful way Todd Haynes refuses to focus on one or two themes or crucial arcs all indicate that perhaps ambition and wanting to say everything and more may have made the film more like the rooms and halls of the real Bedlam.

But what a beautiful mess.  Those walls and hallways are lined with velvet, natch, and spun gold brocade.  And the leftover wine rests in the finest Czech crystal.  And the lithe, naked lovely sleeping bodies, the "residents", as it were, are all smiling.  The men cover themselves with their frocks to keep themselves warm and happily dreaming.  The women with their dinner jackets, their ties still loose around their slender necks.

And maybe I am all wrong.  I have been wrong before.  Many times.  Maybe Haynes insisted on this lack of focus, this careening riot of decadence, glamour, glitter and the gutter best illustrated, to him, everything Glam was all about, what the glorious post-Stonewall gay liberation must have felt like to him.  It was a beggar's banquet drenched with paste diamonds, silks, and eyeliner.  For a short while the Bedlamites and Libertines were free from their Jean Genet prison cells, walking the streets proclaiming that ultimately Pretension is a just a word, just a word, meaning to "aspire to something."  (h/t Simon Reynolds.)

Ah, a couple of rock stars sleeping in on a Sunday.

But amidst this majestic, gaudy parade, very early Haynes lays down a very very important message to the haters and charlatans out there, through Ewen McGregor, speaking as rock star, Curt Wild (loosely Iggy Pop, really):

Everyone's in to this scene because it is supposedly the thing to do right now but you can't fake being gay.  You know, if you're going to claim that you're gay you're going to have to make love in gay style.  And most of these kids just aren't going to make it.

I treasure Todd Haynes' sumptuous yet shambolic Velvet Goldmine.  There are many moments in this film that I will always recall with fondness or wisdom.  In fact, his entire canon is worth watching, notably Poison, Safe, Far From Heaven, and his HBO Mildred Pierce miniseries. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest American directors working today.

"Camp is not just a row of tents."



All my love,
AH