Velvet Goldmine

“When I saw the film I thought the best thing about it was the gay scenes, the only successful part of the film frankly. The film didn’t understand how innocent everyone was then about what they were getting into.”
– David Bowie in conversation with Andrew Davies, The Big Issue, January 1999

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
– Oscar Wilde, quoted in Velvet Goldmine

By the mid-1990s, David Bowie’s glam rock past, as well as his open queerness, had been ostensibly put behind him. A decade earlier, he had disavowed his “experimenting” with bisexuality as his “biggest mistake”, shortly after divorcing Angela Bowie, with whom he had a famously open marriage defined by sexual promiscuity with both men and women. With this abrupt change of lifestyle and attitude, David Bowie’s flamboyant, androgynous persona – so crucial to his rise to superstardom as Ziggy Stardust – had also been cast aside. In 1992, Bowie married the Somalian supermodel Iman and settled down into a life of heteronormativity in New York and Switzerland, far from the sexual escapades and transgressions of his Berlin and London years.

In 1991, Todd Haynes broke out as a key voice in a burgeoning queer movement in American cinema with Poison, a tripartite film inspired by the writing of Jean Genet that proved influential on a generation of gay filmmakers. After his follow up, Safe (1995), a masterpiece about a housewife afflicted by an unknown illness, Haynes approached his idol David Bowie with an early script for Velvet Goldmine, a fictionalised rise-and-fall biopic inspired by the star’s life and featuring a young journalist investigating the cultural disappearance of an icon. As well as Bowie’s general approval, Haynes and his producers sought permission to use seven of his songs in it— “All the Young Dudes,” “Sweet Thing,” “Lady Stardust,” “Moonage Daydream,” Bowie’s cover of “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Lady Grinning Soul,” and the track from which the film takes its title, “Velvet Goldmine.”

That Bowie refused the young filmmaker, and later harshly dismissed the film in public after its release, betrayed an ambivalence and unease on his part about the years of “innocence” depicted in Velvet Goldmine, an era the Bowie of the nineties was uninterested in revisiting or, especially, lionising. At the same time, the star told Todd Haynes that he was preparing his own project about the Ziggy Stardust era and thus did not want to lend his songs to a rival production, though it is not clear whether this project ever made it beyond the speculative stage. Though first versions of the Velvet Goldmine script are not publicly available, it is quite clear that even at the early stage at which he presented it to the star, Haynes viewed the glam rock era, and Bowie’s role in it in particular, as a revolution of liberation – queer and otherwise – whose promise had been squandered in subsequent decades. Haynes would later comment explicitly that the more rigid and authoritarian eighties had extinguished that flame and reversed the messy progress of the preceding decade.

A mid-sized British co-production that attracted significant attention and helped put him on the map as an international filmmaker, the film Haynes made is a flawed but fascinating investigation into a public persona and the significance of an era, refusing many of the conventional tools of identification that define most biopics. Indeed, its refusal of real interiority for its Bowie-like protagonist suggests instead a preference for or interest in surfaces, masks, performance, matched by its gliding camera movements and smooth transitions. Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a cipher, whose rise-and-fall is narrated, Citizen Kane style, through a series of oral histories with his contemporaries (including stand-ins for Iggy Pop and Angela Bowie), and whose vacuousness as a star, even at his zenith, feels eons away from David Bowie’s own distinctive personality and artistic interests.

“Glam rock was the first overt alignment of the notion of the alien with the notion of the homosexual,” said Haynes, “both of which became this fantastical, galvanising potential for musical expression, a potential freedom for kids trapped in their dreary lives.” Beginning with an alien visitation to pass a mysterious glowing orb to Oscar Wilde in Victorian London, Velvet Goldmine makes the extraterrestrial connection explicit, while bearing marked similarity to two earlier Haynes works that betrayed the same interest in the very human depths beneath the public personas of celebrities: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), a tragic biopic of the eponymous pop star, made with Barbie dolls, which was later withdrawn from circulation after a lawsuit from the family, and the short Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), in which a young queer child is obsessed with an I Love Lucy-like TV show as an ambiguous expression of his burgeoning self-image, not unlike the narrative arc we see Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) undertake in Velvet Goldmine.

One might debate what the refusal of the rights to the Bowie catalogue did to Velvet Goldmine. What’s clear is that it forced Haynes to push the material in another direction, even while relying on the obvious skeleton of Bowie’s biography to fill it out. A Haynesian project to its core, Velvet Goldmine remains today, for Bowie fans and general viewers alike, by turns dazzling, muddled, rich in detail, and often, in its grasping for sense in the contradictions of the Bowie persona, quite moving.