Velvet Goldmine (1998) +

An enthralling, confounding fabulation about the vicissitudes of celebrity, style, music and selfhood. Todd Haynes's ode to the glam rock era is a routinely confounding whodunnit which basically asks the question: how does popular culture shape our sense of sexual selfhood. The central figure in the film is Christian Bale (in easily his most emotionally vulnerable bit of screen acting yet) as Arthur Stuart, a journalist who endeavors to answer a mysterious question that yet surrounds the legend of an iconic figure from his youth Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Myers doing what he does best: exude ambisexual erotic tumescence). Brian Slade is Haynes's proxy for a David Bowie-like figure who rose to a kind of transcendent musical superstardom through a savvy blend of visual style, musical mediocrity and erotic adventurousness. Around Brian Slade, Haynes gathers an assemblage of music biopic types: the first promoter (the enthralling Michael Feast); the first wife (Toni Collette, in a rare off-kilter performance -- lots of great bits that never exactly coalesce); the successful producer (Eddie Izzard, similarly erratic); and the main rival (Ewan McGregor in one of the sexiest performances I've seen in some time). McGregor's Curt Wild seems to me to be equal parts Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain -- a captivatingly feral sort of manchild whose intoxicating maleness combines with a preternatural sensitivity/sensuality to become a tornado of self-immolating eroticism. McGregor is amazing in the role, a cipher who is absolutely legible in every moment -- just the sort of actor with whom Haynes's style of filmmaking really soars. So, we have on the one hand Rhys Myers as the iconic Brian Slade, an entrancing contrivance who never fails to capture the audience's attention and imagination, while on the other we have McGregor as the mysterious flame-out Curt Wild (shooting stars are a recurrent image in the film) who haunts the screen long after he's left it. These two poles seem to underscore one of Haynes's main arguments with this film: that popular culture contains both the completely contrived and the utterly real, and both touch the souls of fans. For indeed, this is a film about fandom, especially about how fandom -- or falling into an eroticized obsession with popular culture -- can be a path toward and through the most confounding aspects of self. And, indeed, this thread is where the heart of the film seems to lay, in the Christian Bale's character. Having quickly read Nick Davis's essay on the film, in which he makes a very sophisticated argument about Haynes's layering of temporality to, among other things, underscore the historical dimensions of queer possibility, I'm especially struck by Haynes's use of Oscar Wilde as a framing device for the film's exploration of the sexual fluidity of the glam rock moment. The green pin, which falls from the heavens to become affixed to the blankets swaddling the infant Wilde, becomes a talisman of fabulosity which seems to affirm the genderqueer tradition of dandyish masculinity at crucial moments in the film's narrative. I find this thread to be especially provocative, especially when considering the film's argument about the historiography of male homosexual identity. Haynes, it seems to me, is arguing for the dandy's importance as a queer change agent (for lack of a better term). With Wilde and the glamrockers, we see the dandy embodying an essential gender fluidity at precisely the historical moments (British criminalization of homosexuality, Stonewall) when the contours of homosexual identity are being constructed, even ossified, with an enduring fixity. It's a fascinating frame that Haynes proposes with this film, one that permits the polarities of the social constructedness of queer sexuality to be coterminous with a vision of queer desire as a kind of cosmic consciousness. For me this manifested most profoundly in the moment when Bale and McGregor are frolicking on the roof and look up to see the UFO. The UFO -- a pinkish glowing circle that contains a prominent center and radiant lines emanating outward toward the circle's edge -- seemed to me in this moment to be a semiotic sphincter, a radiant pucker that also seemed to glow a little bit brighter at the precise moment when McGregor's Curt might have been anally penetrating Bale's Arthur. I may be making too much of this flying saucer/sphincter but it really does seem to me to be Haynes's way of reconciling the competing currents of homosexual historiography (homosexuality is a social construction that emerged in its current formation in the 2nd half of the 19th century in tension with a more essentialist notion that the instinct toward same-sex eroticism and gender variance exists across time and across culture as an essential creative force). It does seem to me that, at least on some levels, Haynes is wrestling with this precise theoretical question as he shapes this film. I also really just adore the brief doll moment in this film, in which Haynes uses boy children playing with boy dolls to instantiate the erotic connection between Brian Slade and Curt Wild. This brief sequence seems to me to be the moment when Haynes distills his argument about the way that folks use popular culture, and especially pop icons, as the raw material for their own expression of sexual selfhood. This is the core narrative of the film -- via Bale's haunting character arc -- and one that I find really interesting as a near constant theme in Haynes's work. As so often happens with Haynes, like David Lynch or Spike Lee, I find this film much more enthralling to think about and puzzle through than I do to actually watch. I should shout out to the palpable eroticism in this film, though. It's a confusing current, in that it doesn't really route in a way that's conventionally legible, but the I'm amazed by how erotic the filmmaking is, and suspect it's that frustrated eroticism that makes Bale's character arc so curiously devastating. A fascinating film, one I really undersold -- and probably misunderstood -- on my first pass. (Indeed, I'm struck by the fact that Haynes's accessibility seems almost directly proportionate to how few expectations you arrive with.)