Wrecked and Rebuilt by Velvet Goldmine
my first adult-life rewatch, and as a result, everything
If, when I was fourteen, you’d asked me why Velvet Goldmine was my favorite movie of all time, I’d have cast my burgeoning philosophical-writer persona out the window (momentarily) because I couldn’t even fake meaningful answers. I’d have said:
“Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale are making out and fucking and covered in glitter. If you need something else out of life, we can’t be friends.”
It says something about the extraordinary beauty and acting skills of these three gentlemen and the singular visions of director Todd Haynes that, tethered to this condition, I still never wanted for friends. But there’s a depth to this movie that I couldn’t have seen even in my 20’s or, in reality, for most of my 30’s. Halfway through a sudden and somewhat spontaneous revisiting, I was sobbing. In all my years of claiming to revere this movie, that had never happened before.
On its face, Velvet Goldmine is a series of scintiliating snapshots of glam-rock decadance, strung together on a string of balls-out surrealism that includes collage-like voiceover and a lit-up UFO that rains glitter down on earthly escapades. And it is that. But it’s also a wrenching story of what happens when you love someone who’s determined to self-destruct. And what happens to your heart, to your entire sense of reality, really, when your certainty that you and your beloved will stay bound forever just shatters. Don’t tell any of my teenage selves I told you this, but the reason that I didn’t get Velvet Goldmine before now was because I’ve never been in love. My copious hardcover diaries, the ones destroyed by Katrina when my grandmother’s basement got flooded, would certainly insist otherwise. But those girls that were me lived on a combination of film + hormones, a heady enough concoction to create a lifetime of illusion of love. Longing and what-I-thought-was-heartbreak were my reasons for getting up in the morning and my reasons for my tear-soaked pillow at night, but it was all smoke, really.
Adult heartbreak is its own burning driving force. I felt that I had barely survived my unrequited teenage devotions because everything in junior high felt tenuous and only dubiously worth living for. I was so unaccountably sad almost every single day that a crush unrecieved would have no other impact except turning sad to unbearable. I didn’t know that life could be good, really good, as humanly flawed-possible to perfect, even, and still hurt, every day, because you thought you saw something in your love for a single person that didn’t turn out to be real, didn’t turn out to be there, didn’t turn out to be them.
In the days before gay male couples were duly making out on network television, actual joyous homoeroticism was hard to find in media. This is why teenage me had so little time for the female characters that seemed, through the limited lens of my youth and sexual impatience, only to come between the hot principle characters I was watching or reading for. Brian Slade;s ever-devoted, witty, glamorous, charismatic, determined, and did we mention devoted wife Mandy, with her many depths and dimensions portrayed divinely by Toni Collette, was lost on me. Until now.
Now, I see in her the tragedy that the movie was made of. Every male character in Velvet Goldmine ultimately got the chance to gloriously transform into themselves, living the lives they wanted, and even when the dreams turned nightmarish through hazes of drug and addiction, they made it out okay. The orgasmic rapture of collectively carving out a glittery space where they truly belonged — were worshipped, even, just for being who they were and making the music they loved — ultimately made up for their self-destructive decisions. But Mandy got the short shrift in an all-too-realistic way. She was left twice: once for another lover (Curt Wild, immortally played by Ewan McGregor), and, when the dissolution of that relationship compelled Brian to spiral, he essentially left Mandy again for cocaine.
I’m resisting the temptation to sprinkle this essay with images and clips because context is everything for their full power. Suffice to say that Mandy’s breakdown-attempts to get a coked-out careless morbidly-laughing Brian to acknowledge that she’s just served him divorce papers has to be one of the most heartbreaking scenes between romantic partners in contemporary film. As with all actual-love, we can tell, even when we meet her fully deflated, that she never stopped caring. As Junot Diaz once wrote, “The half-life of love is forever.”
Occassionally I struggle to bring these essays back to my overarching theme, but it’s easy to relate my embodied existence back to Velvet Goldmine, because I don’t know who I would have become without this movie, that’s a fact. Glam-rock gave me a new way to enter and percieve my own body, but I didn’t love the film because I loved David Bowie: I got into David Bowie because I loved this film. My one experience seeing the legend up-close, however, just had to take place in Moline, IL, a town so hopelessly boring that a faded banner over a tunnel advertised its slogan: “Getting better every day!”
David Bowie, who at that time had deep golden-brown shoulder-length hair and enough charisma to make the whole arena stagger backwards, diplomatically asserted that it was great to be here in Moline, IL. (“He’s lying,” my friend whispered.) “You’re like a Chuck Berry song,” he said to the audience. “At least you think you’re a Chuck Berry song.”
I wish I could say that I was among my people as I rocked out in red fishnets, a too-wide-for-most-doorways red petticoat, a very tight tank top that doubled as a Union Jack flag, red-as-fuck lipstick, and my then long red hair pulled into very dramatic, cartoonish pigtails. But the fact was, I stood out amongst the almost-aggressively-hetro yuppie-types in pastel frumpwear. (At the close of “Let’s Dance,” my friend shout-whispered in my ear, “Okay, he played ‘Let’s Dance,’ you can ALL go home now!”) Still, it was Bowie, so it had been worth the however-many-hours of driving from Iowa City to see this show. On that sad day in January many years later when I learned I’d never get another chance, I felt a new surge of gratitude to have had the one.
Velvet Goldmine’s primary storyteller is Arthur, played like music by Christian Bale, who lived a life of constant bullying and isolation until he discovered glam rock. What I had also never experienced during my youth and not-quite-youth of loving this movie was any kind of physical/sexual ecstasy comprable to what Arthur and Curt Wild got up to on that gorgeous cobblestone rooftop near the end. (Again, I could barrage you with photos here, but honestly, just watch it.) What we saw was not just two of the best-looking human beings in existence experiencing sexual bliss together in their prime, but also — one person whose sexual exploits had been myriad, wild, and largely nonstop, gently guiding someone who was, if not literally virginal, entirely new to experiencing his whole self as part of his body, part of his being.
It shows that love, real love, the kind that changes you, can take a lot of forms. It’s not limited to the one who commits to you for life. That’s huge, obviously, commitment for life, but everything is huge. We chop things up into neat little labeled-things to keep them from being overwhelming (and we see how well that’s working out for society as a whole!). But it’s all just big. And that’s what makes Todd Haynes a phenomenal director. He’s ready to let the whole damn thing in. (Accidental double entendre there, but I’m leaving it because it works!)