Fan Fiction: Screening Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine
- Syd Stanley
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Reflections Ahead of Reel Friends’ One-Night-Only Event
“The idea is to create a world in which reality, fantasy, and memory each have equal weight.” - Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine commentary track
There is a scene early on in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in which two characters, both strangers, share a dream. In this dream they encounter a phenomenon they call the “threshold of revelation,” which allows these two to divine intimate truths of one another's lives, leading to upheaval, but more importantly, connection. In this dream, they are the same.
In Velvet Goldmine, teenaged Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) wanders the aisles of a record store until he stumbles on Brian Slade’s (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) debut record. Pale, semi-nude, androgyne, Slade delights and horrifies the young Arthur. Despite, or because, of this, he brings the record home. Later, he watches Brian Slade declare himself to be bisexual in a televised press conference. Arthur imagines coming out to his parents, leaping up and down, screaming, pointing at the TV: “THAT’S ME!”
Throughout the runtime, the adult Arthur investigates and interviews those who knew his idol. It is in Arthur’s memory and imagination that the portrait of Brian is painted. It is also in that memory and imagination that the crux of the film occurs. What is truth and what is fantasy becomes blurred, all at the hands of the figure of the Fan.
In his dream, they are the same.
—
I first saw Velvet Goldmine almost exactly eight years ago.
It must’ve been two in the morning. There were four of us in a dorm, searching for something queer and exciting to watch. That’s the great thing about being young or being new to a field: you have an endless depth of work to draw from and discover. The movie that could change your life might be hiding right under your nose.
Landing on Goldmine felt like a fluke. Only one of us had seen it, and the other three were oblivious to its contents. Hell, I don’t think I’d ever seen a single trailer or still for it in my life. My knowledge of glam and Bowie was incredibly limited. I had literally no idea what to expect
I couldn’t predict a second of it. Everything was foreign, fantastical, brand new – yet I felt as if, somehow, I had never been more connected to something in my life. We were all blown away.
A sort of frenzy overtook us all following, but no one more than me and my best friend, Rebecca. We talked about the film constantly. We listened to the bootleg of the soundtrack on YouTube. She would beautifully sketch and paint out the characters. I remember one instance where, bored in class, I sprawled CURT WILD <3 on my forearm in black and red felt-tip marker. Around Rebecca’s birthday we held a “Death of Glitter” party, in which all our friends were instructed to dress in chic glam rock style. Over time, the insistence died down, but the love remained.
When I applied to film school, I wanted to be a screenwriter. Over the course of that summer, my desire shifted entirely to understanding how and why a movie could make me feel the way Velvet Goldmine did. I instead pivoted towards theory, criticism, and history, and found a field that challenged and invigorated me in equal measure. And for the first time in my academic career, everything began to make sense.
–
Velvet Goldmine is not concerned with reality.
Often diluted to a pseudo-Bowie biopic, the film tackles the feeling of the era itself rather than the particulars. But, if Todd Haynes is to treat Glam Rock as a religion, it must have a messiah. In our world, it was David Bowie. In theirs, Brian Slade.
Many characters are mishmashed amalgamations of real-life rock and roll figures, like Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Suzi Quatro, and Angie Bowie. Dialogue is lifted from interviews of them and their contemporaries, personal stories Haynes collected over time, and the works of Oscar Wilde. Slade’s singing voice is dubbed by three different artists: Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers himself. There are alien spaceships, circus tents, Barbie doll love confessions, and references to Citizen Kane. Everything imagined is real, and everything real is imagined. In the film’s audio commentary, director Todd Haynes refers to it as “a complete fiction in which everything is true.”
Haynes is a meticulous filmmaker. I visited his permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY in early 2024. For each of his major films stood a small display, all with drawings, storyboards, concepts, reference images. Velvet Goldmine’s section was littered with colorful character sketches and storyboards. For his latest at the time, May December, there stood a giant binder with laminated pages you could flip through with images ranging from stills from Bergman’s Persona to landscape photos of the suburbs of Savannah, Georgia. There were at least seventy-five pages of material. Each of his films spawned a binder like this. I longed to look inside Goldmine’s, but I settled for the limited display.
It was awe-inspiring to see how much detail goes into his work, especially knowing that Velvet Goldmine was born from years of studying and preparation. Looking back on it after doing another wave of research, I understand him all the more. His positioning as a fan, letting the information in his head unravel and unfold in whatever ways he sees fit, turns the film into a kaleidoscopic collage of ideas, wants, desires, and dreams. It allows the viewer direct access to this feeling Arthur chases and represses in equal measure throughout. If you’ve ever been passionate about anything, you’ll understand it. The film is as much about the era as it is about loving something larger than yourself.
I’ve helped to program a screening of Velvet Goldmine once before this back in 2023. It was my first real marquee film, and my first on behalf of Videodrome’s monthly Plazadrome series at the historic Plaza Theatre. Despite screening the first night of Barbenheimer, we had a really lovely turnout. Rebecca even came down from Nashville for it. Some audience members went full glam. I remember I wore a pair of black and rainbow creepers that tore up my ankles. Despite my bloodied socks, I had a hell of a time with my team and my friends. Afterwards, we went to El Myr and listened to a friend of Videodrome's Matt Booth spin glam records. It was a terrific night.
Three years later, the film returns to my home theater, the Tara Atlanta, programmed with Reel Friends. When I pitched this film, despite having shown it not that long ago, I pitched it with the idea of celebrating the film in our typical immersive fashion. I was thrilled at the idea of dressing up and singing Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love or T. Rex’s Diamond Meadows. Fate decided to intervene. I used to host and perform at these screenings all the time - it was the highlight of my career. Now, I am four months into identifying and treating an autoimmune disorder that makes leaving my house next to impossible. It makes not only my ability to attend this event, but my entire future uncertain.
With all of that, I still wanted to emphasize how important this film is to me. All this alone time has allowed me to consider and reframe just why I feel this way about it.
The answer’s simple: it’s instinctual. Every molecule of Velvet Goldmine speaks to me, whether narratively, visually, sonically, the littlest mistakes to the most agonizing details. It is the movie that changed my life. In many ways, I feel like it gave me a purpose. I feel it even now, stuck at home, poring over my film books, scanning through Internet Archive. I am more connected to the piece than I ever have been in my life. I think of Haynes and the years spent compiling research and dreaming this thing into existence. We become historians out of a desire for knowledge or understanding something far away from us. Desire and love go hand in hand. I do this because I love it.
Reel Friends presents Velvet Goldmine this Thursday (4/9) at 8PM at the Tara Theatre. Purchase tickets HERE.
