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Velvet Goldmine (1998) More at IMDbPro »

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Moonage Daydreams of Stardust, 23 September 2006

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

"...As the slap on my ass by a lipstick-kissed elbow glove…" - Shudder To Think, *The Ballad of Maxwell Demon*

A true songwriter would give his left testicle to smack down lyrics as creamy. And *Velvet Goldmine* - a diabolical, Bowie-esquire, Wilde-ian fantasm – veritably pulsates with this species of lascivious mind-painting.

Not for the musically squeamish, the more familiar you are with David Bowie and the glam slam he was largely a part of and responsible for, the more tongue you will afford *Velvet Goldmine*. Being alive and licking during the 1970s is the best symptom for maximum sensory affinity; failing that, if your bag is Iggy Pop, T-Rex, Brian Eno, Lou Reed (matter of fact, any glam-stroked band, from The Sweet, to Slade, Kiss, or Alice Cooper) *Goldmine* will slide into your Velvet just fine.

Written by James Lyons and Todd Haynes and directed like a wet dream gone horribly right by Haynes, starring the cyanide-intense Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (as Bowie analog, Brian Slade) and dangerously sensual Ewan McGregor (as Iggy analog, Curt Wild), *Goldmine* is a celebration of a period that was surface Pop over layered Tart, expressed through raucous colors and pungent pan-sexuality in the form of the musical idiom we now call glam rock; a story of teen alienation and decibel-ed angst, of clutching belief in a lifestyle that seemed like a destination but ended up merely part of a longer journey. The underlying message in *Goldmine* was espoused by Bowie himself in *Changes*: "Ooh, look out, you rock n' rollers! Pretty soon now you're gonna get older!"

*Goldmine*'s success is in its evocation of the period - glam-struck London of the early 1970s – and its poignancy depicting the alienation of an insecure rock fan as he tries to be as Out There as the In Crowd. Around these backdrops, the larger story of the superstar elevated to messiah is woven.

Spearheading the androgynous attack on social morés is enigmatic Brian Slade aka Maxwell Demon, who fakes an on-stage assassination at the height of his popularity. We follow reporter, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), in a *Citizen Kane*-like hunt for Slade's whereabouts a decade after his decline.

The young Arthur (also played by Bale) is the outcast teen who cannot assimilate into the glamster crowd he so desperately feels kinship with; finding no respite at his parents' home either, he turns to the glitter of glam for comfort. At one point, young Arthur, while quietly watching a Slade TV interview with his parents, fantasizes that he jumps up, points to Slade and shouts at his parents, "That's me, that! That's me!" The reality is: no matter how loud he were to shout, his parents will never hear him. From his room postered with rock idols from ceiling to floor; to the way he turntables *The Ballad of Maxwell Demon* album and excitedly commences reading the record jacket, down to his parents being utterly unable to communicate with him, *I* felt like jumping up and yelling at the *Goldmine* screen, "That's me, that!"

Eddie Izzard, as audacious manager, Jerry Devine, makes Brian Slade a household name and allies him with American superstar, Curt Wild, who becomes Slade's lover, to the chagrin of Slade's wife, Mandy (Toni Collette).

In more subtle and striking ways than can be recounted here, *Goldmine* is a homage to *Citizen Kane*, Oscar Wilde and David Bowie (especially Bowie, whose influence extends into the very fibers of the glam mythos itself, the character of Brian Slade alluding to Bowie by his very existence, encapsulating *Ziggy Stardust*, *The Man Who Sold the World*, *Diamond Dogs*, *Jean Genie*, and even a sly dig at Bowie's *Let's Dance* era – with the name of the film itself being the title of a Bowie B-side). The film exists in an insular universe, so none of those influences is mentioned explicitly – which makes the innuendos more interesting to identify and will make the discoveries of their references all the more fascinating to young retro-glamsters.

Even Slade's Maxwell Demon persona is a reference to physicist James Clerk Maxwell's thought-experiment creature (called Maxwell's Demon) which examined scenarios regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

*Goldmine* sears with the genius of its allusions, its opening sequences a joyous primal scream to thwart the demons of conventionality. But – like the inevitable Second Law – its energy is unsustainable. Worse – it makes a bad excuse for its entropy, using formulaic dramatic arcs of washed-up, burnt-out fates, which seems disrespectful to the real-life icons of these filmic counterparts, who enjoy a longevity and success in excess to this day.

Brian Slade is undone by his excesses, and made to endure a Jilted Wife scene straight out of The Actor's Studio. She shrikes at him, "You know what your problem is? You get what you want and do what you will." Not really a problem, *per se*. Which proves conclusively that whenever someone deigns to tell you your problems, the most sensible option is to ignore them.

These pitfalls of rock super-stardom were to pander to "normal" people who believe erroneously that success is a bitch. A prime example of excess engendering success and longevity and industry clout is the man without whom this movie could never have been made – David Bowie.

In order to insert these negative messages, the film becomes overlong. (Damn you, MPAA!) Yet *Velvet Goldmine* somehow redeems its negativity by having Arthur discover Slade's secret - that he did not relinquish his success at all, just his space-messiah persona, swapping his serpentine sensuality for a more sterile, adult-oriented Business Model. In its final scenes, we find the film *has* been paying attention to its real life analogs and tips its hat one last time to David Bowie, the Grand Master of Reinvention.

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