'Velvet Goldmine', or the aesthetics of contemporary dandysm

When David Bowie was interviewed in May 1973, and asked to define ‘decadent rock’ for the magazine Melody Maker, Bowie answered ‘not putting a white rose on a white table, for fear of the thorn scratching the table’. This statement, stressing the musical genre's extreme refinement, shows the parallel between early seventies rock and decadence, a notion that had already been used to describe a controversial artistic movement, that is, a sub-genre of late nineteenth century Symbolism.

American director Todd Haynes, in his movie Velvet Goldmine (1998), goes one step further to relate seventies rock to Decadentism by pointing out that writer Oscar Wilde was actually the first artist to present himself as a ‘pop idol’. In the movie, Haynes traces the origins of glam rock back to Oscar Wilde and his philosophy of art for art’s sake. 

Velvet Goldmine is a fictional re-creation of the artistic/amourous relationships between David Bowie (aka Ziggy Stardust, the alter ego that Bowie created and embodied in the early seventies), Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. The film tells the story of glam rock star Brian Slade (actor Jonathan Rhys Meyer) who staged the murder of his own persona, Maxwell Demon, on tour. For the tenth anniversary of Slade’s shooting on stage, New-York Herald journalist Arthur Stuart (Christopher Bale) receives a new assignment from his boss: to find out what has happened to Slade since. This enquiry enables the journalist and several characters of the movie to look back on to the rise and development of glam rock in Britain thanks to Brian Slade’s music, and also to narrate Slade’s relationship with American artist Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). Velvet Goldmine deals with the craze for glam rock in the seventies, how it influenced the music industry, youth culture and the emergence of new sexual identities.

  

‘Glam rock’, ‘glitter rock’ or ‘decadent rock’ is a subgenre of rock music, mostly characterised by its visual qualities and theatricality. By reacting against the protest songs and folk of the sixties, glam rockers sought to focus on performance, costume and make-up, thus removing the political dimension that rock'n'roll had acquired in the previous decade. Musically speaking, glam rockers tried to innovate by mingling ballads and hard riffs to convey an otherworldly atmosphere to their songs. They also wrote similar lyrics describing the fall of dystopian worlds, the issues of stardom, or provocative narratives about transsexual characters. The most emblematic artists and bands of the genre are David Bowie, T.Rex, Brian Ferry and Roxy Music, and Queen. If glam rock was mostly embraced by British musicians, it notably influenced American artists like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop (whose albums Transformer and Raw Power were produced by Bowie in 1972 and 1973).

Unfortunately, the distinctive features of glam rock led critics to under-evaluate the topic, thus deeming glam rock as ‘rock’n’roll with lipstick or simply rock in costume’. As a result, if jazz and, more recently, the sixties’ music have been accepted as proper objects of enquiry, studies about glam rock are scarce and often prejudiced, maybe because of its extreme ways to attract popular audiences. However, Velvet Goldmine, because of Haynes’ status as an independent filmmaker, prompted reviewers to include this celebration of glam rock in the field of gender or postmodern studies. It enabled theorists to re-evaluate glam rock and its social aspects, by removing the clichés that one found in essays dealing with a strictly musical perspective. 

The rock star's modelling of identities through visual spectacle

Velvet Goldmine depicts the rise and fall of rock stars by throwing into relief the creation of their statuses as icons, or, as young Oscar Wilde puts it ‘idols’. These terms not only enhances their godlike qualities, but they allude to their status of images as well. In this sense, Brian Slade and Curt Wild seek to be recognised easily, and to acquire some well-known significance. 

Not only is the film built according to a complex network of references about literature and pop music, but the mere names and looks of the main characters are visual puns. Haynes displays some remarkable knowledge of glam rockers’ background in his intertextual fashioning of onomastics, and probably expects the spectator to decipher them. The main character of the movie is mainly inspired by David Bowie’s early career. Most of the film’s storyline was actually based on Bowie’s unauthorised biography Backstage Passes, written by Bowie’s ex-wife Angela Barnett. 

Slade’s creation of his persona Maxwell Demon, a rock star coming from outer space, mirrors Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust from Mars. The dates framing the chronology of the film relatively coincide with Bowie’s career as Ziggy: like Bowie, Slade’s career soared in the early seventies and started performing as his alter ego around 1972. Slade’s murder of Maxwell Demon in 1974, the opening event of the movie, recalls David Bowie’s sacrifice of Ziggy when he announced in July 1973 during the Odeon Hammersmith concert in London that he would never ever perform as such.  

If Brian Slade’s looks recall Bowie’s attitudes and performances as Ziggy Stardust, Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) is portrayed as Iggy Pop for his first appearance: half-naked, wearing straight leather jeans and ending up his gig naked. Later on in the course of the narrative, Curt Wilde reminds one more of Kurt Cobain, Nirvana’s lead singer, with his greasy blond hair and black-painted nails, a similarity that one finds, naturally, in the protagonist’s first name. His surname, on the other hand, might refer to his affiliation with Oscar Wilde, who is, in Velvet Goldmine, considered as the nineteenth century mentor of glam rock. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that Curt, at the end of the story, owns Wilde’s green pin, thus revealing the circular pattern of the movie.

                             

                                                  

However, ‘Wild’ may be read as an adjective, corresponding to his ferocious personality and stage performances, but also alluding to Curt’s youth: ‘Curt Wild (…) came from the aluminium trailer parks of Michigan, where rock folklore claims far more primitive origins (…) he was promptly sent off for eighteen months of electric shock treatment. It was guaranteed that the treatment would fry the fairy clean out of his mind, but all it did was make him go bonkers whenever he heard an electric guitar.’ It is worth noticing that the shock treatment event was inspired by what actually happened to Lou Reed in 1956 when his parents tried to ‘cure’ his bisexuality.

Jack Fairy, on the other hand, even though he is not that present in the narrative, symbolises the direct heir (or reincarnation, since the movie constantly blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction) of Oscar Wilde. He is presented by Mandy - Slade’s wife - as a true dandy, the genuine inventor of glam rock: ‘Jack was truly the first of his kind. A true original, everyone stole from Jack.’ Naturally, his surname refers to the colloquial term used to describe a gay person, but it alludes to Brian Ferry as well, leader of  Roxy Music AND Marc Bolan, pioneer of glam rock, singer of TRex, who died tragically in a car accident before his 30th birthday. 

Slade and Wild’s way of life reveal the vanity of artistic illusion: to stand out, they try by every means to be advertised, noticed, using self-publicity, outrage and provocation. ‘The secret of becoming a star is knowing how to behave like one’, claims Jerry Devine, Brain Slade’s manager: to do so, Slade and Wild adopt an eccentric way of living to instil their public figures with fantasy. These elements appear as essential to design the myth of the rock star.

In her essay ‘The Affective Sensibility of Fandom’, Laurence Grossberg points out that for fans, rock stars acquire a peculiar form of significance because they ‘organise social life and specific difference that matters as markers of identity’, but also because of their deification, exposed through their excesses, orgies, and drug abuse. In Velvet Goldmine, Arthur Stuart’s fascination for Brian Slade and Curt Wild is clearly motivated by a will to live the same type of decadent experiences that the rock stars have. Jerry Devine, Slade’s manager, is the one who introduces Slade to stardom, and the orgies that the artist will later be famous for. Devine is actually modelled after Tony Defries, the manager who made a celebrity out of Bowie’s character. 

Tony Zanelta, personal assistant to Bowie, expressed his dislike for Defries by declaring that ‘Defries thought that to be a star, you should act like one, so everything was first class’. Jerry Devine considers that ‘to behave like a star’, Brian should be promoted as a celebrity, and act as an icon. At this point in the movie, Brian almost always appears surrounded by a group of fashion designers, producers and bodyguards working for his label, Bijou Music. The scene where they are portrayed drinking champagne in a music-hall, entertained by singers, epitomises the secluded world of luxury that they have created for the rock star: the crew is placed on the same side as the singers, that is, on the stage, and they freeze, as if they were conscious of being filmed. The frozen dimension is reinforced by their similar gold and white costumes matching the colours of the setting.

   

The artificial dimension of Brian Slade’s career reaches its climax when the star is performing. In these scenes, Todd Haynes tries to re-create the provocative attitudes of Bowie in concerts, that the artist considered as a total form of spectacle. The Ziggy Stardust tour was noticed for its theatricality: it involved various types of media and artistic performances. For the two concerts at the Rainwbow theatre in London - 19^th and 20^th August 1972 - Bowie played with mime Lindsay Kemp and his cast. The setting was divided into several grounds and Bowie later added three screens projecting images of rock icons like glam rocker Marc Bolan, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, as if Ziggy Stardust was one of their descendants. Similarly, at the end of Velvet Goldmine, during the farewell concert to glam rock, images of Brian Slade and Curt Wild appear on a piece of cloth while Jack Fairy comes out of a coffin to perform one of Slade’s songs.

As a consequence, Brian Slade is presented by his crew and manager as an object of desire. If the spectator wonders if some of the movies’ sequences really happened, Todd Haynes strengthens the sense of fantasy that surrounds rock stars like Slade, Wild, and Fairy. Fantasies are necessary to build up their legend, as Mandy Slade puts it while she remembers Jack Fairy’s entrance at the club where she first met her husband: ‘I needn’t mention how essential dreaming is to the character of the rock star’. Dreaming and fantasy indeed enable the director to establish an artistic lineage between Oscar Wilde, Jack Fairy, Brian Slade and Curt Wild. In the movie, they are portrayed as dandies of some otherworldly nature. The movie starts with a shot that reads ‘1854, Birthplace of Oscar Wilde’, and a baby is left on a doorstep while an UFO flies away.

Whether this UFO is really dropped Oscar Wilde on earth matters little, Todd Haynes rather stresses that the extra-terrestrial nature of these characters accounts for their genius. One might see this sense of differentiation as a defensive technique against the trauma and stigmatisation they suffered as young gay boys. Oscar, Jack and Brian imagined themselves to be different, and thus to be unique: ‘Jack would discover that somewhere there were others quite like him, singled out for a great gift’. Their link as exceptional dandies is materialised by an emerald on Oscar Wilde’s collar. During the film, the emerald pin is passed from dandy to dandy, as if it granted its owner with fame and luck: Jack Fairy finds it in the schoolyard, after being bullied, probably at the place where Oscar lost it when he endured similar abuse, Brian Slade steals it from Jack while kissing him, to then give it to Curt Wild as a gift, who eventually passes it to Arthur Stuart.

                            

If glam rockers want to appear as dandies, they do so by placing particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language and leisure, thus establishing a cult of the self. The affiliation with Oscar Wilde is quite conspicuous when one notices the numerous allusions to The Picture of Dorian Gray and to Wilde’s aphorisms. These quotes enhance art’s beauty and futility, equating Wilde’s philosophy of art of art’s sake. In one scene mimicking a press conference, Brian Slade is placed in full light, at the centre of a circus arena shrouded in darkness. Not unlike Oscar Wilde who used to hand out visiting cards describing himself as ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, Slade is introduced as a scholarly authority by his assistant: ‘the Aesthete gives characteristic evidence replete with pointed epigram and startling paradox, while explaining his views on morality in art’. 

In this scene, Brian Slade answers to the journalists’ questions by quoting Wilde’s aphorisms written on boards held up by Brian’s assistants. When one journalist asks: ‘Is it your belief that all dandies are homosexual?’, he answers ‘Ha! Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner!’. This aphorism comes from a dialogue between Dorian Gray and Lord Henry in Chapter 8 of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Henry, the epitome of the dandy, uses this phrase to comfort Dorian who has just learned that Sybil Vane has committed suicide, because of Dorian’s lack of interest in her.

Furthermore, if Jerry Devine’s character is mostly based on Bowie’s manipulative manager Tony Defries, since most of Velvet Goldmine’s dialogue comes from Oscar Wilde’s quotes, one can easily compare him to Lord Henry, the protagonist who introduces Dorian Gray to a life of luxury and refinement. Devine is actually the person that builds up Brian’s public figure. He is characterised through his aphorisms about stardom: ‘It doesn’t really matter what a man does with his life. What really matters is the legend that grows up around him’. Probably following Devine’s advice, Brian quoting Oscar Wilde to deliver provocative statements is aimed at building up his legend and baffling journalists. Provocation and outrage are means for him to be noticed, especially when he is asked about his eccentric costumes and music. When one journalist asks: ‘Brian, why the make-up?’, the star answers: ‘Because rock’n’roll’s a prostitute. It should be tarted up, performed. The music is the mask…’, thus acknowledging surface and illusion as distinctive features of his art.

Lord Henry, aka George Sanders,
cool before anyone in 1945

Velvet Goldmine tackles the issue of the rock star’s identity by questioning the relation between Brian Slade and his persona Maxwell Demon. Todd Haynes tries to convey a sense of doubt for the spectator to wonder how much one can involve oneself into playing a role, and to what extent the creature or the image is linked to its creator. The relation between doubles, originals and copies is reinforced by the fact that every glam rocker seems to be a copy of Jack Fairy, who is himself a copy of Oscar Wilde. In his essay ‘The Invention of People: Velvet Goldmine and the Unburrying of Queer Desire’, Nick Davis argues that Brian Slade is the ‘surpreme stylist with no style (…) appearing in an endless array of costumes, posters, videos and pictures’. As a result, the star more appears as an image or his alter ego, ‘becoming synonymous with his commodified persona’. Just like David Bowie wrote the story of superstar Ziggy Stardust who was killed by some of his fans, Maxwell Demon’s narrative is about a space creature destroyed by its own success. When Brian Slade aka Maxwell Demon is shot on stage, this event seems to fulfil the prophecy that the musician had attributed to his character, whereas it was a carefully planned event, especially when we learn in the movie, later on, that Brian Slade’s murder on stage was a ‘shooting hoax’. What is so compelling about Todd Haynes’ movie is that, unlike one would think, the spectator is never prompted to wonder who shot Maxwell Demon – even though it is hinted that Jack Fairy was responsible for it - but rather whether he really was shot, and what happened to him afterwards. 

Further on in the movie, we understand that the shooting logically occurred after the fall of the star, his addiction to cocaine and his will to end up the tour despite his manager’s claim that Brian was ‘contractually bound to finish the Maxwell Demon tour as Maxwell Demon’. When Arthur Stuart has to find out what happened to Brian Slade in 1984, he discovers that Brian, probably after enduring plastic surgery, has reincarnated into Tommy Stone, the famous American pop star with perfect tanned skin and blond hair, most of the time wearing a white suit. Many critics compared these looks to some of the characters that David Bowie invented after he symbolically killed Ziggy Stardust, especially The Thin White Duke and how he appeared on the cover of the album Let’s Dance (1983).

Shocking, outrage: undermining stable assumptions about identity and sexuality

Imitation, doubles and personas play a key role in the movie since they enable characters to re-design their images. What Brian Slade, Curt Wilde and Jack Fairy are notorious for in the film is precisely what attracted critics’ and journalists’ attention as regarded David Bowie and glam rockers: the ability to constantly re-adapt themselves, to incorporate new styles and former models into their music. This is why, according to Stuart Lenig, glam rock ‘fuses styles and media (…) mixing theatre, pop music and technology’. 

Therefore, Todd Haynes reflects glam rock’s musical and visual diversity in the numerous appearances of rock stars wearing several costumes. Throughout the story, Brian Slade adopts various styles alluding to precise musical trends.We first see him as a mod, with a tight tuxedo and neat hair-dress, then wearing hippie-like clothes recalling David Bowie’s cover for The Man Who Sold the World. Naturally, it is when the spectator sees him as Maxwell Demon that his costumes are the most noticeable: mingling Victorian-inspired costumes and glam rock aesthetics, Brian presents himself as a fashion magnate, since his fans will dress and make-up according to his image. For Arthur Stuart who used to be a Brian Slade and Curt Wild fan, imitating gay icons was a way to see himself as an object of aesthetic contemplation. While Arthur is portrayed at the beginning of the movie hiding away from his parents to wear tight clothes and make-up, Brian’s shocking assertions about his bisexuality are the touchstone for Arthur to reveal his queer feelings to his parents while watching Brian on TV claiming: ‘I should think that if people were to get the wrong impression of me, (…) it wouldn’t be the wrong impression in the slightest’. This ‘burst of exhibitionist self-discovery’, is triggered by Arthur worship’s for his favourite stars: this identification enables Arthur to accept his difference and bisexuality.

While exposing the ambiguous sexual tendencies of his characters, Todd Haynes deals with the seventies’ sexual revolution to question whether it really achieved a recognition of gay communities. ‘What was so interesting about the glam era, was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing’ Haynes argues in an interview, adding that this sexual freedom ‘drastically changed, or reverted to something different, or went to hibernation in the eighties’. Glam rockers’ androgyny is not exposed only through their make-up and costumes, they also proclaim their bisexuality to make it notorious. 

The picture that has caught the press’ attention as regards Brian’s career the one portraying him and Curt Wild kissing, an act they performed before journalists during a conference. ‘And they tell you it’s not natural!’ shouts Brian before kissing his fellow-musician. If this passage hints at the relationship that Bowie had with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, it certainly displays bisexuality as transgression. At the outset of the film, one common-looking man expresses his shock, equating teenagers’ behaviour with ‘disgrace’. The most violent confrontation between the seventies’ sexual freedom and Britain’s previous, conservative generation occurs when Arthur’s father discovers that his son has been masturbating over the photograph of Brian Slade and Curt Wild kissing. ‘You bring shame to this family!’ exclaims Arthur’s father, before urging his son to leave their house forever.

By presenting themselves as objects of desires, Velvet Goldmine’s glam rockers expose their bodies as a source of visual pleasure. This is particularly the case while they perform the song ‘Baby’s On Fire’. During the concert, Brian Slade comes towards Curt Wild who is playing his solo, to kneel before him and bite his guitar’s strings: the sexual act is reproduced and simulated on stage. In the background, the crowd can be heard screaming, and the move precisely seems to be performed in order to arouse the audience. The concerts of glam rockers thus imply a typical anti-conformist body language and enhance their iconic status. This move was actually first performed by Bowie for his concert at the Oxford City Hall in June 1972 with his guitarist Mick Ronson. At the time, this move was perceived as utmost sexual provocation, and it was publicised by Mick Rock who took a picture of this moment that appeared in Melody Maker magazine, annotated and signed by Bowie himself.  

In Velvet Goldmine, the exhibition of glam rockers’ bodies relies on display and flamboyance. Todd Haynes blurs the definitive limits of sexuality by revealing stars’ bodies through artifice: they become a source of fantasy for their fans who seek to dress like them, to feel that they belong to this community of aesthetes. Nevertheless, the displaying of the male body in Haynes’ movie does not function as a source of identification for the spectator, it is not a vehicle for the visibility of the subject position either: the director prefers to use cinema to question the discourses about the sexual body and its connection to illusion. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze develops the concept of the ‘power of the gesture’ as related to postmodern cinema, by pointing out that the displaying of the ‘gest’ establishes a ‘thread which goes from one category to another’. In Todd Haynes’ film, the use of make-up and costume indeed enable rock stars to mingle sexual categories, and to appear as outer space creatures (like Maxwell Demon or Oscar Wilde) to expose their transsexual bodies.

By mingling the narratives of several characters about the glam era, Todd Haynes provides the spectator with a kaleidoscopic view of the seventies thanks to a complex set of technical effects corresponding to his topic. Many theorists agree to characterise Todd Haynes’ films as ‘postmodern’, because he deals with the art of simulation, pastiche, and contemporary culture. What is certain is that he deals with the issue of art’s usefulness and mocks the Hollywood model by building his movies on assemblages of references and the questioning of consumerism. The technical effects of Velvet Goldmine suit the topic since Todd Haynes emphasises theatricalisation, imitation and illusion. The use of zooming is most of the time dramatic and fast. For instance, a scene portrays teenager Arthur while he is in literature class, drawing a picture of Brian Slade as the teacher reads a passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely a record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him (…). He felt that he’d known them all, those strange terrible creatures that had passed along the stage of life and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own’. 

As the teacher reads the third sentence, he makes a pause and the zoom focuses on his face: we have the illusion that he is staring at Arthur –who appears in the previous shot- as if he had just noticed that his student was not paying attention. On the other hand, the Dorian Gray passage sums up the whole movie so well that the teacher quoting (at this moment, even though he still holds the book, he has stopped reading, and seems to quote by heart) Oscar Wilde is a direct address to Arthur, to urge him to lead his life like a dandy. And indeed, since Arthur investigates about Brian Slade’s shooting hoax and mixes his own memories of the early seventies with the narratives by Brian’s friends, the lives of these ‘strange terrible figures’ become ‘his own’.

 

The most remarkable feature of Velvet Goldmine is perhaps how Todd Haynes merges allusions to ‘high’ culture – through references to Oscar Wilde, and a reflection about the role of originality and imitation - and to ‘low’ culture by tackling the link between the star-system and fandom. In that sense, the movie mirrors the aesthetics of glam rock, which were aimed at being provocative to draw the public’s attention. Yet, glam rockers fashioned their image as refined dandies, and included subtle artistic references in their songs. Similarly, Brian Slade’s costumes as Maxwell Demon are glittering and colourful, fans try to reproduce them and Slade’s makeup, just like Arthur who adopts Brian’s blue tinting to go to the ‘Death of Glitter’ concert. On the other hand, many of Brian’s costumes are inspired by the male bourgeois outfits of the Victorian era.

Even though the movie is framed by several characters’ narratives, Arthur Stuart’s viewpoint dominates the storyline. In a way, Todd Haynes restores the respect one owes to fandom and how it actively participated in the developing of the glam rock movement for these stars used celebrity and provocation as means to attract popular audiences. As far as glam music is concerned, let us not forget that, in the expression ‘pop music’, that is, what glam rock belongs to, the adjective ‘pop’ comes from ‘popular’. 

In her essay ‘Fandom as Pathology: the Consequences of Characterisation’, Joli Jonson declares that the stigmatisation of fans as excessive, obsessed individuals is characteristic of a ‘media-addicted age’ and that this stigmatisation is seen only as a response to the star-system. Todd Haynes explores these issues by filming the audience of Slade and Wild’s concerts that are bewitched by the music and the stars’ behaviour on stage. However, by taking a former fan’s viewpoint as the movie’s main guideline, Haynes gives dignity to the fan’s vision.

Focusing on an ex fan’s viewpoint recording the testimonies of Brian’s relatives and friends enables Velvet Goldmine to convey a self-conscious meditation on the problem of story-telling by blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality. In an interview he gave to Stephen Dalton for Uncut Magazine, Todd Haynes declared: ‘the film is an outright attack on a lot of unexamined assumption of what films are supposed to be, on the things people hold dear about films, which is, that’s real. That was always my target, which is I think what glam rock’s target was’. The theatricality of the movie indeed exceeds any stable form of representation, thus challenging the effectiveness of information, perhaps to make the spectator wonder about the nature of certain events. 

At one point, towards the end of the movie, a sequence shows Arthur Stuart and Curt Wild having sex after the ‘Death of Glitter’ concert. The blurred way of filming this sequence, as if it happened in a dream, entices us to think that this event only belongs to Arthur’s fantasy. Still, when we connect this sequence to the rest of the movie, to the moment when, for instance, Curt Wild refuses to be interviewed by Arthur about Brian Slade’s death, the spectator wonders whether Curt Wild’s refusal comes from his will to deny what happened between him and one of his numerous fans. This is why Nick Davis paradoxically characterises this scene as a ‘flitting image from the past that does not correspond to the way it really was’ and a ‘memorialisation of desires’ in a pre-era of gay liberation, by pointing out how inextricably memories, desires and fantasies merge in the movie. Nick Davis thus compares the aesthetics of Velvet Goldmine to the Jamesonian concept of the postmodern mode: ‘the symptom of social impotence (…) that leaves little option but the imaginary’. To assert their identity as a queer community, glam rockers and their fans resort to dreaming.

Therefore, Velvet Goldmine does not present events in a chronological way, even though it opens with Oscar Wilde’s extraordinary birth. To clearly distinguish the complex combination of various timelines, one needs to watch the film several times because it explores the relationship between storytelling and the media, mingling diverse sources of information such as television, advertisement posters, radio announcements, and newspapers’ headlines. The information the spectator gathers is so fragmented that, after Arthur has completed is research about Brian Slade’s shooting hoax, both he and the spectator are invited to reflect about the ends of media as purveyors of truth: narratives, fantasies and fascination do not exactly coincide with the notion of newsworthy information. On the contrary, subjective storytelling seems more relevant as another means of communication, that is more attuned to glam rock for it is an art of simulacra and theatricality.

Todd Haynes’ film is not a documentary about glam rock, nor is it a biopic about David Bowie’s career in the early seventies. The director prefers to mingle reality and fiction in order to convey a certain spirit, for the spectator to experience a mood about what glam rock might have been. Just like glam rockers, Todd Haynes deliberately plays on images, mixes popular and high culture references, probably expecting the spectator to decipher these allusions. Therefore, the director is self-conscious about the film’s sense of artifice. The film is neither an attempt at studying the psyche of the protagonists, it explores the surface of cultural exchanges focusing on music and dance, costuming and outrage. Besides, it is a respectful engagement in the life of an ex-glam rock fan. We may wonder if, thanks to films like Velvet Goldmine addressing the issues of gender and stardom through the media of cinema, glam rock will be considered as a serious topic of analysis. In 2001, John Cameron Mitchell, another independent filmmaker, questioned the notion of gender within the frame of rock music in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a musical telling the life of a transsexual star who looks for her ‘other half’. Todd Haynes, in 2007, re-adapted the relationship between rock music and the notion of fragmented identity in I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan, in which several actors played Bob Dylan’s role, notably a woman (Cate Blanchett). Perhaps the most relevant impact of these films is their ability to bring a cinema of transgression to the mainstream.

                              

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Fiction and Aphorisms

   Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. (1891) London: Penguin Classics, 2000

   ---. Oscar Wilde’s Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations. London: Dover Thrift Editions, 1998

Filmography

   Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Dir. John Cameron Mitchell. New Line Cinema, 2001

   I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan. Dir. Todd Haynes. Paramount Pictures, 2007

   Velvet Goldmine. Dir. Todd Haynes, starr. Jonathan Rhys Meyer, Ewan McGregor,

Christian Bale, Tony Colette, Eddie Izzard. Miramax Films, 1998

Discography

   Bowie, David. Hunky Dowry. RCA Records, 1971

   ---. The Man who Sold the World. Mercury Records, 1971

   ---. Space Oddity. RCA Records, 1972

   Pop, Iggy. Raw Power. MainMan and Columbia Records, 1973

   Reed, Lou. Sally Can’t Dance. RCA Records, 1974

   ---. Transformer. RCA Records, 1972

   Roxy Music. Roxy Music. Island Records, 1972

   T.Rex. Tanx. EMI and T.Rex Wax Co, 1973

   Velvet Goldmine: Music from the Original Motion Picture. Fontana London, 1998

Secondary Sources

On cinema and Todd Haynes’ movies

   Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1976

   Jameson, Frederick. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press Books, 1990

   Morrison. James, ed. All that Heaven Allows: The Cinema of Todd Haynes. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007

   Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tanliuson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989

   Wyatt, Justin. ‘Cinematic/Sexual: An Interview with Todd Haynes’ in Film Quaterly, 1993, n°93, pp.2-8

On the music industry, star-system and glam-rock:

   Dalton, Stephen. ‘Glam Rock: Scary Monsters, Super Freaks’ interview with Todd Haynes for Uncut Magazine, nov.1998, pp.1-5

   Gourdon, Anne-Marie. Le Rock: aspects esthétiques, culturels et sociaux. Paris: CNRS Editions, coll. Arts du spectacle, 1994

   Hebdige, Dick. Subculture. London: Routledge, 1979

   Lenig, Stuart. The Twisted Tale of Glam Rock. California, Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2001

   Lewis, Lisa A. Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992

   McCain, Gillian and Leg. Please Kill me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk, New York: Grove Press

   Seknadje, Enrike. David Bowie, Le Phénomène Ziggy Stardust et autres essais. Paris: Corbis, Philippe Auliac, 2009

   Waldrep, Shelton. The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004