Velvet Goldmine: The Promise of a Queer Future

An Essay on Media and Culture in Queer Cult Cinema

“We set out to change the world… ended up just changing ourselves.”

Todd Haynes’s 1998 film Velvet Goldmine is an acquired taste. Between its highly nonlinear storytelling and the seemingly random breaks in the plot for a jukebox music video, this piece effectively breaks the standards of filmmaking itself. It is subversive at its core. 

You’ll never see anything like Velvet Goldmine. And that’s what makes it a masterpiece.

In a current media landscape concerned with “representation” — and thus, what separates good representation from bad representation — it is all the more important to take a look at our past, especially in works like Velvet Goldmine, a film that was not made for a mass audience, and certainly not to appease critics. The film doesn’t exist to be representation; it exists to be queer.

And I think that’s something a lot of queer people need to see today. We are so concerned with existing as a token, as a hypothetical representation of our culture, that we may sometimes forget to be people, to exist for ourselves. We forget the foundations of self-expression after years of living so long for others. And thus, it’s important to look back at films like Velvet Goldmine because the film itselfencourages retrospection. 

A plot summary can hardly do the movie justice, but I will make my attempt. The film is a love letter to 1970s glam-rock, starring Christian Bale’s Arthur Stuart as a journalist tasked with investigating the career of David Bowie-esque glam-rockstar Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) on the tenth anniversary of his final show as “Maxwell Demon,” a Ziggy Stardust-inspired alter-ego — the show where Slade effectively fakes his own death onstage. 

We learn of Slade’s bisexuality early on, and the film explores his relationships with his ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and the infamous Curt Wild, an Iggy Pop-type character performed by the scene-stealing Ewan McGregor.

In a sense, the movie is a retrospective on a retrospective. It was made in the late 1990s, carrying with it the cultural memory of the AIDs epidemic and all the tragedy that the LGBTQ community went through in the previous decade. That being said, the “present day” scenes of the story take place in 1984 — a landscape presented so boring, so dull, and so utterly hopeless that it’s hard to imagine that this is the same 1980s remembered today for its bombastic colors and neon aesthetics. And yet, the meat of the story takes place in the early 1970s: over a cultural moment so brief, yet so impactful. The characters of the film regularly acknowledge this divide between the “past” of the glamorous 1970s and the “present” of the bleak 1980s, as Collette’s character speaks on with nostalgic remembrance: “Today, there’d be fighting in the streets. But in 1972, it was more like dancing.”

In a way, when Brian Slade killed off Maxwell Demon, he was killing off something more than just an alter-ego — he was killing off a cultural hero, someone who queer kids like Arthur Stuart looked up to as this beacon of hope. He killed off an idea.

Perhaps one of the most powerful throughlines of the film resides in its exploration of the media’s impact on queer culture. Journalistic coverage is almost the cornerstone of the story: The opening of the movie is news footage covering Brian Slade’s final performance as Maxwell Demon; there are repeated BBC interviews with fans and the supposedly decadent youth of the decade; a common visual transitional thread is the rapid-fire sequencing of newspaper headlines, featuring gems like, “A star is born — and he twinkles,” “Gay stunt at slade show,” and “All that glitters — is Gay.” And, well, the whole structure of the movie is reliant on the Citizen Kane–esque format of journalistic interviews.

Made all the more interesting by critics’ mixed reviews outside the narrative, we should emphasize just how much media penetrates the story in a way we seldom see from other queer films. Most tend to be quiet, intimate romantic-dramas, especially among other indie projects under the New Queer Cinema umbrella. But not Velvet Goldmine. 

The romance between Brian Slade and Ewan McGregor’s Curt Wild is a loud, highly sensationalized, utterly public display, set up “for the world to believe” by Slade’s new management. At one point, they quite literally kiss for an audience of flashing cameras; they quote Oscar Wilde — “The curves of your lips rewrite history” — and twenty seconds of silence unfold as Wild and Slade share this intimate moment, only to be rudely interrupted by the flash-photography of the press. And in the end, it’s fitting that the relationship’s downfall concerns pressures that unfold behind closed doors — Slade falls in love with an image, not the actual person, while Wild falls in love with a person, who ends up succumbing to his image. 

Though it might cause the downfall of stars like Wild and Slade, it cannot be overstated how significantly the media acts as a positive influence to those like our true protagonist Arthur Stuart. The story relies on media as a bridge to connect the stories of these larger-than-life rockstars and our down-to-earth POV character — a choice that reflects the relationship between media personalities and ourselves.  

No clearer is this expressed than in a scene towards the midpoint of the movie: we’re first shown Brian Slade being interviewed by the press, wherein he talks about his bisexuality (a nod to David Bowie’s own infamous contention with the press). Meanwhile, there’s intercut shots of Arthur, in his suburban home, as he points excitedly to the television screen, exclaiming: “That’s me! That’s me!”

Only for it to cut back to Arthur sitting, tense and still, to show that this moment of proud reclamation had always been nothing more than a dream.

This scene only gets harder to grapple with every rewatch. To speak both personally and broadly, Arthur’s story empathetically grapples with the unique struggles of queer youth in a media-saturated society. His parents are appalled at his seemingly decadent behavior, and his tale is heartbreakingly timeless. I’m sure plenty of queer people today can relate to scenes of him throwing his jacket into a bush as he leaves his house in a less-than appropriate outfit, or him hiding magazine clippings of his idols under his bed to avoid awkward conversations, or him simply experimenting with gender-nonconforming hair and makeup only in close quarters. I know I do.

Todd Haynes was aware of the effect this film would have on youth; in an interview regarding the cult status of the film following the DVD release, he says that the film “seems to mean the most to a lot of teenagers and young people… exactly who I was thinking about when I made Velvet Goldmine” (Haynes, 2007). Outside the narrative, plenty of teens like Arthur began treating Velvet Goldmine with the same reverence — as a beacon of hope.

For beneath the glitter and glam, Velvet Goldmine is a testament to queerness of the past and the queerness of a future. Oscar Wilde, perhaps one of the most influential queer minds in history, takes up quite a large, important, though rather invisible role in the story — for it is his elusive gemstone that gets passed on by the characters through generations. Rediscovered by Jack Fairy, stolen by Brian Slade, gifted to Curt Wild, and finally, cleverly left with Arthur Stuart, Wilde’s brooch is a testament of queer strength throughout time.

Aside from that, much of his work is referenced throughout the text, both from the characters’ lips, and around them. One scene shows Arthur Stuart daydreaming in English class, paying more attention to the drawings of his rock idols in his notebook, while his teacher reads a very particular passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11)

And I feel, here, this quote sums up the film’s thesis: we must find solidarity in our past.

The movie emphasizes that we must remember, at all costs, the stories of our community. That we must not only remember our suffering, but our joy. We can find solidarity in those who lived before us, just as we can find identity in media heroes of the ages. Sure, we might never go back to the same glamorous idealism of a pre-AIDs world, but looking back provides a memory of what our future can be, so long as we choose it. 

More than “representation” of today, I’d argue that Velvet Goldmine is a film we need to revisit. It dared to end on a note of pure, unrelenting hope — to tell young queer viewers to look back at their past, and see how their community has survived for so long. To show these young people that it gets better, because it already has been better. It’s not a happy ending by any means, but it’s full of hope nonetheless. 

At a cultural moment where we weren’t sure if there was a future to speak of, Velvet Goldmine spit in our faces, and told us we have the promise of a future.