Exploring the relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop in this fictionalized account from director Todd Haynes.
by Brendon McCullin
It turns out that some love stories are one-sided. Todd Haynes‘ paean to the glam rock movement of the early-’70s, Velvet Goldmine, takes its title from a David Bowie song, but the admiration wasn’t mutual. The Thin White Duke felt that the script borrowed far more from his life than just his music and he subsequently refused permission for his songs to be used in the 1998 film. That doesn’t stop the film, though, from now serving as a powerful reminder of just how great Bowie’s early career really was.
Accounts have varied about why the singer disapproved of Haynes’s project. The official word from Bowie was that he planned his own film based on his androgynous rocker years. Others have theorized that the singer took exception to some of the source material that Haynes tapped into, perhaps spurred by a scene where the film’s enigmatic lead character, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), meets his future wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), for the first time — especially, since the sequence seems to be lifted directly from Angela Bowie’s tell-all book Backstage Pass: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie.
Even though the script was reworked to create more distance from Bowie’s life, while cribbing a bit more from T. Rex singer Marc Bolan and cult glam legend Jobriath, it’s still hard to watch the film and not think of the late singer. Despite the non-blessing by Bowie, Velvet Goldmine plays as an examination of what it means to live a life dedicated to performance, a notion that Bowie seemingly embraced. Slade’s alter-ego, a rock god character he calls Maxwell Demon, is every bit as fabulous as Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.”
It takes a bold filmmaker to apply to glam-era Bowie the narrative structure of Citizen Kane. Just as in Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Haynes’s film features a reporter (Christian Bale) who tries to dissect an elusive personality through interviewing those who presumably know him best. Of course, most directors probably wouldn’t have had the guts to cast six different actors to play Bob Dylan the way that Haynes did in his biopic I’m Not There, or hypothesize that Irish writer Oscar Wilde was actually an alien as in Goldmine.
While the film really takes its cues from Bale’s journalist, for Bowie fans the attraction is the film’s take on Slade’s relationship with both Mandy and his glam counterpart, Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who’s primarily based on Bowie’s good friend Iggy Pop (with a bit of Lou Reed, for whom Bowie did some producing, mixed in). While fans have always wondered about exactly what may or may not have happened between Bowie and Pop, not to mention Mick Jagger, Haynes leaves nothing to the imagination with the physical relationship between Slade and Wild.
By using a non-linear approach to tell Slade’s story, which includes an exile from public life that obviously never afflicted Bowie, Haynes gets to pick and choose what stories he wants to tell. Those vignettes work best when set squarely in the ’70s with Slade and Wild at their most fabulous androgynous best. It might not be exactly what transpired with Bowie, Pop and their contemporaries but, as the saying goes, it’s close enough for rock-and-roll.
Bowie unfortunately is now gone, but it’s going to be a long, long time before he’s ever forgotten. Haynes’s take on one of the most influential periods of the singer’s career is a fitting reminder of the wild, debauched, yet artistically thrilling times when glam ruled the rock scene and for the first time, seemingly everything was up for grabs.
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