Can someone please explain this movie to me??

Honestly it took me quite a few viewings of the film & reading questions and answers on here to get it.

Basically:

A pin thought to be Oscar Wilde's was found by Jack Fairy and it was then stolen by Brian Slade, who later gave it to Curt Wild. Curt then gave it to Arthur. I saw it as a 'rite of passage'.

Brian Slade was a huge pop star, but before that, he met and married Mandy and Cecil became his manager. After basically selling out to Jerry Divine and becoming mega-famous, the pressure became to much for Brian so he faked his death, upsetting his fans and his wife, Mandy Slade. They break up, she stays at the Sombrero Club where Brian used to perform, and she gives an interview to Arthur Stuart.

Brian pretty much disappears.

Arthur was a huge fan of Brian Slade back in the day but ended up hooking up with Curt Wild instead - after Arthur ran away from home because his parents dissaproved of him. He was a groupie, basically, that's why you see him with members of the Flaming Creatures.

Arthur, now a journalist, is assigned to investigate Brian's fake death and has to find out where he ended up after all those years. Arthur realizes that Tommy Stone is actually Brian Slade.

I'm probably leaving a lot out, so I hope someone can add on to what I started... :p



Oh, Adrian. Adrian always tells the truth.

"but the spaceship and strange characters confused me."

Well, one thing I can tell you about the spaceship...it was a common theme among David Bowie/Ziggie Stardust, Jobriath, and Klaus Nomi to use an alien persona. It was somewhat a representation of how it felt to be "different" as well as being gay or bi in a society that wasn't ready to accept it. It felt like being an alien. Just look at Jack Fairy. He seemed like he came from another world. Brian Slade's Maxwell Demon persona was an alien, as well. Does this help?

The poster above me did a very good job explaining the basic plot. If you have more specific questions, we can try to answer those as well.

Others have explained aspects. Here's what I think is most important:

Oscar Wilde's brooch has other-wordly origins, just as (possibly) Oscar Wilde does. His revolutionary spirit is carried within the brooch.

Jack Fairy finds it as a result of being physically beaten for being different from the other kids. It helps him recognise his difference as a gift, one he should embrace.

Brian Slade steals the brooch from Jack, thinking it will give him some of Jack's power and glamour but it backfires on him. He can't control the power at all.

Brian gives the brooch to Curt becuase he is desperate to express the depths of his feelings, feelings he rejects when his fame is threatened by Curt's own difference. Curt is the real deal. Brian still only "wishes he's thought of it."

The only think Arthur ever wanted was to belong. His pathetic wannabe clothes and make-up and behaviour can't fool Curt, though. Curt sees that Arthur is the real thing too. That's why he lures him up to the rooftop. He was so broken by Brian's betrayal he hasn't been feeling anything at all, but with this young, earnest man he wants to, and does, feel again.

But when the morning comes, it's revealed that the sparkles from the spaceship were only sparks form the chimney, and in the light of day they are nothing but ash. We create our own glamour.

When Curt meets Arthur in the bar all those years later, he does recognise him, but it would be too awkward to acknowledge it in the open. When he gives the brooch to Arthur, he's thanking him for making him feel again. This gift also assures Arthur that he is no longer an outcast - Curt accepts him as "one of us" (the glam people). Arthur gets what he's always wanted - to belong.

The moral - you can't steal someone else's mojo, you have to EARN it.

The spaceship - doesn't anyone remember "The Man Who Fell to Earth" which starred David Bowie? Ground control to Major Tom....

I think it was symbolic of his Ziggy Stardust persona and the above mentioned film...


~Just another freak in the freak kingdom.~

Here's an essay I wrote on the film, perhaps it can help.

Singing in the Glitter:
Genre Bending in Velvet Goldmine

“Musical” has become a dirty word in Hollywood. Other than Dreamgirls and Chicago, recent artistic and financial successes within the genre have been few and far between. However, in this latency period a subgenre of pseudo-musicals designed to ease audiences into the concept of characters singing has emerged. One of the first major Salvos in this movement came in the form of Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, a film that uses a deluge of digenetic sound to create a musical tapestry, even as the film’s content more closely follows Charles F. Altman's conception of a horror film over that of a musical.

Velvet Goldmine is a monster of a movie. Much like Frankenstein's creature, the film is sewn together from a multitude of outside sources. Most obviously it is a fictionalized biopic and a backstage musical, however, upon closer inspection, the post-modern stylings and subversive intentions of the filmmakers become more apparent. While the surface is simple, albeit occasionally overwrought, the subtext and layers of the movie are actually more indicative of the collage of genres that Jim Collins examines in his article, "Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity," (Collins, 243-262). Certainly, with 32 classic Glam-Rock tracks and 2 original recordings there is enough music and onscreen singing in Velvet Goldmine for it to count as a musical, perhaps even an opera. But there is significantly more to it than this confining definition can allow for. In fact, the film is easily as much of a mystery, memoir, satire, spoof, social critique, science fiction, fantasy, sex comedy, drama, detective story and post-Tarantino reference orgy, (if one that aims slightly higher than Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) as it is a simple musical. And though the ascetics are clearly those of a musical, the plot and thematic events are far more linked to the horror genre, specifically H.G. Wells’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Grey.

Altman defines horror and science fiction in his article, "Towards a Theory on Genre Film," as,

“…[G]enres [that] meditate no so much the prescribed and the prohibited as they do the known and the unknown. Each horror movie, each sci-fi film depicts a border area, just outside the known world, giving the spectator an opportunity to let his imagination go, to enter worlds which seem unattainable, forbidden, or unimaginable,” (Altman, 36).

Altman claims that horror films deal primarily with the duality of man, (Altman, 37). His example is the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a film that bears striking resemblances to Velvet Goldmine. In that film, Jekyll is portrayed as an impeccably refined Englishman who transforms into the despicable, and darker skinned, Mr. Hyde. The film inadvertently deals with the concepts of white power, entitlement and racism. Velvet Goldmine uses this same conceit of the split personality of Slade, as well as that of journalist Arthur Stuart, to specifically deconstruct gay panic, egotism and Foucault’s concepts of self-actualization. All three, sexuality, hedonism, and the finding of one’s true self, are far more in line with the horror film than they are with musicals.

Horror films are popular for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is their ability to titillate the audience through their use of duplicated heroes and villains. This phenomenon, allows audiences to both revel in the villain’s debauchery and cheer on the forces of good is essential to one’s appreciation of a horror film, (Altman, 38, 41). Similarly, if one were to take the characters in Velvet Goldmine at face value, said characters would almost universally appear to be vulgar, shallow and degenerate. However, it is this very repulsiveness that makes them endearing. The Sid Vicious-like antics of the drugged out Curt Wilde are meant to give the audience the vicarious thrill of being a heroin-fiend rock star while still reinforcing Reagan’s message that drugs are bad. Also, his homosexual activity exists to give the audience the sexual excitement of gay sex while his placement as a lost soul allows the audience to indulge in such excitement under the pretense of a cautionary tale. Similarly, Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, the dapper protagonist of Singin’ in the Rain, is meant to both excite the audience with the Horatio Alger myth of stardom with his wealth and wild antics as he runs from over zealous fans at the film’s beginning, while simultaneously reinforcing the validity of the Protestant work effort through his acceptance of responsibility and commitment to Kathy Selden, as well as his rejection of the tawdry Lina Lamont, at the film’s end.

Moreover, instead of the metaphorical doubling of the hero in his counterpart, Velvet Goldmine does this literally when Brian Slade becomes his own antithesis, Tommy Stone. The film goes out of its way to repeatedly reference and quote Oscar Wilde and his Faustian horror tale, The Portrait of Dorian Grey, a novel and film from which Velvet Goldmine liberally borrows. The ultimate moral of Dorian Grey is that the hedonistic excess of an individual has ramifications not just on others, but also upon one’s soul. This is mimicked in the film when Slade fakes his death; only to reemerge as Tommy Stone, a man who has lost everything that Slade stood for, save over the top hairstyles.

In the film’s final moments, Curt Wilde dryly comments, “We set out to change the world, but we only succeeded in changing ourselves.” “What’s wrong with that,” asks Stuart. “Nothing, if you don’t look at the world.” These words, and the corresponding image of a bar full of people who look dead enough to scare a zombie, act as a sucker punch to the audience, undoing all the joyous social upheaval seen earlier in the film. Making all the effort of the characters for naught. This ending is ultimately the same as that of Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge, (and really, all the films in this series), wherein the dastardly and doubtlessly Dorian Grey inspired Freddy Kruger apparently dies, only to reemerge in “gotcha!” finale, as the bus driver steering the surviving teens off a cliff onto sharp rocks in one final nightmare sequence.

The bleak ending of Velvet Goldmine, not coincidentally set in 1984 as a sideways reference to both Bowie’s song of the same name and the classic novel, implies no hope for society. Also, the reveal of the missing protagonist as an ever present sort of Big Brother character is entirely removed from Altman’s definition of a musical, which he states is both a celebration of the endearing nature of the human spirit, and the learning of a compromise between family values and personal wants, (Altman, 37, 39). Therefore, while Velvet Goldmine might rightly be called a musical, it is only a film in the musical genre, not a musical genre film. The concept of a musical is put forth, but as Charles Schaltz in his article, “Film Genre and the Genre Film” explains, the film cannot be a musical genre film because the contract between the filmmaker and the audience has not been fulfilled (Schatz, 691). That is to say, the expectations of a musical stock plot are not met.

Because Velvet Goldmine does not easily fit into any genre, it is a good example of Collin's concept of Genericity, which he places as an inherently post-modern reaction to hyper media saturation of modern American life, (Collins, 243). Surely a film that ends with the implication of the end of western civilization, an end that occurs some 14 years before the film was even made, would fit this description. But, even this definition of a musical in ascetics only does not serve the film well. Altman explains that the musical "is about entertainment, about its marginal position in American society, about its importance in the composition of the person as a whole," (Altman, 37). And certainly, music, and entertainment as a whole is of central importance to the characters, plot and themes presented in Velvet Goldmine. Slade goes through massive personal and artistic change in order to be accepted, Wilde does his best to self-destruct for one’s viewing pleasure. Jack Fairy invents an entirely new genre of music through his own body modification and daring open homosexuality. And too, there is even some display of the compromise that Altman speaks of when Curt Wilde leaves Stuart the pin that aliens had given to Oscar Wilde, a sort of prayer for the doomed future.

So, what is one left to conclude about Velvet Goldmine? The film flirts with many genres and styles but seems incapable of deciding on one. It follows the outline of a horror film, and makes extensive intertextual references to specific horror films, but the end product seems unwilling to exist within any constraints. Perhaps then, the film not an example of “genericity” at all, but rather a true a biography of David Bowie, going as far as to mimic his propensity towards pansexual reinvention, a story about the myth, rather than the man.


,Said the Shotgun to the Head--
Saul Williams

Brian Slade and Curt Wilde attempt to change the world for the better through bisexual glam rock, but only change themselves for the worse.

_Richard

When it was done, I remember saying "Wait, what did I just watch?". haha

Ewan McGregor said in an interview that "The whole movie was made on drugs."