The Automatik

It seemed that in some mysterious way, their lives had been his own.
I wasn’t impressed the first time I saw Velvet Goldmine. In fact, I was fairly disappointed and confused. At a record convention the next morning, I picked up the soundtrack because I liked the music. Listening to it, I suddenly felt this pang of desire to see the movie again. Delirious with anticipation, I swooned to the soundtrack all day. In the theater that night, I had a serious glam breakthrough. It made sense, it was divine, it was my passionate fandom and my obsession with gay culture right there on the screen! When it ended, I wanted it to start all over again. Waiting two or three days to see it again was exquisite torture.

The third time was probably the most meaningful of all, the way you feel when you have just realized that you are in love and you see the object of your affections for the first time with the awareness of this fact. My friend and I took a Velvet Goldmine virgin with us and it was almost like seeing it again for the first time. By the fourth and fifth times, the theater let us in for free. Like a shooting star, however, its li fethere was short. The knowledge that I would never be able to see it on the big screen again was such a crushing blow. As another fellow obsessee brilliantly lamented, “I’m sad because Velvet Goldmine will never go on tour!”

From an objective view, the movie isn’t necessarily a flawless work of cinematic craft. There are a few plot holes and you have to suspend a bit of disbelief. But what it lacks in Oscar quality, it more than makes up for in spirit. Christian Bale’s painfully vulnerable performance opened my eyes to his massive talent and impressive body of work. Ewan McGregor was the best Iggy Pop since, well, Iggy Pop. Toni Collette proves that actresses should not be defined by the likes of Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock. And director Todd Haynes is one of my new heroes. Visually, thematically, and emotionally, Velvet Goldmine, has more to offer on the sublime wonders and heartbreak of rock and roll, fandom, and self-discovery than any movie I have ever seen (Almost Famous came close, though). It’s that rare kind of movie that you want to come true, because the world is poorer if the characters are not real people and you want to cry because you love them but you can’t jump into the screen and be a part of it all. But there’s always fan fiction.