Velvet Goldmine and The Space of Youthful Indiscretion

In keeping with the spirit of Velvet Goldmine, my blog this week will be a bit less linear than usual.

I’m curious to hear all of your thoughts about the gemstone which reappears throughout the film. In particular, what is the significance of Arthur Stewart (Christian Bale’s character) receiving Oscar Wilde’s gemstone as the movie comes to a close? The gemstone first appears as the infant Oscar Wilde is beamed down to Earth from a spaceship.  It is later dug from the dirt by the young Jack Fairy and then passed along to several other glam rock stars. Its multiple origins – first space and then the dirt - make the stone a clear representation of the marginalized beliefs, behaviors, and performances Wilde conveyed throughout his works. The transgressive nature of these performances is mirrored by the glam rock artists who follow Wilde.  These individuals are clearly striking a pose which explode traditional masculine performance and question normative conceptions of sexuality. What does the passing of this stone to a buttoned-up journalist whose attachment to glam rock, or any subculture for the matter, appears to be a thing of the past signify? It seems possible his status as a journalist could be significant.  Curt’s passing of the emblem could be symbolic of the advent of the modern media’s saturation of the public’s consciousness with an endless amount of performances which both re-inscribe and reinvent norms. Stewart’s resistance to accepting the token may signify the resistance of our culture to the destabilization of norms through performance but its eventuality because of the nature of the information age. It also seems possible that endowing this man with the gemstone asserts lasting destabilization of norms, or the existence of a world in which glam rock could be more than a subculture, will only occur when people stop “aging out” of trangressive performances and our norms become less rigid, fully incorporating marginalized behaviors rather than giving them a limited space of acceptability as youthful indiscretions.

After viewing the film, I was also left considering to what extent Brian Slade and various other more minor bisexual characters made an argument for the legitimacy of bisexuality, or, more broadly, the consideration of sexuality as a spectrum rather than binary.  The scenes which show a news reporter interacting with several  purportedly bisexual younger folks clearly positions bisexuality as a trend more than a legitimate form of desire, placing this form of desire into the theoretical space of youthful indiscretion. The moment in which a man being interviewed points out that these masses don’t seem to realize identifying as  bisexual entails “gay sex” characterizes the widespread adoption of marginalized sexual practices and desires as an impossibility. Though Brian Slade publicly pronounces his bisexuality, the love of his life is clearly Curt Wilde. His marriage serves only as a side note to the progression of the stars’ relationship. Upon receiving his divorce papers, which are tied with a bow- an interesting aesthetic, Slade refuses to grant his wife’s request that he acknowledge her as such, laughing uncontrollably as he screams and making it difficult to buy that he was truly emotionally invested in this woman. At one point, Slade’s former manager refers to the star as “elegance walking hand and hand with a lie.” It seems possible this “lie” is his alleged bisexuality, which there is room to interpret as a denial of homosexuality. For this reason, I am not certain the film succeeds in clearly carving out a space for sexuality outside of the binary (aside from the youthful indiscretion zone of course) despite the fact that it puts glam rock culture on full display.