Review of Velvet Goldmine

Velvet Goldmine should not be viewed (and reviewed)solely as a Ziggy Stardust film -- it's not; it's a parable, and like all parables, it is open to more than one interpretation. What is sad, viewing the comments here, is the number of reviewers who have commented on the film's "homosexuality," as if there were nothing else in the film, or at least no other sexuality. Glam Rock made BIsexuality "fashionable" (here in the States, at least), and only one of the many characters in the film (including Oscar Wilde) might be clinically viewed as being "homosexual" (whatever THAT means); the main characters are exploring ALL aspects of their lives, including their sexuality, and most of them have both male and female partners, sometimes together. To obsess about a male-male or female-female scene between any two given characters at any one point of the film is to miss the whole theme of growth and personal development -- INESCAPABLE personal development, says our reviewer -- which runs through Velvet Goldmine.

An alchemical transformation occurs to the personae of all of the main characters; fixating on the single theme of same-gender sexuality ignores everything which happens to the characters before or after their same-sex encounters.

Velvet Goldmine shows us Glam Rock as one type of catalyst which changed the lives of the people who lived through it in the early 1970's; Disco was the catalytic force of the late '70s and early '80s. (One wonders what the future will identify as the catalyst of the 1990's -- Bill Clinton's sex life being discussed during dinner hour newscasts, perhaps?)