Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom in 's "Velvet Goldmine" Author(s): Chad Bennett Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Winter, 2010), pp. 17-39 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619769 . Accessed: 10/10/2014 00:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Texas Press and Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom in Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine

by Chad Bennett

Abstract: VelvetGoldmine offersa trenchantqueer theorizationof shame in relation to fandom's affectivereading practices. Through the film'srepresentation and formal enactment of such reading practices, we can see the formative role fandom's shame fueled pleasures play in the queer film aesthetic Haynes's oeuvre exemplifies.

I was at theHammersmith Odeon when [David] Bowie killed off Ziggy ... men were [Stardust] in '73. A lot of throwing off their underwear and showing theircocks all over theplace. A lot of fluidwas flyingabout. One girlwas actually sucking someone off at the same time as tryingto listen to was on. was so what going I thought it extraordinary because nobody me a had any inhibitions. I remember that around nobody gave shit really was was about doing these things because it rumoured that maybe this the lasttime Bowie would perform.Maybe thiswas the last timeZiggy would to in on be here. And everyone's got get this because otherwise you're just a took their clothes off. And was CO square. So everyone just wanking nothing. There was a guy next to me in time to one track and I COr-? wanking thought: X h My God! What does he do when he's alone? Then I suddenly realized that c all the I'd were were things been doing perfectly OK. Because here people < doing itwith each other and sharing it. Julie, fan1 CO I'd . . . like to see himself from a fan's of view and under X [Bowie] point o stand how intense a fan's can be. It CD just devotions may be embarrassing, but O _ it's very real. Sheila, David Bowie fan2

is _ Fandom embarrassing. Embarrassing for us, for the objects of fan devo to x tion, and, perhaps above all, for fans?like Julie, the fan whose account of David Bowie's final as an t appearance Ziggy Stardust renders already in concert more famous decidedly infamous. (No other eyes at the show, not > 1 Fan identifiedas "Julie," as quoted in Fred Vermoreland JudyVermorel's Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans _ (:Comet Books, 1985), 182-183. _c 2 Ibid.,71. XI o o Chad Bennett is a PhD Csl candidatein English Literatureat CornellUniversity, where thisessay won theBiddy Martin Prize ? in a on Queer Studies.He is currentlywriting dissertation gossip and twentieth-centuryAmerican poetry. www.cmstudies.org 49 | No. 2 [Winter 201017

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

even the unblinking eyes of D. A. Pennebaker's four movie cameras, seem to have glimpsed the presumably hard tomiss display of "cocks all over the place.")3 Julie's a fantasy, decade on, turns inside out all of the things a fanmight do with her de sires when alone in her a Bowie LP on the bedroom, turntable and surrounded by album news carefully arranged sleeves, clippings, and pinups.4 Fan activities, often and marked and into private by isolation, secrecy, shame, here morph something and OK." even as to an un public, communal, "perfectly But she labors produce ashamed fan narrative and identity,Julie stages her fandom in complicated relation and further to?engendered by engendering?the range of emotions grouped under are the heading of shame: her words flushwith shame fora fellow fan's impressively rhythmic,public masturbation ("My God! What does he do when he's alone?"); for her more autoeroticism own, private ("all the things I'd been doing"); and for her inability, at the time and in retrospect, to shed the embarrassment and shame the erotics of like those around her to saturating fandom, seemed have done ("nobody had but to in on any inhibitions," "everyone's got get this because otherwise you're a just square.") InMichael Warner's polemic on the ethics of sexual shame,The Troublewith Normal, he recounts the ancient Athenian philosopher Diogenes' dramatic response towhat he saw as the of sexual shame: in the hypocrisy masturbating marketplace.5 But, like the fantasyof Bowie fanswanking in thepop marketplace in order to affirmfandom's as shame-inducing eroticism "OK," this response and its pretense of shamelessness seems almost "An ethical to absurdly willful. response the problem of shame should not us to that shame doesn't writes "a require pretend exist," Warner, sensing certain hollowness to these views of as anodyne sexuality simply benign and pleasant."6 In deed, there isvery littlethat strikesthe reader as simplybenign or pleasant or perfectly in accounts OK the oral and written of pop fandom collected, like Julie's, in Fred and Judy Vermorel's absorbing 1985 study Starlust: The Secret Lives of Fans. Rather, these . . . scenes "embarrassing, but very real" productions of fans' sexualities feature of fluid identifications and transgressive desires whose staging ranges from the disarm to numerous ingly banal the stunningly elaborate. The erotic tales of Bowie fandom, are so especially, deeply interwoven with many of the narrative threads that often run through stories of queer lives and desires?including the thread Eve Kosofsky on as in Sedgwick, in her work affect, has recognized tracing shame's constitutive part If term as can to queer identity. the "queer," Sedgwick proposes, be taken refer pri sense some reason to marily to "those whose of identity is for tuned most durably the note . . . structures of shame developing from this originary affect their particular of expression, creativity, pleasure, and struggle," then perhaps there is something queer status as?as about fandom in general, given its shamed Henry Jenkins argues?"a

3 See ZiggyStardust and theSpiders fromMars (D. A. Pennebaker, 1973). 4 Julie: "I had this thingwhere I'd stickmyself inmy roomand switchoff the lightsand burn incenseand play Bowie recordson thisold recordplayer my brothergave me. And I'd startto masturbate." Vermorel,Starlust, 100. 5 Michael Warner, The Troublewith Normal: Sex, Politics, and theEthics of Queer Life (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUni versityPress, 1999), 2. 6 Ibid.

18

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 Cinema Journal | No. 2 j Winter 2010

one scandalous category in contemporary culture, alternately the target of ridicule

and anxiety, of dread and desire."7 at structure to The Bowie fans represented in Starlust, least, their fandom in relation over shame and the shame-related affects that hover around their erotically charged, lapping fan activities?including viewing, reading, listening,writing, fantasizing, role construct in terms playing, and archiving. As these fans their queer narratives both of star and against the array of official marketing materials surrounding the pop Bowie, are to if not the concomitant with they able redeploy, shed, shame their "scandalous," as taken are culturally marginal position?for Sedgwick notes, "the forms by shame" . . . "available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, toufiguration too for work As but perhaps all potent the of purgation and deontological closure."8 Warner more bluntlyputs it,"it is futileto deny the ordinarypower of sexual shame."9 seen an more We have how just such attempted denial?or, accurately, the failure of thisdenial?propels Julie's fan narrative,which hinges on the question of how to rid oneself of shame. But if thisaffect cannot easily be gotten rid of, thenperhaps the fan identifiedin Starlust as Sheila poses a more productive question: not how to do without . . . shame, but ratherhow to do thingswith it. "I'd like [Bowie] to see himself froma a. can fan's point of view and understand just how intense fan's devotions be," she says. "It may be embarrassing, but it's very real." Sheila's wish that Bowie "see himself from a fan's point of view"?her desire that the object of her fandom simultaneously occupy a that position and the spectatorial position of the fan, site of "intense" affect?mirrors own her "embarrassing" vision of herself from Bowie's point of view. Her wish further come to suggests the ways fans often identify and communicate with stars, the ways they better "understand" and shape stars and themselves through queer affects like shame, use sees as making of what Sedgwick its "transformational energy," its "experimental, creative, performative force."10 Embarrassment, here, both interrupts identification and at once tenuous suggests its potential intensity; it emphasizes and shores up the identity a as of the fan, making self that merely may "be" also appear something "very real." I take as my point of departureJudy's and Sheila's accounts of pop fandom,marked extreme to by embarrassment and shame and generated in response the gender accounts bending styles and ambiguous sexuality of Bowie's personae, because these a set and link together of issues?fandom, shame, performance, queer identity?that motivate the discussion that follows. The identity-making force of fan activities has be come a as well as commonplace in studies of gay and lesbian spectatorship and fandom more on next to in current work queer spectatorship and fandom.11 Set queer theory's

7 Eve KosofskySedgwick, TouchingFeeling: Affect,Pedagogy, Performativity(Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2003), 63; Henry Jenkins,Textual Poachers: TelevisionFans and ParticipatoryCulture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15.

8 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 63. 9 Warner,The Troublewith Normal, 3.

10 Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity:Henry James's The Artof theNovel," GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993): 4. 11 See, for instance,Richard Dyer's "JudyGarland and Gay Men," inHeavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 137-191; and JudithMayne's assertion, inCinema and Spectatorship (London: Rout ledge, 1993), that fanactivities rangingfrom viewing films, to "shared pleasures incamp," to "speculations about the real livesof performers"play significantparts in "the various narrativesthat constitute the verynotion of a gay/lesbian identity"(166).

19

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

mid-1990s turn to affirmative of shame and explorations queer performativity, claims for fandom's role in shaping queer identityappear to overlap significandywith similar claims about shame. Sedgwick ventures that, at this cultural and historical moment, of the vernaculars that seem most "many performative identity recognizably 'flushed' ... with shame consciousness and shame creativity do cluster intimately around lesbian and gay worldly spaces," and I propose thatfandom, from thisvantage point, emerges as one particular queer, shame-saturated, "performative identity vernacular."12 As such, fandom provides a rich site for thinkingabout queer affectand the imbricationsof its thorny, stigmatized history and "experimental, creative, performative force." An extraordinary example of such thinking?and the focus of my critical atten tion?is Todd Haynes's filmVelvet Goldmine (1998), an ambitious queer fantasia on fandom, performance, identity, history, and politics. Among other things, Haynes's complex film is a thinlyveiled Bowie biopic, using the arc of his career to document the fleeting promise of the " era" and the less transitory effects of its demise. It is also a pastiche of filmhistory, borrowing itsnarrative structurefrom (OrsonWelles, 1941) and its bold tone and style largely from counterculture event filmslike A ClockworkOrange (StanleyKubrick, 1971) and Performance(Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, 1970).And it is a rumination on identityas performance, situating the film'sBowie-esque character Brian (JonathanRhys Meyers) as heir to a Wildean traditionof aesthetic self-fashioning.13Most significandyfor thisdiscussion, scene as a Velvet Goldmine reclaims certain queer facets of the glam rock part of critique of what Douglas Crimp, in another context, calls "the current homogenizing, normal a izing, and desexualizing of gay life."14 Haynes's film shares with number of roughly a concurrent, queer theoretical projects desire to acknowledge and reconsider the po contem tential productivity of those aspects?often affects?of queer history which or porary gay culture distances itself from frankly disavows. Rather than just reading recent Velvet Goldmine through the lens of queer theory, then, in what follows I consider the film as itself a trenchant queer theorization of shame, of fandom's affective read

ing practices, and of the formative role these reception practices and their shame in the film aesthetic oeuvre Velvet fueled pleasures play queer Haynes's exemplifies.15 Goldminebegins with a coy epigraph: "Althoughwhat you are about to see is a work of at are to fiction, it should nevertheless be played maximum volume."16 We instructed a such that our approach the movie's fiction with certain intensity, reception, like the even fan's, becomes audible, authorial: listen loudly, the film says. Although it "may

12 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 63. 13 On this tradition,see SheltonWaldrep's The Aesthetics ofSelf-Invention: Oscar Wilde toDavid Bowie (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2004). Waldrep's studyechoes VelvetGoldmine's critical point of view: inmoving fromWilde to Bowie to VelvetGoldmine, itstrajectory borrows and fleshesout Haynes's own.

14 Douglas Crimp, "MarioMontez, forShame," inRegarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (NewYork: Routledge, 2002), 58.

15 Fandom's central role inHaynes's queer formalismcontinues in his films followingVelvet Goldmine; (2002) presentsa fan'squeer reworkingof the cinema of Douglas Sirk,while the fanperspective of I'mNot There (2007) swaps out Bowie forBob Dylan, offeringa furtherqueer deconstructionof themusical biopic and the rock idol'sstar discourse.

16 Haynes, here, references instructionson the back cover of the originalpressing of David Bowie's The Rise and Fall ofZiggy Stardust and theSpiders fromMars (RCA, 1972): "TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUMVOLUME."

20

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 \ No. 2 | Winter 2010

to us?or be embarrassing," this cinematic work of fiction has "very real" things tell we as to rather, through its fiction, fans have "very real" things say?about shame and performativity, shame and fandom, and shame's difficult part in the pleasures of queer reception.

Shame Is Performance

Shame, itmight finally be said, transformational shame, isperformance. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick17

scenes [I]n these and other of queer culture itmay seem that life has been ... freed fromany attempt at respectabilityor dignity. [I]f it'spossible to be more sure to a exposed and abject then it's be only matter of time before someone on gets there, probably stage and with style. Michael Warner18

on Exposed, abject, stage and with style?Michael Warner's description of marginal queer serve as culture could the tag line for Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine. In one of the film's we are most memorable performance sequences, introduced to garage rocker-cum glam starCurt Wild (EwanMcGregor), whose name linkshim both toKurt Cobain, one of rock music's most celebrated and shame-ridden casualties, and Oscar Wilde, one most of shame's tortured and eloquent theoreticians, and whose look and stage moves reverberate with the menace queer of circa 1970. Pop's ravaged, skinny frame held a masculine a cartoonishly musculature, inexplicably motored about by lithe, femi nine slither?an erotic presence that dared you to look and to look away. So too with Wild, who takes the stagewith a piercing howl, launching into Iggy and ' "TV Eye" with one hand clutching themike and the other down his pants.Wild oils up his shirtiesschest and coats it in glitter,using the jar tomime masturbation with a moon shimmering climax; and he drops his leather pants to the audience before turn ing to expose himself and give the repulsed but fascinated crowd the finger.All the the of Wild's is both while, rapt gaze audience scrutinizing and shaming: it exposes him (the festival'scrowd of hippies tauntshim with shouts of "Wanker!" and throws on flamingdebris stage) and induces him furtherto expose himself (he campilywanks for the crowd and deliriously leaps into it through the fire)."They despised him," Brian Slade sullenly concludes after Wild's performance, but he means it as an odd honorific. "When you're abused like that,"agrees Brian's wifeMandy (ToniCollette), "you know touched the stars." The crowd's overdetermined you've ambivalence is echoed by the on lyricsWild growls?"She got TV eye me"?which leave unresolved who is watch ingwhom, who inhabits thepositions of spectatorand performer,who is exposing and who isbeing exposed, who is starand who is fan,who is abusing and who, precisely, is "abused like that." In this the scene's context, searching camerawork, marked by fre extreme zooms and frantic seems quent, pans, simultaneously voyeuristic and ashamed, at to both pains keep the skulkingWild firmlyin frame and, just the opposite, to avert the film's from gaze his seductively shameful figure.

17 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 38 (italics inoriginal). 18 Warner,The Troublewith Normal, 34.

21

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 No. 2 | | Winter 2010

As Wild's stylishlyexposed and abject performance unfolds on-screen, Slade's first manager, Cecil (Michael Feast), provides invoice-over itsqueer backstory,establishing that,"according to legend," duringWild's adolescence in "the aluminum trailerparks ofMichigan" he was "discovered by hismother in the family loo, at the 'service' of his older brother,and prompdy shipped off for eighteenmonths of electric shock treat ment" (Figure 1).But the stigmaof this shock treatment,meant to "fry the fairyclean out of him," instead generates the fabulously abject showwe witness: "all itdid was make him bonkers every timehe heard electric guitar" (Figure 2). The sequence cuts betweenWild's performance and illustrativeglimpses of his teenage trailerpark years, though,as Cecil notes, "rock folkloreclaims farmore primitive origins" forWild. The "primitiveorigins" of thisalternate "legend" are suggested visually?a prowlingwolf dissolves into the subsequent shot of a wolflikeWild lurkingon stage?so that even as Cecil quiedy sets aside this registerof "rock folklore," the filmboldly engages it, thus positioningWild's more realistic history,which draws on the reported experience of

______\C*^*^^ ______i^ ^> ^^^^^fSSKKtBKtKi^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

______^l^^^^__^_^_^_^_^_^H

___-___r__F^____^____F______-_-H

Figures 1-2. Flaming creature: CurtWild transforms the stigma of "electric shock treatment" into the thrall of "electric guitar" (Velvet Goldmine, , 1998).

22

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 No. Cinema Journal | 2 | Winter 2010

as an a , also account of "origins." As teenager in the 1950s, Reed's intense

rock-and-roll fandom and sexually ambiguous behavior led to his being institutional ized by his parents and forced to undergo shock therapy.Haynes, here, linksand blurs Reed's oft-recounted biography and the fantasies of "rock folklore," and deploys his resultingmythos of glam rock in order to situate the shame and stigmaof queer child at hood the origin of glam's aesthetic of self-making performance. In a staggeringmoment inOscar Wilde's De Profiundis,Wilde recalls "sitting in the dock on the occasion of my last trial listeningto [theprosecutor's] appalling denuncia me ... at I tion of and being sickened with horror what heard. Suddenly it occurred to me, How splendidit would be,if I was sayingall thisabout myself!"19 Velvet Goldmine takes a cue rock and its stars as from Wilde?one of many?in depicting glam emerging from the sudden, queer realization: how splendid itwould be if Iwas stagingall thisabout myself! Throughhis shame,Wilde realizes (and valorizes) itsperformative potential, theway it can as transform "appalling denunciation" into erotic confession, or, in Vehet Goldmine, throes into thrall the violent of "electric shock treatment" the of "electric guitar." Wilde . . . anticipates Sedgwick's argument that "transformational shame is performance" Or as Crimp, drawing on Sedgwick, explains, shame is "the switchingpoint between stage and a a fright stage presence, between being wall flower and being diva."20 For Sedgwick, thepolitical vitalityof the term queerclaims shame as itswellspring: "far from being capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy."21 or to Velvet Goldmine persistently "cleaves," passionately adheres and tears itself away from "the childhood scene of its re shame" and beautifully, troublingly abundant sources for we queer performativity.22 Even before learn of Curt Wild's queer ado lescence, the film'sprologue depicts an Oscar Wilde orphaned not by wolves but by a that him as an on spacecraft deposits infant the doorstep of Victorian Dublin. The young Wilde?alien, outcast, queer?wields his immense resources of shame like a A shot a row of one glamorous weapon. tracking past schoolboys who stand by one to state what to a a they would like be when they grow up?a tailor, farmer, barrister, a truckdriver?is punctuated and punctured byWilde (LukeMorgan Oliver), a would be "pop idol," whose self-assured, anachronistic, gender-dissonant ambitions, not to mention his emerald cravat and sparkling pin, arrest the camera and draw the dubious stare of his teacher. to . . Cut (a title informs)"One hundred years later .": a child is being beaten. we From above watch as a pack of uniformed schoolboys, not unlike those in young a Wilde's classroom, circle boy not unlikeWilde on theplayground. They shove, tease, tear and abandon him. The camera draws nearer we see at, topple, and that the boy,

19 Oscar Wilde, De Profund is (1905), inDe Profundisand OtherWritings (New York: Penguin, 1973), 197, italics in original.

20 Crimp, "MarioMontez, forShame," 65.

21 Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity,"4.

22 For furtherdiscussion of the representationof queer childhood inHaynes's work, see Jon Davies, '"Nurtured in Darkness': Queer Childhood in the Films of Todd Haynes," and Lucas Hilderbrand, "MediatingQueer Boyhood: Dottie Gets Spanked," both inThe Cinema of ToddHaynes: All That Heaven Allows, ed. JamesMorrison (London: WallflowerPress, 2007), 57-67, 42-56.

23

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

face down and rooting in themuck of theplayground as if caught or absorbed in his disgrace, is,of course, notWilde, but another boy whose continuitieswith Wilde are made clear when he unburies a familiargreen pin, now caked with age and dirt.The prologue's narrator (JanetMcTeer) intones,"Childhood, adults always say,is thehap piest time in life.But as long as he could remember,Jack Fairy knew better."At home, seven-year-oldJack (Osheen Jones) stands before a vanity in the dark of his parents' bedroom and presses his fingerto his still-bleedinglip. He examines thefinger, and we see it in close-up as he brings it, tremulously,as if charged with tenuous insight,back to hismouth where it smoothes theblood thatmarks his beating across his lips like lip stick (Figure 3). "One mysterious day" the narrator continues, "Jack would discover that somewhere therewere others quite like him, singled out for a great gift.And one . . . day the whole stinking world would be theirs."With this camera last line, the swish-pans fromJack's engrossed eyes to the mirror image theypeer into.Jack's reflection,boasting the discovered pin and glossy blood-red lipstick, smiles knowingly and puckers his as were an lips, if this alternate a version of Jack, self constructed

out of legible shame, shame artic ulated on the body itselfbut now read back, recited, reflectedwith different emphasis: how splendid itwould be if I were saying all this about myself! (Figure 4). Jack the fairy,beaten on the playground, here transforms into ur-glam rocker Jack Fairy, emblazoning the sign of his shame not only as a means of self-making, but also as a way of establishing queer af fective relationships ("somewhere therewere others quite likehim"), forging transhistorical bonds be tween those most prone to shame (signifiedby the shiftingpossession of the pin), and delineating the Figures 3-4. Lipstick traces: Jack the fairybecomes glam potential political efficacyof these star Jack Fairy by emblazoning his shame?a bloody lip ties whole from a playground beating?as a means of self-making queer ("the stinking (Velvet Goldmine, Miramax, 1998). world would be theirs").

24

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 No. 2 Winter Cinema Journal | | 2010

VelvetGoldmine also depicts its enigmatic subject, Brian Slade (whose identity,as "is never stabilized as other than Mary Ann Doane notes, anything performance") in relation to the childhood scene of shame.23 But Slade's queer performativity?his and the fact that the strategic manufacturing of "meaning being"?is complicated by shame towhich it is intensely linked is seldom originally Slade's own. "One of the strangest features of shame," writes Sedgwick, is the way "someone else's embarrass ment, stigma,debility, bad smell,or strangebehavior, seeminglyhaving nothing to do can so I'm a with me, readily flood me?assuming shame-prone person?with this seems sensation whose very suffusiveness to delineate my precise, individual outlines We see this of this in the most isolating way imaginable."24 strange feature shame, "double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrol narrative of lable relationality," in the three vignettes that compose Cecil's Slade's encounters on childhood, adolescence, and early career.25 In each, Slade and takes someone else's shame. summer The first encounter takes place while young Brian spends "a in London with his aunt?a figure of some ill repute in the Slade family,after shemarried a a cockney in the 'entertainment field.'" After eagerly soaking up creaky music hall drag performance, Brian wanders backstage and, like a good Freudian child, follows the sound of distressingmoans to a slightlyajar dressing room door, throughwhich as a scene: seen he just eagerly devours peculiar primal the performer he has just now sex on onstage () performing oral his heavy-set, sweaty uncle. The uncle crassly smirks,and blows littleBrian a kiss,while thehaggard singer,still in drag, head between the uncle's legs, turns, dazed, eyes heavy with numbness and shame. "Brian's tender introduction to the theatrical underworld," we are told, "would leave a a dramatic impression." Sure enough, theatrical drumroll bridges the dramatic im scene on pression the makes wide-eyed Brian and the quite literal dramatic impres sion he makes out of it,precociously imitatingLittle Richard as he leaps into frame, performing "Tutti Frutti" for his distinctly uneasy parents and distinctly uninterested own wears a a grandmother. Brian's drag act?he flamboyant mod suit, pompadour a wig, and penciled-on moustache?makes clear whose shame he has taken on, and a an further signals queer identity taking shape through the affective connection to other's shame.26 In Cecil's second a now a vignette teenaged Brian, "swank London mod," fully under the stylisticsway of , fucks a young schoolboy in exchange for a watch. The scene centers on the gold intensely exchange of this watch: the boy it as he Brian on the and we soon see conspicuously swings passes street, it in close-up

23 MaryAnn Doane, "Pathos and Pathology:The Cinema of Todd Haynes," Camera Obscura 19, no. 3 (2004): 15. 24 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 37. 25 Ibid.

26 Brian isalso, of course, takingon the shame of LittleRichard?a shame linkedto the charged intersectionof race and ambiguousgender performance.Haynes explores thisfleeting suggestion of performativeshame's relationshipto racialdifference more fully?though interms lessovertly connected tosexuality?in I'mNot There (2007), where the curious embodimentof as a black child folksinger(Marcus Carl Franklin)named Woody Guthriesuggests, among other things,Dylan's (and American popularmusic's) complicated, troublingappropriation of the creative resourcesderived fromthe shame surroundinga certainstrain of black Americanexperience and performance.

25

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

as Brian snaps it into his palm and slips it into his jacket's breast pocket, payment for services about to be rendered. But more than simply indicating the price of thispar as a ticular sexual exchange, these shots of the watch identify it locus of concentrated sex as same sexual shame: that of already culturally marked shameful (paid, sex, and intergenerational),but also carried out inwhat appears tobe deep personal relation to In a we see encounter shame. strikingly composed full shot, that the sexual awkwardly takesplace in a sparselyappointed child's room, inwhich the schoolboy lies face down atop the covers of a neady made twinbed, fullydressed except for the shortdistance his pants have traveled to expose his bare buttocks (Figure 5). The boy's face is averted both fromBrian, standing over him at the foot of the bed, and fromus, as if he has been reduced to just the ineradicable indignitycommunicated by thiswaiting white flesh,almost shamefullyvoluptuous in itsascetic surroundings,and signalinghis illicit desire to be penetrated. as on move Brian, too, is exposed he takes this shame?a transfer indicated by the ment of thewatch from the queer boy who uses it to buy precious, shamefullycoded pleasures, to Brian, who exposes himself in accepting it as his price for giving these pleasures. The exchange of thewatch from one body to another stands in for the act we never so sexual do not witness. The schoolboy and Brian much as touch on seem screen; their starkly dissimilar attires, placements, postures, and attitudes to pit them in differentworlds altogether.Though the camera frames them together,and though they share in sexual shame quite direcdy, theynevertheless remain composi tionally isolated,highlighting theway inwhich one can be suffusedwith the shame of even seems to another while this affect's "very suffusiveness delineate [one's] precise, individual outlines in themost isolatingway imaginable." The sound-bridge into the next we see at scene?in which shortly Brian's first full-blown glam performance, the sense Sombrero club?gestures toward this that Brian shares in the rich performative resources of the schoolboy's shame (as signifiedby the exchange of overdetermined

Figure 5. The erotics of shame: Brian Slade fucks a schoolboy inexchange for a gold watch (Velvet Gold mine, Miramax, 1998).

26

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 Winter 2010 Cinema Journal 49 | No. |

to gold) but does not share in his identity.As Brian loosens his tie and begins undress, ver exposing himself by strippingaway hismeticulous veneer of style,Freda Payne's "Now that sion of "Band of Gold" begins, with its eventual chorus: you're gone/All a that's left is band of gold." most Brian takes on Curt Wild's shame at a Perhaps significantly, unwieldy key own set moment in the formation of his unstable identity (and career). Brian's festival with the of a few distracted precedes Wild's, but exception cries?"bugger off, you most audience can be bothered to riled woofter!" being the energetic?the hardly get distaste: up by his appearance. Mandy disingenuously characterizes the crowd's tepid "They adored you!" But we recognize how disappointing even this lie is toBrian when, concludes same audience: after Wild's fiery performance, he jealously of the "they to on another's and shame is ex despised him." Brian's queer desire take degradation plicit?"I justwish ithad been me," he says, "wish I'd thoughtof it"?and his ability once so In scene a film to again do is equally apparent. the subsequent promotional introduces Brian's soon-to-be-famous Maxwell Demon persona, and in the film Brian inhabits nearly all of the characteristics forwhich Wild's performance has been de as a spised: he appears menacing, slithering, half-dressed alien, glamorous and abject and wailing away on guitar behind a wall of fire. Slade's liability?or ability??to be flooded with the other's shame certainly ap pears to coincide neatly with Sedgwick's caveat that such affectivefluidity depends on as on one's first being "a shame-prone person." If, Crimp, elaborating Sedgwick, a a explains, "shame-prone person is person who has been shamed" (a definition he a seems acknowledges is "necessarily... bit tautological"), Brian to fit the bill.27 "Brian never we can cared much for the suburbs," Cecil tells us, and only presume?based on his being shipped off for the summerwith an aunt "of ill repute," his parents' to disapproving response his gender-troubling performance, and his emerging queer never we sexuality?that the suburbs cared much for Brian, either. From this vantage, own might conclude that Brian's deep experience of others' shame points toward his sources to on not unique of it. According Crimp, "In taking the shame, I do share in to the other's identity. I simply adopt the other's vulnerability being shamed. In this most as operation, importantly, the other's difference is preserved; it is not claimed my own. In on or or am not taking taking up his her shame, I attempting to vanquish his or her otherness. I putmyself in theplace of theother only insofaras I recognize that I too am to It is in to assert prone shame."28 tempting, this context, that Brian is depicted as particularly susceptible to shame and particularlygood at exploiting its transforma to tional, performative capacity. Or, borrow Warner's language: if it's possible in Velvet Goldmineto be more exposed and abject then it's sure tobe only a matter of timebefore Brian Slade gets there,probably on stage and with style.But temptingand accurate as such an assertion it seems might be, only part of what Haynes's film is after in its scene explorations of the of shame. Velvet Goldmine does not share in the relative ease with which Crimp acknowledges but sets aside the possibility of effacing"the other's in on or or difference" the "operation" of "taking taking up his her shame." Instead,

27 Crimp, "MarioMontez, forShame," 65. 28 Ibid.

27

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 \ No. 2 | Winter 2010

the extent to which Slade at times seems to do just this?to claim the other's particular or as affective experience identity his own?becomes the ethical fault line the narrative straddles as it investigates Brian Slade and glam's queer moment from the perspec tive a of dystopian 1980s inwhich Slade has morphed intoTommy Stone (Alastair a of Cumming), garish portrait the economic greed and heteronormative threat of neoconservative and culture. the film seems to we politics How, ask, do distinguish between affective communication and communities queerly enabled by shame, and the appropriation and concomitant normalization of these queer affective lives and communities?Next toJack Fairy's and CurtWild's performativeuses of the childhood scene of Brian Slade's as a shame, queer performativity emerges site of both promise and as a site of trouble?indeed, promising trouble and troubling promise. Slade's on the resources of the in seeming dependence co-opting other's shame constructing his own seriesof shiftingstar identitiespresents an ethical dilemma that turnsus back again and again, along with the film, to fandom.

Fandom and the Pleasures of Shame

I needn't mention how essential dreaming is to the character of the rock star. Mandy Slade, VelvetGoldmine

we Need mention that what Mandy coyly "needn't mention" warrants attention? For if the fictions of rock stardom on we depend dreaming, whose dreams, might ask, are "essential"? The rock star's? The fan's? Both? When we recall that Velvet Goldmine envisions these dreams as more and fantasies taking shape theatrical performance and introverted performative gestures, both rooted in experiences of shame, the ques more tion becomes loaded. Through whose shame is "the character of the rock star" constructed? The character of the film's central rock star, Brian Slade, collapses easy distinctions between and stars, fans, their respective dreams: Brian's stardom is in large part facili tatedby his fandom, firstfor Jack Fairy, and subsequentiy forCurt Wild. That Brian is as a as a star much fan is underscored by the film's doubling of him and Arthur Stuart (ChristianBale), thejournalist and formerSlade fanaticassigned todelve into themys own tery behind Brian's faking of his onstage assassination and subsequent disappear ance tenyears prior. Brian and Arthur are linkedby more than just theirformer fan/ star or current reporter/subject relationship; as Arthur investigatesSlade, it quickly own becomes clear he is uncovering disavowed aspects of his life. "Suddenly," he says, "I was being paid to remember all the things thatmoney, the future,and a serious life so mourns excess made certain I'd forget." Velvet Goldmine the loss of the rich of af era: fect surrounding Arthur's adolescence and the glam the teenage Arthur scampers a through the adult Arthur's memory and the movie wearing perpetual, heartbreak ing blush, and the film parallels Slade's ascent to stardom with Arthur's memories of "all the things" of his lost youth at odds with normative culture, especially his now nerve repressed fandom and queer sexuality. Whether working up the to first trawl the Manchester suburbs inhis tightglam wardrobe, or shylyasking his brother to loan him "two quid" to help buy The Ballad ofMaxwell Demon LP with an alluringlyandrogynous or over same cover room at Slade adorning the cover, masturbating this album in his

28

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

are home, Arthur's embarrassing, youthful fan enthusiasms hardly separable from his In as shame-saturated, burgeoning sexual enthusiasms. depicting shame performance, on as a to the film homes in fandom formative, performative practice closely tied expe riences of shame?both one's own shame and that of the stars around whose bodies one swirls the star discourse absorbed and often reworked by fans. Need mention how can essential Velvet Goldmine's queer cocktail of shame, eroticism, and performance be for the character of the fan as well as for the character of the rock star? as a Critical discussion of queer fandom has most often imagined it practice in vested in anti-normative interpretation?or "queering"?of mainstream texts, and though VelvetGoldmine engages to some extent in this typeof reading (mostnotably in itsqueer resculptingof cinematicmonument CitizenKane), the film'splot principally on a star or focuses fans of discourse and product that is already (more less) explicitly on queer. Haynes's interest, then, and mine, is less fanning the flames of queer sub more on comes to a text, and flaming the text's fans. In Velvet Goldmine, fandom entail as performative identity and mode of reading invested in pleasures marked queer?at

the levels of both representation and cinematic style. While suggesting that fandom in an general?as identity category laden with cultural shame?might productively as am be thought of queer, I nonetheless wary of emptying queer of its lesbian, gay, or trans not mean bisexual, specificity. I do for the "queer" in "queer fandom" to ap pear entirelyredundant. As Matthew Tinkcom usefullypoints out, not all fandoms are alike: "Gay fandom has historicallydiffered from other fan practices as they are de scribedby critics such as John Fiske and Janice A. Radway, in thatgays have oftenhad to in as be comparatively discreet how they appear fans, and thus have deployed camp rhetorical in order to circulate their strategies writings."29 The comparative discretion sees in an even Tinkcom gay fan practices suggests deeper relation to shame than in and in a critical or nongay fandoms; suspicious climate where any textual absorption emotional investment in a text?let alone unbridled fan enthusiasm?tends to be seen as shamefully uncritical, queer fandom doubly exposes itself to shame. Velvet Goldmine's of takes on one the most representation queer fandom, then, of apparent examples of shamed and reading practices; the film's examination of the significant role shame in plays the queer performances and pleasures of fandom has much to tell us about the and the of other or exces productive uses, risks, queer reading practices less visibly no sively but less indelibly marked by shame. In considering Velvet Goldmine's representation and formal enactment of shame in relation to fandom's it is useful to the as reading practices, invoke reader figured in Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of theText. Here, Barthes extends his distinction between and it now in terms of the readerly writerly texts, casting reader's general bodily "plea as his or more sure," distinguished from her specific "bliss."30 For Barthes, the classic, text of readerly pleasure "contents, fills, grants euphoria"; it "comes from culture and does not break with is linked to a of it, comfortable practice reading."31 The avant-garde,

29 MatthewTmkcom, "Scandalous! KennethAnger and the Prohibitionsof HollywoodHistory," inOut Takes: Essays on Queer Theoryand Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham,NC: Duke UniversityPress, 1999), 272. 30 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text,trans. Richard Miller (NewYork: Hill andWang, 1975), 19. 31 Ibid., 14.

29

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema 49 Journal I No. 2 | Winter 2010

text of a writerly bliss, meanwhile, "imposes state of loss," "discomforts," and "un settles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his to a crisis his relation with at tastes, values, memories, brings language."32 Barthes tends especially to the "doubly perverse" readerwho seekswriterly bliss in themidst of the of texts?a reader much like in pleasures readerly Barthes himself his deft reading of Balzac's Sarrasine, or, closer to this discussion, like the fan who seeks out the blissful and excesses in an official star not snags, gaps, discourse that nonetheless provide just but pleasure, pleasures that constitute the very identity of the fan as their effect. Such a writes reader, Barthes, "simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the pro found hedonism of all culture . . . and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistencyof his selfhood (that ishis pleasure) and seeks its loss (that ishis bliss).He is a twice subject split over, doubly perverse."33 Barthes's of this a con description "perverse" reader?"never anything but 'living tradiction': a who split subject, simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhoodand itscollapse, itsfall"34?aligns provocativelywith Sedgwick's discus sion of the queer subjectwhose shame engages him or her in an odd double bind: "in interrupting identification," she writes, "shame, too, makes identity," and thus emerges as "at once and as deconstituting foundational."35 Just Sedgwick's queer subject, at once as an formed and deformed by shame, is imagined absorbed reader?she notes that "the attitudeof shame" ("the loweringof the eyelids, the loweringof the eyes, the of the is also the "of too hanging head") attitude reading"36?so is Barthes's subject, simultaneously formed and deformed by reading, imagined in profound relation to shame. "[W]ho endures contradiction without shame?" Barthes asks. His response: "the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure."37 Far from being free of as shame, this reader's shameless assertion of pleasure, Barthes clarifies, brands him an so exceptionally shamed: "doubly perverse," "anti-hero," he appears beyond the we can a man pale that perhaps only "[ijmagine" him. "Such would be the mockery our of society," writes Barthes: "court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast next to him out."38 Setting Barthes's perverse reader Sedgwick's shame-prone subject underscores how Barthes's reading practice ismade possible through shame, and, fur moment ther, how at this cultural there is perhaps something queer about the reader on a at the instant of pleasure. The erotics of reading hinge, for Barthes, "moment" shameless of textual pleasure in which the shamefully reader experiences "the consis we can erot tency of his selfhood and its collapse," and in Sedgwick likewise locate the as as a a in a ics of shame it "floods into being moment, disruptive moment, circuit of

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.,21.

35 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 36-37. 36 Ibid, 114.

37 Barthes, 3. The term"pleasure," here, does not referto Barthes's distinctionbetween the textof pleasure and the textof bliss. The specificityof thisdistinction isonly sometimes invoked;often Barthes uses the term"pleasure" to refermore generallyto the rangeof pleasures?sometimes blissful?of the text. 38 Ibid.

30

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 No. 2 Winter Cinema Journal | | 2010

identity-constituting identificatory communication."39 These fleeting, erotic, shame are case two saturated moments spatially located between*0?in the of Barthes, between distinct readings of and pleasures in a text; in Sedgwick, between the legible spectacle no or of the performer's body and the less legible spectacle of his her audience?and Barthes articulates this "between" space of the pleasure of reading, its transience, and terms to its erotics in relevant Sedgwick's moment and site of shame. For Barthes, "Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the a flaw, which becomes so."41 The site of pleasure, then, "is the site of loss, the seam, the cut, thedeflation, thedissolve which seizes the subject in themidst of bliss."42 Such sites seductively promise the constitution of identity and the transgressive deconstitu tion of that same identity:"Is not themost erotic portion of a body where thegarment gapes?' asks Barthes. "|T|t is thisflash itselfwhich seduces, or rather: the stagingof an "43 appearance-as-disappearance. Seams, cuts, dissolves, flashes?if we return, now, to Velvet Goldmine, it is with a dis

tinctly cinematic vocabulary for the erotically charged moment and site of shame, tex our more tual pleasure, and queer identity formation and dissolution at disposal. For than simply helping to elucidate the thematic connections Velvet Goldmine makes among as an fandom identity and reading practice, its pleasures, and the shame with which it is carried out, the practice of reading advanced by Barthes?one that searches out and the erotic in exploits excesses, complications, and gaps readerly texts?pinpoints some of the in which the film ways registers the shame of fandom aesthetically. If, most refer to "the per Sedgwick, queer might productively shame-delineated place of to those this identity," who develop "from originary affect their particular structures of expression, creativity, pleasure, and struggle," then those formal aspects of the text both sought and produced by the "shame-delineated" reader offer us one concrete ex of shame's textual structures and their ample productive, queer attendant pleasures.44 Velvet Goldmine's seams, cuts, dissolves, and flashes enact fandom's queer mode of Consider?as if it were not reception. possible to?the conspicuous scene in which two young girls act out theflourishing love affairbetween Brian Slade and CurtWild Brian and From a camera using Barbie-esque Curt dolls.45 high angle the tracks across

39 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 36.

40 "Meaning isnot inthings but inbetween them,"a titlecard inVelvet Goldmine (quotingNorman 0. Brown) informs us.

41 Barthes, 7. 42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.,9.

44 Sedgwick, TouchingFeeling, 63.

45 The scene's brash self-homage to Haynes's Superstar: The Karen CarpenterStory (1987), a biopic featuringan all-Barbie cast, underscores the film'smore subtle revisitingof Haynes's body ofwork: the sustainedmeditation on shame and self-makingin Poison (1990), especially the film's -inspired sequences; and the fertilenexus of queer childhood,shame, and pop fandomthat Haynes explores inhis shortfilm Dottie Gets Spanked (1994). We might ascribe the rippleof vulnerabilityrunning beneath VelvetGoldmine's shimmeringsurface, then, to the film's a stagingof charged encounter between Haynes's cinema past and present; as Sedgwick writes of Henry James's similar staging inthe prefaces to the New Yorkedition of his novels and stories, "What undertakingcould be more or narcissisticallyexciting more narcissisticallydangerous than thatof rereading,revising, and consolidatingone's own 'collectedworks'?" {TouchingFeeling, 39).

31

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

a Slade LP spinningon a child's plastic portable record player, and, strewnacross the floor,the album cover, stuffedanimals, plush carpet, one half of a small pair of white Mary Janes, a ponytail holder, a canister of glitter,crayons, baby dolls and Barbies, and, at last, two sets of litdegirl legs,protruding fromunderneath a table (Figure 6). As the camera glides over the tabletop, the film significandydissolves to a shot of the Curt and Brian dolls, poised in a diffusely lit romantic scene thatplays out through the girls' hands and voices (Figure 7). After the Brian doll shylydeclares his love ("I love your music, my son, and I love?") and the Curt doll gendy acknowledges it to two swoon out a ("You don't have say it,mate"), the of frame in soft, plastic, sexual scene embrace. The is absurd but tender, self-reflexively distant and emotionally ab sorbed. Its queer child's play (two litdegirls identifyingwith and voicing thedesires of two queer men), furtherpositioned as fandom (the girls act out theirSlade fantasies as surrounded by fan paraphernalia), is exposed embarrassingly naive and accepted a scene with disarming seriousness. The film allows this crucial in its narrative's central

Figures 6-7. The Barbie doll scene: Velvet Goldmine dissolves between embarrassing fandom and unem barrassed stardom, shameful imagining and shameless doing (Miramax, 1998).

32

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 Cinema Journal | No. 2 | Winter 2010

out relationship?Brian and Curt's first kiss?to be imagined and acted by fans whose are as or at as as awkward fantasies nonetheless authorized real, least real anything else that occurs within the film'sdiegesis, emphasizing theway inwhich fandom is given as a authority in the film mode of cocreative dreaming, essential to the character of the rock star. This performativityof fandom ison starkdisplay in the subsequent scene, inwhich as a Brian and Curt restage the girls' doll-enacted fantasy kiss fully realized, live-action publicity spectacle.As "Carolyn," another Bowie fanwho speaks in thepages of Star lust,says, "It got to thepoint where I thought I'd inventedhim. I created thiscreature out he was on .. I of my desire and working my power.. After all, imagined it first, then he did it."46Velvet Goldmine's Barbie doll scene depicts both embarrassing fandom and unembarrassed stardom, shameful imagining and shameless doing, and bridges these twopositions with a dissolve, a vertiginous temporal and spatial gap inwhich we move from two at to two stars in In girls play love. this dissolve, childish, queer erotic play, visuallymarked by isolation and shame (ithides itselffrom the camera, takingplace underneath a to a screen table) gives way the performance of glamorous kiss, fixed in one set of to close-up; and subjectivities gives way another. Through this moment the film depicts and formally enacts the fan's reading practice, making literalBarthes's figureof the textualdissolve, which establishes and collapses the self,and is conducive of both shame and pleasure. VelvetGoldmine's oddly affectingBarbie doll scene can be read as more generally em the blematizing film's ethos of fandom and the pleasures of its shame-saturated read a most ing practices, setup clearly delineated in the bravura masturbation sequence weaves which together Slade's queer performance, its media dissemination, Arthur's shameful the fandom, and fluid erotics that seep through these moments and spaces. The four-minute in roughly sequence begins silence, with the passionate kiss between Curt and Brian that closes Brian's Wildean press conference. The sonic rips and pops of shutters and flashbulbs and the insistent of Brian on pulse Eno's "Baby's Fire" scores the and is covered and as a (which ensuing sequence presented here Slade song) violently interruptthe kiss and lead to the firstof four threads the sequence inextri In this first we see shame as cably tangles. thread, performance. As Slade performs on "Baby's Fire" he is joined onstage byWild, who plugs in his statickyelectric guitar and ornaments the with a raucous solo. song Slade responds by dropping to his knees and mimicking fellatioon Wild's guitar,playing straynotes with his tongue in an echo of Bowie's aural sexwith guitaristMick Ronson at a June 1972 performance atOxford Town Hall, famously captured by glam photographerMick Rock. In the film,the per formance recalls scene Wild's childhood of shame: the electric shock treatment gener ated by his being caught "at the 'service'of his older brother" becomes an electricgui tar solo which the mock services of generates Slade. The performance also stages the queer affectivebond betweenWild and Slade, extending their initial fan/performer a connection, enabled by shared susceptibilityto (if not experience of) shame, and highlighting the erotics of this connection: Slade goes down onWild's electric guitar, thephallic signof his transfiguredshame.

46 Vermorel,Starlust, 229.

33

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 j No. 2 | Winter 2010

we see In the sequence's second and third threads queer fandom and its shamed an pleasures: the photographic capture of Brian and Curt's kiss, its reproduction in issue ofNew Musical Express (NME) featuringa "Brian Slade Exclusive," and itsdis a semination?in rapid series of shots the issue rolls off the press and is bundled and consume as stacked for shipment?to fans like the teenage Arthur, who it part of the stardiscourse NME reports and sells,but who also reenvision it in termsof their own seems as a distinct desires. Such queer fandom to anticipate shame prerequisite not in for and result of its pleasures, and is disappointed. Arthur locks himself alone his bedroom beforemasturbating over theNME photos of Brian and Curt's kiss and earns performance, and while his fandom, communicated by his blaring music, the sharp dismay of his father (JimWhelan), who hollers at him to lower the volume, his queerfandom earns his father's shame: having forced his way into the obliviously room over a a same-sex enraptured Arthur's and discovered him propped photo of to kiss, pants around knees, he furiously shames him. "You bring shame this house," he snarls. "You bring shameto yourmother and me. It's a shameful,filthy thing you're doing." The sequence's fourth and final thread suggests such fierce shame's potential as camera moves a refiguration intense pleasure: the sumptuously through decadent orgy at which Brian and his entourage of beautiful young things lounge and cavort across the and pleasure each other before Brian and Curt, locking eyes room, hypnoti a more encounter in consummate cally exit together in pursuit of private which they their erotically charged artistic collaboration. as if I have set out the masturbation sequence's four narrative and thematic threads distinct, though in the filmthey are anythingbut that.Rather, the evidentmutability as one to of each thread emerges the film fluidly shifts from another and back again, of fandom and the binding together the concentrated shame Arthur's extravagant in an even earlier inwhich pleasures of Slade's stardom. This binding begins flashback, Arthur sits in his high school litclass, sketchingBrian Slade in his notebook while his teacher reads aloud fromThe Pictureof Dorian Gray: "He felt thathe had known them all, those strange, terriblefigures that had passed along the stage of life,and made sin some their so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed that in mysterious way, seem sum lives had been his own."47 Here, as elsewhere in the film,Wilde's words to up VelvetGoldmine with epigrammatic precision: in somemysterious way, the filmposits, own. and Brian Slade's life is Arthur's The "mysterious" link between Slade Arthur, one?a on shame of star and fan, appears an affective continuity based the shared "sin" and on shame's transformation those who partake of and "evil," performative "marvelous" and nuanced. This link ismade ex (on "the stage of life") into something Slade's fabulous a televised plicit when young Arthur watches announcement, during he is "a as one has press conference, that the impression that blinking fruit," reporter a put it, "would not be a wrong impression in the slightest."In rush of identification an action to the affect the shame-prone Arthur envisions equal inexplicably joyous at the swelling insidehim: he imagines himself bursting to his feetand gesturingwildly that! me!" TV as he shouts at his unmoved parents, "That isme! That's me, That's

47 For the originalpassage, which contains veryslight differences inwording, see Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), 118.

34

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 Winter Cinema Journal 49 | No. | 2010

Rather than disavow such exuberant queer affect or the intense fandom that gen as an erates it, Velvet Goldmine calls for its reclamation erotic, aesthetic, and political resource.D. A. Miller elegantiydescribes queer fandom (in thiscase of theBroadway as "not musical) connoting "those early pre-sexual realities of gay experience": just the solitude, shame, secretivenessby which the impossibilityof social integrationwas or was first internalized; the excessive sentimentality that the necessary condition of sentimentsallowed no real object; but also the intense, senselessjoy that,while not identical to these destitutions, is neither extricable from them."48 Against such realities, the normative attitudes of contemporary gay culture?for which, Miller writes, "gay if not identity" is strictiy "a declarable, dignified thing"?render fandom, queer af more a on or fect generally, "at best pleasure permitted only condition of melancholy ironic discretion, and otherwise a taste so bizarre as to deserve, or so seductive as to de In now mand, nothing short of stigma."49 Velvet Goldmine the stony-faced adult Arthur, "a declarable, dignified thing,"but seeminglyvoid of affect,follows the "seductive," queer siren song of such stigmauntil he iswilling to ask, likeBarthes inThe Pleasure of . . . theText, "Emotion: why should it be antipathetic to bliss ?"50 extreme Throughout the film's masturbation sequence, Arthur's emotion, far from being "antipathetic to bliss," proves nimbly productive of it.Like Barthes's "doubly perverse" reader who "enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss)," Arthur engages with the text of Slade's star discourse? here, theJVME exclusive?in a shamefulact of reading thatpulls his sense of identity on both together and apart. The sequence's accent the continuities and discontinuities of identityand identification?the "mysteriousway" inwhich the storyof Slade's life one is (and is not) Arthur's own?plays out, appropriately, in its editing. On the hand, the sequence's editing disrupts continuity.As the film shuttlesbetween a number of seemingly distinct moments?Slade's performance; the media coverage of the perfor mance; Arthur's reception of this media coverage; the orgy; and the present, in which sense Arthur interviews Mandy?temporality and film space blur, unsettling any clear of and to as as chronology calling into question what is be taken real and what fantasy. For turns to on instance, Arthur the photograph of Slade going down Wild's guitar we same event on before view the take place stage, suggesting that the performance we see is perhaps teenage Arthur's imagined version of it, teased out of the photos he over and the music he in room. nar pores absorbs alone his Likewise, though the rative of as the performance and orgy is ostensibly Mandy's, the adult Arthur listens to her account of Slade he seems to to own assimilate it his past experience, isolating the and in seams, cuts, dissolves her story and using these textual gaps to rework the account as, in part, his own. In disrupting a continuitywhich would firmlyposition Arthur and Slade in differentspaces and temporalities, the sequence's edits?which themselves with Arthur's fan of new con align point view?simultaneously establish nections between Arthur and fandom and Slade, stardom, shame and performance, shame and dignity, suspect emotion and subversive textual bliss. The seams and cuts in

48 D. A. Miller,Place forUs: Essay on theBroadway Musical (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1998), 26. 49 Ibid.,26-27. 50 Barthes, 25.

35

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

Mandy's and jVME's accounts of Slade coincide with the film's actual seams and cuts, which as emerge simultaneously disruptive and connective formal moments charged with Arthur's past and present performative shame and textual bliss. The cutmost explicitlymimetic of Arthur's queer reading practices edits together a shot the over of humiliated Arthur, whose parents have discovered him masturbating pictures of Slade, and a shot of Slade, gracefully rising into frame and followingWild out of the room at his enticingly tacit invitation.The seam joining these shots neatly are move conveys the way in which Arthur's queer pleasures both frustrated by and toward fulfillmentthrough his shameful identificationwith Slade; and though this sig seam a as soon as we can nificant is seductive flash that disappears it appears, at least contours glimpse its by reading what surrounds it. Prior to the cut, Arthur's shaming to a is composed in relation the mirror atop his dresser, prop whose reflective presence scene a in the of shame's mise-en-scene has been well prepared. In series of shots that recalls Jack Fairy's self-fashioning through childhood shame, the adolescent Arthur, so as to literally caught with his pants down, crouches and lowers his head not face his or own parents, their reflection in the mirror, even, initially, his painful reflection. We see scene as a mo first this of shame entirely reproduced in the mirror, though it takes as camera to to ment, the pulls back take in each of the scene's players, realize that the frame isquivering not (only)with Arthur's terrifiedshame but because reflected.When camera to a more scene the cuts distant angle that encompasses both the original and see a itsmirror copy, we how the reflection makes spectacle of Arthur's shame, both multiplying itand presenting itfrom a differentvantage. as a a The shot composition emphasizes the reflection space of performance: trio to so when Arthur con of stickers bearing Slade's image is affixed the mirror, that first frontshimself in itwe see Slade's face in lieu of his own. Further, the figureplacement to his which leads us, in sharp diagonal, from Arthur's bewildered mother, disgusted to the star father, to shame-stooped Arthur himself, and, finally, the image of queer pop the earlier scene in which Arthur with whom he desperately identifies, echoes that of on on his seated sits the floor watching Slade's press conference TV, while parents, behind him, watch him attentively watching Slade's well-oiled, queer performance.51 scene shame mediates all of the com Accordingly, the mirror's spectacle of the of as munication?verbal and nonverbal?between Arthur and his parents, just Slade's his status as a fruit" mediates Arthur's own previous televised declaration of "blinking desire to declare his queerness (bypointing at Slade and declaiming "That's me!") and his parents' suspicions of this same queerness (theylevel their interrogativegazes both at Slade on the tellyand thepotentially "blinking fruit"attentively propped in frontof as as it). Shame's mirror image?shame refigured spectacle, performance?facilitates a of and real or that threatens complex exchange words, gestures, glances, fantasized, but also produces queer identity. in it When at last we see Arthur's sobbing face in the mirror, excruciating close-up, in shame is split into twoby themirror's beveled edge (Figure 8). As he drops his head

51 The figureplacement also more closely echoes thatof a pertinentshot inDottie Gets Spanked, inwhich the effemi nate Steven intentlywatches The Dottie ShowwhWehis mother and father?alternatelyencouraging of and troubled by his queerly keen interestin television star Dottie Frank?just as intentlywatch him.

36

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 No. 2 | | Winter 2010

the dual reflection solidifies into one, and when he raises his head again it dissolves back into two, as if,on the cusp of textual bliss, Arthur flirtswith the "consistency of his selfhood" and "its loss."The

cut that tears us away from this im age ismarked as the "site of a loss" of self and themoment of textual bliss.On theother side of thisseam, out Slade carries the erotic fantasy Arthur's masturbatory fandom has set in motion, and seems almost to

respond to Arthur's father's sham Figure 8. The shame of queer fandom: Arthur appears "a subject split twice over, doubly perverse" in Velvet Gold ing commands. "Do you hear me? mine (Miramax, 1998). Stand up!" Mr. Stuart demands, but where Arthur, terrified of further exposure, has been unable to move, Slade con fidendy stands in pursuit of his desires,which indeed stand in forArthur's and seek to fulfilltheir blissful potential. In Arthur's fantasy,the shame of fandom offers the pleasures of stardom, humiliating isolation holds out the promise of passionate con nection, and frustrated desires move toward fulfillment. The film stressesthat thisfan's fantasy?this act of reading?is not easily reducible to naive textual absorption. In hindsight,Arthur recognizes the ideal he desired and identifiedwith ("That's me!") as reflectiveof his own persistent shame and its terrible beauty.Mandy comments, "It's funnyhow beautiful people lookwhen they'rewalking out the door," and though she refers to Brian walking through the door that leads to Wild's room and out of her life,for Arthur herwords triggerthe memory?which ends the sequence and plays out in silence?of leaving home in exile on a bus headed for the city.More than simply another instance of Arthur's and Brian's blurred narratives, Arthur's acknowledgment of how beautiful he himself looked when walking out the door of thehouse towhich he brought shame suggests theway his investigationstages a reconciliationwith a past self and an affective lifemarked by difficult,negative, but a foundational affect. His acknowledgment is not shameless self's reconciliation with shame left in the past, but rather a reconciliation through shame; Arthur does not board the bus forLondon and leave his shame behind, but rather leaves his parents' home in shame, taking the shame he brought to thathome with him as a passport to the queer pleasures of glam London, an ephemeral metropolis the film's narrator describes, quotingWilde, as "a landwhere all thingsare perfect and poisonous." The masturbation sequence beginswith the silence of a queer kiss and endswith the silence of queer exile, as if thepleasure Arthur takes in one results in the other,but also as if thatfraught pleasure isworth it.As Barthes notes, though "the reader of the textat the moment our he takes his pleasure" faces the shame and "mockery of society," which cast him an an "would out," he is also "anti-hero," almost unimaginable critical pres ence to can a able endure the potent contradictions that make poisonous exile form of perfect pleasure.

37

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010

moment con Arthur's shame-drenched of queer self-collapse and self-assertion trastssharply with Brian Slade's pivotal scene of shame, also composed in relation to a mirror.While Arthur reads in his reflectionshame dressed to advantage and enters fullyinto thatpossible self,Slade stares intohis backstage mirror before the final show of theMaxwell Demon tour as a prelude to killing off the spectacle of shame he sees there,and walking away as if itnever existed (Figure 9). Late in the film,Slade?now sees a stadium-rocker Tommy Stone?again reflection of this shameful self, this time in a TV broadcasting his monolithic stadium show, and again he recoils (Figure 10). His image on TV significandyappears to be played by an actor other thanJonathan Rhys Meyers, who plays Slade, or Alastair Cumming, who plays Stone, as if it is an alien version of himself, looming over him likeDorian Gray's portrait: a ghost of re pressed shame, haunting what he has become.

Figures 9-10. The Picture of Brian Slade: Slade's disavowed reflections emphasize shame's capacity to disfigure as much as transfigure (Miramax, 1998).

38

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 Winter Cinema Journal | No. 2 j 2010

was?a The glam movement, for which Slade newsreel tells us?the "patron saint," forged its strongaffective bonds through shame that cut across hierarchies; thediverse orphans of glam thatappear near the film'sbeginning and at itsend includeArthur, a clean-cut young boy, punk rock kids, teenage schoolgirls,drag queens, and miners on strike. How does Brian Slade, queer pop star, become Tommy Stone, bland corporate idol and celebrity shill for right-wingPresident Reynolds? Slade's extreme trajectory are makes clear the film's view that the erotics of queer fandom inseparable from same the marketplace economy, and that the shame that enables affective ties and dismantles moral hierarchies can?if disavowed?become the instrument of those

very same or new moral hierarchies.

Conclusion: ItMay Be Embarassing. If Slade's rise to stardom exemplifies the or "experimental, creative, performative force" available via one's openness propensity to the other's shame, his laterdisowning of that shame suggests theway its seemingly resources are as to as inexhaustible always risky resources, prone disfigure transfigure, but so. on so perhaps necessarily Critics writing shame often emphasize its potential productivitythat itno longer seems shameful (orparticularly productive). Shame with out difficultyor peril, without fear or negativity, shame somehow wholly reframed or no transformed would longer be shame but pride, the very affect that troubles re cent anti-normative critique. In Velvet Goldmine, the embrace of shame at the heart of more Arthur's?and the film's own?fan practices is all the potent for its real risks, for its to suspect susceptibility empty formalism, uncritical consumption, emotional nega can tivity, and moralistic appropriation. Fandom's kind of textual absorption indeed be painfullynaive or unrealistic, can be the dupe of power, but, VelvetGoldmine insists, it can also be a means of sustenance vital, queer and pleasure. "He called ita freedom,"Arthur says of CurtWild in his finalvoice-over, failing to an specify what this ambiguous "it" is. Is it act? A voice? A desire? An affect? An iden tity?And who, in thisday and age, could ever think that "it,"whatever it is,would set one free? Arthur's equivocal final words, which concede that this "freedom" is suspect as a but also admit it real possibility,might well be describing the stigmatized reading practice of fandom and its queer affective investments in its culture's texts: "He called it a A can ... freedom. freedom you allow yourself or not." #

/ am toEllis grateful Hanson and Cinema Journal^ anonymousreaders for theircomments on earlierversions of thisessay

39

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions