guybabineau.com
home / about / channel surfing in the sea of happiness / contact
Retroactivity The Wizard of Oz, Pleasantville, Velvet Goldmine by Guy Babineau
The Wizard of Oz
Even though time, according to the philosophers, is an artificial construct, most of us set our clocks by it; alarm, biological or otherwise. The crystal- balling futurists say that cyberspace will take as back to a more primal understanding of time—or lack of understanding—since there’s no morning, noon or night in the online universe.
Most of us today have lost our circadian rhythms and spend our time keeping up, losing sleep and feeling out-of-step. We turn to artistic things, high brow and low brow, to help us appreciate or comprehend the changes around us, or to make us feel that we belong, often turning to nostalgia.
There’s a crystal ball in the movie The Wizard Oz, heightening Dorothy Gale’s homesickness for Kansas. “Aunty Em, Aunty Em!” cries Dorothy, trapped in the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle as she stares at the crystal ball for images of home while, literally, the sands of time run out in an hourglass beside it. The classic film enjoyed a digitally remastered reprise in 1998 in theaters across North America. The movie is a talisman for anyone who saw it as a kid and we want kids to keep seeing it just so we can have an excuse to view it again.
The Wizard of Oz is a basic coming of age hero story. To fight for what she loves and believes in (in this case a dog) a kid leaves home on an adventure quest. At the end, with the help of some over-the- top shoes, she finds out that you can’t run from your problems, that you have to have the courage of your convictions, that home is where the heart is. Oz, “where troubles melt like lemon drops way above the chimney tops”, is a childhood fantasy of a perfect world traumatized by inevitable mortality (the witch).
You could get into an endless debate about the moral and philosophical pros and cons of The Wizard Oz, but they all amount to a hill of beans when Judy Garland breaks into Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Part of the reason we can’t part company with this movie is that the making and media manipulation of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz was an important cornerstone in the mythologizing of technology, making it one of the first movies to be so postmodernly plundered. There are endless accounts of Margaret Hamilton’s foam witch make-up catching fire in a special effects disaster, boozing munchkins, and the neverending gossip about Garland’s pharmacology, but penultimate was the studio’s exploitation and promotion of new color technologies, with the film’s black & white to color back to black & white structure. ‘How the story served the technology’ had never before been so ballyhooed.
Pleasantville
The kid in 1939’s Wizard of Oz (link) goes from a frumpy, black & white mid-America into a dangerous multidimensional world of endless color and possibilities, and wants to go home. In Pleasantville, two kids in 1998’s multidimensional world of color and possibilities, which like Oz is threatened by mortality—this time around the wicked witch is AIDS, nuclear stockpiles and greenhouse gas emissions—are transported into the frumpy, black & white Mid-America world of 1950s television, and want to go home.
Nerdy highschooler David (Tobey Maguire) is addicted to reruns of a ‘50s Father Knows Best- style family sitcom called Pleasantville. He has been given a supernatural remote control by an odd television repairman (Don Knotts). The device whisks David and his popular, sexy, status conscious twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) inside the TV, and into Pleasantville’s monochromatic plotline.
Most of this Capraesque movie chronicles what happens to the people of Pleasantville when David and Jennifer expose them to sex, art and literature; not to mention losing basketball games for the first time, toilets, bigotry, double beds and housewives who don’t have dinner waiting on the table. Each new discovery adds a splash of color to the people and their town.
Writer/director Gary Ross’s track record would inevitably lead to Pleasantville’s not-too-hard-on- the-brain message of humanism. He wrote the movies Big and Dave, and was a speech writer for former presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis and President Bill Clinton. On the plus side, William H. Macy is terrific as George, the sitcom father. As his wife Betty, Joan Allen is extraordinary and is responsible for the film’s few moments of real emotional depth.
The complex technical gimmickry required to make these scenes work is the film’s big payoff. The film delivers its moral message with a sledgehammer. There’s no real danger in this movie, no new ideas. Part of the problem is that the kids from 1998 inhabit a world equally as stereotypical as Pleasantville. Yet, in the end you walk away with a good, old-fashioned PC sense of well-being. If you want to see a feelgood film, this one delivers stylishly.
Velvet Goldmine
Many moviemakers today offer simplistic observations about lifestyles and pop culture in previous decades, painted with a skewed palette of contemporary subjectivity. It allows us to feel superior. In Pleasantville, it’s the 1950s. In Velvet Goldmine, it’s the glamrock scene of early 1970s London.
Velvet Goldmine is all style. The film is a thinly disguised—and thinly told—retelling of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust years.
In the late 60s Bowie was a cute, pop-idol-wannabe Mod performing art songs in the clubs of swinging London. Stanley Kubrick’s movie masterpiece 2001 A Space Odyssey came out in 1968, and Bowie retaliated with the 1969 hit song Space Oddity, nicely tied in with the first moon landing. On tour, his mime act in a dress didn’t go over well at rock festivals, so he changed strategy. He dropped his ethereal pretensions, embraced hardcore rock ‘n’ roll, took advice from Andy Warhol’s Factory gang, borrowed some edginess from Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, and blasted off with some really excellent songs.
In March 1973, in the culmination of his first North American tour to promote The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, David Bowie descended from the gods above the stage at Radio City Music Hall riding an enormous silver sphere. He wore bespangled pantaloons, a silver medallion on his forehead, bright red electrified hair, and sang about outer space, the end of the world, fame and bisexuality.
No one at the time quite knew what to make of Bowie’s Brecht-fest at Tiffany’s, but his influence would mark a momentous transition in pop and rock. The album Ziggy Stardust never made it onto the charts in the States, despite raves in Rolling Stone, New Musical Express and every other industry rag, yet it is considered to be one of the most important rock albums of the era.
Five Years, Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide, Lady Stardust, Suffragette City, etc. chronicled a self-obsessed rock star who wavered between saving the world and saving himself.cThis was sexy, intelligent parody, even self-mockery. And Bowie had the talent to keep’em hooked.
Velvet Goldmine is the title of a Bowie song thatdidn’t make it onto the Ziggy Stardust album. The film borrows it’s structural framework from Citizen Kane. In 1984, a reporter (Christian Bale) is asked by his newspaper to investigate what has happened to former glamrocker Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyer) on the tenth anniversary of the pop star’s hoax assassination while in concert. The audience follows Bale as he wades through interviews with key players in Slade’s life, flashbacks that bounce around like a pinball, overly long faux music videos, musical parodies of Bowie by a group called The Venus in Furs and constant, irritating references to Oscar Wilde. The characters posture like crazy. This might be interesting if accompanied by some psychological insights, or some original wit. Lacking these, the swanning dandyism soon besomes dull.
The story is partly Bale’s voyage of self-discovery as he relives the burgeoning homosexuality of his adolescence. Ten years later he still doesn’t seem to have resolved this issue, and it’s enough to make you want to slap him and tell him to grow up. The end of Velvet Goldmine is untidy; you’re not really sure what happened to Slade, and you’re not really sure you care.
Bowie was asked by the film’s producers for soundtrack rights to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, but he said no. He refused to have anything to do with the movie. It’s not hard to see why. Though Velvet Goldmine is fantastic eye candy, which is why it got an award for Artistic Contribution at Cannes and shared an Oscar for costumes, it ain’t rock ‘n’ roll. Rhys- Meyer’s pouty, curvaceous Bowie figure lacks the razor-sharp charisma that makes people into rock stars. Toni Collette is wonderful as his neurotic estranged wife. As Iggy Pop, Ewan McGregor is great, although he looks spookily like Kurt Cobain. Other than the central character, the cast is very good considering they have little to work with.
Director Todd Haynes is known for movies heavy on symbolism, low on story, such as Safe and Poison. The bloated, later films of a once sleek and brilliant Ken Russell come to mind. That’s really the big problem with Velvet Goldmine. How did Haynes manage to do a bloated movie about a subject as sleek and brilliant as Bowie and the zeitgeist he created?
Velvet Goldmine makes the whole Ziggy/glamrock scene look silly, superficial, self-involved and pointless, which to a large extent it was. But it was also a daring, exciting moment in pop culture, a moment with enough oomph to make Bowie the most influential artist in British pop music over the last thirty years. Director Haynes has failed to capture the era’s fascination. That’s a drawback of making style your main character instead of using it as the setting.
Originally published on the online zine, U © Guy Babineau 2003-2004
< home
