when i die i hope i come back as a beautiful microscopic granule of sand

I love how in Velvet Goldmine the connections with real life are an open secret but there are also a lot of easter eggs for the most avid fans to enjoy. There are various degrees of references, from the more obvious ones to stuff like the club where Brian meets Curt, which is never named in the movie but if you’re a fan you immediately know that it’s supposed to be Max’s Kansas City. Also the fact that these references have to be hidden to avoid getting sued is, in a meta way, kinda like the experience of watching old queercoded movies that couldn’t legally be explicit, and being able to understand all the subtext and secret meanings that would fly over your average straight person’s head, obviously Todd Haynes as a gay director is probably very familiar with this, so I really like that even in this explicitly queer movie there’s moments that have a double meaning that are specifically directed to a portion of viewers that know what they really mean, the movie even tells us so with the quote “Meaning is not in things but in between them”, so the people that can read between the lines get the true meaning of the movie. In the end, even with its general appeal (since you don’t need to know anything about the actual real life artists to enjoy the movie), Velvet Goldmine is a movie made by fans for fans, and I love that so much.

To add to that last part, the paradox of Velvet Goldmine, and all fan made content, is that it has everything to do with the original work but at the same time it has nothing to do with it because it’s the fans’ personal interpretation. This is one of the things that annoys me the most when I see people criticise this movie because they forget that it’s Arthur’s (aka the fans’) story and focus too much on how the other characters aren’t precisely like their real life counterparts, which is simply impossible because the public’s knowledge of these celebrities will never be the whole truth, the movie doesn’t have Brian’s or Curt’s side of the story, it’s all just what Arthur remembers and what he finds out in his interviews, and that’s how it is in real life too because the fans can only ever know what is made public knowledge, so even if the movie had openly been about Bowie and Lou Reed/Iggy Pop/Angie it would have been too biased by the memories and the knowledge of the people working on the movie to truly be about them, which is why I find Bowie’s criticisms of the movie very funny because it has nothing to do with him, it’s a movie from the fans’ p.o.v. so it would have always been uncanny for him to basically see himself from an outsider’s perspective. All of this is to basically say that Velvet Goldmine, being born out of the love the people involved have for the era it depicts, is much more of a documentary about the fans, especially queer ones, than the superstars, and that’s what makes it such a beautiful and unique movie.

I'm literally trans. Fairies want nothing to do with your gender critical bullshit. This fairy is trans now.