Relationship Spotlight: Brian Slade & Curt Wild (Velvet Goldmine)

I recently watched this film again for the first time in ages, and I enjoyed it immensely.  It’s definitely one of the more original movies I’ve seen, I love the immersion into a world I know little about, and Citizen Kane-esque narrative device is well-used.  Plus, how can you dislike a film that posits that Oscar Wilde was both an extraterrestrial and the first glam rocker?  Made of win!  Brian and Curt’s relationship certainly isn’t one of the best I’ve seen, but it’s plenty interesting, and I’m so intrigued by the way the film uses it.  Between the colorful characters it involves, the good drama it facilitates, and the sly commentary it makes, it seems ripe for review, so here we are.  (Spoilers for Brian/Curt.)

Since this is both a working partnership and a romance between two flamboyant rock stars, it’s only fitting that Brian first sees Curt onstage.  The two men’s styles (musically and aesthetically speaking) couldn’t be more different.  At the time, Brian is all soft edges, long hair falling in his eyes as he accompanies his Bowie vocals with an acoustic guitar and wears hippie-ish dresses onstage (this is before he adopts his glitter-alien persona.)  Curt, meanwhile, is the epitome of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” – there’s no softness or care in his indifferent fashion sense, the ragged vocals of his heavily distorted music, or his wrecking-ball stage presence.  The performance Brian sees isn’t a concert as much as an experience.  He’s transfixed by Curt’s audacious sensuality, blatant anarchy, and seeming contempt for the adoring audience losing its collective mind.  Brian’s second reaction is professional jealousy, to wish he’d come up with that salacious stage show, but his immediate response is too overwhelmed for coherent thought.  Over the course of a single song, Curt Wild has managed to win everything Brian has to give.

It’s why, when Brian finally meets Curt some time later, with Brian on the rise and Curt on the descent, he’s still gaga.  Curt is literally slumped in a corner and drugged up to his eyeballs when he’s introduced to Brian, but Brian doesn’t have eyes for any of it.  Curt’s unceremonious parting with his record label and unemployable reputation only gives Brian the chance to offer Curt the prospect of a co-written album.  Others who’ve known Brian throughout his life describe his inescapable magnetism, but in Curt, Brian meets his match.  Regardless of the drama, the creative differences, and the recording equipment destroyed in studio tantrums, both men exert a power over one another that’s nearly impossible to break even when they’re apart.

I really like the way the film juxtaposes Brian and Curt’s actual relationship – intense, messy, dysfunctional, electric, and utterly heartfelt – with the publicity-seeking façade put forth by Brian’s agent.  Depending on the day, Jerry has the media treating them like an old Tinseltown power couple or as titillating proof of Brian’s edgy outrageousness.  He arranges to have them “unexpectedly” photographed, with shots blown-up to linger on their socially-taboo kisses.  One of my favorite scenes in the film is the fantasy sequence in which Brian is made up as a ringmaster in the center ring, delivering bon mots a la Wilde to a gallery of slathering reporters.  Curt makes his way clumsily down the aisle, serving drinks and cast in the role of the pop star’s devoted housewife (but, of course, much naughtier – he’s a man, don’t you know,) and Brian snaps off a few cheeky wink-wink suggestions about their liaisons.  When they kiss, though, there’s no pretense or performance.  In that moment, it’s only them, and it’s not until the flashbulbs start going off that the rest of the room comes back into existence.  It’s that imperfect but entirely real connection that none of the media frenzy can touch.