“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
I would argue that becoming worryingly obsessed with The Picture of Dorian Gray is an integral part of any creative queer person's coming of age; without it, the experience is simply incomplete. There are a lot of very valid reasons Todd Haynes could have included the enormous amount of Oscar Wilde references: a looot of queer art would not exist without him; before real queer people pushed their way into the public sphere, we identified with Dorian instead; this is a movie that's more or less about disastrous queer historical figures, and Oscar Wilde is perhaps the most disastrously queer person in modern English history.
I would like to think that Todd Haynes included the "Oscar Wilde is an alien and his pin holds magical gay alien art powers" part solely because he really, really wanted to.
This film does camp really, really, really well. I genuinely couldn't differentiate reality from dream sequences from music videos from metaphors, and I think the blurred line between the real and the fantastical is one of the core reasons why this movie works at all. It's unabashedly ridiculous, and it moves in whichever direction it pleases however it pleases— there is no other way to make a gay anthology.
This lost a couple stars because a lot of it felt like a made for tv movie I'd already seen, but couldn't remember when I'd seen it. Maybe if the filmmaking was a little bit more interesting during the non-theatrical portions, I wouldn't have minded the lulls in plot.
This would've changed my life if I saw it in 2016. I'm sure it changed a lot of people's lives in 1998. I want a million more Velvet Goldmines— self-indulgent, over-the-top, explosive retellings of queer history, where being gay isn't the worst thing that could ever happen to you.
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