From the horror-tinged social statements Poison and Safe that kickstarted his career to his recent investigations of midcentury counterculture through Carol and The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes’ filmography provides a meaningful map across LGBTQIA+ cinema from the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s to today. Through his queering of both Sirkian and noir-adjacent melodrama in Far From Heaven and his Mildred Pierce miniseries as well as his camp and atemporal revisions of the biopic through Superstar and I’m Not There, Haynes’s body of work is a near all-encompassing locus of the theoretical foundations and historical trends that helped define Queer Cinema. Perhaps Haynes’s most inventive and underappreciated entry into the queer canon is his reinterpretation of Citizen Kane by way of Glam Rock in Velvet Goldmine. Replacing Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) with the David Bowie stand-in Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Haynes creatively shakes the foundations of cinematic storytelling by transforming Kane into a queer spectacle, relocating the narrative from the upper echelon of media moguls and politicians to the brave and banal alternative spaces of rock stars, cruisers, and music aficionados.

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In order to assess the aesthetic alterations that set Velvet Goldmine apart as a particularly queer interpretation of Citizen Kane, it is essential to establish the structural and narrative similarities between the two films. Throughout Citizen Kane, the burgeoning journalist Jerry Thompson (William Alland) conducts a series of interviews with individuals close to Kane in order to demystify Welles’s titular protagonist, culminating in a conversation with Kane’s best friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten). Velvet Goldmine sees a similar young journalist named Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) interviewing fellow rockstars and producers near Brian Slade in the midst of his “death hoax” phase, which crescendos into a brief but personally pivotal encounter with Slade’s creative nemesis and former lover Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). While Citizen Kane expertly employs the format of triangular intrigue to simultaneously complicate and unravel the mysteries of Kane, Velvet Goldmine boldly prioritizes the personal experience of Bale’s young journalist through the lens of the glam rock rivalry between Slade and Wild.

Even as the film seems to superficially focus on the Bowie-like Brian Slade’s elusive existence as he grapples with the difficulties of fame and the nuances of sexual desire, Velvet Goldmine masterfully folds the secondary text of Arthur Stuart’s own coming out story into the ever-developing narrative of Slade’s career sabotage. Showcasing sequences of familial rejection for his artistic interests and sexual identity, Haynes punctuates the glam rock narrative with moments of kitchen-sink realism detailing Stuart’s struggle for acceptance in the midst of his obsession with 1970s rock music and its surrounding queer culture. Through the film’s Kane-style non-chronological storytelling, the fragments of Brian Slade’s own annihilative self-doubt in his stage persona as well as Curt Wild’s Iggy Pop-like actions of punk fury and glam freedom both on and off stage signal a wily sense of narrative truth, as Stuart bases his future article on the personal accounts of various individuals from the era. Although this sense of distrust makes up the film’s narrative foundation, Stuart’s bleary-eyed sense of story-truth captures the fluidity of the figures and their personal expression, rendering the disjointed narrative structure as a positive testimony for queer communal liberation. Even Slade’s desire to “kill off” his previous persona to pursue a new, more authentic self as Tommy Stone emphasizes the necessity for narrative discontinuity to achieve positive identity formation.

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In terms of visualizing queer joy and personal freedom throughout Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes and his crew foreground glam costume design and camp set pieces to indicate the gleeful fluidity and unmistakable individuality of the characters at the center of the film. From Arthur Stuart’s teal velvet blazer and leopard print scarf to Brian Slade’s shimmering metallic jumpsuit with feather wings, each protagonist’s clothing choices externally encapsulate their interior emotional and psychological states, eschewing the traditionalism and high society garb of Kane’s confidants for a raucous and colorful kaleidoscope of singular self-expression. Similarly, rather than rendering both domestic and shared spaces as signifiers of personal tragedy and greed-induced grief, Velvet Goldmine visualizes glamorous mansions and over-the-top concert venues and underground clubs as liminal locations for identity formation and communal celebration, further queering the expressionistic settings of Kane into more period accurate and character affirming spaces. By utilizing costuming and spatialities to deconstruct the sociocultural conventions that transform Charles Foster Kane into a compelling and tragic figure, Velvet Goldmine allows Brian Slade’s self-destruction to be a cocoon-like locus for personal recreation and generational inspiration.

Perhaps the most pivotal shift in Haynes’s reimagining of Citizen Kane comes in his refusal to define a specific parallel to Kane’s “Rosebud.” Rather than reveling in the communal ambiguity of a famous man’s final words, Haynes’s screenplay empowers Arthur Stuart and all of the people whom he interviews to rediscover the ambiguity and alluring majesty of Brian Slade through their recollections, which gestures towards Slade’s possible role as a semi-tragic Kane figure and an elusive symbolic structure akin to Rosebud. By placing the key to Slade’s mysterious disappearance within his discontented rejection of glam rock icon status, Velvet Goldmine elevates the role of fluid expression and self-acceptance to the highest tier of personal liberation, adapting Citizen Kane from a tragedy concerning the disillusionment of the American Dream embodied by a single figure into an inviting story of self-discovery tethered to the complicated lives of deeply human rock stars and the importance of positive community. While Rosebud acts as a representation of Kane’s childhood trauma and personal regret, Slade functions as an overt agent of impactful change in Stuart’s life, allowing him to unravel his own identity through an examination of Slade’s personal and artistic wrestling. By casting Slade as both the Kane and Rosebud in Velvet Goldmine, Haynes offers a revisionist expansion to a cinematic masterpiece that exhibits an equally timely and timeless twist towards queer spectacle. Through interwoven narrative ruminations on the consequences of fame and the joys of fluidity as well as emotional manifestations of positive sociocultural shifts toward a more accepting world, Velvet Goldmine remains an essential entry in the 1990s queer canon and one of the most imaginative and important reimaginations in Hollywood history.