That would be the fourth or fifth such effort in 18 months. It contains an accidental element, in other words. I find it a little repressive, frankly, this notion that a spectator must respond to what he passionately cares for in a field where the choices are relatively arbitrary and subjective. It strikes me as a minor miscalculation, which perhaps speaks to a more serious miscalculation. Haynes' determination to make the opposition between artificiality and naturalness a kind of permanent aesthetic program also seems questionable to me.
Truth comes in all sorts of forms, under the influence of various impulses.
The realism of Courbet or Kiarostami is as radical as the dandyism of Wilde or Haynes. The basic difficulty with Velvet Goldmine , in my mind, boils down to this. He seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of energy exploring a relatively slight subject. My own suspicion is that Haynes is more interesting than the performers on whom he lavishes a good deal of attention. We live in a society that insists on prescribing our identities.