The Velvet Underground (2021)
dir. Todd Haynes
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Apple TV+
Iconic director Todd Haynes’s first documentary feature is a florid chronicling of an iconic band and larger artistic movement that was responsible for dissolving the line between so-called low-art and high culture. In The Velvet Underground, Haynes uses every tool at his disposal to transform what might have been a fairly conventional narrative arc into an artistic experience that approximates the environment that his subjects conjured in their own work.
The Velvet Underground is the story of a band every bit as influential as The Beatles who also worked in uncharted artistic waters. Revelatory interviews with surviving members John Cale and Maureen "Moe" Tucker, as well as dozens of other artists active in The Velvet Underground’s time and place in history, bring the band’s initial ten-year creative period – the mid-1960s to the mid- ‘70s – to vibrant life.
The one subject that somewhat eludes Haynes is the Underground’s iconic front man and its primary creative force, Lou Reed, who died in 2013 from liver disease. Reed was, by all accounts, a mercurial figure, driven by a deep-seated insecurity and an insatiable desire for fame. Reed’s childhood friend, Allan Hyman, describes him at one point in the documentary as “like a three-year-old in many ways.”
Haynes succeeds in painting a tortured portrait of Reed. We hear about Reed’s parents subjecting him to barbaric shock therapy as a young person as a way to cure him of his homosexuality. As a rebuttal, Reed’s sister pushes back on the claim, saying that whatever decisions her parents made in regard to Reed were for a myriad of mental health issues, depression and substance abuse among them.
In other words, it’s complicated.
Mostly left out of the doc are aspects of Reed’s bisexuality. The artist married three women during his life, two of those marriages – his last began in 2008 – came after Reed had lived as openly gay. Also nowhere to be found in The Velvet Underground are more recent recollections – as documented by Reed’s unofficial biographer Howard Sounes – of the musician’s alleged violence against women. So, while Haynes’s film makes Reed a compelling figure – I did feel, by the picture’s end, that I knew him better than when I started it – it ultimately feels incomplete.
The documentary includes one passage about the sexist atmosphere at the Factory, the art collective of pop-artist luminary Andy Warhol, where the Underground were essentially formed. Female Factory acolytes like Mary Woronov and Amy Taubin – who later became a prestigious writer and film critic – are interviewed in the film. At one point, Taubin refuses to mince words. The Factory was “NOT a good place for women.”
This bit of the film sets the stage nicely for when Haynes moves on to Warhol’s insistence that German singer and model Nico be added to the Underground’s lineup. It was a naked ploy, the film surmises, to make an attractive woman the face of the band. The Velvet Underground lets Nico shine in the segments about her. She refused to be only the pretty face Warhol wanted her to be; she took her role and aspirations as an artist seriously, and the movie does, too.
Haynes’s own artistic instincts are beautifully realized in his documentary.
Underground founding member John Cale speaks early in the film about his epiphany of translating the then-emerging music movement known as Drone into more traditional rock/pop music. Drone is what it sounds like. One single, sustained tone, or several tone clusters that slowly bleed into one another over the course of the piece – which could last many minutes or even hours – create a sense of time dilation and hypnosis. The Velvet Underground creates the same aesthetic to sublime effect. My memory of the film, and the way I experienced it while screening it, is as one long, sustained note that is constantly transforming over the course of the film. The score of the movie is a kaleidoscopic wall of both Velvet Underground songs and other influential music of the period.
When combined with Haynes’s technique of avant-garde, almost experimental, filmmaking, the effect of picture and sound combined is quite striking. Warhol was also obsessed with the concept of extended time. He would shoot film of his Factory superstar models with blank expressions for long periods of time. Haynes uses much of this footage as originally intended and as a way to introduce us to the main players.
He uses off-kilter framing and near constant split-screen techniques that – to me, anyway – approximate what it must have been like to attend one of Warhol’s live Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, a live-art piece that blended music, dancing, and film. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows were centered around promoting the Velvet Underground’s experimental music.
Cale is introduced in the opening minutes of the documentary through footage of the musician appearing on a 1963 episode of the game show I’ve Got a Secret. The guest on the episode who had the secret was a man who was the only audience member to sit through the entire 18-hour and 40-minute performance of composer Erik Satie's Vexations, which Cale staged with several other musicians.
When you combine that with the ideas that Warhol and his contemporaries had about the “poetic aspect of cinema” – Warhol’s rumination on the idea of time passing resulted in his 1964 film Empire, which consists of a static shot of the Empire State Building and is 8-hours and 5-minutes long – it’s easy to see why Warhol and the Underground fell into each other’s orbits.
Todd Haynes’s first feature-length documentary is as aesthetically daring as the art movement he’s chronicling. Through the copious interviews and expert use of what must have been thousands of hours of archival footage, The Velvet Underground re-creates a time and place in recent art and pop culture history.
Indeed, the blending of those two, and the transformation of both into the same thing, was the ultimate legacy of Andy Warhol, his Factory, and the band he managed and promoted for a time. Haynes’s doc elides some of the history of the movement. It’s hard to fault him too much when you consider the vast amount of material that he had to, and successfully does, cover. Because of its daring style, The Velvet Underground is destined to become a classic of the music documentary genre.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- The story Haynes is telling is interesting enough, but his aesthetic choices turn a good documentary into a great one.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- “If it’s not dark and degrading, it’s not hot. It’s not sex. You don’t understand. You’re becoming a Republican.” Y’all know me. I’m about as liberal as they come, and I want nothing less than to be identified as a Republican. But, Lou…you have derailed here. All joking aside, this one quote from Reed gives a devastating insight into his tortured psychology, which was no doubt a reflection of society’s repressive and backward treatment of homosexuality at the time.
- I was really interested (but apparently not interested enough to mention it in the main review) in the antagonistic relationship between the Underground and Frank Zappa. Mary Woronov speaks in the film about the Underground and Warhol’s entourage leaving their home base in New York to plant a flag in the LA music and art scene. They hated it, mostly because of the hippies. I have an affinity for hippies, but Woronov makes a good point in the movie: all the free love and world peace talk is useless if you don’t do anything to actually help people.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this on Apple TV+. Listening to it through a pair of Bluetooth headphones enhanced the experience for sure. It can also be found in limited release in theaters.