Musical biography, with its well-worn beats of sudden stardom and hedonistic self-immolation, lends itself to cliché like few other cinematic genres. But Todd Haynes has spent a goodly portion of his career deftly skirting the Dewey Cox-ian, instead contriving original narrative and formal means to communicate what makes a given legend distinct and meaningful. In the case of his new documentary “The Velvet Underground,” he accomplishes this by paying as much homage to the seminal downtown rock act as their scene, situating their success within a wider movement of horizon-broadening artistic experimentalism. Starting with the split-screen frames meant to evoke the projection of avant-garde short films, Haynes captures the atmosphere swirling around impresario Andy Warhol and his Factory of collaborators — not just band members Lou Reed, John Cale, Moe Tucker, Sterling Morrison, and guest vocalist Nico, but also figures on their periphery like filmmaker Jonas Mekas and critic Amy Taubin.
Taken as a whole, they form an unofficial oral history of a time and place, when the grubby rawness of an independent culture steeped in sex and drugs commanded the zeitgeist of New York. There can be no celebration of this era without a bitter acknowledgment of its decline, however, all the East Village flophouses where art freaks used to shoot heroin are now remodeled as Citibank branches. Within this rise and fall, Haynes singles out the dynamic between Reed and Cale as the core thread, the tension between the born rock star and the classically trained virtuoso sparking in songs that destroyed the divisions between earworm pop and meditative droning. For all of Haynes’ impulses toward sociocultural anthropology, it’s the music that ultimately inspires the most reverence from him; if nothing else, there’s no better way to hear “Venus in Furs” than blared over an auditorium’s loudspeaker setup.
In one of the first tentative in-person interviews since the start of the pandemic, we sat down with Haynes in a midtown hotel far removed from the scuzzy milieu of his latest film to discuss Mekas’ legacy, the creative fertility of a modern Manhattan, the streaming question, and the upcoming Peggy Lee biopic he’s currently prepping with Michelle Williams.
The film is dedicated to Jonas Mekas. Did you have any personal relationship to him prior to the start of production, or just his work?
I wish I knew Jonas more. He’s an unbelievable man. Adolfas Mekas, his brother who passed away years ago, he ran the film program at Bard. I was there for an MFA summer program, where my first long-short “Superstar” was made, and I met Jonas very briefly through Adolfas in those old days. I’d sometimes see him around the city after that.
The presence he conducts in the film world is comparable to what Andy Warhol was doing within The Factory, though Andy was producing his own work. But my point is that Andy was a gathering place, a father figure to the artists he brought into his world. Jonas was in that role, to a larger degree beyond his own work, for avant-garde film. He was so invested in the concept of avant-garde thinking, not just in film, but as its own set of ideas. He saw it as a vital part of what described the moment he was living in, and all the possibilities that could hold. In the ‘60s, avant-garde films really did enter mainstream critics’ purview; they crossed over more, they were points of discussion within high, low, and middle society in some instances. People lined up around the block three times over to see “Chelsea Girls,” and “Scorpio Rising” made a real impact. Jonas went to jail, took on legal cases over artistic freedom of expression, for films like “Flaming Creatures” and Jean Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour.” He changed the policies around obscene content. He represented so much.
It’s hard not to be nostalgic about these times, but I think the film also tries to give a check to an overly romantic view. Amy Taubin says something to the effect of the good old days not being so good for everyone.
I would say, pretty unambiguously, that that was a better time. There were many remarkable women in The Factory, Mary Woronov and Maureen [Tucker], who might say — though Maureen occupied a unique and uncategorizable place in The Factory — that it was an amazing scene to be part of. That doesn’t mean we haven’t dealt with objectifying women, and in this case, men as well. In my opinion, it helped the women that guys were being objectified even more aggressively than they had before, in this gay underground subset.
I’ll add one more shade to this, and say that what made the Velvet Underground’s work so challenging to the masses was they were themselves talking about how uncomfortable we are in our skin, and how vulnerable we all feel, and they were all talking about it as men. They were announcing, in the midst of what seemed to be the ideal counterculture scene, that life was fucking hard and there’s no easy way out. Sometimes, we play that out through self-destructive behavior, and that’s human. No one was claiming that, as many other ‘60s countercultures did, that they had all the answers in love and peace.
In today’s New York, it seems like an avant-garde scene of that caliber has been rendered impossible by rents in Manhattan. The people making this art with this mentality have been shuffled out to the edges of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, places not so centrally located.
For the reasons you state and a lot of other reasons, it’s hard to see somewhere allowing for that to happen. I’d love to be proven wrong more than anything. It’s not just the economic disparity, the extremes of wealth and poverty, that separate people from each other. It’s also that our digital practices sequester us in every discrete way that we function. We’re more comfortable alone on our screens, separate from one another. You go to a bar, all single people sitting at the counter will be on their phones. So many social tendencies are filtered through these habits that pull us apart from one another, and then COVID hits, and everything’s exacerbated. Look at any major cultural boom, in America or Europe, and it’s always a short number of years, between different sorts of people living in close proximity to each other. You need that physical and temporal compression.
The opening barrage of noise, with all the surround-sound stereo panning, is an important tone-setter for the film. But so many people will watch this on their laptops through Apple TV — do you think anything essential is being lost outside of the theatrical environment?
I do, yeah. I knew already that I wanted the film to be seen on the big screen, but that’s how I feel about all my movies, and movies in general. When I saw the film premiere at Cannes at the Lumière Theater, it was all about the sound. I knew how it would look, but I wasn’t prepared for how rich it would sound in a theater. The band put so much into their engineering, you want all of that to come through in your own mix. Sound is three-dimensional. The images are two-dimensional, though they pretend to have that third dimension, but sound really is all around us. The level of what a theatrical audio setup can do is nowhere near what anyone could set up in their homes. That’s part of it. At Cannes, one condition of our dealmaking was a clause requiring a theatrical release, and Apple was totally into it. But we’ve also been dealing with COVID, and there are practicalities to consider about getting it out to everyone. Apple has worked with Magnolia Films, and they’ve demonstrated that commitment in a pretty robust arthouse release for the film. A lot of theaters, more in the US than anywhere else, are going to show it. We’ve got plans for a release in the UK and select cities around Europe. They’re doing what they can to have it seen in those conditions during a precarious time for movie releasing.
If you had been able to interview Lou Reed, what would you have most liked to ask him?
One thing? Come on! With Lou, as it went with everyone I interviewed, you’d want to get to a place where they can relax around you, and the conversation veers off course from your notes and research. Things happen as you’re talking, and the direction of the questions change. That’s the goal with someone as guarded as Lou especially, because I don’t want him to think he’s talking to a journalist. I’d want it to be artist to artist. Maybe he’d know something about my work! I’m sure I’d have questions that would bug him, like if I ask him what’s behind this or that. He’d say, “Ahh, what’s behind anything?” But what I’d want to discuss the most, a topic I talked about with John [Cale] and Maureen, is the queer sensibility of this cultural moment that went beyond what people did in bed. It was an attitude, a politics, an aesthetic.
You’ve made movies about Bob Dylan, the Carpenters, a fictionalized Bowie stand-in — do you see your upcoming project about Peggy Lee as continuing on that creative path?
The Peggy Lee feature was brought to me as a sort of “would you be interested?’ proposition, and I didn’t know that much about her story. I only knew a little bit about her music. But the script is interesting as a certain take on the Jazz Era, filtered through its focus on a particular female artist who made sexuality and her own version of coolness such a signature part of her musical statements. And yet, what’s interesting about Peggy Lee, is that she wasn’t really any of those things herself. She was a sensual person in terms of desire, but she didn’t embody the image of ‘cool’ as we think of it; she put tremendous labor and preparation into everything she did, and there’s something kind of lonely about her. She wasn’t altogether fulfilled romantically, though she had a love of her life in Dave Barbour, a collaborator and great guitar player. But there were things missing, and she tried to fill in those voids with music. The balance between her appearance and who she really was, that’s touching to me. There’s a lot there.
In the genres of music that influenced her, she was very forward-thinking. She made concept albums! She had all these strange artistic endeavors. Think of how unusual it was for “Is That All There Is?” to become her signature song. It’s like a Kurt Weill song, inspired by a Thomas Mann short story about the meaning of life. She talks through the whole thing. And yet it was still a hit! Bizarre, incredible, risky song. She’s a wild one, in her own way.
“The Velvet Underground is currently playing at the New York Film Festival and debuts October 15 on Apple TV+.