The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes, dir. (2021)
Well, there are now two entries in Todd Haynes’ filmography that begin with “Velvet.” As it’s been 23 years between 1998’s Velvet Goldmine and the just-released documentary, The Velvet Underground, I look forward to 2044 and the third entry in the Velvet Trilogy: an interactive, VHR (Virtual Hyperreality) bio-genetic-fan-fiction in which the viewer can become a member of 1980s post-psychedelic trio, Velvet Monkey, alongside indie stalwart Don Fleming, or – if they advance to the second level – of 1990s power pop duo, Velvet Crush, joining Ric Menck and Paul Chastain.

Haynes‘ new film rushes in where angels fear to tread. If Brian Eno’s apocryphal saw about only a hundred people buying the first Velvets album but all of them starting a band is correct, then surely it’s even truer that while only one director made a feature length documentary about them, every person who saw it became a critic. Like any good art, the Velvet Underground is a different thing to anyone who hears them. Each of us feels that they were a band made specifically for us. So how can one film speak to every viewer, every listener?

To his credit, Haynes ignores this problem. He’s made the film that he wants to see, the one about his Velvet Underground. Also to his credit, he devotes more than half the film’s running time to the scene out of which the Velvets emerged. We get a lot of our information directly from the mouths of people like Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Amy Taubin, Danny Fields, Mary Woronov, and Jonas Mekas, to whom the film is dedicated. There is also a lot to look at. Haynes raided previously unraided archives to kaleidoscopically cobble an image of images: not today’s “picture-in-picture,” but experimental cinema’s “picture-on-picture.” Perhaps the most effective technique in the film is Haynes’ use of Warhol’s screen tests of the members of the band. As Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker are introduced into the narrative, the screen splits, with the new figure’s screen test occupying half the picture, while the other shuffles through home movies, experimental b-roll, and archival footage of New York in the sixties. At one point, Reed’s face lingers (or looms) as Cale is introduced. Reed’s impetuous mug hangs around until the reel runs out, overtaken by film leader. Haynes’ doc pays homage to Mekas and other downtown NYC artists by making a kind of pastiche tribute of and to their innovations. Superimposition, split screen, quick cutting, and fast motion are used to disorienting effect, mimicking the experience of 60s happenings and Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

The Velvets, of course, were part of the EPI, its soundtrack and, to some extent, the eye of its storm. But only to some extent. With the EPI, Warhol created an experience without a center and therefore without edges, borders, or ends. The Velvet Underground were a disquieting element, immersing the entire space in the sound of one thing chafing against another, generating a friction that threatens (and perhaps only threatens) to ignite. When Warhol witnessed the Velvet Underground at Café Bizarre grinding their way through “The Black Angel’s Death Song” (despite being warned by the manager not to play it) and then starting it over again, he heard this friction. Language against noise. Order against chaos. Stasis against progress. The clock against eternity. The Velvet Underground were capable of conjuring a kind of anti-teleological magic. Their miracles had no source, no master plan or master planner. They delivered no tidy moral-of-the-story. In place of the modernist compulsion to shed light on a subject (or an object) and thereby to understand - to define - what it is, the Velvet Underground flooded the visual field with white light, casting everything in equally blinding relief. This is not merely an inversion of the worldview that modernism inherited from Judeo-Christianity, in which every effect has a cause and every cause is a lesson and every lesson is god. This is not democracy’s teleological recourse to freedom. It is not the law’s recourse to justice. It is not capitalism’s recourse to profit. The Velvet Underground abandons the miracle. They pursue, instead, the epiphany of the epiphenomenon. “Some people work very hard,” Lou Reed sings, “but still they never get it right.” You can’t plan to have your mind blown.

The first half of Haynes’ documentary situates the Velvets in a time and place in which their sound was sound and their sense made sense. With John Cale emerging from daily ninety minute drones with Conrad and Young, “Black Angel’s’ Death Song” is so commonplace as to merit no particular attention. Lou Reed, frack to Cale’s frick, is portrayed as the contradictory character he was. But the film does pull a few of its punches. Reed comes off as driven but not quite the egomaniac that he often was. He is clearly difficult, but the film stops short of showing us what a schmuck he could be. Every biography has to selectively edit, deciding which, of the many stories that constitute a life, to tell. Haynes’ film does not mention Lester Bangs and his decades-long running antagonism with Reed. There are a few stories there worth telling. The film is long on declarations of innovation, but short on explanations as to how this innovation was achieved. Jonathan Richman is the closest thing we get to a decoder of the band’s methods and madness. It would have been nice to hear from a few others who could speak to Reed as a singer or a songwriter, to Morrison as a guitar player, to Tucker as a drummer. The remarkable fact that Tucker played without foot pedals, with her bass drum turned horizontal, goes unremarked. Most unfortunately, we aren’t treated to significant insight into how the band worked musically with and against each other to produce their unprecedented sturm und drang. 

The film would have benefited from a section dedicated to “Sister Ray,” from White Light/White Heat, the second Velvet Underground album. No song better exemplifies what the band was capable of. For seventeen and a half minutes, the band is locked in mortal combat – with each other, yes – but more crucially and more vigorously, with the moment. They know that this is it: the one chance they’ll get to commit this song, this thing, this something-happening, to tape; to lock it down for the eternity of a vinyl groove and to do right by it. We can also hear each of them wanting to do right by themselves. There is Cale’s organ climbing up on its shipmate's shoulders to get its own gasping head above water. But there is also Mo Tucker, ratcheting the tempo, like the captain/the engineer/the pilot/the driver in the climactic scene, pushing the boat/the train/the plane/the car to the brink in order to escape or save the day or both or something else. The laws of narrative demand that the machinery fails. The engine blows in a billowy flash and the gears claw each others’ insides and the whole careening carcass comes to rest in a heap of failed intentions. Yet, as every script confirms, all is not lost. The denouement must still arrive, if by other means. Somehow, the effort continues by alternate energies, by reinvigorated will.

“Sister Ray” follows the script. But what’s truly revelatory about the song as it appears on White Light/White Heat is that, despite ourselves – enlightened modern listeners though surely we are – we don’t realize that we are watching that script. We don’t know, or else we’ve forgotten, that the laws of narrative apply to this particular experience. The Velvet Underground disabuse us of our expectations. They suspend the suspension of our disbelief. Here, in this specific universe – the one in which the Velvet Underground are building their ship inside the bottle inside the crate inside the hold of the ship submerged in the ocean in a diorama built inside a bottle in the hold of the ship – here in this specific universe that is “Sister Ray,” we have no right to expect release, but only tension and tension and tension in this ever expanding universe without end.

So, when, at three or four different moments, the band sounds as if that’s it, that’s all they’ve got, only to churn back up, to rise like a fallen monster/boxer/drunkard back to their feet, we are truly surprised. Surprised that there is more noise, more friction, to be extracted from the information as it scrapes against the boundaries of the apparatus. “All the needles are on red.” It’s the opposite of “We’re trying to get a light on him.” There’s no “him.” There’s only “it,” that which is happening. And the light is not external to it, but activated by it. Likewise, there’s no “we.” There’s only “it,” that which is happening and of which we are a part. And “it” is never complete, never finished. As information and apparatus merge, as content and form conflate, subject and object fold together into an indiscernible entity, less spatial than temporal; an it-that-is-happening.

Like I said at the start, everyone who watches Haynes’ film will have their own critiques. No Bob Quine?! No Patti Smith?! No Laurie Anderson?! Some may even argue that, despite the film's conclusions, Loaded is a good album. The point is not to quibble but to keep the conversation going, allowing the film to be a catalyst for thoughts and figures it doesn’t include. With that in mind, we should thank Todd Haynes for not totally screwing this up (the way Jim Jarmusch did with the Stooges film, Gimme Danger). In the end he paints a pretty invigorated, nervy, indignant picture of a pretty invigorated, nervy, indignant group at a pretty invigorated, nervy, indignant time. His skittery forms follow his skittery figures and in the process a film emerges which is about its subject while also being a kind of echo of its subject; an inheritor, a descendant. 

There is an amazing bootleg of the Velvets known as “The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape.” At a show in Boston, somebody apparently shoved a portable tape recorder into the enclosure of Lou Reed’s amplifier cabinet. From that vantage, subsumed by the maelstrom of feedback and fret noise, we hear things that are always there in the Velvets, if never quite so apparent. To borrow an observation that Lester Bangs made of the Stooges, the Velvet Underground “work deftly with musical ideas that may not be highly sophisticated (God forbid) but are certainly advanced.” Approximately twelve minutes into “Sister Ray,” Reed’s amplifier assumes the identity of a natural disaster. An erupting volcano, a mudslide, a tsunami – something going where it isn’t supposed to go. It is hot and heavy and hungry. Things in its path are devoured. Thingness itself is swallowed whole by what is happening. What is happening? “The question can be modulated in any tone” (Jean- François Lyotard). Whatever it is, it cannot be represented by a dot on or between one of five lines. Rather, it quivers in the oscillations of the hand, the string, the current, the speaker, the room, the bodies, the land, the minutes, the edges of each frame that might be used to quantify what it is that is happening. Haynes film quivers sympathetically with this energy. It, too, happens.