Review: The Velvet Underground Richly Fathoms an Iconic Band’s Lasting Impact

Todd Haynes excitingly captures an era’s explosion of creativity, one that bespoke new and challenging kinds of freedom.

The Velvet Underground
Photo: Apple TV+

One of the most impactful and enduring “products” birthed by Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s was the Velvet Underground, the rock band headed by the legendary Lou Reed. Growing out of the heady, subversive arts scene of New York City, their unruly stylings foreshadowed punk’s anti-hippy energy and dismissive attitude toward conventionally accomplished musicianship. Skimming along the lines dividing rock, pop, and the fine arts in a way that may only have been possible in their late-’60s and early-’70s moment, the Velvet Underground made some of the most versatile American popular music of all time.

Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band, titled simply The Velvet Underground, begins with an epigraph, a familiar quote from Charles Baudelaire: “Music fathoms the sky.” While Baudelaire is mentioned early on as an influence on Reed’s songwriting, there’s no explicit working out of what this oft-quoted, rarely understood citation of a 19th-century French poet has to do with a band of American avant-garde ’60s rockers. Haynes simply trusts us to trace a line between those four words and the Velvet Underground’s narcotic, poetic sound.

This masterful collage of a film overwhelms with its aesthetic possibilities. Haynes splits the screen into multiple panels, incorporates clips from the burgeoning avant-garde cinema of the ’60s, and overloads the soundtrack with the Velvet Underground’s often cacophonous rock experiments. Warhol’s portraits of the legendarily troubled Lou Reed and his bandmates—John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen “Moe” Tucker—alternate or are directly juxtaposed in split-screen with clips from Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round. We see Allen Ginsburg reading poetry and we get a long, close look at the brushstrokes in a Mark Rothko painting.

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Music fathoms the sky, indeed. Haynes’s circulating aesthetic currents work in confluence to emphasize how the music of the Velvet Underground summed up, and in a way that no one else could, the totality of the times in the artistic capital of the United States. It fathomed the unfathomable depths of a roiling culture in a process of rapid transformation.

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In a refutation of conventional documentary approaches, the way that The Velvet Underground places its subject in history has little to do with the global events of the ’60s and such grand narratives as the flower power movement being ignited by the Vietnam War. Rather, Haynes aims to capture the feeling of a specific time and place. What kind of environment allows for an untrained, unsteady, but absolutely entrancing voice like that of Nico into widespread public consciousness? As figures such as Sterling Morrison, David Bowie, Jonas Mekas (an acquaintance of the band who appears in the film as an interviewee), and Reed have passed away, Haynes knows that the memory of this milieu is in danger of fading.

Haynes’s own experimental, montage-heavy approach to assembling the wealth of archival and interview material at his disposal serves to recreate something of the exciting bricolage of the era’s culture, the explosion of creativity that bespoke new and challenging kinds of freedom. The incessant experimentation of the New York arts scene, propelled in large part by artists like Reed, opened utopian possibilities even when it was at its grittiest and darkest, as exemplified in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and the Velvet Underground’s notorious Burroughs-inspired ode to Reed’s narcotic of choice from their debut album, “Heroin.”

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While The Velvet Underground is sure to acknowledge the various faults in this collective but unofficial late-’60s culture of free expression—like the sexist, sometimes even threatening environment of Warhol’s Factory—it also reopens the period as a field of possibilities. What it illustrates most compellingly is how the band’s music remains as uncanny and seductive a mixture of pop appeal and challenging avant-gardisms more than a half century after the group’s formation. Claims for the eternal qualities of any music are dubious at best, but what Haynes exhibits through his own complex, textured documentary is that the Velvet Underground’s music remains fertile ground for inspiration.

Score: 
 Director: Todd Haynes  Screenwriter: Todd Haynes  Distributor: Apple TV+  Running Time: 110 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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