Mia Hansen-Love’s new film Eden is a decades-spanning epic of a recent niche cultural past: the rise of French house music in the 1990s and 2000s. Eden is not a docudrama like The Doors, a biopic like Ray or a generic “scene survey” such as the millennial rave culture bomb Groove. The film is a certain type of character-driven, fictionalized narrative feature that liberally incorporates real people and events. This approach can be used for any subject matter. Hansen-Love’s partner Olivier Assayas used it for Apres Mai, his underappreciated autobiographical survey of the rise and fall of post-1968 radical politics in Western Europe. A similar framework is also popular with military thrillers such as Zero Dark Thirty.
When the subject matter is music, however, these films are made with such love, attention to detail, and passion that they generate spontaneous cult followings. Todd Haynes is the best exponent of this filmmaking approach. His early art school sensation Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story tells Carpenter’s life story and battle with anorexia with Barbie dolls, and although it is not precisely of the genre, Superstar represented a radical new conception of the possibilities of representing musical biography on-screen. Ten years on from Superstar, Haynes released the ur-text of this sub-genre, the magnificent Velvet Goldmine. Drawing extensively on the true-life biographies of David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop, Haynes’ script transposes real people and events onto fictional caricatures, Brian Slade (a composite of Bowie) and Curt Wild (an amalgamation of Reed and Iggy). Goldmine explores ideas about identity, features Oscar Wilde quotes, and digresses into music-video-like vignettes. Upon its release, the film was praised for its aesthetics, earning an Oscar nomination for costumes, while the soundtrack became its own cult item, featuring members of Radiohead, Roxy Music and Sonic Youth covering Stooges and Brian Eno songs.
There is an often neglected emotional and thematic core to Velvet Goldmine that is just as powerful as the unhinged, career-best performance from Ewan McGregor and the film’s hyper-saturated design of glitter and makeup. It’s a preoccupation that the film shares with Eden, namely: What happens to the rest of your life when your only priority is music?
Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People—another music film that shares these pseudo-docudrama sensibilities—contains the answer: when your only priority is music, the rest of your life falls apart, but at least you have a helluva good time. Chronicling the rise and fall of Tony Wilson’s Factory Records, 24 Hour Party People ups the meta-theatrics of the pop-saga film with actors precisely re-creating historical scenes, while the event’s real-life participants take on minor character roles and comment on the proceedings. When I first saw 24 Hour Party People, I was immediately flush with that rare sensation of thinking the movie was made just for me. Riffing on everything from Joy Division’s legendary drum sound to Wilson’s constant self-mythologizing, 24 Hour Party People is a delight for anyone with even a passing interest in the Manchester sound and scene. It is also the portrait of a man whose zest for life as exemplified by his constant pursuit of the latest and greatest is his greatest asset and worst quality.
One complaint that even fans of the film often lodge at it is the story’s second half, with its slow slide into money problems, drug abuse, and the poor and dated “Madchester” sound of “Happy Mondays” simply not being nearly as cool as the first half. Eden uses a similar split structure, first mapping the early Parisian nightclub scene and the novel sound of “French Touch” disco before chronicling the sometimes glamorous, sometimes tedious global growth of the subgenre. You simply cannot have one piece without the other, and anyone who has been intoxicated by music, whether it’s the post-punk exuberance of early New Order to classic house and disco, will continue to search out that next band, producer, or genre that gives them the same sensation as their first discovery. Drug addiction is a perfect way to dramatize this quest: the first exposure is always euphoric, glamorous, and romantic. As time wears on it becomes a habit, and finally, a dependency. The insecurity caused by constant hand-wringing over whether one has fallen out of touch with the currents of modern music was perfectly expressed by James Murphy in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” released in 2002 just a month before 24 Hour Party People made its debut in US theaters. The song captures the anxiety of being passed over by younger, hipper kids in a deadpan, hilarious, and self-deprecating way, itself a further meditation on Neil Young’s timeless provocation “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Although films like Velvet Goldmine, 24 Hour Party People, and Eden provide plenty of fan service for devoted adherents to debate the relative merits of Eno’s contributions to Roxy Music, Martin Hannett’s contribution to the history of music production or the pervasive influence of Daft Punk, they are also portraits of the dual elation and sorrow of living a life devoted exclusively to the pursuit of music. Whether it’s the polyamorous, pansexual, and emotionally reckless relationships in Velvet Goldmine, the specter of suicide, death, and overdose that hangs over 24 Hour Party People, or the constant financial pressures and fear of commitment that shadow Paul throughout Eden, these films paint an ultimately dark picture about a subject—popular music—that is otherwise known to be sexy and carefree.
