Plot
The story follows a British journalist, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), who revisits his own past while writing an article about the mysterious disappearance of a former glam-rock star, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), for an American periodical. Slade's career had ended during backlash from a publicity stunt: he faked being murdered on-stage, after which he gradually disappeared from the public view entirely. Stuart locates and talks with people connected to Slade, trying to find out what happened to him, and recalls the glam-rock scene of the '70s in a series of vignettes, which recreate the stories of Slade, Slade's collaborator and onetime lover Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), Slade's former wife, Mandy (Toni Collette) and others involved in their lives. The film utilizes a non-linear structure to interweave the stories of the various characters.
Read more about this topic: Velvet Goldmine
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)