In a flashback scene set on New Year's Eve, 1969, Slade meets his future wife, Mandy, for the first time. Alberti employed a four-point star filter — another common visual tool of the era — to lend the scene a diffused, vaguely psychedelic feel. "The star filter was very much an aspect of the glam-rock look," she points out. "I asked Todd if that scene would be a good place in the movie to use it. Like the zooms, the star filter was used so much in the Seventies that the technique eventually became tacky. But it was liberating to say, 'Yeah, zooms are great if they're used well!' And so is the star filter. It took every reflection of light — from Mylar-type curtains in the background to someone's earring to a reflection on someone's hair — and broke it up into a four-point 'star.' For that scene, I used a lot of 2Ks in a half-circle with just 1/8 CTO on the lamps. When Slade moves toward Mandy, and the romance starts, I tried to create the feeling of time stopping and people stopping around them. We faded down the 2K white light and cross-faded up some 5Ks with the dark-blue Lee 119 gel on them. Once again, those gels are very thick and the 5Ks allowed me to get an exposure."
A surprisingly simple use of gels and mirrors propels a later, very impressionistic scene in which new creative partners Slade and Wild ride together in a merry-go-round car as a hallucinatory mix of lights and spaceships swirl behind them in the night sky. "Christopher Hobbs built this little car that you normally see in fairground attractions," Alberti details. "We had two people simply pushing the car back and forth with the actors inside. I had four 2K lights altogether, two on either side of the car, all fitted with different gels. Four different electricians moved the lights across the actors. One had his light bounced in a mirror, and moved the mirror. Another had a light with a piece of Mylar, which I had him shake and move. I just told my guys to have fun with it, to 'dance' with their lights at different rhythms. Then behind the actors, we rear-projected some footage that the camera operator, Joe Arcidiacono, had shot on a fairground ride with my Aaton 16mm camera. It was very, very low-tech scene, but there is a beauty to the old techniques. The few visual effects shots in the film were done by Peerless Films, a great optical house in London."
Haynes consciously chose to use old-school effects techniques throughout the film to mirror the organic creativity of glam rock. "I wanted the film to have a grittiness to it, even if there were scenes that had to have spectacle and richness," he explains. "It's not like I wanted the film to look tacky; I wanted it to look rich, but I also wanted to achieve that look in simpler ways. That scene with the merry-go-round car is very effective despite the fact that it's achieved in the crudest possible way. Similarly, the music of the time didn't have a lot of gimmicks. When a song had strings, they used real strings, and drums were always real drums."
The filmmakers also aimed for a gritty feel in a Kane-inflected scene set in the Eighties, during which Stuart finds Slade's ex-wife wasting away her days at a drab New York bar, her best years well behind her. "We shot that scene at a bar in London," Alberti recounts. "I made the light quite harsh from the top, and used very little fill light. It's a harsh time in Mandy's life, and she's not glamorous anymore. Earlier in the movie, I lit her in a very glamorous, almost Thirties style. But now, even with no makeup, a bad hairdo and toplight, Toni Collette is still gorgeous, and so is Christian Bale. Christian had no fill light in the scene, because Todd had told me that he hates scenes in movies where everybody has a point of light in their eyes. The key light above Mandy is a Tota light that I hid in the beam of the ceiling with a little bit of diffusion. For the background I used a couple of flagged-off 2Ks from the balcony, as well as a few Kino Flos."
Haynes and Alberti took this carefully deglamourized style to its logical limit in the film's penultimate scene, as Stuart finally tracks down a burnt-out Curt Wild in a New York watering hole drowning in sickening fluorescent light. Ironically, the two find themselves surrounded by young Tommy Stone worshippers. "Todd really wanted me to push that scene to the extreme," Alberti comments. "It's sort of a satire and caricature of the era. He wanted to get across the idea that the Eighties were no fun, with no real creativity. The key for me was to light the scene with no color or passion. I lit the room almost entirely with [ceiling-mounted] Kino Flos with Plus Green correction. In the back window there's a red light to suggest that the scene takes place in New York City, even though we were shooting in London."
Alberti first credits the look of the film to Haynes's vision, then to Christopher Hobbs's production design, Sandy Powell's costumes, Peter King's hair and makeup, and to the support of the film's producer, Christine Vachon.
For Haynes, the film's final sequence sums up the passing of a bold, challenging era in pop culture and closes the movie on an appropriate bum note. "To me, that scene represents the dearth of radical spirit that I saw as such a tremendous aspect of the Seventies," he comments. "It's not meant to blame the poor kids in the bar — this is the music they were given, and it's all they have. Everybody needs some piece of pop music to cling to and get through their teenage years with. For this generation, it's Tommy Stone, while for another generation it's someone else. The onus falls more on the artists themselves. As Curt Wild says, 'If you don't think about what your work is doing to the world, this is what you end up with.'"
