OF COURSE, THERE’S the face.
Lovingly caressed by every camera it meets, David Bowie’s visage is
like no other. Light curves effortlessly around his impossibly sculpted
cheekbones and sunken eye sockets, illuminating the surfaces and shading
the contours without ever revealing the mysteries behind them. His
lips, drawn taught in a knowing grimace, occasionally curl back into a
wicked half-grin, but to us they confide very little. His eyes—uncannily
asymmetrical since an adolescent scrap left one pupil permanently
damaged and forever dilated—seduce, provoke and dismiss us, all within
the span of a single glance.
Bowie’s beauty is untouchable, unknowable, but it doesn’t easily allow
us to look away. It is a face too iconic to disappear into character. It
stands inevitably apart, the countenance of a visitor from the molten
planet of glam rock who floats far above our terrestrial shores. It
looks down on us, looks through us, or stares, inscrutably, past the
distant horizon, lost in a reverie we couldn’t begin to understand.
A SURVEY OF Bowie’s on-screen characters reveals a gallery of literal
and figurative extraterrestrials: an intergalactic pioneer in
The Man Who Fell to Earth; a centuries-old vampire in Tony Scott’s
The Hunger; an Englishman interned in a Japanese P.O.W. camp in
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; and most queerly mysterious of all, Andy Warhol in
Basquiat.
Strangers in a strange land, men in but not quite of the world, these
alter-egos inspire fascination and revulsion in equal measure. Bowie’s
characters attain gravitas through the performer’s singular physical
presence and resonance through the echoes of his public persona. Bowie’s
Bowie-ness inflects his every moment on screen. He is
inescapably the half-grinning androgyne, flaunting social norms with a
rock star’s coiled aggression and the inscrutable magnetism of an
otherworldy prophet. In Bowie’s most sublimely cinematic moments, that
dynamic pulls us outside the narrative illusion only to give us the
context necessary to fully grasp the character. Such moments find truth
in artifice, reality in fantasy, confessions in fabrications. The
aesthetic looks back to Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde yet it feels not
only weirder and wilder but genuinely
sui generis. Bowie was born Bowie.
The pop star chafed against the narratives thrust upon him, even the
ones he had originally engineered. A famed inventor of on-stage
personae, Bowie assassinated his public doppelangers almost as quickly
as he created them. Ziggy Stardust—the rocker from Mars who remains
Bowie’s most beloved creation—had his (sort of) final appearance less
than two years after Bowie introduced him to the world in 1972. After
Bowie next realized a commercially successful blend of funk/soul/rock in
such mid-70s hits as “Young Americans,” “Fame,” and “Golden Years,” he
abruptly moved to Switzerland and made a trio of experimental
ambient-noise albums with Brian Eno. A subsequent cycle of Eighties-era
crowd-pleasers like “Let’s Dance” and the Bowie-Queen collaboration
“Under Pressure” was followed by ill-fated collaborations and forays
into electronica that left longtime followers scratching their heads.
His private life proved a more typical rock-and-roll cautionary tale,
marked by a long-time cocaine addiction and public fall-outs with band
members and labels. Many fans who found solace in Bowie’s
gender-bending, omnisexual vibes were later disappointed by revelations
of womanizing and by Bowie’s public backpedaling over his “avowed”
bisexuality.
David Bowie, dressed to thrill, as the eponymous intergalactic rocker of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973)
THE “SWAN SONG” of Ziggy Stardust performed at the Hammersmith Odeon in
July 1973 was chronicled for the ages by documentary legend D. A.
Pennebaker.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is an
ideal beginning for any consideration of Bowie on screen, both for
foregrounding the performer’s “real life” persona as constructed
artifact and for the tantalizing ways it complicates our understanding
of Bowie at a crucial peak in his career. Pennebaker offers only
fleeting glimpses of Bowie backstage. Those expecting rock-star antics
will be disappointed. Staring ahead intently as assistants apply
eyeliner or help him wiggle his way into the next form-fitting costume,
Bowie remains notably placid and detached. Ex-wife Angie enters his
dressing room to wish him well. He smiles with strained tolerance, but
the vibe is clear: no chitchat, it’s time to get into character.
In a post-Gaga world, the Hammersmith Odeon feels downright restrained.
Pyrotechnics remain at a minimum, and the only real on-stage antics come
when guitarist Mike Ronson and bassist Tony Visconti engage in a
playful instrumental showdown during “Width of a Circle.” Even Bowie’s
famously outré costumes manage to charm and endear more than shock and
awe. Bowie’s asymmetrical, semi-sleeveless singlet remains a slinky,
daring knockout—and, I’ll lay my cards on the table here, pretty fucking
hot. By contrast, the short, flowy white robe he dons throughout most
of the opening songs feels less glam fabulous than sexy-housewife. But
no matter. Bowie could have come on stage wearing sweatpants and a
stained t-shirt and Pennebaker would have remained fascinated. He and
his team train their cinema-verite gaze upon the singer in long, loving
close-ups as he works his way through the playlist, his spellbinding
features bathed in neon-red light.
Bowie on stage is a jumble of contradictory impulses that coalesce with
startling ease. He looks out over the adoring crowd with a steady gaze
and the occasional lascivious smirk, as if suggesting a private joke
that the audience may or may not be in on. When he gyrates his hips ever
so slightly, it’s a seduction that carries a faint whiff of disdain.
Not that he really wants to push anyone away. The character-centric
nature of
Ziggy Stardust lends itself to song-as-storytelling—this
was the
decade of Rock Opera—and Bowie accompanies his supple vocals with
gestures and facial expressions that are at-times disarmingly earnest.
He beseeches us as much as he confronts us. Pennebaker may indulge in a
few heroically monumentalizing low-angle shots, but his on-the-fly
visuals produce an unexpected intimacy with the performer. We “know”
Bowie in that we have observed his exquisite artifice up close and
personal.
Unlike E. T., Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) can never go home in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
THE EROTICIZED ALOOFNESS; the poignant isolation that comes from being
worshipped and not understood; the pursuit of connection through
ritualized gestures and otherworldly fantasies: such are the ideas upon
which Bowie’s subsequent film roles rest. This was never more apparent
than in his first starring role, as questing alien Thomas Jerome Newton
in Nicolas Roeg’s beguiling SF allegory,
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
Sent to transport water back to his drought-choked planet, Newton builds
up a business empire by patenting the advanced technologies he brings
to Earth, all in the hope of funding an intergalactic H2O transport. He
becomes an object of fascination for all who meet him, particularly
boozy hotel worker Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), who becomes his lover, and
womanizing fuel technician Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), who works on the
ship that Newton hopes will save his planet. But ominous government
machinations and Newton’s own growing addictions to alcohol and
television land him in a luxury-penthouse-turned-prison-cell where he
spends his days drinking between bouts of scientific probing and
prodding.
As a performance, Bowie’s Newton doesn’t quite cohere in the traditional
sense. It feels like a series of emotional and intellectual notes in
search of a coherent melody. Bowie’s relative inexperience as an actor
rears its head in some emotionally discordant moments, such as when
Mary-Lou lashes out at Newton’s chilly reserve and violently clings to
him until his shirt rips open. Bowie’s theatrically anguished reactions
are less like
Brechtian distanciation
than studied melodramatic tics. And when Newton recalls his home
planet, is the poignant longing in Bowie’s eyes really even
there? Or is it an editor’s skillful slight of hand: a
Kuleshovian juxtaposition
of Bowie’s face with Roeg’s hypnotic deserts landscapes, twirling
extraterrestrial bodies and milk-drenched intergalactic copulation?
It doesn’t really matter.
The Man Who Fell to Earth wouldn’t
have the same air of chilly, free-floating angst without this disjointed
quality in Bowie’s work. Newton is a man who fell out of time as well
as space. He floats through an ever more-garish miasma of televisual
excess, insidious double-dealing and soul-deadening consumption. That
Newton responds to these with a schizophrenic mixture of obsessiveness,
contempt and erratic bouts of despair helps shifts the focus from
psychology to sociology: how the world imposes itself upon—and
eventually consumes—the individual.
Whether one sees this as a direct allegory for Bowie’s own
objectification and deterioration depends on whether you share the
film’s view of him as a passive tabula rasa upon which others project
their own fantasies and fears. However you read it, the final image we
see of Newton is the quintessence of dejection. Nursing his umpteenth
cocktail, the ageless alien offers aging friend Nathan the only thing he
has left to give: money. The diamond-hard countenance that once enticed
others now only imprisons him in a perennially torturous present. His
head falls forward, fedora blocking our view of his features. He remains
slumped over as the credits roll, as if unwilling to allow us one more
instant to gaze upon him.
Vampire John (Bowie) whispers not-so-sweet nothings in the ear of his bloodsucking lover (Catherine Deneuve) in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983).
SEX AND DEATH dominate two of Bowie’s major film appearances in the early 80s.
The feature debut of Tony Scott,
The Hunger (1983) follows a
couple of centuries-old vampire lovers named Miriam (Catherine Deneuve)
and John (Bowie), who stalk the clubs and streets of 80s-era New York in
search of sustenance. Their first on-screen appearance is so
deliciously stylized that it pushes past proto-MTV flash to attain a
kind of trash sublimity. Gliding through the shadowy corridors of a
goth-punk club as Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy hisses and writhes in a nearby
cage, they glimpse a young couple grinding on the dance floor. Miriam
and John seduce them with little more than a look, luring them back to
their cavernous Manhattan townhouse for some hot and sloppy
throat-slashing. In many ways, the film is at its best in this sequence.
Unburdened by plot mechanics, Scott can offer us teasing glimpses of
Bowie and Deneuve shrouded in smoke and glimpsed through chain link: two
very different sex symbols embracing the seedier undercurrents of their
erotic appeal.
Bowie—his wavy, dirty blonde locks trimmed and dyed black—has no problem
playing up the carnivorous libido that undergirds his on-stage wiggles
and naughty smirks. Unlike
The Man Who Fell to Earth, however,
it’s the disintegration of Bowie’s body that plagues him, rather than
its stubborn immutability. His ability to regain vitality through
feeding deteriorates rapidly over the first half of the film, resulting
in his rapid aging (and an ever-thickening layer of fright make-up) and
eventual dismissal from the plot.
The Hunger is ultimately a
Sapphic fantasy, with Susan Sarandon’s aging specialist falling under
the sway of Miriam’s charms. In its use of Bowie’s sexual magnetism as a
signifier for all-consuming erotic excess, the film simplifies the
singer’s persona without greatly diminishing its effect.
The homoerotic climax of Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)
finds Major Jack Celliers (Bowie) laying one on his captor/admirer Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto).
Nagisa Oshima’s
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence casts Bowie as yet
another obscure object of desire, but this time brings the ambivalent
homoeroticism to the fore. Bowie’s Major Jack Celliers gets thrown into a
Japanese POW camp during World War II, where he becomes the private
obsession of camp commander Captain Yonoi (fellow rock-and-roller
Ryuichi Sakamoto). Oshima films Bowie in full rakish-hero mode. That
piercing glare burns with the righteous indignation of the dispossessed
soldier. Those mussed blonde locks at once suggest innocence and
roughish impetuousness.
It’s a spirited performance, touched by occasional bouts of Bowie-ish
eccentricity (rarely has an act of miming been imbued with such
simmering resentment) but ultimately his most traditional role—and in
many ways among his least interesting. The film is clearly inspired by
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
with Bowie embodying a variant of William Holden’s renegade Navy
commander. (There’s a reason that the performance most people remember
from Kwai is Alec Guinness’s obsessive, conflicted Colonel Nicholson.)
In the titular role of the British lieutenant colonel attempting to
bride the camp’s culture gap, Tom Conti emerges as the more
fully-fleshed out figure, as tortured by his indecision as Bowie is
magnetic in his self-assurance.
But
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence earns a special place in the
Bowie canon for its explicit acknowledgment of the singer’s queer
appeal. Few other directors have been as forthright as Oshima in
eroticizing Bowie’s lithe figure and beguiling good looks through the
gaze of another male character. Oshima’s homoeroticism comes
intrinsically intertwined with the emotional authoritarianism and
violent masculinity that runs rampant in his vision of the Japanese
military. Yet despite (or because of) the aggression that underlines the
homosocial intimacy, an electric charge courses through the climatic
kiss Celliers places on Yonoi’s cheek. It reminds us just how much of
our fascination with Bowie’s lies in trying to figure out the precise
proclivities of this highly sexualized yet ethereally sexless being.
1983 CAN ARGUABLY be seen as the apex of Bowie’s film career. His
subsequent roles became smaller or less challenging. Scorsese’s choice
to cast Bowie as Pontius Pilate in
The Last Temptation of Christ
(1988) was in keeping with the film’s boldly revisionist take on the
life and times of Jesus. Despite the provocative empathy Scorsese shows
for the New Testament’s more-reviled figures, one detects a reductive
strain in this bit of casting: the crown prince of 70s-era glam-rock
decadence presiding (albeit with some reservations) over the death of
the Lord. The 90s and 00s brought a handful of small, enticing roles,
most recently as Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s
The Prestige. Just as often came wink-wink cameos and voiceover work for animation. And as for
Labyrinth (1986), well, you’d need a whole other essay to talk about
Labyrinth.
What, ultimately, did Bowie get out of all this? His interest in
performance is well-documented, including his studies in mime and
avant-garde theater under dance instructor Lindsay Kemp in the mid-60s.
His first film role came around the same time, as a handsome ghost
haunting a young painter in Michael Armstrong’s 1967 short,
The Image.
Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and other stage personae concocted
by Bowie over the years were all attempts to enrich and extend the
elaborate narratives and characterizations that occur within his
songwriting.
I’d indulge in some armchair psychology, but Bowie beat me to the punch.
“Offstage I’m a robot,” he famously said of himself. “Onstage I achieve
emotion. It’s probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being
David.” Performance becomes a way to process the inner turmoil that
cannot be expressed privately. Is it a coincidence that Bowie accepted
the role of Thomas Jerome Newton—a millionaire at once successful in and
divorced from the world, slowly spiraling into addiction—right when his
career was buzzing and his cocaine use skyrocketing?
Disgust or disinterest? It’s one and the same for Bowie’s Andy Warhol in Basquiat (1996).
THIS BRINGS US to one last Bowie performance. Director Julian Schnabel casting Bowie as Andy Warhol in
Basquiat (1996)
can initially seem at once obvious and muddled. Yes, they share a
similar corner of public cultural consciousness: two skinny,
memorably-coiffed white men who tweaked sexuality and performance within
their respective mediums and developed devoted cults of loyal
followers. Plausible, but pretty thin. Then there’s the aforementioned
issue of Bowie’s Bowie-ness shining through whatever role he plays. It
can work when the role itself is created for him or based upon a
character whose own personality lacks particular distinction. But Warhol
was nothing if not a personality with particular distinction. Viewed
this way, the performance is kind of a mess. Bowie plays him with a look
of perennially spaced-out bafflement, pitched somewhere between
incomprehension and disgust. He never seems to want to touch anything,
clasping his hands against his chest as if in fear of being contaminated
by the banality of the world. When he talks, his lips curl
involuntarily into an exaggerated sneer that goes beyond mere distaste.
It’s like he’s lost control of some of his facial muscles. And then
there’s the voice: an aggressively affected monotone, every slightly-off
emphases wrapped in layers of quotation marks. Is it a Warholian
comment on the very act of speaking? Or is Bowie just doing a strained
imitation?
Yet, the more one watches the performance, the more heartrending it
becomes. In her overview of Bowie’s acting career in Slate, Jessica
Winter deemed Bowie’s turn as Warhol “a lazy, glib anti-impersonation.”
(“When did Warhol ever sound like a Valley Girl with acid reflux?” she
adds with an eye-roll.) This implies that impersonation was the ultimate
goal. Schnabel knows how to cast actors who can inhabit a real-life
character with something approaching verisimilitude. Look no further
than the casting of Jeffrey Wright in the title role of the
self-destructive painter. As with all of his performances, what is
inevitably reflected in Bowie’s Warhol is Bowie himself. It’s nothing if
not revealing—a sketch of an aging artist, flirting with self-parody,
who attempts yet another act of reinvention to stave off the dire
possibility of artistic obsolescence. The twitches and mannerisms that
Bowie gives to Warhol begin to feel less like ill-judged attempts at
imitation and more like a physical manifestation of the anxieties
working just Warhol’s (and Bowie’s) inscrutable surface. It’s moving in
ways that Bowie probably intended, and also in ways that he probably
didn’t.
A brief scene late in the film particularly stands out. Perched
cross-legged on his desk, Warhol receives a package from Basquiat. He
finds a gift inside: a football helmet with Basquiat’s glued-on dreads
sticking out of the sides. The significance is a touch cryptic, as it is
with much of Basquiat’s art. Warhol examines it quizzically before
placing it atop his head. He adjusts his glasses, shifts the helmet a
bit, sighs, and stares off into space. He appears notably small in the
frame, his nattily arranged ensemble offset by the ungainly headpiece
resting atop his white coif. As a bit of visual comedy, it’s a
throwaway. But it’s also a privileged moment, as it’s the last time we
see Warhol in the film. Reflecting on it later, I kept returning to the
look of quiet uncertainty on Warhol/Bowie’s face as he gazes off screen.
For all the layers of artifice occurring in that moment, there’s
vulnerability at play here that’s rare within Bowie’s on-screen work.
Perhaps it’s appropriate that it is through the portrayal of that most
self-consciously stylized of artists that this most self-consciously
stylized of singers feels so curiously, poignantly life size. For just a
moment, he falls to earth.
Matthew Connolly is an Editor at Alt Screen.
Selected films starring David Bowie—including Basquiat; The Hunger; The Man Who Fell To Earth; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars;
and more—are playing at the Museum of Arts & Design, June 3rd-30th.
Mr. Rice's Secret (2000)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
The Hunger (1983)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
The Prestige (2006)
Labyrinth (1986)
