David Bowie On-Screen

Not Here

David Bowie has always been a significant figure of the screen. Through appearing in experimental music videos, tense television interviews, controversial live performances, biographical documentaries, and auteur and genre films, he was a seminal, shimmering part of screen culture for more than forty years. His first television appearance was on the BBC’s Tonight program, in 1964, where he was interviewed about his newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. At this stage, when he was still called David Jones, we are introduced to not only his hunger for publicity but also his closeness to difference, of not quite fitting in. David Bowie is, of course, not a single or singular star image: he has appeared as David Bowie and in and through various high-voltage, liminal, gender-bending personae, including Aladdin Sane (1971); he has appeared in self-reflexive cameo roles in such films as Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001); and he has taken on various serious acting roles, including the outcast poet-musician Baal in Baal (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1982), the vampire John Blaylock in The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), the murderous Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), and the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006). Across the body of David Bowie’s screen work, one finds a great diversity in the type of roles he has taken on and the performances he has given, even if they are, nonetheless, all loosely bound by a profound alterity—a signification of difference.

David Bowie is a significant screen figure even when he is not on camera, with numerous performers, artists, and film and television texts drawing on his imagery and titular iconography to shape their texts. This is most famously the case in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), ostensibly a Bowie biopic that Bowie famously disapproved of, refusing to grant Haynes the rights to his music.¹ While Bowie is not in Velvet Goldmine, he is nonetheless presented there as Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), with events and relationships culled from Bowie’s own biography. Bowie’s songs are often used to score a film scene or as the backing soundtrack, to historicize and affectively shape the mood and feeling of the world being brought into view. Bowie’s music, his voice, his fantastic embodiment enchant the screen worlds his soundscapes are used for. In Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014), for example, “Moonage Daydream” plays as the rebel crew of the spaceship Milano enters the spectacular galactic corpse-planet Knowhere. David Bowie’s voice and the psychedelic imagery found in the song lyrics bring his alien messiah identity into the spectacular vistas on display.²

Since his death in January 2016, David Bowie has appeared on the screen in a different and particularly moving way as a type of fan wish fulfillment and cultural haunting. For example, in the Doctor Who episode “Smile” (BBC, 2017), the Doctor faces an army of robots who are programmed to incinerate people if they detect that they are not happy. Retreating while smiling, the Doctor calls out, “I’m happy, hope you’re happy too,” linking the scene to the lyrics of the song Ashes to Ashes (1980). Peter Capaldi’s Doctor was also initially modeled on the Bowie star image, the Thin White Duke, and so Bowie is constantly rematerialized in the body of this alien time traveler who has the ability to resurrect or rejuvenate.³ Even in his death, then, Bowie lives on in screen culture. And in living on so strongly, if in part as apparition, he perhaps points to the material thinness of how our cultural world is held together:

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be, that we would do...