David Bowie’s Perverse Cinematic Body

In his films as much as his music, David Bowie embodies a mode of queer performance in which gender and sexuality are never straightforward. His films do not always foreground issues of identity or desire, yet his on-screen physical presence unsettles us in ways that are visceral and corporeal. Julie Lobalzo-Wright argues that Bowie’s constant transformation and theatricality lack the consistency necessary for an effective movie-star image. Instead, she suggests, his transgressive image and inauthentic performance of gender work only where they mesh with the character he plays—as in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976).¹ This is not quite to say that Bowie is a star who always plays himself in film, but rather that his performances are most resonant when his oddity centers a queerly disoriented textual system. Bowie’s success as an actor comes in some measure from his ability to select directors who could harness and amplify these qualities. Such a recognition allows us to juxtapose his performances for Oshima Nagisa and Jim Henson, two figures who are surely not often considered together. While the homoerotics of Bowie’s star image have been analyzed extensively, considering his films with these two directors enables a focus on another crucial aspect of his queer performance: his play with sadomasochistic erotics.

In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Oshima Nagisa, 1983), the intense relationship between Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, as Allied captive and Japanese commander in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp, develops a BDSM-inflected regime of homoerotic visuality with Bowie’s body at its core. Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986) is much more mainstream, yet Bowie’s transgressive sexuality as Jareth the Goblin King is bold and textually excessive in a children’s film. The film’s cult status developed largely from audience response to Bowie’s physical embodiment of the dominant and dangerous Jareth. These performances are not only queerly unstable; they are more specifically perverse. Feminist film theory teaches us to understand spectatorship as bisexual and polymorphous, sadistic and masochistic, and Bowie materializes that potential in his on-screen body. Bowie alludes to BDSM at many points in his career, from being repeatedly tied up with rope onstage to playing with handcuffs in The Linguini Incident (Richard Shepard, 1991). But it is these two films that most vividly foreground his body in relation to perversity. Focusing on the sexual power dynamics of Labyrinth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, I argue that Bowie insistently rearranges cinema’s regimes of eroticized vision.

In one of her influential accounts of pornography, Linda Williams outlines cinema’s doubled structure of perversion. First there is the explicit content of pornography, then cinema itself as perversion: the apparatus gives us access to acts and bodies distant from us in space and time. She concludes, “In hard-core sadomasochistic pornography we thus encounter a double perversion: perverse acts and the perverse pleasure of viewing these acts.”² Of course, neither Labyrinth nor Merry Christmas is pornographic, but this doubled structure nonetheless helps us clarify how these films—and Bowie’s performance in them—can be read productively through the lens of BDSM. Merry Christmas shows us perverse acts such as Bowie’s Major Jack Celliers being bound with rope and prisoners being beaten, and then invites viewers to interpret them perversely. In their diegetic context, these violent acts are neither consensual nor sexual, yet Oshima conjoins the regimes of bodily violence and desire. Labyrinth offers us the perverse spectacle of Bowie in leather outfits and makeup, casually wielding a black riding crop, and its mode of address similarly invites the young viewer to respond sexually. Narratively, Jareth is the antagonist, but, as with Celliers, the spectator’s affective relationship to him is shot through with an erotics of power.

Williams also usefully points out the difference between sadism as “clinical perversion” and “the more socially normative voyeurism and fetishism inscribed in cinematic discourse itself.”³ Beyond her context of BDSM porn, this distinction explains the gap between the conventional ways that feminist film theory discusses sadism and masochism (as integral to classical spectatorial...