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  • David Bowie: In Cameo
  • Sean Redmond (bio)

In this essay I explore three film and television fiction cameo roles that David Bowie has performed in. Bowie brings the complexity of his shifting star image to each cameo performance, drawing on competing and sometimes conjoining artistic traditions as he does so. The parameters of posing and mimicry, self-reflexivity and cultish subversion, and the shifting ground of modernism and postmodernism show how Bowie’s cameo performances are not singular or consistent but rather refer to the specificities of the text in question, the other authors and actors involved, and the multifaceted nature of his star self. When Bowie embodies a cameo role, a series of intersecting star and performance registers are in play that suggest that he is always in cameo.

The three texts that I have chosen to analyze are Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992), Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001), and Extras (Ricky Gervais, BBC, 2006).1 These texts occur across film and television, as well as artistic and commercial streams, and they take place over a twenty-year performance period, allowing one to see how Bowie embodies and breaks down the very constituents of the cameo role. I predominantly refer to those texts where David Bowie appears as David Bowie, the exception being Twin Peaks, where he takes on the “disappearing” role of FBI agent Phillip Jeffries. These texts also address the various plateaus of Bowie’s star image, as each draws on different and competing moments from his career.

The questions that frame this reading of the cameo performances are, Which David Bowie is being brought into view? How is the text using him, and why? I look at each text in chronological order, both to narrate the cameo in relation to the perceived notion of the artist’s career progression and to build sedimentary layers of analysis: one cameo builds on the previous one, and yet calls it forth, in the same way Bowie’s star images linger on. The shape-shifting David Bowie ultimately complements, and in part resides in, the floating landscapes of his (always in play) cameo performances.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me: A Disappearing Cameo

David Bowie’s cameo in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me occurs near the start of the film. The scene begins with an establishing shot of the cracked Liberty Bell, followed by a cut to an interior shot, where FBI agent [End Page 150] Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) enters the office where he works and says to agent Gordon Cole (David Lynch): “It is 10:10 a.m. on February sixteenth. I was worried about today because of the dream I told you about.” The importance of time and temporality, and the distinction between real and dream, are immediately signified, a trope of the Twin Peaks series to which the film is a prequel, and one that is shortly to be connected to Bowie’s (dis)appearance in the film. The cracked Liberty Bell is now a mere museum piece, and the watch that Cole looks at as Cooper speaks to him seems an absurdist temporal gesture, perhaps borrowed from the figure of the Hatter, as if time has to be constantly checked and monitored.2 As the exchange unfolds, there is a pregnant pause between the two men, as if they were both frozen in time. The abrupt cut that follows their conversation into a long corridor, where Cooper then appears, is momentarily discontinuous. Cooper then stands and stares into a mounted surveillance camera (stationed at the near end of the long corridor) before entering a nondescript “control room” with a bank of monitors. A series of brief shots then shows Cooper looking into the eye of the surveillance camera and at the monitors that display a live feed of the corridor. Cooper is observer and observed, seemingly puzzled, or put out by the fact that he cannot see himself being watched or surveilled. He seems surprised that he cannot exist on the screen and in the control room or corridor at the same time. Time is rendered “out of joint,” and the spaces he occupies are a “nonplace,” inhabited but not lived...

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