New Killer Star

Images of violence and death are commonly found in David Bowie’s music and film art. This can be violence felt by him, violence he directs against himself, violence that he offers to others, and the violence of others directed toward him. This essay considers how violence and death play out in two of Bowie’s on-screen appearances from the beginning of the 1980s—the BBC teleplay Baal (Alan Clarke, 1982) and the film The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)—in terms of the shadowy, incorporeal space itself around death. This liminal space is clearly suggestive of death’s status as the threshold between life and what comes after, but it also contains other noteworthy implications. For example, the space is an arena where potential events, states, and meanings are held in suspension, such as life and death, presence/absence, and us/them. This is a phenomenon that is represented here by the crossed-out title New Killer Star, the name of a Bowie song that means one thing when written and another when spoken (it sounds like “nuclear star”), thus rendering it ambiguously both there and not there. As such, the idea of the liminal speaks to Bowie’s continued use of ambiguity, conflict, and paradox in his art. This essay is therefore primarily interested in what these performances contribute to an understanding of Bowie and his art rather than other social and cultural readings that might, with equal validity, be applied to them.¹

A number of writers have noted how Bowie “creates and exists in certain types of spaces”; for example, Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond cite Bowie’s “urban, alien, tourist and inter-galactic” spaces.² Tanya Stark has discussed Bowie’s consistent engagement with death and the “symbolic centrality of death that permeates” his career and links this to his “fascination with liminal spaces.”³ Although she doesn’t explicitly refer to the metaphysical place between life and death, I take up this reading of “liminal” in connection with these two texts because it is in this marginal land where the dual drives of Eros and Thanatos compete for screen time that the action of Baal and The Hunger take place.

Alan Clarke’s Baal is an adaptation of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s first play (1918). Brecht’s Baal has little relationship to the “epic theater” he later pioneered that sought to force the audience into being active by employing his Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), where they were encouraged to remain aware that they were watching a fictional performance in order to promote a social-critical response in them. When Clarke directed the play for the BBC in 1982, he introduced some elements, such as the split screen, the tableau, and the character of Baal singing and speaking directly to camera, to gesture toward Brecht’s later style and deny the audience the passive voyeuristic spectator position. Baal is, as Paul Morley explains in The Age of Bowie, a “lone, angry, messianic, adolescent and heavy-drinking poet idolized by his peers,” and he can be compared to Arthur Rimbaud, the influential nineteenth-century “savage symbolist” poet.⁴ Morley says that Rimbaud is a model of the “post-adolescent insecurity tipping into fury and rage that’s at the heart of the clichéd bad boy rock star.”⁵ Baal is an “amoral, anarchistic, anti-authoritarian, anti-social, snarling hater of women but inexplicably attractive to them”; he “spurns and alienates everyone he comes in contact with, leaving destruction in his wake.”⁶ Rather than lingering on the ruin of other characters, though, the narrative focuses on Baal’s flight toward death. After murdering at least one person (off-screen) and abandoning the mother of his unborn child, we see Baal dying alone and abject in a woodcutter’s cottage.

The Hunger also focuses on the prolonged journey toward the annihilation of Bowie’s character. He plays the beautiful undead vampire John Blaylock, who lives with his exquisite six-thousand-year-old wife, Miriam (Catherine Deneuve), and together they prey on and then drain the blood of willing New Yorkers before disposing of their remains...