Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
In the 1966 short film, The Image, written and directed by Michael Armstrong, a young man (Michael Bryne) finishes a study for a portrait of a youth of about 16. The boy is depicted with an expression of longing on his face and his arms outstretched as if to embrace—or clutch—the viewer. No sooner does the artist step back to contemplate his work than the boy himself appears and wordlessly approaches him, gliding across rooms and hallways, a figure clearly not of this world.
The terrified artist attacks the invading apparition repeatedly and with increasing violence, first bashing in his skull with a classical bust and then stabbing him numerous times, all to no avail (save to garner the film itself an X rating). Finally the boy—who now appears to exist as multiple copies of himself—vanishes when the artist destroys his portrait. As the artist weeps over the remains of his painting, the camera pans to a photograph of the boy, smiling into the camera. The film’s script purported to be “a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity,” but the boy—revenant, doppelganger, phantasm, clone, and finally pure image—is both the film’s driving force and a neat encapsulation of the aesthetic paradigm of David Bowie, whose first film appearance the role was.
When Bowie died earlier this year, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his latest album, the shock was almost as unique as the artist. It felt less a case of a talent taken too soon—as did the passing of actor Alan Rickman a few weeks later at the same age—than the case of a talent taken at all. Bowie, surely—Ziggy Stardust, the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Thin White Duke, the Goblin King—was elven enough to be one of the true immortals.
From the very beginning with his weirdly chipper novelty song, “The Laughing Gnome,” Bowie was an inhabitant of and frank advocate for the world of the fantastic. “Space Rock” has been a genre since the late ’60s, and Death Metal has long loved its Lovecraft, but Bowie was possibly the first pop/rock star to actively create popular fantasy and science fiction tropes rather than simply riff off them for head music and album covers. His first hit single, “Space Oddity,” was a winsome, inter-orbit slice-of-life topped off with less a pun than an ironic nudge at Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Launched five days before the Apollo 11 mission, the song became at once satire and anthem of the NASA event, and Major Tom, alienated by technology in the most literal of ways, would have fit in nicely with the sexual and psychological overtones of the contemporaneous Dangerous Visions anthologies.
Like the neutered spacemen of Samuel Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” from the first Dangerous Visions, much of Bowie’s glam-era fame was derived from an unearthly third-sex appeal. But where Delany’s “spacers” were gabby, prepubescent brats, Bowie’s eponymous Man Who Sold the World lounged suggestively on a divan, attired in “dresses-for-men” by Michael Fish (perhaps best known for John Pertwee’s shirts on Doctor Who), and sported the copper-kettle tresses of a Rossetti femme-fatale. Sentient computers, Lovecraftian gods, and references to Aleister Crowley abounded: the album popularized the full range of fantasy fiction as picking grounds for artists from Siouxsie & the Banshees to Nine Inch Nails.
Bowie’s Ziggy persona suggested a mad space opera breaking free from the 3-D drive-in screen. On the face of it, the arrival of the Starman, the Spiders from Mars, the coming of the black holes, and the destruction of earth were episodes that echoed Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still but played like nothing seen before. When the album’s nihilist-Prometheus manqué was wedged back into cinema by Nichoelas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth the results were oddly cold and perfunctory for all their visual glitter. Bowie had already sold the world—falling to it seemed beneath his capabilities. Still, the film has a genuinely disjointed, dreamlike quality and is full of scenes that linger as sun-struck images. (The Man Who Fell to Earth is said to have inspired the fictional film Valis in Phillip K. Dick’s novel of the same name, where the character of Eric Lampton is a possible stand-in for Bowie and the film itself a conduit for an alien space probe’s messages.)
Bowie’s stint as a vampire in Tony Scott’s The Hunger was seamlessly in keeping with his starved allure, despite the botched ending and lush violence (which Bowie himself felt uncomfortable with). The film’s twin themes of glamour and addiction emerged from the same perpetual twilight that provided the Thin White Duke with found-object broken Aesops aplenty. Aesthetically a series of amoral personas, Bowie himself remained deeply fascinated by and concerned with morality, and through the 1980s he interjected these concerns in the unlikeliest of contexts: the music video for “Let’s Dance” featured an unprecedented and apocalyptic reference to nuclear testing on Australia’s Aboriginal lands while a fairly explicit—indeed, rather heavily censored—call for racial and sexual parity dominates the video for “China Girl.” The tunes themselves were skittish ditties—the world Bowie made of them suggested that a view of real corruption might seethe at the heart of a throwaway bauble.
It was precisely this image that provided Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth (1986) with its most potent scenes: Bowie as the Goblin King, serenely contact-juggling a trio of crystal spheres which, loosed over the decayed maze of his realm, float into its depths and entrap the young Jennifer Connelly in a masquerade of red and every-other-colored death. A box-office failure that picked up a cult following, Labyrinth was my first big-screen exposure to Bowie and remains, in my opinion, one of the undersung wonders of its decade.
The movie, a bizarre mash-up of Bowie’s pop, Henson’s puppetry, and Brian Froud’s impish designs is shot through with a Monty Python sensibility that makes its lower depths an easy thing to miss (Python’s Terry Jones wrote the earliest draft of the script). Ostensibly a coming-of-age story, it is in fact a chilling look at arrested development congealing into near-madness—Connelly’s sullen pseudo-princessy teen is the younger, less flagrantly sensual version of the selfish perpetual adolescent that the Goblin King already and irreversibly is. Manipulative, indolent, bullying, petty, abusive to his court and, most interestingly, sterile (thus the baby-napping that kicks off the plot), Bowie’s King is also glamorous in the faerie sense of the term, charismatic, charming, and for all appearances a true new romantic—telltale signs of the sociopath at play. A more succinct yet multifaceted picture of the personality disorder has yet to be realized in fantasy fiction, right down to the King’s inability to counter a single line of criticism: when Connelly simply tells the Goblin King that he has no power over her, the maze and its narcissistic master promptly evaporate.
Bowie’s interdimensional dash through Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me rates as a minor crowning moment for both artists, although no one seemed to realize as much at the time: Lynch’s deadpan creepiness creates a blank space for the Thin White Duke, whose appearance as the missing CIA agent, Phillip Jeffries, is played as the Möbius strip–like final minutes of the disappearance that preceded it. The film, which I think one of Lynch’s greatest, is too complex to be given its due here: what makes Bowie’s involvement interesting is the way that Lynch taps into him as a pure symbol. This could seem like nothing more than canny typecasting (“Of course something otherworldly is going on—that’s David Bowie!”) but the result goes terrifyingly far beyond that, producing an effect of genuine power. As Bowie’s southern-accented Jeffries howls and disintegrates into the electrical flux of Lynch’s cosmology, we are transfixed by the way in which the theatrics of camp intersect with the uncanny. Lynch later managed something similar with singer Marilyn Manson’s few shocking seconds in Lost Highway—a film that commences with Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” playing over the alarming opening credits—but even that sequence lacks the mesmerizing horror of Bowie’s encounter with the denizens of the Red Room.
It is easy enough for detractors to point to Bowie’s general development as less an evolution and more a hopscotch of commercial reinvention. Writing dismissively of Madonna in The New Republic, essayist and historian Luc Sante identified Bowie as her role model, “a magpie with a flair for highlighting the critical elements of the styles ... appropriated.” As early as 1973, a preternaturally fogeyish Martin Amis wondered in the pages of the New Statesman if Bowie was perhaps “just a mild fad hystericized by ‘the media,’ an entrepreneur of camp who knew how little, as well as how much, he could get away with.” Bowie’s self-deprecating streak, merged with a wry acknowledgment of career-spanning excesses (pharmaceutical and otherwise), often seemed to indicate tacit agreement with these critics.
But mutability and adaptability are evolutionary characteristics too. Horror with its Gothic antecedents, fantasy with its mythic cycles, and science fiction with its rambling sense of encyclopedic incorporation have all been far more comfortable with the idea of a shared and semi-scavenged field of inspiration. If Bowie was a magpie, he was still both harbinger and psychopomp. What Sante and Amis saw as appropriation, surrealists and steampunks alike would recognize as a fantastical and fated act of salvage. As Bowie himself would have undoubtedly observed, it’s funny how secrets travel. 
David V. Griffin lives in Esopus, New York.
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