I would never presume to discuss David Bowie’s legacy as a musician. It’s far too soon to try to get a handle on that fluid, funky, ever-changing river of fevered invention, and just hours after hearing of his death – just two days after his 69th birthday, which seems far too young – I am in no way prepared to investigate my own relationship to the man’s body of work.
But as a musician, Bowie was uniquely suited to the movies. His delicate features and mismatched eyes, rendered huge and alien on a cinema screen, made him a figure of fascination his artistic nature pulled him towards projects that might have seemed too daunting for casual actors. But of course Bowie was acting full-time well before he stepped in front of his first movie camera.
He didn’t play a lot of normal people. The closest he came, I think, was his prisoner of war in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – a British major who becomes a figure of fascination, and then fixation, to the camp’s commandant (Ryuchi Sakamoto, in one of his own rare appearances in front of the camera). Oshima frames Bowie as a fetish object, and Bowie responds with a precise physical performance that’s just this side of unreadable – the same way he drew people into his various musical personae, but here dripping with psychological depth as well as magnetism and eroticism. It’s a remarkable film that doesn’t really get the credit it deserves as a queer cinema milestone, and a lot of its power is due to the enigma of Bowie’s presence.
He was always well-cast as the Other. A doomed extraterrestrial emissary in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth and an elegant vampire reaching his expiry date in Tony Scott’s The Hunger. He danced with puppets (and Jennifer Connelly) as the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s berserk Labyrinth, and played a distracted Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ. All films made by artists who clearly relished the opportunity to fold Bowie into their work, and maybe hang out with him on the set for an extra day or two.
Having proven himself more than capable on screen in the 80s, Bowie retreated from film work in the 90s. Not entirely – he turned up in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as an FBI agent in the middle of an inexplicable meltdown, and he played Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat – but those were cameos rather than commitments, like the times he played himself in Zoolander or Extras.
When he turned up as Nikolai Tesla in The Prestige in 2006, it felt like a coup for Christopher Nolan – both for the genius casting and for the fact that the director managed to persuade Bowie to play a proper role, rather than a winking walk-on. Nolan had used Bowie’s Something In The Air for Memento’s end credits I like to imagine he spent the intervening years sending Bowie little presents to lure him back to proper acting.
It’s a fine turn, quietly fussy and just slightly otherworldly like all great actors, Bowie gives you the sense that you’re glimpsing the real artist underneath. (And yeah, Tesla does seem like the sort of person who might sit down at a mixing board and come up with Space Oddity.)
So, that’s Bowie the actor. Bowie the life force, though? That comes through on decades of soundtracks, employed by directors who knew how to use him.
Uli Edel tracks his Berlin nightmare Christiane F. with Bowie music, even featuring a live performance of Station To Station – re-creating a moment in the 70s when rock culture was just beginning to understand Bowie’s electric effect on it. John Hughes opened The Breakfast Club with a verse from Changes, introducing a generation of kids to another side of that weird guy who sang the song about dancing.
Quentin Tarantino scored a key scene of Inglourious Basterds with Bowie’s Cat People theme Putting Out Fire for an anachronistic kick James Gunn employed Moonage Daydream to take our breath away – along with his characters’ – in Guardians Of The Galaxy.
And Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow used Starman brilliantly in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, letting John C. Reilly’s dopey rocker perform a roller-boogie version during his disco period. It’s a tribute to the film’s sense of good-natured parody that the sequence is both horrible and delightful.
If I have to pick just one? I’d go with the slice of Modern Love that powers Denis Lavant’s delirious dance through Paris in Boy Meets Girl is a wonderful collision of youthful exuberance and cinematic immediacy. Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig cannily reused the track for a similar sequence in Frances Ha: it’s the music playing inside their heroine’s head as she dashes through New York.
But I don’t have to pick just one. That’s the great thing about having had David Bowie in the world at all. He’s scattered pieces of himself throughout our culture, and we get to sift through them for the rest of our lives. The only real question is where to start.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
