The Cinema of David Bowie

“I like Elvis movies because Elvis is in them.” —Kurt Russell

David Bowie, gone mere days after his 69th birthday, leaves a pop-culture footprint so vast that he will be mourned by just about everyone in the arts. His music career speaks for itself, as does his profound impact on the fashion industry. But his film work, undoubtedly to be picked apart at length for relevant coverage, nonetheless exists in constant danger of being overlooked if not outright dismissed by many. Perhaps the quintessential Bowie acting joke was delivered on the late, lamented UK panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, in which former host Simon Amstell broadly summarized Bowie’s work in The Last Temptation of Christ thusly: “I’m not saying he was wooden, but a certain Mr. Jesus Christ was nailed to him!”

And yet, for all the typecasting of Bowie as a strange, aloof, often mystical character, the artist displayed not so much a wide range as a firm command on the range he had. It just so happened that the character type Bowie played best was “David Bowie.” Do not mistake this for a lack of skill; David Bowie as a concept took years to create and was in a state of constant maintenance for the remainder of the artist’s life, and it only made sense that he should apply that persona to his work in cinema as much as music. Look at that quote up top. It expresses a simple, obvious truth. No one watched Love Me Tender to see the complicated tale of romantic jealousy between brothers, and certainly not for the fraternal Civil War politics. They went to see Elvis Presley. Bowie, iconographic image-maker that he was, understood this deeply, and his acting never attempts to paper over the fact that he was one of the most famous men in the world.

The flipside of Bowie parlaying his musical image into his acting is that he also transposed his capacity for great self-revelation within the confines of a cryptic figure. This is evident from his first dramatic film role, in The Man Who Fell to Earth as an alien who comes to our planet seeking water for his parched people, bringing with him technological innovation to secure the largesse needed to acquire resources. Bowie at first plays a capitalistic version of Ziggy Stardust: sex-obsessed and steeped in the vices of the day, and ultimately consumed by his own excess. But Thomas Jerome Newton lays bare the loneliness that only peeks out at the margins of Bowie’s breakthrough album, and Bowie plays the character with a numbness that consistently pulls focus onto the character’s listlessness and torpor. The later stage of the film, in which a narcotized Newton is shuffled between dead-eyed life in front of TV screens and ruthless experimentation by interest groups who want to figure him out, look an awful lot like a tweaked version of an average day for Bowie circa 1976. (Even the scenes of flash photography burning the alien’s human eye contacts into his retinas have a certain flavor of the biographical, mimicking, perhaps, the effect of so many bulbs on Bowie’s permanently dilated eye.)

The sadness that Bowie brings to the part is bracing, and its blend of the raw and aloof prefigures the most sonically cold yet confessional streak of his musical career in Station to Station and the Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger). The blur between music and film work can also be seen in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima’s psychosexual POW drama about prisoner-guard dynamics. By 1983, Bowie was settling into his role as new-wave godfather, largely simplifying his image, but his performance in this film merges the muted inscrutability of his present with the decidedly queer bent of his early years. The homoeroticism of the film is buried beneath military codes of conduct, masculine insecurities, and language barriers, but Bowie teases it out with suggestive leers and combative martyrdom that both plays up and upends his perennial outsider status by revealing how ill-fitting a human being Capt. Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto) is.

Also released in 1983 was Tony Scott’s The Hunger, featuring Bowie not even having to try to play an eroticized vampire. Yet instead of a feature-length romp of sex, blood, and urban-gothic chic from Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, the artist gets a more complex, moving role as an immortal who suddenly discovers the limits of his eternal life. Watching Bowie’s vampire suddenly age decades in a matter of hours could stand in for fears of obsolescence in a rapidly changing landscape, and the scene of the wrinkled creature begging Deneuve for a cure is one of the most heartbreaking in Bowie’s acting career.

This isn’t to say that Bowie only portrays his vulnerable side. He also excelled at playing villains, where he could let his arch demeanor run wild as catty sadism. This is most obviously expressed in Labyrinth (1986), his Jareth resembling Divine on a cocaine-and-peppers diet. Gaunt and gaudy, with gobs of makeup unable to cover mounting wrinkles, Jareth is Bowie’s nightmare vision of himself if he’d stayed glam and never evolved, a musty, mothballed queen. Bowie is the only enduringly good thing about the movie, bringing to the puppet-filled dark fantasy its most obscure and bizarre aspect and its most clear point of reference. No less outlandish is his work in Absolute Beginners that same year, in which he contrasts his goblin self-parody with a bullish goof on the ad men taking over the music business and wringing every last drop of blood from artists. Yet his best antagonistic work is that of Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), playing a officiously ass-covering bureaucrat whose meek protestations of helplessness in the face of mob justice belie a great capacity for passing the buck. In some ways, his Pilate is a better satire of the executive class ruining art with loaded focus-group feedback and vested interests than his role in Absolute Beginners.

Bowie’s mixture of the defiant and cheekily cagy with the longing and uncertain is inherently cinematic, and it’s no wonder why he steals these movies and even manages to cast a long shadow over films that simply invoke him through musical selection. Bowie may never have appeared in a Wes Anderson film, but his soundtrack presence in those movies is as crucial to limning the emotional state of Anderson’s characters as the director’s framing and dialogue. He is the omnipresent yet absent core of Velvet Goldmine (1998), Todd Haynes’s ultimately ambivalent estimation of the glam scene and the sexual release that Bowie championed, then abandoned. That film counters the guarded confession of Bowie’s own acting roles with the opposing viewpoint of a fan who had to face up to the fact that something that meant the world to him was just a phase for the man responsible. These are but two examples among countless instances of Bowie deepening cinema even when he wasn’t an active part of it, and that aspect of the artist’s impact is as worth considering to his overall film image as his actual work in the industry.

Above all, Bowie understood film to be a logical extension of what he was already doing, which was using personae to constantly let slip details about himself while staying abreast of a public struggling to keep pace. He was, in every format of his work, an enigma, not the last of the pop mysteries but indeed the only pop mystery. His closest analogue was Bob Dylan, who used self-mythology and stylistic overhauls as a reaction against fame, to force those who identified with him and relied on him to drop all that foolishness and just appreciate his music. It’s why he made such a terrible actor. Bowie, on the other hand, understood that it was the embrace of fame that protected the true self, not paraded it, and it’s why his acting work remains so compelling.

Though not Bowie’s best work, a personal favorite is his performance as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006). The casting isn’t quite right; on the surface, Bowie’s status as a profoundly talented recycler, a borrower or flat-out thief of ideas and modes to suit his own purpose and gain, puts him far closer to the specter of Thomas Edison that seeks to dismantle Tesla at the margins of the film. But Bowie’s performance as the Serbian genius captures a certain fatalism that rings true to the man, the knowledge that he will not be fully appreciated in life and that his achievements are doomed to be misunderstood through “explanation.” So much of Bowie’s acting is not minimal or wooden but intuitive, capable of expressing basic but difficult-to-elucidate emotions. The elegiac quality of his Tesla stands out in the wake of his death, a reminder of his talent that also serves as much as a restless but somberly resigned self-eulogy as his final album, Blackstar.