David Bowie: Hooked To The Silver Screen

While the world mourns the loss of David Bowie, most of the tributes have focused on his incredible contributions to music. However, let us not forget how his creativity, originality and subversive approach to his art also extended to many notable film roles.

Bowie began his movie career as he meant to continue, with his stunning, eerie and empathetic role as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 The Man Who Fell To Earth. Vulnerable, mysterious, sensual and otherworldly, the role proved transformative, and was among the inspirations for his next two albums, Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977).
The Starman’s film career was marked by the theatrical, extraordinary gravitational pull that he couldn’t help but exude. His talents were best utilised in roles that allowed him to embrace the power of his aura. Bowie recognised this, and was also drawn to films that were made by interesting artists who took risks, like David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Julian Schnabel and Tony Scott.
From his role as vampiric stud in The Hunger to a Berlin prostitute in Just A Gigolo, to his sky tapdancing in Absolute Beginners, Bowie embraced deviant sexuality, heightened realities and the unapologetically strange. Even when he played real people, like Andy Warhol in Basquiat and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, Bowie tapped into what made these brilliant, famous men odd and outcast; genius outsiders just like him.
This affinity for the unusual also lent itself to humour and mischief. A tiny and instantly classic cameo in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander showed Bowie’s playful side, but it was his approach to a villainous role in a kids’ film that demonstrated how perversely puckish he could be.
Playing Jareth, the hypersexual, vain, mercurial Goblin King in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Bowie took a part that saw him surrounded by fairies and puppets, and elevated it into a role that was beguiling for children, whilst also explicitly layered for adults. His slinky, mercurial, leather-clad, eyeshadow-wearing, BDSM-alluding rock’n’roll conjurer queered masculinity, sexuality and gender, and became an enduring and iconic character. In the film, a young Jennifer Connolly defeats Jareth by telling him, “You have no power over me.” But when it came to Bowie’s relationship with his audience, we all know that he had all the power – yes, the power of voodoo.