David Bowie's Screen Presence



David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (cine-real.com)

I think it not particularly necessary here to dwell on the excellence of the Thin White Duke with regards to the impact he had on music, period. I thoroughly loved him as a musician but feel that, particularly these past and next few days, there’ll be multitudes and multitudes of far more well-informed, better written articles regarding his life in musical numbers, career reinventions, and just general all-round awesomeness as a person. So I thought, why not look at a different, but no less impressive, side to Bowie’s talents? That being his excellence as a thespian, and his incredible utilisation of his musical persona imbedded within his screen presence.

Now I feel that while the praise given to Bowie for his musical talents was always rightfully placing him on heaven’s high, unfortunately his work as an actor was often vastly underrated, and even chastised for some very odd reasons. A common argument thrown against him was that he was ‘playing himself’ in all of his performances, a statement I take great exception to not only against him, but against other actors who have similar critiques made against their talents. To name but a few: Tony Curtis. Jesse Eisenberg. Charles Bronson. All of these actors do indeed play/played characters within a particular ‘type’, but what differentiated them from say, someone who genuinely just coasts by film by film putting no effort in the performance as ‘themselves’ (i.e. George Clooney when he couldn’t care less about the film he’s in), is that they know how to utilise this very particular screen presence the audience know them for, and use it then to create a character. Case in point: Michael Keaton in Birdman. Riggan Thomson is not Keaton playing Keaton, but Keaton utilising aspects of his career and public image to create a lived-in portrayal of an actor living under the shadow of a previous hit character.

Anyway, I digress. Regarding this criticism of ‘playing themselves’ I feel like musicians in general are particularly susceptible to criticism in this regard. And while this criticism is sometimes valid for some of them (for example I love The Beatles but quite frankly, apart from maybe Ringo, they really didn’t have much in the way of onscreen talent), it doesn’t quite ring true to me for others. For example, Ludacris (okay, rapper first and foremost but he’s really good in Crash and one of the few people who can actually act in the Fast & Furious series), Ice Cube (he does some fine comic work in the 21 Jump Street series and gave a fantastic performance in Boyz N the Hood), Mariah Carey (surprisingly touching and heartfelt as a therapist in the hard-hitting Precious), and Tom Waits (adds something to anything he’s in really) are examples of singers-turned-actors who did very well within their admittedly, specific range of acting.

As for Bowie? Well what you got with Bowie onscreen was definitely a very particular style of acting. Did he have elements of himself in his performances? Certainly—whenever one sees ZIggy Stardust strut across the screen, the very nature of the casting choice is made clear. The character he is playing is MEANT to stand out as being Bowie-esque; it’s never intended to be a chameleonic disappearance into the role, at least not in the usual sense (I’ll get onto that later). But while Bowie could’ve definitely just gone on autopilot for his cinematic performance, going through the motions in exactly the same way as he presented himself through his music, he never did that. Though it was always noticeably him in his roles, he always added a little bit extra to make each David Bowie performance both identifiably him, but also distinct from each other in differing ways.




I guess the best place to start would be his leading turn in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In this Bowie plays an interestingly named alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, who arrives on Earth to salvage some water for his ailing family and planet. This Nicolas Roeg production (an excellent director by the way, whose Don’t Look Now should be required Halloween viewing for everyone, and also contains one of the most beautifully filmed sex scenes ever), makes no qualms about it being a very obvious showcase for Bowie’s pure, undistilled presence as a popular music artist. The intangibles of his mannerisms, way of speaking, oddly alluring and rather out-of-this world appearance, and to be very vague, just the general vibe he gives off as a persona, provide the initial presentation of the character as a very convincing space oddity (no pun intended). What’s most terrific about this performance is, that while it is in some ways one-note, it’s also deceptively complex. Bowie isn’t just playing aspects of himself onscreen here, he’s playing on the audience’s preconceptions of him from the media and his music. He takes on all the things that make Bowie, Bowie, and fuses them into this character whose equivalent traits make it difficult for him to identify with earthlings and the rest of the world.

The quirks of the character are rendered naturalistic because they just feel so right for Bowie, but he doesn’t stop at that; he adds a heartbreaking, sensitive emotional core to his relationship with Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). The best way to describe this relationship in the film is a sort of twisted subversion of the central romance of Edward Scissorhands. Playing on the sexual allure of an identity so mysterious and intriguing, and taking it into darker territory with the tonal shifts of the film. That Bowie is equally adept at playing the shy, inquisitive outsider looking for love, to the disillusioned, alcoholic broken-hearted fellow by the film’s conclusion, is testament to how he successfully navigates both joy and sorrows of Thomas Jerome Newton while keeping his persona as a constant.  The film itself I’ll grant is a hate-it-or-love-it sort of deal, but do give it a watch.
Anyway, I’ve talked a great deal about this debut performance, but he was certainly no slouch after this. I really need to see Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence but I’ve been told by my mum that he’s rather good in that, in both disappearing rather well into the role of a rebellious British officer, while also using his innate Bowie-ness to create this otherworldliness to his character’s defiance. In Labrinyth he plays the wonderfully campy, amusingly insufferable and vaguely inappropriate side of his children’s movie villain, Jareth, perfectly, but when the Goblin King needs to get properly malevolent he’s equally adept at ramping up the menace too.

Even in minor roles like Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ he was very good at just making an impact with limited screentime. He adopted a strange, yet very effective American-esque accent to play Andy Warhol in Basquiat and ends up being the highlight in a film peppered with celebrity cameos. He’s all the ball of weirdness and quirk you’d envisage him as the equally lovably odd Warhol (the two were friends in real life which may have contributed to the excellence of the performance) but once again, instead of just being a cipher impersonation, Bowie doesn’t overdo the mimcry of Warhol and also remembers to develop, with limited number of scenes, a compassionate, endearing quality to his relationship to Jeffrey Wright’s Basquiat.

David Bowie in The Prestige (collider.com)

 

His finest performance though, in my opinion, would most certainly be his performance in the excellent Christopher Nolan magic thriller, The Prestige. Remember what I said earlier about Bowie not being particularly chameleonic as an actor? In retrospect, I take that back. His performance as Nikola Tesla, the oft-neglected inventor of the AC current and within the film a crucial key to the central mystery surrounding Hugh Jackman’s character, is just great. If I didn’t know beforehand that Bowie was going to be a big selling point for the film, I wouldn’t have recognised him. The voice he adopts is kind of like his usual voice but with such intricate little variations on his usual inflections, and a very light but incredibly effective accent. He has a certain air of warmth to his usual quirks, but also depicts the underlying mental instability of Tesla incredibly well. In short it’s probably the best encapsulation of how Bowie’s excellence as an actor reflected his aptitude in music, and just all-round excellence in life. He gives you all you want from a David Bowie performance, but adds in little reinventions and little twists to his formulae to generate variety and depth to it.