A road at night, unreeling before our eyes. Dashed yellow line down the center, flickering by at unmanageable speed. Yellow lettering to match it, rushing toward us, bearing names that scatter and burst. Blue-gray blur of headlights on the asphalt; we must be in a vehicle, though we see no driver, no wipers, and no steering wheel. And a sound of equal velocity: drums and guitar, then a voice that keens—light and high, ungrand, yet with something urgent to impart: “Funny how secrets travel, / I’d start to believe / If I were to bleed / Thin skies / The man chains his hands held high / Cruise me blond / Cruise me babe…” How come we haven’t crashed yet? What about those secrets? Is there really a blond? Where are the oncoming cars?
That is the start of David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (1997), one of the most exciting credit sequences that cinema has thrown in our direction; the audience is left shaking before the story has even begun. As for the voice, it belongs to David Bowie. The song is “I’m Deranged,” which he wrote, with Brian Eno, for the 1995 album “Outside.” We will hear it again at the end of the movie, by which time Lynch will have made quite sure, as is his custom, that derangement has wafted through the auditorium like a dose of the flu. “Lost Highway” seems to cruise along according to Bowie’s instructions, as if determined to prove that the mysteries of which he sang were true. The film veers all over the place, but he shows it the way.
Bowie, who died on Sunday, at the age of sixty-nine, was a man of the movies. That is not to say that he was a great actor—at least, not on the big screen—nor that most of the films in which he appeared were anything but minor. But his career, so conscientiously self-wrought, was more akin to that of a movie star than to that of a rocker, and it also suggested that he grasped the force of the moving image, and its fragile half-life, more acutely than many of those who bestride the dramatic profession. “What do you think I’m like?,” he asked Dick Cavett, who was interviewing him in 1974. “A working actor,” Cavett said. “That’s very good,” his guest, who had yet to appear in a feature film, replied.
He had appeared, the year before, in “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary, which caught the unpredicted moment, onstage in London, when Bowie announced the death—somewhere between a retirement and a vanishing act—of the Ziggy persona. To listen to some of the tributes paid over the past couple of days, you might think that Bowie had spent most of his earthly span in a jumpsuit of many colors, or in other varieties of extraterrestrial garb, whereas the sobering fact is that the Ziggy Stardust tour lasted a mere eighteen months. Questioned, early on, about his quicksilver style, Bowie said, “It’s like looking at an actor’s films, and taking clippings from the films, and saying, ‘Here he is.’ ” Notice the stress on the clip. Well before the advent of the music video (another short form that he mastered), and decades before YouTube, Bowie foresaw that our taste, and our impatient appetites, would beckon us toward the fragmentary. He had the courage of his own brevity, being not just canny enough to leave his fans aching for more but wise enough to know that the incandescent glow of a look is all the more enduring, on the public retina, for being snuffed out. Then he paused, relit himself as something else, and carried on.
That can happen in the movies, too, but seldom is it the prerogative of the star. It was a shock to the worshippers of Rita Hayworth when her rolling red tresses were snipped off, for “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947), and replaced by a curt blond crop. But the man who ordered the scissors was the director, Orson Welles, whereas the Bowie who made the same transition, from the gravity-spurning russet quiff of Ziggy to the bright, almost Tintin-like forelock of the “Let’s Dance” era, in the nineteen-eighties, was directing himself.
How screen performers must crave the command that Bowie asserted over his own transmutations, and envy the fruits that he plucked from new technology. Where a movie star, immured in a blockbuster, might struggle for creative space and fret, with justice, about being overrun by digital tricks, Bowie realized that he could use the Internet to slip in and out of our consciousness, like a guest or an amicable ghost. 2013 was not a bad year for the cinema, what with films such as “12 Years a Slave,” “The Great Beauty,” and “Blue is the Warmest Color,” but none of them, I think, had the sudden impact that was made by Bowie’s “Where Are We Now?”—the song that fell to earth, unheralded and unhyped, on January 8th. “Just walking the dead,” he sang, without fanfare or ado, like a man out walking his dog. Stories were told of grown men switching on their radios, hearing that new cry from a familiar voice, and being stirred to the brink of tears. And all without the slow grind of a marketing campaign; set beside the mercurial business of Bowie, the movie industry appears to be forged from lead.
Hence, perhaps, the tug of dissatisfaction that we feel when surveying the sprawl of his films. I remember being more thrilled by the prospect of Bowie as Pontius Pilate, in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), than I was by the result. As for “Just a Gigolo” (1978), the promise delivered by the poster—Bowie and Marlene Dietrich, together onscreen!—was unfulfilled, not just because the movie was dire but also, it transpired, because they never had been together. Their scenes were shot separately and merged. In our imaginations, though, how tempting the union remains—the native Berliner and the starved-looking Briton who would make his home in that city, and put it to such remarkable purpose, amid the frost of the Cold War. It was Dietrich who, in a nightclub scene from “Morocco” (1930), wore a top hat, white tie, and tails, strolled up to a table, and kissed a woman on the mouth. Tell me Bowie did not learn from that.
There were other calamities, too, from which Bowie, ever the escapologist, managed to flee unscathed, and even with his reputation—or his catalogue of hits—enhanced. Nobody, nowadays, recalls much of “Absolute Beginners” (1986), and rightly so, but the whole enterprise was worth it for the title song that Bowie provided—for the single chord, to be honest, that strikes between the first and second lines of the verse: “I’ve nothing much to offer / There’s nothing much to take.” But why are we struck so? What is it in the echo of that strum that refuses to go away? In a word, surprise. Time and again, whether in the symphonic flourishes of his dress-sense or in the choice of one note, Bowie perceived our expectations and swerved aside. He grew weary, it is alleged, of the “Serious Moonlight” tour, in 1983, and perplexed by the pitch of fame that it brought, but I cannot forget the Shakespearean shock of hearing that adjective for the first time, on “Let’s Dance.” Moonlight had always been gentle, or flattering, or soft; it was the stuff of sonatas and serenades. But who knew that it could be serious, like an ailment or an affair of state?
It was on a previous tour, for “Station to Station,” in 1976, that Bowie had screened passages from “Un Chien Andalou” onstage. There could be few better guides to Bowie’s instinct; that 1929 movie, directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—despite its running time, barely more than twenty minutes—remains a bible of the unexpected. As for the design of the shows, Bowie confessed to his candid borrowings from German expressionist film, plus “the lighting of, say, Fritz Lang or [G. W.] Pabst.” Considering this addiction to chop and change, and to the mustering of sound and vision into a restless collage, it may be inevitable that, when Bowie did assume substantial roles, in other people’s films, he seemed less light on his feet. He was required to sustain a character, and to lend it an arc, whereas his natural tendency, given any arc, was to bend it or snap it in two. Movies are the bedmates of poetry, as Bowie knew, and to treat them as a sort of illustrated novel is to load them with a burden they were scarcely designed to bear. Thus, his cameo in “Zoolander,” whipping off his shades and guying his own status as a lionized legend beside the catwalk, is not only more entertaining, but more tightly bound to Bowiehood, than his entire leading role in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” If, back in 1983, you could open a magazine, find the startling image, from that movie, of his fair imprisoned head (he is buried up to his neck, like the heroine of Beckett’s “Happy Days”), cut it out and stick it up on your wall, you had what you needed, and no more.
One drawback to Bowie on film, strange to say, was his speaking voice. Deployed to such astonishing effect, be it chatty or percussive, within his songs, (“I know when to go out, / And when to stay in,” he reveals, in a low confiding murmur, at the kickoff of “Modern Love”), it was curiously floated and flattened by motion pictures. That is as evident in his Nikola Tesla, in Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” (2006), as it was in his Goblin King, in “Labyrinth” (1986), where he boasted a magnificent wig that might have been plugged into one of Tesla’s experiments. Jim Henson’s film, half-derided at the time, has since acquired a fond following, but it must be admitted that few of Bowie’s line readings, for any director, resound with a fraction of the ululating bark with which he powers through the spoken verses of “The Jean Genie.” One hesitates to say this of a rock god, but he might have made better films in the silent age.
The exception, needless to say, is “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Nicolas Roeg’s indomitably weird creation of 1976, which ravened up “Space Oddity,” “Starman,” “Life on Mars,” and every other scrap of Bowie’s otherworldliness to conjure its disaffected fable. Bowie plays Thomas Newton, an alien who comes to us not in peace, nor to make war, but in search of water. He stays, invents, discovers alcohol and sex, grows wealthy, gets trapped and preyed upon, and never leaves. The melancholy of that final fact—and of the closing shot, with Newton quietly stranded, in a broad-brimmed hat, at a café table—has swelled since the film’s release. It compounds the myth of Bowie: not so much a permanent resident on planet Earth as a baffled yet well-intentioned visitor, who urges us to take a step sideways, inspect our regular habits, and see them for the peculiarities they are. I get all that, and its appeal is hard to resist, just as the call of infinite space was to Major Tom, but equally I am convinced by Bowie’s mild protestations, in a BBC interview of 2002: “I wouldn’t dream of getting onto a spaceship. It would scare the shit out of me,” he said. “I’m scared to go down to the end of the garden.”
One thing to be wary of, with Bowie as with the Beatles, is the grave danger of forgetting how funny he was, and how easily amused. Mingled with the freak show was a generous stock of common sense, plus a measure of companionable cheer, and that Martian glare was readily supplanted by a grin. Behind him stood the music hall, and the garrulous double-act of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and other staples of popular diversion; one band he joined in the sixties, the Lower Third, used to perform “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” from “Mary Poppins,” and “Modern Love” is not so modern that it can’t afford to glance back, in the exhortation “Get me to the church on time,” to “My Fair Lady.” The octave between the two syllables of “Starman,” in Bowie’s song of that name, is lifted from the interval between “Some” and “where” in “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” On a chat show, Bowie spoke warmly of his radio days, as a child—hearing his mother sing along to “Oh for the Wings of a Dove,” and picking up on the darting melody of, wait for it, “Tubby the Tuba.”
In short, like most deities, he was never quite as solemn as his worshippers. To read some of the more breathless elegies, you might think that Bowie’s adoption of multiple personalities arose from a genuine psychological crack. Doubtless, he could feel as lost and as unmoored as the rest of us, especially in our youth, and his music famously gave succor to those who believed themselves to be adrift or misunderstood. That is something to be grateful for, yet still, to cleave to a work of art, in any medium, because of its therapeutic benefits is to risk neglecting the artist’s sense of play. His or her right to fool around, and to happen upon beauty in the fooling, matters just as much—I hate to say it—as the rescue of your soul. That is another reason to relish Bowie’s involvement with the movies, even if it amounted to little more than a flirtation; it reinforced the ludic aspect of Bowie, who had, at other times, been lured into the apocalyptic mode. His most enjoyable turn could well be as Andy Warhol, in “Basquiat” (1996), where he got everything right—the prim shuffle of the walk, and the vaporous drone of the ruminations. Bowie was at ease, playing the part of a guy who played the part of himself. Nothing was not a game.
If you abstracted Bowie the actor from our screens, he would still haunt the senses of cinema-goers, because his music has crept into movies, sometimes when you expect it least. It was right and proper, for instance, that John Hughes—much of whose work, so goofy at first blush, seems riper and sadder with the years—should have feted the characters of “Sixteen Candles” (1984) with a blast of Bowie’s “Young Americans.” Molly Ringwald, for one, deserves no less. You will have brushed past the same song when it appeared in “Jack Reacher” or last year’s “Aloha.” But hear it again, and afresh, as it accompanies the closing credits of “Dogville” (2003) and “Manderlay” (2005). The director, in both cases, was Lars Von Trier, and he overlays the music with a scalding montage of photographs: first, of Depression-era poverty and alcoholism, and second, of African-Americans not just shunted to the margins of society but openly harassed and hanged. The song continues to chivvy you along (Luther Vandross had a hand in the backing vocals), but, thanks to the images, you are returned, as the casual listener might not be, to the pity and the scorn of Bowie’s words:
The lyrical drive was no less strong in “Cat People (Putting out the Fire),” which, for Bowie admirers who like to track their man through the movies, offers double the value. It first appeared in Paul Schrader’s “Cat People” (1982), and then emerged from the darkness once more, in 2009, when Quentin Tarantino unleashed it for “Inglourious Basterds.” (Bowie himself appears in neither film.) For that movie, as you would presume, the mood is utterly ensnared in cinematic references, with Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) preparing herself for vengeance against an auditorium stuffed with Nazis, including Hitler and Goebbels. The physical flammability of film itself is deployed as a weapon, neatly bringing Bowie’s conceit—“I’ve been putting out fire with gasoline”—to fruition. If there is a slight want of potency here, it is not Bowie’s fault, but that of Giorgio Moroder, who is responsible for the music; like so many pulsing compositions of the eighties, it is littered with hooks but twistless, lacking that leap with which Bowie, left to his own devices and desires, would take care to supply.
No such meagreness attended “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004), which permitted Wes Anderson to pour forth his devotion to Bowie. Being Anderson, he insured that the pouring was largely done at an oblique angle, thanks to Seu Jorge, who performed well-known Bowie numbers in Portuguese, as though insisting that we could and should know them anew. His rendition of “Starman” is at once brisk and relaxed, and shot without adornment, by night; he tucks his half-smoked cigarette into the head of his acoustic guitar, next to the tuning pegs, sings, finishes, retrieves his smoke, takes a puff, tosses the butt over his shoulder, exhales in a luminous billow, and receives a bout of applause. The sequence is as casual, and somehow as necessary, as Feste’s pausing the folderol of “Twelfth Night” to grace us with “Come Away, Death” and his other songs—jester’s riffs, of no consequence, except that their swift meditations on mortality and love will linger in the mind’s ear long after the play is done.
Not to be left out, Bill Murray, too, in the title role, takes a deep draught of Bowie. One evening, aboard his ship, he is so whelmed by emotion, as he talks to the fellow he believes to be his son (Owen Wilson), that his only option is to shake hands and say, “I’ll be right back. Don’t go away.” He then sets off along the boat, the camera tracking his progress, and, as he does so, the soundtrack explodes—“Sailors, fighting in the dance hall…” This is not Jorge’s Bowie, lovely though it is, but the man himself, at his most ecstatic, in the chorus from “Life on Mars,” and, as Zissou stands in the prow, perfectly calm and composed in his regulation tuxedo and red knit hat, we realize that Anderson is doing what millions of others have done before: he is handing over his feelings to David Bowie, and letting a song do all the work of the heart. Why write dialogue when the wild exclamations of another artist, recorded in 1971, will give vent to everything that you want your characters to say—or, rather, what they cannot say because it is all too much? Such is the yearning that beats throughout this scene. You can see it ten times or more. It is never a saddening bore.
That, more or less, is what Bowie means to the movies. Once you start hunting for it, you stumble across it without warning, in the nooks of unlikely films. “I should go,” Greta Gerwig says to Adam Driver in “Frances Ha” (2012). She’s over at his place. He says, “Before you go, do us another dance,” and she, being Frances, complies, jumping up and down as if clinging to an unseen pogo stick. That seems to meet the case, but she has more to express, and so it is that we cut to an external shot, and to the opening bars of Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Our heroine is running now, allying herself with the cause of all those figures who, for whatever reason, have capered or sprinted through New York—Shirley MacLaine at the end of “The Apartment,” Dustin Hoffman in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and Woody Allen in “Manhattan,” racing to refind the girl he should never have let go. Gerwig, in leggings, sneakers, and a floral dress, adds a few long prances of her own, like somebody crossing a stream, and spins around for the hell of it, or for the bliss of hearing Bowie in her head. Then, back at her apartment, she shuts the door, and instantly the music stops. Love is most modern, it would seem, not in the cloistered cells of our homes, but out on the street.
And so to fourteenth-century England—an obvious shift, since Bowie is banned from no location. At a formal banquet, the nefarious host demands that his guest from afar, Sir Ulrich, demonstrate a dance from his own land. Briefly confounded, Sir Ulrich recovers and begins to move. A lute twangs, a fife pipes up, fiddles do their thing, and the revellers clap their hands. Gradually, the tempo increases, the lonely word “Angel” descends from on high, and at some imperceptible juncture, we find ourselves in Bowie’s “Golden Years,” with the assembled company, in their silks and snoods, squaring up to boogie. This passage—the highlight of Brian Helgeland’s “A Knight’s Tale” (2001), with Heath Ledger—is the best and most honest use of anachronism that I know of. It summons the gold of our own years and sends it back in time to gild another age. Rather than saddle us with some cod-medieval lumbering, the movie comes clean, as if to say: We don’t know what these folk listened to, and it wouldn’t mean much to us if we did, but we can guess that they were inspired enough to dance, and we know what inspiration sounds like. It sounds like Bowie.
And so, with his death, the dance is over, though not quite. His final album, “Blackstar,” came out last week, impeccably timed, and the video of one song, “Lazarus,” finds Bowie not only in bed, with a bandaged face, reporting on his current situation—“Look up here, I’m in heaven”—but upright and poised, as if for one last jive, in his last ever catsuit. He shudders and takes a backward pace, and then another, in a kind of wounded moonwalk: Major Tom, floating in a most peculiar way, reversing into a wardrobe and closing the door. “Knowledge comes with death’s release,” he sang in “Quicksand”—the closing track on the unimprovable Side One of “Hunky Dory,” and the most sumptuous of his many choruses. What David Bowie knows now, and what Narnia awaits him in the wardrobe, none can tell. But his life, unlike most lives, had the shape and the refulgence of a movie, and we can watch it again and again.
