Forever Stardust: David Bowie Across the Universe. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017, paperback, $17.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1784531423.
Being Bowie. Documentary film/audiovisual essay. Directed by Will Brooker, edited by Rebecca Hughes, 2016.
[1] In 2015, Will Brooker, professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University, author of books on Batman and Star Wars and then the editor of Cinema Journal, decided to live as David Bowie for a year. This was done as research for a book on Bowie he was planning to write, a way of learning about his subject beyond traditional scholarly methods: considering Bowie's output as an artist, reviewing secondary sources, watching interviews, and reading Bowie's voluminous press. Brooker's immersive research had rules: he would live Bowie's trendsetting life in order, year by year, album by album, albeit in radically compressed time. He would submerge himself in Bowie's cultural context—reading the books Bowie read, seeing the films Bowie saw, listening only to music from the moment in Bowie's timeline he was occupying or before (figure 1). Brooker also traveled to many of Bowie's geographies, walking the streets of Brixton, Bromley, London, Berlin, and New York, standing outside his house on Mustique, walking the train tracks where Bowie's half-brother killed himself. Brooker also performed as Bowie, fronting a stage show with Bowie-cover act The Thin White Duke as his backing band. He dyed his hair—a lot—and then was knocked for a loop when his research subject (and alter ego) unexpectedly passed away halfway through the project, on January 10, 2016.
Figure 1. Screenshot from Being Bowie showing Brooker being interviewed on Danish TV about being Bowie; above left, Will Brooker; above right, David Jones as Aladdin Sane. [View larger image.]
[2] The results of Brooker's experiment in performative research are now available: a book, Forever Stardust: David Bowie Across the Universe (2017), and Being Bowie (2016) (note 1), a documentary film/audiovisual essay about Brooker's year in performance made with editor Rebecca Hughes. Both projects show the impact of Brooker's research methodology, which he has sometimes offhandedly called "method acting" (note 2) but that is really a form of performance research not unlike that done by scholars such as Anna Deavere Smith and E. Patrick Johnson (note 3). Such scholar-artists answer their research questions not only through traditional scholarly methodologies—the "empirical observation and critical analysis from a distanced perspective" that Dwight Conquergood (2002) shorthands as "knowing that" and "knowing about"—but also through a mode of embodied research "grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection" that Conquergood calls "knowing how" and "knowing who" (146). The contrast, as Donna Haraway (1991) has expressed it, is between a "view from above" and a "view from a body" (196), and it is perhaps no surprise that this mode of research has been used by and for people for whom the body is unavoidable, essential, political: women, people of color, people of marginalized sexualities, subaltern groups of all kinds. The body knows things that no book thinks to tell you.
[3] So while Brooker's embodied research methodology may be relatively new for film and cultural studies, it has a longer and deeper history in theater and performance, not to mention fan studies; in fact, an affective criticism that sees interpretation as tied up with identification and pleasure is even gaining ground in English lit, as we can see from Rita Felski's criticism of "suspicious" (that is defensive, critical, against the grain) readings of texts and her defense of "modes of enchantment." Felski argues in "After Suspicion" that "We can be taken hold of, possessed, invaded by a text in a way that we cannot fully control or explain and in a manner that fails to jibe with public postures of ironic dispassion or disciplinary detachment. James Joyce enthusiasts are no less obsessive and monomaniacal than Star Trek fans, and experiences of absorption and self-loss are not the exclusive property of swooning adolescents" (2009, 33).
[4] Brooker, having set himself up to be thoroughly possessed and invaded by Bowie, thus refuses to perform "ironic dispassion or disciplinary detachment," something that's hard to do with orange hair and a lightning bolt across your face, in any case. But as Felski's reference to Star Trek fans indicates, Brooker is also enacting a way of knowing that has (in its recreational form) long been practiced by fans, who have various modes, including fan fiction and cosplay, of knowing by performing, enacting, and identifying. Brooker discovers new things about Bowie by, as his film title declares, Being Bowie; I've put it slightly differently in my own title, above, which refers to Constance Penley's description of slash as allowing fans both to be and to have their favorite characters (1992, 488); following this, I suggest that Brooker tries to get Bowie by being him.
[5] And Brooker does, I think, convincingly get Bowie, even as he ultimately loses him, too, when Bowie dies midway through the film. Brooker certainly discovers new things about Bowie, though many of his most interesting insights are not—or not straightforwardly—in the book. In fact, Brooker rarely speaks directly to his own experience as Bowie in Forever Stardust, preferring to write in a more open-ended way that extends the opportunity of being Bowie to the reader. "We know the facts and we can still visit the locations," Brooker repeats throughout (53, 54, 66, 108, 111), as if demonstrating the difference between knowing that and knowing how, or perhaps where (figure 2). But Brooker does not narrate his own visits to Bowie locations, nor does he straightforwardly discuss the insights he gained while moving though the world in Bowie's shoes; these he saves for the film and for interviews about his process. Instead Brooker writes in terms of we and us, as if inviting the reader on his journey. "We can see for ourselves" or "We can see…as we walk." We are included almost physically—we see, we walk—which implies that we, too, are/were/will be David Bowie in some way.
Figure 2. Screenshot from Being Bowie: "We know the facts and we can still visit the locations." [View larger image.]
[6] In fact, Brooker starts his book with a list of people who have already been Bowie or whom Bowie has himself been: so, for example, David Bowie was Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane; William Gibson and Hanif Kureishi have created characters based on Bowie; Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Bowie-analogue Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine (1998); Michael Fassbinder bases his performance in Prometheus (2012) on Bowie; Owen Beasley and Iselin Steiro play younger versions of Bowie in recent music videos, while Bowie himself plays other people; Bowie has played Nicola Tesla and The Man Who Fell To Earth and Jareth the Goblin King (1–3). "We should remember that Bowie is, on-screen and off-, an actor, with a mastery of many voices" (33) Brooker writes, and quotes Bowie early in his career insisting, "I want to act…I'd like to do character parts" (60).
[7] This is Brooker's primary insight in Forever Stardust and one that he mines thoroughly and interestingly throughout the book: that David Bowie was a character (or perhaps a series of characters) created by the man legally known throughout his life as David Jones and, as such, David Bowie lives on in various ways past the death of his author. In this sense, Bowie is more like famous biographical subjects like Oscar Wilde (always more famous for creating himself than for anything he wrote) (note 4) or transmedia characters like Sherlock Holmes (who in his thousands of interpretations has long transcended the influence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) than like authentic voices like Bob Dylan (note 5). Dylan tends to be framed as an expressive writer in the sense famously articulated by M. H. Abrams (1953) in The Mirror and The Lamp, which is to say, one whose work seems to externalize his own feelings and images; expressive art is the sincere and genuine expression of a writer's inner life and unique mind (note 6). Dylan's reputation as "a fierce and uncompromising poet" (Wyman 2013) and an authentic voice of his generation was recently capped by his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
[8] But Bowie's a different story; his performative stance means that he's often working more in what Abrams calls the pragmatic mode: that is, one that aims to produce certain effects on the reader/spectator/listener. This audience-focused mode is highly theatrical, in that most plays are judged by the effect they have on their audience rather than as an expression of the author's inner self, and Bowie is all effect a mile wide—or Across the Universe as Brooker's book subtitle has it. I think that Brooker would have written his book slightly differently if he'd adopted theater and performance studies language straight off; he'd have perhaps spent less time working to distinguish Bowie's modes of creativity from expressive forms of authorship: no one in the theater would "traditionally assume that a statement in the first person is a straightforward confession of intent" (30) by the author. Shakespeare is not Hamlet, and Brooker rightly rejects readings of Bowie's lyrics that treat them as personal or biographical statements: "We do not assume that Bowie genuinely 'just met a girl named Blue Jean' whenever he sings that line (30)."
[9] That said, it's fascinating to glean how much currency ideas of an expressive, authentic self must still have in rock criticism, considering how extensively they have been debunked elsewhere and how hard it is for anyone other than a straight white man to achieve this authentic voice (consider the classic dichotomies of punk versus disco, singer-songwriters versus boy bands). In fact, I'd argue that, regardless of whom he slept with, one of the queerest things about Bowie is the extent to which he is routinely characterized as a thief or magpie (note 7), so that Brooker has to spend many pages charting Bowie's various appropriations, homages, and thefts. Rock criticism apparently still expects its stars, like the romantic poets, to speak from the soul, and so seems to have trouble processing that Bowie is a great artist because he steals.
[10] So Brooker's achievement in Forever Stardust is to explain that Bowie's work is not conventionally (that is to say, expressively) authored (36), instead analyzing Bowie's promiscuous multimedia creativity in terms that also apply to remix, performance, and fan work: that is, as "a multifaceted network…a vast intertextual array of roles and persona, influences and analogues, fans and heroes" (4), "a creative collage or combination of previously expressed words, ideas, and signs, drawn from multiple diverse sources" (30). David Bowie is thus interpreted as a transmedia character, a series of behavioral strips (Schechner 2002, 28), a body sailing from text to text: a role that we ourselves can take on and that many of us have already taken on in musical/sartorial/sexual/attitudinal/visual/desiring and desirous collaboration with David Jones of Bromley. From this point of view, Jones was the originator of the part of Bowie, who is now being played by an army of fans and cosplayers and musicians and actors and fashion designers, and Brooker himself, in his performance-based research, is merely being more culturally honest than the rest of us, just as fannish cosplayers are unafraid to show the world how a story has affected their body.
[11] As such, it's in the audiovisual essay Being Bowie and in the interviews Brooker gave during his year performing that we really see what he's learned from embodying the role. The interviews are obviously part of the research in that they put Brooker into a situation that David Bowie would routinely have been in: that of being a tall, outrageously dressed Englishman being jeered at by conventional people for doing something that the straight world (fans would say the mundane world) finds exceedingly odd. Brooker is self-effacing and candid enough to show himself taking no small amount of guff from talk show hosts and others interviewing him about his decision to spend a year in Bowie's costumes and platform boots. In one marvelous scene, Brooker—at this point in his research theatrically dressed in a copy of the Union Jack coat from Bowie's late-1990s Earthling period, complete with cropped red hair and goatee—is confronted by a Danish interviewer, who asks mockingly, "Can you give us an example of how this Bowie immersion results in relevant academic data?" (35:32). Brooker fields this question with wit and grace, but one imagines that it gave him a visceral sense of the self that must develop to handle media situations like these; Bowie himself took no small amount of crap, especially in the early days, for performing as an androgynous alien.
[12] "I wanted to get a sense of what it was like for Bowie to inhabit those personas," Brooker says early in the film (2:00), "to wear the makeup and the masks," and the answers he comes up with are both specific and new. "It's very tiring. It's very, very, very tiring," Brooker reports (7:35), adding "as many women know. It's a lot of bloody trouble…it's a lot of trouble, and it's a lot of expense, doing your makeup, doing your eyebrows, getting your hair dyed, getting your hair cut" (figure 3). For the record, I have never seen a male critic have this kind of insight, and, as a feminist and a performance studies scholar, I find this kind of physicality to be strikingly absent from the image of the world as framed by mainstream male artists and critics, so I was delighted to find it here. This is the sort of insight that women turn to fan fiction to find; we want to know the stories of the body as well as of the mind: what people eat, what they wear, where they sleep. Brooker knows that Bowie stands a certain way at the microphone while singing because it's the only way to stand in the shoes he's wearing; this insight reminded me of the important but underreported claim that the painkiller addiction that killed Prince began as a way of coping with the crippling hip, knee, and spinal disc problems developed over a life lived in high heels (Friedman 2016; McPhee 2017; Bueno 2016). So these aren't trivial insights; our bodies define us, we are our bodies.
Figure 3. Screenshot from Being Bowie: "It's a lot of trouble, and it's a lot of expense, doing your makeup, doing your eyebrows, getting your hair dyed, getting your hair cut." [View larger image.]
[13] "Perhaps in a way you start to adopt some of his mannerisms, his style, his behavior," Brooker says (6:53), and tracing Bowie's behavior is not simply a matter of knowing what books he was reading (which Brooker does: Bowie's reading Aleister Crowley, Nietzsche, and "strange science fiction") but what his body was doing. In a voice-over to the film, Brooker says, "It looks like fun, but it was manic, it was breakneck, it was carried forward on its own momentum fueled by champagne and caffeine. If you listen to me in these interviews, I was so tired I could barely string a sentence together" (6:27). The body tells its own story, and Brooker's story is one of exhaustion, the compressed research time echoing, in some way, Bowie's own too-fast life. It is a story of eating only red peppers and milk for extended amounts of time and drinking too many energy drinks to mimic at least some of the heart-racing effects of Bowie's use of cocaine. It is the story of starstruck people looking at you, wanting to pose for photographs with you.
[14] Brooker's embodied research pays off particularly in his analysis of Bowie's Let's Dance period. While Bowie became a mainstream superstar during this time, it is also the phase of Bowie's musical career that diehard Bowie fans tend to feel most alienated from. But after stepping physically into it, Brooker claims that it was his favorite of all of Bowie's personas. He reports that it felt very brittle to be this Bowie, whose costume and mask is characterized by "very, very hard, locked-down hair. The bright smile, which you might not feel, I suppose, all the time" (17:12). Brooker imitates Bowie's performance of "an easy laugh" (15:53) and claims that you might feel, living this role in the 1980s, that you "were wearing a uniform, that you were really really fitting in, that you were becoming one of the boys" (17:25). He concludes that being David Bowie in the production style of 1983 felt like pretending to be "the grownup I wanted to be when I was thirteen years old. It was a child's idea of a grownup" (17:41). Brooker brings a similar psychological astuteness to the Bowie of the lost years of June 2004 to January 2013. At this time Bowie was living a relatively quiet life downtown in New York City, wandering around in a newsboy cap and sunglasses. I saw Bowie myself a couple of times when he was in this phase of his life; he turned up once at CBGB's 313 Gallery when Kristeen Young, a prodigy of Tony Visconti's, was playing, I remember. Everyone knew he was there; nobody spoke to him.
[15] "What does it feel like?" Brooker asks, dressed as Bowie from this era. He is directly addressing the camera. "It feels like being an old man. In disguise as an old man" (42:24) (figure 4).
Figure 4. Screenshot from Being Bowie: "It feels like being an old man. In disguise as an old man." [View larger image.]
[16] "The project was originally meant to be about David Bowie," Brooker confesses, right at the start of his film, "but perhaps it ended up being more about me." Much of Brooker's academic work has been about fandom but not as personally as here; Brooker not only shares details of his family history and personal life but also does not hide the crisis provoked by Bowie's death. While at a glance it might seem narcissistic, in fact these are works of fannish generosity. "This is my letter to Bowie," Brooker says at the start of Being Bowie, adding a moment later, "You'd write a different one" (4:05). It's rare for texts to be this respectful of their audiences, this willing to grant that others may be fans, too: fans, experts, writers, critics, artists. Brooker articulates his ideas without asserting superiority or excluding what others know. Both Forever Stardust and Being Bowie invite their readers and spectators to play along, to become artists, to be Bowie. Ultimately, this is the lesson Will Brooker takes from David Bowie and from being Bowie: that we should all try to be "a bigger, better, brighter, bolder version of ourselves" (4:20). We in fan studies know that engaging with popular culture isn't passive or a simple consumer activity; that it incites discussion, participation, performance, self-discovery. Being Bowie shows us how certain texts can provoke multiple forms of fannish engagement: personal, musical, emotional, performative, sartorial—and yes, scholarly. Brooker shows us fandom as an incitement to art.