Be Him/Have Him: Brooker/Bowie
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Be him/have him: Brooker/Bowie Francesca Coppa Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States [0.1] Abstract—Review of Will Brooker, Forever Stardust: David Bowie Across the Universe. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017, paperback, $17.99 (256p) ISBN 978- 1784531423; and Being Bowie.Documentary film/audiovisual essay. Directed by Will Brooker, edited by Rebecca Hughes, 2016. [0.2] Keywords—Celebrity; Cosplay; Fandom; Film; Music; Performance; Rock Coppa, Francesca. 2018. "Be Him/Have Him: Brooker/Bowie" [review]. In "Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries," edited by Myles McNutt, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1285. 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.