David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom by Ana Cristina Mendes Lisa Perrott

Author:Ana Cristina Mendes, Lisa Perrott [Ana Cristina Mendes, Lisa Perrott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032090016
Google: T7ZmzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-06-30T05:02:15+00:00

Bowie and Bolan’s intertextual otherworlds: Bowie as influence on Bolan

As I have already argued, Bolan and Bowie’s carnivalesque ‘second life of the people’ was an intertextual one – and more specifically, one that drew upon a multiplicity of media forms. Bolan’s otherworld was influenced by the mysticism, paganism, and astrology of the 1960s counterculture, as well as Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, whose works were popular at that time. Bolan’s narrative spaces were filled with elves, dragons, wizards, woodlands, storybook creatures, UFOs, planets and stars, magic, and reincarnation. His bandmate Steve Peregrine Took was named after a hobbit. ‘Aslan and the old Narnians’, the Cottingley Fairies, mystical poet Khalil Gibran, and Carlos Castaneda were explicitly referenced. In 1972, Bolan’s film Born to Boogie featured an Alice in Wonderland fantasy sequence, with Bolan as the Mad Hatter, and television wizard Geoffrey Bayldon3 playing a butler serving hamburgers to a mouse, nuns, and a vampire. Bolan’s final album was titled Dandy in the Underworld (1977), alluding to the myth of Orpheus and the operetta ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’. Bowie’s otherworld was the radical opposite of Bolan’s fantasy space – that is, it was a primarily science fiction reality. ‘Space Oddity’ referred to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs all envisioned near future realities. In 1976 Bowie himself became part of the text of the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth (Tevis 1963), by playing the role of alien Thomas Jerome Newton in the book’s adaptation for cinema. Despite the obvious differences in regard to which genres Bowie and Bolan’s intermediality engaged with, their narrative spaces hold much in common thematically – including that they are both the spaces in which their alternate identities are privileged and played out, while also being spaces of escape from, or critique of, the present-day realities of the 1970s. In other words, they presented audiences with alternate realities that were anywhere but the here and now of 1970s Britain. What has been less well-documented, however, is how Bowie and Bolan were influenced by, and would pay homage to, each other within these carnivalesque otherworlds – thus indirectly quoting each other’s stardom and musical output in order to create multi-layered, fantastical alternate realities that provided an escape from mundane everyday reality. Primarily, it appears to have been Bowie that influenced Bolan, rather than the other way around – however, it was Bolan who Bowie would directly reference, and I will return to this point in the final section of my discussion.

Bowie had begun narrating otherworlds much earlier than Ziggy Stardust – ‘Space Oddity’ (1969) being the most striking example – and it could be argued that ‘The Laughing Gnome’ (1967) refers to a crossing over of worlds (in which the song’s protagonist meets a gnome in the city). Gnomes might be argued to bear some similarity to Bolan’s elves and other anthropomorphic creatures, in that they are human-like nature inhabitants, diminutive in size, and a familiar feature of children’s fantasy and fairy tale stories.

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