David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge Studies in Popular Music) by

Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA, DAVID BOWIE AND THE DESIRE FOR THE WEST

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence allows us to observe the reconfigured Bowie persona dovetailing with the stylistics of an art house film with international ambitions—and directed by an avant-garde auteur from the Japanese New Wave to boot. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is indeed the very first attempt by Oshima at an international production and his first English-language film. It so happens that, at the time, Oshima was known mainly for In the Realm of Senses (1976) and Empire of Passion (1978). These two pornographic films were marked by an aesthetic perfectionism that pushes the idea of the visionary and God-like artist to its very limits. The end result is the transformation of the voyeuristic logic of porn into a formal avant-gardiste experimentation, something that is equally at work in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. But the most interesting aspect of the movie (which is also what makes it so original) is the way Oshima’s aesthetic project, which leans towards a postcolonial cinema, “meets” Bowie’s persona.

The plot of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is based on stories by Laurens Van der Post who was a prisoner of war (POW) during World War II. The film takes place in 1942 in a Japanese POW camp on the island of Java. The commander of the camp is Captain Yonoi, a young Japanese officer played by Ryuichi Sakamoto, a Japanese pop star who is also the composer of the film’s music. The arrival of Major Jack Celliers, played by Bowie, crystallises the tensions borne of the postcolonial relationship of East and West. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is rooted in the universe of the prisoner of war film and follows the blueprint laid out by cinematic forebears such as A Town Like Alice (Jack Lee, 1956) or Three Came Home (Jean Negulesco, 1950).7 However, it is influenced above all by The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957). Similar to David Lean’s movie, the theme of intercultural interaction between Eastern and Western people is refocused on an all-male community. However, Oshima’s film reverses the usual point of view; it is no longer the West that looks at the East but the other way around, hence the representation of a desire for the West substituting for the representation of Western superiority at work in David Lean’s film.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence reactivates the Western cultural memory of the war in the Pacific in a critical manner, flying in the face of the dominant American conception of multiculturalism (of which the late Stuart Hall was one of the most prominent critics) with its tendency to essentialise ethnic groups. As pointed out by Edward Said, unlike the Americans, the British consider Japan a “cultural rival”—a rival imperial civilisation, that is (Said, 2003: 14). The film’s British POWs are those whose detention occurred after the fall of Singapore in 1942. A humiliating defeat for Great Britain, this historic event had a great impact in Asia because it lent strength to the idea that, after all, the ‘invincibility’ and ‘supremacy’ of White men might be nothing but myths.

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