Transition transmission: media, seriality and the Bowie-Newton matrix

ABSTRACT

The character Thomas Jerome Newton survives the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg 1976) to appear in adaptations, music videos and the play Lazarus (2015). Like David Bowie he can be understood as a serial figure, one who exists as a series across media. The notion of Bowie as changeling resonates with popular culture’s preoccupation with identity and a common trope of biographies in reading his music, film and art, yet there has been little attempt to acknowledge recursive themes and patterns or explore his identity as serially instantiated through and across media or read his story through a transmedia lens. Working with the concepts of performance theory and performativity, celebrity, media communications, actor-network theory and seriality, I ask about Bowie’s agency as medium for ‘his’ characters, a conceit made possible via McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message (1999) and indeed, Bowie’s own suggestion that he ‘is the medium for a conglomerate of statements and illusions’. Drawing particular attention to the figuration of Bowie-watching-Newton-watching (after a sequence in Roeg’s film), I pursue the notion of a Bowie-Newton matrix, and speculate on the dispersed agencies – of author/actor, character, and studious viewer – behind Newton’s resurrection.

KEYWORDS:

• Seriality
• media-consciousness
• Bowie-Newton matrix
• character-agency
• agent of continuation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Guardian, for example, notes how Michael C. Hall ‘takes the role of the starman’ (Soloski 2015).

2. He waived his Equity fee due for the BBC charity single ‘Perfect Day’ (1997) as ‘a way of saying thank you for the Flower Pot Men’ (Thompson 2006, p. 188); his earliest memory was a televisual one: his mother, Peggy, singing along to Ernest Lough’s recital of Mendelssohn’s ‘O for the wings of a Dove’ (Leigh 2014, Pegg 2016).

3. Bowie was a high-profile fan of UK serial Peaky Blinders. His 2014 collaboration with jazz composer Marie Schneider, on Sue (or a Season in Crime), is a nod to complex television, while the track Blackstar was the theme to The Last Panthers (Johan Renck 2015).

4. Julian Jaynes’ (1976) notion of ‘outering’ interior voices (and the thematic links with schizophrenia) was familiar to Bowie (anxious that mental illness had claimed many relatives on his mother’s side, including his half-brother Terry Burns), as was McLuhan’s insistence that media was an outered extention of the senses (1962, p. 265).

5. See for example Barry Nicholson’s piece ‘Blackstar Reappraised’ (2016), Michael Paulson’s ‘After David Bowie’s Death, Lazarus Holds New Meaning for Fans’ (2016) and Eric Wandrey’s ‘David Bowie, Shakespeare, Death and Hope’ (2016). As Nicholas Pegg writes (2016, p. 477), ‘Theories will doubtless abound for as long as people listen to David Bowie’s music, and there is certainly no shortage of fuel’.

6. The ‘author function’ is a concept developed by Foucault to suggest how power attempts to identify the source of discourse thus impeding ‘the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction’ (1969, p. 119).

7. ‘The strange thing about television is that it doesn’t tell you everything’, Newton says in the film. ‘It shows you everything about life on Earth, but the true mysteries remain. Perhaps it’s in the nature of television’ (The Man Who Fell to Earth 1976).

8. Media contains other media – such as in the way the telegraph contains print, which contains writing, which contains speech – operating so that the contained medium becomes the message of the containing medium.

9. Presley was born the same date as Bowie – January 8th-and also recorded a song called ‘Black Star’ in 1960 for the film that became ‘Flaming Star’, the latter featuring him as a ‘mixed-blood’ character caught between two worlds (although the song, about death being ever over the shoulder of life, was subsequently dropped).

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Dene October

Dene October is a senior lecturer at the University Arts London where he teaches various theory options in fan, design and media cultures including David Bowie Studies. Recent publications include his monograph Marco Polo (2018) and his edited volume Doctor Who and History: Critical Essays on Imagining the Past (2017). He has also contributed chapters to several collections on David Bowie.