+++ This article first appeared in 2017. On January 8, 2022 David Bowie would have been 75 years old. Therefore this text has been updated. +++
It is obvious that David Bowie inspires the visual arts. With costumes, make-up and facial expressions, he is an ideal figure for fashion, photography, painting. Less known, but very impressive and really funny is Bowie’s performance as a comedian. Back in 2006, Ricky Gervais isn’t yet the angry Golden Globe host, but still the British chubby on which his comedy fame is based. With his excellent second TV series “Extras” he describes the miserable life of a film extra; in every episode, real celebrities appear, who mostly self-ironic reveal themselves to be vain gossips. In an episode of the second season, Gervais’ character Andy Millman seems to have made it: The eternal extra has launched his own sitcom, the audience loves the silly peasant theater. Millman might be happy, but he hates his new life. Because he knows he’s selling people shoddy shit.
Full of self-pity, he goes to a bar with his colleague, where he meets David Bowie and his entourage. Millman hopes the superstar will understand his problems. Bowie nods in understanding a few times, goes to the piano and improvises the song about the “Little fat man who sold his soul…” And at the end the whole bar sings along: “See his pug-nose face – pug, pug, pug, pug “.
Bowie’s songs can create entire series worlds
Two years earlier, Wes Anderson showed that Bowie songs, even in exotic versions, can determine the atmosphere of a feature film. The esthete among indie directors hired the Brazilian singer Seu Jorge for “Die Tiefseetaucher”, who translates Bowie’s classic into Portuguese and sings alone on the guitar. The songs characterize the film, Bowie is enthusiastic: Seu Jorge gave the songs “a new dimension of beauty”.
The BBC mystery crime series “Life On Mars” shows that Bowie’s songs can create entire series worlds. A cop is thrown from the present to 1973, and Bowie’s song “Life On Mars” has just come out. The series shows Manchester in the 1970s, Bowie songs blare out of the radio speakers, but the country hasn’t got that far yet: Blacks and women are discriminated against by white beer-bellied patriarchs. Bowie’s otherworldly music should have left these men completely at a loss. And yet they sing along, even the line that could be dedicated to them: “Look at those cavemen go”. The sequel “Ashes To Ashes” then continued the series in 1982.
In Schätzing’s “Limit” Bowie is offered the opportunity to travel to the moon – he declines
Sometimes you meet Bowie unexpectedly. For example in Frank Schätzing’s literary blockbuster “Limit”. The story takes place in 2025, superstar senior David Bowie is giving a concert at the OSS space base, singing “Space Oddity” there, of course. In Schätzing’s plot, humans plunder the moon for energy. Bowie is offered the opportunity to travel on the satellite, but he declines: His life today is much more earthly than it used to be. After his death, Schätzing proves that he really is a big Bowie fan with a personal obituary: “Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.”
While the great Bowie novel may yet be out (Author’s Tip: Bret Easton Ellis), he’s long established as a comic book character. For his “Sandman” series, Neil Gaiman gives the Lucifer character the look of Bowie. The prince of hell not only looks like the superstar, but also has a diverse personality: Gaiman’s devil is polite, educated, stylish, aristocratic – and bad as well. Also in 2015, Gaiman publishes the illustrated story, The Return Of The Thin White Duke, found in the Trigger Warning collection.
Of course, the great pop culture reference machine The Simpsons hasn’t ignored Bowie either. His songs run in several places. Director Skinner talks about a cat with different colored eyes named Bowie in one episode. There’s Homer in the look of Aladdin Sane – and a 2013 episode starring Alan Rickman (died of cancer on January 14, 2016, four days after Bowie) as Professor Snape. and this is accompanied by David Bowie’s “All The Young Dudes” in the version by Mott The Hoople.