‘Skull designs upon my shoes’: David Bowie Fans in the Media Mirror

The day Stephen Shapiro’s photographic study Bowie (2016) was published, I hastily took a snap to promote my good taste on social media. My phone’s camera spilled light across Shapiro’s beautiful cover, trapping my own reflection, a dark shape that by chance aligned perfectly with the shadow of Bowie cast by professional lighting. The serendipity became clear later that day as I wrote this proposal deliberating on the uncanny “anti-narcissistic form of self-reflection” (Boym, 2001) that media offers fans. Fan Studies vacillates between theorising fans as media-consumers (Sandvoss, 2005), active users (Duffett, 2013) and projecting identity onto it (Gee, 2003) tending to frame the interaction around an active/passive reader dynamic (per Barthes, 1998). However, my aim is to identify and explore media as reflecting back the image of the fan at the moment of their most enchanted engagement with the fan object.

I begin by outlining the concepts of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000) and seriality (repetition-with-variation or difference as per Deleuze 1994 and différance Derrida 1982) seeing Bowie as both mediated and media. This conceit is made possible via McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message (1999) and, tangentially, through Colin Wilson’s claim that Bowie is a medium (Blanks, 2016). I then identify how Bowie-related media function as memory sites, looking at media-specific monuments as well as intermedial and remedial morphing between music papers, film, records and fan interactions.

Finally, I explore the notion of media-as-mirror, one developed from Holmes’ observation of photography as “the mirror with a memory” (quoted in Ruchatz, 2010), Holdsworth’s account of domestic television as a black mirror (2011), and my own work on fan memories as augmented by intersensual listening experiences with Bowie (October, 2015b). The character of Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg, 1976) is a cipher for these ideas, glancing ‘himself’ differently through multiple television screens (October, 2015a) and re-emerging as Lazarus (2016). That Bowie could not let go of this character is evidenced by Shapiro’s photographic remediation of the film, and through fan reflection, one that engenders further reflections and seriality

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