David Bowie Is … Actor, Star and Character: Entangled Agencies in The Man Who Fell to Earth

This chapter considers David Bowie’s role in Nicolas Roeg’s (1976) film The Man Who Fell to Earth, by problematizing the notion of Bowie as performer, and through a triangulation of texts and intertexts involving actor, star and persona. This is not simply an assertion of Bowie’s acting of the character Thomas Jerome Newton in the film, since that suggests a causal relationship very much in keeping with the logic of film’s guiding metaphor, gravity, and implies any critique should be focused on Bowie’s agency as an actor. As many have commented, Newton’s performance is eerie. Indeed, here is a character who over-steps the film into Bowie’s other performances, including later projects, and media interviews. The film, picking up from Alan Yentob’s the BBC Omnibus (1975) documentary Cracked Actor, also appears to dramatize Bowie’s desire to be a star, and document his rise and fall, or should that be the rise of fall of another intersecting, serial character, Ziggy Stardust? This chapter notes Bowie’s naïve and polysemic acting performance as speaking to unresolved debates on the orientation of the actor (Naremore, 2004), interactions between spectator and star (Dyer, 1979, 1986), wider discussions about quotidian acting (Goffman, 1969, 1974), performance boundaries (Schechner, 1973, 1985), and identity as performative (Austin, 1962; Butler, 1990). It also revisits the notion of the Bowie-Newton matrix conceptualized in the author’s previous work on the film, including on costume (October, 2015, 2020, 2021). Bowie? Newton? Who is behind the act? The chapter presents a model of analysis that posits an untimely, and unlocal, entanglement of agencies – a quantum handshake between (but not limited to) actor, star and character.