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.

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