Cinematic delusion: The hidden meaning behind David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’
As one of the most innovative and influential musicians of all time, David Bowie was an all-encompassing creative who had an unparalleled impact on the culture of the late 20th-century Western world. Embodying several different personas, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke, Bowie reinvented himself from one album to the next, even stretching his cultural supremacy to the realm of cinema, where he collaborated with the likes of David Lynch, Nicolas Roeg and Christopher Nolan.
Similar to his eclectic persona, Bowie also had a vibrant taste for cinema, with some of his all-time favourite movies including Stanley Kubrick’s epic sci-fi 2001: A Space Oddity, Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy The General and the pioneering surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou from Luis Buñuel. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise then that Bowie used the world of cinema as a key source of inspiration whilst writing his 1973 magnum opus Hunky Dory, an album that signalled a significant shift from the star towards the art-pop sub-genre.
The fourth track on the album, ‘Life on Mars’, is widely regarded as one of Bowie’s very best, protruding from Hunky Dory like some sort of surreal statement straight from the mouth of his forthcoming persona, Ziggy Stardust. Allegedly written as a semi-parody of Frank Sinatra’s 1969 song ‘My Way’, a track that has come to represent the self-determination of the national American psyche, ‘Life on Mars’ puts a mirror to this psychology, asking the listener how their lives have been shaped by the fantasies of consumerist media.
By the 1970s, entertainment industries were flourishing in the Western world, the archaic studio system of Hollywood had been left behind, and creativity was flourishing thanks to the emergence of the ‘Movie Brats’. Similarly, the music industry had become increasingly commercialised following the chaos of Beatlemania, giving rise to a new kind of obsessive fandom.
“The girl with the mousy hair,” described in the opening of ‘Life on Mars’, is a witness to this world becoming ever-more obsessed with the medium of movies, music, and television. Fleeing from home due to her disparate parents, she escapes to the “silver screen” of the movies but is saddened and bored by their unoriginality, offering her nothing that relates to the struggles of her own life.
Filmmakers ask the young girl to focus on such senseless frivolities as “Sailors fighting in the dance hall”, scurrying cavemen and crooked law enforcement, with Bowie describing the rich tapestry of the cinematic landscape. But, it’s in the final line that Bowie really makes us question the intentions behind the song, writing, “wonder if he’ll ever know he’s in the best selling show,” suggesting that the actors are not in scripted drama, relating cinema instead to the ‘movie’ of everyday living.
Indeed, whilst we might try and pursue a life as magical and exciting as the ones we see on the silver screen, such is simply impossible, with reality offering up countless imperfections. Still, as the everyday Westerner strived for consumerist perfection as society neared the new millennium, Bowie questioned whether cinema was mimicking reality or whether people were starting to convince themselves that the glittery perfection of cinema was possible to emulate.
The song questions the blurred lines between reality and fantasy during developments in late 20th-century society, positioning this confusion from the perspective of a young girl trying to make sense of life. Wishing to escape from Western society, she asks, “Is there life on Mars?”, a sincere plea to travel to a place unlike the one she sees before her, as well as an escapist fantasy that demonstrates she’s trapped in the exact idealistic web she’s been struggling to be released from.
