‘Under Pressure’ in ‘Aftersun’: The greatest David Bowie needle drop in cinema
There have been few more natural performers in any artistic medium than David Bowie.
The man born David Jones may be one of the most celebrated musicians to have ever picked up an instrument, but there was no way that he was ever going to be contained to mere soundwaves. After all, the man paid good money for his mime training, and it’d be a cold day in hell before it all went to waste.
I joke, but he was a polymath in the truest sense of the word. Not only was he a singer, songwriter and a highly underrated instrumentalist (half the guitar work on his records was played by the man himself and nearly all the sax work), but he was an incredible presence as an actor too. Of course, we all know his turn as Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth, but just as compelling are his performances in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Twin Peaks and Hunger.
It goes deeper than that. Bowie embodied characters that, in turn, embodied the music. The music that came from Ziggy Stardust was worlds apart from the Thin White Duke. Even if he didn’t have a named character for those records, they were still cinematic enough for whole universes to be created within them. It’s perhaps one of the main reasons that so many directors have used his work in some of the most beloved movies ever.
Quentin Tarantino dropped Bowie’s ‘Cat People’ in a pivotal scene of his 2009 World War II drama Inglorious Basterds, putting aside the obvious anachronism in favour of the sheer atmosphere of his 1982 single. It’s a trick Taika Waititi replicated when he used the German language version of ‘”Heroes”‘ at the climax of Jojo Rabbit. Wes Anderson, James Gunn, and Noah Baumbach are all directors who’ve used the great man’s work. David Lynch liked his work so much that he not only used ‘I’m Deranged’ in Lost Highway, but cast him in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
What is the greatest David Bowie needle drop?
However, the best of all comes from a film more recent than all of them. One that doesn’t use the music of David Bowie for sheer style or cool factor, but that taps into a side of his music that doesn’t get enough mention. All of Bowie’s best work contains a deep, aching sadness at its core. Who hasn’t shed a few tears to ‘Life On Mars?’ or ‘Blackstar’ or ‘”Heroes”‘ in their time, and it’s that sadness that Charlotte Wells found in a song that is, otherwise, a classic of the 1980s.
Wells’ 2023 film Aftersun follows Sophie Patterson, a young adult looking back on her memories of a holiday she went on with her troubled, yet well-meaning, father Calum, when she was 11. The film depicts Sophie witnessing things during that holiday that she only has a way of understanding as an adult, and coming to understand him as a person in that time. This culminates in one of the more powerful strobe sequences I’ve ever seen, set to the joyous yet profoundly deep harmony of Queen and David Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’.
Sophie remembers that, on the last night of the holiday, the two of them danced to the track in a hotel bar packed with holidaymakers. After starting fairly realistically, the film drifts into outright impressionism. Cutting to a darker, more packed club that sees Sophie flit between her younger self and her current self. Among a sea of strobe lights, sweaty people and blurring colours, adult Sophie catches a glimpse of someone who could be her father dancing too, lost in the music.
The two dance closer together and, among flashing, overpowering lights, we see Sophie sometimes screaming at her father, sometimes crying in his arms as he dances away, blissfully in his own little world. Eventually, all the instruments drop out, leaving Bowie and Mercury to lay the pain at the heart of the track bare. Harmonising on ‘this is our last dance’ as we know that the same can be said for Calum and Sophie themselves.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s unforgettable. It’s with a bullet the best use of David Bowie’s work in the cinematic medium, and while that’s an incredibly high bar to clear, it’s one that does just it with aplomb.
