The Hunger

THE HUNGER’S DEATHLY SHADOW
The sweet annihilation of David Bowie, NYC, circa. 1980-83

Book Chapter | I'm Not a Film Star: David Bowie as Actor | Ian Dixon & Brendan Black (eds) | Bloomsbury Press | 2022

Tony Scott (dir) Nightclubbin’ with Miriam and John Blaylock (aka Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie), The Hunger, MGM,1983

ABSTRACT

David Bowie’s role in The Hunger came at a challenging time for the artist. He had taken a sabbatical from his music due to a protracted contractual dispute with former manager Tony Defries and had fled the public eye following the death of his friend and mentor John Lennon. Between August 1981 and November 1982 Bowie took on three major screen roles: the BBC television series Baal, The Hunger and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Despite the turmoil in his own life, for Bowie the actor, this was a time of creative exploration and invention. Rogue, vampire, and POW. It is in the role of John Blaylock however, that we witness Bowie’s exploration of the gothic interior.

We can also read this moment as a continuation of the slow and deliberate annihilation of David Bowie’s past he had first signposted in Ashes to Ashes. As John Blaylock the doomed vampire, Bowie becomes the decay, the accelerant for change. While we might question the merit of Tony Scott’s film, the Blaylock role is a key performative turn in a sequence of acting roles that visually and dramatically evoke notions of retreat, erasure and despair. For Bowie the artist – as it was for Blaylock the monster – the role is imbued with a sense of entrapment and the grotesque, from the outside as much as from within. This chapter is also a collection of allusions, placing Bowie’s role in The Hunger at the centre of a convergent image stream of fabrication and mimicry, a hyper-visual culture that privileged style over substance, with allusions also to both the present and the past, burnt into Scott’s lavish film. Disfigurement, isolation, addiction, rejection, the cool logic of the decade of greed – it's all there in The Hunger.

Tony Scott (dir) David Bowie as John Blaylock in The Hunger, MGM,1983

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