Lil' Bowie wow

Ziggy Stardust rises and falls once again.
By Johnny Ray Huston

WHEN DAVID BOWIE as Ziggy Stardust takes the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon in D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, there's little pomp and circumstance – the music just starts. It's a curious anti-moment, considering the theatricality of Bowie's persona at the time. (It's also a sign that director and performer aren't in sync, collaboratively or combatively.) The song with which Ziggy and his band kick off the last night of their tour is "Hang On to Yourself," a warning Bowie's teenage daydreamers – blinded by the light of a persona he had recently created, a persona he was about to kill – needed to heed.

It's no coincidence that Starlust, the title of Judy and Fred Vermorel's pre-slash 1983 collection of "secret fantasies of fans," echoes Ziggy's last name. Starlust reveals mass networks of Barry Manilow maniacs and numerous pornographic scenarios featuring one-hit wonders, but Bowie devotees dominate the book. They don't dominate their idol, though: no matter how hard they try to gain control of their obsession, they wind up frustrated, trapped in a mythological world created by a master manipulator who remains remote. There's Jenny, who calls Bowie "untouchable"; Heather and Jason, who feel taunted by his media presence and oblique messages; Roger and Simon, who think they're characters in his songs; and Julie, who complains about the loudness of his silence. "I invented Bowie," claims Carolyn, Starlust's final fan, but in fact, Bowie seems to have directed her sex life for decades.

Bowie-alike birds of a platinum feather flock together under the strobe light in Pennebaker's documentary, dazed and hypnotized by Mick Ronson's "Moonage Daydream" guitar solo, which sounds like the panicky call of a gull flying into an endless dark cavern. When Bowie plods to the final word of the last line of Jacques Brel's "My Death," his fans replace "you" with shouts of "me!," wishing to be the one to chauffeur him from life to doom via love. But Bowie smirks and stops the song, denying them even a collective "you." He's no warmer to wife Angie the Liza wanna-be during the first of Ziggy's backstage-pass interludes, greeting her with a grimace-smile she only later recognized (in her trashy autobiography) as a "mask."

Gauging by Bowie's few between-song Ziggy comments, he was hardly at the Odeon the night Ziggy died – he's perpetually preoccupied with imagining himself as the newest member of an elite fraternity featuring men named Mick and Lou. ("I think he's a friend," he says tentatively of the latter; in contrast, Ringo Starr's denim patchwork getup is largely ignored by Bowie in the dressing room.) But the movie's chief problem is that Pennebaker's direction isn't comfortable making love with Ziggy's ego. Sure, the camera watches when the star flashes his sinewy legs and perky ass, and it's gazing nearby as a series of spangled and striped costumes are placed on and peeled off his snow-white-tanned starving child physique. The sole moment of intimacy, a conspiratorial look (during "Watch That Man"), is strictly business. As is Bowie's pantomimed homoeroticism, a fact underlined by annoying recent interview quotes ("It [gayness] was like another world I wanted to buy into"; "It wasn't something I was comfortable with ... but it had to be done").

Revived for the 30th anniversary of Ziggy's "death," Ziggy Stardust – a grainy visual record and erratic sound mix of a sporadically terrific concert – does not rank as one of the classic rock-docs of its era. It never matches the menace of the Maysles' Gimme Shelter, which places a crimson velvet crown laced with poison needles on Mick Jagger's head. And it lacks the jokerlike spontaneity of Pennebaker's own Bob Dylan portrait, Don't Look Back. On July 3, 1973, what Bowie's male Lola character needed was a von Sternberg, someone hip to his cynicism but unafraid to fall in love again with the start of each new song. What he got was an ill-prepared document of ready-made history.