Sound and Vision

Chapter 4 focuses on the first decade of David Bowie’s feature screen career in order to examine the changing industrial and aesthetic relationships of narrative feature filmmaking to popular music between the 1970s and 1980s. Using six of Bowie’s starring feature film roles between 1976 and 1986, this chapter explores broadening nonmusical roles for rock stars onscreen. Such casting was made possible in a context in which rock music had become normalized on film soundtracks, absent the rock star’s onscreen performance. This chapter draws connections across the economic and aesthetic relations of popular music and cinema from the popularization of the composite score in the 1970s (that is, film scoring with popular songs rather than orchestral music) to the synergistic organization of film and music industries in the 1980s, demonstrating how composite scoring set the stage for synergy organized around MTV. In this context, rock stars’ screen performances became less tied to the previous types of roles explored in this volume: composite scoring and synergy both expanded and standardized the nondiegetic prominence of rock music within film, and such practices meant that the industrial imperatives that constitute rock stars’ relationships to film no longer necessitated those stars’ onscreen performances of music. Analyzing how his dramatic and musical film performances intersected with his rock star image, this chapter explores Bowie’s variegated screen roles in terms of how rock stars’ industrial and textual functions no longer required cogent alignment.