The Labyrinth Solution: David Bowie and Gilles Deleuze

The Labyrinth Solution: The World of David Bowie & the Film-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. A Talk by David Deamer

Labyrinth has everything a modern fairy-tale should have… Mayhem, dramatic and comedic, ensuing from the quest for her banished baby brother by recalcitrant teenage heroine Sarah. Muppets as goblins, talking hands, living rocks, wee friendly worms and humongous monsters. Music written and performed by David Bowie, who co-stars as the mad, bad Goblin King. And a mise-en-scène of wonderfully diverse episodic settings, glorious gardens, smelly bogs, dark oubliettes, all spinning off from the labyrinth with Bowie as Jareth at the centre of it all. Drawing upon children’s classics from Carroll, Baum, Sendak, the Grimms, and Andersen, as well as Kabuki, Borges, and Escher, Labyrinth is a complex movie – scripted by Monty Python’s Terry Jones – where things are not always what they seem, fantasy and dream suffusing reason and reality.

Two readings of the film are well-known: a coming-of-age story and a cautionary feminist fable. Yet, it seems to me, there is another, surreptitious but nevertheless complementary approach to Labyrinth. One in which the liberations and liabilities of fantasy and dream are explored through the images of the film. Key to this is the involvement of Bowie, a music artist who played with theatrical personas, concepts, and settings in song and on stage, challenging identity, gender, sexuality, masculinity, and so on, but sometimes suffocating within his masks, getting lost in dark psychological mazes of delusion, paranoia, psychosis… To explore this aspect of Labyrinth, the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze will prove inestimable, the explorations of his Cinema books (1983/1985) differentiating and defining dream-image movies where ‘musical comedy gives us in an explicit way so many scenes which work like dreams … as a point of indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary … at once fantasy and report, criticism and compassion’.

David Deamer writes on cinema, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of some essays as well as a couple of books – Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images and Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb. Deamer is an independent scholar, was lecturer in film-philosophy for twenty years at Manchester Metropolitan University, now works at Stepping Hill Hospital, and heads up engagement and events for the British Society for Phenomenology. See daviddeamer.com