Bowie and Immersive False Reality
My interview this week, which will post tomorrow, will be with Glenn Hendler, author of the Diamond Dogs 33 1/3rd book. Like all books in the series, Glenn’s book is brief—but it contains quite a bit of information as well as ruminations about the album, fascism and the ability of an artist—or a demagog—to distort their audience’s sense of reality.
I’ve been thinking about this concept since I first read something like it in an essay by Simon Critchley. How is what Bowie did different from an actor on a stage, or any other rock star with his own stage persona? Perhaps Mick Jagger is a different guy in person than the way he comes across while in character. What’s different is that Bowie, at least early on (certainly during the Diamond Dogs period), demanded that his audience buy into his act, despite knowing, on some level, that it is an act.
Bowie was not alone in this. Around the same time I read Glenn’s book, I also read Mary Beard’s The Emperor of Rome. It turns out that Nero would appear in plays and act while wearing a mask to ostensibly hide his identity. But it was a mask that looked like Nero—“So how did you tell the difference between the real emperor and the stage character?”
Beard explained, “…one of the most destabilizing questions in Roman autocracy was how you could recognize what was true, or how, in the world of the emperor, you could ever know whether to believe what you saw and heard. The fact and fiction of the stage put a particular spin on that. For a start, in some of the stories of Nero’s performances, the business of pretending to be someone you are not fell not on the actor, but on the audience. They might have to act dead in order to escape, or…pretend they were enjoying it. It was as if, when the emperor was an actor, everyone else was forced to be an actor/dissembler too.”
This description comes remarkably close to Hendler’s description of Bowie’s act—where “there’s no separation between set and reality.” Bowie, according to Hendler, “seems to be testing, or showing off, his ability to manipulate the crowd.” At some point along the way to rock stardom, Bowie noticed that he could sway his audience. Glenn makes a point in the upcoming interview that he manages to get his crowd to cheer for genocide, by playing in his real concert a recording of the beginning of Diamond Dogs that included fake crowd noise (borrowed from a Faces concert), ending in his declaration that, “this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide!” Diamond Dogs is all about the corrosive relationship between the crowd and their idols, ending with their demanding Big Brother.
As a side note, I find it significant that the album ends with the crowd proclaiming, “we want you, Big Brother.” Big Brother never actually appears in any of the songs on the album. Instead, Bowie paints a picture of a fallen world, with chaotic conditions that made the prospect of a strongman sound appealing. But the demagog, for Bowie, doesn’t have the answers. Instead, though, by faking it, the demagog, like the rock star, creates his own authority:
“Bowie deeply believed that his ability to affect his audience—to change us – was continuous with an authoritarian leader’s ability to manipulate a crowd… He got that power by pretending to have it on an album and then performing that pretense in concert, just as he had become a rock star by pretending to be one on the Ziggy Stardust album and then performing as that character in concerts.”
So, before I get to what might at this point seem like an obvious parallel, I’ll point out another medium that is premised on this idea of immersive false reality—professional wrestling. Abraham Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, explains the idea behind the wrestling term, “kayfabe,” which “simply denoted the public-facing fictions of professional wrestling… this illusion was maintained at all costs.” Denoted, because wrestling industry executive McMahon decided that in order to change his own reality so as to avoid government regulation, he (and his wife Linda) had to come clean and admit that pro-wrestling was entertainment, not sport.
But just as one illusion was put to the side, wrestling fostered another. According to Riesman, “The new status quo is what we might call neokayfabe. It says pro wrestling, with all its spectacle, is a lie — but that the lie encodes a deeper truth, discernible to those few who know how to look beyond what’s in front of them. To those fans adept at reading the signs, another narrative emerges, and another beyond that. Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it… Neokayfabe exists in the tensions between revulsion and attraction, honor and hedonism, irony and earnestness.”
OK, so by now you probably see where I’m going. If it isn’t obvious, Riesman squares the circle, so to speak— “Through [Donald] Trump, Vince [McMahon’s] wrestling-infused mentality has reached the highest levels of the American system.” Yes, Vince McMahon was (and probably still is) an informal adviser to Donald Trump. Linda, Vince’s estranged wife who was in on the act, is the U.S. Secretary of Education. Or at least she’s pretending to be, as she presides over her department’s deconstruction.
The thing about all of this—Bowie as Ziggy (or, more accurately during the Year of the Diamond Dogs, Halloween Jack), Nero the acting-emperor, the world of pro-wrestling fakery, or up-is-down Trumpism—is that on some level the audience – the marks, as they are known in wrestling parlance—know that it’s all fake. Well, maybe not all fake. Bowie, the pretend messianic alien rock star, willed himself into becoming an actual rock star. Trump is not simply acting like a dictator, he is acting as a dictator.
He knows what he’s doing. Keep in mind, this is the guy who featured Hulk Hogan essentially as the keynote speaker of his nominating convention. After Hogan spoke, Trump said this—“You know, they may call it, they may call that entertainment. I know about entertainment, but when he used to lift a 350-pound man over his shoulders and then bench press him two rows into the audience, I say maybe entertainment, but he is one strong son of a gun, I tell you.”
Think about that—Trump was saying of Hulk Hogan, who is so phony that that isn’t even his real name, that despite wrestling being “entertainment” (which is to say, staged), that Hogan is, or at least was, a “strong son of a gun,” which doubtlessly was true. So, Trump is saying, therefore wrestling is real. Just like everything else Trump says.
I don’t think Donald Trump’s name comes up in the interview that will post tomorrow, but we talk about everything else here and more. So come back tomorrow, and in the meantime, as Bowie would later say, welcome to reality.