David Bowieās RICOCHET: Serious Moonlight Tour Documentary (directed by Gerry Troyna, 1983)
Itās a terrific piece of film making. Itās like the documentary Chris Marker never made about Bowie (without Markerās somewhat distracting voice-overs) - here seen sporting his platinum blonde look from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Amidst some cool modernist neon-lit shots taken in South-East Asia, Bowie seem to be feeling post-colonialist guilt/white manās anxiety for becoming rich overnight in the wake of Letās Dance.
As he arrives in his home country (hmm, Hong Kong) and engages with his fellow British citizens from the Far East, Bowie comes across as a faux James Bond, or a strange parody of it (thereās talk and more anxiety about the future HK handover in 1997).
The juxtaposition of Bowie, an always sleek and seductive figure - and self-aware of it - with the still underdeveloped, shabby Third World backgrounds shown in the pictures works wonders. There it is, Western sleekness plonked right in the middle of the action - just like the Superman III billboard in the middle of Bangkok, advertising a visually sleek Hollywood vehicle made for American mass audiences which was sold around the world to people who donāt have the shared cultural experiences (and income) to know what is going on.
So I guess the point here is that wealth is in part created by sleek imagery (i.e., marketing), which allows to sell crap to people who donāt have the means to buy it (whether theyāre from economically developed places or not). Itās also a recurring theme in the film, as with the HK boys who have to sell their record collection to buy a ticket for the Bowie gig - and with Bowie himself acknowledging his tickets cost too much for the local audiences.
At least Bowie is somehow dealing with his post-colonial guilty. Most pop musicians wouldnāt (specially the British)(and also those Scottish ones who used to be on Creation Records).
However, Bowie commits a faux pas when asked by an HK (Chinese) reporter about his fascination with the East (which here can be interpreted as āChina) to which Bowie responds: āYes, I like Kabukiā. Adding to the confusion,Ā China Girl is a song Iggy Pop wrote about a Vietnamese girlā¦
Anyhow, I have been to those places and I love them all in their own different way. By now, HK and Singapore have made it - they graduated to developed nation-state (city) status. But Thailand is still lagging behind. Itās funny because the world now seems to be filled with ādevelopingā nations - which used to be called Third World, when the hierarchy was more rigid. Now any nation can have the status of āwanna-be richā. Which means that chasing the carrot is in-built into the system. Can you imagine if all places in the world were ādevelopedā and all people didnāt struggle, would that be the end of history?
Maybe Thailand is too Buddhist to be fully economically developed - not a bad thing. And even though we see Bowie keeping his cool and detached faƧade throughout the show, he eventually decides to get in touch with his spirituality somewhere in, appropriately enough, Thailand (I donāt know much about that Thai Buddhist ceremony he took part in but Iām curious about it).
Thatās another funny contradiction, since the 80s were the time when he, and everyone else, were focusing on becoming tycoons. As a matter of fact, he once stated that āJapan would make him to zen to writeā - meaning that heād rather have a successful artistic career than following a path of enlightenment.
But maybe all those mixed feelings of anxiety were getting to him. But film ends with a lively performance of Fame, which is the path he decided to follow.Ā
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