David Bowie Loved This Hypnotic Sci-Fi Movie So Much That He Wrote A Song Based On It
by Devin Meenan · /FilmDavid Bowie's songwriting, from "Starman" to "Life on Mars?", was often flavored with allusions to outer space. His alter ego "Ziggy Stardust" had a name that evokes the cosmos, and Bowie even played an alien in Nicholas Roeg's 1973 film "The Man Who Fell to Earth." The picture's out-of-this-world lead is as lonely as many characters in David Bowie's songs.
Bowie's history with space travel goes back to his first hit single, "Space Oddity," and its astronaut lead character, Major Tom. The song was released in 1969, the climactic year of the space race as the U.S. Apollo 11 mission touched down on the Moon. The song debuted shortly before the mission, and soon the BBC approached Bowie to use it as background music during their broadcast of the Moon landing.
The excitement of the Moon mission couldn't have hurt "Space Oddity" as it was climbing the charts, but Bowie maintains he wasn't writing about that. In a 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine, he explained how the song was truthfully inspired by Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (first released in 1968). "Space Oddity" certainly reads like a riff on "Space Odyssey." Bowie recounted:
"I found ['2001'] amazing. I was out of my gourd anyway, I was very stoned when I went to see it, several times, and it was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing."
At the time, "2001" was easily the most convincing cinematic depiction of space travel in cinema. Inarguably one of the most ambitious science-fiction movies ever made, "2001" sits in a pantheon with later blockbusters like "Jurassic Park" and "Avatar" that reset the limits of how fantastical movies can get without breaking the illusion of reality.
The shared melancholy of Kubrick's Space Odyssey and Bowie's Space Oddity
Despite Kubrick's attention to detail, "2001" is only halfway hard science fiction. The movie depicts an alien monolith shaping human evolution, and it concludes with astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) transformed by that monolith into a "star child" that drifts in space viewing the Earth. Anecdotal evidence suggests some audiences at the time were baffled by "2001: A Space Odyssey," but a stoned David Bowie evidently let the movie's kaleidoscopic majesty wash over him.
"Space Oddity" hits notes closer to despair, though. By the end of the film, Bowman's life as he knew it has ended, and the star child is left alone among, well, the stars. That sense of isolation comes through in the ending of "Space Oddity," where a circuit in Major Tom's ship breaks and he loses contact with ground control. Major Tom is left floating helplessly in space; he can see the Earth, but not return to it. In the song's final verse he concludes:
"Here am I floating 'round my tin can
Far above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do."
That's why Bowie, though "overjoyed" that the BBC featured "Space Oddity," found it amusing that it featured in their Apollo broadcast.
"I'm sure they really weren't listening to the lyric[s] at all," Bowie told Performing Songwriter. "Obviously some BBC official said, 'Oh, right then, that space song, Major Tom, blah blah blah, that'll be great.' 'Um, but he gets stranded in space, sir.' Nobody had the heart to tell the producer that."
Still, the BBC helped cement "Space Oddity" as one of the defining space travel stories of the 20th century — just like its inspiration "2001: A Space Odyssey" is.