Lars Von Trier - Young Americans

Perhaps one of the most striking features in Lars von Trier's Dogville is the final slideshow, its blunt naturalism and dynamic speed a great contrast to the stylized, measured flow of the film itself. The choice of David Bowie and his song "Young Americans" is by no means accidental in this respect, not only for its merry rhythm and gloomy lyrics, but for the image the artist represents in himself. Bowie is a cultural icon of some significance, and by 2001, when von Trier filmed Dogville, the singer’s reputation as a musician, actor, and pop culture image was established to such a degree, that his somewhat questionable, or at least unorthodox sexual norms already reached a cult status in themselves. This same sexuality as a reaction to the star cult surrounding David Bowie as a person is, again, an unorthodox yet fruitful way to interpret the appearance of his song at the end of Dogville, just as much as it can serve as a basis for a comparison between Bowie and the characters of Tom and Grace in particular as far as pop cultural iconography of androgyny is concerned, in motion picture and music. For the sake of argument I will analyze appearances of Bowie's songs at the final credits of several films that articulate a sort of innate criticism of pop culture and “American culture” as such, namely David Fincher’s Se7en and its treatment of law both human and superhuman, David Lynch’s Lost Highway and the issue of industrialized sexuality through narrative pornography, and finally Mary Harron’s American Psycho and the notion of sociocultural nonexistence: these are, in the von Trierian sense, all the citizens of Dogville.

A strong semblance is to be found between modern popular star cult and religious worship, in both the overzealous fanaticism and the dichotomy of love and hate, the mental and sexual desire of becoming one with the adored subject via identification or vicarious (more recently acoustic and primarily visual) pleasure. A contemporary piece with Bowie's Young Americans, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) is a perfect example for that. For this purpose perhaps it should be "Grace Mulligan Superstar", in the von Trierian sense. It is along this von Trierian savior-star trajectory that I wish to examine David Bowie and his vocal and iconic appearance.

Just as Nicole Kidman represents a savior turned inside-out (in both gender and methods of salvation), so does David Bowie questions star cult and the notion of a modern messiah through such works as The Man Who Sold the World (1971), Hunky Dory (1971), and predominantly The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), by

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becoming and embodying the very icon he ridicules, subverting it by enacting (and

overdoing)

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