Culturebox: Cracked Actor

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dvd extras Cracked Actor The film career of David Bowie. By Jessica Winter Posted Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, at 6:59 AM ET In the summer of 1983, a man calling himself David Bowie appeared on the cover of Time magazine. With his blond coif and portfolio of smooth platinum hits, this tanned and tailored crooner of what he dubbed "positive music" seemed a man apart from the shape-shifting, gender-melding '70s pop mutant also known as David Bowie, whose spookier guises had included the Lost Spaceman, the Alien Sex Machine, and the Funky Disinterred Corpse. It was as if Lady Gaga had suddenly morphed into Michael Buble. But later that same year, this clean-cut, mainstream Bowie did something reassuringly, Bowie-ishly bizarre: He played a lead role in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. To invest one's peak pop-star capital in a bleak homoerotic drama, set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and directed by the provocateur behind the art-porn shocker In the Realm of the Senses--well, that's the kind of loopy career choice you'd expect from the fellow who brought us the Anorexic Centaur Centerfold, the Stewardess as Rock God, and the Human Lightning Bolt. To continue reading, click here. Jessica Winter is a writer in New York. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Spitzer: Brazil, India, and China Will Be Thrilled if Republicans Win the Midterms Are Any of Today's TV Theme Songs as Good as WKRP in Cincinnati's? Shafer: Why Do Sportswriters Want To See Players Retire While They're on Top?	Advertisement
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