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Modern and Traditional Japanese Culture: The Psychology of Buddhism, Power Rangers, Masked Rider, Manga, Anime and Shinto. 在日イギリス人男性による日本文化論.

Friday, January 22, 2016

 

Mr. Valentine: Bowie was Japanese


Bowie was my first hero, when I was about 13 or 14, and now 35 years plus later, he remains my last. Now, after his death, and watching three of his last (Valentine's Day, Lazarus, and Blackstar) it seems to me that David Bowie was Japanese. I had always suspected it.

The sixties themed pop tune "Valentine's Day" has been argued to be a critique on gun violence (or the glamorisation and sexification of guns) since it starts and ends with the Charlton Heston pose (0:05 3:01, as above, guitar raised like a gun), shadows looking like a gun, guitar used as gun, bullet flying across the frets, his aiming and shooting of a make believe gun, the shadow of his guitar changing to that of a gun both during the Heston pose, and later in the song at 2:24 where the shadow of his guitar turns into a Tommy gun such as was used in "Valentine's Day Massacre".

There may be clues in the names. There were at least two massacres on Valentine's Day. "Teddy and Judy" may be gun shooting victims (I can find no real ones) or a reference to the pair in The Kinks "Waterloo Sunset" to which perhaps this song has a resemblance. Mr. Valentine is sometimes referred to as Johnny Valentine in an interview with a co-creator.

Someone else in the YouTube comments suggests that Valentine's Day may be about death in general which seems quite plausible to me, especially since the shadows behind Bowie sometimes seem to be that of a grim reaper (1:54) reaping Bowie (2:54).

The rest is my, rather off the wall, take in which I agree that the song is about death, but a self inflicted death, and possible rebirth.

First of all the Charlton Heston pose is also Heston's "my cold dead hands" pose: the pose of death.

I note that when Bowie sings about the face and hands of Mr. Valentine he is also showing us his own face (e.g. 0:55) or looking at his own hands (2:06 2:38), so I wonder if he may be referring to his own visual image which is icy and, like all images, dead. Our self images are also surprisingly "little" like Mr. Valentine (as one can convince oneself by drawing around the image of your face in a mirror, I think that this is why Noh masks see below are small).

This song reminds me of the first lines of his first pop video where he refers to himself as being small, and loving this image till a certain day "Love you till Tuesday"

Bearing in mind that Bowie is double, from the cover of Pinups and Hours, the smiling Asian Zaphod to whom he is conjoined at the head in "Where are we Now" and there are dead female eyes in all our minds, as claimed in Blackstar, Valentine's visual image may be paired up with the eyes. I.e. we love ourselves as images with the eyes of another in our minds. [ In this regard, I wonder if Bowie fell in love with his wife partly due to her name Iman, I man, eyeman, his Eve see below. ]

I claim that this is the structure of the Japanese self: the eye or mirror of the other Amaterasu and their face or "mask" (Watsuji). Usually Westerners however narrate themselves (Freud, Mead, Bruner, Bakhtin, etc) so the eyes in Blackstar would ordinarily be effeminate ears (c.f. Freud's "acoustic cap" "bonnet" or Nietzsche's ears, or Derrida's "Ear of the Other"). I think that Jones, Major Tom, Bowie, Ziggy, the Thin White Duke and Mr. Valentine had a tendency to narrate himself in the 3rd person, and identified with his image.

From this perspective we may be killing ourselves as we live, making a a dead image of ourselves, "falling to earth." Our true being is our consciousness but we believe that we are in the black hole that we believe to be in front of our light. Instead of living as our being, as the white star, we are turned inside out. In this situation death, "Valentines Day", or (Love you till) Tuesday, when we give up on that love affair, may conversely be life, a rebirth. Bowie may be alluding to this possibility in Lazarus.

The Biblical representation the eyes or ears in our heart may be Eve a comforter made out of our hearts, who we can replace with Jesus, or Amitabha for instance.

I should like to do a Charlton Heston Bowie Pose, when I die am reborn. I should be so lucky.

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This blog represents the opinions of the author, Timothy Takemoto, and not the opinions of his employer.