Clumsy grace

[imomus]

It's 1977 and David Bowie looks like a ventriloquist's dummy in cravat and white flares. With sculpted hair and thick pierrot make-up, he wanders alone in a white room, making occasional desultory stabs at his guitar, mumbling some of the words to a song called 'Be My Wife', a rather strange cabaret piano stomp about being lonely and wanting to marry. Someone seems to have put Bowie in this room to sing, but he just can't summon the showbiz conviction. He just can't go through the motions. Each gesture falters halfway, each mimed lyric ends in an illusion-breaking wince. It could be an instruction video entitled 'What Not To Do In Showbiz'. Never be low, never be half-hearted, never do anything by half-measures! Keep your sunny side up! Walk it like you talk it! Turn the conviction up to 11!

But it's precisely the half-heartedness, the clumsiness which make the 'Be My Wife' video so winning. Incompleteness of gesture and uncertainty of tone are still rare enough in pop videos that we sit up and pay attention when we see them. There's also something tremendously appealing about seeing a very good looking person seeming lost and lonely. I suppose it's as kitsch as a sad clown in some ways. And commedia dell'arte isn't far away: Bowie seems to be in the role of Pedrolino, the pierrot, making a mime sketch of a rock star making a rock video. The physical theatre is deft even in its clumsiness; the awkwardness is performed gracefully. There's something of Buster Keaton here (Keaton gets a little homage in a much later Bowie video, 'Miracle Goodnight').



One of my favourite moments in 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' is when Bowie is seen in a church with Mary-Lou. He's trying to sing a hymn, but can't quite get the notes right. He winces and grimaces, looking terribly pained and nerdy and British and embarrassed. We want to take care of that character, just as Mary-Lou does. We understand his difficulty with our rituals.

Bowie revisits awkward grace in some other videos: 'Fashion' abandons the winning tentativeness of 'Be My Wife' and plays the deliberate clumsiness in more obnoxious mode; the Bowie character makes a silly rat-like gesture at one point, stops, sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and continues. It's a great little piece of actor's business, a sort of Brechtian alienation effect. Very few rock stars have the degree of theatrical sophistication it takes to risk ambiguity like that. And very few rock stars are attractive enough to risk making 'ugly' gestures or giving 'mixed messages'. The video for 'Heroes' is also fantastic; here the deliberately awkward pose seems to refer to Christ on the cross, and also anticipates Bowie's portrayal of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. I suppose the sleeves of 'Lodger' and 'Heroes' also contain the same deliberate awkward angularity and 'brokenness', with a wink in the direction of German Expressionism and Egon Schiele.



Someone else who knows the grace of clumsiness is my friend Toog. His 2002 album 'Easy Toog For Beginners' ends with a song called 'Clumsy', a succession of embarrassing situations and apologies which ends with a series of explosions. Oops, he did it again.



If 'beauty is just the first sight of terror we're still just able to bear', as Rilke said, perhaps 'clumsy grace' is the place where beauty most fully realises itself, right on the edge of ugliness. Perhaps it's beauty's avant garde. Or is clumsy grace the 'revenge of the nerd?' Is it the visual equivalent of squandering the family fortune? I remember reading a self-appointed style expert somewhere saying that good-looking hipsters who dress in deliberately awkward thrift store clothes want to 'discourage the weak' from pursuing them. But does 'clumsy grace' make successful people seem more or less accessible to the millions of people out there with low self-esteem? Does it lower the bar or raise it? And I wonder if there's even some attempt at 'clumsy grace' in Bush's malapropisms and hesitations, his dismal performance during the TV debates? Although in his case it's hard to detect any 'grace' whatsoever, and he disqualifies himself by turning the conviction up to 11.