The Last Show of Ziggy Stardust – Under the Scope

Many in PoV Country know who David Bowie is. For those others, Bowie was an English rock star who performed from the late 1960s into the 2010s and scored international hits with “Fame,” “Changes,” “Golden Years,” “Rebel, Rebel,” “Under Pressure,” “Let’s Dance,” and “Modern Love,” to name a few. Bowie was also an actor, starring in the films “Zoolander” (as himself), “The Prestige” (as inventor Nikola Tesla), and “Labyrinth” (as the Goblin King lording over a cast of Jim Henson Muppets). But readers may know Bowie best from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel, “Fire Walk with Me,” where he played an FBI special agent from Louisiana. However, in the film’s sequel his voice was overdubbed because his Cajun accent was so bad. (It’s really hard to fake a Cajun accent. Hard to hide one too. Ask my students.)

Bowie’s classic songs have also been used as background for Hollywood movies. The most recent and perhaps most well-known of these is the Ridley Scott-directed, Oscar-winning film from 2015, “The Martian,” which stars Matt Damon as U.S. astronaut Mark Watney who’s left stranded on the red planet after an evacuation. The film features scenes of Watney’s solitary activities with a soundtrack of a famous Bowie song, which goes like this: “There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’d like to come and meet us / But he thinks he’ll blow our minds…”

The song “Starman” was the 1972 hit single from the oddly titled album, “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” This concept album began Bowie’s famous glam-rock period. On the album, “Ziggy Stardust” is the name of Bowie’s alter ego, an alien rock superstar who arrives on Earth to save the youth of the world from an impending apocalypse. And Ziggy’s (Bowie’s) backing band on the album was named the “Spiders from Mars.” The album was recorded amidst the worldwide excitement of landing men on the moon and release of the Stanley Kubrick film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Bowie was continually inspired to write songs about spacey things during this period. In 1971, he recorded the escapist commentary “Life on Mars?” (1971), which has the refrain “Take a look at the lawman / Beating up the wrong guy / Wonder if he’ll ever know / He’s in the best-selling show / Is there life on Mars?” And in July 1969, the same month and year as the Apollo 11 moon landing, he released the poignant, angst-laden “Space Oddity,” which softly begins “Ground Control to Major Tom…” and continues with “Tell my wife I love her very much,…// Here am I floating round my tin can / Far above the Moon / Planet Earth is blue / And there’s nothing I can do.”

And here we are, over 50 years since those classic songs were recorded and nearly a decade after Bowie’s death, spending billions of dollars worldwide on satellites and landing crafts and surface rovers, and we’re still asking his 1971 question, “Is there life on Mars?” Has the money and technology paid off? According to images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter, it has! There are indeed spiders on Mars.

Now, satellite technology was in infancy during Bowie’s glam-rock heyday, and so he had no idea when he named Ziggy’s band that there were actually spiders on Mars.  Perhaps he was fond of and wished to shed light on the ecological importance of our creepy co-habitators here on Earth. Beyond the eight hairy legs, multiple eyes, two jaws, two fangs, a few venom sacs, and multiple silk glands, it’s a spider’s voracious but selective appetite that’s most important: Without spiders, the earth would be overrun with insects! From behind their dark and dangly hiding places, spiders trap and devour our most annoying pests—like roaches, ants, mosquitoes, flies, and maybe even a few of those swarming termites that graced PoV country this past April 30th! But, of course, spiders draw the line somewhere: Just like all other insectivores, lovebugs are off their dinner menu. (Lovebugs must taste really bad. Ask a motorcyclist.)

But spiders are relatively small, and the Mars Express orbits hundreds of miles above the surface. So, Mars must have really big tarantulas to be seen from a satellite! Or are the images showing us something else? What the Express has actually viewed from its orbits is the remnants of hundreds of dirty geysers.  These geysers erupt during Martian spring when the planet’s icy surface begins to warm in the sunlight.  Frozen carbon dioxide from beneath the planet’s surface heats up and turns to gas. When enough pressure builds up, the carbon dioxide gas erupts with such force that some dark-colored dirt is raised from beneath the surface and is splayed across the lighter- colored surface dunes.  From an orbit hundreds of miles away, these geyser splatterings look like hundreds of Bowie’s favorite 1970s bandmates.

Seems like it’s easier to simulate spider images in outer space than a Cajun accent on Earth. But consider this:  Is it coincidence that we’ve discovered no insects on Mars? Mais, je ne connais pas, me.