You may not believe, livin’ on the Earth planet … Astronauts get played, tough like the ukulele…

~ Dr. Octagon, “Earth People”

Chris O’Leary, for better or worse, summed up Bowie’s first true hit, 1969′s “Space Oddity,” with a single phrase — not a dismissal, but a matter of fact: “it’s a gimmicky folk song dressed up in extravagant clothes.”

True.  But just about every science fiction franchise, and certainly every member of the peculiar genre we call the “space opera,” is subject to this same summary judgment.  Star Wars, for all its lasers and roaring spacecraft, is basically a spaghetti western, part shoot-em-up adventure, part Bildungsroman.  The Matrix trilogy, with all its post-punk Baudrillardisms and cave-rave excesses, is essentially a meditation on the Christus Victor atonement model, as read through a mixture of equal parts Lewis Carroll and Bruce Sterling.  And don’t even get me started on Tron.

“Major Tom’s fate is a resignation of sorts to the cosmos,” O’Leary continues.  “Bowie had intended it to be the technocratic American mind coming face to face with the unknown and blanking out—but the song wound up being a harbinger of our cultural resignation, predicting that we would eventually lose our nerve, give up on the dream, and sink back into the depths of the old world. Perhaps we aren’t built for transcendence, and the sky sadly is the limit.”

“Major Tom’s fate” is precisely what interests me here.  Though I find O’Leary’s analysis brilliant and quite well-informed, I have a different trajectory in mind — for this post and the two that will follow.  I want to go hunting for Major Tom through his erstwhile appearances in and around the Bowie oeuvre, reading them not so much as harbingers of “cultural resignation,” but with an eye firmly on that question of transcendence.  What, if anything, can David Bowie’s enigmatic rocket man tell us about God?

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