David Bowie played many characters in his career but for lots of fans, one stands out as his most iconic, most defining, most beautifully weird. And it’s not the one you’re thinking of. It’s Jareth, the dashing antagonist in 1986’s Labyrinth, which enjoyed a 35th anniversary reissue in September.
The more serious type of Bowie scholar can get a little prickly about Labyrinth. The film, arguably Bowie’s most mainstream cinematic role, is glossed over in most of his major biographies, dismissed as the slightest of the projects undertaken in what is generally (and unfairly) accepted as a creative dead zone between Let’s Dance in 1983 and 1993’s Black Tie White Noise. For the Mojo-reading, vinyl-polishing, Ziggy-worshipping acolytes of a certain age, Labyrinth is too camp, too childish, too silly. There’s more to it than that though.
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