Charli XCX Is Firmly In Her Cinephile Era

The novelist Walter Tevis described his 1963 sci-fi novel The Man Who Fell to Earth , obliquely inspired by his struggles with alcoholism, as “disguised autobiography.” It had been optioned at least three times before attracting the attention of director Nicolas Roeg, who saw it as a more spiritual story of alienation. Roeg initially wanted the main character, an extraterrestrial inventor, to be played by the 6-foot-9 sci-fi writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton, or Peter O’Toole, the beautiful manic adventurer of Lawrence of Arabia ,__ before being persuaded to check out Cracked Actor , a tour documentary featuring a coked-out-of-his-gourd David Bowie. Through Bowie, Roeg transformed Tevis’s author surrogate into what Pauline Kael would call “a wilted stranger [who] can be said to represent everyone who feels misunderstood,” whose “lesbian-Christ-leering [and] forlorn, limp manner and chalky pallor are alluringly tainted.” In other words, he’s David Bowie as he was in 1976: Fashioning the character around the remnants of Bowie, the rock star from Mars of the Ziggy Stardust period, the film also shaped the zonked-out, esoteric magus Bowie of Station to Station and Low , which both use stills from the film for album covers.

When a pop star appears in a movie, they deepen the movie by bringing everything we already know about their star persona to the role. The movie also deepens them, by giving them a platform to develop what we already know about that star persona in a visual and narrative medium, and to leave a bigger impression as they seem to bestride the entire cultural landscape.

The stakes of each impression—which is also the term in digital marketing for when a potential customer sees an online advertisement—have never been higher, as margins shrink in the culture industry. To put across a persona—or, as the current media-bestriding pop star now has us calling it, an “Era”—stars employ ever-larger teams of creative directors, stylists, videographers, and assistants. They carry the hopes of ever more label executives, brand and agency partners, and potential collaborators, not to mention potential collaborators’ teams, labels, and brand and agency partners.