Cinema Journal 57 | No. 3 | Spring 2018 by Sean Redmond In this essay I explore three film and television fiction cameo roles that David Bowie has performed in. Bowie brings the complexity of his shifting star image to each cameo performance, drawing on competing and sometimes conjoining artistic traditions as he does so. The parameters of posing and mimicry, self-reflexivity and cultish subversion, and the shifting ground of modernism and postmodern- ism show how Bowie’s cameo performances are not singular or consistent but rather refer to the specificities of the text in question, the other authors and actors involved, and the multifaceted nature of his star self. When Bowie embodies a cameo role, a series of intersecting star and performance registers are in play that suggest that he is always in cameo. The three texts that I have chosen to analyze are Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992), Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001), and Extras (Ricky Gervais, BBC, 2006). 1 These texts occur across film and television, as well as artistic and commercial streams, and they take place over a twenty-year performance period, allowing one to see how Bowie embodies and breaks down the very constituents of the cameo role. I predominantly refer to those texts where David Bowie appears as David Bowie, the exception being Twin Peaks, where he takes on the “disappearing” role of FBI agent Phillip Jeffri es. These texts also address the various plateaus of Bowie’s star image, as each draw on different and competing moments from his career. The questions that frame this reading of the cameo performances are, Which David Bowie is being brought into view? How is the text using him, and why? I look at each text in chronological order, both to narrate the cameo in relation to the perceived notion of the artist’s career progression and to build sedimentary layers of analysis: one cameo builds on the previous one, and yet calls it forth, in the same way Bowie’s star images linger on. The shape-shifting David Bowie ultimately complements, and in part resides in, the floating landscapes of his (always in play) cameo performances. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me: A Disappearing Cameo. David Bowie’s cameo in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me occurs near the start of the film. The scene begins with an establishing shot of the cracked Liberty Bell, followed by a cut to an interior shot, where FBI agent 1 “The David Bowie Episode,” Extras, aired September 21, 2006 (BBC) David Bowie: In Cameo © 2018 by the University of Texas Press