January 11, 2016: Here at SBTB HQ, we’re quiet and sad about the death of David Bowie, and we kept returning to this entry where we discussed Jareth, his appeal, the layers of bad boy villain and potential redemption. We’re resurfacing it here to pay a small tribute to the character and person who transfixed so many of us, and we’re re-opening comments if you’d like to add yours.
I’ve always struggled to understand why some readers find a controlling, super-alpha hero attractive. I got down-right snotty about it for a while before I realized that I, too, have known the love of a man who is fun to fantasize about but who is a terrible, terrible person…Jareth, from the movie Labyrinth, played by the gorgeous and very, very bad David Bowie.
Labyrinth is a movie featuring people and Jim Henson’s Muppets. The movie is a coming of age story about Sarah, played by Jennifer Connelly. She’s a bratty young teen who doesn’t want to grow up. She idolizes her missing mom, resents her stepmom, and feels put upon by her father and stepmother when they ask her to babysit her baby brother Toby. When Toby cries, Sarah says she wishes the goblin king would take him away.
Enter the Goblin King, Jareth, played by David Bowie. Here’s a sampling of Jareth’s actions:
- He kidnaps a baby
- And sends an under-age girl through a maze full of machines and creatures that might kill her
- And threatens to turn the baby into a goblin
- All of which causes Sarah to be almost killed and/or made permanently stinky
- He has Sarah’s memory erased so he can attempt to seduce her via magical roofie
- He sends the baby crawling after a ball on a set made of M.C. Escher-style stairs in a fashion that is CLEARLY not safety minded. If he had electrical outlets, he probably wouldn’t even put those safety covers on them.
He also looks like this:
At the climax of the film, Jareth says that he did everything for Sarah:
Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for *you*! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations. Isn’t that generous?…I ask for so little. Just fear me. Love me. Do as I ask, and I shall be your slave.
For those of us who were around the same age as Sarah (she’s fifteen) when the movie came out, this sparked lively discussion – should Sarah have rescued Toby or should she have stayed with Jareth and ruled over the Goblin City with him?
Jareth is a skeevy older guy who preys on under-age girls, he’s a kidnapper, and he’s certainly controlling – and all of us would have laid down our lives for him in a blink. Sure, David Bowie, take all the younger siblings you want as long as you dance with me in that weird giant bubble.
Behold the scene which is creepy as shit, actually, but also pretty much totally defined my adolescent sexuality:
So many of the Bitches encountered Jareth in our formative years that we all have thoughts. Jareth is a shit, ladies! He’s scum! He’s not even sorry! He’s going to keep being scum! So why are we helpless before the power of the tights?
Amanda:
As a teenage girl, it’s hard not to be mystified by Bowie’s bulge in The Labyrinth. Seriously. Whenever it’s in a scene, it’s an impossibility to take your eyes off of it. That man knows his assets.
HOWEVER! I am not here to wax poetic about Bowie’s bits. Though I could. If you really want me too.
For me, this is probably the earliest example I can think of where I was totally into the bad guy. Let’s not get into the fanfiction that I devoured because of this. I’m blaming Jareth for my eschewing the well-meaning hero and pining for the morally ambiguous, unfairly attractive villain instead, even though I’m well aware that they are awful people. THEY CLEARLY JUST NEED THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN TO CHANGE THEM.
- Jareth/Sarah
- Draco/Hermione (where my Dramione fans at?)
- The Phantom/Christine
The list goes on.
There’s an arrogance that comes with being a villain; they’re so self-assured in who they are and what they’re doing. They’ll exercise their power and do whatever is necessary to reach their means, and it just flips all my switches. I’m a fixer by nature, so perhaps a character needing (though perhaps not actively seeking) redemption appeals to that personality trait.
Give me a good bad guy any day of the week.
RHG:
He’s right in that gives her what she (thought she) wanted. She wanted an adventure. She wanted to be frightened. She wanted to get the damn baby to shut up. She wanted to be the center of attention for someone and be appreciated for being her and not the live-in baby sitter. (Was that unfair for her to think that’s all she is to her dad and stepmother? Yes, but 15 year olds are not known for being fair.)
And being of the age where all I wanted was that – adventures and attention and being in peril and have to think my way out of it (but not ACTUAL peril, adventure movie peril) and those pants – that had a profound effect. A girl, on an adventure, who had to think her way through it and collect a bunch of friends along the way (and the implications that either her toys were Real or it was in her head)?
Either way I could relate to everything Sarah went through. Stepparent with whom she had a cantankerous relationship. Conflicted feelings about a younger sibling’s very existence. The desire to playact and live deeply in fantasy and books. Wearing a vest because it was the fashion.
I want to unpack the “Love me, fear me, do as I ask and I will be your slave” thing a bit more. I think this was the first introduction many of us had to the concepts that arise in BDSM, before any of us had a word for it. I remember thinking that on the surface, that was SUCH a huge contradiction, and yet…. and yet… it was intriguing. How would that work? He did give her everything she asked for and there was a pretty dress and Bluto and well… why not? At least consider the choice he’s given you, girl!
I also love this Fan Theory on what Jareth’s deal is. IT EXPLAINS SO MUCH.
CarrieS:
First of all, thanks Mom, for making me a version of Sarah’s vest that I wore constantly and that my kid is now wearing constantly. Many generations will wear that thing, clearly. As an adult I think Sarah is incredibly irritating but as a kid DAMN but I wanted to be her.
I think one thing that makes it easier to crush on Jareth is that the story isn’t presented as a romance. The difference between Edward in Twilight and Jareth in Labyrinth is that we aren’t being tricked into thinking of Jareth as a hero – he’s always presented as a bad guy.
When Jareth drugs Sarah so that she enters a trance and finds herself dancing with him in a magic bubble, the scene embodies all the tension of discovering your sexuality – it’s kind of scary and kind of hot and you have to find your own power within it. But even though the scene itself has these romantic elements (the song, the dress) it’s not presented as a romantic thing that Jareth did. It’s quite clearly presented as an evil and manipulative thing that he did. If I felt like the writer or director wanted to convince me that drugging Sarah was an admirable and romantic act, I’d be revolted, not turned on.
It’s a scene with a lot of contradictions that I’m able to enjoy because it’s presented as a complicated scene. As a teen, this spoke to a lot of things I was juggling – fear of being exploited and having not being able to make my own decisions, a completely contradictory desire to not be held responsible for my own decisions because sexuality is scary, a feeling that sex is dirty and creepy (Sarah is totally creeped out by the dancers with their grotesque masks) and a feeling that sex is glamorous and alluring (Davie Bowie’s hair and make-up deserved their own Oscar).
I can’t stand romances in which controlling heroes are portrayed as romantic heroes unless part of their arc is that they meet their match in the heroine and/or they change in the course of the story. But I LOVE a broken-hearted villain, i.e. Eric from Phantom of the Opera and Loki from the Marvel movies.
Readers, did Jareth awaken strange new stirrings with you? What unrepentant, has not changed, is still evil, villain or villainess has rocked your world, and why? Should Sarah have stayed in the goblin world with that amazing dress or what? Let us know your thoughts.
Yes to all!!
Jareth was my first bad boy crush, the one that showed me I was ruined for the “good guy hero” character.
I saw the movie when I was 9 years old, and become pretty obsessed with it to be honest.
I think he is the reason for my Dramione love and of course for my Loki feels 😛
It’s such a relief to finally be able to discuss my Jareth crush without shame! I also love the recommendations here – I’d give considerable sums of money for a labyrinth romance novel. The nearest I’ve come to satisfying the craving is L.J Smith’s Forbidden Game trilogy which has the bonus of Norse God mythology and rune stones.
“But I LOVE a broken-hearted villain, i.e. Eric from Phantom of the Opera and Loki from the Marvel movies.”
And this is why I love Snape and write fanfic about him under the name of excessivelyperky on ffn. Bad hair, crooked teeth, toxic liver (he’s been inhaling his students’ mistakes for years) and all. And why some of us think Princess Lily didn’t deserve *him*. Although mostly I pretend he didn’t die in the Shrieking Shack.
I also loves me my Rumples on ONCE UPON A TIME; you never know which section of the Wheel of Morals is going to turn up at any given time.
See, the fun part about villains that we love is that…those of who write get to change their names and turn them into heroes.
It’s fun!
I’m surprised I haven’t seen this mentioned above, but to my mind the sexiest villain was the highly conflicted in-love-but-wanna-be-evil-except-not-if-it-hurts-her villain played by Richard Armitage in Robin Hood. https://youtu.be/AvKgrAqtkBs
We’ve re-opened comments to this entry should you wish to add one.
RIP, Goblin King.
If there’s a rock and roll heaven
You know they’ve got one hell of a band.
When I woke up this morning to the news of David Bowie’s death, I thought of this post and all of the comments. He was truly one of a kind, and an amazing musician, and will be missed.
His video for “Lazarus”, beyond being a classic example of all things Bowie, is all the more eerie now because it sounds like the “Goodbye and thanks for the good times!” from a dying man to all of us. This is the kind of loss music never quite recovers from. There will never be another like him.
I so loved this movie as a kid.
R.I.P. David Bowie (The Goblin King is immortal.)
NP: Bowie’s cover of “Across the Universe”
Btw, if anyone is the market for a physical copy of Darkstar, it was somewhat cheaper at Barnes and Nobles website this morning.
I thought of this article and all the comments this morning when I heard the news this morning. I sort of believed (maybe the way we all do about famous people) that David Bowie would live forever, always there, always doing his thing. His music was part of my youth and, like many of us here, so was Jareth. Hard for me to believe that yet another of the influences that helped shape me is gone. Rest in peace, David Bowie. Thank you.
I always saw Jareth as being misunderstood. I was 9 when Labyrinth came out. The first time I watched it, I hated Sara. (I know, big whoa there)The second time I hated her more, and I fell in love with Jareth a bit more.
I saw him as a manipulator, sure, but he also loved her, in some crazy underage skeevy way. He gave her everything she ever wanted, even knowing the dalliances of a child’s mind and her being a spoiled brat.
Yes, his way of getting and giving her everything her heart desired, landed on the horrible side. But, don’t we have to look to ourselves and ask, what would we do to make the person we love happy? Now, we wouldn’t necessarily drug someone or kidnap a baby for them, but he took the most literal of her wants and gave them to Sara. All he asked, in a most poetic way I might add, was for her to love him as he was.
That’s what pissed me off about it. Because in all reality, to me anyway, Sara didn’t love Toby. She certainly didn’t love her father who also grieved for her mother but decided to move on, she only cared about herself. I don’t even know if she loved herself, honestly. The reason she frantically tried to find her baby half-brother is because she knew her dad wouldn’t be happy with her or worse. She wasn’t scared for Toby. She didn’t hurt for Toby.
I remember looking at my mom at the age of 9 and saying, this is a tragic love story. I think I surprised her when I said it. She gave me a curious look and said, why do you think so? My answer was so simple. The Goblin King loved her so much, he gave her everything, and she rejected him. She broke his heart by saying; “You have no power over me,” when in reality, she had all the power over him. And, even when she returned home, he still watched over her as an owl.
Long live the Goblin King.
It just broke my heart this morning to hear David Bowie passed away. I know he was mainly known for his music, but Labyrinth is what *I* remember him for with such fondness. Definitely watching tonight as a toast to such a talented and unique person.
RIP Mr Bowie; you were so many people, from Ziggy Stardust to Jareth to Nikola Tesla, and all of them fabulous.
Someone mentioned the voiceover animations of this comic so I wanted to attach a link to the real thing (it starts at the latest one so go back to the last page for the beginning – does that make sense?) http://pika-la-cynique.deviantart.com/gallery/772068/Girls-Next-Door
And also this one which was actually the original inspiration for Girls Next Door: http://asherhyder.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=600
(same deal here, although I have set the link at the start point for you)
I watched this movie when I was a few years younger, but it was years after it had come out. I had bought the VHS at a yard sale and watched it once for fun…. I thought I was crazy for being attracted to the Goblin King. I’m so glad I’m not the only one! 🙂
Oh, I’m so sad today. There are very few people that you just look at and go, “Yeah, someone like that will never happen again,” people that just seem to be somehow touched by God. Where God just looked at that one and said, “Yeah, you get to be David Bowie.”
I was in the car this morning taking the kids to school and “Let’s Dance” was playing, which is one of my favorite songs. So I’m blithely singing along and then it ends, and the DJ announces that David Bowie had passed away. I covered my mouth and whispered, “Oh, no. Oh, My God.” I’ve been pretty much playing David Bowie nonstop in my office today. I’m on a mission to see how many times I can listen to “Modern Love” and “Golden Years.” RIP, Goblin King. You were proof that magic does exist.
just so very sad
A legend and I fell in love with him when I watched Man who fell to Earth
but he was a genius
In every single thing he ever did
RIP David
It’s been a very long time (at least the days of VHS) since I’ve seen LABYRINTH. I do know that the illusion with the orb was not special effects but was a technique called one-handed juggling (not nearly as dirty as it sounds; there are books that teach it). Anyway…
Part of the appeal of the villain is that while they may be selfish, wandering, and unreliable, they’re handsome and sexually experienced (and possibly into the sort of kinks and activities that well-behaved people “shouldn’t” know). Someone once wrote about Ray Liotta’s character in SOMETHING WILD that while he’s obsessive and dangerous, he’s passionate and probably wild in the sack.
Part of the appeal is one of my least favorite romantic tropes: the reformed rogue, the idea that all that’s needed to turn a villain/bad boy to become responsible, loving, and loyal is the love of a good woman. To me, this is the wishful thinking that makes someone think a man who’s had 89 one-night stands will suddenly want something more, instead of thinking how to get to 91, 92, etc. after finishing with the woman who is sure her love can change him.
Some of my favorite unrepentant-but-sexy villains are from the Black Lace novels — especially WHITE ROSE ENSNARED and DARKER THAN LOVE — where the villains are selfish and horrible and uncaring but also sexual dynamos (“I hate him and he’s just using me, so the next time he takes me to bed I won’t have more than three orgasms — four, max!”) and at the end the hero kind of adopts some of the villain’s moves that the heroine enjoyed with the villain.
Oh, and here’s an oddly appropriate bit of David Bowie from THE YOUNG ONES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZp4EsIQg1k I suspect he’d get a kick out of that.
I was up late (as Usual) and was utterly shocked when I saw the breaking news bit about his death. It surprised me how affected I was. I think it’s too soon for me to do a movie marathon in his honor, but I’ll do just that when I’m not so sad.
When I was twelve years old the main ways to get books was through this book order form that came through the class room once a month. This was how I got the book from the movie Labyrinth. At the time I knew next to nothing about the movie. We never went to the movies and only had one TV channel that really worked. Anyway I wanted the book simply because I thought the guy on the cover was hot. Though that wasn’t quite the right term, there was just something about Jareth that I couldn’t define but I wanted to read about. Over the years I have bought many a book because of an attractive male on the cover but David Bowie’s Jareth was my very first. RIP David Bowie
I haven’t been here or posted in a long while, but when I saw this link in my FB news feed I felt I had to pop on by.
I essentially grew up listening to Bowie thanks to my eccentric older sister (she introduced me to Warren Zevon, too, another gone much too soon rocker) and was way past teenage girldom when Labyrinth was released. Heck, ’86 was the year I got married, I’d probably been listening to Bowie since Space Oddity was released in the US in ’73.
However, because Bowie was in it, and there were Muppets! I eventually watched Labyrinth, on VHS, and found it kind of tacky, I guess being nearly 30 just made me too old to appreciate it as a teenager would. But heck it had BOWIE, and the HAIR! He played a cool dude, he has always played cool dudes in whatever I have seen him in.
When I heard he had died I was stunned, and stunned at how much it affected me, I’ve spent most of the day listening to his music, reading tributes on line and posting links. I am glad I once got to see him perform live during his Serious Moonlight tour. It was an incredible concert performance, because Bowie did not just sing; he performed, he became his characters. He was a chameleon, a genius, a great goblin king, and dear god, how I miss what he would have done next.
So very sad Bowie is gone. He was utterly unique.
My daughter is turning 5 soon and was very interested in the Labyrinth GIFs. Perhaps there will soon be another Labyrinth fan! I hope so.
Oh yup. In Top Gun, I liked IceMan. I still think Fanny should have married Henry Crawford.
@LunaRocket: welcome back. I completely understand how you and others feel – I was surprised by how much the news of his death affected me, too. I’m sorry that it’s sad news that brought you over, but I’m glad to see you visiting!
@SB Sarah: Thank you. I do enjoy reading the reviews and HaBO when I am here, I can only say there is just so much to do on line and off that I just have to pick and choose. My big interest is in science, fiction and fact and other than some dreadfully tame Harlequin Romances I read at the beach as a teenager (because it was the only thing Grandma had laying around at her rented beach house), I had never even thought to read a romance novel till DH’s “favorite sister” loaned me two. Wish I could remember how I found my way here shortly after, but my mind isn’t what it used to be.
But getting back to the subject, I too, was a bit surprised about my reaction to DB’s death but when I thought about it, I really shouldn’t have been, he’d been a big part of life growing up, and his wonderful marriage to Iman just made me happy. I have discovered that I love a(n) HEA and it breaks my heart to see hers broken. I can only imagine how I would feel if I lost my DH and I just fall apart all over again.
Damn it.