I have a cold. As I cough and re-watch childhood favorites Legend and Labyrinth, it becomes clear to me that my love of highly sexualized powerful bad boys started at a very young age. I ALWAYS preferred the big-horned devil over ‘good boy’ Tom Cruise, and if it had been a choice between living with David Bowie’s Goblin King, Jareth, and my little brother…well, let’s just say the baby and those singing muppets would have all been s**t out of luck. I’m not evil or anything. I just thought the ‘bad guys’ were more interesting. Here’s why:
1) They were powerful. Jareth the Goblin King had a castle, and the big-horned guy had huge diamonds.
2) They were packing. David Bowie’s tights made it very difficult to look into his eyes during the dancing scenes, and the devil was a centaur–so quite literally, hung like a horse.
3) They knew what they wanted. Sure, their scheme may have been a plan to kill babies and bring about eternal darkness, but at least they weren’t saying that they were ‘still finding themselves’ or ‘not sure when they could commit’.
I can understand attitude making someone more interesting, but in that pic the always androgynous David Bowie looks like a geisha with 80’s heavy metal big hair. And he wore tights tucked into boots with heels. If only I had known at the time that this look did it for girls at my high school…