DREAMING of LIFE ON MARS by elizabeth hart bergstrom

This story starts with a mixtape and a boat. If it weren’t for my older sister and brother, I might never have fallen in love with the music of David Bowie. And if it weren’t for my older sister and brother, I might never have fallen in love with a rocky island in the Atlantic Ocean, eight miles off the coast of New Hampshire. With that fondness for the ocean and Bowie songs cemented at a young age, it was no surprise that the songs of Seu Jorge in the movie The Life Aquatic became a mainstay in my music collection. In 2021, a year whose theme for me has been alienation with small flickers of hope, I find myself thinking most of all about Jorge’s version of “Life on Mars?”.
My sister made me a Bowie mixtape when I was about thirteen, with the tracks carefully handwritten on the insert. It included songs from Bowie’s self-titled 1969 album and from Hunky Dory, including “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars?”. I looked up to her and took her recommendations as gospel because she was eight years older than me, smart and funny, and had been the lead singer of an actual rock band in high school. She and my brother—five years older than me, also smart and funny and weird—undertook my musical education in the late ’90s, not just Bowie but the Pixies, Elliott Smith, PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, funk, jazz, and anything else we could get our hands on at record stores and thrift stores. Music was a lifeline to survive depression and bullying in our teenage years, and mixtapes were love letters we sent each other as our closeness as siblings grew.
My sister was also the one who found out about Star Island. I first traveled there on a ferry boat with my family when I was ten years old. Home to a haunted Victorian hotel, wreathed in fog and surrounded by jagged cliffs, it was exactly the kind of adventure setting I imagined while reading fantasy and mystery books. I became fascinated by the island’s crashing ocean waves and its stories of ghosts and buried pirate treasure. As teenagers and young adults, my siblings and I made a journey there every summer to go to Unitarian Universalist summer camp. We saw a twenty-foot shark swim alongside the ferry boat, borrowed wetsuits to snorkel in the cold harbor, and spent hours in the marine laboratory on the island, where naturalists teach visitors about local wildlife and fill tanks with lobsters, starfish, flounder, hermit crabs, and mackerel, then let them go. The starwatching there is phenomenal, far from the lights of the mainland.

It was on that island that my brother taught me and a friend to sing the backing vocals to Bowie’s “Changes” while he sang the lead melody. We sat inside the two-hundred-year-old stone chapel, lit only by flickering candle lanterns at night, and felt the reverberation of our voices and my brother’s guitar. There’s something magic in the acoustics of those white-painted walls. Whatever songs I sing there become dear to me for the rest of my life.
So I got a CD of Hunky Dory, which opens with “Changes,” and listened to the album on repeat throughout college. I put glow-in-the-dark stickers on the buttons of my Discman so I could press play in bed at night with my headphones on. The fourth track is “Life on Mars?”. I was drawn to its melancholy lyrics, tinny piano, and the plaintive style of the vocals. I understood the song as a story about a teenage girl trying to escape her abusive father by going to the movies, but everything the screen shows her is something she’s already seen before. Jaded, lonely, but still hoping to be surprised, she wonders about life on Mars because she thinks there’s got to be something better than this.
Others read the song as a critique of fame and shallow entertainments that serve only to distract and regurgitate the same storylines, which I appreciate, although I’ve found escapism through fiction more necessary than ever during the pandemic. Especially with the technological advances of streaming and online shopping for those who can afford them, it seems there are an endless number of movies to watch, albums to listen to, and products to buy (more or less ethically). But they don’t necessarily make us happier or kinder people. I imagine this sentiment was true for Bowie when he released Hunky Dory in 1971, and it feels true to me fifty years later.
Toward the end of my college years, the movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou came out. I loved its soundtrack, stop-motion animation, and retro aesthetic—which I later learned was an homage to oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, including the red knit caps, blue button-up shirts, white research boat, and yellow block letters announcing each location. The film shares my affinity for the ocean and Bowie.
Brazilian musician and actor Seu Jorge plays much of the soundtrack, reinterpreting Bowie songs with lyrics rewritten in Portuguese. His character is named Pelé dos Santos, a crew member on oceanographer Zissou’s boat who sings and plays guitar from the ship’s deck, recording studio, and crow’s nest. For me, he sets the emotional tone of the movie. Director Wes Anderson only gave him five lines, which is its own issue, but his music speaks for itself. Jorge released his Bowie covers as a standalone album in 2005, and for Christmas my brother gave me the CD, which I’ve been listening to ever since.
Jorge’s voice, a rich baritone singing an octave lower on “Life on Mars?” than Bowie recorded it, stands out strongly against his finger-picked acoustic guitar. There’s a feeling of emotional intimacy, vulnerability, and earnestness. What’s striking to me now in reading translations of Jorge’s lyrics is how much more tender and hopeful his rendition of “Life on Mars?” is than the original. Instead of a story about a jaded girl going to the movies, Jorge tells a love story. He keeps the English phrase “life on Mars” while spinning a story of two lovers who dream about a future with an infinite blue sky and the possibility of escaping to a life on another planet.
Bowie also admired Jorge’s musical talent and these covers, writing in the liner notes of this album: "Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs acoustically in Portuguese I would never have heard this new level of beauty which he has imbued them with.” Bowie could be tender at times, too, as in other tracks on Hunky Dory like “Fill Your Heart” and “Kooks.” But Jorge’s versions went beyond the usual changes made by covers—tweaking the tempo, instrumentation, or vocal style—to create something so compelling and original in its own right that I now hear the echo of Jorge in Bowie’s versions.
I kept listening to both recordings for a decade as I moved from job to job, relationship to relationship, to grad school, and eventually to New York City.
I was working in the West Village when Bowie died in January 2016. The news hit me hard in a way the deaths of celebrities never had before, only equaled a few months later when Prince died. Celebrity is tricky, of course—I knew almost nothing about Bowie as a person, and wouldn’t claim he was perfect in that regard, but he had shaped my ideas about music and androgyny as the Goblin King of my childhood, the Man Who Fell to Earth, and the Starman of my adult life. That week, I walked from my office to the apartment where Bowie had lived on Lafayette Street. Fans had created a shrine on the sidewalk outside, piled high with bouquets of flowers, prayer candles, feather boas, LPs, handwritten notes, and packets of astronaut ice cream. Silver glitter spangled the pavement. A painting of Bowie’s face with the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt gleamed on a gold background above hand lettering: “BOWIE FOREVER.”
I met two women who had brought an oversized fuzzy spider dressed up as a Spider from Mars, complete with two green antennae, a red disco ball, and a vintage Bowie button. They attached the spider’s legs to the police barricade and sprinkled it now and then with a jar of glitter they’d brought from home. Despite the cold wind, many of us huddled there in our winter coats for a long time, paying our respects.
Later that year, I heard Seu Jorge was performing his Bowie covers live as a tribute tour, and I jumped at the chance to get tickets to his New York show at Town Hall. I went alone since plans with a friend fell through, but found the audience was a sea of familiar red knit caps. Jorge was wearing one, too. The stage was decorated with fishing nets, wooden crates, and a ship’s wheel, with a projection screen showing a silhouette of Bowie. Jorge gave a charismatic and generous performance interspersed with anecdotes about how he came to work on these covers. Like the fact that he’d only known two Bowie songs before being asked to work on the movie, neither of which are on the soundtrack, or the fact that prior to the movie he confused Bowie with Billy Idol, since they were both white guy-glam rockers. Jorge later shared that his father had died the same week Bowie passed away, so he dedicated his songs to both of them, and the emotion that imbued his performance that night moved me to tears. It’s not surprising that apart from his Life Aquatic fame, Jorge has a long and successful career as a samba musician.
I wonder what the idea of life on Mars meant when Hunky Dory was released in 1971, just a few years after the first humans landed on the moon while the world watched in wonder on their TV screens. And what does it mean now, with rovers and helicopters exploring the red planet and billionaire/robber baron Elon Musk planning to build colonies there? (Musk also launched a Tesla into orbit around the sun in 2018, which sounds like an eyesore of space junk, but at least the car stereo is playing “Space Oddity” on repeat.)
Now we know that icecaps cover the Martian poles, and a vast ocean used to cover a fifth of the planet. There’s still so much to learn about our own ocean on Earth, but I have to admit it’s exciting to think about strange aquatic creatures that might once have lived on Mars. A NASA article written by Charles Q. Choi notes that “life could even be there now, hidden in subterranean aquifers.”
I still like dreaming about space through Bowie songs and covers, but I don’t imagine space as a place where we could escape the problems of Earth, its climate change and illnesses and inequality.
I haven’t seen my brother in almost two years because of the pandemic. I miss his humor and the sound of his guitar. My sister and I live in the same town and have become part of each other’s support system, which I’m deeply grateful for. I dream about the day we can all be together again on Star Island and strum “Life on Mars?” around the campfire before roasting marshmallows. To Seu Jorge, and to David Bowie, thank you for lending a soundtrack to these friendships, and thank you for expressing in music the wonder we feel when we sit by the ocean and look up at the stars.

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom’s writing appears in The New York Times, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Her best music bona fides is that she saw Elliott Smith play the 9:30 Club when she was sixteen, and she liked his Ferdinand the Bull tattoo. You can find more of her work at lizbergstrom.com or on Twitter @Liz_Bergstrom.