Life on Mars?

Since there are so many comments, here is a summary of at least one line of interpretation: Georgy writes that the meaning of Is there Life on Mars is like "stop the world I want to get off, and another that it is in search for intelligent life. And hey, what if the friend she was to meet was Bowie? The film would be in his absence. It is on the tortured mind of America that Mickey Mouse has been commercialized as CapNemo notes. The workers have gone on strike to gain fame, and one commentator there were worker strikes in England at the time (Capnemo), and the Disney workers had gone on strike to have their names mentioned in the film credits (mnonm). These lines somehow parallel the opening of the song in the lyric structure, and so are like the home life of the girl, in an analogy set up by the lyric structure.

The next four lines parallel the girl going into the theater. The poet directs our gaze from Amerika to Britain, to the millions of citizens that are like the million hordes of the mice, from the south to the Northern limits of the realm. The mousy hair means that the girl of the first part is one of them, the mice (CapNemo). Mickey Mouse connects with the hordes of mice and the girl with the mousy hair to mean the average citizen made a star, not even Mighty Mouse, a hero who appears small but is mighty. That he has grown up a cow requires further explanation. Bewleybro writes that it is the biblical golden cow, the idolatry like that of the Jews below Mt. Sinai. James Madison recalls that this was once the title of the British national anthem. Rule Britannia is the range of the empire politically, and so, the poet notes, it does not extend to my mother, my dog, or clowns. The range of the kingdom and hence the modern state is by nature limited, prevented from governing the family, animals, and clowns, i. e., fools or madmen. Ask mothers, or even lawyers like Sir Edmund Coke, whether the crown rules inside the family. Hence the song is not totaliarian.

As the film is a bore because the girl has lived it, so the politics of the commercialization of the imagination and the effect of John Lennon on the workers is a bore to the poet, because he has written it already, as many times as the girl has lived the fighting of the sailors and the errors of the law. The sailor and the lawman stories are like Mickey Mouse, a commercialization of the imagination. The Lennonist response to the capitalist subjection of the imagination, and the quarrel between the working class and commercialization, is to the poet a godawful small affair, as the quarrel between the parents over the theater is to the daughter. Bewlaybro writes"Everything she sees on film, she sees in real life," and this is a criticism of Lennon for a lack of imagination. The spelling of Amerika is the German spelling, used by the socialists (DavidB), Jim Morison and David Bowie is agreement with the socialist criticism of the emptiness of capitalism, as distinct from agreeing with socialism. But this story is being writ again in this song, "Is there Life on Mars." So the poet Bowie looks to the starman or the man who fell to earth in the search for life or for intelligent life, transcending the political realm of Britain and Amerika. So Honkey Dory leads into Ziggy Stardust, and in the images of the starman and the Mars man Bowie will represent the poetic apprehension of that invisible republic, above the caveman world of the modern state, even in its better examples.