First of all, I love David Bowie. Love love love David Bowie. I even loved David Bowie in 1986, after Let’s Dance and Tonight made him officially irrelevant (or, as my friend

puts it, “once you’re on the cover of Time, your career is officially over”). I own both Tin Machine albums, plus the ultra-rare live Tin Machine album Oy Vey, Baby. So I think my cred as a David Bowie fan is pretty high. And the casting of David Bowie as the Goblin King sounds perfect. Bowie is at his best when playing enigmatic, otherworldly creatures — space aliens, Andy Warhol, Nicolai Tesla.

But Oh. My. Freakin’. God.

I could look past the Tina Turner wig and the overwrought kabuki eyeshadow. I could sort of look past the Mad-Max-goes-gay-Nazi wardrobe. I could even, if pressed, look past the fact that the writer (Terry Jones!) hasn’t given the Goblin King anything in particular to do. But I find I cannot look past the aspect of David Bowie’s performance in Labyrinth that should have been the strongest: the songs.

I spent far too muchof the running time of Labyrinth wondering what the hell happened. Bowie has a rich understanding of song forms, why didn’t he write anything remotely appropriate to the narrative of the movie he was appearing in? It honestly sounds as though the Henson people approached him to star in their movie and then, as an afterthought, said “oh, and will you come up with a few songs?” and Bowie, the ink not yet dry on the contract, looked up and blinked and said “uh, yeah, sure, why not?” and then, as the shoot date loomed, hastily scraped together some scraps of unfinished jams from the Tonight album and gussied them up in the studio.

In a great musical, the songs advance the plot. In a middling musical, the songs entertain. In Labyrinth, the songs neither advance the plot nor entertain. They are, in fact, obstacles to overcome. Labyrinth repeatedly says “We’ve got some more movie coming up folks, but in the meantime we’ve got to get this woefully misbegotten song out of the way.” Harold Arlen this is not.

The lack of a plot doesn’t help matters (how can a song advance a plot if there is no plot to advance?). Labyrinth is about a maiden, Sarah, whose step-brother is kidnapped by the Goblin King. What does the Goblin King want? Good question. The Goblin King, for some reason, wants Sarah’s infant step-brother. But wait — the Goblin King, immediately after snatching Sarah’s step-brother, sets her a challenge — 13 hours to negotiate his fiendish labyrinth and rescue the boy. So, wait, does he want the kid or not? If he wanted the kid, why would he give Sarah the opportunity to get him? Why would he cut her any kind of deal at all? She has nothing on him, she has no leverage. If he wants her infant step-brother, he would just take him and be done with it. And, as he is the Goblin King, “fair play” cannot be the answer. No, obviously the Goblin King wants Sarah to negotiate the Labyrinth for some other reason. What might that reason be?

Sarah, the viewer will note, is a spoiled brat, a snotty princess with a room full of tchotchkes who considers an evening of babysitting to be the Spanish Inquistion (hey, don’t look at me, I’m not the one who brought Terry Jones into this). Maybe the Goblin King wants to force the rash Maiden into growing up a little, maybe he wants to teach her a lesson. Well okay, but then he’s not a very good bad guy, is he? The Wicked Witch of the West doesn’t want to “teach Dorothy a lesson,” she wants to kill the little bitch — the “teaching a lesson” part of the story falls to Glinda, who gives Dorothy the ruby slippers to protect the maiden on her journey to self-actualization.

So the Goblin King doesn’t want Sarah’s brother, and he doesn’t want to kill her, and “to teach her a lesson” makes absolutely no sense. Why is he doing this then? The reasoning the Goblin King gives at the end of the movie was that the Labyrinth is meant to be a kind of seduction of Sarah — he put her through the test of the labyrinth in order to break her down, erase her ego, and then make her suseptible to his gobliny predations.

This makes a certain amount of sense, and it is perfectly satisfying in fantasy-movie terms. The Maiden’s job in a fantasy scenario is often to be seduced by the corruptions of adulthood before regaining her senses. But here the notion is utterly undeveloped. If the Goblin King’s intent is to seduce Sarah, why doesn’t he do anything to achieve that end? Indeed, the Goblin King, once he’s set Sarah on her course, barely stops to think about her again. Once he gives her his challenge, you know what the Goblin King does? He goes back to his lair with his goblin puppet buddies and waits. He lounges on his Goblin King throne, he plays with the infant step-brother, he sings excruciating 80s pop to him, he shows off his grey tights with their penis-enhancing cut (David Bowie’s Penis should really have its own credit in this movie — there’s a shot where he thrusts it, in close-up, into the face of a dwarf, that literally snapped my head back in revulsion). When he learns that Sarah is successfully negotiating the labyrinth, the Goblin King is startled and enraged, and then goes and throws a monkey-wrench in her path, but otherwise he pretty much just sits around, stares out of windows and sings his clattering, tuneless crap. The Goblin King, apparently, has nothing to do, and yet he can’t be bothered to actually participate in the narrative he has set into motion; when he does act, it’s with petulance and impatience. Some villain! It’s as though we’ve caught the Goblin King on a bad day; what he’d really like is to be in another movie, but this one will have to make do for the time being. It’s as though the Wicked Witch of the West, once her sister is killed, were to threaten Dorothy’s life and then go back to her castle and sit around bored for a while. Yeah, yeah, ruby slippers, okay, um, how about flying monkeys?

Imagine the worst Bond villain in the series. Imagine Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. Imagine Scaramanga, with his third nipple and his midget sidekick and his stupid fucking plan to somehow corner the energy market and, oh yes, develop a death ray, and, you know, as long as we’re at it, kill James Bond. Scaramanga is one of the worst villains in the history of motion pictures, but his story arc is the goddamn Dark Knight compared to the Goblin King in Labyrinth.

As I’ve said, the plotting of Labyrinth is, essentially, nonexistent. The movie has a setup and a finale, and then “a bunch of stuff” in the middle. I can hear the story meetings quite well — a group of talented designers and puppeteers — no, but really quite talented — sitting around a table saying “Oh! And you know what would be great?!” without any sense of plot, theme or character. Hey, you know what would be great? A dance number where the puppets’ heads come off! Hey, you know what would be great? A big drill contraption! Hey, you know what would be great? A big orange beast thing! etc. And let it be said that the design, apart from the horror of Bowie’s costumes, is quite excellent indeed. The optical effects have not aged well, but the practical effects are all charming and wonderful, the talking doorknobs and the snakes that turn into feather boas and the walls that seem to be there but aren’t. There is real imagination making its way through Labyrinth, but almost no sense of structure. Or, to put it another way, it has a Gilliamesque approach to design, and a Gilliamesque approach to structure as well.

Sarah meets a handful of characters. There is Hoggle the Dwarf, Ludo the Beast or Ogre or Something, and Didymus the Creature Who Both My Wife And I Thought Was a Fox But Turned Out To Be a Yorkie. The purpose of these characters is, or should be anyway, to reflect some aspect of Sarah’s problem. And I guess in some vague way they do. Hoggle kind of but not really teaches her something about friendship, Ludo teaches her the value of kindness to strangers, and Didymus teaches her about chivalry. Then, none of these lessons turn out to have any value whatsoever in Sarah’s goal of “retrieving the baby.”

And let’s look at that goal again. Sarah is 16 or so and, in spite of the fact that she looks exactly like a teenage Jennifer Connelly, we are told that she has never had a date. And, as far as the narrative is concerned, she doesn’t seem to want any dates. Is she “saving herself”, somehow, for the Goblin King? If she is she doesn’t demonstrate that desire — she just pouts and whines and refuses to take care of the baby. When the baby is taken away however, she instantly regrets her actions and feels compelled to rescue it. So Sarah goes, in one plot point, from “maiden” to “mother” without having the pleasure and/or terror of any of the steps in between — no courtship, no romance, no wedding, no initiation. You’ve never had a date? Boom! Too late, you’re a mother now — deal with it!

And so the movie actually ends with Sarah, having (spoiler alert) rescued the baby and abjured the Goblin King, going to her room and putting away all her dolls and games and fairy tales and tchotckes. In Labyrinth, you’re either a child or an adult, there is no in between.

As always, I invite my faithful readers to submit their favorites of the genre under discussion.  What should a screenwriter well-versed in the Fantasy genre see?