A bored girl in a cinema becomes the witness to a culture that keeps replaying itself as spectacle. The private hurt is small — the girl with the mousy hair, parents shouting, friend absent — but the screen enlarges it into sailors, cavemen, lawmen, Mickey Mouse, Lennon, Britannia, fame, violence, advertising, and national myth. The joke is that escape is no escape: the film is a bore because she has already lived it, and the singer knows it too — I wrote it ten times or more. The question Is there life on Mars? lands less like science fiction than a plea for somewhere outside the loop.

The recording makes that plea feel grander than its evidence should allow. Bowie sings the absurd collage as if it deserves opera, while the piano and strings give it a real tragic lift. The steady pull underneath keeps the fantasy from floating away; the song is ornate, but trapped in forward motion. What remains is not an answer about Mars, but the ache of wanting any world not already sold back to you.