Talk:Drive-In Saturday

Fair use rationale for Image:Bowie DriveInSaturday.jpg
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 * Fair use rationale has since been added to the image in question. Cheers, Ian Rose 09:50, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

It isn't about pornography
The reference to porn films in the lead section is an interpolation, apparently based on an overly literal reading of Bowie's phrase "make love." The "video films we saw" from the lyrics are a pastiche of romance and romantic comedy, and contain no overt sexual content. Perhaps the reference to Twiggy gives the best clue as to Bowie's intent. She had recently starred in the Ken Russell film The Boy Friend, itself a splendid pastiche of 1920s Rogers and Hart musicals. Tasty monster (=TS ) 11:36, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Spycoops (talk) 05:04, 2 March 2016 (UTC)Spycoops

I agree the song is not about pornography, it's about something altogether more naive.

The description Ian had, that humans could "forget" how to reproduce, is not believable. Humans were able to figure that out without pornography. In Bowie's post-apocalyptic world people have forgotten the niceties of courtship, the shy beginning to sexual love, such as shrugging, asking to stay over, and the uncertainty. The crash course is watching old movies where this happened with stock characters.

Also Ian's version says nothing about the reading of books as a method learning which is also in the song.

It is no rationale to quote the cited source which actually says nothing about the narrative of the song.

Thank you. No criticism intended.
 * No criticism from my side either, but interpretations of songs need to be based on reliable sources, not one's opinion. The cited source (Carr & Murray 1981) for the passage in question explicitly mentions porn films and not books, i.e. "The song describes a future time when active sex has become something of a lost art which has to be painstakingly relearned from videos of old porn movies screened at drive-ins." Now I think the wording in the article reflects that interpretation. It may not be the only reading of the song so I have no objections to prefacing the passage in the article with "According to authors Roy Carr and Charles Murray..." or some such, and adding other interpretations from other reliable sources, if you can provide them, but to remove cited material because you disagree with it, or to alter the article wording and leave it referenced to a source that doesn't support the interpretation, is not helpful. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 06:08, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
 * P.S. I'd also agree that "reproduce" is not an appropriate term per the citation (it wasn't a word I'd written) and that something like "make love" better reflects the source. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 06:35, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

HI Ian - As you will have noticed, i'm a novice with this wiki editing thing. Just got in and made a bunch of edits around attribution after seeing a few academic works unreferenced about the place. Feel free to edit my edits as you see fit. :) Isabels Picnic.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by IsabelsPicnic (talk • contribs) 01:54, 22 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Coming into this discussion 4 years late. I've been thinking about this for a while. To me, the song is clearly not about porn films, but more mainstream films.
 * First, references to Twiggy and Mick Jagger don't suggest porn.
 * Second, the lines "She's uncertain if she likes him / But she knows she really loves him" suggest the "she" has learned about love and romance from more romantic films. She knows what it means to like someone, and doesn't feel that way about "him", but her understanding of love comes entirely from old films. She doesn't know what that feels like, but she knows she's supposed to be in love and what it's supposed to look like. They imitate love based on how films portray it, and she thinks that's what love is - she would say she knows she loves him, even if she isn't sure she actually likes him. Earlier, she has learned to affect coyness: "She sighed like Twig the wonder kid / and turned her face away". Love and coyness are not the kind of things you would learn from porn films.
 * Third, and most importantly, there's nothing at all in the song that suggests porn. I have no idea where that interpretation even comes from.
 * Now I know this is all just my interpretation, which of course to Wikipedia is irrelevant unless I can persuade a publisher to publish it, at which point it becomes practically gospel. But there are lots of books on Bowie, and I wondered if someone else has access to ones that give a different intepretation so we can improve the article.194.82.210.247 (talk) 17:17, 9 March 2020 (UTC)