The casting here is no coincidence. Bowie and Sakamoto, both pop music icons, were huge at the time (1983). Their real-world celebrity was crucial to their onscreen characters: celebrity generates fascination, but must preserve distance to do so. The fan is drawn to the icon and projects the fulfillment of all sorts of inchoate desires upon him or her; but the distance between the fan and the icon allows these fantasies “to be,” as Yonoi significantly quotes from Hamlet. Similarly to how the lens in a film projector is required to be a certain distance from the screen for the movie to be seen, so the icon is required to be a certain distance from the fan for the fantasy to be imagined. But distance prevents a personal relationship. Any attempt to bridge the distance will collapse the fantasy, and the icon will cease “to be,” as such.

Oshima uses the distance between celebrity and fan to inform the taboo of homosexuality in the military. When Bowie-as-Celliers strides across the parade grounds in a time-is-suspended-type long shot, he collapses this distance, culturally, erotically, and conceptually. His gesture can be interpreted as a Western type of seppuku, performed to save another officer. By collapsing the bubble of celebrity, he destroys Yonoi’s fantasy relationship with him, and in consequence destroys himself. The icon is brought down to earth in a particularly gruesome way, as illustrated by Celliers’ subsequent punishment.

отсюда /прошу прощения, что на английском, нет времени перевести