Their dynamic is wrong in every size and colour, and – depending on whether you’ve spotted the other character Bowie plays in the film – could be about to get a little bit more wrong. Jareth spies on Sarah, comes into her bedroom, drugs her, dances with her, and promises to be her slave if she’ll love him, fear him and do as he says. Jareth’s a 300-year-old Goblin King (played by a 38-year-old pop star) who wants to live within 15-year-old Sarah. Like Bowie’s codpiece, it stares you in the face all the way through the film. It’s not as if nobody noticed the vibe between lead characters Sarah and Jareth at the time, or in repeated viewings since. The simple fact of knowing that something is unhealthy doesn’t stop it from being fun, which is to say that it’s still okay to love Jim Henson’s 1986 cult kids’ film Labyrinth while acknowledging that its sexual subtext is creepier than a drunk uncle on a camping trip. A chocolate-filled doughnut, for instance, can be delicious even while it crams our arteries with trans fat.
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