Jareth is a fictional character and the main antagonist of the 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth. Portrayed by David Bowie, Jareth is the powerful and enigmatic king of the goblins to whom protagonist Sarah Williams wishes away her baby brother Toby. Jareth gives Sarah thirteen hours to retrieve the baby from his castle at the centre of an enormous labyrinth, during which time he sets obstacles in her path and tries to entice her away from her quest.
The character was created by director Jim Henson and writer Dennis Lee, and designed by Brian Froud. Several contemporary musicians were initially considered for the role besides Bowie, including Sting, Michael Jackson and Prince. Henson first approached Bowie in 1983 to offer him the part, and the character was developed with Bowie in mind—who was also hired to write the songs for Labyrinth, performing three in the film as Jareth.
Conceptualised as the inner fantasy of Sarah, Jareth's character design was influenced by Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Rochester from Jane Eyre, as well as the Scarlet Pimpernel, medieval knights, Grimm's Fairy Tales, ballet dancers, contemporary rock stars, and "leather boys" such as Johnny Strabler from The Wild One.
Reception to the character has been generally positive, with critics praising Jareth's magnetism and costuming. Bowie's performance as Jareth, while alternately lauded and derided by contemporary critics, has since become one of his most celebrated film appearances.
Development
Conception and writing
Labyrinth started as a collaboration between director Jim Henson and conceptual designer Brian Froud following their previous collaboration, The Dark Crystal. In making Labyrinth, Henson wanted to create a film that combined elements of fairy tales and classical stories in a script that would appeal to a modern audience. According to Froud, he and Henson decided to have human characters as the lead roles in order to make Labyrinth "more accessible and immediate" than The Dark Crystal, which had featured only puppets. Henson explained that they structured Labyrinth "in a way that the human is really carrying the whole picture" and acts as a "bridge" between the fantastical puppets and the audience. In the film's initial discussions between Henson, Froud, artist Wendy Froud and writer Dennis Lee, the character of Jareth was first conceived as a shapeshifting "prince of darkness" who kidnaps a king's baby, spiriting it away to the Castle of Darkness at the centre of a great labyrinth inhabited by goblins. Wishing to avoid similarities to Ridley Scott's original fairy tale film Legend, which was in development near the same time as Labyrinth, Henson and his team made significant changes to Labyrinths main characters and story. They decided to have the protagonist be an adolescent girl, Sarah, who journeys to the centre of the Labyrinth to rescue her baby brother after wishing him away to the goblins. Describing the subtext of Labyrinth as being "about the growing-up process of maturity ... a young girl right at that point between girl and woman, shedding her childhood thoughts for adult thoughts", Henson intended to partly represent this in the figure of Jareth, who exists in Sarah's imagination. Henson said of the character:
In Lee's early version of the story, Jareth had solved the Labyrinth long ago but "never had the courage to return to the real world". During the drafting stage, Henson and screenwriter Terry Jones had a fundamental disagreement about Jareth's character and what the story would be about. Jones envisaged Jareth as a "hollow man" who merely seems "all powerful to begin with" but is actually using the Labyrinth to "keep people from getting to his heart." In Jones' original script, Jareth represented "people who are more interested in manipulating the world than actually baring themselves at all", and is destroyed by Sarah reaching the Labyrinth's centre. This idea "didn't mean anything" to Henson, who intended his film to be a girl's coming of age story.