Brett Morgen's Moonage Daydream is a 140-minute shape-shifting epiphany that leads to the revelation that, yes, we are David Bowie lovers and that's it. It's a gloriously celebratory montage of Bowie's archival footage, live performance footage, video art and experimental paintings, film and stage work, and interviews with various normcore TV personalities to whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open, and charming.
As a rock star, Bowie was a unique artist, esthete, insurgent experimentalist, gender maverick, and unrepentant and unrepentant cigarette smoker. (I wonder if he ever gave that up?) Morgen includes the traditional gallery of student posters of the various icons Bowie can be compared to: Oscar Wilde, Buster Keaton, James Baldwin, Aleister Crowley, all perfectly acceptable, but none of them. quite close to the sweetness and idealism of Bowie's rock. The physical beauty of him, in my opinion, can be compared to Wilfred Thesiger.
What I loved about Morgen's film was the way it shows that his fans, especially the euphoric young men at the Hammersmith Odeon and Earl's Court shows, were no different from Bowie: they became Bowie. Overwhelmed, transfigured, their faces resembled his. One boy says, with the passion of a convert on whom enlightenment is dawning like the rising sun: "You don't have to be bent over to wear makeup!" We're talking about the '70s, of course, but... well... it's fair, no, it's not.
The film does not cover Bowie's personal life as such, although it does touch on his half-brother Terry and his strained relationship with his mother. Angie is not mentioned, but Iman is: this film is about the public Bowie, the Bowie of surfaces and images. His personal life is a mystery: he says that he has never bought property in his life (at least before settling down with Iman) and that he only lived in London or Los Angeles or Berlin, simply pursuing the vocation of an artist, although an artist who he has been generously and profitably recognized in his own lifetime.
Morgen suggests, probably rightly, that Bowie's great period probably came to an end with the '70s, but that his intellectual curiosity and creativity continued to have something heroic and magnificent about them as the years passed. And maybe his adventures in other art forms, like mime Marcel Marceau type or playing the Elephant Man on stage, were a little misjudged because he had already absorbed all of these things, he was already tapping into that kind of energy in his personality from rock. Some of his film performances were better than others, but again the point was that he had included film stardom as an ingredient in what he was already doing. The nervous rush of his presence continues long after the film is over.
Watch Moonage Daydream 2022 Movie Trailer:
Comments
Post a Comment