The two most symbolically-resonant deaths of our era have been that of Queen Elizabeth II this year, and that of David Bowie, back in 2016.
At that time I wrote three Songbook essays, No. 114, “David Bowie and the Songbook,” No. 115, “David Bowie as Democratic Changeling,” and No. 116, “David Bowie, Changes.’” (There was digital-decay marring of the last of these, so I’ll present a ‘healed’ version here soon, but the main body of the piece survived.)
The main message of those three pieces was that Bowie mattered, because he became a hero-symbol of the kind of Freedom our societies encouraged us to pursue and divinize.
He still matters, and we now have a new film on him which some are labelling the definitive one. It takes its title from one of the more sexed-out (and cliché-reliant) songs from the Ziggy Stardust album, “Moonage Daydream,” and director Brett Morgen, who with the blessing of the Bowie estate was able to utilize its collection of footage, interviews, and stills, describes it as a non-narrative immersion piece. It does not provide the viewer with standard rock-bio explanatory material, and generally limits its spoken words to ones from Bowie himself or newsreels. You’re plunged into a rockstar dream-freakout, and obliged to make sense of it yourself.
For the first forty-minutes, it works. It’s the grandest music video ever, with the D.A. Pennebaker footage of the Ziggy Stardust tour as its main course, but spiced and spliced with hundreds of Morgen’s own insertions, effects, sounds, and references: there’s Bowie strutting in 1972, here’s some colorized bits from silent films like Metropolis, rocket-engine noise, the crowd, one of Ronson’s guitar solos, galaxies, footage from the 2015 Blackstar video, a British teenage girl gushing over Bowie, stills from the Ziggy period, and clips of Bowie’s own elegant voice, often from when he’s looking back on it all, all mixed together. Several times, the film’s montages speed-up in a crescendo parallel to the pace or volume of the music.
A psychedelic experience, an experimental film.
One interesting thing it does is to begin with some of Bowie’s more profound statements on the need to search, to seek to fill the gap left by the supposed Death of God—a Nietzsche quote or two even marches across the screen, but out in outer-space, on a surreal moonscape, in fact, interspersed with shots of awe-inspiring galaxy-centers and such. And then, we in a sense come to earth with Starman Bowie, landing in the midst of the Ziggy tour. It’s a journey from the philosophic heights down into the mad god-inventing maelstrom of rock’s poetic bluster, glorious in its youth-worship and erotical charge. Here we are, experiencing the Ziggy Stardust tour through kaleidoscopically-tinted glasses, and hearing a state-of-the-art blast of sounds along with the sights. No explanation or road-map is offered, the better to present it as some kind of poetic journey or hallucinogenic trip. If you don’t know the ABC’s about Bowie’s career, you’ll be confused a bit—and initially, this is a choice that works for Morgen. Like no film I’ve seen since The Doors, the first forty minutes of Moonage Daydream enacts Rock Mythologizing and Rock Wildness.
But, where to go from from there?
Well, there is much more footage to show, many more elegant sayings of Bowie to float into our hearing—the pace slows down, and we get some good reflections on Bowie and his family situation when growing up, the expected glimpses of his gender-bending gestures, some illluminating reflections on his pattern of radical emotional distance, and before we know it, we’re in the desert, going to Los Angeles, and we begin to see interviews and footage from Bowie’s uber-decadent LA period, and Bowie’s own later musing about why he went to live there, when he already knew it was a city he loathed.
And then…
…and then…
…you see, Morgen didn’t know what do to after those first triumphant sequences. He had set Bowie up as an artistic figure of near world-historical importance in the opening space/moon bit, a stance I am ready to accept and work with (albeit from a social-conservative perspective that pits other principles against Bowie’s), and had most-spectacularly presented him as an Alien come-to-earth, done all this dream-like, but was he now going to proceed this way Bowie-period by Bowie-period?
Eventually, after learning a number of interesting things in interesting ways, and after another montage-crescendo hints at how decadent and near-suicidal his life got in Los Angeles, sure-enough, we’re then falling into the oft-told story of his needed retreat to and reinvention in West Berlin.
That’s all pretty good cinema if you know your Bowie, but still, you begin to feel yourself squirming. Is this film a dream sequence? A documentary? Where will it go now, and…what was the running time of this thing again?
It turns out there’s only one other style-period closely focused upon, that of the 1983-84 Let’s Dance album and tour, but from what I’ve said you should be able to tell that the basic problem with this film is that Morgen couldn’t decide whether he wanted a film centered upon, and thus limited by, his amazing Philosophic Alien-Star come down to Ziggy Bachannalia sequence, or, an Experimental No-Hand-Rails Rock-Documentary kicked-off by it. The result is that by about seventy-minutes in, most viewers will begin to get antsy, and the more demanding sort of Bowie fan will be beginning to get annoyed. Both types will sense there isn’t a coherent story here—it seems to become a matter of a new stylistic direction is chosen, new creativity is unleashed, and there something Sacred about that, Genius about that, and sure, perhaps something to be learned by other artists from that, but it all begins to seem the same story, over and over.
The film does reveal that at some point, post-Berlin-stage, Bowie began to become more comfortable with himself, and less prone to emotional isolation. Visually, it offers us scenes of him soaking-in the hidden corners of some Southeast Asian nation, with his meeting the locals, singing with them, looking spiritual on a river-boat ride and so forth, to help convey that, but it’s mainly the extensive quotation from his own lips that does the work there, and I was grateful enough to hear his testimonies of his relative happiness after so much pain, even if I was getting restless myself.
That theme of his growing contentment blends at one point into a suggestion that the Let’s Dance album and tour, so notable for its return to classic pop-song, was his attempt to re-integrate himself into the wider Western/international culture, and do something deliberately “positive” for it, now that he was feeling more positive. And yes, I am among those masses who like “Modern Love,” “China Girl,” and the title track just fine. So, it’s a bit of a dissapointment when the film proceeds to quote him as regretting his bowing to popular taste there, just a couple of years later, and seeming to present some of his forgettable angsty work from the 1990s as artistically truer.
Anyhow, by that point, Morgen has thrown up his hands. He’s trapped—he’s only got 20 minutes left before the audience goes utterly stir-crazy, and he’s got the rest of the 80s, the 90s, the 00s, and the last days to cover, and more importantly, from Bowie’s marriage to the Somalian model Iman in 1992 on, he’s got the portion of David Robert Jones’s life that is the most private, normal, and non-rock-star to deal with, the portion that is the resolution of the theme of isolation Morgen had been touching on. There’s just no making sense of the iconic life of the 70s-into-the-80s without bringing it thoughtfully up against that latter-half of his life. Briefly showing us the hitherto unseen paintings by Bowie or (IMHO unpleasant) concert-footage from the 90s doesn’t cut it, to say the least, and it again screws our attention onto the Icon of Avant-Garde Creativity, rather than upon the man. Overall the film won’t admit in the slightest any limitations to or shortcomings of the man’s Art, which may be why it won’t show how he made room for other aspects of life besides it.
I was struck by the fact that we see stills of Iman for less than thirty seconds, never see her filmed, and never hear her voice. We never see them together at home. We never hear Bowie describing their life. (Maybe the estate prevented any of that?)
Now of course, some radical cuts would have to have been made if you were going for the documentary approach within a single film. Thoughtful Bowie fans will note a number of big topics that aren’t dealt with by Moonage Daydream, but only the insane would have expected a documentary to not have shoved at least several of them aside: A) Bowie’s early career and first marriage, B) Bowie and Money, C) Bowie and Sex, D) critical evalutions, E) Bowie’s new role as a more marginal pop/rock-figure from the late-80s on, F) life with Iman and retreat from public eye. But none of these are dealt with, even if surface-y aspects of Bowie and sexuality are inevitably touched on given his image. (Note also that the topic many of our progressivists would most want addressed—Bowie and the LGBTQ identities—is ommitted, although I suspect it had to be given Morgen’s determination to stick to Bowie’s own words, and Bowie deliberately saying little about that topic.)
Again, I would have been fine with all such ommissions if Morgen had not gone quite a few steps down the bio-doc path, that is, if he had found some way to break off his film after the retirement of Ziggy, or had jumped forward to some other phase decades later, or done something to indicate a decision about what kind of film this would be.
As it stands, it is an experimental-bio-doc that falls apart and is just given up on in the latter half of the life, tacked onto a brilliant long-form music video.
So I would say the film fails as a whole, and I would not recommend it for those who don’t already know a good bit about Bowie.
But those first thirty to forty minutes—whew!