A few months back, I had the pleasure of reading Dana Stevens’ Camera Man, which is a new biography of Buster Keaton that attempts to place Old Stone Face into a historical context. Stevens sees Keaton’s lifespan and the particulars of his story as a way of documenting the rapid changes in American life over the course of some seventy-odd years. He was born into a world that had cinema, of course. However, it was still seen as a novelty and grew up being flung around a stage by his father in their vaudeville act – a profession that Buster himself would help kill off, at least on these shores, when he made his way to Hollywood and joined an ascendant cast of famous faces. His post-sound career collapse is paired with a discussion of the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, a short-lived television show he worked on is used to discuss the evolution of that medium, and Stevens does her best to foreground this information with its relevance with regards to one’s own life in the present day. Now, you may be wondering, why the hell is this dude spending valuable virtual page space about a Buster Keaton biography when he should be writing about Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s impressive new documentary about the one and only David Bowie? Well, aside from the few allusions and tributes to Keaton that Bowie made throughout his career (and which Morgen includes here), its because I think Camera Man and Morgen’s film share a similar sort of thesis: As Stevens’ work is about the creation of the 20th Century through a single person’s biography, Morgen uses Bowie to tell the origins of the 21st, with the chameleon-like nature of the artist’s stagecraft – and his refusal to accept any sort of stasis – to emphasize the shifting moods and cultural vibes in the decades before Y2K. But it’s through Morgen’s style that this initial contextualization grows into a transcendent understanding between subject and viewer, ultimately making Moonage Daydream less a general cultural overview and more of an intensely empathetic mind-meld, as profound as a shout of “you’re not alone.”
Now, Morgen definitely is not telling this story in a traditional, chronological fashion: Much of Moonage Daydream is “unstuck in time,” as Vonnegut put it, with the filmmaker taking images from whatever period of the artist’s life feels appropriate for the mood he’s trying to evoke. Ziggy Stardust will make an appearance in sections presumably about the Berlin Trilogy, or Bowie’s haggard Lazarus from Blackstar will be intercut into a segment recalling his painfully “normal” childhood, etc. This sort of disjointed mood-based montage storytelling should have been expected by anyone who has seen any of his previous films (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck being perhaps the most famous but June 17, 1994, his 30 For 30 film about the O.J. Simpson Broncho chase and the way the sports media reacted in real-time to the event, is one of my all-time favorite docs), but it can be particularly jarring if you’re not particularly familiar with his style. It’s an assault on the senses that’s meant, as went the opening of Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, to be PLAYED LOUD, and trust me, by the time the ’90s come and a thundering pseudo-industrial live version of “Hallo Spaceboy”, is thrown at you with clips from Johnny Mnemonic and other cyberpunk/low-tech futurist classics, you may very well try to cover your ears. But only so much of Bowie’s chronological life informs Morgen’s story: The rest is all told by the century itself.
As you probably are well-aware, Bowie achieved his first fame with “Space Oddity” after a few years of floundering as a folk-hippie artist – a shift straight towards a technological future from a faux-pastoral vibe that hit its peak of popularity in the summer before the moon landing (this theme of technological innovation underwriting phases of Bowie’s career — aesthetics he would ultimately help shape — is a major part of how Morgen grounds his subject in history). It’s with an evocative image of a dead astronaut, whose jeweled skull sits in his helmet in between the crags and craters of the moon, underneath a looming black star, that Morgen begins his film. The image of the doomed Major Tom is one that Bowie himself would return to over the course of the decades, most famously in “Ashes to Ashes,” and Morgen’s very first shot crafts a composite that feels akin to the kind of reinterpretation of the old that his subject would do: The skeletal remains of the beginning of his career, with his bones recovered by a long-tailed girl for preservation and celebration. If this is a Pagan funeral for a fallen god – which is Bowie’s own interpretation of celebrity, with people using the artist as a way of filling the God-shaped hole – it certainly turns into an Irish wake by the time that Ziggy Stardust shows up a few minutes later.
I’m not going to waste your time by listing out the innovations he and the Spiders of Mars would make during that period in Bowie’s life, but this was his first true shot across the bow in culture: A queer, unstable element leaping headfirst into a world that genuinely didn’t have a good framework for understanding him (the interviews in which puzzled talk show hosts try to grapple with the man they’re talking with who are initially bemused by and then become enamored with him are quite memorable), handcrafted by an artist who discovered that he could change the world like his heroes if he really wanted to. Plenty of people fucked with gender expression in that era. Still, nobody did it quite as memorably as Bowie did – instantly iconic in his aggressively stylish way, wielding his bisexuality like a broadsword. It’s amusing to think about how many songs on Hunky Dory, Bowie’s record before Ziggy, are intended as tributes to some of his icons – Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol – but after that, he’d achieve a status that meant he’d be getting the tributes written to him by musically-inclined fans instead.
And those fans – crying outside of his shows, gleefully soaking in his radiant vibes – are one of the point-of-view perspectives. Morgen’s often chided for attempting to get into his subject’s head in a way that’s prone to misinterpretation, but I think that criticism is somewhat of a fallacy. Montage of Heck had its detractors, but it’s more akin to Gus Van Sant’s Last Days than Kurt and Courtney or whatever generic documentary with an outrightly-stated thesis and viewpoint. As much as he’s trying to accurately portray his subject’s interior life, he’s also documenting our relationship with it, a kind of emotional historiography that might not have worked for Cobain but works beautifully for Bowie. His relationship with his audience is, ultimately, his relationship with himself as an artist, with the ebbs and flows of passion and frustration underwriting his incredible productivity (as a television news piece glimpsed in the film points out, he recorded 17 records, acted in a number of films, and led a Broadway production before his mid-30s). It’s this dissatisfaction with his status quo that Morgan finds so much bitter poetry in, assisted, of course, by Bowie’s film work (some referenced here, off the top of my head: The Hunger, Just a Gigalo, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and, of course, Labyrinth). The Ziggy era ends as he becomes the Thin White Duke, full of blue-eyed soul, whole milk, bell peppers, Aleister Crowley, and plenty of cocaine, but the hits of that era – Young Americans, Station to Station, etc. – are only briefly glimpsed given their emergence in a period of artistic wanderlust, which Morgen depicts using gorgeous shots from The Man Who Fell to Earth, Roeg’s 1975 masterpiece, which also happened to the musician’s first major film role in the midst of that experimental moment.
Such is how the film proceeds from there: Bowie moves through the major periods of his life with aplomb and restlessness, and Morgen summarizes them in vivid detail without straying too far from the emotional nexus of Moonage in favor of simplistic anecdote or detail. The artist’s narration is doubly fascinating, given how it acts as both Ur-Bowie, guiding us along through his chimeric forms, and as a kind of paced and measured reflection, one observed with a tragic fatalism as Bowie tries to couple with the fact that he is, in fact, mortal. His words are full of Gethsemane-like struggle, especially when recounting the tale of his half-brother, an RAF airman who Bowie idolized, who also introduced his younger brother to subculture and outsider art (a warm relationship within his family, which apparently were few and far between), before his schizophrenia fully emerged. He was institutionalized for the rest of his life. For every journalist who wondered if Bowie was crazy, this puts it on the record, once again, that Bowie himself had his doubts about his sanity. But other small self-criticisms (his need for audience love, his oscillation between cynicism and optimism) would feel petty if they were not backed up by the currency of his talent and productivity – this is a man who did all of this and yet, he still feels that he hasn’t done enough? – and his coping mechanisms to offset that doubt become clearer and clearer. His art, of course, is one, but so is discomfort, such as a period in which he recalls moving to Los Angeles, a city he detests, to provoke himself into making something worthwhile, as well as loneliness and isolation, a tenet-based facade that only falls later on his life when he meets Iman (set to the swooning “Word on a Wing”).
This is how Moonage Daydream relates to us and how it creates empathy rather than just admiration – it uses the emotional range of Bowie’s work in music and on film and canvas to create an understandable mood as if we were given a day pass to whatever Valhalla awaits bards and balladeers after they shed their mortal coils. We’re no closer to “knowing” Bowie at the end of it, but we are somewhat closer to knowing ourselves, where we’ve come from and where we’ve been, and, most importantly, how to move forward and pivot should we wish. This, to me, is more important than what a talking-head documentary can often bring to the table, which is not to insult the form: plenty of great filmmakers can coax excellent interviews from subjects, tell coherent and well-explained stories about real events, and some can plunge themselves into the depths of lived experience and seek out some kind of first-person truth.
But when you’re confronted with a documentary like the one Morgen’s made here, one is overwhelmed by sound and vision, but through the noise, an abstract yet profound clarity kind of emerges: This man transcended himself, and I can as well. Bowie admonishes us to never “waste a day,” which feels like a platitude until you realize that this was a man who wasted enough of them to gain awareness of that loss as the sands of time began to accumulate on the wrong side of the hourglass. Moonage Daydream, ultimately, is an exultation for one to live and to do the best they can to live as well as possible, and though one’s life might not be as flashy and odd as Bowie’s, it can very well be as profound. This was, after all, the pleading truth embedded in one of his most important recordings: we can be heroes, and he and Morgen want you to know that it doesn’t have to be just for a single day.