Muristek
Brett Morgen’s intimate montage of the uniquely influential artist celebrates his career, creativity and unfailing charm
Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is a 140-minute shapeshifting epiphany-slash-freakout leading to the revelation that, yes, we’re lovers of David Bowie and that is that. It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming. (There is the inevitable Dick Cavett – who deserves a documentary of his own – also Russell Harty, Valerie Singleton and Mavis Nicholson, though my one disappointment is that Morgen didn’t include the legendary 90s TV interview with Jeremy Paxman in which Bowie tried to convince Paxman that this internet invention was going to be very important.)
As a rock star, Bowie was a unique artist, aesthete, insurgent experimentalist, gender dissident and unrepentant, unselfconscious cigarette smoker. (I wonder if he ever gave that up?) Morgen includes the traditional student-poster gallery of the various icons to whom Bowie can be compared – Oscar Wilde, Buster Keaton, James Baldwin, Aleister Crowley – all perfectly allowable, but none of them quite approximate Bowie’s own sweetness and rock idealism. His physical beauty in my view can be compared to Wilfred Thesiger.What I loved about Morgen’s film was the way it shows that his fans, especially the ecstatic young people at the Hammersmith Odeon and Earl’s Court shows, were not different from Bowie: they became Bowie. Overwhelmed, transfigured, their faces looked like his face. One guy says, with the passion of a convert on whom enlightenment is dawning like the rising sun: “You don’t have to be bent to wear makeup!” This is the 70s we’re talking about, of course, but … well … fair enough, no you don’t.
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