Words by Annie Fish
“What does David Bowie mean to me” is one thing, obviously— he means everything to me, and that bias was always going to be the biggest obstacle against me having an unfettered good time during Moonage Daydream. The joke I made to myself going in was “this is the battle for the soul of David Bowie.” It’s a bad joke, obviously, but I think it gets towards something that I personally spend too much time thinking about. I tried as hard as I could to be realistic. I know I am not the “typical Bowie fan.” But then I thought, well, what even is a typical Bowie fan anymore? Consensus on the man has changed a lot over the last ten years. Where once there was clearly demarcated eras of Bowie’s life that were off-limits to enjoyment, now even Pitchfork calls Tin Machine “unfairly maligned.” The playing field has never been more level.
But there remains the question that I really don’t know— what does David Bowie mean? What does he mean to the world? What do other people think about David Bowie? I wonder if there’s any use at all in thinking of something like “a legacy,” but I wonder now that it’s been six years since Blackstar and nearly ten years since The Next Day and the anniversaries just pile up, how is history going to record David Bowie? Like the big book of knights in Game of Thrones— who is it that gets to write the entry on David Bowie, and what is it going to say? It’s a huge undertaking, even without unprecedented access to “literally everything,” to the full archives of David Bowie. If everything’s in front of you, how do you narrow it down to anything looking like a “narrative?” Do you forsake narrative and go for pure iconography? Do you touch on every bit of a huge and fruitful career? Or do you narrow it down to a certain timeframe?
Or do you blame Iman for the creative death of a musical iconoclast and reinforce the most tired, spent opinions about "David Bowie" and reduce him to little more than just a man who once was Ziggy Stardust?
As time extends from my late-night viewing of Moonage Daydream Monday night, I find myself growing more sour on it. At first I was just something approximating bewildered, maybe a little disappointed, even as I kept the thought in my mind that “hey, this movie was never going to be just for you.” I knew what not to expect. And yet— and yet— what Moonage Daydream tries to say about David Bowie’s life feels genuinely poisonous to me, like the last gasp of a boomer’s dream of the 70s coming back to strangle the forbidden new one last time. I’m not kidding about the Iman thing, either— the movie goes out of its way to imply that their marriage meant a creative death for David Bowie, even as a dozen albums and quotes from the man himself in the movie actively refute. That’s sexist as heck, and just ignorant of the subject matter.
But even beyond that, the “narrative” here places such a high mark on Ziggy that it strains against itself. David Bowie himself obviously moved away from Ziggy Stardust, he spent his whole career moving away from Ziggy Stardust, and yet Moonage Daydream constantly returns to it, invading sections of the movie where there’s no need to. Want to see this scintillating footage of the Diamond Dogs tour? Sure, but it’s going to be set to the album version of “Cracked Actor.” Want to know more about literally anything he did between 1983-1996? Well, cool— here’s some more footage of the final Ziggy Stardust show. Want to know anything about what he did in the 2000s? Nope, movie's over, here's "Starman." It does this despite including clips of Bowie himself writing off the importance of Ziggy, breaking him down to nothing more than pieces of inspiration.
And that’s the thing— when David Bowie is allowed to speak for himself (and the movie’s only dialogue is made up of interview clips from only David, so he's granted that opportunity quite a bit), the movie reaches something close to magic. The sequence that stands in for the “Berlin Years” is great— it’s mostly Bowie talking about capital-A Art, and why he makes it, and what it means to him, and why Art and its creation is important, and it’s fantastic. It’s proof that he was a deeply intelligent person who was always considering what he was doing. There’s a sequence that’s just like, thirty of his paintings huge on the screen, and they're beautiful— the man was pretty good at painting, too! He got better at it over time! That’s great to see, and does more for demonstrating how David Bowie thought about his own status as an artist than any slapdash, over-processed montage of outfits could ever do.
That’s the most frustrating thing at play here— the use of David Bowie talking about himself often cuts against the desperate attempt to put a narrative choke on him. But it also tries to have it both ways, trying to reinforce things that go against themselves. The worst example of this comes with Bowie’s 80s, which was always going to be a thorny part of any documentary about the man, and yet still the movie finds a way to make it even more vacuous.
Let’s Dance, and the millions and millions of dollars he made off of that record and tour, are turned into some kind of triumph. Which, sure, is true in one way— the movie pairs this with an interview from a few years earlier where he’s asked if making such difficult records means he makes less money, to which Bowie replies “no shit, Sherlock!” It’s a funny moment, for sure, but he also says that he feels free because of it. Which I’m sure was true, but also David Bowie wasn’t making money in the late 70s, due to both bad management and making records like Lodger. “I’d never begrudge an artist for making a living,” he says, which on one hand is nice to hear. On the other hand, it’s ignoring what Bowie did to make that living. There’s shots of just unimaginably huge crowds and we’re supposed to say “alright, he did it!” But this is paired unironically with the infamous Rolling Stone cover headline of “David Bowie Straight,” the interview in which he renounced any trace of homosexuality at the exact most craven moment.
There’s quotes in this sequence of Bowie saying “I’m making the simplest music of my life,” as if that’s some sort of win. But the movie clearly posits it like the crowning triumph of his career— because, in most people’s eyes, it is. He was never as popular as he was exactly then, he was the man on the magazines, he was a global superstar. But we know this, because we’ve been told it for forty years, it’s the most popular, well-known thing he ever did.
I’m not arguing against this because I’m being a purist. I’m not arguing against giving the people what they want. I’m certainly not arguing against its inclusion at all— Let’s Dance is a solid album, give or take a “Shake It”— but the weight put upon it feels like the same kind of weight as the constant returns to Ziggy Stardust: it’s a Spotify “This is David Bowie” playlist writ large; it feels done by committee, by algorithm. It doesn’t tie into any of the things Bowie’s actually saying about his relationship to commercialism, his relationship to work, to art. It’s there because people love it, and nothing more.
But here’s the thing about David Bowie— there’s one of him for everyone. As the great giant Glass Spider lit up on the screen, a woman in the seat in front of me pointed with absolute joy at the screen. It was easy to see— she was there, that was her David Bowie, that’s what she was there for. But the movie instead cuts between footage of the Glass Spider show (sourced seemingly from a youtube rip of the DVD release— more on that in a bit) and bits and bobs from the 80s (one shot from Labyrinth, the Pepsi ad with Tina Turner), but mostly it keeps cutting back to the “Rock and Roll Suicide” from the final Ziggy Stardust show.
It’s clear what the intent here is— that the late 80s are when Bowie fell from grace, when he became the rock and roll suicide, when it all got a little embarrassing. I get that people think Never Let Me Down was silly and ill-advised, but I don’t think it’s quite fair to not even allow the record the opportunity to speak for itself, to instead paper it over with what is popularly assumed to be “better” Bowie. Also, it’s insane that of all things to paper over as embarrassing, it’s Labyrinth that gets shafted, too, when it’s clearly one of the most popular and populist things he ever did.
Which kinds of gives the game away, in a sense. This is the Bowie of the Boomers, who were there for Ziggy and who thought Labyrinth was for babies. This is what people thought of Bowie’s career ten years ago, when Lodger was still a joke, and we could sweep the 90s under the rug, and we forgave him a duet with Tina Turner (ew, a girl!) because “Modern Love” was just that good. But it’s worse than that, because it all just stops with Let’s Dance. There’s a “Hallo Spaceboy” that’s meant to make fun of “David Bowie in the 90s,” unless Brett Morgen actually thinks that splicing clips of Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix and bad digital code with Youtube rips of Earthling tour clips is a serious engagement with what Bowie was up to then.
I guess we should now talk about what I mean when I say Youtube rips— a lot of the movie looks like shit. Some of this I understand: it’s clear that the footage from the Diamond Dogs tour was in rough shape, for example. But even something like the “Ashes to Ashes” video look like garbage, blown up with hazy AI upscaling and then blown up to IMAX after that. There’s wavy interlacing on nearly every video, and even the clips from Metropolis or The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari look not only forced into HD (I mean it— they truly look like they went to “youtube to mp4 dot com” and grabbed the clips from there), they also look like they kept motion-smoothing on, spoiling whatever effect the juxtapositions were meant to have.
That’s not the only student-grade fuckup here. There’s entire sequences that simply reuse footage that’s already been used in the movie. You watch Bowie warm up some moves in the “Hearts Filthy Lesson” video (though we never hear the song) twice. At least five entire minutes of the 1983 Ricochet film are used twice, some even three times. And there’s no artful reason for the repetition (even just using the song “Repetition” would have worked, lol); it just feels like a mistake. You’ve got 50 years of archives to pull from— why would you ever need to reuse something? And yet there we are— watching the same two minutes of Bowie going up and down an escalator in Singapore again.
Then there’s the “cinematic experience” part of it, which at best amounted to me seriously wondering why there wasn’t an epilepsy warning before the movie. It’s certainly an “experience,” but it often feels like it’s just for the sake of it. There’s shots of space and old 50s B-movies because Bowie loved Space! And here’s some splotches of color to go with “Sound and Vision” (though for one second it sounds like they might have actually restored a deleted verse to it, which would actually be a huge revelation)! Mostly it just feels like getting someone’s throw up in your face during karaoke. There’s a lack of artfulness to it, there’s no real rhyme or reason to a lot of the visuals barfed up in the blender. The song “mash-ups” are often equally insipid— one sequence is given over to Lazarus' Michael C. Hall singing “Absolute Beginners” (the only reference the movie makes to the play) over the drums from “Sound and Vision,” but there’s no attempt made to even match the vocals to the beat. Also, while I certainly appreciated the cheek of mashing up "Blackstar" with "Memory of a Free Festival," I'm not quite sure of why it was actually chosen outside of being kind of funny (the fact that it's the climax of the movie makes it even more bewildering). It’s just a mess, and rarely has anything to do with what’s on the screen.
It works, sometimes: when it’s a montage of news footage of the time it feels like it’s there to give you a sense of place and setting, a feel of what world Bowie was beaming himself into (it feels like a reference to The Man Who Fell To Earth, which the movie also returns to quite often). The rest of the time it feels claustrophobic, a distraction from its subject matter. There’s a lack of context to a lot of what we see. Like, obviously the joy of seeing Bowie Bowie Bowie is real, but the movie starts from a space montage and slams you right into Ziggy (once again, the 60s didn’t happen). The crowd shots are occasionally wonderful, but without the context it’s just people screaming. The movie just assumes that you know why Bowie was a big deal. One quote from Dick Cavett doesn’t cut it, and even the infamous Russell Harty interview feels just slammed in because the line about the “bisexual shoes” is funny. For as much as it rams Ziggy’s outrageous costumes in our face, it doesn’t actually convey how transgressive it was. It’s just “isn’t this cool” and moving on to the next toy in the kit. There’s just stuff, thrown at you, over and over, until the case slams shut because Mom walked in.
So what is David Bowie's legacy? Would someone seeing this movie know? Someone who doesn’t know a thing about David Bowie surely won’t get the whole picture, and yeah, that bums me out. But what bums me out the most is that the obvious self-importance of the movie works to make a genuine claim for a definitive version of the story. Not only is that a silly thing to give to David Bowie, especially when you’re also once again praising his chameleon nature, it’s also just not what David Bowie was.
For all it tries to tie futurism to the man, it also tries to cement him as a creature of the past. Ignoring the actual way he chose to close his career makes it seem like the last thing he did was some embarrassing techno music that “no one liked,” that only exists in blurry Youtube clips. David Bowie’s work actually has a lot to say about right now, it always did and it never once stopped. It’s “futurist” because he was writing about a lot of universal feelings: alienation, the oncoming information age, the end of the world, human connection, fear. Effectively saying “wasn’t this nice” closes the door on an artist who could still be an inspiration to someone who needs it.
Occasionally Moonage Daydream gets over itself and lets you learn a little bit about one human being— David Bowie was the name a guy made work under. A human, just like us, who lived a superhuman life and just wanted to make art throughout it. That’s pretty cool to see, and occasionally it’s inspiring, too. What Moonage Daydream mostly does is muddy its own message, cloud its own subject with junk, and simplifies a huge life into stuff. It’s a nauseating, frenetic, ugly mess of a movie that does its subject no favors, and still finds time to insult the love of his life. Its chaos nearly killed me.