DAVID BOWIE
For
some time now the documentary dealing with the life and work of a singer,
musician, actor, band, or member of Andy Warhol’s cult has become something rather
like a genre all its own. Like all other
movies, of course, these differ in style and certainly in quality, but most of
them follow a familiar pattern. They
usually provide some chronological information, reflecting the subject’s
childhood, family, background, and so forth; making the filmmaker’s job fairly
easy, in our time these people, like most of us, appear in innumerable
photographs, home movies, and videos. Of
course, since the figures also spend their time in the public eye, a good deal
of film showing performances and various appearances in the media already
exists for exploitation, so much of the productions consist, in a sense, of
archival recovery, the visual records of a familiar past.
The
new biography of David Bowie, Moonage
Daydream, follows a mostly predictable pattern, though like too many of its
ilk, leaves out information that might enhance the subject and instruct the
audience. The film itself at times
appears to be its own subject, a showcase for the director’s ingenuity; it
serves as a kind of anthology of clips and scenes from scores of other movies,
from many of the singer’s professional appearances, a kaleidoscopic
presentation of colors and images only vaguely related to its central
figure. The scenes and sequences that appear
in the movie tend strongly toward science fiction, horror, and shock, with
repeated visual references to Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis, but with little connection to the narrative of the
singer’s career, little apparent relevance to any particular period in his life;
several others feature some of the films in which the singer himself acted.
The
career itself mostly appears in a series of concerts where Bowie performs before
some enormous and enthusiastic crowds. Going
back and forth in time, and interrupting those moments in no particular
chronological order, the film includes several scenes of the singer being
questioned and sometimes baited on one of those dreadful English interview
shows; unlike most of the interviewees, he dresses in full drag, with lipstick,
makeup, and extreme shoes, which catch the interviewer’s eye and inspire his
questions. Despite Bowie’s success, his
apparent talent, and of course his groundbreaking creation of various onstage
personalities and styles, the whole business smacks of the decadence spawned by
rock musicians these days.
In
a couple of repeated sequences, a camera follows the singer through the streets
of some city in what seems to be Southeast Asia—Vietnam? Cambodia? Laos?—where
he undergoes some sort of initiation or baptism in some Eastern faith
(Buddhist? Hindu? Tao? Shinto? ) from an apparent religious figure. The process, almost obligatory for contemporary
rock stars, really seems a holdover from the days of empire, when moneyed Brits
sampled the customs of the Orient, now translated into spiritual enlightenment
or something similar.
Aside
from the various triumphant scenes from a rich and varied career, the movie
dwells only momentarily on the singer’s personal life. The director shows a glimpse of a woman,
apparently a wife, and children, then later, another woman who also apparently
became his second wife. The film never
reveals the progress of a career in any sort of chronological order; one photo
of the young David Jones with his parents pretty much sums up the whole of his
past; whatever else the movie provides, we actually never learn how David Bowie
became David Bowie, probably the major disappointment of Moonage Daydream.
