MOONAGE DAYDREAM - new film about David Bowie - trailers & articles

[highplainsdem]

3. The Rolling Stone review I just read (I'm still catching up here) helps shed some light on

the filmmaker's perspective that might have created a filter on Bowie that could make him seem like a pretentious bore to some people, maybe a lot of people.

Brett Morgen suffered a heart attack while working on this project, and afterward he came to see Bowie as a guide to living. Hw doesn't use the word messiah, and we can be grateful for that, but it's a worshipful view of Bowie I'm personally uncomfortable with, since it reminds me all too much of a very worshipful view of the Moody Blues I've run across in some of their fans, some of whom believe that band, at least through the early '70s (those fans tend to dislike the Moodies' later albums), were here to enlighten humanity, to guide people.

From Rolling Stone:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/david-bowie-documentary-moonage-daydream-1355400/

Then, on January 5, 2017, Morgen suffered a massive heart attack. He flat-lined for three full minutes, then lay in a coma for five days. And when the filmmaker awakened, everything had completely changed. “I was 47 years old, which is relatively young for a heart attack,” Morgen says. “But my life was completely out of balance. I started to think about what sort of impact I’d leave behind, what sort of lessons I’d taught my kids to that point. And it was, work hard, work hard, work harder — the same things that put me in the hospital. I was lost and needed to learn how to live and breathe again.”

When he finally went back to screening Bowie’s old interviews, TV appearances, and concert clips, Morgen still saw the early Seventies singer with the screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo, the man who made you believe he might have actually fallen to Earth from some far-out planet. But now he also began to pick up on what he thought of a guide for living a more present life, and how not to let time pass you by, in his subject’s story. All of Bowie’s musings about art, change, and his need for constant growth began to feel less like soundbites and more like something profound. He found himself tapping deeper into the Tao of Bowie. “There was a lot of wisdom and guidance and nurturing that now came to the forefront,” he says. “I realized that, through David, I’d have an opportunity to tell my kids everything that they would need to know about how to live a fulfilling life in the 21st century.”

By the time Morgen had recovered and finally finished viewing all of the Bowiemania he’d assembled, he realized that Moonage Daydream had strayed extremely far from most of his original notions. Still, while he had some idea of how he wanted the movie to feel — how to emphasize the “experiential” aspect of sitting in a theater and feeling as if you’re seeing and hearing Bowie’s work for the first time — Morgen still wasn’t sure what the connective tissue was that would allow him to do it. “I still didn’t want to make a film that explained anything — ‘He did this and he did that,'” he says. “But because the heart attack had messed with my memory, I was having a hard time remembering what I’d seen two years ago and connecting it to the later stuff. I didn’t have a producer or a research assistant to bounce things off of, or a studio executive giving me notes. The weight of doing Bowie without a safety net, without a sort of straight narrative to lock into, was terrifying. I didn’t know how to do it. I was excited by the Bowie Guide to Living aspect but in a dark place about everything else.”

-snipping two paragraphs about how Morgen used a week in 2018 when his family was out of town to just go take train rides for that week, for the change of scene-

And it was during that days-long train ride, he said, that he’d finally find his through line. “It’s transience,” Morgen says. “That’s the one thing that’s constant in his life and in his career. You can filter every one of his albums through that lens, and so many of his artistic choices. Normally, people talk about it in terms of fashion and musical genres with him, but you see it everywhere with him: chaos, spirituality, gender fluidity, his approach to songwriting. Even the 1980s act as a sort of reaction to transience! From there, the script just pored out of me, and it became the idea of fashioning a kind of jukebox musical around that idea. Take three songs from each album, so I’m not leaning too much on one period over another. Each song has to have some relationship to transience. It could be the writing, or the way he wrote it. It can be thematically overt or be subtle. But they somehow had to connect, so that whether the audience understood it or not, it could tell there was a purpose to it being there.”

Bowie himself wasn't a bore, IMO -- I've seen and read lots of interviews, too. But filtering his statements, which were probably NOT meant to be taken as profundities, to create "the Tao of Bowie" aka "the Bowie Guide to Living" -- and those are Morgen's own words -- runs a very serious risk of making Bowie seem like a pretentious bore.

I would NOT want to read any sort of book by Brett Morgen about the Tao of Bowie or the Bowie Guide to Living, I also suspect Bowie would have some choice words about any such literary and sermonizing project.

But the music in the film, especially with Visconti's remixing, should help save it anyway, distracting from Morgen's filtering and preaching via very selective editing of Bowie's own words.

And I really hope the film does not create a subset of Bowie fans who view him as a great teacher who was here to enlighten us.