DAN WEBSTER:
You’re probably familiar with the old parable of the blind men and the elephant. It dates back to the time of Buddha, some two-and-a-half millennia ago, maybe even earlier.
It goes something like this: a group of blind men are told that a strange animal has come into their village. Checking it out, the men explore the creature, each touching a different part. And so that’s how one touching the trunk proclaims that the animal is a snake, the one touching the ear says it’s a fan, the one touching the tail talks about its being a rope, and so on.
The point is kind of obvious: it’s a commentary on relativism—the fact that what one person perceives can be factually correct, but in a larger context, potentially far different from what is perceived by someone else.
Applying this thought to the people we meet, a person who at first glance comes across as loud and obnoxious may seem like a mere jerk. But given time and experience, you may discover this same person is actually kind and compassionate. The life lesson, then, is clear: people can be far more than what they appear to be on the surface.
Applying this to Moonage Daydream, a biographical study of the late David Bowie written, produced, directed and edited by Brett Morgen, it’s easy to see that Bowie was far more than any particular guise that he allowed us to see.
Always the experimenter, Bowie took his first stabs at international fame posing as Ziggy Stardust, the gender-bending center of the glam-rock era. Working with different musicians, and exploring a variety of musical styles, he transitioned into a more pure pop character during the 1980s and onward, losing some fans and gaining others while recording a number of hit songs.
Bowie was, however, never just a mere musician. He was a skilled painter, something that Morgen’s film reveals. His early music videos, “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl” among them—both directed by David Mallet—were some of MTV’s most popular. And in those and later video work with talents such as Julien Temple and Gus Van Sant, as well as in his concert performances, his ability to move showed just how seriously he’d taken his early mime training.
Same with his acting, which he did both on the stage (most famously as the title character in a Broadway production of The Elephant Man) and in the movies, starring alongside such talents as Catherine Deneuve, Tom Conti and a young Jennifer Connelly in such films as The Hunger, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and Labyrinth.
And there was the man himself, a wanderer, never content—“the patron saint of defiant outcasts,” as the New York Times called him—always seeking to express himself in whatever art form he pursued. A man who embodied rock-star excess, who nearly self-imploded with drugs, and whose embrace of sexual and gender freedoms went hand-in-hand with his two marriages—the last a loving connection with the Somali-born supermodel Iman.
Morgen’s film covers much of this, though in a way that some Bowie fans may find frustrating. Morgen offers no straightforward sense of Bowie, as can be found any of several conventional looks at his life and career, from HBO’s David Bowie: The Last Five Years to A&E’s David Bowie: Sound and Vision.
Morgen clearly was after something different, namely, to find a way to evoke Bowie’s very artistic essence. The Toronto International Film Festival perfectly describes Moonage Daydream as “a kaleidoscopic weave of archival performances and candid interviews.” Those interviews, recorded over decades, act as background to the blend of images that involve everything from cartoons to film and archival footage to a quick-cut hodge-podge of cultural references. They give Bowie the opportunity to explain his relationship to art and how he—and it—changed over the course of his life.
What Morgen gets about Bowie was something Bowie understood about himself: he was an artistic chameleon, each part of him as distinct as an elephant’s trunk is from its tail, yet all melded into a single personality. What Morgen had the great good sense to do was to weave his mix of disparate, often breath-taking imagery with some of the best of Bowie’s music. The result is an artistic tapestry that Bowie himself might have designed.
Transcript provided by SPR.