Moonage Daydream is a brilliant audio-visual collage of David Bowie’s life and art, mainly his life as a performer from Ziggy Stardust to Let's Dance: the 1970s to 1980s, that is. Directed by Brett Morgen, it showcases Bowie's many talents besides being a singer-songwriter with mercurial and chameleon-like charisma: his dancing and mime and painting skills and all-round creativity.
I should declare that my sister’s best school-friend’s mum was good friends with David Bowie’s mum in Boring Beckenham where we grew up together - not Cool Brixton, as Bowie claims (yet again) in this film - so I practically knew the guy!
Moonage Daydream does not tackle Bowie's drugtaking
in any way. A far better biopic - in terms of showing the personal-life
problems of The Artist – is Rocket Man, which does not shy away from Elton
John’s struggles with alcoholism, shopoholism and other addictions.
I want to focus in this review on the way that Bowie played
with gender. There are some amazing scenes (which I've never seen before) of
him performing in a dress as well as many scenes (better-known, imo) of his flamboyant
experimentation with colourful clothes and makeup.
Two things stand out (for me personally). One was Bowie’s
relationship with his mother, which seems to have been cold and distant and
lacking in affection. Related to this was a sense of how uncomfortable he was
in his own skin – which explains his constant search for alternative identities
up to the 1980s. It was only with Let's Dance that he seems to have
settled down to seeing himself as first and foremost an entertainer rather than
an Alter Ego making profound pronouncements on isolation and alienation. Once
he had ‘found himself’, as it were, his search for other personalities and
genders disappeared. He was still a rock-god: he just wasn't one who was
continually Making A Statement.
The other thing - my conclusion to this piece and the reason why I've written it - is Bowie's androgynous gender. I can
remember conversations at school about whether he was actually a man or a woman
and then at university about whether he was gay or straight or bisexual. All of
that is a testament to his ability to create a myth around himself.
But what is most interesting - from the point of view of
this Gender Critter of Terf Island - is that he never pretended that he was actually
a woman. Nor does he seem to have been re-branded as a trans woman (yet!?) by
the revisionist Trans Cult. I think they may have missed a trick here. Surely he/she/zay/ziggy should be in
the trans pantheon by now along with Jesus and Joan of Arc and the woman in
ancient Greece who pretended to be a man in order to be able to practise
medicine, and all the others that we never knew about until the Trans Cult
captured history!
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