Brett Morgen was born in 1968 in Los Angeles, California. His parents wanted to name him Britt after a famous football player, but they misspelled the name in the registry. He loved cinema since childhood. He told everyone that he would be a director when he grew up. And when he grew up, he became a director. Documentary director. A very special species. There is a documentary that tries to show that a part of the world understands the world in a very broad sense, as any historian who draws attention to: be it a person, a thing, a conflict, a history. , a place, a moment – and then there’s someone who extracts the essence of what he’s documenting and turns it into a little museum piece. Morgen does the latter. And he was about to stop doing that.
The year he began collecting material for what would become his latest documentary, the lysergic and profound Moonage Daydream, that is, at times, Lynchian—there is dark and above all cosmic meaning, and if his narrative embraces chaos, it is. because he talks about life being anything but that: the chaos that may have been composed by David Lynch himself had a heart attack.
a week in coma
He was then 49 years old. He spent a week in a coma. Luckily he got better. Moonage Daydream is the kind of piece that couldn’t exist. He condenses David Bowie, yes, as always, from the idea of what man is, an almost magical formula, to being both too human and therefore a step from another planet.
As before, a canvas in motion, a gigantic and mutating canvas where time is not treated like the other Bowie speaks of – a character and the main, the one who allows it, for whom time has been since the beginning. Change: “I’m obsessed with what he’s doing with us, how something can mean nothing one day and everything the next,” he says at one point in the documentary – but just as a means of reflection, Morgen plays the existing Bowie. Behind Bowie, whom the world believes he is watching – “There is no artist, it is the people who create him. No Bob Dylan, no Mick Jagger, and neither am I. We are something unreal, formed in the minds of those who want to believe we exist,” he says, at another time, and what he captures is his own essence, what he was before him. And was he? Someone on the way.
“Art is not finding, it is seeking. It would be very sad for me to find anything. I want to keep looking”, he says of the small collection of superimposed and illuminating moments that make up Moonage Daydream.
Bowie settled in cities of all kinds of countries to see how it affected his writing. Sometimes it was cities he hated like Los Angeles, sometimes it was cities he would let himself isolate – and above all, he painted portraits of isolated people like West Berlin. “I am a mystical beatnik,” he says at another point. An existential beatnik, traveling inside and out at the same time, becoming the journey itself, realizes that the only thing that doesn’t matter is the destination.
kerouac
“Jack Kerouac’s Reading on the Road changed my life,” says Bowie’s voice, in many ways the pinnacle of Moonage Daydream. I was fascinated by the way an artist was born and created at the same time, and it seems that in the moment – Bowie talks from his childhood about what kind of planet his parents’ marriage itself was. He has always been excluded from his half-brother’s influence, and above all, this is happening.
His way of being in the world would not be to be exactly in it, or to live there in as many different ways as possible. He internalized Beatnik until it became the idea of the trip. “The artist must ask himself what he can contribute to the universe and act accordingly, giving rise to an infinite number of other outlets,” Bowie says.
And it can be said that Kerouac holds the door that Bowie enters, and that Bowie, his own Neal Cassady, holds: his half-brother, whom he adored and left him his first records because he was so much freer than before. Including one from Coltrane who set it all in motion, he took the legendary motto, “I can offer nothing but my own confusion,” on the Road, and plunged into it, trying to extract what was shining.
“I write because writing allows me to sail safely,” Bowie says, and gives unrivaled advice: “If you want to know if what you’re doing is good, and you think you’re safe where you are, walk a little further. go out to sea and stop touching feet. That will be the only way.”
Source: Informacion
