David Bowie as Cultural Anthropologist and the Artist’s Spirit in the Moonage Daydream Film

Moonage Daydream film promotional art.

The Moonage Daydream film, released in 2022, is a vibrant, kaleidoscopic visual assemblage of David Bowie’s creative spirit as it suffused and shaped the course of his lifetime. The work powerfully reckons with Bowie’s expansive practices and processes of perpetual creation, reconsidered from the vantage of retrospect. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film is the first documentary to be officially approved by the Bowie Estate. The cinematic journey, much like the artist himself, traverses sequences, visions, and transformations across Bowie’s creative modalities – far from music alone – in a full-throttle fashion. Sonic visions swirl, condense, pop, and vanish, much like yantras or spiritual portals of meditative or trance-like states. Indeed, the spirit of Bowie seems to shine through the work.

Morgen, in an interview in Variety, likened Bowie to a “cultural anthropologist.” He was always working to displace his own assumptions about reality, life, death, and rebirth. He constantly pushed himself past the philosophical, musical, and artistic realms that were known to him. Even more, he allowed himself to be redefined and refashioned, quite literally, by the processes. 

            Midstream in the film, a voice asks Bowie why he creates. As Bowie’s voice replies, he floats in a clocklike fashion in an otherwise black and blank void. Near him, an unnamed blonde woman in black floats and turns as well.

“I think it has something to do with wanting to find a place where I can kind of set sail and know that I won’t really fall off the edge of the world when I get to the other end of the sea. I find it an intoxicating parallel to my perceived reality,” Bowie says.

The frames then shift to his sprawling canvases on floors, where he pours acrylics with seeming abandon. His sculptural works likewise abound.

“I’m not sure that I’m manifesting my ideas when I do my work. It’s just this inexhaustible supply of extracurricular thoughts that don’t exactly apply to the survival of life, and I don’t know what to do with them,” he continues. “Rather than be pinned down, my momentum was to hit and run very fast – once I’d done something and set it, drop and move on.”

            Nonattachment to ends in his art afforded Bowie space to create in a process that was itself the paradise. The ultimate space is a state of active creation.

“By enjoying the process, you are creating a dream come true,” Bowie’s voice says, hovering over footage of his active painting.

            Bowie routinely crossed multiple worlds in life and art, and the film reflects the multiplicity of these journeys. Little of his life was spent ensconced with other musicians.

“The nature of my life is one of a beatnik traveler, more than anything else. I spend very little of my life in musical circles. I spend most of my time discovering the social life of rather obscure places.”

            His beautiful ode to life, death, and perpetual futurity, “Ashes to Ashes,” plays in the background as he speaks of his sojourns. “I’m happy / hope you’re happy, too.”

“Where I am very much influences my work - I have to make sure I don’t get too bloated with philosophic opulence - I have to keep throwing bits and pieces away.”

            Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the film is the voice of Bowie, which is interlaced throughout. His voice carries us along the journey with prismatic clarity and serenity. His own reflections provide the narrative threads. A central theme within his commentary is his perpetual surrender to impermanence and to the mutability of forms. This sense of impermanence, fragmentation, and constant flux gave Bowie a feeling of “artistic freedom.”

“The idea of holding onto anything that is manifest is farcical.”

The unending movement and search give art its meaning, vitality, and momentum. There is no ultimate resting point or place, no destination of completion.

“I’d be really scared if I had the feeling that I had got somewhere because, for me, art is about searching. And if you come to a place where you think you’ve made a discovery, I think that really is – God, that would be really demoralizing.”

His words here play over two shadows coming together in blue light behind gossamer veils – of reality itself? Of spirit?

“I think the search is the thing.”

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For an extended discussion of perpetual flux, fragmentation, and philosophical articulations with the work and phenomenon of Bowie, see, for example, Simon Critchley’s Bowie (OR Books, 2014).

Photograph of David Bowie from the 1970s, via David Bowie Estate.

David Bowie on a shoreline.

About the Author

Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and author who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani DiFranco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as eight volumes of poetry. Coyle Rosen is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She was a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.