(Contains some spoilers)
There was a long period when I was a teenager, say between the ages of 15 and 19, when I wanted to be an actor. So shy when I entered high school I could barely make eye contact with anyone, I joined the drama club on a whim, hoping it would help me be more sociable. It didn’t, actually, nor did it result in some cliched moment where the teacher saw something in me and took a chance by casting me in a big role. In fact, I was often relegated to the background, only given one or two lines in which I could easily be swapped out for someone else if I just stopped showing up for rehearsals. There was no Lana Turner style moment of great discovery, or when I dazzled the audience with my raw, untapped talent.
But I did enjoy the acting experience, such as it was. It wasn’t so much the stepping into a role that I liked so much as the process, the rehearsals, the putting on makeup, the peeking out of the curtains to see the audience on opening night, the camaraderie that developed between the actors. It didn’t help with my shyness overall, but it did allow me to finally make friends, some of whom are still my friends today, more than three decades later. Though I wasn’t a particularly talented actor, I liked it enough that I thought I might pursue it professionally, I continued with acting classes in college, and cultivated a fantasy of eventually moving to New York City, where I would live in a loft apartment, write (which was my true love), and act. How I would be able to afford said loft apartment (even at early 90s prices) was a less specific part of this fantasy. It would simply just happen, somehow.
The thing about high school drama clubs is that they’re a little more tolerant of the delusional. Musicals have large casts, meaning there’s a role for nearly everyone who auditions. The less talented are cast as the “chorus” and relegated to the background, but at least they get to do something. In college and beyond, “drama clubs” become “theater groups,” the productions are smaller, and they no longer feel obligated to make room for everyone. You have to grow a thick skin real quick, and accept that auditions are going to lead far more often to rejection than acceptance, not to mention that those rejections are going to be hard and final. And that’s even if you were genuinely talented, which I was not. So I “quit” acting, in favor of another delusion, that I would be able to support myself full-time as a novelist.
Ti West’s Pearl, a prequel to (and filmed concurrently with) X, released earlier this year, might be the most sympathetic (to a point, at least) villain origin story you’ll ever see. Set some sixty years before the events in X, it’s about the early days of that movie’s horny, murderous senior citizen, when she was a young newlywed with hopes and dreams of becoming a Hollywood star, leaving behind her dreary life on a remote Texas farm.
Pearl (played in both films by Mia Goth, in one of the greatest horror film performances of the past few decades) starts out as a tragic figure, trapped on her family’s farm with a cold mother who both demands and resents her presence, and forced to care for her father, left in nearly a vegetative state after an unspecified illness. Barely out of her teens, Pearl assumes that her marriage to Howard, a wealthy young man from town, will be her ticket off the farm. But Howard inexplicably rejects his family’s lifestyle, and instead embraces the humble existence of a farmer. When he joins the Army to fight overseas in World War II, Pearl finds herself even more isolated.
She uses the rare moments she has to herself to maintain a rich fantasy life, one in which she’s a star in the making, performing dance routines where farm animals are her only audience, and playing dress-up like a little girl. Pearl’s only friend appears to be her sister-in-law, who, while supportive of her dream, also turns out to be one of her competitors in a contest to win a spot in a traveling chorus show. Her mother is not only discouraging of this dream, but seems offended by the mere idea that Pearl believes herself to be meant for other, better things. So unbending and prideful that she won’t even accept the gift of a Christmas ham, leaving it to rot on the front porch of her house, Pearl’s mother believes that because she didn’t get to live the life she wanted, neither should her daughter.
Even though it’s already known (assuming you’ve seen X) what horrible acts she’ll eventually commit, in a weird way we almost want Pearl to succeed. Most monsters are not born monsters. It’s a pattern of untreated mental illness, parental abuse, social and physical isolation. Just before things go to hell, we wonder: what would have happened if Pearl had been given a chance to make her dreams come true?
There’s only one problem: she’s not actually talented. Oh, she has energy and ambition to spare, but her dancing is clumsy and amateurish, and the manic grin she puts on her face when she performs is more off-putting than charming. She also doesn’t know how to take no for an answer, which is even more important than raw talent when it comes to show business. Rejection sends Pearl into sobbing, screaming tantrums, which eventually result in murder.
But even then, she’s wracked with guilt, struggling with a toxic brew of loneliness, resentment and uncontrollable rage, exacerbated by the knowledge that she will never get off that damn farm. “All I really want is to be loved. I’m having such a hard time without it lately,” she tells her initially sympathetic, then terrified sister-in-law. It’s a unique and oddly heart-wrenching scene, allowing the audience to still be able to see the remaining bits of humanity Pearl hangs onto.
The irony is that, in being forced to give up her dream of stardom, and upon Howard’s return from overseas, Pearl is about to take on the acting role of a lifetime: pretending to be a normal human being. Up until the characters in X appear, decades later, she fools everyone with a flawless performance as the star of her own one-woman show. She always knew she had it in her.
On the flipside (and if you’ll forgive this tortured attempt at tying these two movies together for any other reason besides the fact that I saw them within a couple days of each other), as Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream shows, David Bowie couldn’t have been anything but a star. Whatever you may think of such concepts as fate or destiny, it seems inarguable that no matter where Bowie was in the world, even if he had grown up on a little farm out in the middle of East Bumfuck, Texas, he would have made it. There was no other option. It’s impossible to imagine him as a shopkeeper, or working as an accountant, because there’s no alternate universe where that would have happened. Every variant of David Bowie in every universe would turn out the same way.
Morgen’s film is by definition a documentary, but not exactly. No new information is offered, and we get no present day insights from various talking heads. Though his marriage to supermodel Iman is briefly and lovingly touched upon (and the film was made with her consent) she herself doesn’t appear in it. In some ways, it feels incomplete, only focusing on a few key periods in Bowie’s six decade career, and ending without any mention of his battle with cancer, or the music inspired by it, which was considered amongst the finest work he ever produced. What it is instead is a trippy collection of performance footage, interview clips that trace Bowie’s evolution from giggly trickster to serious artist, and seemingly random images of films and artwork, in keeping with Bowie’s belief that people take fragments from both their lives, around the world around them, to create their own realities.
Set to a soundtrack turned up so loud the theater seats vibrate (try to see it on the biggest screen you can) and enhanced with Laser Floyd-like bursts of light and color, Moonage Daydream is almost a little too overwhelming at times, but also one of the most exhilarating musical films in a long time. Seeing it back to back with Elvis may result in a hangover the next morning, but what a way to go. It’s really more about the uniqueness of David Bowie’s existence – he was here, and now he’s gone, somehow, and we’ll never see anything or anyone like him again. Why would you even try to encapsulate something like that, let alone in a conventional Point A to Point B documentary?
Bowie’s talents lay not just in composition and singing, but in somehow always staying one, if not several steps ahead of things, and knowing exactly when it was time to move on and try something new. As indelible an image as Ziggy Stardust still is, some fifty years later, Bowie retired him as a persona after only just one year. When Bowie adopted a classic, 40s style look for the Let’s Dance era, there was concern that he was becoming stodgy and would lose younger fans. Instead, it was the start of his most successful era as a musician.
He just knew, somehow, and Moonage Daydream reflects how he took in the world around him and applied the new, the old and the unusual into something no one ever saw before. And then he proceeded to do it again and again. Even facing death, he continued to find beautiful and inspiring things to use in his work, taking it all in and turning it around up till the very end. It’s a dizzying, unforgettable experience, and an excellent look at a genuine star.