The entire point of Bowie's work is that his 'real life story' is the least important thing abt him, so they've gone and made a movie that what this 'really means' is that he was 'afraid' and that creating personas allowed him to 'finally live his fantasies on stage' https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1321483732679839744

No. They weren't 'his' fantasies onstage because onstage it wasn't 'him', it was Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke, idiots. Look how fucking sad they've made him in this movie in the service of this pornographic obsession with seeing ppl made vulnerable

Watch any interview with Bowie and you'll see- he talked about himself in a dry, matter-of-fact way without any self-pity but with humor and the self-knowledge that he wasn't the object of utmost importance

What this is going to do is take his heroism (he was a heroic figure) and redirect it inwards towards some vaguely idpolised understanding of his autobiography, in process making it symbolically unavailable to the average person

What made him heroic in the first place was his generosity of self- it was his ability to become the visibile metaphor of the fantasies of his audience that made him significant, not his personal sadness or 'struggle for recognition'

He actually says in the trailer 'I need to be known! I need them to know me!'

This is so bad lmao, fucking cursed artefact. He was *UNKNOWABLE*- that's why he was glamorous

Our culture is sick

'Don't stop and you'll have them grovelling' < there we go- this is the millennial idpol fantasy: 'Show the non-believers that you are a spaceman! Make them grovel!' This isn't heroism but revenge and hostility, which is the only way ppl can imagine being powerful now

He's never going to look truly otherworldly in this movie, which is what actually made him beautiful. Here he just looks flabby and permanently on the verge of tears in keeping with our contemporary morbid obsession with 'softness'

'You're not a spaceman! You're from Bromley!' < the movie thinks that Bowie being reminded he's from Bromley is the worst possible thing someone could say to him, which is why his 'Oh yes I am' is supposed to be 'empowering' and not actually pathetic, which it is

Because our culture is now run exclusively by literalists who have systematically alienated themselves from the workings of the imagination, this movie thinks that Bowie *actually*, *secretly* believed he was a spaceman, as if he were the world's first otherkin

Don't think that the movie isn't specifically designed to flatter this kind of morbid fantasy, btw- there was a tiktok going around yesterday of a girl crying at the discovery that she is not, in fact, an anime character, that is *identical* in its tone of sickly sentimentality

The message of this movie is that Bromley isn't real- 'being a spaceman is real!' It just so happens that the real world of Bromley is the one in which you continue to have obligations towards other ppl, the one where you don't always get your own way- that's always the message