‘Hazy Cosmic Jive’: composing presence and absence in Moonage Daydream (2022)

As the V&A museum in London announce their acquisition of over 80, 000 pieces from the David Bowie estate to be exhibited in 2025, and in the immediate wake of Celebrity Studies’ special issue on the ‘maintenance and reassessment of posthumous fame’ (Boyce and Dove 2022a, p. 485), this paper will perform a textual autopsy on Moonage Daydream (Morgen, 2022), highlighting how Morgen extends existing parameters of eulogising the famous. Drawing upon scholarly convergences between stardom and death studies that pivot on a paradoxical interplay of presence and absence, this analysis will begin by outlining how remembrance rituals can offer a conceptual vocabulary to dissect recurring tropes in designing the deceased. It will then examine how Moonage Daydream adheres to a traditional posthumous discourse of preserving and fossilising Bowie’s recognisable star features. How the film disrupts a standard regeneration of bodily presence in absence will then be considered, exposing tensions between the material and immaterial, preservation and dissolution, the mortal and immortal. Overall, this study will propose Morgen’s reanimation of Bowie signposts possibilities for further creative resurrections of the famous during their media afterlife, offering an alternative rhetoric in the composition of death in visual culture.