No matter my interest in The Lure and reverence for David Bowie, I could only cringe upon hearing that director Agnieszka Smoczynska will soon helm a musical based on the man’s work. This is, of course, a certain bias speaking: consider our narrow-viewed cultural perspective that pretends he created, say, 16 songs and nothing else of note, throw in memories of Across the Universe, and you might understand why visions of a “Ziggy Stardust”- or “Rebel Rebel”-led sequence started slicing their way through my brain.
Lo and behold, Agnieszka Smoczynska also holds Bowie’s 1995 rock opera Outside in high esteem. Speaking to Birth Movies Death, she revealed it’ll act as the basis for her “musical fantasy,” Deranged, almost certainly titled after standout track “I’m Deranged” — itself probably best-known as the opening-credits tune from Lost Highway. Her provided logline more or less follows the album — i.e. “an investigator who is hired by the Art Crime Department to determine whether the murder of a 16-year-old girl is a crime or a work of art” — though “more or less” is especially applicable here, being that Outside, frankly, doesn’t make a whole lot of narrative sense. Nor does a second, seemingly more solid starting point: the Bowie-penned short story, “The diary of Nathan Adler or the art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle,” included in the album’s liner notes and available to read here.
That’s less of an issue when listening to the music itself, some of the best and most adventurous Bowie ever produced. I could say I don’t envy Smoczynska’s task in getting a proper cinematic shape from Outside, but, Lord, I’d love if someone let me create my own film of it, so yours truly is suddenly rather anxious to see how she transforms the thing — after her second feature, which will be “psychological drama about a woman who has lost her memory.” But it’s probably best not to rush this one.
In the meantime, listen to Outside below: