The shocking and
surprising death of singer, actor, painter, and costumer David Bowie on January
10, 2016, led me to hear again several of his many important songs, watch his
performance tapes, and revisit several of his films, two of the most important
of which, Into
the Night and Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence I had previously reviewed in
previous My Year volumes. At first I
thought I might wish to write an essay on his larger career, but having read a
number of such pieces, I felt I could contribute little that hadn’t already
been said.
Having never before seen his first film, The Man Who Fell
to Earth, which is currently out of print
in its many DVD versions, I bought a used copy of the earlier Anchor Bay
version (the newest having been published by Criterion), and determined to
review it as a kind of memoriam to the great, transformative figure.
fall of a god
by Douglas Messerli
Paul
Mayersberg (screenplay, based on fiction, The
Man Who Fell to Earth
by Walter Tevis),
Nicolas Roeg (director) The Man Who
Fell to Earth
/ 1976
No one has ever
claimed that Nicolas Roeg’s fascinating 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth makes logical sense. All right, Thomas
Jerome Newton (David Bowie) is an alien from another planet who drops into
earth to check out the possibility of shipping water to his own
drought-stricken planet. That he happens to end up in the relatively dry state
of New Mexico and. once there. proceeds to hawk an extraterrestrial ring for
just $20, when, we soon after discover, he is already loaded with a fistful of
American100-dollar bills is unexplained. Maybe he just needed a little spending
money for daily living, intending to spend the rest on hiring a patent lawyer,
Oliver V. Farnsworth (Buck Henry). 
That Farnsworth can quite easily read
the complex mathematical renderings which represent the vague inventions that
our world has never-before known, I suppose, is something that we overlook,
just as we can ignore the fact that the film makes utterly no attempt to
explain what these patents have represented and how Farnsworth manages to sell
them for millions of dollars so very quickly. But why does Roeg spend so much
energy early-on in his discombobulated film with the sex life of Dr. Nathan
Bryce (Rip Torn), a university professor who specializes in sex with his young
co-eds is never truly established? And why Newton should want to hire him, over
all others, as his fuel-technician, planning as he does to build rockets to
carry the water back and forth between earth and Newton’s unspecified planet is
totally inexplicable.
And
what attracts Newton back to New Mexico to establish his colony? Okay, it must
have been easier to film there. Of course, it’s a beautiful spot, and foreign
directors have long been driven to express the vast, empty spaces of the
American landscape and its equally empty culture through desert locales.
It is there, during a temporary hotel
stay, that Newton meets the all American girl, church-going, TV-watching,
alcoholic Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a woman so lonely and abused that she is
delighted that someone might bother to listen to her—which Newton does with a dazed (according to Bowie,
cocaine-induced) stare into space; we perceive it as part of Newton’s inability
to adjust to his new planetary locale. Evidently the man who has recently
fallen at incredible speed from his rocket, can’t deal with fast earth-bound
movements; even an elevator ride sends him reeling. In any event, once Mary-Lou
gets her hands on him, carrying him into his hotel room, she is unwilling to
let go until he too is hooked on TV and alcohol. But being an alien, evidently,
he can watch not only one TV channel but simultaneously digest a whole bank of
them, as if living in a world created by the video artist Nam June Paik.
Is it any wonder that their
relationship begins to dull, and he turns to his new fuel technician for
friendship? Although seemingly happy with his new job, Bryce, again without
explanation, begins to suspect his employer and sets up an X- ray camera to capture the real alien look of
Newton. It’s not a pretty sight, as we perceive, when Newton reveals himself to
Mary-Lou who goes screaming out of the house.
No matter, Bowie/Newton quickly gets
beautiful again, and continues to work toward his goal of creating a rocket to
bring the earth-water home. Betrayed by Bryce, again for reasons that are not
entirely clear, Newton is stymied—arrested and locked away into a series of
secret hotel rooms, where, kept under alcohol sedation, he is prodded and poked
by all sorts of scientists who try to determine who or what he truly is, also
accidently, and for no reason whatsoever, sealing his human eyes onto his own
alien slits. Farnsworth is murdered, apparently by the conglomerate of the US
government and a rival company.
Strangely, all this seems not to matter
much. If anything Bowie/Newton, still staring off into space, gets younger,
while Mary-Lou, evidently missing the old days, and looking like hell a few
years after living in an alcohol-infused relationship with Bryce, drops by for
a visit; both quickly agree that they no longer love another. Soon after, he
discovers that the door to his prison has been left unlocked. Was it ever
really a prison? Perhaps the open sesame was simply giving up his former girl.
Does it matter? He escapes, but no
longer has any place to go, the people of his own planet having long ago died.
In short, it’s hard not to agree with
film critic Roger Ebert who described The
Man Who Fell to Earth as being "so
preposterous and posturing, so filled with gaps of logic and continuity, that
if it weren't so solemn there'd be the temptation to laugh aloud."
Reportedly when Paramount’s Barry Diller first saw the finished work, he
refused to pay for it, claiming it was nothing like the film he was promised.
Yet, Roeg and his cinematographer
Anthony Richmond, have created in this film such a beautiful looking color
work, and Bowie—even when staring meaninglessly off into space—is so
mesmerizing that it’s hard to dislike this movie. And at moments (even in
little lines such as “I just need to sleep, Mary Lou”) Bowie deadpans his alien
in a way that almost matches Peter Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of another kind
of alien in Being There three years
later. And, finally, this film has a lot of likeable music, organized by The
Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips.
Even if the movie doesn’t say as much as
it might like to have about what we human Americans might do to a more
intelligent and beautiful species, it does suggest that this galaxy-trotting,
lanky Christ (literally carried to his salvation by his commonplace Mary) might
never get back to heaven, hinting—perhaps unintentionally—at a sort of
Wagnerian fall of the gods. And isn’t that, after all what Bowie really was, a
kind of alien-like god, having just a few years earlier turned his golden mop
of hair into a frizzled red cap to create the first of many personae, Ziggy Stardust,
also an alien from outer space.
Los Angeles,
January 18, 2016
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