RIP David Bowie – In praise of The Man Who Fell to Earth

Man… where to even start? I was giv­en an assign­ment at a pre­vi­ous job to write about the films of Nico­las Roeg for a sea­son at London’s BFI South­bank. The prob­lem was, I’d only seen a cou­ple of them (Walk­a­bout and, strange­ly, Track 29), so carved out a block of duvet time to sail through the canon in chrono­log­i­cal order. I was scin­til­lat­ed by what I saw, and with each film I watched I seemed to have a new per­son­al favourite. The sen­su­al­i­ty, the edit­ing, the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry sounds design, the vio­lence… The one that I was a lit­tle unsure of way back when was 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on a nov­el by Wal­ter Tevis and star­ring the rock icon David Bowie who, in the music world, was tee­ter­ing on the precipice of his cre­ative­ly fecund ​‘Berlin’ era.

As he had done with Mick Jag­ger in Per­for­mance and, lat­er, Art Gar­funkel in Bad Tim­ing, Roeg was prov­ing him­self a mas­ter of benign­ly leach­ing off of the inher­ent tal­ents of musi­cians and chan­nel­ing them into an on-screen mood. You’d be hard pressed to claim that these stars deliv­ered great per­for­mances in the tra­di­tion­al schema of movie act­ing, but their very pres­ence – their essence – is what made these films idio­syn­crat­ic and, by exten­sion, mem­o­rable and great.

In the inter­im since com­plet­ing that assign­ment, The Man Who Fell to Earth is the Roeg film I’ve returned to the most often, as it feels like this mono­lith­ic edi­fice that’s too mighty to mount on sin­gle pass. Though the sto­ry is about an alien bestow­ing supe­ri­or tech­nol­o­gy to Earth’s sci­en­tists as a long-shot method of sav­ing the peo­ple of his own des­o­late, far­away plan­et (and suc­cumb­ing to depres­sion and alco­holism in the process), it’s a more edi­fy­ing work if tak­en as a shot of pure emo­tion. Bowie plays the wil­lowy, age­less star­man who dubs him­self Thomas New­ton and swift­ly goes about exe­cut­ing his elab­o­rate mis­sion. Though he doesn’t do any­thing as gauche as to express it direct­ly, the unyield­ing pain of his char­ac­ter is present from first frame to last.

Sweep aside the nation-cri­tiquing inti­ma­tions of the film, its vicious attacks on Amer­i­can com­merce and the homogeni­sa­tion of cul­ture at that time, and what you’re left with is a bit­ter­sweet por­trait of rock star­dom and the social cocoon that comes as part of the lifestyle. A bless­ing, a curse, a dream, a night­mare. Bowie’s pen­e­trat­ing oth­er­ness in the film – often over­looked by oth­er char­ac­ters because of his sta­tus – is what makes it so mov­ing and so hon­est. By plac­ing him in the lead role, the film strays from its sci­ence fic­tion roots (is it the least sci­ence fic­tiony sci­ence fic­tion movie ever made?) and becomes a more cere­bral and del­i­cate study of what it means to be dis­con­nect­ed and alone.

The film’s trag­ic end­ing sees the alien alien­at­ing his human para­mours through his under­stand­ably errat­ic behav­iour and an inabil­i­ty to com­pre­hend that he’s been chewed up and spat out by a cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem which oper­ates not on benev­o­lence, but on suf­fer­ing. Roeg described the film at the time of release as ​“a mys­te­ri­ous Amer­i­can love sto­ry”, and it’s a love sto­ry between the Amer­i­can pop­u­lous and its cho­sen idols, how­ev­er eccen­tric and frag­ile they may be. Per­haps only matched by Björk in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, Bowie’s per­for­mance in The Man Who Fell To Earth doesn’t just make the film, it is the film. If you’re hasti­ly charg­ing the film of inco­her­ence, then you’re doing it wrong, just as I had way back on assign­ment dead­line. With any­one else in that role, the film would sim­ply not exist as it is.

Bowie went on to act in a num­ber of oth­er movies – I’m sure his role in Labyrinth will get its dues else­where, but he was also per­fect­ly cast in Nag­isa Oshima’s Mer­ry Christ­mas, Mr Lawrence (a film which dealt with latent homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der flu­id­i­ty in a Japan­ese POW camp) and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, in which he wears an over-sized white sport suit and but­toned down Hawai­ian shirt like he was born into them.

It goes with­out say­ing that all these films will take on new res­o­nance now that Bowie, at the age of 69, has suc­cumbed to can­cer and left the world in a state of con­fu­sion and grief. All death is sud­den and unex­pect­ed, how­ev­er much warn­ing you have, but Bowie felt like some­one who was always just about to get start­ed. The Man Who Fell to Earth stands as his most sub­lime cin­e­mat­ic lega­cy. It’s maybe too much of a stretch (and too morose) to see it as the clos­est thing we have to a screen biog­ra­phy, but it works as a por­trait of a man who exist­ed on slight­ly high­er fre­quen­cy from the remain­der of humankind, but craved inclu­siv­i­ty. As many have already stat­ed on social media, we should feel priv­i­leged to share a world with Bowie. How we’ll adjust to a post-Bowie world is anyone’s guess.