Nicolas Roeg’s space oddity has only become more relevant in our age of all-consuming media and unbridled corporate greed.
When Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth landed into American theaters in 1976, even critics who disliked the picture couldn’t help but mark it as a sign of the times. The film appeared as a key case study in both Pauline Kael’s mammoth analysis of masculinity on screen in the ‘70s and as the one bright spot in Vincent Canby’s dour takedown of the era’s science fiction. At the same time, it received thoroughly mixed reviews, described as a “muddle” by Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times, “confusing” by Gene Siskel, and “preposterous and posturing” by Roger Ebert in his 2.5 star review, even as all three critics copped to the fact that beyond its stunning visuals, there’s something profound going on in this poetic, trancelike, western-sci-fi Christ allegory of an alien stranded in America.
Based on a 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis – nowadays best known for ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ (1983) – The Man Who Fell to Earth was the visionary British director’s follow-up to his era-defining horror masterpiece, Don’t Look Now (1973), and it was plagued by difficulties just prior to release. Shot over six weeks in New Mexico by an entirely British crew, its American distributor, Donald Rugoff, was just as confused as Gene Siskel, calling it “one of the weirdest films [he’d] ever seen” and summarily cutting over twenty minutes from its runtime. Perhaps that’s why critics were so confused. In the 50 years since, it’s become a cult classic, heralded as a tremendous cinematic achievement, in part precisely for the profound ambiguities and narrative ellipses that gave audiences pause. There’s an undeniable urgency that runs under the film’s deliberately laconic melancholy, and as the years pass, its vision of lost innocence, corporate greed, political corruption, and imminent climate apocalypse only feels more topical.
Get more Little White Lies
In its complete form, The Man Who Fell to Earth plays like a lonely transmission picked up from outer space on a transistor radio in the desert. It follows the doomed, drifting voyage of an extraterrestrial who goes by the name Thomas Newton – David Bowie, the Starman himself, whose cover of The Beatles’ ‘Across the Universe’ had been released almost exactly a year before – and has arrived stateside from a desolate, parched world. He’s left behind a nuclear family, all three wrapped in plastic suits to conserve their precious bodily fluids, and he plans on amassing a tech fortune here on terra nova in order to save his wife and children from deaths by dehydration that, from the first, nevertheless feel inevitable.
When Newton first appears, crashing into Fenton Lake in New Mexico, he drinks water from his hands with an abandon and single-mindedness that will come to perplex every single one of the motley denizens of our frivolous, hedonistic nation whom he encounters. Here, at least according to Newton’s soon-to-be-lover, Mary-Lou (Candy Clark, still hot off of her 1973 Oscar nomination for American Graffiti), water is for ice cubes. She likes four of them in her gin and tonic, and given how many of those she drinks a day, Newton’s family would surely likely last a lot longer if even she alone was willing to share. After he pawns enough gold bands to supply a Vegas wedding chapel for a year, Newton uses his new wealth to set up a megacorporation based on a series of patents that – to the astonishment of his brand new CEO, patent lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (a wryly smarmy Buck Henry) – could take out “RCA Eastman Kodak and DuPont for starters” and earn over $300 million in its first year. “That’s all?” Newton asks; his needs are superhuman, and that will be his downfall.
From there, he goes into seclusion in the dry Southwestern landscapes that likely remind him most of home, inadvertently retreating further from his mission and his sense of self over months, then years, then decades. The film’s other characters decay alongside him: A college professor (a wonderful Rip Torn) staves off intellectual and ethical stagnation through sex; Mary-Lou’s boozing wastes her youth and innocence, and Farnsworth’s life is shattered by his economic success. Repeated references to Icarus accompany Newton’s downfall as he allows himself to be picked up by Mary-Lou, slowly picks up a booze and TV habit, and is ultimate eviscerated by the forces of Truth, Justice, and the American Way – that is to say, capitalistic brinksmanship, media hypersaturation, narcotized narcissism, and the watchful eye and meaty fist of Big Brother. This is, after all, a 1970s movie.
Bowie himself is a perfect foil for its heartbreaking addiction narrative and fascination with the pervasive impact of media on American life. Though accounts vary, according to the star himself, he was still actively addicted to cocaine during filming and he claims to have never even read the script. His turn here, like Mick Jagger’s in Roeg’s Performance six years before, is hypnotic and utterly entrancing – even as he claimed to have not been acting at all. It was his first major film role and given his delicate state of mind, he claims that the on-screen crackup reflected the breakdown visible in Alan Yentob’s classic BBC documentary on the star, Cracked Actor, which, in a fitting parallel, followed the star as he undertook his first American tour in mid-1974. In another odd confluence, the star, who famously pounds milk from a carton in Yentob’s film, would fall ill during production on Roeg’s from drinking spoiled milk on set. Such are the kinds of convergences that make Roeg’s films play like occult conjurations from another realm, whether the subject is black magic, visionquests, or visitors from other worlds. Needless to say, then, for The Man Who Fell to Earth, as he told Rolling Stone in 1983, Bowie felt that “just being me was perfectly adequate for the role. I wasn’t of this earth at that particular time.”
As an allegory, this supernaturalistically-tinged film is intentionally elemental, an elegy of water and dust set to a riotously eclectic soundtrack that went tragically unreleased at the time. The looseness and emotional distance that drove Rugoff to hire a professional psychiatrist to give notes on his radical recuts – a coldness that became an immediate point of frustration for many contemporaneous critics – are in part what makes this film so prescient. As Newton succumbs to his dependency on a progressively more astounding number of simultaneously blaring televisions to blot out guilt at his failure to return home, it’s possible to glimpse our modern age of brainrot, Cocomelon, and ADHD. In the sudden, meteoric and all-consuming corporate hegemony of his shadowy company, World Enterprises, we can see parallels to the technocratic overlords of our present, SpaceX and all. In the bone-chilling disaffection and certitude with which ecological disaster is faced, our modern nihilistic cynicism with climate change is bleakly on display. When shadowy government henchmen arrive on the scene to take over his business and hold him captive without cause, the lack of surprise we feel encapsulates the ever-increasing sense of disillusionment that’s taken over our political landscape over the course of our current decade.
“Historically, people have recognized strong individuals as heroes or heroines by their willingness to accept the responsibility for their acts,” Pauline Kael wrote at the time, “Now we’re in a period when we know that most wrongdoing – the worst wrongdoing especially – isn’t socially punished. And it’s terribly apparent that the wrongdoers face no moral consequences.” Half a century on, The Man Who Fell to Earth still seems a tragic warning, its mysteries potent, its beauty captivating. Newton’s ill-fated Icarus falls, and shades of ourselves fall alongside him.
