The Man Who Fell to Earth

Nicolas Roeg movies are weird. All of them. Well, all the ones I've seen, which includes Don't Look Now, Walkabout, The Witches and Performance. But this space oddity from 1976 is definitely the weirdest of them all, a trippy experimental sci-fi drama with an odd sense of humor and a lack of narrative cohesion, telling the story of an alien isolated by his own success at blending in to human society.



In perhaps the most appropriate casting of all time, David Bowie plays that alien. It's a completely natural performance, perhaps because in 1976, David Bowie actually believed himself to be an alien. It's all there on the albums, people!

A lot of the outer space mythology that would occupy Bowie's attention and music during this time weaves itself through Man Who Fell to Earth, and not just Aladdin Sane's wig. The movie even includes a wailing, glam-rock soundtrack, though its spaced-out psychedelia doesn't hold a candle to actual David Bowie music of the period...Why didn't he just do a soundtrack album himself?

The story follows a fairly typical sci-fi pattern for the first half-hour or so, before completely skipping the rails and going its own way. Bowie's alien falls to Earth, taking the name of Thomas Newton, and quickly heads to New York to find a good patent lawyer. He does, in the form of Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), and thus begins his own corporation, World Enterprises, to sell his fantastic, space-age inventions.

And, just like that, he's a multi-millionaire head of a major corporation, married to the sweet but simple Mary-Lou. Roeg doesn't bother giving us time to "get to know" Thomas, keeping him completely distant and inscrutable. Of course, this is the idea. He's an alien, unable to relate to humanity in any real way, and the more he ingratiates himself into human society, the more of an outsider he comes to seem.

Once the money's been earned, Thomas reveals his plans to Mary-Lou and a scientist named Bryce (Rip Torn) - his planet suffers from a horrific drought, and he must build a spacecraft to fly water back to them from Earth.

This is a very silly plan, and for reasons not fully explained in the film, Thomas never actually carries it out. We see a few flashbacks to his home world, where he left a wife and two children languishing in a barren desert wasteland via a small, Star Wars-looking sand vehicle. But he seems rather content to remain on Earth, enjoying his vast fortune, and after revealing his true nature to Mary-Lou, there no longer seems to be much reason for him to make the risky, uncertain voyage back across the stars.

Like in his previous films, Roeg's really making use of the conventions of a genre to suit his particular purpose. Just as Don't Look Now borrows the tools of horror films without really going for scares, Man Who Fell to Earth seems a bit bored with telling an actual science-fiction story. The big questions behind Thomas' journey - how he got to Earth, how he plans to get back, his feelings towards humanity, his understanding of the mysteries of existence - are repeatedly pushed aside for experimental montages and kinky sex scenes.

So many strange ideas are brought up in the film, only to go unexplored. The narrative spans decades, as World Enterprises builds an international reputation only to sputter out, and as Mary-Lou ages, leaving Thomas and coming back to him and leaving again. But Thomas never ages. And as he's increasingly seduced by vice, from alcohol to sex to greed, Thomas begins to seem more human, and even better able to relate to humanity. After a symbolic final tragedy, rendering Thomas ultimately unable to return to his home planet, the movie kind of peters out without offering up any real insights into these many issues. Unlike most great sci-fi, it's more concerned with intimate human stories than big metaphysical questions.

But what is present in the movie is interesting enough. Roeg's especailly concerned with time, pushing through Thomas' life at an erratic clip, focusing in only where he pleases. At one point, Thomas appears to pierce the fabric of space-time itself, rocketing his car back 100 years to a time when settlers pushed across the wind-swept landscape of his New Mexico home. Like much else in the film, nothing more is done with this concept. Roeg throws it in almost as an afterthought, allowing for the flavor of science-fiction without really making a genre film.

Roeg's insights into the relationship between sex and violence are intriguing as always. One love scene finds Rip Torn throwing his lover around and taking her picture in a variety of prone positions. And in one of the most peculiar love scenes in a major motion picture ever, Thomas and Mary-Lou cavort with a blank-loaded pistol while making extraordinarily messy alien love.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a difficult film to follow, and an even more difficult film to penetrate. As many ideas and facets as I was able to connect, there are many other whole sequences that still didn't quite seem to fit. An investigation into Thomas by government agents, including a series of cruel experiments, came out of nowhere and didn't really lead to anything conclusive. And though the connection between Thomas' strange behavior and that of another famous corporate mogul, Howard Hughes, is made, it's not followed up on.

Oh, and television plays a major thematic role in the film (Thomas watches several TV's at once; he claims to have learned about Earth initially from television broadcasts; Farnsworth's name is probably a reference to Philo Farnsworth, inventor of the television; at one point, Bryce even spots Thomas on television in a World Enterprises commercial). But what is Roeg getting at here? That TV is alienating people from one another, that technology splits us apart and keeps us stationary? Or that watching television (and any kind of art) is a poor way to understand human nature? Or something else entirely?

I'd have a hard time recommending this film to any casual movie-goer. Unlike Don't Look Now, which is a long but very rewarding piece of entertainment, Man Who Fell to Earth is a odd bird. Roeg fans and those who enjoy dense, peculiar 70's films will find a lot to savor here, however, and I managed to enjoy it for what it was. Dated or no, a thoughtful, well-shot movie with David Bowie is a thoughtful, well-shot movie with David Bowie.