Photo: The Man Who Fell to Earth, British Lion Films, 1976
by Alice McIntyre
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring David Bowie, is a movie I constantly return to. Bowie plays an alien named Thomas Jerome Newton, who has arrived on Earth from his distant homeworld in the wake of catastrophic drought. His mission is simple: acquire water and bring it back. He does this by way of introducing advanced technology from his planet to humanity, becoming a proverbial captain of industry and building the World Enterprises corporation, aided by patent attorney Oliver Farmsworth (Buck Henry). Along the way he meets Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), with whom he has an affair, and Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), who becomes his confidant.
Newton develops an affinity for alcohol and television which soon becomes crippling. He isolates himself and communicates with his business partners only by phone. Addiction and isolation strain his relationship with Mary-Lou, and after a fight he reveals his alien form to her. Her reaction, predictably, is shock and horror. Mary-Lou attempts to calm down, even kisses Newton’s hand, but still panics and flees.
This component of the film, the tension between us and the personas we construct for others, is likely to resonate with many viewers. Newton is fundamentally Other, an extraterrestrial, irreconcilable. So too, for him, is Mary-Lou. Here is this former maid of another species, light years away from his home and wife and children — an object of convenience, a plaything no different than a gin and tonic or a television screen. The dissonance between construction and reality, between what is yearned for and what is real, is shocking when made apparent. It doesn’t matter if you’re really an alien or not, that element of otherness will forever persist. You will never be congruent with how others perceive you, and vice versa. This is especially true today, where communication is omnipotent and occurs over long distances on the basis of simplified “profiles” of ourselves.
When Newton is about to make his spaceflight home, he is abducted by government agents with the assistance of a rival company. He’s held captive in a secret luxury apartment and subjected to a barrage of medical examinations. After a test involving X-rays, the contacts he wears to appear human permanently fuse to his eyes. His gin-soaked captivity lasts several years. An aged Mary-Lou eventually visits him and the two have sex, declaring their mutual lack of love for another towards the end of their encounter. Newton discovers that his prison has deteriorated and become unlocked, and leaves. He releases a record containing messages to his home planet, in the hopes that radio broadcasts reach his family. The final scene is of Newton passing out, drunk in his chair after a restaurant meeting with Dr. Bryce. His mission has failed.
The Man Who Fell to Earth says a lot about today’s would-be renaissance men, the Elon Musks of the world. They preach grand solutions: colonies on Mars, self-driving vehicles, you name it. Utopian visions have a seductive quality in times of crisis. It would be much simpler to have a celebrity Superman rescue us from looming climate catastrophe, to have a shining future of hoverboards and hyperloops. The reality is that such figures are motley crew of conmen, robber barons, and union-busters. Whatever disaster turned Thomas Jerome Newton’s home planet into a desert couldn’t be stopped by cavalier adventures through space, and neither can the present crisis on ours. The delusions of eccentric billionaires and trust-fund kids are like the blank-filled gun Newton and Mary-Lou play with during their final encounter: all bark and no bite, hollow excitement.
The fusion of Newton’s contacts to his eyes signifies the elimination of his uniquity. He can no longer be perceived as anything other than human. The allure of the genius who appeared from thin air and the eerie eroticism of a creature from another world have vanished. Newton is reduced to just another wandering alcoholic, estranged from everything he’s worked for and everyone he’s ever cared about. The aspiring übermenschen of our world, too, are nothing but human beings subject to folly and failure.
It takes more than a man or an extraterrestrial to save a civilization. It takes profound, systemic social transformation. The heroes of our age aren’t big names. They are the arsonists of the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct, the longshoremen striking on Juneteenth, the thousands who’ve poured into the streets against injustice and oppression. Those are the ones who will sweep away the drought of decaying capitalism and usher in a bright, socialist future for humanity.
Verdict: Thrift Store Paintings/10. A beautiful, haunting relic of the 1970s.
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