The Man Who Fell to Earth: humanity, lost and found

A stranger in a strange land, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) undergoes, like all Nicolas Roeg’s heroes, a personality change in which he is got at, taken over, transformed into an other.

In the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis, this visitor from outer space had a clearly defined purpose: to bring the survivors from his own drought-stricken planet to Earth’s Eden, and once there, to save us earthlings from making the same self-destructive errors as his people did. In Paul Mayersberg’s script, this purpose is deliberately withdrawn, not so much in its overall implications (although the messianic element is very much toned down) as in its detail. Invited to work on Newton’s research project, for instance, Dr. Bryce (Rip Torn) is instructed to concern himself with problems of fuel conservation, but finds himself worried about the recovery programme. ‘Don’t be,’ says Newton flatly, and no elucidation is forthcoming. A line or two of dialogue from the novel would have sufficed to explain that the Antheans have space ships but no fuel, and that Newton’s mission is simply to rectify this lack. Judging this, like so many other matters of plot detail, to be irrelevant to the theme they have elaborated from the book, Mayersberg and Roeg prefer not to explain. 

The result, not unpredictably, has been a fairly general charge of mystification. Whether couched in terms of chic dismissal (John Coleman, Russell Davies), guarded appreciation (David Robinson) or somewhat baffled enthusiasm (Dilys Powell), the common denominator of critical opinion seems to have been that ‘The problem with The Man Who Fell to Earth is that it contains enough ideas for six different films: and far too many, in my opinion, for one’ (Nigel Andrews, Financial Times). The problem is perhaps added to by the fact that the equally mystificatory metamorphoses of Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now occurred in areas of clear definition (further defined by the way essentially ordinary people grew increasingly aware of specifically alien cultures: the Übermensch, the aborigine, the clairvoyant). Newton, on the other hand, is an alien coping with a familiar culture (ours), and as he is gradually forced to integrate, to become like us, a sense of disorientation necessarily accompanies the fact that we, simultaneously, have become him.

There are more ways than one of stroking a cat, however. And the way to tame The Man Who Fell to Earth is not by trying to perceive an intellectual logic which isn’t there, but by following the tangential, emotional continuity that orders its ideas into a tightly woven structure which becomes an astonishingly literal illustration of Marvell’s conceit: ‘As lines, so loves oblique, may well/Themselves in every angle greet/But ours so truly parallel/Though infinite, can never meet.’

One point on which the critics are unanimous is in finding David Bowie entirely convincing as a visitor from another planet. Since no one could reasonably be expected to recognise an extra-terrestrial, what this means is that Bowie’s presence and performance suggest qualities that are recognised as common denominators of difference, of alienness, of – in fact – non-humanness. There is, naturally, his bright orange hair. More particularly, however, a composite picture emerges of vulnerability: ‘ethereal, pale, enigmatic features’, ‘slight, fearful facial tremors’, ‘frail body’, ‘gaunt, sad and dignified’, ‘a person ill-equipped to cope with the rigours of life on our particular planet.’ What is significant about this reaction is that vulnerability and those attributes commonly associated with it (shyness, gentleness, hesitancy, tenderness) are readily accepted as being non-human qualities. The attitude, of course, is cunningly implanted by the film itself in its juxtaposition of Newton’s defencelessness with the tough protective shells adopted (‘to cope with the rigours of life…’) by the three humans who, through their intimate association with him, gradually rediscover something of that vulnerability: Farnsworth (Buck Henry) and his pebble-eyed greed, Bryce’s cynical indifference, Mary Lou (Candy Clark) and her drunken, bovine resignation.

Echoing – or rather, supporting – this seesaw relationship whereby, as Newton becomes ‘human’ in spite of himself, the other three become progressively more (shall we say?) ‘unhuman’, is a suggestion that the relationship is occasioned by the momentary coincidence of two parallel worlds. Behind the story of the Anthean’s arrival on Earth there is, clearly, another story of a society’s evolution through technological sophistication to a self-destruction that has left it hesitant, defenceless, stripped of its arrogance, rather in the position of primitive man fighting desperately for survival. Ironically, the man who falls to earth in search of paradise finds Man (only a stage or two behind in the auto-destruct process) abandoning that paradise to reach for the stars. Small wonder, beyond the joke of his neglect of the Latin language, that Newton remains struck dumb when confronted by the motto ‘Per ardua ad astra’.

A sense of desolation and disaster is established from the outset by the dying landscape that meets Newton’s eyes: the decaying wooden structure by the lake; the old railway engine lying wreathed in weeds; the deserted highway with one solitary car speeding furtively past; the abandoned blow-up advertising kiosk; the old wino croaking like some weird mutant from his lair. Almost immediately, however, the image is turned upside-down by the incredibly wrinkled old woman in the jewellery store, clothed in an exotic plumage of enamelled bracelets, necklaces and pendants that takes one far back into America’s Indian past. The quaint old woman, the Louis Armstrong record on the soundtrack, the Old Curiosity Shop atmosphere, all suggest a comfortingly nostalgic familiarity. Yet nestling among the bric-à-brac displayed for the serendipity-minded, the store also offers a row of gleaming portable television sets. Is this small New Mexico town a backwater trying hard to catch up, or has it left us far behind?

It is as though Newton’s arrival, Newton’s eye on our world, had upset the time machine – those clocks that suddenly tick so manically, racing into a triumphant peal of alarms and bells as he is finally freed, spent and useless, from his prison – for a truce in which to consider the future. Real connection comes only once, in the momentary encounter between two kinds of innocence when the pioneer family by the roadside see what man has become, and Newton sees what man once was. But – as disturbing as the restless switch from genre to genre (mystery, spy, private eye, Western, science fiction, romance, documentary) which simultaneously presents a kind of history of America and prevents one from drawing the expected conclusions – the dislocation in time functions throughout as a subtle intimation of connections missed (the two Persona shots of Newton and Mary Lou/Newton’s wife staring at each other, then bleakly out at the camera, as the ‘love’ between Newton and Mary Lou reaches, simultaneously, its peak of tenderness and of dishonesty), or occasionally, unavailingly made. Farnsworth, for instance, literally foretells his own death when he says, immediately after being hired by Newton, ‘When Mr. Newton came into my apartment, my life went straight out the window.’ (That apartment, one might note, like so many of the settings in the film, strikes a curiously ambivalent note: a Victorian den tarted up into an Ideal Home exhibit.)

The key motif through the first part of the film, resuming all the adumbrated themes (journeys, brief encounters, connections sought and missed, parallel lines) is the railway. When we first see Newton, the old steam locomotive he passes is clearly derelict, yet on the soundtrack we hear the steady, rhythmic chugging of a train, as though he had miraculously persuaded it to move again; and this impression is reinforced by the same noise off, only faster, more urgent, as Mary Lou carries him to his hotel room in Artesia after his fateful encounter with her in the lift. ‘They always seem to lead such interesting lives, people who travel. Maybe, some day…’ says Mary Lou’s voice-off wistfully as she walks out of the hotel and towards the railway lines after getting him settled. A little later, from the window of this room, Newton stares at a train moving slowly over a level crossing (the shot almost exactly matching, with an unnerving sense of breaching a time-jump, the one of a vast construction site outside Farnsworth’s office in the preceding sequence), and murmurs, ‘They’re so strange here, the trains.’ Very pertinently, this shot of Newton at the window is preceded by glimpses of Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon as seen on one of his multiple TV sets, notably a scene in which Gary Cooper is warning Audrey Hepburn of the dangers of emotional involvement, and another in which he sweeps her into his arms while Wilder’s camera turns ironically to the violinist providing an ecstatic romantic accompaniment. ‘When you look out there at night,’ murmurs the wistful Mary Lou, ‘don’t you feel that somewhere there’s gotta be a God? There’s gotta be!’

Here the train motif draws near to its conclusion, with Mary Lou deifying love, while Newton himself has perceived the dangers of involvement in an encounter doomed to end as yet another missed connection. At this point Mary Lou, helpless and hopeless, the small town floozie drowning her grey future in drink and churchgoing, has a hesitant vulnerability already disappearing as she asserts her demands on and domination over Newton. It is this vulnerability more than anything, one feels, that inspires Newton to ask her to go with him. There is one more train, this time a glittering, anonymous electric express hurtling by as their car waits at a level crossing. Newton is not interested, even when Mary Lou draws his attention to it; and it is left to her, in a long and rambling anecdote about the days from her childhood when trains were cosy and friendly and full of people, to express his foreboding intuition of emptiness. He knows already, as she is soon to prove, that she can connect only with what he seems, not with what he is.

The motif for the second half of the film is incarceration, the end of the line. Newton and the three humans he has affected – made human by breaking through to their capacity for faith, in themselves or in others – retreat into seclusion: Bryce and Mary Lou in the two houses facing each other on opposite sides of the lake (and irresistibly recalling Gatsby and Daisy: ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock’); Newton in the tumbledown shack in the desert; Farnsworth in the apartment whose shelter he is reluctant to leave (his killers have to heave him twice at the window before it gives way). Although never more than two of the four ever meet at any one time, they are all indissolubly linked together by association. By the ginger cat in Newton’s room near the beginning, the (same?) ginger cat in the apartment shared by Bryce and Mary Lou at the end, the portrait of a cat with the Anthean’s eyes that hangs over Farnsworth’s desk. Or, more elusively, by Bryce’s sudden hesitation on the pier as he arrives for his first encounter with Newton: he has just passed a hanging paper mobile whose form echoes the glass chandelier in Farnsworth’s apartment, and foreshadows the form of the candles which Mary Lou lights at the end of her last, frenzied love-making with Newton. (Or possibly it is the weird hint of oriental pagoda lent to Newton’s house by the wooden structure in front of it that makes Bryce hesitate; a touch of playful fantasy aligned with the childhood nostalgia omnipresent in the film: the dark tower with three gateways – the magic choice – leading to the research establishment, the womb-like interior of the space ship, the gingerbread house on Anthea, and of course the frustrated maternal and paternal instincts, respectively, of Mary Lou and Bryce.)

Of this quartet, this maquis drawn together to resist, Farnsworth dies for the cause (albeit attempting to renege), Bryce and Mary Lou become collaborators, and only Newton is literally incarcerated: in the weird suite of rooms so strangely reminiscent of the one at the end of 2001, but which is less an oasis of rebirth than a repository for the forgotten, decaying elegance of the past, in which even the grass has been reduced to a green baize memory and the trees to a mural decoration. This place is on the one hand a totalitarian torture chamber in which Newton is ‘persuaded’ to conform, to welcome those images of the human imagination that batter him from his TV sets, a distillation of brutish sex and violence from countless movies that he has tried to block out of his mind. And on the other, a refuge, an ivory tower in which Newton finally merges with the other movie and literary heroes whose adventures are fleetingly evoked and who also retired in despair to their Xanadus: Charles Foster Kane, Jay Gatsby, Clare Quilty of Lolita. There, gravely watched over by the silent, bearded man who may be one of the other ‘Visitors’ he spoke of or one of his tormentors (in either case tacitly acknowledging that no more need be expected of him), Newton, too, cherishes his Rosebud, mourns his Daisy, and awaits death. Which death, since the Anthean has now become fully humanised, is by implication the death of the human race.

The Man Who Fell to Earth does not, of course, end with a sci-fi vision of destruction; but it achieves the same effect of desolation as Newton slowly bows his head, leaving us staring at the crown of his hat like a sun that may never rise again. Having come to Earth in search of hope, he finds only the self-destruction he has already witnessed well under way again; and by a curious osmosis, the futility of his space odyssey becomes our own dangerous folly in attempting to reach, per ardua, ad astra. This process of transference is started at the very beginning of the film by the deliberate inversion of viewpoints as the Anthean arrives on Earth. Since his space craft evidently plummeted into a lake surrounded by hills, one expects to see him climbing upwards; instead he is seen, apparently from lake-level, coming down a hill. Immediately we find ourselves standing where he was, alongside a silently watching figure, as the Anthean now walks past the camera’s previous position. Who, in other words, is the observer and who the observed?

A hint is perhaps offered in the overhead shot of Newton’s face as he lies down on the bench outside the jewellery store to wait for it to open. The effect, as the camera lifts away from the face, is of a rocket take-off in which we see the slowly receding Earth with new eyes, naked and defenceless. The trajectory of this rocket takes us on a voyage of discovery from familiar backwoods to distant space… or from ‘Blueberry Hill’ to ‘Stardust’. And as the old favourites by Louis Armstrong and Artie Shaw which enclose this journey suggest, it is essentially one of nostalgia: the world we discover is the world we have lost.