The Man Who Fell to Earth

If David Bowie’s perfectly teen and feverishly orange-colored haircut isn’t enough to pull you into the theater for 1976’s The Men Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg’s characteristically fragmented and unruly editing, sweeping cinematography and inherent experimentalism should. By then with a vast experience as a cinematographer under his belt, including film classics such as David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), on his fourth feature-film Roeg created in The Men Who Fell to Earth one of the smartest, droniest, and wildest, as much psychedelic and down to Earth science fiction films of the 1970s.

While Roeg was on the heels of success of his tormenting and polemical horror movie Don’t Look Now (1973), by 1976 Bowie was at yet another turning point in his shapeshifting career, soon to move into his so-called “Berlin years.” This was Bowie’s first experience in cinema, and, according to legend, he was so wasted on cocaine to the point of, later, barely remembering the shoot. True or false, Bowie sticks to the part to perfection, playing an “alien” aristocratically named Thomas Jerome Newton in muted and mesmerizing ways; a frail oddity around which the other characters gravitate.

What a bold and inspired move to place the British iconoclast in the utterly alien US outback, appropriately fainting under hot weather to the sound of banjos and Manifest Destiny flashbacks, in my mind weirder still than the exoplanetary ones, where a family of aliens struggles to survive a water drought while waiting for Bowie to save them with his terrestrial plans. Bowie’s Thomas comes across as woozy and out of context as the film’s shuffled montage, where past and future entwin psychologically.

Canonically androgenous, here Bowie feels extra-sensitive next to his ruddier and ruder North-American co-stars. “You’re too thin,” his soon to be wife, played by actress Candance June Clark, who was straight out George Lucas’ hit American Graffiti (1973), says, worriedly, after he nose bleeds in an elevator. This sensibility, however, shines brighter in the intimate sex scenes between Bowie and June Clark—their naked bodies, his garish dyed hair, her childishness, make for the most beautiful scenes in the entire film. In this regard, between the acting and the lush anamorphic wides and brash zooms, this is a highly somatic film experience—it is hard for us not to feel like Bowie’s alien, violated in a sea of televised, highly Americanized, delirious, shoddy imagery.

Beyond the style, however, it is the supporting characters—Bowie’s lover, lawyer, and employees—who, in their inner and outer monologues, bring a touch of both mundanity and humanity to what is in fact a film centered on an alien billionaire. For, despite his frailty, Bowie’s alien is also eerie and ruthless in his tech entrepreneurial visions. It’s his lawyer who says it best: “World Enterprises sees itself as a loner, a pioneer if you will; we have that get up and go spirit.” Rewatched in our dictatorially algorithmic times, there is a certain premonition of Silicon Valley yippie-ki yay—to quote Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1998)—cowboyness to the character. The plotted reading of The Man Who Fell To Earth portrays Bowie as a tragic and naïve fallen angel, who ultimately succumbs to both vice and exploitation in the hands of greedy earthlings. But the man who fell to Earth is also unnerving, oftentimes bordering on frighteningly neglectful of everyone else in the pursuit of savioristic goals.

From redneck America to a divided Berlin, Bowie would go on to use images from The Man Who Fell To Earth in two album covers, more famous than the film: Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977). It was as if he was bringing his Americanized alien to a fractured Berlin, connecting different imaginaries, including his native British, to give an image to the ambient, haunting, dissociative pop music style he was then exploring. Between those albums and the film, it was the cover of Low what I saw first—to me one of the most beautiful of his career—inspiring me at sixteen to cut and dye my hair like Bowie’s. A reminder about how casting, art direction, and make up can make an otherwise erratic and niche film iconic.