Fantasia Obscura: As Close to a David Bowie Biopic as We Ever Really Got
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, especially at times like this, the answer comes to you as you take a good look at what’s in front of you…
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
(British Lion Film Corp; Dir.: Nicholas Roeg)
Please note that this is not the film we teased last week; we are delaying that to look at this movie, prompted by the unexpected death of David Bowie.
At times like this, there is the expected reaction: there is general sadness at the loss of a recognized artist, tempered by how well the person hearing of it knew the departed. This can range from simple recognition to deep despair; because Bowie’s profile and impact were so great, most of the world tends to lean towards the latter.
There are other reactions that will at some point come forth, among which is a search for understanding. For a number of people, there may be a need for context, for explanation, to get at the essence of the artist and put Bowie in a perspective that makes it easier to understand what drove him, what defined him. The act of reduction is not cruel or dismissive; it only helps us better place that person’s work within their larger experience, to better understand how art impacted their life.
And perhaps better than any of his albums, Bowie’s first dramatic experience on film gives us an incredibly deep understanding of himself that gets straight to his core.
Based on a novel from 1963 by Walter Tevis, Bowie plays an alien whose world is dying from an intractable drought. He comes here and assumes the name of Thomas Jerome Newton, working with patent lawyer Oliver V. Farnsworth (Buck Henry) to market devices from his home world, in the hopes of making a fortune that will enable him to build a spaceship with which he can bring water home to his people and his family. Due to his otherworldly knowledge, Newton assumes a leadership position in World Enterprises Corporation and becomes incredibly wealthy.
Whilst Newton is running this business, he becomes lonely and gets closer to Professor Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), a new hire at World Enterprises who is ethically challenged, and to Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a local girl who works at a hotel Newton stays at, in whom he takes a particular interest. While Bryce digs into the mystery of his employer, Mary-Lou introduces Newton to everything Earth has to offer, which leads him to begin luxuriating in an excess of alcohol and television, his vices distracting him as he wallows in them.
Ultimately, Bryce discovers Newton’s unearthly secret, and Newton must reveal himself to Mary-Lou out of respect for her, to which she reacts very badly. Suddenly alone, Newton readies his prototype ship with which he hopes to return home, but it is quickly snatched up by the government working with another well-connected company. They also imprison Newton, kill Farnsworth, and take over World Enterprises to bury its assets while Newton is studied.
During the examination, Newton is badly hurt; among other issues, his sensitivity to x-rays injures him by fusing his contact lenses used to disguise his eyes to his eyeballs. By the end of it, Newton is encouraged by his jailers to go so deep into his debauchery that he doesn’t realize that his prison could be walked away from when they decide they’re finished with him. He is so self-imprisoned that when Mary-Lou comes to visit, they end up hooking up and going at it with each other, after which she leaves and he is unable to follow at first.
When he does get out, years have passed on the outside and the world has forgotten Newton, who has not aged a day since coming to this planet. Sure that his mission is a failure and that his people and family are dead, he resorts to recording music that he hopes will find its way home when played on the radio, beaming out into the cosmos, attempting to apologize to them while he sits here wallowing in depression and addiction.
Newton ends the film falling out of touch with everything around him, supposedly the way Bowie went into making the film. Bowie claimed years later in interviews that while making the picture, he went on instinct and didn’t really have a clue as to what he was doing. And, at first glance, the fact that Bowie was in his “Thin White Duke” period during this time could make you take him at his word.
A closer look at the movie and how it plays into Bowie’s body of work, however, forces you to call him out on that line, especially as many who watch the film find their way into the video for the song “Ashes to Ashes” from 1980:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMThz7eQ6K0
If one wanted to, one could settle for evidence against disengagement with the new stage production Lazarus. The play, a follow-up to The Man Who Fell to Earth written by Bowie and Enda Walsh that premiered in 2015, included music that Bowie could not have scored the film with thanks to contractual obligations. These can be noted as proof that he was a lot closer to Thomas Jerome Newton than he admitted.
But there’s a much dee
per meaning to be gleaned from all this: the theme of isolation and being unable to make a connection and feeling as though one is unable to do any good for others due to that gap. The alienation of the character and the concept of feeling so exorbitantly unfamiliar can be found not only here, but also in the Ziggy Stardust persona and in many of the other phases of Bowie’s career. It’s a theme that gets restated again and again in his acting: as Pontius Pilot in The Last Temptation of Christ, as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, and as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige. There is something brilliant personified before you — and for whatever reason, you cannot begin to fully engage with it.
The isolation Thomas Newton had from us, and we from him, is not all that different than the isolation between David Bowie and us at many points in his career and life as he opened us up to new experiences and ways of looking at the world and ourselves. That, more than anything else as we look back now, allows us to better understand his impact.
NEXT TIME: Baring further disasters, we finally get around to the film that gave Bela Lugosi a break from Dracula, and Robert Barleth Cummings a career path…
(Cover photo via Rialto Pictures/StudioCanal)
