Sex and drugs and rock and roll: rewatching Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth

It seems to be an iron rule of the modern world that, at any one time, there's always a David Bowie exhibition on somewhere or other. This week, for example, for the modest outlay of £27.50, you could check out the David Bowie: You're Not Alone "multimedia spectacle" in King's Cross in London. Apparently, this will allow you to "discover the creative mind, spirit and soul of one of the world's greatest, most visionary artists". Er, yeah. Though I was in King's Cross yesterday I managed to resist the allure of this offer, instead opting for another Bowie "experience": rewatching (after probably 25-30 years) Nicolas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976). Sound and vision, man. Bowie's wildly-overrated music generally leaves me unmoved, but I must admit to recently enjoying Heroes (English and German versions) as used in Chris Petit's Radio On. This, I thought the other week as I bought a DVD of The Man Who Fell To Earth, this is the way to approach Bowie: not via his tiresome music and superstar persona, but via films, especially the interplay of (ahem) sound and vision. Does it work out that way with Roeg's film? Er, no, not exactly. Anyway, here are a few things that struck me about this 50-year-old "cult" film with its starry lead actor:

Pin-up: David Bowie as the revealed alien

*Bowie's low-energy performance generally works well, with his fey - borderline camp - acting style (anti-acting?) contrasting to good effect with the much showier, high-energy styles of Rip Torn as the scientist Dr Nathan Bryce, and Candy Clark as Mary Lou, Bowie's lover. Bowie's character, Thomas Jerome Newton, is as much an English alien in the USA as he is an extraterrestrial alien on planet Earth. With his distinctive clothes (hudded duffle coat, black suit and buttoned-up shirt worn without a tie, fedora hat), white skin, nail varnish, pink lipstick and orange-pink hair, Newton is a European intruder in the brash macho world of New York and New Mexico. Added to this, Newton favours Japanese decor and furnishings. By mainstream American standards he's "otherworldly" in all sorts of ways. Perhaps, even, this is how Quentin Crisp alighted on his "resident alien" tag to describe his life in New York?

*As Newton's slow-burn project to get back to his own planet comes to nothing and he becomes a marooned alcoholic, kidnapped by a big corporation and then left to marinate in gin and hopelessness, he's effectively another version of Jagger's enervated Turner from Roeg's Performance. He's a washed-up starman cut off from the world - in fact, all worlds. Meanwhile, Roeg's casting of three major music stars in his films - Bowie, Jagger and Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing - is surely pretty noteworthy in itself. I assume Roeg was interested in how the dynamics of using a big-name rock star in his films would play out. 

*Unsurprisingly, The Man Who Fell To Earth is full of Bowie-eque self-referentiality. A film made with a rock star who made songs about ... being an invented rock star. Toward the end of the film we discover that Newton has - rather mysteriously - made a record called The Visitor. It's on sale in a vast US record shop for the knock-down price of $3.66. Rip Torn's all-American character admits to "not much" liking it, to which Newton says curtly, "I didn't make it for you, anyway". Bowie the eternal musical outsider. Elsewhere, Newton is dragged to church by Mary Lou where he's seen mumbling along to Blake's Jerusalem. Now it's Bowie the reluctant singer. Here he's just about singing along to this hymn of "Englishness" as it gets an airing in a small-town church in the wilds of New Mexico. Meanwhile, though Newton isn't - exactly - a musician in The Man Who Fell To Earth, he's still a reclusive "star" of some kind. In fact he's a semi-comical/cartoonish corporate star (an early Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos) controlling various huge companies ("World Enterprises"), someone who gets ferried around in a huge chauffeured car - the chauffeur, Arthur, played by Bowie's real-life chauffeur/bodyguard, Tony Mascia. Another in-joke in The Man Who Fell To Earth is that Newton declines to "put a record on" when the patents lawyer (Buck Henry as Oliver Farnsworth) has the lengthy job of reading through Newton's sheaf of patents documents.   

*To say the least, The Man Who Fell To Earth is uneven. The scenes showing Newton's alien family in their parched desert world are striking and suitably strange, while there's another very arresting scene when Newton seems to go through a momentary tear in time, apparently seeing a group of nineteenth-century US settlers outside a primitive farmstead who themselves are stunned to witness this alien-looking presence (a large twentieth-century car) rolling through their rustic world. On the other hand, some of the corporate chicanery scenes are quite hokey and rushed (I was thinking, "this is like something from a bad Columbo episode") and various bits with Rip Torn and Candy Clark are similarly poor, with all sorts of ropey acting and abrupt tonal shifts. For example, there's a scene near the beginning of the film where Clark, as the airhead hotel worker, is shown carrying Newton who's just fainted in the lift. Peter Bradshaw calls this an "extraordinary sequence", but I reckon "preposterous and borderline terrible" would be nearer the mark. 

*And then there's the sex. It seems to be a bit of Roeg trademark - Sutherland and Christie in Don't Look Now, Jagger in the bath with Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton in Performance. Here we have some pretty terrible "raunchy" scenes with Rip Torn's lecherous academic tussling in bed with his much younger students, plus - of course - Bowie's Newton having quite a lot of alien-on-human sex with Clark's Mary Lou. In the latter we even - if I'm not mistaken - get a brief view of Bowie's semi-erect penis (it's cock rock, man). The low-point, for me, is an extended sex scene toward the end where Newton is using a silver revolver as a sort of sex toy with Mary Lou in a drunken debauch. The gun only fire blanks (geddit) and indeed the entire scene is a total, embarrassing dud. 

*And finally, what about the music in this filmic vehicle for one of the world's biggest rock stars? Here I think it's another cock-up. Instead of spooky electronic music or whatever, we get - incongruously - a soundtrack stuffed with Jim Reeves, Roy Orbison, Bing Crosby and Artie Shaw. I presume this was supposed to create a sort of semi-comic "jauntiness", but instead it just ruins the atmosphere and sounds plain wrong. Evidently, "contractual wrangles" preventing Bowie himself doing music for the film. Much as I tend to dislike Bowie's stuff, surely this would still have been much better.

Rip Torn taking a break from the Larry Sanders Show to appear alongside a popstar 

So yeah, The Man Who Fell To Earth strikes me as quite an odd film - odd as in not always-very-successful. But still, for all its - ahem - spacey oddity, it's a pretty intriguing watch. At its best it includes strange, almost dream-like "Western" landscape sequences that reminded me of Peter Fonda's excellent The Hired Hand (1971). Or, in the alien planet scenes, it brought to mind David Lean's rippling heat-laden desert in Lawrence Of Arabia (Roeg had worked as a cinematographer on Lean's film). Less successfully, it appears to rip off Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, as you see Newton being experimented on by callous corporate scientists who are (sort of ) reprising the Malcolm McDowell "eye torture" episode. In The Man Who Fell To Earth there are in fact quite a few scenes involving Newton's eyes and tweezers - scenes I found literally unwatchable - and Newton is also shown er, eyeballing multiple TV screens with their junk programmes and corny old Westerns. Here, Roeg appears to be satirising modernity - especially US modernity? - as a disembodied world of pure, mind-rotting "spectacle", something Newton is shown to be hooked on alongside the gin and lime he's constantly guzzling. This element is not bad; not brilliant, perhaps, but not bad. Yes, there's a lot going on in The Man Who Fell To Earth, including the incidental pleasure of seeing Candy Clark's Mary Lou looking like a member of the B52's or of Newton walking out of abandoned mining country into a small town (Haneyville in Alabama) like an early version of Harry Dean Stanton's character in Paris, Texas. Overall, Roeg's film is a sort of triumphant mess, a spaceship crash of a film. Slightly surprisingly, Bowie crawls out of the wreckage more or less intact and his zoned-out acting is the film's most memorable quality. Bowie later claimed he'd been "stoned out of his mind" on cocaine throughout the shoot, though Candy Clark says the opposite: he was "clear as a bell", having promised Roeg there'd be no drug use during the film. For what it's worth I'm inclined to believe Clark, as Bowie's often quite subtle acting looks like a very considered piece of work and not some drug-addled accident. In the end, my strong aversion to Bowie's music won't be dispelled by watching his performance in The Man Who Fell To Earth but I think it'll enable me to hear old chestnuts like Starman, A Space Oddity and the Ziggy Stardust album without quite so much of an internal cringe. Yep, it'll be yet another David Bowie experience.