Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to
Earth is about being
alienated by a world overwhelmed with images. As a moving image, a film, it
only supplies a horizon of meaning, somewhere between seeing and not seeing,
watching and being watched, the showing and the telling and comprehension and
incomprehension.
A horizon of incomprehension is
something that was apprehended by audiences and critics alike on its release
due to an emphasis on surreal visuals and performances over plot coherence, but
the story is in actual fact a very simple one. (An alien comes to Earth to try
and save his people by shipping water to his home planet and ends up trapped
here). It is in-between how the story is told and shown that a jarring sense of
alienation and confusion is created. The
best way to approach this movie is to understand that The Man Who Fell to
Earth is supposed to be
alienating and confusing and as a visual art form this film relies on and creates
these sensations through the use of images and their estrangement (or not) from
the narrative. The common critical consensus is that this film is a mess, an
uneven film in a film director’s purple patch of an uneven career, but so often
what is conceived to be common about anything is wrong. The Man Who Fell to
Earth is a masterpiece
exactly because it is alienating and confusing but, also at the same time,
pretty straightforward.
In this science fiction parable
the most alien planet we experience is our own, seen through the eyes of Newton
(David Bowie) the titular alien who falls to Earth. At first stumbling onto our
planet physically (sliding down a mountainside) metaphysically (experiencing an
incongruous physical world) and socially (the first human he meets deceives
him) Newton’s perspective, like the viewer’s, is established as isolated,
uncertain and clumsy. However, it is through this isolated, uncertain and
clumsy perspective that the world we live in can really look like an alien
planet, and for all of us that fell here, life on Earth is merely a matter of
stumbling onwards and becoming familiar with it, including Newton, who at one
point says, “I think it just takes getting used to, that is all.”
But does he ever get used to it?
This is the question that the film asks of you from the beginning and as Newton
descends into humanity, falls to earth, through the consumption of alcohol,
television and sex, three activities that perpetuate through all our human
lives, the film also asks us if we ever get used to it also. Does the world
cease to be an alien and alienating planet? Do we, as one character says,
“wonder if we do and say the right things?” or do we, fall, like Newton, and
then have to succumb to sensory self-deprivation, amputation and medication, in
order get used to it?
The answer to this question is
somewhere between the showing and the telling, in-between the images and the
story being told. Possibly the scene with the most allegorical meaning occurs
at the very centre of the film’s duration (really) at 1 hour and 9 minutes into
a 2 hour and 18 minute work. Newton talks about television as a means to
understand the world, just as The
Man Who Fell to Earth offers
a means to comprehend an otherwise alien and alienating planet, but fails to do
so. He says, “The strange thing about television is it doesn’t tell you everything. It shows you everything about life, for
nothing, but the true mysteries remain.” And like Newton we continue to
stumble, trying to unravel a simple story being told with a mysterious story
being shown, where the images and their meanings don’t quite match, and the
true mysteries remain, because the world is naturally incoherent and
alienating. The barkeep in the final scene speaks to us directly when he says,
"I think Mr. Newton has had enough, don't you?" So, again like
Newton, drunk in the bar at the end of the movie, we also end up slowly
collapsing, as a movie audience, experiencing the final moments of an
alienating and confusing film, and as human beings, stumbling through our
lives, until we have not only got used to it, but we have also had enough.
