From there, he goes into seclusion in the dry Southwestern landscapes that likely remind him most of home, inadvertently retreating further from his mission and his sense of self over months, then years, then decades. The film’s other characters decay alongside him: A college professor (a wonderful Rip Torn) staves off intellectual and ethical stagnation through sex; Mary-Lou’s boozing wastes her youth and innocence, and Farnsworth’s life is shattered by his economic success. Repeated references to Icarus accompany Newton’s downfall as he allows himself to be picked up by Mary-Lou, slowly picks up a booze and TV habit, and is ultimate eviscerated by the forces of Truth, Justice, and the American Way – that is to say, capitalistic brinksmanship, media hypersaturation, narcotized narcissism, and the watchful eye and meaty fist of Big Brother. This is, after all, a 1970s movie.
Bowie himself is a perfect foil for its heartbreaking addiction narrative and fascination with the pervasive impact of media on American life. Though accounts vary, according to the star himself, he was still actively addicted to cocaine during filming and he claims to have never even read the script. His turn here, like Mick Jagger’s in Roeg’s Performance six years before, is hypnotic and utterly entrancing – even as he claimed to have not been acting at all. It was his first major film role and given his delicate state of mind, he claims that the on-screen crackup reflected the breakdown visible in Alan Yentob’s classic BBC documentary on the star, Cracked Actor, which, in a fitting parallel, followed the star as he undertook his first American tour in mid-1974. In another odd confluence, the star, who famously pounds milk from a carton in Yentob’s film, would fall ill during production on Roeg’s from drinking spoiled milk on set. Such are the kinds of convergences that make Roeg’s films play like occult conjurations from another realm, whether the subject is black magic, visionquests, or visitors from other worlds. Needless to say, then, for The Man Who Fell to Earth, as he told Rolling Stone in 1983, Bowie felt that “just being me was perfectly adequate for the role. I wasn’t of this earth at that particular time.”
As an allegory, this supernaturalistically-tinged film is intentionally elemental, an elegy of water and dust set to a riotously eclectic soundtrack that went tragically unreleased at the time. The looseness and emotional distance that drove Rugoff to hire a professional psychiatrist to give notes on his radical recuts – a coldness that became an immediate point of frustration for many contemporaneous critics – are in part what makes this film so prescient. As Newton succumbs to his dependency on a progressively more astounding number of simultaneously blaring televisions to blot out guilt at his failure to return home, it’s possible to glimpse our modern age of brainrot, Cocomelon, and ADHD. In the sudden, meteoric and all-consuming corporate hegemony of his shadowy company, World Enterprises, we can see parallels to the technocratic overlords of our present, SpaceX and all. In the bone-chilling disaffection and certitude with which ecological disaster is faced, our modern nihilistic cynicism with climate change is bleakly on display. When shadowy government henchmen arrive on the scene to take over his business and hold him captive without cause, the lack of surprise we feel encapsulates the ever-increasing sense of disillusionment that’s taken over our political landscape over the course of our current decade.
“Historically, people have recognized strong individuals as heroes or heroines by their willingness to accept the responsibility for their acts,” Pauline Kael wrote at the time, “Now we’re in a period when we know that most wrongdoing – the worst wrongdoing especially – isn’t socially punished. And it’s terribly apparent that the wrongdoers face no moral consequences.” Half a century on, The Man Who Fell to Earth still seems a tragic warning, its mysteries potent, its beauty captivating. Newton’s ill-fated Icarus falls, and shades of ourselves fall alongside him.