Weirdhouse Cinema: The Man Who Fell to Earth

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss Nicolas Roeg's 1976 sci-fi film "The Man Who Fell to Earth," starring the legendary David Bowie.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb
and I am Joe McCormick.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
And today on Weird House Cinema we are going to
be talking about the nineteen seventy six science fiction film
The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicholas Rogue
and starring David Bowie. This is a film that has
been on my radar for many years. I knew it
had a reputation for being quite strange and according to

(00:39):
some critics at least quite good, though I think critical
opinion is divided. And I'd never seen it before, didn't
really know anything about it at all, and so here
we are to talk about it. I just finished it
this morning.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, this is what I had never seen in its
entirety before. I just had vague memories of catching parts
of it on like a lonely after noon in the
nineties on A and E television, so certainly certainly not
a full understanding of the picture. I just had some
visions of the alien David Bowie, and some basic kind
of like meandering about in the seventies.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Man showing this on TV must involve a lot of editings,
like every insurance salesman in the film gets naked.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, this is this might be our nakedest film that
we've covered on Weird House Cinema. It's our thirtieth selection
from the nineteen seventies, and it's also pretty long. This
one actually ties Perana Mandir for the longest film we've
covered on Weird House. Both of those clock in at
one hundred and thirty eight minutes, though initially in the
initial US release of the film, there was something like

(01:45):
twenty minutes maybe even I've seen some people talk about
thirty minutes being cut off. I think it's more like
twenty minutes were cut from the film for that initial release.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
I wonder what twenty minutes those were.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
I think some of the some of the naked bits.
For sure. There is the Hello Mary Low sequence, so
we'll get too later on. It's my understanding that was
cut in its entirety.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
I see.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
But it's weird to consider this film and cuts, as
we'll discuss, like the this is not necessarily a linear plot.
You know, there are this this film, you know, drifts
across the peripheries of multiple genres. There are a lot
of ideas in it, and this is I think one
of the film's strengths, but it's also been pointed out

(02:30):
as a weakness by its many detractors. I wanted to
touch on just a couple of reviewers and what they
have said about this film in the past. Okay, First up,
Roger Ebert. You know, we often check in see what
the great Roger Ebert had to say about films. Sometimes
we agree with him wholeheartedly. Sometimes, you know, we have
to agree to disagree. He reviewed this film twice, once

(02:53):
upon its release in seventy six, and then again in
twenty eleven for its re release. He gave it two
point five stars initially, and then later in twenty eleven
he bumped.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
That up to three stars, classic Ebert do over. Yeah,
but in the Airplane over the Sea, Oh no, actually,
I think that's a ten.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
So it's still always interesting to hear what he had
to say. So in seventy six he wrote, quote, it
requires an almost courageous leap of the imagination to take
Nicholas Rogues The Man Who Fell to Earth. Seriously, here
is a film so preposterous and posturing, so filled with
gaps of logic and continuity that if it weren't so solemn,
there'd be the temptation to laugh aloud. And yet at

(03:35):
the same time, this is a film filled with interesting ideas.
It's like a bunch of tentative sketches for a more
assured film that was never made.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
I think that's sort of right on the money. I
mean it just I think depends on how appealing or
unappealing those various elements are to you. There are parts,
I'd say, overall, I think I quite liked The Man
Who Fell to Earth, and I really liked the other one,
Nicholas Rogue movie I've seen, and there were similarities stylistic
similarities between them that we can talk about as we

(04:06):
go on. But there, yeah, there are things about this
movie that it would be hard to argue they really work.
Like the scene where where David Bowie's character is arguing
with his human lover Mary Lou played by Candy Clark,
and he gets angry and smacks a tray of chocolate
chip cookies out of her hand and they fly up

(04:29):
into the air and we see them in slow motion
like the spaceships, or like the Bone turning into the
spaceship in two thousand and one and then the cookies
fall to the floor and they're all broken, and I
think that the camera kind of lingers on that, like, oh,
the cookies are broken, you know, like their souls or
like like their relationship or something. I mean that is
that is high camp?

Speaker 2 (04:50):
That is fun Yeah, yeah, like that that has to
be intentionally humorous, right. I laughed out loud at that sequence.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
But to interpret it as intentionally humorous does take like
a leap of faith, because there's no wink at you
at all. It's you know, they're not There's nothing that
you could use to really prove that this is supposed
to be funny. Like that moment is played deadly serious
in the movie itself.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah. There. I think that the main scene that jumps
out as potentially having that wink is where the goons
are trying to throw buck Henry out the window and
they their first attempt, he like cracks the glass and
falls back on the living room floor. Yes, and he
apologizes too, and he's like I'm sorry, and they're like,
I don't worry about it, and then they throw them
out the window.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
To h I agree that moment clearly. Yeah, that kind
of it breaks the reality a bit and becomes more
intentionally funny. And yet you could get the wrong idea
from what we're talking about and assume that that means
the Man who Fell to Earth is some kind of farce,
which for the most part, I think it's not. I
think most of this movie is meant to be taken

(05:56):
seriously to to you know, to convey emotion and drama
between the characters in the straightforward way it's presented, and
you are supposed to feel what the characters are feeling.
So it just has these strange kind of moments where
something absolutely ridiculous happens, but then it goes back into
being a kind of ponderous exploration of alienation and alcoholism.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, yeah, Alcoholism is one of the central themes in
this film, and I understand in the book it's based upon,
and yeah, it's I think a lot of films you expect,
you reasonably expect more of a linear progression. Scene A
speaks to scene B, and so forth. This is a
movie where it's like you have all these different scenes

(06:42):
with different interactions between characters, and they may speak to
each other without any real consideration of time and space.
You know, It's like you're triangulating a feeling out of
different points in the film.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
Yes, and I think also contributing to what you're saying
there well. Get in a more detail about this later on.
But David Bowie's performance itself, he's the central character in
the movie. I would say his acting performance is incredibly ambiguous,
to the point of almost feeling kind of random, like

(07:15):
Newton is often. The character he plays in this movie
is named Thomas Jerom Newton, and Newton goes through much
of the plot being kind of aloof and spacey and unemotional.
He sort of detached from the action. He doesn't display
a lot of emotion, and then there are suddenly moments
when he does display a lot of emotion, and they're

(07:36):
not always what you'd really expect based on the context
of the scene or the dramatic arc of the film
as a whole. The way he sort of occasionally comes
out of his somnambulent and detached state and displays emotion
almost feels like like Bowie kind of like roll to die.
Before he did each scene, it was like, how am
I going to play this one? Rather than like reading

(07:58):
the script and thinking what would be logical in this scene.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, and it's I mean, this is especially a weird
film to try and judge an actor's performance in, especially
someone like Bowie, who is coming into this, as we'll discuss,
you know, not a tremendous filmography under his belt, coming
in mainly as a rockstar celebrity, and with Bowie especially,
I've always found this to be the case, and found
it to be the case leading up to this episode,

(08:24):
trying to figure out, like who he really was. It's
like that scene in Nolan's Batman sequel where you're trying
to knock down or the various scenes where you're trying
to figure out the origin story of the Joker. It's
like a different story each time, and it makes you
feel like, well, nothing is real, Like he's completely protean,
He's this this shape shifter.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yes, I see exactly what you're saying. Yeah, Bowie can
very much feel like that, which which is not a
knock on Bowie. Of course I loved him, Bowie's music
and and you know, not a knock on him despite
what I just said, not really a knock on him
as an actor, because despite the the kind of random
displays of emotion and odd choices he makes throughout the film.

(09:05):
It does make it harder to take this movie as
a straight forward drama. But at the same time, while
he sort of Bowie's contributions are kind of taking away
from the movie in one direction, they are adding greatly
to it in another, which Bowie just brings some kind
of powerful energy to the screen and he is hard

(09:28):
to look away from.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Absolutely. I mean, anybody you look at talking about this film,
they almost always at the very least praise Bowie's performance.
So like when Ebert came back and revisited this film,
he was acknowledging the cult status. He praised Bowie's quote
unquote eurie performance and he wrote, quote it's slow going
at times, and the plot isn't worthy of the performances.
Too many shots of limousines and an unexplained big truck,

(09:53):
too many unfocused conversations and offices. I gave it two
five stars and seventy six That was about right, but
I'm nudging it up to three stars for the twenty
eleven re release. Star ratings are meaningless anyway, so consider
this just a quiet protest vote against the way projects
this ambitious are no longer possible in the mainstream movie industry.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
I see what he's saying there, So like, even though
he thinks this is still a very flawed film given
the convergence of a greater proportion of modern movies on
a kind of like safe marketable sameness, he looks back
and is like, well, Okay, they tried to do something
really weird and really different, different and really ambitious with

(10:35):
this story. And there might have been ways that it
didn't quite work, but great respect for trying.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah. Now. I also frequently cite the writings of Psychotronic
Film Guide author Michael Weldon as well. You know, he
almost always have something to say about the films we
cover on this show, and you know, sometimes it's very
matter of fact, like this is what this film was.
Other times there's a little more or like review quality

(11:02):
to what he's written, and this is such a film.
The really interesting thing, though, to me anyway, is that
he absolutely praises the film, seems to love the film
and Bowie's performance in it, while also seemingly being rather
dismissive of Bowie's musical career. So I'm going to read
part of what he has to say reminder that this
review would have been written no later than nineteen eighty three. Quote,

(11:24):
David Bowie makes a great alien, and this fascinating science
fiction film, which spans twenty five years, will be revived
in the future, long after most of his derivative rock
albums land in the cutout bins. Okay, Mikey, So you know,
I guess some folks don't like Bowie's music. I mean,
I guess, to be fair, Boi's discography covers a lot

(11:46):
of ground.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
Right, yeah, I mean, if you don't like it, you
don't like it. I like it. I'm a Bowie fan.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
I mean it could prove true. Eventually. There may come
a day where people are like David Bowie who and
they're like the guy from the Manufeld to Earth and like,
oh yes he's amazing.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
Oh yes, that's strange musical career. Oh wow, watching twenty
five televisions and screaming get out of my mind.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
All right, Well my elevator pitch for this one. I
went through a few different possibilities, but ultimately I'm landing
on David Bowie is from outer space. But like for real, I.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Do think it's interesting that by this point David Bowie
had already been playing an alien wasn't the premise of
Ziggy Stardust that he was an alien who came to
Earth and started a rock band. And then that was
nineteen seventy two, I think, And then several years later
he's in a movie based on this premise, but it

(12:40):
was a movie based on a book that already existed.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, I mean, it's almost like he was auditioning for
the film with his career up to that point, And yeah,
you have a better head for all the different personas
he went through, because again that's another aspect of the
protein nature of Bowie. It's like there are these different phases,
different incarnations, and in a way, this film ends up
being like another version of himself that is out there

(13:07):
in the same way that Jareth, the Goblin King from
Labyrinth is like another Bowie persona that kind of lives
in the same pantheon.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well, I'm not going to pretend to have a deep
knowledge of all the faces of Bowie and the different
personas he adopted over the years. So I know there
was the Ziggy Stardust thing, which I think was more
audacious and supposed to be more audacious and outlandish than
this kind of persona I have seen The Men Who
Fell to Earth, persona linked to Bowie's musical stage persona

(13:37):
known as the quote thin White Duke, which is apparently
one of his more odious faces. That also I think
had to do with a time of his life where
he had genuine drug addiction. And so I don't know,
I don't know a lot about that, but it does
seem like this movie sort of fits in somewhere in
the mid seventies in his career and does contribute to

(14:00):
his evolving stage persona as a musical performer as well.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
I read just drastically contrasting things about Bowie's performance in
this Like, on one hand, I think I saw something
where they like Bowie said that he was whacked out
on drugs when they filmed this and he doesn't remember it.
And then there are other stories where like Nicholas Rogue
is like, no, no, he gave up drugs for this
film and was, you know, very punctual and very professional.

(14:27):
And then you also hear things about how Rogue apparently
at one point entertained the idea of casting Michael Crichton
in This Ruffle, which was just because he was tall,
I guess, and maybe had a little like, but it
was like that gives you some insight into what he
was maybe at some point going for here, like he
wanted a non actor who also had some level of
celebrity status of that at the time period, and you know,

(14:49):
and then how does that play into sort of the
expectations of how this character was going to come across
on screen?

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Is this before or after Westworld?

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Oh? I don't, I don't remember off the top of
my head.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
So annoying you google Westworld now and this TV series
comes up. It's like, I don't want to know. I
want to know about the movie. Oh, nineteen seventy three, Yeah, okay, okay,
So you know that was written and directed by Michael Crichton.
So it's like, I want the guy who directed Yule
Brinner in Westworld to play my alien.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, I mean Crichton was pretty successful at the time.
So I don't know. I guess it makes sense. But
I will drive home that David Billie's performance and this
does not feel like your typical non actor or celebrity
immediately turned actor performance. There's a lot more there to consider.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
I think the way I would put it is, despite
him making some dramatic choices, that almost seem to work
against this directly. Bowie just has overwhelming screen charisma and
is very interesting and believable as a performer.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
Absolutely all right, let's listen to a little bit of
the trailer audio. Are you the the first?

Speaker 3 (16:18):
The first one? This is it?

Speaker 2 (16:22):
I've always been visited.

Speaker 4 (16:24):
Nothing you have seen or heard about David Bowie will
prepare you for the impact of his first dramatic performance
in The Man Who Fell to Earth. This is another
dimension of David Bowie, one of the few true originals
of our time. You're really a freak, I mean not unkindly.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
I like freaks. Is this a weapon?

Speaker 1 (16:50):
The weapon was too small for aniplanetary travel.

Speaker 4 (16:56):
Assume that it's a weapon. If I stay here, CAUSI die.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
You take me with you. I'll see you don't die.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
I can't see.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
You.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
Are I think you know?

Speaker 2 (17:20):
You know too much about it?

Speaker 4 (17:24):
Very taking me. He's just like everybody else.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
He's he's he's a freak. You don't understand.

Speaker 4 (17:32):
You might be able to save him, very lou save him,
help me?

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Then no, love me?

Speaker 1 (17:45):
I love you.

Speaker 4 (17:54):
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a powerful love story,
a cosmic mystery, the spectacular fantasy a shocking, mind stretching experience,
insight in space and sas.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
All right, well, if you want to watch The Man
Who Fell to Earth in its entirety, before you continue
on with this episode or after a week, talk about
the people involved in it. Luckily, it's widely available in
all formats. I'm not even sure exactly which edition I
rented from Videodrome. Maybe the fortieth anniversary edition. They had
like several different versions, and I think it's also available

(18:47):
in the Criterion collection. It's been put out a number
of times.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yeah, I just streamed at this time.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
All right, let's jump into the people involved here. As
we've been saying, the director is Nicholas Rogue, who lived
nineteen twenty eight through twenty eighteen English film director and cinematographer,
with a noted and highly influential style, often characterized as
featuring fractured editing and nonlinear storytelling techniques. He's also pretty

(19:21):
well known for his depictions of nudity and sex in
his films, but the details of this are a bit
more nuanced, as we'll discuss.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
I think Rogue has a reputation, at least for using
sex to great dramatic effect in his films, So he
makes movies that have a lot of sex in them,
but it's not just for the sake of depicting sex
and nudity. It, more so than in most films, is
sort of a scene in which dramatic relationships and interactions

(19:51):
between characters are developed.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah. Yeah, Like the flesh is not the endpoint. The
flesh is a storytelling tool or a character creation, character
development tool. So we'll have more to say about that
as we roll on. It's really I think one of
the several interesting things about the picture. Roguess cinematography credits
extend back to sixty one and include such films as

(20:14):
sixty four as The Mask of the Red Death. There's
one sequence in particular. I imagine you probably noticed this
as well. Remember in Mask of the Red Death we
had the procession of different rooms that are different colors,
and what did we have in this film? We had
a similar thing pretty late in the picture, Like the
penthouse in which the man who felt or earth is imprisoned,

(20:35):
has this feel to it.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
I did not make that connection, but you're exactly right.
In the rooms, yeah, that you go from like a well, yeah,
like one of the rooms is a sort of a
yellow room that is a it has wallpaper up that
depicts a forest in autumn and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
So we featured Mask of the Red Death on a
previous episode of Weird House, So go back and listen
to that one if you want more on that.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
But that one was directed by Roger Corman. Right, Rogue
did cinematography.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
Cinematography, Yeah, so I started off on the cinematographer side
of things. He worked on Fahrenheit four fifty one. Then
he ventures into directing with nineteen seventies Performance starring James
Fox and McJagger, and then came nineteen seventy one's walk
About and seventy threes. Don't Look Now.

Speaker 3 (21:19):
Don't Look Now is the other Nicholas Rogue directed film
I've seen, which it's been a number of years now,
but I remember that being a very dark and sad
but very interesting and compelling horror film.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, I'm familiar with it by reputations when had Donald
Sutherland and Julie Christy. That sounds right, Okay, Yeah, I
haven't seen it. The only other film that I've seen
by him is The Witches from nineteen ninety, which you
know is ultimately a children's film, but also also very
interested in anyway. Following the Manufeld to Earth, he did Eureka.

(21:58):
In eighty three, he did I'm not sure to what,
he did some sort of music video collaboration work with
Roger Waters. He did a segment in eighty seven's Aria
the Witches in ninety Cold Heaven in ninety one, a
nineteen ninety three TV adaptation of Heart of Darkness. And
then there was a period featuring a couple of erotic

(22:18):
or semi erotic film projects I'm not sure, an episode
of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicle Show and a two
thousand and seven horror film titled Puffball The Devil's Eyeball.
There's also a nineteen ninety six Sampson and Delilah movie
in the mix there that it looks like it has
a solid cast.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
Oh Man, Nicholas Rogue movie about the Bible. That sounds
up my alley.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah, all right. The screenplay is by Paul Meyersberg born
nineteen forty one. He was an apparently an uncredited writer
on Roger Korman's The Tomb of i Gia from nineteen
sixty four, followed by staff writing work on Conrad Rooks's
adaptation of Hermann Hess' Sidharta in seventy two. Subsequent screen

(23:00):
playwork includes seventy seven's The Disappearance Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence,
nineteen eighty three's Eureka, nineteen eighty eight's Nightfall, nineteen nineties,
The Last Samurai Not the Tom Cruise one, and that Nightfall,
by the way, that is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's
work Nightfall. He also directed That Oh Interesting. The screenplay

(23:23):
is adapted from the novel The original novel by Walter Tavitz,
who lived nineteen twenty eight through nineteen eighty four an
American novelist and screenwriter. He wrote the novels The Hustler,
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Mockingbird, The Steps of
the Sun, The Queen's Gambit, and The Color of Money.
Obviously The Hustle, Yeah Color.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
So did he write multiple pool related novels?

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, yeah, I think one is the follow up to
the other. But oh, I see yeah, But yeah, The Hustler,
of The Queen's Gambit, and The Color of Money were all,
of course made into films.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
I would not have guessed that in a million years. Wow.
Same writer as The Color of money.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Yeah, and then we should also point out that The
Man Who Fell to Earth has been adapted a few
different times. This was the first adaptation, but then it
was adapted in eighty seven as a TV movie with
Beverly DiAngelo and Will Wheaton. And then there's a real
recent TV series adaptation that came out in twenty twenty two.

(24:22):
And it looks interesting as well and has a good cast.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Oh, it's got Bill NII and Chi will tell a
G four Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah, So Bill Nye apparently plays David Bowie's character from
this film, but an older version of him, So I
guess it's kind of like a sequel. But again, I
haven't seen it, so I don't know all the details there.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Just looked it up as E four is playing somebody
named Faraday. That's not a character who was in this movie,
so I don't know if that's an character from the
book or something.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
Maybe he's a new alien, I'm not sure. Yeah, I
just saw some stills from it. Okay, but now it's
time to talk about David Bowie. Yes, David Bowie plays
Thomas Jerome Newton. Bowie lived in nineteen forty seven through
twenty sixteen. Yeah, a legend of music and film and

(25:12):
just culture in general, an enigmatic figure who seemed to
revel in alternate personas and phases and reinvention. Again, there's
this kind of protean element to his celebrity image. His
music career often flowed in and out of cinema in
the form of short film music videos, full blown musicals,
and more. He'd had a handful of bit roles before

(25:34):
this movie, but the manufeld earth like propelled him like
lead status this movie. By the way, if I'm looking
at everything correctly occurs in his discography between nineteen seventy
six is Stationed to Station. In nineteen seventy seven's Low
Low features a photo of Bowie from this film as
the album ark.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Oh okay, that's interesting. I wouldn't have identified that because
the cover of the background is very orange, which is
not really one of the dominant colors in this film.
But yeah, hair, oh, that's true. You're right, the orange
and the sort of yellow in the front of the bangs.
But yeah, he what he's wearing sort of like a

(26:15):
coat without a dark coat with a high collar.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, yeah, side profile.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, and that's a coat that he wears several times
in this movie. We see him in that when he
first arrives on Earth and he's like sort of climbing
down a hillside in the American Southwest after his ship
has crashed and he's wearing this big coat. But there
are other times where he shows up, like he appears
to rip torn at one point and he's just got

(26:41):
the coat on and the hood on and he's like, hello,
we're going to meet tomorrow and ripped horns like ah,
and then they meet the next day.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
They do yeah, Yeah, it's an important scene to prepare
you for that meeting. Well. After this movie, Bowie, he
followed this up with David Hemming's nineteen seventy eight film
Just a Jigglow, Alan Clark's Ball in eighty two, The
Hunger in eighty three, which is a vampire movie, the
Japanese war film Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence in eighty three,

(27:10):
John Landis Is Into the Night in eighty five, Absolute
Beginners in eighty six, Jim Henson's Labyrinth in eighty six,
as well The Last Temptation of Christ in eighty eight.
He plays a pilot in that and from here from
there on out, his acting roles, they seem to enter
it like a different phase, a lot of smaller roles.
He appears in Lynch's Twin Peaks fire Walk with Me

(27:30):
in nineteen two. He played Andy Warhol in Basquiade in
ninety six, Tesla and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige in two
thousand and six, a very fun small role, you know,
kind of a cameo. And he also played himself in
various movies and TV shows, sometimes to comedic effect, like
he's in Zoolander. I think as himself that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
Putting a musician in a movie doesn't always work. I
think it's the kind of thing people assume would work
because it's like, oh, yeah, you know, you're a rock star.
That takes a certain kind of charisma, But it doesn't
always translate into playing a role in a drama. But
I think with Bowie it does. I mean, Bowie Bowie
might have some kind of weird, some contours popping out

(28:14):
of the role he's assigned within a script that are
just pure Bowie, But at the same time he's he's
clearly quite good as a screen actor.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, like we've been saying, it's just a tremendous performance.
You can't take your eyes off of head. He has
this like just his physicality is so strange and alluring.
He has this great kind of sickly elfin energy that
is even distinct and like, looking at these other Bowie roles,
like the Goblin King and Labyrinth is essentially an elf
you know, granted it's many years later, but totally different

(28:45):
energy to that elfin character.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Oh yeah, No, the Goblin King is like he is
in charge. He's in control. He is the dominant master
of his kingdom. Bowie's character in this film is even
when he's playing like a a character who is the
head of a great industry and has all this money
and is being driven around everywhere, he is a man
who has constantly alienated, an off balance and afraid of

(29:10):
what might happen, and not in control.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, all right, we also have Ripped Torn in this
film playing Nathan Brice Torn lived nineteen thirty one through
twenty nineteen, American actor of stage, TV, and film, with
credits going back to the mid fifties. He acted and
eventually directed on Broadway as well, having studied at the
Actors Studio in New York under Lee Strasberg. Early TV
credits include such shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller.

(29:37):
He went on to play Judas in nineteen sixty one's
King of Kings. He betrays Jeffrey Hunter's Jesus. By the way,
the story goes that he was originally cast in the
Jack Nicholson role for Easy Rider, but got into what
seems to be a very heated argument with Dennis Hopper,
the details of which were later the subject of legal battles.

(29:58):
So yeah, yeah, you can read about it online. There's
some disagreements about who started what fed, who may have
pulled a knife on who, and the courts had to
settle it.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
But I can't imagine the noises Rip Torn made in
this argument, because I bet they were. A.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah, he has a kind of a bestial quality to him.
I think that's one of the there's a yeah, there's
rip Torn has a there's an energy there.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
He unleashes some fearsome growls and grunts throughout The Men
Who Fell to Earth.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah. He played Henry Miller in nineteen seventies Tropic of Cancer.
He appeared in Michael Crichton's seventy eight film Coma and
in nineteen eighty two, he played the child sacrificing villain
Max and Don Cosarelli's The beast Master. Very fun performance
that one. But that doesn't stop there. He played a
ceo in ninety three's RoboCop three, he played Z and

(30:53):
the Men in Black Franchise, and oh, he played General
Electric Ceo Don Guys on Thirty Rock And Yeah. He
was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Cross
Creek in eighty three. And he also, I think had
multiple Emmy nominations for his role as already the producer
on The Larry Sanders Show.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
I guess this reveals I've never seen a lot of
his work, but I mean, he's got that distinctive voice,
and he he's one of those character actors who can
just show up for a cameo role and the lines
written for him don't have to be funny at all,
just like the way his voice sounds and the way
he looks makes the role comedic.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
I think this may be the first film I've watched,
the first anything I've watched with Rip Torn in it
where he's not an outright villain or there at least
a prop up comedic effect.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, I agree. This is I think the first time
I've ever seen him in just a straight dramatic role.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
All Right. We also have Candy Clark playing the character
Mary Lou, who we've alluded to already. Candy Clark was
born in nineteen forty seven, probably best known for her
role as Debbie Dunham in a nineteen seventy Three's American
gri for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress,
only her fourth film role. Subsequent credits include Oh, A
wonderful list of movies, seventy eight is the Big Sleep,

(32:09):
A film called More American Graffiti in seventy nine, which
I didn't realize was a thing. She's in Larry Cohen's
ce the Wings Serpent, fabulously fung giant monster film set
in New York from nineteen eighty two. She's in the
Chopper movie Blue Thunder. She's in Amityville three D from
eighty three. She's in Stephen King's Cat's Eye from eighty five.

(32:31):
She's in the nineteen eighty eight Blobb remake. She is
in Cool as Ice, the Vanilla Ice movie from nineteen
ninety one.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
Oh, that's a fan favorite. That's the movie where we
discovered that Vanilla Ice can jump a motorcycle over a
fence without a ramp. I guess he just kind of
lifts it. He's faster than a horse. And that's there's
like the whole racing the horse sequence there, right, Well,
I believe that motorcycle can go faster than a horse.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Well, yeah, but I don't know why. It seems to
you throw Vanilla Eyes into the equation. It just raised
his questions. I think.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Also, that's a movie about him falling in love with
and trying to date a girl whose father who's disapproving.
Father is the gun guy from Tremors.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
Oh yes, yes, yeah, it's been I saw a roof
tracks version of this. I've never watched it straight up anyway.
She plays Buffy's mom and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from
ninety two. She's in Zodiac from two thousand and seven,
and she did a number of TV episodes over the
years as well, including episodes of fairy Tale Theater and
Twin Peaks.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
I thought Candy Clark was fantastic in this movie. She
is the human soul of the film, whereas Bowie is
giving this kind of random, uncontrolled, ambiguous performance where you
don't always understand where his emotional displays are coming from,
or why they're happening this way this time, or or

(33:56):
what the source of his aloofness is, what is he
really feeling. She is there to be the anchor of pure, understandable,
earth based human emotion, and she's quite powerful in her role.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
I think, yeah, it's a role that's often has this
kind of like raw, innocent, unfiltered feeling about it.

Speaker 4 (34:14):
You know.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Again, she's definitely the human heart of the picture, all right.
We also have a character named Oliver Farnsworth. He's a
patent lawyer that becomes important to the plot and eventually
ends up running David Bowie's Earthly Empire, played by Buck Henry,
who lived nineteen thirty through twenty twenty American actor, screenwriter,
and director who worked on a lot of interesting projects

(34:36):
over the years. His writing credits include sixty seven's The Graduate,
nineteen seventies Catch twenty two, seventy three's The Day of
the Dolphin, and nineteen ninety five's To Die For. His
directing credits include seventy eight's Heaven Can Wait I Believe.
He co directed with Warren Beatty on that one. His
acting credits include bit parts in various things he wrote,
but I'll single out here that he did one Tales

(34:58):
from the Crypt episode and was also a familiar face
on thirty Rock playing Liz Lemon's dad, Dick Lemon.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
Oh I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, old Dick Lemon. Yeah, it's a fun, fun role.
He also is you know, kind of linked to especially
early Saturday Night Live because he was a he hosted
like ten different times.

Speaker 3 (35:17):
Oh, okay, I think he is also quite good in
this movie.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, he is often wearing some really distracting glasses, like
reading glasses. I guess that it just like you know,
total coke, bottle very trailer park boys, I guess would
be the comparison to compare it to modern media.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
Yes, there is a tragic part where some goons come
to his apartment to do him harm and they take
his glasses off and he says, those are my eyes.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Yeah, this is a This is a good performance as well,
in large part because Nicholas Rogue seems to have decided
at some point it's like it doesn't matter how small
a character you are in this film, we can still
get in there and show you at your most tender.
We can show like where your heart is, even if

(36:05):
it's really not necessary arguably for the overall plot.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah, this is a character whose role in the in
the plot progression is just as like a lawyer and
then a corporate functionary. But we get these moments of
like him at his in his home life, with his
with his partner Trevor, and they seem to have this wonderful,
supportive relationship, and like there's no reason in most films

(36:31):
that you would see this character's home life and their relationships.
You just see him like executing orders that are to
be done for the project.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yeah. Yeah, so their relationship is sweet, and I'm ultimately
glad it was included, you know, even though it's exactly
the sort of thing you can imagine someone arguing for
a cut. They're like, why do we need to know this?
And you know what?

Speaker 3 (36:51):
That continue that trend of like showing surprising glimpses of
home and family life and relationships with characters who had
other in other stories just be purely functional sort of
game pieces. That's true also of like even the sort
of the I don't know if you'd call them villains,
like the antagonists of Bowie's character in the movie, including

(37:13):
like rival corporate agents and people who work for the
government who were ultimately trying to enact a conspiracy against
David Bowie.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
That's right, and that includes the character Peters played by
Bernie Casey, who lived nineteen thirty nine through twenty seventeen.
He was an American football player turned actor. As I've
had to do before, I'll leave it to you, gentle listeners.
If anyone out there knows football, you can write in
and tell us what Bernie Casey's role in football was

(37:42):
and like how big a deal he was. But at
any rate, he was a football player, he became an actor,
and his credits have a you know, there's a fair
amount of diversity in the sort of roles he played,
Like for instance, he's in nineteen seventy two's Gargoyles, a
desert gargoyle film, and yes, he plays a gargoyle, like
a full body gargoyle costume wearing gargoyle in this.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
We've talked about checking this out to see whether it'd
be good for the show or not, because I think
wasn't it directed by Stan Winston or something or maybe
effects by Stan Winston. It was like a t a
made for TV movie about gargoyles that live underground in
New Mexico.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, it's another one that I think I weirdly saw,
like on A and E on a Sunday afternoon. There's
like there's certain films. They're almost all seventies films, and
for some reason, like A and E was really into
playing them on Sunday afternoons. I don't know what it was. Anyway.
He was in seventy three's Cleopatra Jones. He was in
nineteen seventy six's Doctor Black, Mister Hyde, nineteen seventy seven's Ants,

(38:43):
Exclamation Point Roots the Next Generations. In seventy nine. He
was also in Sharky's Machine, an Atlanta movie that came
out in nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
I haven't seen that.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, I haven't either, but it's I'm always kind of
interested in older Atlanta movies, you know, as I've explained before,
like The Visitor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Visitor especially. He
was in Never Say Never Again from eighty three. This
is the second adaptation of the James Bond Thunderball novel.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
Did he play Felix Lighter in that?

Speaker 2 (39:16):
I'm not sure what This was the one where Sean
Connery came out of retirement, right, and there was like
some sort of rights issue that allowed them to do it.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
That sounds right. So it was not sanctioned by the
official I don't know, the James Bond media machine. It
was not one of the official franchise films. It's just like,
we got Sean Connery for some reason. It's legal for
us to make Thunderball, so we're just gonna do it.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, I think I've maybe seen it once. Let's see
what else? Was Bernie Casey in eighty eight, so I'm
gonna get you sucka in eighty nine, he was in
Bill and Ted. He was an under siege in ninety two,
and oh, he's in John Carpenter's in the Mouth of
Madness from ninety four. I forgot about this. I believe
he plays one of Sam Neil's characters, insurance Buddies.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
Oh okay, yeah, was he his boss or something?

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, Like it's not a not a huge role, but
there there. I think he's in that sequence where they're
having lunch at a cafe and a sutter cane fan
smashes the window in Oh that's right.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, like a guy runs up into like smashes the
window with an axe or something.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, so Bernie Casey also has some
interesting TV credits star Trek d Space nine and Babbylon
five sequest twenty thirty two, and also a voice roll
on Batman Beyond And Yeah, like you're saying, this is
another role that doesn't call for any fleshing out. Really,
this is just not even a secondary character in the film,

(40:41):
but Rogue goes the extra mile to give his insight
into his romantic and family life.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
Wait did you mention also has him skinny dipping.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Oh yeah. Of all the actors I've mentioned here, Buck
Henry is the only one that doesn't have a nude scene. Yeah,
we get this scene between and Peter's wife where they're
skinny dipping, and it's kind of this dream like, Yeah,
a dreamlike nude bathing scene that I guess it's probably

(41:10):
less talked about in terms of the other nude scenes
in this film, but I thought it was. It was
very again, very beautiful, very dream like. Again, a sequence
that shows a lot of skin, but it isn't about
their skin like, it's about it's about their hearts. I
know that sounds cheesy to say, it out loud, but like,
like that's what it is. It's like, this isn't about
their bodies. It's about the relationship between these two characters.

(41:32):
And we can argue to what extent we really needed
this insight into their their the way they feel, because
their characters are not as central to the plot as
other characters.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
Yeah. Again, if this were another movie, what Peters does
is primarily be involved in a conspiracy to imprison David
Bowie in a hotel room.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah. One last actor I'm going to mention here, and
this is Claudia Jennings, who plays Peter's wife. She lived
nineteen forty nine through nineteen seventy nine. Not a huge role,
but we do get some sense of her character. We
get a sense of her as a mother even she
was Claudey. Jings was a was nineteen seventy Playboy Playmate
of the Year and made quite a splash in B
movies during her short career. So her credits include seventy

(42:15):
twos The Unholy Rollers. I think that's a roller derby
kind of a movie. A movie also from seventy two
called Group Marriage, So future shock alert on that one.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Seventy three's Gator Bait, which is a swamp movie, like
some sort of an action swamp movie. I don't think
i've seen it, but I'm familiar with the title.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
Seventy eight exploitation film, sowe it is.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
It's a swamp'sploitation film, and I think they made a
sequel that she's not in with something like Gator Bait
to Cajun Justice. That's it. She's in seventy eight to
Death Sport, and she's in the nineteen seventy nine David
Cronenberg car racing movie Fast Company that also has John
Saxon and George Buzza.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
Never seen it.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
All right. Getting to the music on this picture, it's
interesting because there's a whole like saga here. There's a
whole story, and there are also differing details about how
it all came together. But basically David Bowie was originally
going to tackle the score and soundtrack for this film
as well, but apparently a variety of issues prevented this
from happening. So there was like there were time issues,

(43:27):
there were like royalty issues for some of the tracks
that he was eyeballing. There were creative hurdles, like you know,
we're talking about the different personas and phases of David Bowie,
and it sounds like like maybe he was kind of
between phases to a certain extent at that time. So
instead we have a very fractured soundtrack, which I think
ultimately fits the film and was intended to capture a

(43:50):
diverse sense of American music. But we have two chief
individuals contributing tracks here. The first is John Phillips, who
lived nineteen thirty five through two thousand and one, and
so yes, this is John Phillips of The Mamas and
the Papas. He wrote most of the songs that we
associate with The Mamas and the Papas, as well as
what San Francisco be Sure to Wear Flowers in your Hair,

(44:11):
though I'm not sure was that a Mama's in the
Papa's song without somebody else performing it?

Speaker 3 (44:15):
I don't know anyway.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
He was also one of the writers on the nineteen
eighty eight Beach Boys song Kokomo for the Tom Cruise
film Cocktail, and this was his first picture as a
composer and probably the best known of the handful of
films that he composed for. Now, I assumed that Phillips
was ultimately going to be responsible for only the folkier
tracks and the rockier tracks on here, and certainly he

(44:39):
does give us the track Bluegrass Breakdown, which you can
listen to on You know that you can stream this
soundtrack wherever you can get your music. But he also
did an excellent electronic track on this titled Space Capsule,
so that that track I really liked as well. But
then we have other tracks contributed by Stomu Yamashta born
nineteen forty seven. We talked about him previly on Weird

(45:01):
House Cinema as he did the montage music for Phase four,
the Weird Saal bass Ant movie.

Speaker 3 (45:08):
Oh okay, I'm trying to remember what the music for
that movie was like, I don't quite I remember the
visuals far more.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
But Yamashta it is a Japanese percussionist, keyboardist, and composer
known for helping defuse traditional Japanese percussive music with Western
prog rock in the sixties and seventies. He was a
member of the super group Go, alongside such names as
Steinve Wynwood, best known for the track Higher Love, and
German electronic music pioneer Klaus Schultz. Yamashta also recorded also

(45:43):
scored I'm Sorry nineteen eighty two's Tempest, starring John Cassavetti's
Susan Sarand and Molly ring Wald and rawl Julia. So
his musical contributions on this film are are also really
interesting and also kind of varied. Two tracks in particular
is one called Poker Dice, and there's another one called
One Way.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
You know, I'm just thinking about how different this movie
would have been if it had had a David Bowie soundtrack.
That seems like that really would have changed the effect
of it. And I guess we don't get to know
exactly what that's like, but I expect that would be
more than a superficial change in the experience. It would
be significant.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
I found that in just thinking about this movie, just
knowing that I was even going to watch it, having
not watched it yet, I still had myself constantly earwormed
with Space Oddity and then also the Flight of the
Concords parody song Bowie's in Space without even listening to these, like,
you can't help but think about Bowie's music when you're

(46:44):
thinking about Bowie and even in his acting work.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
All right, we ready to talk about the plot.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah, this man's not going to fall to Earth on
his own. We got to help him.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
So this is not one of those movies where it
would make sense to discuss things seen by scene. Instead,
I think what I'm going to do here is give
a short synopsis of the whole film, and then we
can come back and focus in more depth on things
that stood out to us. So basically, the plot goes
like this. A spacecraft crashes down in a lake somewhere

(47:16):
in the American Southwest. I think it's in New Mexico,
and we see a hooded figure emerge and make his
way down a hill and through these ruins of an
old mining town and into a currently populated town. And
this is David Bowie, and he looks human. In fact,
he even speaks English, and he speaks with a British accent.
So he is an alien disguising himself as a human.

(47:39):
He's trying to blend in. He doesn't want to be
found out, and he goes around telling people his name
is Thomas Jerome Newton and explains some of his weirdness
by claiming that he is British.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, it's like it's rural New Mexico, so everyone's just like,
all right, that sounds about right.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
Oh yeah, yes, the British are known to levitate. No,
he doesn't levitate. So he immediately starts trying to get money,
which is interesting. I'm like, oh, why is he trying
to get money? Like, he tries to sell some jewelry
at a shop, but he can't get what he wants
for it, so he ends up meeting with a lawyer
named Oliver Farnsworth. Farnsworth is a patent attorney and Newton

(48:18):
brings with him schematics for a number of technologies on
which he wants to take out patents and these are
all revolutionary alien technologies, things that we can't do on
Earth at all yet. So Newton quickly becomes a multi
millionaire and he becomes the head of a corporation called

(48:38):
the World Enterprises Corporation and hires Farnsworth to run the
company for him. So now he's rolling in money. And
Newton rides around in a limousine, remaining polite but aloof
like he is nice to people but does not form
any intimate connections and is always awkward and reserved. But
that changes while he is on a visit to a

(48:59):
hotel hell somewhere in the Southwest, he meets a woman
named Mary Lou played by Candy Clark. She is initially
a worker at the hotel where he's staying, and he
has like an episode in an elevator that the elevator
is going up and he is like, I don't know,
rendered woozy by the g forces of the elevator or something,
and collapses on the floor and she carries him. She

(49:22):
picks him up and carries him to his room and
then takes care of him once he's there, and they
form what at first seems to be a fast friendship,
Like they hang out talking all night. I think they
play cards or something. She takes him to church and
she introduces him to her favorite drink. Gin Bee Feeder
is a brand with a serious presence in this film.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Yeah, I mean, I guess this is kind of a
shame because prior to this, he's he's always turning down
alcohol and insisting on water. He's like, as we learn,
he's from a desert planet where there's little to no water,
and so the mere fact that anywhere you go they
offer you a water, He's like, yes, please, I'll take six.
And then she's like, you know, you could just be
drinking gin and he's like, oh, well this is great,

(50:06):
I'll do this now.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
But Mary Lou does not know that she is causing
severe harm to him by getting him to switch from
water to gin. But yeah, that is a good point
that early in the film, like he's always asking for
like when he goes to meet with the lawyer. At
first he goes to Farnsworth's house and they're like, would
you like a scotch? And he's like, I'll have a
glass of water if you have it, and they actually

(50:29):
kind of amused by this. But yeah, he's always just
looking for water everywhere he goes. I think there's even
a scene where he dips a cup early on in
just a stream of what looks like cloudy, dirty water,
just like runoff running through the you know, in a
ravine and the desert, and drinks it and is really
enjoying it.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Yeah. It's worth noting here that this is a film that,
maybe almost stealthily, if you don't know to expect it,
you might be surprised that it is a film that
does seem to be in a large part about alcoholism. Yeah,
and I understand that they the author of the novel.
Part of this was semi autobiographical, so you do see
him like struggling through alcohol addiction through much of the

(51:10):
film and having to interact in a world that also
seems to be heavily dependent on alcohol and constantly enabling
of his alcohol consumption.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Yeah, I think that. Yeah, that's right, that those are
constant themes, and in many ways you could almost say
that it's a story about a man who begins on
a mission of supreme importance and is derailed from that
mission by alcohol.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Yeah, and derailed makes sense too, because there is a trait.

Speaker 3 (51:38):
Oh, we'll get to that.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
So eventually Mary Lou and Newton their their friendship blossoms
and they fall in love. Though at one point she
asks if he is married, and he sort of matter
of factly says yes, But they continue with their love
affair nonetheless, and Newton has a house built for them
on a lake in New Mexico and they start living together. Meanwhile,

(52:02):
we've also been been getting to know Rip Torn as
doctor Nathan bryce A. He's portrayed as a university chemistry
professor who has a series of inappropriate affairs with college students,
and he is hassled by the man in university administration,
Like there are scenes of his boss getting on his
back about things, including his affairs. So he leaves academia

(52:27):
and takes a position with Newton's company, and he's sort
of recruited to design some kind of spacecraft. I seem
to recall a scene where he's arguing with his boss
at the university about how he's like, ah, they want
computers to do everything these days. Computers leave out the errors.
That's where creativity comes from.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah. Yeah, he does rail against computers there for a bit,
and he's like, I think I'm gonna go work with
this company that's actually hiring human beings, and that, of
course is David Billie's company. Right.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
So as time goes on, Newton in several ways would
say becomes more human, like his relationship with Mary Lou deepens,
but he also becomes deranged by addiction to alcohol and television.
Why would he need a TV when he's got t Rex. Well,
I don't know, but maybe in the world of this movie,

(53:17):
t Rex does not exist because David Bowie needs not one,
but seven TVs to watch simultaneously, and later about twenty
TVs to watch all at the same time, he is
obsessed with television.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Yeah. Yeah, Like sometimes there's just a random TV. Like
there's one scene where he's watching TV and like a
shack and it's just sort of like haphazardly stacked on
some kindling.

Speaker 3 (53:41):
Now, eventually both Nathan, Bryce and Mary Lou figure out
that Newton is an alien. Nathan figures it out by
secretly taking X ray photographs of him while they're talking
about work, and then when he goes to confront Newton
about this, Newton admits it. And actually in this scene,
that's the scene you were talking about, which I think

(54:02):
I want to get into more detail about in just
a bit. But basically, in the scene, Newton explains his mission,
this is why he's on Earth, and he says, quote
where I come from, there's a terrible drought. We saw
pictures of your planet on television. We saw the water.
In fact, our word for your planet means planet of water.

(54:22):
So Newton's home planet it's all dried up, it's a desert,
and he is here for Earth's water. I think, not
to steal it all and kill us, but to somehow
do something to get a significant amount of water back
to his home planet.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, like, you get the sense that he's not greedy.
He just knows that there's so much water here that
he can easily well not easily, but the big challenge
is how to bring it back. But clearly, like we
could stand to lose some of it and it would
make an enormous difference for his people.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Newton also reveals what he is to marry Lou in
a different set of circumstances. He reveals himself to Mary Lou,
I think as a kind of atonement after they have
a fight and he is mean to her, and this
leads to a bizarre reptile pupil alien sex scene.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Yeah, following a rather weird sequence where he begins to
take off all of his like fake human parts, including
using tweezers to remove his contact lenses that hide his
reptile highs. This movie seems convinced that the way to
take contacts out is with metal tweezers, which I found

(55:32):
particularly horrifying to think about, because you know, I've been
wearing contact lenses for like thirty years at this point,
and I've never used tweezers to take them out. Thank God.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
Now, eventually Nathan, Bryce and Newton complete the spacecraft that
they've been working on. But just when Newton is getting
ready to depart Earth, a conspiracy against him is unleashed.
So there's like a shadowy government organization I don't know
if it's the CIA or what. And also a consortium
of rival corporation have like joined forces to do something

(56:02):
about Newton. I honestly don't recall exactly what triggers this,
do you.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
No, there's kind of there's this whole sequence where he's,
you know, Bowie seems to be about ready to board
this spaceship and we're like, all right, let's do this,
let's take off, and then it doesn't happen, and everything
feels fractured at that point, and so you kind of
have to piece together what is happening and what happened.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
Right, So, they the bad guys kidnap Newton and they
sort of old boy in prison him. They lock him
in a hotel room, and then scientists come and do
experiments on him and try to study his body, and
they treat him cruelly, Like there's a scene where they're
they're trying to look at his eyes and he's like, no,

(56:45):
don't do X rays on my eyes, and they do,
and it fuses his contact lenses to his eyes so
he can't take them out. So now he can't reveal
his real reptile eyes. He's like stuck with human looking eyes.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Yeah. Yeah, they kind of treat him like child. They're
not even like really treating him like an alien prisoner.
It's more like he's a child who's been grounded. But
they keep giving him alcohol to make him compliant with
these various tests, and presumably they never really learned much
of anything from him, right.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
And there's a scene where like when they finally get
the X rays, they're all like grinning with these evil
faces while you know, while he's clearly there suffering. But yeah,
they just keep shoving beefeed or in his mouth to
keep him compliant. They also unfortunately murder Oliver Farnsworth and
his lover Trevor by throwing them out of skyscraper windows.

(57:36):
And also for some reason, they throw out the barbell
that Trevor was bench pressing.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
Yeah, it's weird because that out the window. I don't
know it just I guess it made for a nice sequence.
It's it's so weird looking back on this now, because
again the film takes the time to develop Farnsworth and
his partners as people that you care about to some degree,
but then they are dispensed with kind of comedically, and

(58:04):
so you don't feel as bad for them as you might.
Like you might think a scene like this would be
would be played more for tragedy's sake, and it's it's not.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
This is the scene where like Buck Henry, I mean,
he's good in the scene. He's quite funny, where like
they throw him against the window and he's like, oh,
sorry about that, like apologizing that he didn't break through
the window as he was supposed to.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Yeah, so it's a great, great Buck Henry scene for sure.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
But anyway, so Newton is imprisoned for many years and
finally Mary Lou finds him. She comes to visit him,
and they briefly rekindled their love affair in a bizarre
series of scenes, but eventually she starts asking him about
his wife and family back home, back on his planet,
and they decide they do not love each other anymore,

(58:51):
and they go their separate ways, and Newton escapes his prison,
but now he has no hope of ever getting back,
ever getting the water back to his home planet, or
ever seeing his family again, so he takes a sort
of a sharp right turn. He becomes a musician and
a recording artist of some kind. We never actually see

(59:12):
him playing music. Instead, we just see rip Torn go
to a record store and listen to one of Newton's albums.
And then, in the final scene in the film, Rip
Torn finds Newton drinking on the patio of a restaurant
and asks him about his music, and Newton says it's
his only chance of ever speaking to his family again
back on his planet. He's hoping they will hear his

(59:34):
music on their home planet over the radio beamed through space.
And then like the waiter cuts him off. He says,
you can't, you know, I think you've had enough to drink,
and then he bows his head, and then the credits
roll over the downturned brim of his hat.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Yeah, the ending alone, there's not a lot of wonder
to it, you know, it doesn't end on a note
of wonder. And I'm not saying it doesn't work. And
I guess it's kind of a it take on the weary,
ageless immortal trope because at this point in the film,
everyone else has aged significantly, but Newton has not. Aged,
he still looks exactly the same. And you know, I
guess this is one more rumination on alcoholism and loneliness

(01:00:14):
and so forth. But it doesn't feel particularly cosmic, So
I could see where people would have differing impressions on
the actual ending to the film.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
So one of the things I wanted to think about
in the movie is the recurring visions of Newton's home planet.
First of all, I would say, I don't know if
it actually was, but it looks like it was shot
at White Sand's National Park in New Mexico. It's got
these kind of like white dunes. It's kind of a

(01:00:53):
pale aracus, some sort of desert environment, and we see
visions of a family with rubber skin and reptile eyes,
and they are wearing still suits. Basically, they're wearing some
kind of suit that looks like it's recycling water in
these tubes around their skin.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Yeah, these are one wonderful makeup, wonderful weird costumes. They
also kind of walk around oddly. They look like they
have emerged from some sort of a fringe animated sci
fi picture that it's a great look.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
Sometimes we see them languishing and apparently dying in the desert.
I think this seems to be Newton's like fear of
what is happening to them in his absence without him
completing his mission. Also, a lot of the visions of
his home planet involve what should we call it, the
furry orange tram. There's like a train car that runs

(01:01:47):
on a track through this desert. It's covered in orange
shag carpet or fur of some sort, and it's sort
of pyramid shaped and it has this I don't know,
it has like a tarp covering to block the sun,
I think, but it's a furry train.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yeah, it's amazing looking. It looks again, very seventies euro
sci fi looked at this thing. It raises so many
questions about the technology of these alien creatures, in the
same way that you have so many questions about their biology.
But I like that you have more questions than answers
regarding any of this, because it is supposed to feel

(01:02:24):
completely alien to us.

Speaker 3 (01:02:25):
Another thing I was thinking about with the flashbacks to
his home planet, one of his Earth based sex scenes
with Mary Low is intercut with what seems to be
a memory of sex on his home planet, which involves, like,
I don't know, rolling around in Ian Holmes's Blood from
Alien there's just like this frothy white milk everywhere is

(01:02:48):
really gross. But I guess if you're from his planet,
it's quite romantic.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Yeah. I didn't know what to make out of that
other than it was weird.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
Another thing that I thought was interesting about the film,
and did involve a lot of filmmaking technique, was Newton's
relationship with and eventually obsession with TV, starting with him
just wanting to watch television and then wanting to watch
multiple televisions at once, and he would and like you,
it would cut between the programming on the different televisions

(01:03:19):
showing all these sort of aspects of humanity. And there's
one part where he has a sort of alcoholic TV
freak out mom where he's like drinking and he's watching
twenty TVs at once and they start overwhelming him clearly
and he starts screaming, get out of my mind. But

(01:03:40):
I wonder where this comes from.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
I feel like there's this It's interesting to look back
on pictures like this. There are various pictures I can
think of off the top of my head that do
get into this idea. You know, sometimes for comedic effects
sometimes for fantastic effect about just how overwhelming it suddenly
felt like to have access to especially cable television or
even satellite television. You know that very well may line

(01:04:03):
up with this idea of overchoice that we've been discussing
in our Future Shock episodes. You know, this idea that's like,
suddenly you can watch television all the time, and you
have access to tens, dozens, maybe hundreds of channels. You
can basically start watching television and not stop. And it can,

(01:04:24):
I guess, feel kind of alien for us to think
about this, because you know, certainly we can still watch
a lot of television, as we've discussed, but I feel
like our relationship with television is a little different now
because we have these other major super time suck distractions
via the Internet that are also vying for our attention.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
Yeah, there was actually one thing about TV in this movie.
It was a scene that I thought was really fascinating
that I want to get into in more depth here.
So it's the scene where rip Torn confronts Bowie about
being an alien. So to at the scene, Newton is
like hiding alone in a dilapidated shack in the desert,

(01:05:06):
watching TV. He's like watching a Western, I think drinking.
And then Bryce arrives and Bryce confronts him and Newton
admits that he is an alien, and this is the
scene where he explains his mission. You know, on his
home planet there's a terrible drought, he says. He says
that he saw pictures of our planet on TV, on

(01:05:26):
the TV that reached his planet and saw the water
on the surface, so he is here to get the water.
So he knows Earth from television, which this in one
sense maybe explains part of Newton's obsession with watching TV,
or maybe it's just the raw appeal of TV to
any sentient being that can see it. But anyway, so

(01:05:49):
he explains his mission and then Bryce says to him,
are you the first? And Newton says there have always
been visitors. In fact, he says, even on his planet,
they found evidence of visitors who had been there. And
then he says to Bryce, haven't you seen them here
on Earth? Haven't you come across them? And then Bryce

(01:06:09):
says no, he doesn't think he's seen them, and then
Bowie says, I've seen them. And first of all, like
that was a cool moment. I was like, oh, oh,
there have been other aliens here. But then it develops
further and goes in a totally different direction. It seems
to me so like Bryce seems unconvinced about Bowie saying this,

(01:06:31):
and he's like, what do you mean, what's the evidence
of them being here? And then I think it's sort
of implied that Newton thinks there have been other alien
visitors to Earth because he's been tricked by stuff he
saw on TV, Like he literally has been watching In
Search of and stuff about UFOs and ancient aliens and

(01:06:51):
stuff like I think he's talking about Eric Vondanakan or
something and bry and Bryce is like, well, I don't
believe in any of that, and then Bowie just just
kind of like, oh, okay, well you know there has
to be something out there. But that was so so
like imagine an alien coming to Earth and then falling

(01:07:11):
for all of the like UFO stuff and being like, oh,
I guess there have been a bunch of other visitors here,
just like the rest of us seeing stuff on TV.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
Yeah. I like that side of this scene, but even
like that initial feeling of like, well, here's the alien
visitor potentially confirming that there are yet other alien visitors,
like in a sense like he has insight that we
don't have, because he does have like some like he
knows there are aliens and he can he can, you know,
sort of compare with what they know on his world

(01:07:42):
as well. And Yeah, I liked it. It's a nice
weird section of the film.

Speaker 3 (01:07:47):
I love that the one too. Yeah, you think he
has special insight, but then it becomes maybe he actually
has the same insight that lots of people think they have,
which is they watched in search of Yeah, I just
looked it up. It wouldn't be in search because that
didn't start until the year after this movie, but would
have been whatever the equivalent if that wash. Now there's
another thing I wanted to get into, which is Newton's

(01:08:09):
relationship with Mary Lou. She obviously really loves him, she's
in love with him. Does he love her? As I
was saying earlier, Bowie's performance is very ambiguous. He's often
kind of aloof and kind of tranquilized and seems to
be not reacting to things very strongly, but then sometimes

(01:08:32):
reacting very strongly and in sudden outbursts and unexpected ways.
So he's often kind of somnambulent and then suddenly he
shows clear warm emotion toward toward Mary Lou. But even
in the moments when he does that, it feels kind
of random, like other times he has these strong emotional

(01:08:55):
outbursts like anger or dangerous playfulness at her, or kind
of love bombing, and it's not easy to tell like
why each particular emotion is coming out at the time
that it is. And I guess you could just say, like, well,
he's an alien and he can't relate to us, and
you know, so it's hard to understand his you know,

(01:09:16):
the way his mind works. But what is his relationship
to the people of Earth, especially the few people close
to him? Does he care about them? Does he love them?

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
I mean, I guess the feeling I got from the
film is that it's it's paradoxical, you know, it's and
it's and it may vary from one point to another,
you know, He's it seems like one of Nicholas Rogue's
approaches here in this film anyway, is that like all
humans and even non human characters are complex, you know,
and it's like just because they even have a reduced

(01:09:48):
role in the plot doesn't mean that they're not complex
people with passions and fears and moments of tenderness. So
I think it's very possible, Yeah, that there are times
and there there is a part of him that does
feel this deep attachment to Mary Lou and perhaps that
grows over time the more of an earthling he becomes.

(01:10:09):
But then also he is still other. He is still
an alien. He still has this family that he has
essentially kind of abandoned. Like there's there's this movie again
kind of triangulating different ideas, Like you have you have
his character who has an alien wife and children in

(01:10:30):
another world, perhaps dying because he has gone to get
help and hasn't come back yet. And then you have
rip Torn's character, who also has a wife and child
that he is distant from and is strange from. And
then we also see the Peters character, you know, the
government agency guy, and we see his family, and this
is an example of where the family unit is intact.

(01:10:52):
And so we're you know, I think we're supposed to
compare these, We're supposed to think about how these apply
to these models apply to each other.

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):
Yeah, there is definitely something going on with the theme
of like the families elsewhere and I think the way
it resonated for me with like these weird moments of
like seeing Peters at home with his family suddenly like
you know, tucking his children in and then discussing with
his wife whether he knows he's like, are we really
doing the right thing? Is a strange moment again that

(01:11:21):
you would not expect with this type of character in
another movie. It's almost like it's a different way of
reminding someone that even though he has shown with his
family here, it's like showing you that in these other
scenes where he's just doing the conspiracy, he had a
family elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):
Yeah, it's a very thoughtful, very thought provoking film that
I guess ultimately it puts a lot of the legwork
on the viewer to try and sort of piece things
together and figure out what is being said. It doesn't
necessarily hold your hand.

Speaker 3 (01:11:53):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
Yeah. Now, I wanted to touch on the eroticism of
the film again. I don't think it would be accurate
to classify this as an erotic film by any sense,
though it certainly makes frequent use of eroticism. We have
scenes that feature male and female nudity, as well as
alien in human nudity, I suppose, and they feature human

(01:12:15):
nudity in a way that is generally unapologetic and frank,
in ways that viewers might not be accustomed to. But
Rogue again doesn't seem to be doing this just for titillation.
At least to me. These scenes feel less exploitive, maybe
more voyeuristic, though, because instead of flesh again being the
destination of the scene as it often is in other films,

(01:12:38):
especially the kind we often end up watching on Weird House,
flesh is another tool that the filmmaker uses to explore
a character, to explore a relationship between characters. But then
this actually ends up making the scenes more titillating because
they feel more genuine and actually provide insight into the
inner depths of the characters on the screen. You're not

(01:13:01):
just watching You don't feel like you're just watching flesh.
You were watching flesh and emotion as one.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
Yeah, I would say that this just seems like a
film in which sex is, more so than in most films,
a locus of drama itself, like it shows how the
characters are relating to one another, and what their lives mean,
and how what they and how the ways they relate
to each other is changing.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Yeah, I agree. I was looking at an article from
twenty eleven. This was in The Guardian by Danny Lee
titled good screen sex is hard to find unless you
watch a Nicholas Rogue film, and the article is very
interesting and in depth if for people interested in this
filmmaker's work. But the article speaks of The Man Who

(01:13:47):
Fell to Earth as quote, a deeply melancholy film with
a strange and genuinely beautiful sex scene between David Bowie's
stranded alien Newton and Candy Clark's hotel made Mary Lou
that replaced the felt's heat of Don't Look Now with
an existential ache and plenty of gunplay.

Speaker 3 (01:14:06):
Oh okay, so this is this talking about the quote
Hello Mary Lou scene where they've got a revolver involved there.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
Yes, this is a deliriously ludicrous scene. It begins with
a kind of like rough edge of meanness and potential
violence where Newton has this shiny revolver and you know, see.

Speaker 3 (01:14:27):
His drink with it. He's making darkness.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
Drink with it, Yeah, and then like licking it. He
like puts the barrel in his mouth to look the
alcohol off of it. And then he's like brandishing it
at Mary Lou and you know this, again, this feels
potentially like it's going to go in a really horrible direction.
But then the whole scene transforms into just an absurd
erotic romp with a kind of a heartfelt eroticism at

(01:14:54):
the core, but also just a laughable and intentional disregard
for how blank fire arm cartridges work and just how
basic cam gun safety works, because as they're engaging in
this kind of like playful four play, they are also
firing this gun at each other at like point blank
range and be like beyond fo yeah, not at all safe, like,

(01:15:16):
not at all realistic. Do not get any actual four
play ideas from this film, but it Yeah, it's just
completely bonkers but also very tender. So again, this film
is like that, it's uh, you'll it'll have different energies
and also the like same similar but opposite energies in

(01:15:38):
the same sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
Yeah, it's strange, emotionally complex. Uh yeah, I thought this.
See I when you said that this sequence is part
that was cut out, I was like, what they cut
out that part? I don't understand how you have this
movie without that part?

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:15:54):
But then it transitions to to Newton and Mary Lou
playing tennis in this room with bizarre forest patterned wallpaper,
and they decide they don't love each other anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
Yeah, and this is one of many sequences too, where
there's just way too many half consumed bottles of alcohol
just sitting around, like it's clear that the alcoholism is
just out of control. And oh, and then there's a
weird sequence in there too, where like she asks him, like,
why does he drink because he apparently doesn't physically get drunk,
and he's like, well, I see things when I drink.

(01:16:28):
And I didn't know what quite what to make of that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):
She says, you never get sick. I think she means like,
you know, you never hung over, But I don't know
if I buy that, because he seemed hungover a lot.
And yeah, but that's what she says. And then he says, yeah,
I see things. I see bodies. I see the bodies
of men and women as just Newton being Newton. Yeah.
She's kind of scandalized by this, like, oh really.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
Oh, yes, yes, I do remember this part. Yes, but
then we never actually figure out what he's talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:16:59):
Yeah, this is the part where he's pointing the gun
at her. Yes, but she thinks it's funny.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
So they end up going their own separate ways. Bryce
and Mary Lou end up becoming a couple. They say
they have Christmas together. We get a whole Christmas sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:17:12):
They're both drinking a lot, also continuing with the themes there,
but yeah, they have Christmas. We have Rip Torn drest
as Santa Claus in a wicker store, and yeah, they're
getting ready for Christmas. And then somehow this leads to
Bryce ending up listening to the record and then going
to talk to Newton one last time, and Newton asks

(01:17:35):
him did you like the record? And Rip Torn says
not much.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Well, you know, it doesn't have to be good. It
just has to be popular enough to get enough airplay.
So those signals make it out to the mystery home
planet of David Bowie.

Speaker 3 (01:17:51):
That's right. So I guess he's trying to specialize in
radio ready, commercial, commercially marketable hits that have secreting code
messages that his that his rubber still suit wearing family
will understand.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
Yeah, but you know, seriously, there's a lot to sort
of dissect there too, like this idea that he sets
out to do something to support his family, to reconnect
with his family, but eventually he just tries to create
art instead that may somehow reach them in a distant
and non physical fashion.

Speaker 3 (01:18:27):
He came here to save their lives, he failed, and
in the end all he could do was hope to
speak to them again.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Yeah, so it's you know, it's powerful stuff, all right,
that's the man who fell to Earth. So yeah, this
is a very interesting film to look at. I'd be
interested to hear what listeners think of the movie, what
your relationship with the movie over the years has been.
If we have any Bowie fans out there, how does

(01:18:55):
it play into your understanding and appreciation of the artist?

Speaker 3 (01:18:58):
Why does he need a TV when he's got t Rex?

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
And you know, I'm tempted to rewatch The Witches now
because it's like I've seen this whole, Like I've seen
the real Nicholas Rogue. I want to like, maybe watch
something that is more commercial and more family oriented and see,
like what did he bring to the table on that,
because I don't it's been a long time since I've
seen the original adaptation of The Witches has some great
performances in it, some great puppetry in it, but I

(01:19:26):
can't speak to like the fingerprints of Nicholas Rogue on
that picture. But hey, maybe some of you listeners have
watched it more recently and you can speak to that
for us. So we'll go ahead and close the book
on this one. But just a reminder that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with new
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do a

(01:19:46):
listener mail, On Wednesdays we do a short form artifactor
monster fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. And if you want to see all
the like a list of all the films we've done
over the years, the main place to go is go
to letterbox dot com. It's l E T T E
R B O x D dot com. You'll find our

(01:20:06):
profile there. We are a weird House and we have
a list and you can pull up all the like
the poster images and the details of the films we've
talked about.

Speaker 3 (01:20:13):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer, Jjposway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello. You can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:20:34):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.