Last night while prowling the aisles of Blockbuster, I stumbled upon a film I’d been meaning to see for a while, but had not thought to look for. It was director Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. While I am a Bowie fan, the reason for my interest in checking out this cult classic was a bit more obscure. In Philip K. Dick’s semi-autobiographical mystical sci-fi novel, VALIS, he and his friends go to see a strange movie which, for him, proves that the visions he has been receiving from extra-terrestrial sources are not only real, but have been received by others as well.
In the novel, he calls this movie by the name of Valis as well, but evidently the real-life movie he bases this section on is actually The Man Who Fell to Earth. This film came out in 1976, I think, and is fairly bizarre. Which is only fitting, seeing as Bowie plays an alien who has come to water-rich earth in some sort of quest to find a way to aid his own increasingly arid planet. He ends up getting sucked into a worldly life, where he becomes the wealthy head of an international corporation and falls into a stormy relationship with a local hotel worker. I read a bunch of reviews on Amazon saying this movie was super bizarre and really hard to follow, but I didn’t feel like that myself. Descriptions of it’s surreality were also greatly exaggerated, although it does have some unusual artistic editing, and a lot of scenes are left to the imagination. So it’s strange, but it’s not too difficult to follow, I think.
As to it’s connection with Philip K. Dick’s novel, VALIS, it’s hard to discern exactly what hidden symbols he was seeing or projecting into it when he experienced it. Here’s a halfway decent essay connecting the two works intellectually. But I’m guessing it was not so much on that level that Dick identified with it. As far as I remember, his description of the movie within the novel talks a lot about extremely subtle connections and juxtapositions, rather than specific plot or thematic elements. But who knows. Sometimes the shit that guy was into is just totally impenetrable. Maybe I’ll go back and read that part of the novel again, and then give the movie a closer viewing. If nothing else though, it’s actually a fairly decent (if a little slow) movie, and for diehard fans, Bowie’s wang even makes a brief appearance. So there’s always that.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- David Bowie’s Alien Phenomena
- Bowie’s Ex-Wife Says He’s An Alien
- Philip K Dick
- You dick!
- L. Ron Hubbard vs. Philip K. Dick
