THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
SPACESHIP EARTH SCREEN Obviously science fiction never succeeds. Its ostensible purpose is to show us what the future will be, but its effect is always to show us what the present is instead. The...
...He tells Bryce later that he learned what he knows about man through tv scanning of the earth...
...The nexus of Roeg's movie, the point at which its different lines of development all seem to cross, is a scene where T. J. Newton (David Bowie) drops in on one of his employees, Nate Bryce (Rip Torn...
...Roeg has understood from the beginning that that frailty was really all that Newton could ever represent TO US...
...Beyond signalling this change in his relationship with Bryce and Mary Lou, the scene where Newton is x-rayed marks a change in his relationship with the whole human race...
...The then and there always, inevitably, becomes just a metaphor for the here and now...
...And the "scientific" investigation to which he is subjected in bis penthouse prison is even more confined and helpless...
...After leaving Bryce's, Newton reveals his true identity to Mary Lou and lets her see him without earthly disguise...
...He finds Newton at a bar in a half-drunk state which has apaprently become habitual for him...
...The first time we meet Bryce he is cheating on his wife by making love to a teeny bopper, but as soon as Newton's company hires him, several scenes later, he loses his desire for young girls...
...Disguised as a man, Newton has used patents be brought with him to make himself the most powerful industrialist in America...
...When Newton removes his false skin and human eye covers, Mary Lou is so revulsed that she cannot make love to his strangeness as he has to hers...
...Now he lives on a lake in New Mexico in a compound whose only other house is occupied by Bryce, an eccentric mathematician Newton has come to trust...
...As Newton settles back in a chair, he asks Bryce to shut off the television so they can talk...
...Thus, just when Bryce quits cheating on his wife, Newton begins cheating on his, the one he left behind in space and whom he thinks of often...
...In the interim, though, Newton has taken up with a young girl, Mary Lou (Candy Clark), a hotel chamber maid who befriends him...
...Bryce tosses him the remote control so he can* do it himself, but the gadget, made to trigger the x-ray instead of turning off the tv, seems to malfunction...
...Their love lives, especially, have seemed star-crossed...
...When the doctors have satisfied themselves about him, Newton just finds one day that his penthouse has been left unguarded, and he is free to go...
...Yet it is Bryce who winds up with Mary Lou in the end...
...But the broken glass is perhaps a glancing allusion to 2001, which reached its conclusion when the sole surviving astronaut also drops and breaks a glass at the end of the time warp...
...Then he appears before the television cameras himself when one of his companies sponsors a space launch...
...The only way to make a good science-fiction movie, in fact, is to make one that is about this very incapacity in ourselves...
...Finally Newton is taken into custody and, imprisoned in a penthouse, subjected to continuous examination by doctors and scientists...
...It is in truth an effort not to understand Newton's own nature, but to render him human, and therefore harmless to other men...
...In a scene that, again, has to do with the act of observation, Newton gives Mary Lou an astro-telescope as a gift...
...Throughout the film their experiences have been like the terrestial and celestial halves of a single life...
...Yet Newton is not only able to insert himself into the middle of American culture and capitalism, but able truly to love Mary Lou as well...
...What he becomes once he has escaped just returns to the eccentric but all too human reality which exists outside the film itself...
...From then on, she cannot bring herself to make love to him, and in the end she and Bryce turn to each other as the only two who really knew Newton...
...Like travelling through space to another country, travelling through time to another century defeats its objective because when we arrive we only impose our own meanings on what we find...
...But this is of course the one thing man cannot do...
...In effect, by intersplicing Bryce's lovemaking with the scene from the Kabuki play Newton attends, Roeg seems to be making the point that even a fundamental experience like sex must appear as alien to Newton as Japanese dramaturgy does to us...
...It is not really the recesses of the universe that these films are about, but rather the limits of our own imagination...
...Newton becomes what lead player David Bowie is: a rock star...
...Newton is a visitor from another galaxie who has come to earth in search of water for his home planet...
...and with his superhuman powers of concentration and capacity for information, he frequently tunes in six or eight televisions at once, each on a different channel...
...One intersection that this scene affords us is between Bryce and Newton themselves...
...Only after he has thus gotten Newton to x-ray himself does Bryce substitute a remote control switch that works on the tv...
...But from the moment he pushes that tv remote control switch which x-rays him instead of turning off the tv he's watching, he becomes the object of scrutiny...
...Bryce, on the other hand, has developed some suspicions about Newton, and on the night that Newton drops in, Bryce has bugged his living room with an x-ray machine...
...Speculation of this kind-expanding our imaginations into other eras and other galaxies-disappoints us every time because it turns out to be such a self-centered activity...
...In the next scene after Bryce attempts to x-ray Newton, Mary Lou also learns that Newton is an extra-terrestial being...
...Newton's singularity among men is his capacity to assimilate to what he sees...
...At one point, for instance, the doctors say they want to x-ray into his eyes, and before he can remove the human eye covers he wears, they perform the procedure, thus sealing the covers to the eyes so that they can never be removed again...
...The miscalculation of the hand which breaks that glass in Kubrick's film is a reminder of human frailty, the same frailty that has so desperately re-made Newton in its own image in Roeg's film...
...When Newton drops and breaks his glass, he, Bryce, and the waiter all agree he has "had enough," and on that note the film ends...
...That's essentially what Stanley Kubrick did in 2007, and in a less ambitious fashion it is what Nicholas Roeg has done in his new sci-fi film, The Man Who Fell to Earth...
...Up until this point we have seen him primarily as an observer of mankind, but now he becomes the one observed by man instead...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It's a gesture that suggests he hopes she, and the rest of humanity, will respond to him in kind and accept his otherness as he does theirs...
...In the final scene Brycs tracks him down through his premiere record album...
...Next to Bryce's shoddy and specious emotions, Newton's seem all the more authentic...
...All human experience is as foreign to him as a Kabuki play he is watching at the moment when Bryce is trifling with that teeny bopper...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 15
