Ideas That Fall to Earth

September 18, 2007

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) directed by Nicholas Roeg feels like a film I have already seen. David Bowie plays the part of an alien who arrives on earth and immediately sets about making his way back to his own planet. Through flashbacks we see images of his dry planet and the family he left behind. With his red hair and flare for odd fashion, Bowie's rock character infiltrates the science fiction plot (and how not, when his 1972 album Ziggy Stardust had already cast him as a space oddity?).

The story of the film can be mapped onto Steven Spielberg's E.T. (1982). An alien arrives on earth, gets sort of adopted by a human, works to return home, gets caught by authorities who want to experiment on him, and then finally gets free again. The story in its basic outline is virtually indistinguishable.. but no one would ever confuse the films, and the reason for that is instructive.

E.T. is a film that is thoroughly at home in middle class America. The hero is a young boy; the setting is the suburbs; the bad guys are government authorities. The film also raises the cute quotient of the alien and tones down the sex and anything that could be upsetting. The Man Who Fell to Earth, on the other hand, enjoys its status as an outsider film.. and the production was carried out on a budget. As for David Bowie's sexless alien, he is hardly going to be embraced by middle America as a cute hero.

The trajectory then could be said to flow from daring and rough to pleasant and smooth. That trajectory is key for understanding American popular culture. Forms begin in some kind of rough and unpopular way.. breaking ground but remaining unconsumable for the majority of "popular culture". Then those forms fall to the earth and take on a smoother and more ethically digestible exterior. This occurs at the hand of a master of popular culture, like Spielberg. This trajectory should be counted as a fall because the forms take on a progressively less interesting exterior shape. What is dangerous becomes common.

This trajectory brings with it another oddity: even as the forms fall and become less interesting, their exterior becomes more highly polished. At every step downward the story is robbed of its challenging status, but it is presented in an ever finer and more expensive shell. The production values for E.T. (or for the impending remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth) are high as can be. Those production values mark the film as "quality". The shell of top-notch production values is a way of signaling to a mass audience that this is a film worth seeing.. and simultaneously disparaging earlier efforts that seem by comparison amateur.

We should resist what is smooth and seek out what is rough.. that, at least, is the Old Roads philosophy.