[THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH screens Friday March 4th at 9:20 pm and Sunday March 6th at 7:50 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
(This
is a long, rambling review, but if you stick it out I will leave you
with an unforgettable moviegoing image from my life, and who can offer
you a deal like that?)
Cleve Matthews was a Journalism professor and faculty
advisor of mine at Syracuse University back in the 1980s, and a reminder
that I walked with interesting company prior to my Failure-to-Launch
career as a relative nobody here in Nowheresville.
Among
other achievements, Matthews originated the Public Radio news show "All
Things Considered," and ultimately went to teach at the illustrious (a
bit of sarcasm may creep in when I discuss it) S.I. Newhouse School of
Public Communications, up there in the New York State college town. He
was a very unpretentious fellow, what I knew of him, with a laid-back
sort of Henry Fonda Midwestern vibe that suggested even an unassuming
hick-town Ohioan like me could get ahead in the media without losing
basic human decency. That gave me some hope. For a little while.
In
the obituary photo in the alumni news, Prof. Matthews has a most
unlikely Hemingway-style beard, making his age difficult for me to
determine. Is that how he looked before or after my
four-year acquaintance with him at Syracuse? I recall he also came along
with a group of students, me included, for a 1985 sojourn at the
Syracuse University London Centre in England. His wife was a
photographer and had made some interesting black-and-white prints of a
dance performance. `All things considered,' I don't think Prof. Matthews
could number me as one of his more successful students, but I'm sure he
would have been nice about it.
I'm sorry if these
memories arise so fragmentarily and ill-considered. Kind of like college
in general. But one of my campus memories, not directly concerning
Cleve Matthews, is that of a screening of the cult science-fiction drama
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, so I'll get on with that and just
give a respectful nod to Matthews. Thanks, Professor, for trying to help
with me. But in hindsight I should have changed my major to something
pragmatic. There would be little future in Journalism.
And
because I had a Film Minor (in other words, the formula to be doubly
unemployable in Cleveland), I had to take some Syracuse University film
courses as well. I saw MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH in one. The
instructor, a fellow whose name, unlike Cleve Matthews’, I quite forget,
gave the impression of someone who must have been a "colorful" type in
the hippie daze. He had hand-picked a grab-bag of movies and George
Orwell essays to prove his foggy thesis, about the "machine" of modern
society chewing everyone up, and before long the whole class became a
twice-weekly ordeal with an academic who had clearly spent too much time
listening to himself talk. One of my fellow students had a shouting
match with the instructor, such was the level of frustration and
futility. But I grant the teacher this much: Screening this 1976
Nicholas Roeg picture was one of the better programming ideas, as far as
illustrating his cosmology.
Wildly unlike the CGI-driven sci-fi comic-book stuff George Lucas would foist upon the world a year later, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH has
a genuine otherworldly ambiance and pacing, along with a soberingly
pessimistic outlook. A space-alien movie for grownups, dig it, even with
"stunt casting," most successful as it turned out, of music's David
Bowie in the title role. Putting Bowie's "Space Oddity"/Ziggy Stardust
image to excellent dramatic use, the picture presents him as "Thomas
Jerome Newton," an unnaturally thin, cat-eyed man from a dying, red
planet (Mars?), who travels to more or less present-day Earth with an
idealistic plan to infiltrate Terran society to save his languishing
family and drought-stricken home planet. In America Newton hooks up with
a timid lawyer (Buck Henry) and, thanks to his alien technology, puts
out a series of successful inventions (like a gimmicky instant camera -
is that where Kodak EasyShare came from?) that in a few years makes
their upstart company into a giant conglomerate, with Newton as its
mysterious, Howard Hughes-like CEO.
Newton's plan is to
ultimately finance his own private space program and mount an
interplanetary rescue mission. But - again resembling Howard Hughes -
things go tragically wrong, as the undercover alien succumbs to American
consumer-culture values and temptations. Newton becomes addicted to TV,
alcohol and luxury, starts a relationship with a floozy-ish woman (who
gets the shock of her life when Newton reveals his true, non-sexy
humanoid anatomy). Meanwhile an unfriendly Nixonian US government and
rival industrial-espionage goons get involved to subvert the
extraordinary visitor. "Get out of my mind!" Newton shouts, as his
resolve falls victim to human vices, values and decadence.
It's
not an easy film to grokk, some of it reflecting a narrative not as it
is, but as Newton would want it to be, and some perfectly enigmatic
stuff, such as when Newton's limousine apparently passes into a random
time warp and briefly alarms a few Old West cowboys. Special effects are
more impressionistic and rudimentary than gee-whiz. And the overall
melancholia won't give a generation of filmgoers raised on TRANSFORMERS any adrenaline rush. But the results, even when inscrutable and typically Nicholas Roeg-ish, are still compelling.
How
compelling? Here the film brought me one of my most memorable
movie-watching (or Syracuse University) experiences ever. Remember, I
eyeballed this feature in a somewhat surreal classroom setting. When MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
came up on the syllabus, one of my fellow scholars brought a buddy to
the show - a Mohawk-haired punk in full Sid Vicious regalia. Know that
he happened to sit right in front of me, in a tiered-amphitheater type
of circular arrangement.
Our instructor, who may or may
not have expected this apparition, was incredibly pleased about an
actual punk sitting in on the picture. As he went through his usual
spiel (commenting on the movie we’d seen at the last session, plus the
George Orwell stuff) I noticed the punk writing intently. I had a clear
view to see he wasn’t taking notes. He had no classroom-rules notebook
paper but rather a copy of the tabloid-sized daily student newspaper out
in front of him. And on the page, in blue ink-pen, he was quietly but
fervently scrawling one word. The same word, over and over again, in
jagged letters:
“KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL…”
…I
am not absolutely positive, but I think he continued this after the
lights went down and the movie started. I think the only other reaction
out of him was during the "Get out of my mind!" line; the punk sort of
chuckled or snorted in approval.
I do believe he took
the newspaper with him afterwards. Otherwise I hope I might have had the
foresight to keep it and preserve it, scan a JPEG and present it here,
to show you all that this happened, and I was there. So, I guess the
moral is that MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, with all its unsettling ambiguities, certainly spoke to the soul of this young fellow, and it may to you as well.
Wonder
what that punk is doing now? Leading his local Tea Party Republicans?
Typing “KILL KILL KILL…” on a shiny new iPad? Or getting awarded a nice,
high-paying job over me at a Cleveland media outlet, probably NPR,
where his Mohawk and attitude are welcome as part of the office
“diversity” policy?
R.I.P. Cleve Matthews. I tried, I really did. (3 out of 4 stars)
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