I saw The Man Who
Fell to Earth in the theater when it came out in 1976. Who wouldn’t want to
see David Bowie in a movie? This would be his first time starring in a motion
picture. I was a little disappointed that none of his music was used, but aside
from that, the movie met all of my expectations: it had David Bowie, it was a
science-fiction fantasy, there was beautiful imagery, and I anticipated being
confused. I was fourteen—almost everything confused me. A lot of things still
confuse me. But The Man Who Fell to
Earth doesn’t confuse me nearly as much now as it did then. The film is all
about confusion, confusion of identity, of purpose, of morals. It can be seen
as an allegorical story where youthful ideology is bludgeoned by cruelty of
greed, corruption, vice, and loss. David Bowie had just left his gender-bending,
glam-rock persona of Ziggy Stardust and was in his Thin White Duke era. For a
confused adolescent such as myself, to see someone unabashedly being anything
he felt like being, to express himself as wildly or sedately as he saw fit, and
all the while being suavely cool, David Bowie was quite the inspiration. I
walked into The Man Who Fell to Earth hoping
for a guided tour of trippiness from Bowie—and he delivered.
