The Home of the Creative Mind

Welcome to PooBahSpiel, the online voice and home of the creative mind of Mark Monlux, Illustrator Extraordinaire. Prepare yourself for an endless regaling of art directly from the hand of this stellar artist. And brace yourself against his mighty wind of pontification. Updates are kinda weekly and show daily sketches, current projects, and other really nifty stuff.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

The Comic Critic Reviews "The Man Who Fell to Earth"



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.