"Look up here, I'm in danger."It is 1976, and David Bowie is in trouble. The record company is hammering on his door for Young Americans 2, and all the songs he's writing are lengthy, bleak, and fixated on occult and religious symbolism. He is subsisting on a diet of milk, peppers and cocaine, and preserves his chalk-coloured complexion by never opening the curtains of his house. He has recently completed a film - his first major feature - and although he's proud of it he's struggling to finish the score. His relationship is breaking up, and he thinks he senses dark witches moving in on his LA hideaway...In the end, Bowie never finishes the soundtrack, though he later sends Nicolas Roeg, the film's director, a copy of his album Low with a note explaining that its all-electronic, all-instrumental side two is what he'd hoped to produce for The Man Who Fell To Earth. Roeg instead turns to John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, a bizarre replacement but a shrewd one. Phillips is proficient in the very few styles that Bowie isn't, particularly bluegrass and acid rock, and Roeg is keen to use specifically American styles to counterpoint the aloof Englishness that makes Bowie such a plausible alien in the film's New Mexico locations.It is 2006, and David Bowie is safe. He lives the boundless international life he has always dreamed of; living in New York, married to a Somali supermodel, about to play a Serbo-Croat for Christopher Nolan. His eldest child, a philosophy graduate, is planning his debut film; his youngest is just five years old. The only thing he has had to sacrifice to achieve this state of equilibrium is his musical career; it has been two years since his last concert, and three since his last album. As the years tick by, people come to accept that he has retired.Underneath all the narrative jumps and flashbacks, the arc of The Man Who Fell to Earth is simple. It's every bit the descent its title implies; an alien comes to Earth to gather water for his parched planet, and funds the return trip by patenting a series of world-changing alien inventions. In the process, though, he becomes a Howard Hughes-style recluse, addicted to television and alcohol. He ends up, among other things, making albums for no terrestrial audience, hoping that radio waves will carry the music back to his family on his home planet.He becomes, in short, an outsider artist to surpass Bowie's earlier inspiration the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, the kind of marginal lunatic he drew inspiration from on 1995's masterpiece 1.Outside. Viewed in the context of Bowie's personal turmoil at the time of the film's production, this must have struck him as a plausible escape route. Like Bowie, the alien known as Thomas Jerome Newton absorbs all media, changes the world, then has to work out how to live with that. For all The Man Who Fell to Earth was not conceived as a pop star vehicle in the way A Hard Day's Night was - it's based on a Walter Tevis novel, and Peter O'Toole was Roeg's first choice for Newton - its relationship with its star is utterly symbiotic. The copies of Young Americans that Rip Torn walks past in a late scene are almost a relief; the film is almost over, they seem to say. We're about to go back out into a world where David Bowie and Thomas Jerome Newton are not the same person. The spell is broken.It is 1986, and David Bowie is not in enough trouble. Duets with Mick Jagger and appearances in Jim Henson Productions films are forcing even critics who didn't like his 1970s experiments to wonder; where is the danger in Bowie these days? Where is his potential to disrupt and fascinate? A small anecdote by the British director Derek Jarman may illuminate Bowie's turn to the mainstream here. Two years earlier he had met with David for an unmade project called Neutron. Upon entering Jarman's apartment, Bowie caught sight of the director's collection of memorabilia concerning the Elizabethan sorcerer Dr. John Dee. Terrified, he bolts from Jarman's house, and never meets with him again.At the peak of his occult fascination, Bowie referred to Roeg as an "old warlock". There is something more than the scent of white powder about this pronouncement. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a summit between two of the 1970s' most accomplished Forteans. The x-ray photographs Newton produces resemble black-and-white versions of Kirlian photographs, of the kind Bowie was interested in at the time, and in one of the movie's best scenes Newton sees a Versailles-style timeslip into America's frontier past. Newton's conversation with Torn's Dr. Bryce about the possibility of other aliens existing on Earth resembles the kind of existential thoughts the smarter Ufologists like Jacques Vallee and John A Keel were having. The special effects are almost perfunctory, apart from the extraordinary, acrobatic shots of alien sex. Each fleeting optical effect carries a message: this is not Buck Rogers. This movie's effects are its ideas.It is 1996, and no-one knows what to make of David Bowie. The zeitgeist seems to be in his favour; life has recently been discovered on a Martian meteorite, and the tabloid sensation of the day is a film reel alleging to show the dissection of an alien. In one scene a thin skin is removed from its eyes, just like Thomas removes his human corneas. But he has followed up three well-received albums with a sustained engagement with drum and bass, provoking charges of trend-hopping that, frankly, could have been levelled at any era of Bowie. Worse, the silly old sod keeps going on about the Internet changing our lives...The Man Who Fell to Earth is not a dated film, though there are superficial markers that it was made in the 1970s (the interior decor prominently features those huge spherical lamps that look like something from a '50s SF movie). There are also moments where it is pleasurably dated. The trippy, complex storytelling, swooping camera zooms and explicit sex are impossible to imagine in a modern wide-release movie. Science fiction has become a dominant form in cinema at the expense, largely, of movies like this; even its most obvious modern descendant Under the Skin seems tame by comparison.After Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat it was axiomatic that the next frontier would be watching major stars have real sex. This didn't happen, but Roeg's sex scenes always feel on the verge of going hardcore, particularly when they involve Rip Torn, an actor whose most notorious past role involved him attacking Norman Mailer with a hammer for real in Maidstone. There are gay couples and interracial couples shown casually at a time when Hollywood found it hard to address such things outside an 'issue movie'. One late line even seems to claim Bowie's famous bisexuality as part of Newton's alien worldview; when you're expected to make love to an alien species, does it matter which of that species' genders you're coupling with? The sex is frightening, out of control. The final scene between Bowie and his human wife Mary Lou is one of the most excessive things ever filmed, in its editing, its staging, its nudity, its chaotic lighting, in the heavy, ever-present threat of violence. Also in its emotional undercurrent: the ever-young Newton making love to his aging wife. (The old-age make-up is superb, and I sometimes wonder if Roeg ever looked at Torn's infamous mugshot and thought, "Yeah, we got that one right")But to return to the question of whether The Man Who Fell to Earth is dated or not: I genuinely think that, like its central character, it will never age. There are simply moments where it is in tune with our culture, and moments when it isn't. Its influence is considerable; any movie that wants to seriously address the question of alien life on Earth must wrestle with its shade. Alan Moore is surely a fan; apart from the aforementioned two-way timeslips which were used in From Hell, Newton's dominance of all industries resembles Adrian Veidt in Watchmen. It's far from the only English-language film of the 1970s that recalls Godard, but it might be the only one that pre-empts its inspiration; the montage of standard-def TV footage that Bowie drinks in is astonishingly close to the collage elements JLG would start to use in his work ten years later. And it raised the prospect of private companies entering the space race back when Richard Branson was just a guy with a record label.And it is also human. Roeg is utterly, hilariously contemptuous of the emotional landscape of most films; the jump from Newton and Mary Lou meeting to her ironing his clothes feels like a sarcastic take on the happy ending of traditional movie romances. His film has deeper feelings to mine. Bowie's future director Christopher Nolan would posit love as the navigating emotion of the universe, but for Roeg it's loss. Newton remembers his lost family as Mary Lou talks of the decline of American railways; every species always yearns to travel through time in some direction other than forwards. I can't imagine how we would comprehend a non-linear universe - except every time I watch a Nicolas Roeg film, I feel like I get a little bit closer to grasping it.It is 2016. David Bowie is dead, and a spoof news site jokes that all the mess of the year since - the war, the terrorism, the extremism, the slew of deaths of beloved figures - is down to not having him to hold things together. The last pieces of work he produced are reassessed in the light of his secret illness - the album Blackstar and the stage play Lazarus. Uniting them is the title song of the play, written from the perspective of Thomas Jerome Newton as he seeks to escape the Earth. John Phillips's soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth is finally released for the first time.
