The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

"Television... It shows you everything about life on Earth, but the true mysteries remain."

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

From W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts [1939].

In the autumn of 1961, an American couple, Betty and Barney Hill, claimed to have been abducted by aliens. As they were driving home to Plymouth, New Hampshire, from a holiday in the Niagara Falls — picture, at night, a lonely, winding, mountainous country road — an ‘odd-shaped craft flashing multi-coloured lights’ appeared from nowhere and, most disturbingly for Betty and Barney, began to stalk them, crewed by ‘eleven to eight humanoid figures, peering out of the craft’s windows’. Later, under hypnosis with Boston psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, the couple revealed further details of what had happened. The extraterrestrials wore glossy black uniforms with black caps, and once taken inside the craft, Betty and Barney were subjected to unsavoury experimentation, which included, in the case of Barney, a sort of probe inserted into his derrière. Most helpfully, the extraterrestrials’ leader spoke English. The case became a sensation.

‘Small town America: church-going, television, alcohol and sex…’

I think, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that this was the first case of alleged alien abduction, and later the basis for John G. Fuller’s best-seller, The Interrupted Journey (1966), excerpts of which were printed in Look magazine, and the NBC television film of 1975, The UFO incident. What’s significant, I think, is how the UFO craze took hold in the 1970s, fuelled, partly, I suspect, by Watergate. Trust in government collapsed. I am very much a believer in the ‘cock-up’ theory. That so-called ‘conspiracies’ are actually, often, the result of cover-ups, not so much of the actual event itself, but of the inevitable human ‘cock-up’. And human beings see patterns. We’re conditioned that way. So, I think, it’s no coincidence that the conspiracy theory genre emerged in this period. As in The Holy Blood & Holy Grail, published in 1982, but based on a series of BBC documentaries from the mid-70s, or Tom Mangold and Anthony Summers’ The File on the Tsar (1976) or Anthony Summers’ Conspiracy (1979) on the Kennedy assassination.

For like the 1920s, the 1970s was very much a time of fads and crazes: of Pet Rocks, CB Radio, Space Hoppers, Kung Fu, Rubik’s Cube, Evel Knievel, Skateboards, Uri Geller and the Smurfs. Especially in Britain, which had only three television channels, meaning that a single programme might gain a huge audience following. As hard as it is to believe now, in 1979, 42.85% of the British population sat down to watch the final episode of To the Manor Born. And so television was hugely influential. Much more so than it is today. And then, anybody who was around in the 1970s will remember Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which had the kiddywinks running around in the playground making alien beeping noises.

Which takes us to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), a brilliant work, in my opinion, based on Walter Tevis’ novel of 1976. A film exploring various themes of the time: existential alienation, corporate greed and government conspiracy — of technology and benign ambition thwarted by American consumerism, alcoholism, and paranoia. It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, and one of those films (like so many of the other film recommendations on WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups) that gets better on repeat viewings.

‘To boldly go, where no alien humanoid has gone before…’

Actually, the plot’s relatively simple. Jerome Newton, an alien humanoid (played by David Bowie) arrives on Earth in search of water for his drought-stricken planet. Don’t ask me how he gets here exactly, perhaps in some sort of pod? But he crash-lands in the middle of a lake in New Mexico. Welcome to Bubble-Gum America. Bowie’s brilliantly cast. Androgynous, autistic, a little bit weird, thin as a whippet, an anascorian eye, very English: proper and polite, an alien being in brash, mid-70s America.

‘Arrival…’