The Bowie-Newton in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth'

Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ tracks the descent of its protagonist, Thomas Jerome Newton, from other-worldly innocence to promethean ‘knowledge’, from unbound desire to Nietzschean nihilism, from the liquid flows of androgyny to ‘andro-id-entity’. Yet this ‘being’ seems always to be in the process of ‘becoming’ -- a man who never quite finishes falling to Earth. The film’s two bedroom scenes, for example, appear to contrast the deterritorialized and reterritorialized male body: the alien other (the Body without Organs) against the phallic body (the post-oedipal). Yet Newton’s body is both hyper-phallic and hypo-phallic (crucially, his gun fires blanks): his performance of masculinity is self-conscious, at once a fantasy and parody of ‘being’, a ‘never-quite-being’, or a ‘being-in–crisis’. David Bowie’s performance as alien as rock star as Ziggy as David Jones can also be framed in terms of the being/becoming dilemma of the film. The reading I am suggesting, then, is at odds with a “postmodernist viewer” grasping at “the impossible” (Jameson) in that the Newton/Bowie de-evolution gravitates towards a singular ‘screen’ of masculinity which is, nevertheless, a site of anxiety and ‘performativity’ (Butler). This paper aims to track the Bowie/Newton figuration as a speculation on the becoming-man, a notion Deleuze rejects since man is already and always the subject.

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