David Bowie: Integrating the Alien

As a tribute to David Bowie after his death in January 2016, I chaired a screening of the dystopian science fiction classic The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nic Roeg. Lest we forget, Bowie was considered perfect casting at the time because in 1976 when the film was released there were many people unsure if Bowie was not actually himself an alien.

There was much uncertainty surrounding the androgynous Bowie in his early fame. Was he a man or a woman? He wore make up, defining the glam rock era and in 1970 he wore a dress on the cover of his album The Man Who Sold the World. And what about his sexuality? In early interviews he declared himself to be gay or bi-sexual but then, confusingly for the times, he had a wife and son. In wrongly equating him with his Ziggy Stardust persona, we may well have questioned whether he was earthling or alien. Believing him to be simply playing himself in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth does Bowie's acting talent a great disservice. One thing is clear: the man David Bowie was in touch with his feminine side in a way that inspired generations, as he normalized experimentation with gender and nuanced expression of the underlying complexity of human sexuality.

As a young man, the first time I watched The Man Who Fell To Earth I was overwhelmed by the pessimism of the story. Bowie's character, Thomas Jerome Newton, seemed to be utterly corrupted by his involvement with the human race. This was a familiar trope in 1970s Western cinematic culture, which was still responding to Watergate, Vietnam and the violent death of 1960s idealism (through, for example, the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King). The film cynically portrays Newton's mission to take water back to his own dying planet as doomed to fail as a result of human resistance to the alien through the extreme prejudice of the era. Despite being technologically light years ahead of the humans, Newton seems naïve in the face of human cunning and cynicism: