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Talk:The Man Who Fell to Earth

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Errors and speculations in the plot section

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Just where the Hell does the film suggest Newton would be "psychic" or "exist in several time frames"? As for him seeing people in a field, the only such occurrence I could think of would be the one scored with Try to remember, where he's looking out the car, reverse shot to make us see what he sees: A horse in a field. Cut and several fades to the same horse on a different field/on his home planet/in a painting, where also his family appears. That's not an instance of "psychicness", it's his recalling/thinking of his family back home. Heck, just listen to the song played in the background then: Try to remember, and that's what we're seeing: His memories!

And where does the film suggest Newton would be "feeling what Bryce is feeling"? Due to his ability to see electro-magnetic frequencies invisible to the human eye, he notices how Bryce is secretly taking thermal images of him, and that's how he knows that Bryce now knows that he's an alien as is obvious from the thermal images.

Also, nowhere we're told that the government would know he's an alien. All we know is that Mary-Lou tells him that "they" (presumably the government and the doctors) don't believe him and think he would be "one of us" (i. e., an earthling), only a "freak" one. And the x-ray experiment is not the only significant one he's exposed to. Before that, we have the scene where the doctors cut open his chest and he's pleading for Bryce to help him and Bryce just walks away. It's just a guess, but I suppose that surgery procedure deprives him of the ability to take off his fake skin, so just as due to the x-ray experiment, it becomes increasingly impossible for him to prove to them that he really is an alien.

You may counter that with the scene where he's insisting to the doctors that he "came alone" (presumably to dispel their fears of an alien invasion), but we don't know how the scientists are taking his words and what they're thinking. Also, on a non-verbal level Roeg films and directs the scenes with the scientists a little like they know fully well what they're doing to him and they're doing it on purpose, but it's left ambiguous.

Lastly, his family's fate is left just as ambiguous by the end of the film. We see his wife holding the still body of one of the children as their weak sibling is slowly creeping towards them, but a.) the child could just be asleep or unconscious, and b.) with the style of the film, we don't know if what we're seeing is Newton's memory, his worries, or what's actually happening in parallel on his home planet at the time. All we know is that he at least assumes his wife to still be alive by the end of the film when he says that he's certain she'll hear his album one day when radio waves of it from earth will reach his home planet. Side note: They must have some kind of huge data storage servers on his home planet, as even already by the 1970s, there were much too much radio channels to just casually come upon such a message by accident. --80.187.108.120 (talk) 07:52, 31 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've seen the director's cut now, which is circa 5 minutes longer and which, among others, also has the short sequence with settlers in the field being scared by Newton in the car. I can see why Roeg excised it from the original theatrical version because, while it may explain his constant absent-mindedness a bit better, it feels a bit over-the-top and kinda distracts from the film's main theme of the ambiguity of identity and memories and how people and things like culture and economy are alienating you by molding you.
What I really don't like is how the director's cut makes it plain obvious from the beginning that it was Bryce who was definitely there when Newton arrives. The old version makes it ambiguous in a really sublime way by not showing more than a distant silhouette and even that only up until very late in the film when he says that he "came alone" and "nobody saw him arrive". In the old version, it's a mildly shocking revelation which says a lot about the fragile, fleeting nature of memories and Newton's increasing insecurity and loss of identity on the hands of earthlings, especially those scientists experimenting on him. In the new version, it's just like, BAM!, there's this guy who's there when he arrives, we see his face up close, and we later get to know him as Bryce. While it may explain any potential psychic connection between Newton and Bryce (while making for somewhat interesting speculation that Newton didn't travel in the same material form as he arrived and appeared on earth, perhaps more sort of as an ethereal "Star Child" being as from the end of Kubrick's 2001 existing more on the level of energy and thoughts, also note the blue ray of light crashing into the lake, which could explain how he somehow got linked to Bryce's brain and mind when Bryce saw him arrive), putting this scene in just dumps all over the old version's ambiguity and themes.
The other two new scenes don't bother me as much as the two above. The one where Farnsworth calls Bryce to tell him that Newton will see him soon is sorta like, "Meh, who cares?", although it gives us a little insight on how Bryce is pretty much paid for just idling and diddling around as an employee of WE up until Newton shows him parts of the spaceship that have been built so far. The other scene where they're blowing up his ship not only tells us a little more without significantly changing anything, but it does have a certain, nice air to it by being shot more in the film's overall beautiful and poetic style with its slow pans and fades.
Furthermore, the DVD on which I saw the director's cut does also hold a 30-minute interview with Roeg with interesting background information that could certainly add to the article. For example:
  • Roeg talks about how the film is about how we all pretty much "fall to earth, into life, into things" and are molded by other people into things, when originally we're all really aliens inside who are pretty much forced to conform by society in a painful alienation process that alienates us from ourselves. Towards the end of the interview, he also says that that's why young people often appreciate the film much more than old people, because they're not molded as much by society yet. (On the other hand, there's the scene in the film between Bryce and his boss at the college where Bryce says that many students are already molded to be middle-aged when they arrive at college level, and one could argue that that's even more true now than it was back in the 70s.)
  • Roeg also talks about how his inspiration for how to depict Newton as a character came from him meeting Michael Crichton at a party and Crichton was this tall, somewhat otherworldly appearance almost like a young god, sorta absent-minded and with his head in the clouds, separated from everybody else both due to his height and his charms, while not really at ease with his stealing everybody's attention when among "normal" people.
  • Shortly afterwards, Roeg saw a BBC documentary about Bowie called Cracked actor and saw the same kind of otherworldly weirdness about him as with Crichton, and that's why he wanted him as Newton. He flew to LA to meet Bowie and had to wait in a separate room for 8 hours until it was 1am or 3am because Bowie was recording an album, and then Bowie just suddenly walked in and only said, "I'll do it" and that was it.
  • Roeg and Paul Mayersberg spent three years writing the script, the film was shot in 1975, before being released in 1976.
  • The bum in the beginning who pretty much "welcomes" Newton to earth and humanity at the fairground was not scripted. While shooting Newton's walk into town, Roeg noticed the playground and liked the carousel with lots of little rocket ships going 'round in circles and spontaneously decided to shoot Bowie walking next to it. The bum had been sitting there without the crew noticing him and then just suddenly popped up during one take, and that's the one Roeg used in the end. Roeg comments in the interview how it impressed him how Bowie just stayed in his role during that moment of the bum showing up, and says how much Bowie at that time in his life really *WAS* Newton.
  • The scene where the two killers try to throw Farnsworth out the window and the first time he just bounces off was an unplanned outtake, but Roeg decided to use it as well, mainly because he thought it so funny that Farnsworth's actor was apologizing for the fact that he'd bounced off.
  • When the film was done, the studio wanted Roeg to have Bowie dubbed because he sounded just too weird for them. In the end, Roeg prevailed with keeping Bowie's original voice in, because Bowie had given him exactly the weirdness he wanted for the character. --80.187.110.67 (talk) 04:38, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Shame there is no "differences to the novel" Section

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I'd love to know if Newton attempted to communicate with his wife via pop songs in the novel or whether that was a Bowie addition. Yes. Communicating indirectly via pop songs does seem to be a movie (and presumably Bowie influenced) addition since in the book plot section it says "He records a message which he hopes to broadcast via radio to his home planet." --Timtak (talk) 09:10, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There should also be a section about the original 1976 theatrical version and the longer 2000s director's cut. As said, four new scenes were added which I have mixed feelings about, as one of them turns the film's entire meaning on its head and the one with the settlers in the field kinda distracts from its main theme (see above on this talkpage). --2003:71:4E6A:C962:C9BD:4253:9C28:8521 (talk) 14:33, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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