Abstract
“Capitalist Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth” studies Bowie’s film performance in the light of Romanticism, asking how his character represents the positive, regenerative forces of Romanticism against the forces of modernity. It posits that the film implies a Romantic home world of origin against the capitalist modernity of late twentieth-century Earth, a pastoral community that can be attained by Bowie’s character Thomas Newton paradoxically through the use of patents for advanced technology. Over the course of the film, however, Newton faces a conflict between his plan to save his home population by resettling them in an idealized Romantic community on Earth and his growing attachment to a small circle of human allies who derail his plans. Ultimately, the film’s complex interaction between Bowie’s musical and film personas, and the film’s engagement with Romanticism and capitalism, forces viewers to confront the difficulties of affirming Romantic resistance against modernity while being deeply implicated in it.
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Notes
- 1.
Qtd. in Keren Gorodeisky, “19th Century Romantic Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford University, 1996–, revised article published in Fall 2016 ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/aesthetics-19th-romantic/.
- 2.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicolas Roeg. 1976. 40th anniversary collector’s ed. London, UK: Studiocanal, 2016. DVD; Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), EbscoHost (107398), 21ff.
- 3.
Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 6.
- 4.
Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie, ed. Sean Egan (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2017), 59. Interview with Robert Hilburn for Melody Maker, Feb. 28, 1976.
- 5.
Bowie on Bowie, 112. Interview with Angus McKinnon for New Music Express, Sept. 13, 1980.
- 6.
Ibid., 112.
- 7.
Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 25; Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 26.
- 8.
Bowie on Bowie, 58.
- 9.
Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie (London: Titan Books, 2018), 211.
- 10.
Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman, Alias David Bowie: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 414; Hugo Wilcken, Low (New York: Continuum, 2005), 16–22; for a model of a meteoric Romantic-Satanic “fallen star” that complements the film’s analogies between Newton and Icarus, see Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316009666.
- 11.
[Cracked Actor] “BBC A Film by Bowie Cracked Actor 1975,” directed by Alan Yentob, Internet Archive video, 53:24, originally televised on BBC1, January 26, 1975, added November 7, 2017, https://archive.org/details/BBC_A_Film_By_Bowie_Cracked_Actor_1975. For examples of how Bowie was packaged for a mainstream audience during his residence in Los Angeles, see his eccentric duet pop hits medley as a guest on Cher’s variety TV show, an odd twist on the formula Donnie and Mary Osmond had made popular at the time: “Cher & David Bowie—Young Americans Medley (Live on the Cher Show, [November 23,] 1975),” YouTube video, 6:29, performance televised by CBS, posted by CHER Fan Club, October 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlN8RBP-Ws. For what seems to be a highly scripted attempt to present Bowie as a chummy heteronormative male with artistic and intellectual proclivities who can exchange banter with the widely popular star of the TV series Happy Days, Henry “The Fonz” Winkler, on the Dinah Shore talk show, see “David Bowie—Dinah Shore—[March 3,] 1976—Full Show,” YouTube video, 38.47, from televised episode of Dinah!, 2.117, syndicated program distributed by 20th Century Fox Television, posted by “sveinbeard,” February 20, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRudpIxXZ8I.
- 12.
Quoted in Wilcken, Low, 73.
- 13.
Ibid., 16; Susan Compo, Earthbound: David Bowie and the Man Who Fell to Earth (London: Jawbone Press, 2017), 165–66. I am grateful for the help Susan Compo provided in locating various people involved in the film and those who knew them.
- 14.
Compo, Earthbound, 49, 177.
- 15.
Mayersberg, Interview, Disc 3, The Man Who Fell to Earth DVD.
- 16.
David Jenkins, “Notes on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth,” companion booklet to The Man Who Fell From Earth DVD, 4.
- 17.
Pauline Kael, “From ‘Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences—Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, The Man Who Fell to Earth,’” in For Keeps, 691–97 (New York: Dutton, 1994), edited version of review article first published in the New Yorker, November 8, 1976; Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Monthly Film Bulletin 43 (January 1976): 86–87, ProQuest (1305831307).
- 18.
Wilcken, Low, 19–20; Nicolas Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, Enhanced Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), Kindle edition, location 1086.
- 19.
Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 87.
- 20.
Michael Ferber, “Romantic Anticapitalism: A Response to Sayre and Lowy,” in Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G.A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins, (Rutherford, N.J: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 69–84.
- 21.
Arthur C. Danto, “The End of Art” (1984), repr. in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 85; see also Randall E. Auxier, “Warm Impermanence,” in Theodore G. Ammon, ed., David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel, Rebel. Vol. 103, Popular Culture and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2016), 31–44, EBSCOhost eBook Collection (1346254).
- 22.
Sir Christopher Freyling, Philip Hoare, and Mark Kermode, “David Bowie Then… David Bowie Now….,” in David Bowie is the Subject, ed. Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh (London: New York: V & A Publishing, 2013), 282–301.
- 23.
William F. Van Werten, “Film as Science-Friction: Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Western Humanities Review 33, no. 2 (1979): 141, ProQuest (1291780561).
- 24.
Paul Mayersberg, “The Story So Far: The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Monthly Film Bulletin 44, no. 4 (1975): 225–26, 231, H.W. Wilson Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907–1984 (520835482) and Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD; Robert Phillip Kolker, “The Open Texts of Nicolas Roeg,” Monthly Film Bulletin 46, no. 2 (April 1, 1977): 82, ProQuest (1305510364); Neil Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg (London: Letts, 1991), 61.
- 25.
Compo, Earthbound, 179–95; Mel Gussow, “Roeg: The Man behind The Man Who Fell to Earth,” New York Times, August 22, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/22/archives/roeg-the-man-behind-the-man-who-fell-to-earth.html?searchResultPosition=1.
- 26.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935–36), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. Page numbers hereafter cited parenthetically in text.
- 27.
Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 28.
- 28.
Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, location 1098.
- 29.
Wilcken, Low, 75.
- 30.
Simon Critchley, Bowie (New York: OR Books, 2014), 115, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv62hdz5.
- 31.
Anneliese Cooper, “David Bowie’s Sincerity,” in Ammon, David Bowie and Philosophy, 139–48; Critchley, Bowie, 39–41; Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, location 1104.
- 32.
Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 24; William Blake, “Jerusalem” [‘And did those feet in ancient time’] (1810), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54684/jerusalem-and-did-those-feet-in-ancient-time.
- 33.
The quoted phrase that justifies romantic affairs is spoken by the actor Gary Cooper to his co-star Audrey Hepburn in the film that plays on television during this scene, Love in the Afternoon. See Tom Milne, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Monthly Film Bulletin 45, no. 3 (1976): 146, H.W. Wilson: Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907–1984 (520706438).
- 34.
Kolker, “The Open Texts of Nicholas Roeg,” 113; Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), 14.
- 35.
Ferber, “Romantic Anticapitalism,” 81.
- 36.
James Leach, “‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’: Adaptation by Omission,” Literature Film Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1978): 378, EBSCOhost (1978108249).
- 37.
Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 235; Walter S. Tevis [Jr.], The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963; repr. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978).
- 38.
Loughlin, 243.
- 39.
Mayersberg, “The Story So Far” and Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD.
- 40.
Tom Milne, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” 146.
- 41.
John Keats, Lamia (1820), in Selected Poems and Letters (London: HarperCollins, 2014). Literature Online, ProQuest (2407291424).
- 42.
Paul Endo, “Seeing Romantically in ‘Lamia,’” ELH 66, no. 1 (1999): 111–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032064.
- 43.
Joseph Lanza, Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy, and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg (New York: PAJ, 1989), 145.
- 44.
Kael, “From ‘Notes on Evolving Heroes,’” 693.
- 45.
Mayersberg, Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD.
- 46.
Lanza, Fragile Geometry, 109.
- 47.
Mayersberg, Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD.
- 48.
Cooper, “David Bowie’s Sincerity,” 145; Freyling, Hoare, and Kermode, “David Bowie Then…David Bowie Now…,” 284–85; Leach, “‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’: Adaptation by Omission,” 374–75; Kolker, “The Open Texts of Nicolas Roeg,” 113; Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg, 61.
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Levine, W. (2022). Capitalist Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. In: Rovira, J. (eds) David Bowie and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_5
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