From Tevis to Dick:
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Cycle
"I feel alienated from other people sometimes, when I was younger the feeling was stronger than it is now. My major characters are alienated, by virtue of being pool players, from Mars, robots, the only people alive who can read, or alcoholics. I like to write about people under psychological stress, and when I write I am very serious about it."
Walter Tevis
"The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is plotting against you, but when everything is against you. Instead of "My boss is plotting against me," it would be "My Boss' phone is plotting against me.""
Philip K. Dick
Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earthis the story of an alien who falls to Earth, and tries to rise back up to the heavens again. It is the story of a scrawny, alcoholic little green man who fails in his mission and who, in the end, can only learn to cope with a life of quiet desperation.
Nicholas Roeg's film adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth,is only loosely a story and instead of a pathetic little everyman, the film's protagonist is rock star David Bowie. It is not about the sad downward spiral of an average little man with extraordinary abilities, but is instead about the bizarre spinnings of a superstar who appears most alien when trying to appear human. The man who falls to Earth in Roeg's picture is not a man at all, but a sexually ambiguous and super hip image which serves only to connect other equally bizarre and extreme images to each other. Roeg's alien uses a gun as a phallus, wears sunglasses at night, and stoically drifts in and out of view.
In Philip K. Dick's fictional homage to Nicholas Roeg's film adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel the narrative is entirely dissolved. Dick's novel VALIS(which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), is an autobiographical account of the author's own mystical experiences. The film inside of the novel is also called VALISand it has the central function of taking the character Horselover Fat's (who is Philip Dick's double) bizarre theories and validating them. The Film VALIS,which is produced by a Rock Star named Mother Goose (who, Dick says is of comparable stature and fame to "Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, or David Bowie"), contains secret messages that confirm that Fat's mystical experiences were not delusional, but quite real.
In VALISthe little green alcoholic is gone and in his place is God himself. And God hasn't fallen to Earth, but is in orbit around it. In the film VALISthe characters struggle, not to return to the stars, but to shift the ground of reality itself.
The two science fiction writers in this cycle (from novel to film, to film within a novel) are almost opposites in terms of vision and intent. While Tevis is concerned with the personal and everyday alienation of modern life, Dick takes these concerns and explodes them out in order to expose secret realities. Tevis's universe is populated with men whose bosses are plotting against them, and in Dick's cosmos the protagonists must duke it out with the phone.
So why is it that in VALIS,perhaps Dick's most important exploration of paranoid ontology, "the Man Who Falls to Earth," plays such a crucial role?
Secret Messages From a Pop Star
"[My fiction contains] a message of one world obscuring or replacing another (real) one, spurious memories, and hallucinated (irreal) worlds. The message reads "Don't believe what you see; it's an enthralling—and destructive, evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear time axis. And your memories are faked to jibe with the fake world.""
Philip K. Dick
Dick was obsessed with the idea that reality is hidden and that the empirical world is unreal. Towards the end of his life he produced an 8000 page Exegesis and three novels which tried to explain his mystical experiences. Dick wanted to lift the veil, to uncover the truth below perceived reality.
Nicholas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell To Earth,offered a plethora of hidden or obscured material to uncover. The film is ambiguous, dream like, mysterious, and many of the tropes Dick loved to use to explore metaphysical issues are also present in "The Man Who Fell to Earth." Time dysfunction, insanity, hallucinations dominate both Roeg's film and Dick's science fiction.
For Dick, The Man Who Fell to Earthwas exactly the sort of speculative challenge that he couldn't resist.
"Phil loved [The Man Who Fell to Earth] and for a short time after he saw it, he listened closely to Bowie albums, hoping to discern a sly pop sign from God/Valis/Zebra. No luck."
Lawrence Sutin Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. DickCitadel Twilight Books 1989
The most obvious connection between Roeg's film and VALIS,what both works hold in common, is this obsession with the esoteric, with the notion that the most powerful truths are only discovered beneath the surface of things.
Roeg as the Missing Link
There is more at work here, however, than a correspondence between Roeg's aesthetic tendencies and Dick's mystical/religious needs. Somehow, Roeg's film serves as a missing link between the realist concerns of Tevis and the metaphysical extrapolations of Dick. Roeg's picture serves as a bridge that Tevis's everyman alien must cross in order to get to the other side.
Playing Roeg Backwards
"A couple of days later the three of us drove up Tustin Avenue and took in the film Valisonce more. Watching it carefully I realized that on the surface the movie made no sense whatsoever. Unless you ferreted out the subliminal and marginal clues and assembled them all together you arrived at nothing."
Philip K. Dick VALIS1981
"The strange thing about television is that it doesn't tell you everything. It shows you everything there is to know about life on earth. Yet the mysteries remain."
David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth
What are the concerns of Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth?This is not easy to discern. Roeg hides both plot and theme in bizarre images and these images dance and sway but never connect, let alone set forth a clear intention.
What Bowie says about television is certainly also true of Roeg's picture. So, in order to uncover the truth we must examine these images individually and see what develops. If we are to find out what it is that sits between Tevis's realism and Dick's paranoid mysticism we should put aside the supposed plot of this picture, and look for what's underneath it.
Alienation
"[In Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth] the creature from outer space has been retrieved by his own travel from the unarrived, unmaterialized future known only to us through SF convention, has been fleshed out in humanoid form and then crucified, all so that we should be reminded through his excruciating example that he is not half so alienated from the rest of us as are any of us from the gruesome modernity we have engendered on the near edge of the future."
Rabkin Slusser Shadows of the Magic Lamp
Tevis's novel is the story of an alien visitor who is crushed, not by the military or by our government (at least not exclusively), but by Earth culture. Tevis's Newton is a little green man who is made sick by automobiles and elevators, a man who succumbs to alcoholism, a man whose real purposes are diluted and then destroyed by his own immense wealth. In essence, Tevis's story is the story of the alienated individual whose struggle for autonomy is crushed by modern society.
At first Nicholas Roeg's film adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth,is true to Tevis's vision. When Bowie first arrives on Earth he discovers the ruins of an amusement park outside the small town of Haineyville. A bouncing clown bubble is the first face Bowie sees. As he turns to leave Bowie is accosted by an intoxicated homeless man who has found shelter in one of the Ferris Wheel cars. From underneath the tin roof of the amusement car a gnarled hand emerges and clinches. "C'mere! Hey, c'mere!" the drunk yells, and Bowie flinches and then moves on.
We know that Bowie is doomed, that he won't be able to endure the strain of life on Earth, and the opening credits are still rolling.
And after Bowie makes his first twenty dollars by pawning an alien artifact, once he has started down the road of capitalist accumulation, we see a trailer full of lambs roll by—off to the slaughter.
So Roeg's film shares the original novel's alienation, and in both we are exposed to the "gruesome modernity we have engendered on the near edge of the future." But, while Tevis sets Newton against the rest of society, while Tevis writes the story of a man's struggle to maintain his integrity in the face of corruption, Bowie's interpretation of Newton seems strangely at home in the gruesome modernity. Bowie's superstar performance is, in fact, a key element of the horrific spectacle of modern life, it is the central point that the rest of Roeg's images orbit.
Bowie is the master of images, in fact. A creator of self-developing film, a star in television commercials, and a gluttonous television viewer (Bowie watches six to twelve television sets at a time, creating moments of tv collage throughout the picture), Bowie's Newton is constantly surrounded by and encased in images. His telepathic and other mental powers function in the film primarily as a connecting forces for images of sex and desolation.
Roeg is concerned here not with alienation of the individual in society, but a society which can only produce alienation—a society where real individuals have ceased to exist. Like Marilyn Monroe in Roeg's Insignificance,Bowie faints and bleeds easily and is desired by all. Seemingly having no motives of his own, he is the envisioned object, the objectified source of all action.
Bowie himself is like television as he tells us nothing, but shows us things—but the mysteries remain.
In Philip K. Dick's novels alienation was a dominant theme. His books were populated by druggies and androids and mental patients who had lost the ability to feel. Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth,however is the story of feelings that have lost there ability to be druggies or androids or mental patients—it is the story of the signifier split off and rising up above the signified—the story of deep alienation where all hope has been abandoned.
Time
"What if I told you that there may have been a time dysfunction in 1974, and that the ancient Roman world broke through into our world?"
"You mean as the theme in the film?"
"No, I mean really."
"In the real world?"
"Yep."
Philip K. Dick VALIS1981
"I think we get messages or warnings that we try to resist. Again, it has to do with our notions of time. I'd like to think there is a supernatural. I've never seen a UFO, but I must insist they exist…. There's no such thing as seeing into the future because the future is already here. A premonition is just a way of confirming something you know. And I think film is the perfect medium to show this paradox. It's a time machine."
Nicholas Roeg
In Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earthvision is central. Bowie's Newton has telepathic and time powers which allow him to see the sex life of Professor Bryce, a simulated samurai battle, and his home world all at the same time. When he returns to Haineyville after making his millions, Newton decides to explore his "home town" in a limousine. He sits and stares, watching green grass and pines fly in and out of view. Then as he passes another field of grass he sees smoke. There is a chimney, and a small cabin attached to it, in the middle of the field.
Homesteaders, pioneer men and women and children and even dogs, look confused and shocked. They point at the limousine and squawk. Bowie stares back.
"What are you looking at," Bowie's love interest, Mary Lou, asks. She looks out the limousine window and sees only green.
"What are you looking at?"
In Walter Tevis's novel, time is the space the characters must pass through and eventually be destroyed by. Time is entropy.
In Philip K. Dick's Valis, time is an illusion, time is out of joint, and underneath time is reality—the eternal.
In Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth,time is subjective. Where you are in time depends on how you see.
And when the government officials capture the alien Newton in the film they don't blind him as they did in Tevis's book, but weld the alien's disguise, his humanoid contact lenses, into place. Where Tevis's Newton is literally blind, Bowie has been disfigured and changed. Bowie's Newton can still see, but the government has determined that he must see like a human—like the rest of us.
Postmodernism as the Missing Link
Walter Tevis and Philip K. Dick are both modernists in so much as they are both concerned with arriving at final meanings, exposing truths. Tevis may be a humanist and Dick a theist, but both men are concerned with meaning.
Nicholas Roeg's film adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth,is only interested in meanings in order to subvert them. It is a post-modern film, and it works to expose that subjectivity and perception are all that exists.
This is the missing link. Between the Enlightened Humanist position of Tevis and the paranoid mystical position of Dick is the radical skepticism of Roeg. In the age of the automobile and television one must first explode all ideologies in order to approach the reality of God.
In order for Dick to wrangle out the truth of the pink laser beam that burst through his bedroom window and into his head in 1974, in order for him to discover some system of thought that will allow him to understand, he had to start by discarding everything. It's an old trick really, the center piece of philosophy. Question all you can and whatever is left over, whatever can't be questioned, that has to be the truth. But the skepticism of Nicholas Roeg's "Man Who Fell to Earth," goes beyond Descartes. Nicholas Roeg's questions are not only aimed at our assumptions about reality, but go on to suggest that any endeavor to know reality is futile.
So this is Dick's starting point, it is the missing link between modernist humanism and mysticism—the post-modern abyss.
"Seated before my TV set I watched and waited for another message…like the satellite in miniature in the film VALIS, the microform of it run over by the taxi as if it were an empty beer can in the gutter, the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself…my search kept me at home; I sat before my T.V. set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission."
Philip K. Dick VALIS1981
[This essay originally appeared in Slapshot: A Cinema Journal.]