“It’s very romantic” , David Bowie explained to a bemused Russell Harty in one of their many infamous awkward chatshow exchanges, after of course the pompous host remained fixated on the aesthetics and not substance, yet again.
He was of course referring to The Man Who Fall To Earth. Low, the album of around that time, which is a classic but not the official soundtrack, reflects his sense of burnout, post-Ziggy, with its euphoric krautfunk on side one and esoteric, menacing avant garde on the b -side. Eno, Visconti and Bowie at the height of their full creative powers, created an album which could have been commercial suicide, but which instead hinted at the many U- turns his career was to take. Boredom through repetition of ideas was simply not a creative option, not even on the radar.
And the film itself, directed by Nic Roeg with Bowie as the titular fallen alien Thomas Jerome Newton, straddles melancholic sci-fi with erotic satire on the death of the American Dream. Co-star Candy Clark, who portrays Mary-Lou, remarked in interviews that he did indeed seem alien, with pale, almost translucent skin, and a painfully skinny frame due to drug-induced weight loss. Her naive character, the hotel worker who falls in love with Thomas, even managed to lift him and carry him.
Roeg, who selected Bowie for the role having seen Alan Yentob’s seminal Bowie BBC documentary ‘Cracked Actor’ , effectively provided a contrast to Mick Jagger’s reclusive rock star in his previous film Performance. Bowie, cast as the elusive, pale “man” from a waterless planet, is the antithesis of swaggering, post-hippy masculinity, with his fragile countenance and wispy, barely-there voice.
In that sense, his film persona was to the seventies what Montgomery Clift was to the fifties: a softer, ethereal figure whose androgynous appearance was jarringly at odds with the times. He pointed to a different kind of future star, one who morphed through the decades, never settling on one single aesthetic or genre. O, you pretty thing, you were always ahead of the curve.
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