“THE LONELIEST MAN ON EARTH: FALLING BACK TO ‘THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH’” (BY ROBERT MEYER BURNETT)

The Man Who Fell to Earth opened on March 18, 1976. I was eight, and I desperately wanted to see it.

I mean, desperately.

David Bowie stared out from the advertising, looking like an actual alien in a movie called The Man Who Fell to Earth. What eight-year-old science-fiction obsessive wouldn’t want to see that? I begged my parents to take me. No dice. No amount of pleading, negotiating, or whatever rhetorical weaponry an eight-year-old could muster was going to convince them that Nicolas Roeg’s R-rated, sexually explicit, existential science-fiction movie starring David Bowie was appropriate family entertainment.

In retrospect, they may have had a point.

At the time, I considered their decision a serious injustice. The title promised an alien, spaceships, another planet. Science fiction!

I didn’t know who Nicolas Roeg was, or Walter Tevis — who wrote the novel the film was based on. I certainly didn’t understand that David Bowie was going through one of the strangest and most precarious periods of his life. I just knew there was a science-fiction movie I wasn’t allowed to see, which naturally meant I absolutely had to see it.

But I wouldn’t actually see The Man Who Fell to Earth until September 1980. I was thirteen, beginning eighth grade — and when you’re thirteen, four-and-a-half years might as well be a geological epoch.

Especially those four-and-a-half years.

While I was waiting, science-fiction cinema changed almost beyond recognition. Star Wars. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Superman. Alien. Dawn of the Dead. Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And only a few months before I finally encountered Roeg’s film, The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars wasn’t simply another science-fiction movie. It was a cultural detonation. Suddenly, science fiction took center stage in popular culture. Movies got bigger. Worlds became more elaborate. Visual effects became astonishing. John Williams gave the genre symphonic grandeur. Spaceships thundered across enormous screens while audiences cheered. By 1980, The Empire Strikes Back had made that universe richer, stranger, darker, and, to my thirteen-year-old mind, even more extraordinary.

That was the cinematic landscape I inhabited when I finally encountered Thomas Jerome Newton.

But the film I saw wasn’t the version American audiences had seen in 1976.

It was the uncut version.

When The Man Who Fell to Earth originally reached American theaters, roughly twenty minutes had been removed from Roeg’s original cut. He’d delivered something nonlinear, impressionistic, elliptical, and profoundly strange. In other words, Nicolas Roeg had delivered a Nicolas Roeg movie.

And people panicked.

After a disappointing test screening, they decided to make his strange movie less strange. Out came the scissors. Material involving Dr. Bryce was shortened. Mary-Lou’s horrified reaction to Newton’s true alien form disappeared, along with the extraordinary sex-and-guns sequence in which sexuality, violence, alcohol, love, and alienation collide as their relationship disintegrates.

The cuts altered the film’s rhythm and character development, perversely making its already fragmented emotional architecture harder to follow. Apparently, a psychiatrist was even consulted and declared the film a disaster, which may be the most Nicolas Roeg review imaginable.

But in September 1980, the longer version finally reached American audiences. Four-and-a-half years after begging my parents to take me, I sat down to watch The Man Who Fell to Earth.

And I had absolutely no idea what hit me.

After years of populist, big-budget science-fiction spectacles, Roeg’s movie seemed to come from another universe entirely. No space battles, Death Stars, or heroic missions. No reassuring division between good and evil. Hell, there was barely anything resembling conventional narrative propulsion.

David Bowie wandered through an America more alien than Dagobah. Through deserts. Empty rooms. Televisions. Corporate boardrooms. Sex and loneliness. Memories of another world appeared without explanation. People aged, and the movie never bothered to tell me years had passed. But Newton himself hadn’t aged.

Scenes collided rather than followed one another. I wasn’t always sure where I was, and I couldn’t look away. Eight-year-old me had wanted spaceships. Thirteen-year-old me got Nicolas Roeg — which was better. Certainly not easier. Not necessarily more entertaining. But better.

The movie unfolded less like a conventional narrative and more like music. Or a dream you wake from knowing it meant something enormously important, even though you can’t quite explain what. I didn’t understand everything Roeg was doing. How could I? I was thirteen. But I understood how it made me feel: alienated, fascinated, uncomfortable, and profoundly sad.

Especially the ending. My God, the ending.

Newton comes to Earth because his planet is dying. His family is waiting for him. He has extraordinary intelligence and technology, and a mission. He fails…not because his technology fails, or because another alien civilization defeats him.

We do.

By the end, Newton remains on Earth, alive and essentially unchanged while everyone around him grows older. He’s still drinking, still trapped, still hoping whatever remains of him might somehow reach home. No medal ceremony. No Rebel fleet escaping into the stars. No promise of another adventure.

Just Newton. Stranded.

I’d seen The Empire Strikes Back only months earlier. Han Solo was frozen in carbonite. Luke had lost his hand. Vader had revealed himself as Luke’s father. Our heroes ended the movie wounded, separated, and uncertain. That ending devastated me too; but even at thirteen, I understood something Newton didn’t.

Another movie was coming. Han could be rescued. Luke would return. The story wasn’t over.

Thomas Jerome Newton wasn’t getting another chapter.

The Empire Strikes Back ends in darkness, but it still contains hope. The Man Who Fell to Earth ends in resignation. Newton isn’t defeated in some climactic confrontation. He’s worn down by being here.

I found that almost unbearably sad.

I understood loneliness. Wanting to go home. The terrible realization that something you desperately wanted might never happen. You don’t need a degree in film theory to understand that.

You need to be thirteen.

After seeing the film, I went looking for Walter Tevis’s original novel. At the bookstore, I also discovered his new science-fiction novel, Mockingbird, published in 1980. Both books were on the shelves, so naturally I bought them both.

What I remember most about reading Mockingbird is the profound sadness it left me with. Not a conventional tragedy. Something far more unsettling. Extraordinary intelligence without human connection. The terrible possibility of being surrounded by an entire civilization and still being utterly alone.

Mockingbird remains one of the saddest science-fiction novels I’ve ever read. Humanity hasn’t been destroyed by aliens or nuclear war. Something worse has happened.

Humanity has lost interest.

People barely read. They don’t strive. They hardly reproduce. Machines have gradually assumed responsibility for civilization as humans retreat into drugs, distraction, isolation, and the pursuit of being left alone. The species is quietly dying, and nobody particularly cares.

Spofforth presides over it all, perhaps the most sophisticated robot ever constructed. He’s enormously intelligent, possibly the most intellectually capable being left on Earth. And he wants to die. Except he can’t. His programming won’t allow it.

That’s Walter Tevis — the Sad Science-Fiction Writer.

Years later, sometime in the mid-1990s, I was sitting in Beverly Hills talking to a female producer whose name, much to my embarrassment, I can no longer remember. But I’ll never forget the story she told me.

She’d been mugged. A guy approached her at knifepoint and demanded her wallet. She handed it over — money, credit cards, driver’s license, the usual collection of things we’re all forced to carry around to prove we exist.

Then she did something astonishing. She looked at him and asked, “What do I get?” Apparently, this stopped him. The mugger considered the question, reached into his coat, pulled out a paperback book, handed it to her, and walked away.

The book was Mockingbird.

I have absolutely no idea why a mugger in Beverly Hills was carrying around Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird. Maybe he’d just read it. Maybe he intended to read it. Maybe he’d stolen it from somebody else twenty minutes earlier.

But I knew that book. I’d read it and loved it. And hearing that bizarre story crystallized something I’d been thinking about since I was thirteen. Walter Tevis wasn’t particularly interested in robots, any more than he was interested in aliens, pool, or chess. Walter Tevis was interested in lonely people.

Consider his characters. “Fast Eddie” Felson in The Hustler. Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit. Spofforth in Mockingbird. Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

A pool hustler. A chess prodigy. A robot. An alien. What the hell do these people have in common? Everything. They’re extraordinarily good at something, and no one knows what to do with themselves.

Robert Rossen transformed The Hustler into the magnificent 1961 film starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott. Twenty-five years later, Martin Scorsese returned to Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, with Newman opposite Tom Cruise. Newman finally won his competitive Academy Award® playing a character Tevis had created a quarter-century earlier.

Then there’s The Queen’s Gambit, Tevis’s 1983 novel about Beth Harmon, who can visualize an entire chessboard but struggles to imagine a life beyond it. Decades later, Scott Frank and Allan Scott adapted it into the enormously successful miniseries starring Anya Taylor-Joy.

Different genres. Different worlds. Same wound.

Tevis’s characters have gifts that should set them free. Instead, those gifts isolate them. Fast Eddie can master a pool table but not himself. Beth can see moves nobody else can imagine. Spofforth possesses almost limitless intelligence but cannot achieve the one thing he desires most.

And Thomas Jerome Newton? Newton doesn’t merely feel alienated. He is an alien.

Which may be Walter Tevis’s best idea.

Considering the extraordinary cinematic afterlife of Tevis’s work, I’m still amazed nobody has made Mockingbird into a great feature film. I’d love to see it. Maybe that producer still owns the rights?

Because if The Man Who Fell to Earth concerns an alien who comes to humanity and slowly loses himself, Mockingbird asks an equally disturbing question: What happens when humanity loses itself?

To appreciate what Nicolas Roeg accomplished with The Man Who Fell to Earth, you have to understand that he was a cinematographer before he became a director.

Roeg came to filmmaking through the image. He worked his way up through camera departments and second units, learning how movies were physically made before anyone entrusted him with directing one. And what an education: second-unit work on Lawrence of Arabia, getting fired from Doctor Zhivago, then Roger Corman’s gloriously hallucinatory The Masque of the Red Death, François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and Richard Lester’s Petulia.

Watch those films; you can see Nicolas Roeg developing the visual language that becomes unmistakably his own. The hallucinatory colors of The Masque of the Red Death, the oppressive modernism of Fahrenheit 451, the vast landscapes that swallow human beings in Far from the Madding Crowd, and the fractured editing and dislocated sense of time in Petulia. All the pieces were there. Roeg just hadn’t assembled them into something entirely his own. Yet.

When Roeg finally assembled those influences into his own directorial style, he created one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive cinematic languages. Because he understood something fundamental. Cinema has a weapon other storytelling forms don’t possess in quite the same way: the cut.

Put one image beside another, and you don’t simply create continuity. You can create an entirely new idea. Memory. Prophecy. Dread. Two moments separated by decades can seem to exist at the same time.

Time in a Nicolas Roeg movie doesn’t behave itself. It fractures, doubles back, and anticipates itself. Watch Don’t Look Now. Roeg collapses the barriers between memory, premonition, and experience until we’re no longer certain which direction time is moving.

This made him the perfect filmmaker for The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Thomas Jerome Newton doesn’t experience time the way we do. Years pass without reassuring titles announcing FIVE YEARS LATER. Mary-Lou ages. Bryce ages. Careers change. Corporations rise. Lives pass.

Newton remains Newton.

Roeg doesn’t simply tell us Newton is an alien. He makes the movie itself alien. Its grammar becomes extraterrestrial. Memories of Newton’s dying world interrupt Earth without warning. Sex, television, landscape, violence, and fantasy collide. Cause and effect separate. We’re never entirely certain whether we’re watching the present, the past, a memory, or something unfolding inside Newton’s consciousness.

That’s not sloppy storytelling. That’s the point.

Roeg forces us to experience something approaching Newton’s relationship with existence. What would time mean if everyone around you aged while you remained essentially unchanged? If memories of another planet occupied the same psychological space as the room you were standing in?

Roeg doesn’t answer those questions. He makes us feel them. Tevis wrote alienated characters. Roeg created alienated images. The marriage is almost perfect.

And then he cast David Bowie.

Some movie performances become strange collisions between fiction and reality. Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton is one of them. He didn’t have to convince anyone he came from another planet. Look at him.

By 1975, Bowie had spent years transforming himself from one identity to the next: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke. David Bowie the human being and David Bowie the creation had become increasingly difficult to separate.

Watch the 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor. Bowie is frighteningly thin, fragile, wired, brilliant, and clearly not in a particularly healthy place. Roeg saw all that and put it in front of the camera. His Newton is pale, delicate, and watchful, moving through America as though the atmosphere itself is slightly wrong for him. He doesn’t play Newton like Mr. Spock. No raised eyebrows announcing I AM AN ALIEN. Bowie barely seems to be acting at all. He looks like someone experiencing humanity as an unfamiliar medical condition.

Perfect.

Newton arrives carrying technology centuries beyond ours. His planet needs water, his family needs saving, and he plans to accumulate enough money to build a spacecraft and return home.

Simple enough. Except he lands in America. And America gets to work on him.

What I couldn’t have understood in 1976 was that The Man Who Fell to Earth arrived at the end of a particular era of cinematic science fiction. Consider the genre during the first half of the 1970s: THX 1138, Silent Running, Soylent Green, Westworld, Rollerball, Logan’s Run.

Science fiction shaped by Vietnam, Watergate, environmental collapse, overpopulation, oil shortages, corporate power, and social engineering. The looming possibility that someone in Washington or Moscow might end civilization before dinner.

The future wasn’t someplace we necessarily wanted to visit. It was the bill coming due.

In Silent Running, we’ve destroyed Earth’s forests. In Soylent Green, we’ve destroyed the environment and turned human beings into food. In Rollerball, corporations have replaced governments. In THX 1138, individuality is a pathology requiring medication. In Logan’s Run, society functions because everyone politely agrees to be murdered at thirty.

Nobody was having much fun.

Then Thomas Jerome Newton falls to Earth, and his confrontation with humanity occurs through something more insidious than an alien armada. Commerce.

Newton doesn’t meet the president. He incorporates. Gets patents. Hires lawyers. Builds World Enterprises. An extraterrestrial arrives carrying technology hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years beyond our own, and what do we do with it? We monetize it.

Forget “Are we alone?” The real question is: “Who owns the patent?”

Then, thirteen months after The Man Who Fell to Earth opened, Star Wars happened. And everything changed.

Now, I love Star Wars. I LOVE Star Wars. It changed my life.

But consider the contrast between Luke Skywalker and Thomas Jerome Newton. Luke gazes at two suns and desperately wants to leave his planet. Newton gazes at Earth and desperately wants to return to his. Luke discovers himself; Newton loses himself. Luke finds allies; Newton finds consumers. Luke gains power; Newton brings power and loses everything.

Luke’s journey is transcendence. Newton’s is assimilation.

Even their movies move in opposite directions. Star Wars races forward through an exhilarating chain of cause and effect. Its opening crawl explains the past so the adventure can begin. Roeg’s film moves sideways through time, backwards into memory, forward into uncertainty, dissolving into Newton’s consciousness — almost like a more extreme cousin of George Roy Hill’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Luke experiences time as adventure. Newton experiences time as imprisonment. Star Wars looks toward the stars and sees possibility. The Man Who Fell to Earth looks at humanity and sees appetite.

The blockbuster changed the trajectory of science-fiction cinema. The cerebral, pessimistic films didn’t disappear. Alien, Stalker, and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers were still coming…but the tectonic plates had shifted. The future was about to become a franchise. And sitting right on that fault line was The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Then there are the televisions. Newton doesn’t watch television. He watches televisions. Rows of them, pouring news, commercials, entertainment, violence, and meaningless chatter into the room while he absorbs it all. In 1976, this looked bizarre. In 2026, it looks like Tuesday.

We no longer need Newton’s wall of televisions. We’ve compressed it into a rectangle we carry in our pockets, an endless torrent of news, pornography, politics, war, advertising, entertainment, celebrity, tragedy, memes, and outrage — all of human knowledge competing with all of human distraction for our attention, every waking hour.

Roeg didn’t predict the smartphone. He didn’t need to. He predicted the appetite.

Newton becomes addicted to alcohol, certainly, but he’s also addicted to us: our images, distractions, noise, and endless capacity to manufacture stimulation. He comes to Earth because his planet lacks water. He discovers a civilization drowning in everything else. This is where The Man Who Fell to Earth becomes more than science fiction.

Thomas Jerome Newton is a failed messiah.

Consider the structure. He descends from the heavens carrying miraculous technology intended to bring salvation. People gather around him. Powerful institutions become threatened. He’s betrayed, captured, imprisoned, physically violated, and experimented upon. And when the moment finally arrives for him to ascend — to return to the heavens — we prevent it.

But here’s the cruelest part. We don’t crucify him. That would be too simple.

We assimilate him.

Newton arrives as an emissary from another world, carrying technology that could transform human civilization. He ends up a wealthy alcoholic sitting around watching television.

Humanity doesn’t defeat the alien by killing him. We defeat him by making him human.

Which brings me back to Walter Tevis.

Spofforth wants to die and can’t. Newton wants to go home and can’t. Fast Eddie can master the pool table but not himself. Beth Harmon can visualize every move on a chessboard but struggles to imagine the life waiting beyond it.

Their gifts cannot overcome their isolation.

Intelligence isn’t enough. Talent isn’t enough. Technology isn’t enough. Perhaps even civilization itself isn’t enough if we lose curiosity, intimacy, purpose, and one another.

And that brings me back to the producer in Beverly Hills. Thirty years ago, somebody held a knife to her and took her wallet. She asked, “What do I get?” The mugger handed her Mockingbird. Maybe he’d read it. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d stolen it. Perhaps the entire exchange meant nothing at all.

But I’ve remembered that story for three decades because there’s something strangely Walter Tevis about it. Two people briefly collide in a hostile world. One takes something, then unexpectedly gives something back. And what he gives her is a novel about a civilization that has forgotten how to read, about a machine that wants something its programming will never allow it to have. A novel about loneliness.

I don’t know what happened to that producer’s wallet. I don’t even remember her name. But I remember the book. And I still want somebody to make the movie. A real film. One that neither explains Tevis away nor buries his melancholy beneath spectacle, but dares to inhabit that extraordinary sadness and understands Spofforth’s tragedy as deeply as Roeg understood Newton’s.

Because Walter Tevis understood something fundamental about loneliness, it isn’t simply the absence of other people. Sometimes it’s the realization that no matter how many people surround you, they may never reach some essential part of who you are.

A robot who wants to die. An alien who wants to go home. A chess prodigy who can see everything except a life beyond the board. A pool hustler who can master the table but not himself.

And perhaps that’s why The Man Who Fell to Earth has never really left me.

I first begged my parents to see it when I was eight. They wouldn’t take me, so I waited four and a half years — long enough for Star Wars to change movies, long enough for The Empire Strikes Back to change me, and long enough for science-fiction cinema to become something entirely different.

At thirteen, I finally saw The Man Who Fell to Earth. And it made me deeply sad.

Then I read Mockingbird, probably because Walter Tevis’s name suddenly meant something to me. Or maybe because someone put another ruined Empire State Building on the cover of a science-fiction paperback, which apparently was all the marketing it took to separate thirteen-year-old me from my money.

Whatever the reason, I read it. And it made me feel that sadness all over again.

Nearly half a century later, The Man Who Fell to Earth still does. But now I understand why. Or at least I think I do.

That’s the funny thing about movies. The great ones wait for us. We encounter them at thirteen, twenty, forty, fifty, almost sixty, and the images remain exactly where we left them.

We’re the ones who keep moving through time.

Thomas Jerome Newton doesn’t age. Everyone around him does.

The movie doesn’t change. I do.

Then again, that’s the problem with Nicolas Roeg.

Time doesn’t behave itself.