The Man Who Fell To Earth (Remisted)

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

I’ve decided to alter/remaster some albums, tracks and films that have usually already been released.
 Just felt I could give them a different kinda feel, sound and or look…

I import the video/audio files into the dvaw(s).

Visuals I sometimes grade, edit, add effects to or alter in other ways.
The audio is sometimes remastered.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, 1976

Reading this description will give away aspects of the plot of The Man Who Fell To Earth (Remisted), so if you don’t mind, please read on.

I had seen this film some twenty years before viewing it again this time around.
I remember feeling that I had liked the opening sequences but had felt that the film lost focus after that.

In beginning to work on it I decided to edit out the initial secondary plot involving Newton’s (Bowie’s) quest for financial gain to supply water back to his home planet. I didn’t watch much of this part of the film, instead focusing on Newton’s growing relationship with Mary-Lou. Not knowing where the remist was going (I couldn’t remember its plot) I began to think of the film as a device.

The original film presents an alien who’s messed up by the evils of this world.

But the device I saw was that the extraterrestrial theme was a way to explore a man’s rise to wealth and fame (the original also does this – but with more emphasis on him being initially an innocentish alien, with much imagery of of his wife and children throughout – in this one he lies that he has an alien wife). In this case an entrepreneurial type of man. I wanted to also focus on Mary-Lou. She idolises him, he appears charming and easily throws wealth around, for her and himself, as if, to her, it were a dream, the knight in shining armour who has it all etc.
This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have some genuine feelings of his own for her, or she for him.

But when he allows her to see him in his true extraterrestrial form, she at first recoils in horror. She then attempts to make love to him, again recoiling.

For me this is a metaphor for how one person can idolise another, in this case a wife her husband. But when they don’t live up to the illusions, the idoliser gets angry, blames them, can then begin to demonise them.

So in effect she, in a moment, comes to see a ruthlessness in him that she was previously blind to; that’s the metaphor.

Then the secondary plot comes into the film. The remist has surrealism (following on from the original) and while we don’t know everything about what he is doing, re his space plans, technology, wealth generation and fame, we get the idea that he certainly knows about space travel and is using it to his advantage in this world.

So the film is also about his corruption, a lust he develops for wealth and fame, the damaging effect of this on him. We also see him idolised and then demonised by society.

He is later considered a possible fraud. There’s some kind of covert takeover of his program. He’s detained for psychiatric investigation (an order from ‘the authorities’). Interestingly when his false human eyes are permanently attached to his face, without his will, this for me this represents the fact that in this world, one is expected to wear the mask, always appear charming, ‘powerful’, in control etc – never who one actually is.

As it is whatever he’s working on goes ahead.

He remains a wealthy man but is losing his head in it all etc, he darkens.