Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

Once again I’m realizing I know even less about this than I realized. I had some inkling of a story about an alien landing on earth played by David Bowie, but I think more of the details are from Ziggy Stardust. Turns out Bowie didn’t even end up contributing music to this movie. I believe I recall being told something about the story, but I can’t recall anything more than what’s told by the title. From the summary I’ve glanced at now, it looks like what I was told would’ve glossed over a lot to make it appropriate for the age I was when it was discussed.

After watching the movie:

Thomas Jerome Newton, ostensibly an Englishman, walks out of the wilderness in New Mexico and immediately proceeds to hire patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth to patent several revolutionary patents that turn Newton into the richest man on Earth practically overnight, and Farnsworth into the man running Newton’s World Enterprises tech juggernaut and sole liason between the very private Newton and the outside world. At a hotel in New Mexico, the maid Mary-Lou immediately finds herself drawn to Newton and forms a relationship with him, introducing the strange man to many human vices, though even as she quickly finds she has to compete with his growing array of televisions for the attention of her “Tommy”. Dr. Nathan Bryce, a disgraced chemistry professor now working as a World Enterprises fuel technician, becomes similarly obsessed with Newton, sure that this man who came out of nowhere and has turned the vast resources of the wealthiest company in the world to the completion of an interstellar spaceship cannot be of this planet.

I sometimes feel like a movie is holding the audience’s hand too much, overexplaining what should be obvious. I do not feel like that with this movie. It seems part of the experimentation of the 70s in film was seeing how much they could get away with showing events happening and leaving the audience to figure out what they mean. Early in the movie, this works to its benefit, because we want to be a little unsure about what Newton is up to. But then little ends up shown or told to pay off that mystery, and what mysteries are revealed are replaced with more unsatisfying ambiguities. I was so unsure what was going on that there was a while when I thought that he was bonding telepathically with the people that he touches, living the human experience through them, and that’s why Farnsworth, Bryce, and Mary-Lou have the obsessions they have. But they’re just like that on their own. It sounds like the book made more sense, but the summary of the movie made more sense than the movie did.

The other thing the 70s was a time of extreme experimentation for was sexuality, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more explicit movie that was made for mainstream theaters. If only the telling of the plot was as intelligible as the sex scenes, I’d have at least felt like the movie was worth the long runtime, half of which seemed to include full frontal.

Of course, David Bowie playing a reclusive alien is an obvious choice. It would also be the obvious choice that at the end of the movie when Newton publishes an album he hopes will be heard by his home planet, not only would we hear that music, but if there was Bowie music nowhere else in the movie, that would be his music. But he just ended up not having time, apparently. Meanwhile this is a Rip Torn role much earlier than I’ve probably ever seen him before. Most of his stuff that I’ve seen is from as early as the 90s or maybe the late 80s, so it’s wild to see him popping up so relatively young and already playing a middle aged professor frequently compared to his students’ fathers. I feel like I’ve seen Buck Henry around as well, but I can’t place him. At any rate, I’m pretty sure his work is more from about this time or earlier.

I listen to a podcast by some people who don’t understand movies but are forcing each other to watch them and talk about it. It seems like all the legendary sci-fi movies I was always planning to get to are from the 70s and either make me feel as lost as those podcasters always are, have an amount of graphic sexuality I’m not accustomed to in my much more sanitized and compartmentalized time, or both. Underneath the boundary testing, I think there’s the shape of a good story here, well cast and imaginatively visualized. But the storytelling is in short supply, which for me can’t be made up for by the rest.