Abstract
Some months before The Man Who Fell To Earth was released, its scriptwriter Paul Mayersberg described its variegated structure as being episodic and fragmentary, like a circus.
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Notes and References
Paul Mayersberg, ‘The Story So Far... The Man Who Fell To Earth’, Sight & Sound 44 (Summer 1975) p.231.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, Monthly Film Bulletin 43 (April 1976) p.86.
C. G. Jung, ‘Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies’, Civilization in Transition, The Collected Works, Vol. 10 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964) pp.307–433.
James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London: John Murray, 1974) pp.168–9
Howard Daniel, Encyclopaedia of Themes and Subjects in Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971) p.135.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968) pp.35–6.
See Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, Part III, The Dying God (London: Macmillan, 1923) pp.14–58
C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, The Collected Works, Vol. 5, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956) pp.177–8.
Tom Milne, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, Sight & Sound 45 (Summer 1976), p.146.
The title’ stardust’also alludes to David Bowie’s stage persona Ziggy Stardust. His performance as Newton recalls space travellers in songs released between Space Oddity (1968) and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), when the personae in his songs were of extraordinary diversity. They included benign figures (‘Oh You Pretty Things’,’ starman’) and malign (‘Ziggy Stardust’); tragic (’soul Love’, ‘Five Years’) and comic (‘Andy Warhol’); heterosexual (‘Kooks’) and homosexual (‘Lady Stardust’, ‘Queen Bitch’). He projected emotionally powerful visions from the heroism of the modern odyssey (’space Oddity’) to the diabolism of amateur Nazism (‘The Bewlay Brothers’). The rapidity of change during this part of Bowie’s career (‘Changes’) projected him as a figure akin to the alchemists’ Mercurius. Jung analyses this figure, sometimes represented as both male and female, as consisting of all conceivable opposites, being both material and spiritual, and representing the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa (C G Jung, Alchemical Studies, The Collected Works, Vol. 13 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967) p.237).
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© 1992 Kenneth John Izod
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Izod, J. (1992). The Man Who Fell To Earth. In: The Films of Nicolas Roeg. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11468-9_6
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