proximoception | (no subject)

For all that, though, I like that The Man Who Fell to Earth was made. It's one of the mere handful of Gnostic movies, and what's more belongs mostly to the 'natural' strain to which I waveringly subscribe. Bowie's mission, flashes of images of a wife and family in some unfindable world that he must reach and irrigate, can't be completed here. Here there is too much and everything's too easy--the primary impulse gets scattered among the secondary, and in the end one is left only with alcohol, enabling companions who similarly failed, a lost and bad LP. A complement of Woman in the Dunes, say--curiously but not unconvincingly related to the disintegration of the space impulse post-Apollo 13, to the rise of technologies hypnotizing us with mere parts. Then "No, I'm not bitter" and the voice trails off and the white hat falls.

Presumably all of that was in the novel though because Roeg's handling is almost relentlessly tedious and indigestibly weird.

Having to defend why I'd liked it when younger I explained to her I simply hadn't seen Aguirre yet, though that one's at least half open to a condemnation of searching for your origins in someone else's yard, a la Bishop's conquistador poem.

Nor had I seen The Man Who Wasn't There, for that matter--presumably that title's a homage.

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I think I agree with you about all of it. I saw MWFTE when it came out and loved the atmosphere. I think you nail the gnosticism of it. And I'm pretty sure I'd find it portentous now. But I like remembering it.

I had enough of a sense of the '80s to at least see why Wings of Desire got its rep--there were a vast number of things that simply didn't happen in '80s movies, and a lot of them happened in Wings. Perhaps the Man atmosphere has to be understood that way, as a freeing of what was bound, filming of non-movie things--anchored in a specific checklist of things/ways one hadn't seen c. '76 that the film would have been working with. Looked at from too far away it just comes across as Teletubby outlandishness.

Perhaps I felt that more finely when I was more immersed in '70s movies. And maybe the zoom lens was the Avatar 3D of its day.