Why David Bowie’s stranded alien makes a record, what happens to his eyes and what the final encounter with Bryce reveals.
The Alien Who Can Sell Everything Except a Way Home
At the end of Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film, Thomas Jerome Newton has achieved something that would once have seemed an extraordinary consolation. His voice can be pressed onto a record and sent out into the world. Yet the people he most wants to reach are on another planet. The distance between the reach of a commercial product and the reach of a human message is where the ending hurts. Spoilers follow.
Newton arrives on Earth seeking water for his dying world. He turns knowledge his planet already possesses into patents that can make him rich here. David Bowie plays the early business encounters with extraordinary economy. The people around Newton supply much of the ambition on his behalf. They recognise the value of what he offers without understanding the purpose for which he needs the money.
Why Does His Fortune Fail Him?
Building a fortune and leaving Earth are two very different projects. The first makes Newton increasingly visible to the people capable of frustrating the second. His technology can be made legible to lawyers, investors and customers. His wish to rescue a distant family depends on those same institutions allowing an outsider to direct formidable resources towards a purpose they neither share nor control.
His detention exposes just how little practical protection ownership affords him. Even his body becomes something other people feel entitled to examine. A medical procedure leaves his human-looking eye coverings fixed in place. An appearance he adopted so he could move among humans becomes a lasting mark of what they have done to him.
Why Is Television Everywhere?
Newton discovers a medium that brings distant places into a room without requiring the viewer to travel. For a stranded visitor, that sounds like a miracle. Roeg makes it increasingly oppressive. More screens give Newton more simultaneous images and less opportunity to attend fully to any one life, including the life being lived beside him.
The editing puts the audience in a related position. Years can pass across a cut. Familiar people grow older while Newton remains conspicuously similar. An ordinary reunion becomes evidence of how much time Earth has taken from him. Bowie barely needs to signal the passage of time because the faces opposite him do the work.
Who Is the Record For?
Newton hopes the recording might reach his wife through radio transmission. As a business proposition it is almost the reverse of his early inventions. Those products had obvious uses for millions of people. The record has a purpose that would be fulfilled by reaching one particular listener. The film gives us no reassuring confirmation that she hears it.
When Bryce finds Newton again, he can establish that the man is alive and still here. Those facts once described the start of an adventure. By the end they describe the failure of the journey. Newton’s bowed head leaves the viewer with the person behind the extraordinary public achievement, still waiting for a reply that success on Earth cannot buy.
