A Boy Falling Out of the Sky

The Man Who Fell to Earth

By AARON MESH

Seeming to hail from a cinematic quasar that flared briefly before disappearing forever, Nicholas Roeg's 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth plays on an entirely alien emotional register. This is an earth where sex is constant and aggressive, technology is oppressive and tacky, and all genuine feeling has been lost on another, irrecoverable world. David Bowie's plight, in short, is exactly what the bereavement of adulthood feels like—even if most of us do not pine for the family we left on an A-frame mud monorail. Cinema 21.

  1. Best paired with: Ninkasi Believer Double Red Ale.
  2. Also showing: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Academy), Super 8 (Academy, Bagdad, Kennedy School, Mission, Laurelhurst).

WWeek 2015

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