Some Random Thoughts on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part 1

Each time I watch The Man Who Fell to Earth, I wonder anew. I have no thesis here, so these thoughts just roughly follow the chronology of the movie.

1. Bowie’s character does not smoke cigarettes during the movie. Buck Henry’s Oliver Farnsworth does in the first scene in which he appears and at least once again. Stills from the set show a great deal of smoking going on, but although this was during Bowie’s chain-smoking days, Thomas Jerome Newton does not smoke.
2. Is Newton drinking water from cupped hands when we first see him crouched? I used to think so, but he is too close to the roadway and far from the lake to make that practical. After he sells a ring to the curio shop owner for $20, he returns with a coffee cup. It is more of a prayerful pose. (He has bundles of $100 bills, but these must have been counterfeited on his home planet, which is the way that Newton is finally taken into custody in the Walter Tevis novel. From television, Tevis’s aliens had gotten a good idea, but not good enough, of the appearance of $20 bills. Also, paying with $100s to get a cup and some snacks would be attention-grabbing.) 
3.  There are three trains, excluding the one on Newton’s planet: a rusted steam engine, a Santa Fe freight, and an Amtrak passenger. A presentiment of the opening of Station to Station?
4. This is America. We know immediately and for certain because there are guns. The first is in the cash box at the curio shop, a snub-nosed piece. The Chekovian rule that if a gun appears in Act I, it will be used by Act V sort of applies when Newton orders a pistol that shoots blanks from his jailers when he hears of Mary Lou’s visit. At first he says they gave him one, then corrects himself: he paid for it. He [unwillingly] pays for it all. Not their faces, but their guns are also what we first see of police who check out Newton’s limo in NM. They are a prominent feature in many of movies Tommy watches, including The Third Man and cowboy and Indian movies.
5. Did Newton walk all 20 or so staircases to Farnsworth’s penthouse to avoid the elevator? Just going five floors in Artesia, NM leaves him in a faint.  From the views and time it eventually takes Farnsworth to fall, his penthouse must have been high up. This falls into the realm of the unknowable, the suspend your disbelief category. Newton could have gone one floor by elevator or stairs, rested, and continued. He could have had Tony carry him. It doesn’t matter, just a curiosity. 
6. Some equally irrelevant things are knowable. For example, if Arthur isn’t allowed to go over 30 mph, how long would a limo ride take to Artesia? (By the way, at 3,380 ft elevation, any physical exertion would be harder than at sea level.) Artesia is 1965 miles from New York City, so that would be roughly 65 hours, 30 minutes. So if Arthur drove 12 hours a day, about 5 and a half days. Not so bad. By the time Mary Lou and Tommy start looking for a building site for their home, they must have moved their base to Albuquerque because from Artesia to the city is 239 miles, about 8 hours, Newton time. (The film locale is Fenton, just 77 miles or 2.5 hours at 30 mph.)
7. Coca-Cola is everywhere in America, but considering that the movie was filmed during a hiatus in Bowie’s coke years, it is amusing to hear the Coke commercial “I’d like to teach the world to sing” on in the background on one of the TVs in the early days of the movie and to see a Coke machine in the lobby of the hotel in which Bowie had been kept prisoner.
8. Mary Lou has an orange cat in her apartment in Artesia and much later when she is living with Nathan Bryce. It could be 10, 15, even 20 years old. Bryce and Mary Lou have certainly aged — and Mary Lou looks fairly bloated — since they betrayed Tommy, although Mary Lou still looks the same naked when she visits the prisoner, who has been in custody long enough to declare his intention to stop trying to prove anything to anyone. Enough time passes between Tommy’s release, Christmas with the unhappy couple, and the final scene for Tommy to have recorded The Visitor. Worldwide had been in business for long enough to have a publishing and photography division when Dr. Nathan Bryce enters the story.

Check back in a few days for more.