MWFTE revisited

In preparing for another little round of posts, this time on the place of the cow and/or bull in European culture, I was re-trawling through William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (1981) to get a quote or two to match with some earlier writing. Along the way I found this reference to Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, discussed in an earlier post.

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34) From the Old Testament to the Gnostics and up into the Theosophy of Rudolph Sterner and the psychoanalytic theories of C G. Jung and Norman O. Brown, the Western esoteric stream flows unceasingly underground and nourishes widely separated schools of thought and artistic movements. Nor is Jung the end of it, the last survivor of the Hermetic and arcane into the modern technological society. The latest expression of this Gnostic tradition has appeared in the world of the contemporary film.

In Nicholas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Gnosticism appears in the guise of science fiction. The film opens with an image of life on another planet, a landscape of desert and isolation. We see a single family, a woman holding a small child, and a man, and we overhear his promises so return after he has secured the water of life from another planet. It seems as if this family is the only young thing left on this ancient and exhausted world. Bidding farewell to his wife and child, the young man enters some sort of projection device that hurtles him through space and time to earth. In the next scene we see him falling out of the sky and crashing down into a pool by an old deserted mine in the American Southwest. As he wakes up on earth he puts on his coat of skin, and some version of contact lenses to make his eyes appear human; then he walks out from the country into a small-town shop to begin his magical encounter with the economic reality of earth.

This creature from a higher world has not forgotten all that he knew before; he retains his unworldly talents and supreme intelligence. Slowly he applies his knowledge of science to patent a whole series of inventions and create a new multinational corporation. He becomes a billionaire. The secret purpose for his accumulation of all this wealth is to set up the economic base with which to bring back the water of life to his dying planet, but the whole process of his amassing a fortune is one of increasing incorporation. The corporation becomes the central metaphor for the entrapment of the soul from another world in a body. Everything in the cinematic technique of the film plays upon the theme of entrapment in grossness, in vulgarity, in the noise and squalor of a world constructed of the passion for money. As the hero makes his way through our economic reality, there are occasional flashbacks to his home planet in which we see haunting visions of the wife and child who remain above, waiting for his return. Like the feminine twin ray in Gnostic mythology, the wife hovers above her mate who is caught in the body and fallen to earth.

Hans Jonas has identified the major themes of Gnosticism as “fall, sinking, and capture.” Roeg’s film explicitly plays out these major themes. As the hero becomes a success on earth and does indeed create the kind of Howard Hughes’ empire large enough to finance his esoteric mission of planetary rescue, the very mass of his enterprise begins to capture him, to entrap him in the gross matter of our capitalistic world. The conflict between a spiritual world based upon love, yet lacking the seminal water of life that could give body to its love, and a world that is based upon nothing but matter and money, a world that lacks even a clue about the higher world of the spirit, becomes extreme. The process of incorporation continues until the hero is finally caught and cannot get back. The feminine twin souI is cut off and forgotten in her higher, arid world. In the last scene we see the hero reduced to alcoholism and falling asleep in a drunken stupor over his drink in a cafe. There are even esoteric dimensions to the condition of his alcoholism, our word “whiskey” comes from the Gaelic uiskebaugh, which means the “water of life.” The man who fell to earth came in search of the water of life for his world: he ends finding not its substance, but its shadow.

The vision of Roeg’s film is clearly religious. The intensity with which his cinematic technique psychically assaults our senses, with its loud and irritating sound track and gross imagery, comes from the fact that this moralist wishes to push our faces into our disgusting capitalistic world until we begin to see it for what it is: a world of money and lust in which objects and people are equally consumed. A Gnostic from the second century in Alexandria could not have presented a more intense denunciation of the sophisticated world of international culture.

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Thompson then goes on to discuss Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser in similar terms.

Tags: Gnostic, MWFTE, Roeg