Starman

December 12, 2014 2:36 PM

Seeing ‘the Man Who Fell To Earth’ Was One Of The Greatest Experiences Of Philip K. Dick’s Life - The time PKD got really into David Bowie.
posted by Artw (23 comments total)

Meanwhile Bowie was really getting into cocaine and the occult.
posted by Artw at 2:40 PM on December 12, 2014

Re: the second link. I thought "Is that going to be about his obsession that witches where after his sperm?" but no it was an unrelated occult event.
posted by The Whelk at 2:43 PM on December 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

In turn, David Bowie would later introduce his young son Duncan Jones to PKD's work, among other science fiction writers: "I would say that my upbringing meant that I was brought up by a father that was incredibly passionate about science fiction, among other things. He was a voracious reader, someone who had a real passion for movies, and he was showing me movies and giving me books to read that definitely made me interested in that genre. I mean, he got me started on George Orwell's Animal Farm, 1984, and then John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. He introduced me to Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, William Gibson who wrote Neuromancer. In movies, he was the one who showed me 2001 and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner."
posted by Doktor Zed at 2:45 PM on December 12, 2014 [8 favorites]

This song Bowie wrote about Baby Zowie Is actually rather sweet.
posted by Artw at 2:52 PM on December 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

I always wondered who inspired all that stuff in VALIS with the Lamptons and their sci-fi movie! Great post Artw.
posted by dialetheia at 3:10 PM on December 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

Thanks so much for this, although it makes me a bit sad and sorry for PKD; a lot of times, in Bowie's lyrics, it's hard to tell if he's really into the esoterica or just fucking around.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:12 PM on December 12, 2014

I figure he'd get strung out on pills and fill dense notebooks based on Ziggy and Hunk Dory alone. 70s Bowie is not lacking in stuff that could pass for weird gnostic UFO shit.
posted by Artw at 4:22 PM on December 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

I always credited the greatness of The Man Who Fell to Earth to Nicolas Roeg. And I say this as a huge Bowie fan. I saw Walkabout some time after first seeing The Man Who Fell to Earth, and it has much of the same enigmatic beauty and strangeness that the latter does so well.
posted by Dr-Baa at 4:27 PM on December 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

a lot of times, in Bowie's lyrics, it's hard to tell if he's really into the esoterica or just fucking around.

Bowie was (probably still is) a huge fan of the Dadaist "cut up texts into chunks and pull them out of a bag and create poetry from what is randomly extracted" form of text creation.

Not sure it's "just fucking around", but yeah, he did (does) a lot of that kind of thing.
posted by hippybear at 4:33 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

I had never really thought of Bowie as an influence on later PKD, but I can totally see it, particularly after seeing the recent Bowie documentary.
posted by immlass at 5:06 PM on December 12, 2014

"On the surface, Man is the tale of an alien who comes to earth to save his own civilization and, through adversity, distraction, and loss of faith ("I want to... But not enough"), fails. Just beneath the surface, it might be read as a parable of 1950s conventionalism and of the Cold War. One of the many other things it is, in Tevis's own words, is "a very disguised autobiography," the tale of his removal as a child from San Francisco, "the city of light," to rural Kentucky, and of the childhood illness that long confined him to bed, leaving him, once recovered, weak, fragile, and apart. It was also -- as he realized only after writing it -- about his becoming an alcoholic. Beyond that, it is, of course, a Christian parable, and a portrait of the artist. It is, finally, one of the most heartbreaking books I know, a threnody on great ambition and terrible failure, and an evocation of man's absolute, unabridgeable aloneness"
posted by ovvl at 5:39 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

I remember being 19 and seeing Man Who Fell to Earth in a double feature with Andy Warhol's SCUM. If I remember correctly, I was reading Allen Ginsberg in the theatre before the films started. I was just a big bucket with stuff pouring in.
Unlike Philip K. Dick, I did not end up seeing pink rays shooting from the foreheads of young women who knocked on my door.
Not enough drugs I guess.
posted by crazylegs at 5:51 PM on December 12, 2014

Thanks for informing me that I need to watch this movie. I'm not sure if I was aware of it.

As an aside, Duncan Jones' Moon is a fantastic movie and everyone should see it.
posted by slogger at 6:40 PM on December 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

(Even further aside, true story: David Bowie, Elvis Presley, and me share birthday's.)
posted by saulgoodman at 7:35 PM on December 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

Mute is a project Duncan Jones wants to make into a movie after his movie Warcraft is released.

"...being described in the past as his love letter to Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep’, ‘Blade Runner‘."

So it goes full circle.
posted by eye of newt at 7:41 PM on December 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

Tevis's book changed me. It actually forced me to shed a layer of naivete and willful idealism that I'd been clinging to for far too long. It was very painful but it was also kind of a relief to acknowledge that humans really are not that far removed from simians yet some of the dementations that make us different almost certainly could destroy a potential saviour through an easy if confusing sublimation. It appalled me to admit this to myself, finally, but the chasm it created within me is where the roots of my regrowth were finally able to take hold. Worth it.

Knowing that other creators with work that would shift me in similar ways were as influenced by his story's myriad ripples gives me a kind of cosmic shiver. Good stuff!
posted by batmonkey at 11:27 PM on December 12, 2014

I've read three books by Walter Tevis the author of the "Man who fell to Earth" most recently Mockingbird (published 1980).
This story is about the future where the human race is dieing out due to drug use and general malaise. Poorly written software has sapped humankind and their Robot Guides.
It was interesting to read this book from a 2014 perspective.
The book has a dark pessimism like the Man who fell to Earth. I highly recommend reading it.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 11:36 PM on December 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

Holy shit, saulgoodman! Birthday twins! *fistbump*

If only we could all get together for a party!

(Elvis would be a bit... stinky...)
posted by hippybear at 12:24 AM on December 13, 2014

You also share a birthday with early Grant Morrison superhero Zenith. Sort of.

Though Morrison was born in 60 I can't help but see PKD scouring Bowie records as somehow instrumental in summoning his comics-writing soul to earth.
posted by Artw at 7:41 AM on December 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

There were surely some synchronistic infundibulae happening between this pair...

Bowie's Oh! You Pretty Things was thematically cut from the same cloth, a deceptively jaunty (pun intended, TTP fans) Beatlesque sing-along predicting that the next generation would indeed become "the homo superior". A sci-fi twist on the pop youth anthem, infused with concepts indebted to Nietzsche's Ubermensch and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Vril, The Power Of The Coming Race, concepts Bowie had already extrapolated in a darker fashion on The Man Who Sold The World's After All and The Supermen....

posted by Twang at 7:42 AM on December 13, 2014

'Mockingbird' is a profound book, with a somewhat stiff dystopian SF framework wrapped around a rather haunting story. It actually had me kinda at tears by the end. It would make for an amazing film, but only if it had that style of perfect Roeg/Bowie/Tevis level of inspiration come together.

(We don't like to talk about 'Steps of The Sun', that one is kinda unreadable. 'The Queen's Gambit' is pretty cool.)
posted by ovvl at 4:47 PM on December 13, 2014

So Tevis wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler, and The Color of Money?! That kinda blows my mind; never would've connected those works.

If any of you Bowie fans have a chance to come to Chicago to see the David Bowie Is exhibition, I highly recommend it. Closes 1/4/15.
posted by Bron at 8:49 AM on December 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

A video review of The Man Who Fell To Earth sung to the tune of Bowie hits
posted by The Whelk at 2:37 PM on December 15, 2014 [1 favorite]