Quote for today: “My one snapshot memory of that film is not having to act. I wasn’t of this earth at that particular time.” (Bowie in 1993 on his role in the film “The Man Who Fell to Earth”)
Welcome to my first edition of Walkie Talkies where I pace around my property and chatter on about things. In this case, I’m pacing around the sunporch of my own house, since it’s way too cold and dark to go outside right now. In these sessions – and I’m hoping for them to be daily for the most part – I will be taking a random entry chosen by Random dot org from my spreadsheet of “index cards.” These include quotes, notes, lyrics, and various things that I want to be able to touch on in the future.
So, recently I’ve been going through my reading notes about a book written by Rob Sheffield called “On Bowie.” And I came to this chapter about this movie called The Man Who Fell to Earth. I believe it was made in the 70s. Before I even read the chapter, I came to the conclusion that Tom and I needed to sit down and watch this film in its entirety. Oh boy, was it bad. It was really bad. I wish I’d read the chapter first before making such a rash decision because, had I done so, I would not have watched said film at all.
In that chapter, there’s a quote from David Bowie about how his one “snapshot memory” of that film was that he didn’t really have to act. His reasoning behind that is that he was not of the earth at that time. Well, let’s be honest, I don’t think David Bowie was ever of this Earth. In fact, there are many times in my own life that I haven’t felt like I’m of this Earth, either. That’s one thing about society, in general – so many of us wear masks and create characters which we play out based on the situations we encounter. Indeed, in that same book, Bowie was quoted as being his own “corporation of characters.” I think that’s part of the reason why, from a very young age, I created so many of my own characters. They were just different aspects of my own personality – the kind of people I most admired, the kind of person people wanted me to be, the person I thought I was expected to be, the person I wanted myself to be, and the person I would inevitably become.
That’s one of the beauties of fiction. Much like Taylor Swift sings in “Mirrorball,” “I can show you every version of yourself.” That’s probably why I love that song so much. At the end of the day, the narrative that we tell ourselves is very rarely entirely in sync with our own internal monologues. My entire life, my internal monologue has been extremely effeminate and, for lack of a better word, girly. This simply did not align with my parents’ and family’s expectations for me. In fact, it didn’t even fit the expectations of my own best friends at the time. When they discovered what I really was – a girl trapped in a boy’s body – they didn’t know how to deal with that. I understand that. The person they got to know didn’t really exist. But if they really loved me, as Tom so readily agreed with me, they wouldn’t treat me so poorly. They wouldn’t reject me outright.
One of the things that really bothers me is that people have become so surface-level and superficial. I suppose people have always been this way, but, you know, it’s just something that really gets to me. Especially now, everything has this strange veneer to it. It’s just this AI-coated unreality which has just poisoned everything to a point where I don’t even know who’s real and who’s not anymore. And when I do believe that somebody’s real, sometimes even I am taken in by the illusion of someone being kind and respectable for the sake of getting people to throw money at you. And then when I throw money at said people, then they don’t even want my money. That is just really demoralizing.
You know, people just run around and promise all these outrageous things and make ridiculous claims. But because we live in a world where critical thinking is just not a common thing anymore, people are taken in by it. When I was younger, critical thinking was still a big deal. Nowadays, it’s just like, well, everything’s relative anyway. Your opinion is all that matters in the long run, right? Your own narrative, your own story that you’re writing. You know, that’s your truth. But then, objective reality is going to happen whether you want it to or not. So, living in some subjective fantasy realm inside of your own brain is not productive. It can only be self-harmful.
Back to thinking about that film, that film was a mess. I mean, the cinematography was beautiful, but the pacing was awful. The dialogue was stilted. Yeah, you could tell that Bowie was just kind of there. He was kind of just standing in front of the wallpaper. And Bowie’s awesome. I love David Bowie. But you could tell that as the project commenced, he didn’t really want to be there. Like, the ideas were great, but it was not well put together. It was bad. I felt like I’d lost about two hours of my life that I’ll never get back.
Still, the imagery gave me this impression that there were these great ideas that simply weren’t quite developed to a point where they were relatable. And I feel like that when I look at my own work. I feel like a lot of my own work is sort of like that. It’s beautiful, and it’s elegant prose, but it doesn’t really say what it means to say. It’s wallpaper, basically. Like, there’s a great idea in there, and there’s a lot to say. There’s double or even triple or even quadruple entendres in some of these writings that I have made over the years. But I have spent so much of my life acting that I forgot that, oh, you know, maybe at the end of the day, maybe I should listen to my own internal monologue!
Maybe I should just let things go and admit the person I played for almost 30 years of my life was a complete fabrication created just for the benefit of my friends and family. But were they really friends? Were they really family? Even if they were blood, does that make them family? Yeah, there’s this whole, the whole idea of chosen family which has almost become a cliche. But really, at the end of the day, your chosen family is the people that actually care about you for you. Your blood relatives are completely overrated.
There are times, in fact, when I was a teenager, I basically became convinced that I was not of this earth, like that I was literally an alien that was dropped down to earth, and they put me in the care of these two people who looked generally enough like me. Yet, I wasn’t really their child. Because there was always this sense that I was “the other.” Even though I know for a fact I am their biological child, it seemed like their entire purpose with me was to fix me somehow. Then, there was always this sense that they kept trying to have another child because I was somehow defective. And now I know they do see me as defective. So, me putting on this act for all these years was not productive. It was extremely reductive, in fact.
And when you put yourself in a situation where the optics are all that matter, you lose sight of what really matters, which is the spiritual and substantive side of things. Part of the reason that I’m so into numerology and even tarot to a degree, is purely for the divination aspect. I don’t even believe in gods and goddesses. I do believe, however, that there are spiritual forces beyond our comprehension, electromagnetic forces that bind all of us. So, there are things that we cannot explain through our current science, at least our understanding of it. But I do not believe that divination and numerology are pseudosciences at all. I think that they are based in some reality. Quite recently, I have started to really look deep into numbers, because numbers definitely have significance. And throughout the entire universe, numbers are the same. Math is a constant throughout the universe.
Now, there are certain things, like certain gravitational fields and whatnot. There are some constants that might shift based on where you are in the universe, relatively speaking. But generally, physics behave the same way throughout the universe. Chemistry is the same. Objective reality, told through the lens of science, is the only thing I truly believe in these days. Everything has a cause and effect. Even if we don’t understand the cause, it doesn’t matter if we understand the cause, because the effect has to have had a cause. In fact, there has to be a first cause. But we spend so much time trying to follow the thread back to the beginning that we lose sight of the present.
Back to Bowie’s case, he was talking about how this film was just not a pleasant experience for him. And for many years, I felt like I was in a film that I thought I wanted to be a part of. I thought I wanted to bask in the glow of male privilege, white male privilege especially. But it’s not like I ever really got anywhere with it. No one really truly accepted me as that. They always saw me as queer. They always saw me as different. And the only guys that really saw interest in me was only as a gay man and not for my full self. Well, that’s not helpful to me. But it’s not because I can’t be in a relationship with them. It’s that they don’t look at me as I actually am. They see what they want to see. They create a fantasy in the shape of me. That to me is just not productive from any standpoint. When you reduce somebody to essentially an AI-generated image that you then perpetuate within your own imagination, that’s not helpful. You must appreciate a person, an individual, for who they are.
Necessarily in art, you do have to sort of separate the art from the artist. And sometimes the art becomes its own character, and the artist then becomes only a witness to said character. But I don’t even know where I’m going with this. So, I need to start wrapping it all up, because I want to try to keep these sessions reasonably accessible. My transcription app only allows me to take 15 minutes of audio at a time.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, is that at the end of the day, many of us feel like we’re not of this earth, but we most certainly are. Whether we fit in with the often arbitrary standards of respectability or humanity, if you were born into this world, you deserve to be here, just as much as anybody else.
Sam Gilman had a great video about this yesterday, about how your circumstances should not reflect the contents of your character. No matter where you start in life, it doesn’t matter where you’re stationed. You must make the best of the tools and resources you are given. It might not seem like you have much. If you are just dirt poor, you have got to remind yourself, you’re still better off than probably, I don’t know, the better portion of the world.
For example, in the US of A, which to me doesn’t even exist anymore because America is just a travesty at this point, but conceptually speaking, in the arbitrary borders created by geopolitical bullshit, America is pretty well off, economically and resource-wise. So even the poorest in America, even the homeless, are still ahead of most people in the world in general. Even the American homeless have a shot at digging their way out and finding relevancy in this world again.
But we are often left to feel so hopeless and so powerless because people in power are only in power because they are narcissists and completely self-absorbed and no longer see the humanity in 99% of the population. Now, in order for our world to not completely burn down, we need some people at the top to start realizing, oh shit, we’re not living in a movie. You know, there is an objective reality. We need to take care of each other or we’re all going to fall together.
Now, that went in a direction I did not expect it to go. I’m now out of breath. Thank you for reading this silly ramble. I will edit it somewhat, so thank you for your attention and your time because our time is valuable and it should never be wasted on frivolous things, especially films called The Man Who Fell to Earth.
~ The “Phoenix”
Photo courtesy of Gustavo Belemmi, “Antique toy walkie-talkie,” under Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 International License
