Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth (2007)

from Falling Sky Entertainment

Directed by Richard Schenkman

John Oldman   David Lee Smith

Harry               John Billingsley

Will Gruber     Richard Riehle

Edith               Ellen Crawford

Dan                 Tony Todd

Sandy              Annika Peterson

Art                   William Katt

Linda               Alexis Thorpe

Jerome Bixby wrote Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes, so it is no surprise that Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth combines philosophical meanderings, a science fiction concept of a biological wonder, namely a fourteen thousand year old man, and a seasoned cast, including John Billingsley, Richard Riehle, Ellen Crawford, and Tony Todd. What did surprise me is how long it took for me to “suspend my disbelief.” I was willing to put aside the historical coincidences, that John Oldman, the Upper Paleolithic man who showed no signs of aging past thirty-five, had known Van Gogh and Christopher Columbus alike. But I was put off by one of those misconceptions that my contemporaries have with the medieval world. I groaned out loud when John Oldman described Columbus’ fear of a flat earth, as if that late medieval/early modern captain actually DIDN’T know the world was a sphere. Actually, the going theory of the late middle ages was that the earth was a somewhat squashed sphere, something like a balloon with hand pressure applied around its “equator,” squashing it ever so slightly into an elongated near-sphere. I said to myself “If this fellow really did live in medieval Europe, he would not have worried over a flat earth.” He would have been more afraid of the effects of bathing. Flat-earth talk was something like our stories of the boogey man today, frightening to children . . . and adults not quite in touch with reality.

How surprising, then, that fifteen minutes into the film I was totally engrossed. Maybe it was the film’s fresh approach to some of the important questions of life, including the function of aging, of learning, of religion. Maybe it was Oldman’s initially oblique way of dealing with his life during the past fourteen thousand years, asking his friends what they would assume about life for a “caveman” or Phoenician Sailor, or medieval man in France. No, it was his amazingly plausible interpretation of  the “prehistoric origin of the vampire myth,” saying that because he never aged while community members around him grew old, they “thought I was stealing their lives away to stay young.” I was hooked.

And I really started paying attention to how the film explored the workings of memory, the role of personal experience in our understanding of the past, and contemporary, academic expectations of cold, hard evidence of veracity. Ah, evidence! When asked about ancient artifacts, whether he had any as proof that he had lived in Paleolithic times, Oldman declares that he has carried nothing with him from the distant past, for why would anybody carry through time simple tools that can be fashioned anywhere, tools constantly being replaced by new ones, better ones. Just because a twenty-first–century museum places a hunk of flint chipped into a knife gingerly in a dust-free, climate-controlled glass case doesn’t mean the user of that knife didn’t toss the knife away when he found a really fine piece of flint . . . or when in his travels he came across a settled band of humans with the first metal forge.

The difference in perspective is an intriguing part of the Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth. But the nuances of the film is set into a deceptively simple plot: a professor of history has decided to leave tenure behind, and his colleagues gather to wish him well . . . and find out why he would do such an irrational thing as abandon an intellectually—and economically—secure position. In the course of the “farewell party” plot, which is essentially a free-flowing conversation in the course of an evening, Oldman reveals that he has to move on periodically, before those around him notice that he doesn’t age as they do. In his first few hundred years of his life, it seems, he learned the hard way what can happen to relationships when one who is blessed (or cursed) with eternal youth is confronted by old friends or spouse or even children. A painful situation, according to Oldman, and sometimes dangerous, for having a body that does not age doesn’t mean that the body can’t be killed by neighbors bearing torches and pitchforks . . . or wooden stakes.  

In the course of the film Oldman reveals that he has sat at the feet of the Buddha and attempted to bring the message of Siddhartha Gautama to West Asia, to the Roman Empire around two thousand years ago, taking the name of one Jeshua bin Miriam. He tells this part of the story almost comically, to the horror of his colleagues, especially a particularly Christian colleague, Edith. He bullets out a report of his time with the Buddha and the next five hundred years, culminating in an attempt to bring the Buddha’s message of peace to war-torn Judea: “Guy met the Buddha. Liked what he heard. . . . was Etruscan . . . didn’t like what they became, a giant killing machine . . . they weren’t really apostles . . . they didn’t do any teaching, Peter learned a little more about fishing . . . crucifixion . . . he blocked the pain . . . slowed his body processes . . . they thought he was dead . . . . he attempted to go away undetected . . . tried to explain . . . they were ecstatic.” And so it came to pass that a major religious figure was “born,” with “a lot of fairy tales mixed in.” Oldman cries out that he never intended the Judeo-Roman world to mistake him for a savior, as if anyone could “save our souls that we had never lost in the first place,” that old story of a woman and a snake and an apple being a gross distortion of the human condition. “Cookies and wine . . . that’s not what I had in mind,” Oldman says ruefully.

And as Oldman’s rueful—or as the character Edith would say, sacrilegious—meditation on his experiment in influencing human behavior unfolded, I was struck with a deeper more provocative message than the “Christ” story as the misunderstanding of desperate people in a desperate time. This interpretation of the central figure of Christianity is not new to me.

But neither is the concept that captivated me. It’s just that the film really drives home a very basic lie, the lie of the importance of individual human experience. I was overwhelmed in a visceral way with the implications for what is known as individuality and for that equally potent concept called “naming.” My reaction begins not with Oldman’s rendition of the slice of his life called “Jeshua” but the out-of-hand by most of his colleagues. The shared cultural experience of the past two thousand years presses upon them. And this is no surprise. They can’t help but reject the story of Oldman as the Christ. He gives his name as Jeshua. They re-name him “kook.” What is one individual human’s version of a story the face of a version known by billions. How can an individual maintain—no, how can an individual develop in the first place—a schema of reality that is isolated from the the names and narratives of the collective hive, the Borg, call it what you will.

John Oldman is the only individual in the room . . . and even he is conditioned by the collective, the “hive mind.” The evidence against individual experience, that mis-empowered narrative of a mis-named person, is richly developed in the exchange over the identity of Jeshua/John, and in answers that Oldman gives about about how he handles the loss of loved ones, about illnesses he has had . . . about whether he really is a vampire of sorts. Oldman keeps reminding his colleagues that what he knows about life in different periods of pre-history and historical periods comes in large part from the findings of current research. For example, he knows he had illnesses thousands of years ago, but the names for those illnesses are fairly recent inventions.

The lie—or is it a mere trick—of taking individual experience as the core of identity is blatantly exposed as Oldman explains how he knows he was a Cro-Magnon man, in the way he fields questions about his anthropological name, his identity as Cro-Magnon. This issue of understanding as a function of naming is brought into focus when he says,  “I was a Cro-Magnon, I think . . . when the Cro-Magnon was first identified, when anthropology gave them a name, I had mine.” The idea of knowledge being an act of naming takes me back to the Garden of Eden and Adam asserting his dominance over creation by naming it. There’s power in naming . . . but even more power in the collective social body to set the parameters of identity.

Oldman has to be a “caveman, liar, or nut,” for these are the names we assign to truly individual experience. And even Oldman sees himself as an aberration. He is, after all, the product of his times.

If Oldman—and philosophers, linguists, social scientists, etc. etc. etc.—are right that we know ourselves and our environment only in relation to socially-constructed reality of a particular time and place, then the act of remembering the past is strongly conditioned by how we are schooled to know the past. It is no wonder that Oldman “remembers” Christoforo Columbo as “Christopher Columbus” fearing a flat earth. After all, John Oldman is hindered by our contemporary view of all things old. He is always ever as young as we are!