Page - 81 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

81 3 Lazarus’s Necropolitical Afterlife at Vienna’s #Volks theater “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.” —Bowie, cited in D. Buckley (2015, 64) “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.” —Arendt, cited in Nelson (2012, 243) While the Arena occupation was going on in the late summer of 1976, among the offerings showing in West German, and pos- sibly also Austrian, cinemas was David Bowie’s screen debut in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, dir. Nicholas Roeg).1 The film follows the misadventures of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who comes to earth in search of water for his dying planet, uses his advanced technology to amass the necessary wealth to ship water back to his planet but in the process falls victim to corpo- rate intrigue and his own weaknesses. As he attempts to flee on his spaceship, he is outed as an alien and ends up an incarcer- 1 This chapter reworks and builds on material that appears in Ingram 2020. The release date for the film in West Germany was August 1976, but no date could be found for Austria.