--- title: The Man from Earth type: Movie date: 2026-06-14 rating: 7 year: 2007 director: Richard Schenkman status: Finished image: the-man-from-earth.jpg tags: - movie colorSortKey: [0, 22, 0] --- One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness. (A description I don't mean to carry any moral valence.) The indie revival in games owes much, much of itself to the fact that games are a medium where polish and craftsmanship and production value can actively work *against* the core gameplay loop. Books, on the other hand, have such a fundamentally small gap between what we'd call unpolished, messy prose and avant-garde experimentalism that it becomes hard to apply the lens of quality at all. One of the joys of my recent cinema excursions has been getting to understand some of these mechanics — even when the films themselves aren't particularly successful. There's [[vanya-on-42nd-street]], a film whose lack of production is literally part of the text, and which uses that fact to brilliant effect. And there's [[mindwalk]], a film forgotten to history, with interesting elements of its zeitgeist, that nonetheless conjures a dreamlike quality out of the graininess of its direction layered over the beauty of its landscapes. Somewhere in the middle of these sits *The Man from Earth*, which is probably best introduced through the lens of its screenwriter, Jerome Bixby — a quasi-famous science-fiction writer who did a lot of work on *The Twilight Zone* (as one might guess from the title) and the then-successful B-movie side of Hollywood; the film's executive producer is his son, and it is hard not to think of this as more of an act of Asthi Visarjan than of genuine creative commitment. This is very much a five-act play captured on camera rather than a work built for the medium. The entire action takes place in a single remote house, and unlike the aforementioned _Vanya_ it is filled with actors you've never heard of performing, by and large, very poorly. The music is bad; the lighting is bad. [^1] And yet, for a certain type of person — i.e. myself, and perhaps you as well — this will be a movie you cannot tear yourself away from, even as it grows more and more absurd. The conceit of the exercise is very simple: the central character reveals himself to be a man who is (for the sake of this essay) immortal, then he invites his colleagues — a coterie of university professors in various disciplines — to interrogate him and to challenge the veracity of his claim. That is the film, by and large: professors quizzing an immortal man on what he should or should not know and what he should or should not remember. If you think that is interesting, it may be worth watching; if you don't, turn away. As poor as every other part of the product is, the writing (not unlike the best of Bixby's Twilight Zone episodes) is arresting not for its clarity or beauty but because it forces you, however briefly, to completely eject yourself from your frame of reference. It's a really, really fun premise, delivered earnestly and intelligently. What is the difference between someone with a sufficiently encyclopedic memory and understanding of the world and someone who has actually *lived* it? You might think understand that this is suddenly a more relevant question than it has been. --- Where it becomes more entertaining but harder to recommend is in its attempts to introduce dramatic stakes. One of the characters does not believe John, and so first tries to bring in a psychology professor to commit him — or, failing that, to disprove him. The professor, it's revealed, has recently lost his wife; he pulls a gun on John, points it, and then relents. It's all a little boggling. And then a twin pair of revelations brings the whole thing to its most absurd. One: that John is Jesus Christ. Two: in the final scenes, that John is in fact the psychiatrist's father — having abandoned him long ago, owing to his policy of moving on every ten years to shift identities — a revelation after which John's son promptly dies of a heart attack. It's hard to describe such plotting as anything but insanity. And it's the point at which you begin to suspect that perhaps it isn't just a lack of budget that has made the film feel so shoddily crafted. --- And yet you can't look away. And I don't mean that in a train-wreck sense. There's a real nuance and depth and earnestness to the film's discussion of religion, of history, of all these things. It is not meant to shock. This is a film that has clearly been researched and considered deeply — made less as an act of entertainment than as an act of *inquiry*. And I have to admire those bets, and respect them. I think it's a film that many, many more people could enjoy than have. Especially right now, when the value of intelligence and experience feels increasingly slippery. [^1]: The film was directed by Richard Schenkman, whose very next feature was 2012's *Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies* — which tells you, perhaps, everything you need to know about the range on offer here.