"Thomas Newton" falls like an apple to earth. His diaphanous being has taken the form of David Bowie, androgynous earthling of the orange hair, pale skin, sad eyes. With a business partner-the thickly bespectacled Mr. Farnsworth (as in Philo T., inventor of the first electronic television)-the alien establishes World Enterprises, an empire of images, in order to finance his journey home. In his own empyrean landscape Newton was a family man; on earth he is a perennial Third Man. The idiot Chauncey Gardner's genius brother from another planet, he looks to television to help him understand how we live here; he wants not to watch, but to see. But a wall of inchoate electronic signals merely reflect himself back on himself. "The strange thing about television," Newton despairs, "is that it doesn't tell you anything. It shows you everything about life or love, but the true mysteries remain. Perhaps it's in the nature of television: just waves in space." The "true mysteries" are what Nicolas Roeg's American Walkabout (set amid the lakes and arid stretches of New Mexico) is all about: here is a film that, like its hero, strains to see what a camera cannot see. In cinematography that tries to capture the curve of the earth, and in an elliptical narrative, this is cinema striving for a para- dise lost to television: the life behind the image. (JB)