Thomas Jerome Newton

Origin
Thomas Jerome Newton is a humanoid alien who comes to Earth from a distant planet on a mission to take water back to his home planet, which is experiencing a catastrophic drought. Throughout the film are brief sequences of his wife and children back on his home planet, suffering, perhaps dying.

Newton uses the advanced technology of his home planet to patent many inventions on Earth, and acquires tremendous wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate, World Enterprises Corporation, aided by leading patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth. His wealth is needed to construct a space vehicle with the intention of shipping water back to his home planet. While revisiting New Mexico, he meets Mary-Lou, a lonely, unloved, and simple girl who works as a maid, bell-hop, and elevator operator in a small hotel; he tells her he is English. Mary-Lou introduces Newton to many customs of Earth, including church-going, alcohol, and sex. She and Newton live together* in a house Newton has built close to where he first landed in New Mexico.

Meanwhile, Dr. Nathan Bryce, a former womaniser and college professor, has landed a job as a fuel technician with World Enterprises and slowly becomes Newton's confidant. Bryce senses Newton's alienness and arranges a meeting with Newton at his home where he has hidden a special X-ray camera. When he steals a picture of Newton with the camera, it reveals Newton's alien physiology. Newton's appetite for alcohol and television (he is capable of watching multiple televisions at once) becomes crippling and he and Mary-Lou fight. Realizing that Bryce has learnt his secret, Newton reveals his alien form to Mary-Lou. Her initial reaction is one of pure shock and horror. She tries to accept what she sees, but ultimately panics and flees. He leaves her.

Newton completes the spaceship and attempts to take it on its maiden voyage amid intense press exposure. However, just before his scheduled take-off, he is seized and detained, apparently by the government and a rival company; his business partner, Farnsworth, is murdered. The government, which had been monitoring Newton via his driver, holds Newton captive in a locked luxury apartment, constructed deep within a hotel. During his captivity, they keep him sedated with alcohol (to which he has become addicted) and continuously subject him to rigorous medical tests, cutting into the artificial applications which make him appear human. Eventually, one examination, involving X-rays, causes the contact lenses he wears as part of his human disguise to permanently affix themselves to his eyes.

Toward the end of his years of captivity, he is visited again by Mary-Lou, who is now much older and whose looks have been ravaged by alcohol and time. They have mock-violent, playful sex that involves firing a gun with blanks, and afterwards occupy their time drinking and playing table tennis. Mary-Lou declares that she no longer loves him, and he replies that he doesn't love her either. She leaves him. Eventually Newton discovers that his "prison," now derelict, is unlocked, and he leaves.

Unable to return home, a broken and alcoholic Newton creates a recording with alien messages, which he hopes will be broadcast via radio to his home planet. Bryce, who has since married Mary-Lou, buys a copy of the album and meets Newton at an outside restaurant in town. Newton is still rich and young looking despite the passage of many years. However, Newton has also fallen into depression and alcoholism and the film ends with an inebriated Newton passing out in his cafe chair.

There is a suggestion within the film that Newton posesses psychic abilities, such as a scene by the lake, where Bryce encounters and converses with a shrowded Newton, while Newton is actually sleep in his home. Additionally, in a scene where Newton drives past a field, he sees people who lived there in the distant past, and they also see him in his car driving past the field. This may be an effect of his psychic abilities, or some random time-space distortion caused by his presence.

* In the film, Mary-Lou and Tommy are in a relationship, where in the novel, the differently-named-but-same-character Betty Jo, is simply his companion and employed as his house-keeper.

** Editor's Conjecture: In the novel, Tommy says that he cannot see the color which Humans call 'red', and his hair is described (both in the author's narrative, and in observation by others) as being white. The Editor speculates as to if the color seen in the film, was intended as a tip of the hat to this fact by director Nicolas Roeg, as to Tommy's Anthean vision, his red hair would appear to be white.