They came in peace, but they were Americans
First Man, Damien Chazelle’s film drama about Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 moon mission, opens on this continent Oct. 12. The movie, shown at the Venice Film Festival Aug. 29, is an undertaking of ambition and audacity. One is almost tempted to compare it to setting foot on a barren, unexplored world.
The cinema has given us a nearly perfect fictional classic about an Apollo mission, but Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995) is the Apollo 11 story upside-down: it’s about the heartbreak of shooting for the moon and missing. The Howard-Hanks-Grazer TV miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (1998) covers the whole breadth of the Apollo program. It is wonderful, but naturally a little uneven, and Frank Marshall’s Apollo 11 episode seems half-apologetic. It serves as a mere adagio amid livelier stories of engineering romance, political struggle and tragedy.
In other words, Apollo 11 is difficult material. It entered into myth before anyone could make a work of narrative art about it. The moon landing was, in an important sense, a scripted drama unto itself. Nearly 50 years on, its halo of sacredness resists the sort of debunking or comic handling that tempts those who make movies about Jesus, which is an analogous challenge.
First Man’s answer to the problem appears to involve speculating on the inner life of the central figure in the mission, Neil Armstrong. It is perhaps useful that Armstrong never showed much evidence of possessing depths of poetry or philosophical complexity, and since he is dead, artists are free to project arbitrary colour onto that canvas.
Buzz Aldrin, the most eccentric of golden-age American astronauts and the closest thing to a genius among them, will provide a much meatier role for somebody one day. It would not be too surprising if Second Man, or whatever they decide to call that one, ends up being more entertaining than First.
In the meantime, First Man has already been caught in a tangle of identity politics before it is even shown to paying audiences, this being the year 2018. Someone noticed that the lunar-surface part of the movie does not bother with the unveiling of the American flag on the moon, and Ryan Gosling, the Canadian who plays Armstrong, was left to field questions about that in Venice.
Gosling is so popular and affable that even when he gave an awkward, poorly strategized answer, there was not much denunciation of his national origin. Gosling does not seem like the most natural choice to play Armstrong anyway, but, then again, who does? For commercial reasons, you cannot really let a character actor play Neil Armstrong in a Neil Armstrong movie, and Hollywood leading men are no longer available in the steeleyed, combat-annealed variety. (There are well-known Hollywood performers who are U.S. Marines, but would you cast Adam Driver or Rob Riggle as Apollo astronauts? In a drama?)
Anyway, Gosling caused a minor public-relations wreck, and it is hard to see how this was allowed to happen except through carelessness. Gosling argued that the 1969 U.S. lunar landing “transcended countries and borders,” which is true in a trivial physical sense, and he emphasized that Neil Armstrong “did not think of himself as an American hero,” which is true, but mostly pertinent to the “hero” part. Gosling’s reaction came off as though a conscious decision had been made by the filmmakers to downplay the American role in putting men on the moon.
No such decision seems to have been intended, and the producers were quick to defend their project, releasing a statement by the Franco-American Chazelle and another from two of Armstrong’s sons. Sadly, Republican politicians are eternally running against Hollywood, and did not miss the opportunity to whip up some gratuitous anger. Most amazingly, the still-living Aldrin, who seems not to have been consulted, issued an annoyed tweet juxtaposing hashtags like “#proudtobeanAmerican” and “#freedom” with the legendary photo of himself on the moon saluting the Stars and Stripes. (There are no good photographs of Armstrong outdoors on the moon at all, since he carried the only handheld camera.)
Our poor countryman Gosling ought to have been armed in advance with the line that Chazelle gave later: Apollo 11 was an American accomplishment — a uniquely, thoroughly, necessarily American accomplishment — undertaken explicitly on behalf of all mankind. Even in 1969, with the Vietnam War still boiling, a secretive Soviet moon landing would have made universalist, humanitarian claims less convincingly. The whole world seems to have accepted Armstrong and Aldrin as representatives of our species pretty comfortably.
The obvious, credible reasons for not having a flagsaluting scene in First Man are artistic: one doubts that the movie grinds to a halt for three minutes to recount president Nixon’s phone call to Neil and Buzz, either. There is no point in telling right-wing politicians to relax, but no American child is in any danger of forgetting who reached the moon first — any more than a Russian one is likely not to know who beat the world to Earth orbit.