Like many of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was home in my parent’s living room suffering the ill effects of a summer cold. Watching the astronauts on the moon was thrilling and for a moment seemed to bring the nation together in a spirit of unity.
That feeling soon dissipated in the wake of rising protests over the Vietnam War and the divisive presidency of Watergate. Even flights to the moon lost their allure; they seemed routine. And so a generation later comes Damien Chazelle’s new movie, First Man, based on James R. Hansen’s book of the same title.
Told with a combination of arresting visuals underscored with teeth-rattling sound effects, the nature of spaceflight is made more realistic as well as more harrowing. There is an early scene of Neil Armstrong piloting the X-15 in the stratosphere. After rocketing to 140,000 feet, he can’t get the aircraft to descend. He is the parlance of NASA “ballooning” around the atmosphere.
What makes the movie compelling, however, is plain-spoken – when spoken at all – Neil, son of the Midwest. To call him taciturn is to call Gary Cooper loquacious. As played by Ryan Gosling, Armstrong is a wound-tight introvert obsessed with space flight. His introversion is nicely balanced by wife Janet (played by Claire Foy) who try as she might to draw Neil out rarely succeeds, including a scene before the moon flight when she “commands” him to talk to her sons about the possibility of never seeing them again.
Likely this was played to dramatic effect. Armstrong’s two sons, Rick and Mark, were interviewed recently in the New York Times and have warm memories of their father. As the younger son, Mark, says, “We were sheltered. We were never worried about whether dad would come back or not. He was just on a flight. It might as well have been an airplane, a business trip. A business trip to the moon. It really was like that. “In particular the older son Rick remembers when seeing his father, still in isolation after the moon flight, who spoke little of the moon instead asking, “‘What had we been doing? Are you helping your mom? Are you mowing the grass?’”
What Chazelle has wrought is a portrait of courage tinged with danger as well as excitement. There is a memorable scene during Armstrong's endangered Gemini 8 mission when wife Janet faces off with NASA bosses. She ridicules them as boys playing with toys and is especially upset when they tell her that “everything is under control."
Janet's anger is reflective of the angst that wives of NASA astronauts endured when their husbands were hundreds of miles in space traveling at 17,500 miles an hour. There is little in space that is “under control.”
Men, all male then, believed in the excitement of space travel. Some were test pilot type thrill seekers -- others like Armstrong were skilled engineers, too – all knew the risks, but each embraced them in his own way. Courage, yes. It might be tempting to say, oh wow, they don’t make them like that anymore.
Nothing could be further from the truth. NASA, now peopled with women as astronauts, scientist and managers, continues the mission of space exploration. At the same time, we have watched a generation of young go to war, with one conflict in Afghanistan still continuing. None dare say those men and women lacked purpose or courage.
What makes First Man resonate for our time is the sense of familial sacrifice. Yes, the men missed kids’ birthdays and the like, but it was the women and children left behind who missed their dads. Just as it has been for men and women in service today. They respond to the mission wherever it takes them. It is those on the home front who pay more than they should in terms of worry, deprivation and lost time.
The courage of living with someone who risks his or her life for a living is seldom mentioned, but it is those men and women to whom our nation owes great gratitude.
