by Martin Walker
In a single month, from 7 July to 5 August this year, three US space shuttle missions were launched from Cape Canaveral. This unprecedented burst of hyperactivity was timed to accompany the opening of Apollo 13, the Tom Hanks film of the moon mission which almost failed to return. The best publicity vehicle NASA has known in decades, the film was given unheard-of cooperation from the space agency. To film the zero-gravity sequences the film-makers were allowed to use NASA’s own weightlessness training aircraft, known as the “Vomit Comet” for its effects on digestion. NASA provided 600 runs aboard the windowless KC-135, which soars and dives in great swoops in the sky, offering 23 seconds of weightlessness on each arc. Supervised by Apollo 13 mission commander Dave Scott, the actors underwent astronaut training, used the altitude chamber at the Houston space centre, and finally trained on the flight simulators at the US Space Camp at Huntsville, Alabama. NASA provided facilities and consultants to ensure that the lunar landing module looked right and the in-space lavatory sequence was authentic.
NASA knew what was coming with the movie, building new stands at the launch sites for the crowds they were sure it would attract. And they rushed to bring a new Mission Control Centre online, so that the old one could be the centre-piece of its new museum. Yes, folks, you can now stand at the very place where they first heard the words “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”
Given the way Apollo 13 has seized the public imagination in the US, punters might be even more thrilled to know that this was also the precise spot where, in 1970, Commander Jim Lovell’s chilling line was first heard: “Er, Houston, we have a problem.” And just across the vast room is the very blackboard where Mission Controller Gene Kranz gritted his teeth and said, “We’ve never lost an American in space, and we sure as hell aren’t gonna lose one on my watch.”
And if Hollywood can be rallied to the cause, NASA sure ain’t gonna lose its space programme to budget cuts. Already running on less than half of the budget of the glory days of the Apollo missions, and slated to lose even more, along with 55,000 jobs from its own ranks and its civilian contractors, NASA is fighting for its institutional life. And the film explains how to fight most effectively, mobilising public support by hauling in the punters.
As Hanks and the boys take off aboard Apollo 13 and start some laborious joking for the big audience back there in TV-land, his wife and children and his mother in her old folks’ home all realise to their dismay that the television networks aren’t screening it. Prime time is not interested. Just two flights on from Apollo 11 and the original moon landing, the viewers are bored with just another ho-hum routine flight to the moon. But then an oxygen tank bursts, the lives of three astronauts are in dire peril, and America tunes back in for the deathwatch.
So now, at a production cost of $51 million (a quarter of it Hanks’ fee), NASA and Hollywood jointly present ‘Deathwatch: the movie’. And America is flocking to the box office to see history made real, as only Hollywood can.
NASA put up with some distortions of history in the film. There was no row between the astronauts, like the one which Hanks breaks up between his two overwrought colleagues. And the astronaut who was pulled off the flight at the last minute, suspected of exposure to measles, was not the sole author of the ingenious plan to suck back battery power from the lunar module to get the capsule home. No matter: it’s a great role for Gary Sinise, who made his name alongside Hanks in Forrest Gump, a film which reworked the 60s and 70s into a wholesome and fundamentally comforting morality tale.
But the most intriguing feature of Forrest Gump was what it chose to leave out. In the novel from which the film was drawn, Gump is recruited into the US space programme, sent into space, and crashes down to a cannibal island whose chess-playing chieftain is a Yale graduate. The excision of this sequence saddened Hanks, whose strongest recollection of the 60s is of the space flights. He festooned his boyhood bedroom with astronaut pin-ups, and claims still to be able to recite the names of all the Apollo crews.
“I followed the space programme heavily when I was a kid,” Hanks explains. “Apollo 11, of course, that was the one the whole world stood still for. But I sort of stood still for each one of those Apollo missions.”
America has never really recovered from the extraordinary decade which followed the assassination of Kennedy. The war in Vietnam, the war at home, the burning of Watts and Detroit, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the shootings at Kent State, all ending in the final squalor of Watergate. But America did one thing gloriously right. It said it would put a man on the moon, and it did. And the triumph was all the sweeter for finally reversing the humiliations of 1957, when the Soviet Sputnik had beaten American technology into orbit, and 1961, when Yuri Gagarin had beaten Americans themselves into space.
There is something about the current American mood which makes the 25-year-old success of the Apollo missions and the Apollo rescue politically important. The first full screening of Apollo 13 took place at the White House, at the President’s request. Then in a long speech to his old university, Georgetown, on “Responsible Citizenship and the American Community”, Clinton cited Apollo 13 repeatedly. It was an example of the American ability to overcome mortal challenge. It was proof that technology could be a friend, not a threat. It was a memory of a time when “middle-class values” were not in question. And Clinton said he had found inspiration for America’s future in a crucial phrase in the movie: “Failure is not an option.”
It is unusual for a movie to enter the political discourse this way. But politicians cannot stay away from this emblem of an America that did things right. Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich (the other Vietnam draft-evading baby-boomer on whom US politics now hinges) finds the film “glorious – an inspiration”.
“It’s an amazingly wonderful movie, and it’s a movie about Americanism and about the notion of a team that faces a huge crisis and people work all day, every day, and they finally find a way to solve it by the narrowest of margins, and of very calm courage and of the kind of heroism that Eisenhower described as being held by the young men who landed at Normandy. And it is a remarkable kind of thing,” Gingrich gushed, in the course of a major foreign policy speech’ in Washington this July.
He has always felt this way about Space. One of the first bills he introduced as a young congressman in 1981 was a National Space Act, to “set forth provisions for the government of space territories, including constitutional protections, the right to self-government and admission to (US) statehood.” Gingrich once told me that the two books that most influenced him were Arnold Toynbee’s ten-volume History of the World, on the rise and fall of the world’s civilisations, and Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi classic Foundation series, which does for galactic empires what Toynbee did for earth. The first sci-fi tale that seized young Gingrich’s imagination was Robert Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, one of a series of stories in which Heinlein promoted the values of free market capitalism. Heinlein’s best work in the genre, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, was a set book in Gingrich’s college course, and its tale of the free market moonfolk threatening to bombard earth with rocks to win their right to self-determination pointed to a potential constitutional dilemma which Gingrich’s National Space Act was designed to resolve.
In the 50s, the sci-fi right saw Space as the utopia where their dreams could be fulfilled, while earth was too sullied by the welfare and corporate states to be of much use for anything but a launching platform. And once aloft, it would be run by “Starship Troopers” (to invoke another Heinlein novel), along the model of the US Marine Corps, treating Space as a new frontier to be tamed and settled as if it were a galactic version of the American West.
Unlike most of us – who may have read these things but grew out of them – Gingrich remains a believer, in the fictional form as in the underlying ideology. He has just published one alternative history novel, 1945, in which Hitler does not make the mistake of declaring war on the USA after Pearl Harbor, and is working on another in which a wimpish US president is overawed by a sinister Japan armed with Star Wars, until the nation is saved by a tough and visionary leader of the opposition in Congress.
Gingrich has two co-authors. For 1945, he picked William Forstchen, better known for his work in the “Starship Troopers” genre. And for The Faction, the novel still being written, he picked Jerry Poumelle, who likes to be known as Heinlein’s heir. Pournelle, a conservative of the old guard, used to advocate winning the Vietnam War with nuclear weapons back when Apollo 13 was being wheeled to the launch pad.
And it is significant that (as far as I can discover) Gingrich cites only one other movie which has inspired him as metaphor and life lesson: Sands of Iwo Jima, with John Wayne, in which a tough Marine platoon sergeant lets himself become disliked as he gives his men vital training – and is then killed in the battle as they start to understand why.
It is useful to record this intellectual history, which has helped propel a sci-fi fan right to the top of American politics, because it relates directly to the policies that Gingrich promotes (although it’s dispiriting that his cultural roots are so undemanding).
“Our Nation’s newborn space enterprises may soon fall behind the Europeans and the Japanese,” Gingrich warns. “We will have lost our lead because we did not have the foresight to make a sound economic investment in our future – and because we thought Apollo was a circus stunt.”
Gingrich wants to get back to the Apollo era, with men returning to the moon and setting forth for Mars. He sees “the big idea, the grand project” of space exploration as the glue to hold together the Western alliance of the US, Europe and Japan in the post-cold war years. But he does not want the kind of organised national effort that could give Big Government a good name. He wants, in effect, a privatised NASA, which he dismisses as “a people-heavy, obsolescent bureaucracy that has got to learn a whole lot of new techniques and new technologies. We ought to start changing it tomorrow morning.”
Naturally, it was just this proof that government could do things right which Bill Clinton hailed in his own lavish praise of the Apollo film. In short, the effect of the film has been not only to provide politicians on both sides with a text on which they can parade their patriotism and technological pride, but also a symbol on which they can define their differences.
But it is on a shrunken and introspective and deeply nostalgic American political stage that Apollo 13 now plays its metaphoric role, a trope far diminished from Buckminster Fuller’s grand concept of Spaceship Earth. There is a deftly worked sub-plot in the film, about the rebellious young teenage daughter of Lovell, who plays Jefferson Airplane in her room and doesn’t want to watch Daddy on television. But from Grace Slick’s “One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small,” she is redeemed back to the family bosom, to loyalty and to American pride by her father’s travail. “Remember what the dormouse said – feed your head,” the song ‘White Rabbit’ went. Instead, this daughter returns to duty.
The role of women in this film is to watch and wait, and look jolly brave to help inspire a troubled nation while their males do what men must do. And it is here that the Apollo 13 metaphor gains its real political force. In the Washington Post, the critic John Powers put it acutely: “Its story line could be a Republican parable about 1995 America – a marvellous vessel loses its power and speeds towards extinction, until it is saved by a team of heroic white men. I can imagine the political commercials in which Hanks morphs into Phil Gramm.”
Americans are uncomfortable with ideologies, and prefer instead to cast their political projects in terms of missions, whether it be the settlement of the West, the containment of Communism, the creation of a global free trade system, or a new venture in space. But inspired by Hollywood’s brilliant re-enactment of one shining moment in an era of otherwise ailing Americanism, Gingrich is drafting something that we can only call an ideology, especially as we can identify a clear precursor.
There is another recent charismatic leader whose project brought together a mystic sense of patriotism, cultural superiority and national destiny, to which the people would be rallied by grandiose public works projects of a militarised form. And this precursor also made much of family values, of traditional social disciplines, as the national rock on which the glorious high-tech future would be soundly constructed.
Gingrich, in short, is an American version of De Gaulle, and the ideology he is defining is a free-market, high-tech Gaullism. And like De Gaulle, Gingrich is fuelled by an extraordinary force of resentment, that the nation has somehow let itself down, and been let down by its so-called allies. In De Gaulle and in Gingrich, there is a common need to expunge a national shame: whether France’s defeat in 1940 or what Gingrich sees as the relentless cultural defeats America has suffered since the 60s.
“People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil around me every day. We are at the edge of losing this civilisation. Two more generations of what we had for the last 20 years and we’re in desperate trouble”, Gingrich explained last year. “I don’t want my daughter and my wife raped and killed. I don’t want to see my neighbourhood destroyed.”
However short and Hollywood-tinged the American memory might be, they know that this is guff, that Gingrich’s golden years before the 60s were not nearly so pleasant to experience at the time as they are to recall. They were marked by segregated schools, cowed and domesticated women, corporate disciplines and a generally censorious culture which jerked spasmodically into the extremes of McCarthyism, book-banning and lynching. To his credit, Clinton referred to some of this during his own Apollo 13 speech, recalling that no blacks were allowed at his own Arkansas school.
Where Clinton and Gingrich and thus the US political mainstream come together is in the use of Apollo 13 as a displacement mechanism. This is what Gingrich and Clinton and Tom Hanks choose to remember of their formative periods, and what Hollywood ensures that America gets.
So amid tourist crowds not seen for a generation, the history and the future of the US space programme came together for the thrusting ascent of the Discovery space shuttle on 13 July. And then they parted. The launch and ascent and the deployment of a new satellite was managed by the old Houston space centre, with its ranked tiers of terminals and consoles all linked to a single Cray super-computer. But then, as the astronauts prepared themselves for sleep, that old control centre passed into history, handing over to a new Houston Mission Control, an array of 200 separate work stations, linked together by 130,000 feet of fibre optics.
Houston thus entered Newt’s techno dream, the age of the personal computer, albeit the world’s largest and most powerful fibre optic LAN, or local area network. The onward march of technology helped condemn the old Mission Control to the spanking new museum and visitor centre. It will be less an icon of American history than a totem pole to a spurious but venerated vision of the past.
Interestingly, it went on display in the same week that the Smithsonian Museum in Washington opened its Enola Gay exhibit, of the bomber which carried the atom bomb to Hiroshima. After protests from veterans’ groups, conservative Congressmen and Mr Gingrich, the initial exhibit had been stripped of the discussions of the morality of the bombing, and of the effects on the victims. One of the excised items was a citation from President Eisenhower’s memoirs that “Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” But he was a President who made history rather than one who sought simply to exploit its re-inventions.
Sight and Sound, September 1995
