Man on the Moon: Three Takes [Media Notes 38]

What’s it like to have landed on the moon? I’ve not done it. Only a few have.

The Crown

There's an episode in The Crown where Prince Philip is feeling spiritually depleted as a middle ages man who gave up the life of an Air Force pilot zipping about the world in high speed jets in favor of life as consort to a monarch presiding over ceremonies and gestures. The Apollo 11 astronauts were touring Britain at the time and he arranges a private meeting with them. He's clearly seeking something from them, some revelation, some hint of adventure, but all he gets is ordinary chit chat. Maybe they HAD gotten what he was seeking when they were out there 240,000 miles from earth, but they had no way of conveying it to him nor even a sense that that's what he wanted of them.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I'm wondering that, earthbound though he was, if that isn't what Stanley Kubrick was after in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Roger Ebert asserted that the film was “transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape.” I took up the argument in Media Notes 34. The slow pace, the surpassing strangeness, that was about evoking an experience. Kubrick may not have been on the moon, but he knew awe, and how to evoke it through film. Did the Apollo 11 astronauts feel, but could not way, what Kubrick evoked in 2001?

First Man

I made a similar argument in two posts about Damien Chazell’s First Man: First Man and our capacity for experience, and First Man, a remark or two on how it achieves its effects. Chazell contrasts Armstrong’s life as an astronaut and his suburban life as a husband and father. They are two different worlds. In one world, suburban domesticity, Armstrong’s young daughter dies of cancer. In the other world, adventuring on the moon, Armstrong’s drops his daughter’s baby bracelet into a crack in the moon’s surface. The distance between the two worlds is now bridged by a heartfelt absence.

Is this awe, like Kubrick evoked? Not necessarily like Kubrick, but awe. Or is it something else?