If you haven’t seen Damien Chazelle’s great new film, “First Man,” see it soon, and go with your father or mother if he or she served the country in the armed services.
Go with a sibling or a cousin as a tribute to that elder if the elder is not here now.
Go to be entertained, too. This is a movie movie in which the director and cinematographer dazzle because they go the extra mile artistically.
But the story of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, and how he got there, is also a lesson — an expression of values and character. It is an extended mediation on all that America can be and has sometimes been.
It is not a rah-rah film, and not because it does not make a big deal about planting the flag. Ignore that nonsense controversy.
But it is a deeply humanistic and patriotic film in a real sense. It celebrates perseverance, reason, discipline, and quiet courage.
Courage in this film is quiet, and never boastful. And it is not just the courage of test pilots and astronauts, who were more interested in aeronautical engineering than being daredevils. It is the courage of a wife who loses a child and who must keep a family together when her husband is lost in his own grief and obsession.
The film has its own spectacular space and flight wonders to behold, but the real wonder is that it all really happened. This isn’t “Star Wars.” They actually got to the moon, with computers and hardware that were slight and flimsy.
How in the world did they do it?
Dedication and luck.
As to the dedication part, a friend of mine says that we could not, or would not, fight World War II today.
Would we go to the moon?
We pretty much mothballed NASA after all the triumphs and the Challenger disaster. Neil Armstrong once said that when we lost the sense of competition with the Soviets, the country lost interest. He thought we would build a space station on the moon, which he said would be a fine place to do scientific research — better than Antarctica.
Did we also lose heart?
How I would love to see NASA revived, not because space exploration is utilitarian or useful, but because it fires the human mind and heart and is “holy waste,” in Paul Tillich’s phrase.
And certainly not because it is cheap, or easy, but because, as President Kennedy said, “it is hard.”
A renewed space program might help to reunite us.
At the center of “First Man,” naturally, is Armstrong, the boy from Wapakoneta, Ohio (population 9,867) who, in one of those amazing blessings of history, was also the right man. He was a magnificent pilot with a broad smile and the exacting mind of a scientist and engineer.
If you watch his post-quarantine press conference in 1969, Armstrong spoke and thought with tremendous precision. He was also an anti-heroic, hero. There was nothing of the performer in him. He was self-effacing and shy to a fault, and all the more likable for it. He always said he did not deserve adulation — that being “first” was a kind of accident and that going to the moon, the great thing, was accomplished by many thousands of people. Not one.
He was also devoured by his work and it hurt the family he loved.
He was distracted and single-minded. But I don’t think he was repressed. Men of his generation went back to work after a near-death experience. It’s what they did.
Armstrong was the kind of tough guy who seldom appears in movies and that President Trump would never understand. He was flying when he was 16. He flew 78 combat missions in Korea when he was only 21. When he was an old man he flew gliders because it took skill and was “as close to being a bird” as a human could get.
This self-labeled “nerd with a pocket protector” spontaneously described to the BBC in 1970 what he saw from space in words so clinical they are sublime: “Earth is quite beautiful from space. Quite small and quite remote. Very blue and covered in white lace.”
Neil Armstrong was an experimental test pilot before he joined NASA, as many of the astronauts were, and as my uncle, Thomas Hanley Curtis, was. The men in that small tribe, Chuck Yeager and his colleagues working mostly at Edwards Air Force base in the California desert, developed nerves of steel because they had to. Many of their brethren died in the airborne experiments.
It would be right to say they did what they did for the country. They almost all came from war and many went back to war in later years. But they also did what they did for aviation, for science and for adventure.
I wonder if, just as we have temporarily misplaced the space program, we have temporarily misplaced a certain kind of man — one who is indeed physically brave, but also highly skilled, rational (test pilots were intensely interested in weather), stoical, and modest.
Tied to that modesty is a certain kind of humor. I asked my uncle once how he and his colleagues dealt with the routine loss of life in the test pilot program. As Janet Armstrong indicates in the movie, there were years when there were more deaths of fathers than births of babies. He answered: “We drank a lot of gin and went to a lot of movies.”
If anything is missing in “First Man,” it is the humor of Armstrong and his cadre. Neil Armstrong called the moon an “an interesting place to be.” “I recommend it,” he said.
Keith C. Burris is editor and vice president of the Post-Gazette, and editorial director for Block Newspapers (kburris@post-gazette.com).
First Published: October 21, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
