Tagged: moon

Claustrophobia in space

My Netflix account is used mostly for the boys to watch “Mythbusters” on demand and Kelly to get her British crime dramas. But lately the dog, who has never really got the concept of weekends and is sliding toward doggy dementia in spite of her senior blend food with fish oil, has been getting me out of bed at 5:30 AM on Saturdays and Sundays, so I’ve been taking advantage of the lack of competition to watch some movies that no one else in the family would like. Inspired by Jason Pettus at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, I thought I’d “justify” my Netflix account by commenting on what I’ve been watching.

Three of the movies I’ve caught have clustered around the problem of people trapped in a confined space with no clear way out. They’re all science fiction movies–Moon, Pandorum, and Stranded–but have more psychological density and darkness than the genre typically offers.

Duncan Jones (née Zowie Bowie) tells a story of a man literally trapped with himself in Moon. Its main character, and almost the only human ever on screen (a few others appear occasionally in flashbacks and via teleconference), is coming to the end of a three-year assignment as the only person at a helium mining station on the Moon. An accident which should have killed him puts him face to face with the secrets of his employer’s clever solution to labor relations. The story unfolds slowly, and is as much about memory (much of it false) as it is about isolation. Science fiction fans who are used to laser shootouts and galactic dogfights won’t find much in this story; but readers of Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and especially Philip K. Dick will find a lot to like in this dark little story.

Pandorum is a little more on the action-packed sci fi side of the scale, but still high-concept and thought-provoking. It reminded me a lot of Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three: two crew members of a long-haul space flight wake up with foggy memories and a decided lack of knowledge of what has been happening on the ship during their sleep between shifts. They discover quickly that a lot has been happening indeed, none of it good, much of it violent and bloody, and that their mission has changed from a bold venture to colonize a far distant world to a desperate attempt to preserve the last parcel of humankind in the universe. The cinematography is dark, the spaces are small, and the overall sense of the film is desperation bordering on madness. Some threads are left dangling at the end, and some ideas are skimmed over in favor of action sequences, but “Pandorum” manages to explore the claustrophobia and disorientation of its characters in some interesting ways.

Stranded reminded of John Varley’s “In the Halls of the Martian Kings”, though quite a bit less fanciful than the Varley story. The crew of the first mission to Mars crashes on the red planet, and their landing craft is crippled. A rescue mission from Earth will take about two years to arrive, but the supplies of water, food, and air for the five survivors will last only about a year. The classic lifeboat debate occurs–who should stay and who should go?–and three astronauts leave for their final exploration on foot, discovering something quite unexpected. The dialogue in “Stranded” is more wooden and stilted than usual, made a little worse by the fact that most of the actors are delivering it in English while being native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese. But once past the tendency to exposition through speechifying, this is actually a compelling movie, and delves into a few of its characters more deeply than I expected.

The Daughters of the Moon


In this world where every object was thrown away at the slightest sign of breakage or aging, at the first dent or stain, and replaced with a new and perfect substitute, there was just one false note, one shadow: the moon. It wandered through the sky naked, corroded, and gray, more and more alien to the world down here, a hangover from a way of being that was now outdated.

The Beloved insists that I get rid of the stack of New Yorkers crowding the corner of the bedroom, and so I shall, so I shall. The New Yorker is a guilt-inducing publication, richly stuffed with complex and compelling articles that I never seem to find time to consume before the next one arrives. I always manage to get to the back-page comics, and flip through for the rest of the comics and book reviews, but too often I save articles and stories for a later that never arrives.

I finally got to the February 23, 2009, New Yorker (some of which I had read already), and read the Italo Calvino story, Daughters of the Moon, at last. And what a story it is! Calvino riffs on an observation about the battered state of the moon to craft a fable of a decaying moon, its legion of Diana protectresses, and a Thanksgiving Day Parade gone strange.

The article on Ian McEwan’s use of contemporary psychological research, Daniel Zalewski’s “The Background Hum,” is compelling, too, and was called out as the best article of the issue by The New Yorkerest, but I stand by Calvino and his moon maidens.

not a shiny dime floating in a cold blue

We pull off
to a road shack
in Massachusetts
to watch men walk

on the moon.

A final space poem (for now), this one by Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who read at Obama’s first inauguration.

This poem juxtaposes the strangeness of the astronauts on the moon with the strangeness of a black family at a rural New England roadside stand, and contrasts the incredible progress of the moon mission with the halting, shuffling progress of our society’s attitudes. And the poem suggests, at least in my optimistic reading, that more strange sights like “bounces in space- / boots, tethered / to cords” cannot be a bad thing for us.

My friends, my suited up pilgrims

One side of our house was desert
And the other, the one facing east,
Was Eden itself.
I didn’t know this until I bounced on a trampoline
And landed on the garage roof, me the unpaid astronaut,
Age nine, knees scuffed from a rough landing.

On the theme of poets in space, here’s a wonderful poem by Gary Soto, “The Boy’s First Flight,” commissioned by NASA. Soto pairs a boy’s roof-top adventure beneath “the bushel of stars, / Pitched and pulsating their icy thorns” with the space shuttle’s launch (“what lever does the commander push / To make a smile on his face, her face?”). This poem captures the giddy joy of flight, and the fearless optimism behind the moon shot.

their rare and wondrous deed

Here it is at last, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. In the long and decidedly mixed history of human beings, this is certainly our crowning achievement so far: the first extraterrestrial excursion by earthbound beasts. Be sure to tune in to We Choose the Moon to hear the real-time lead-up to the landing.

The YouTube video above is the song “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey, and Me” by Jethro Tull. David Bowie is all well and good, but for me, this is the ultimate space exploration song: a wistful meditation on the thoughts of Michael Collins, the astronaut who kept the orbiting capsule safe while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set their feet on the moon’s surface. Collins had quite an odyssey of his own, though; while the orbiter was behind the moon, he was the most isolated human being in the universe. As he says in his 40th anniversary Q&A:

I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what
on this side.

Collins is also a very wise man on education (at least from my very biased perspective):

We definitely have a national problem in that kids seem to be going for money rather than what they consider ‘nerdy’ careers. Other countries are outstripping us in the quality and quantity of math and science grads, and this can only hurt in the long run. But a liberal arts education, particularly English, is a good entry point no matter what the later specialization. I usually talk up English.

Ray Bradbury and Roger Zelazny both imagined an official place for poets on journeys of space exploration; perhaps Michael Collins can suggest that NASA project planners read “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” to secure a place for English majors on our next journey beyond Earth.

Moon Shot: a link roundup

Apollo 11 liftoffI was born on July 22, 1969, while the Apollo 11 astronauts were preparing for their return trip from the moon; the journey to the moon has always been of personal interest to me. With the 40th anniversary of both occasions (of varying auspiciousness) looming, there has been a lot of interesting material published on the web.

Interestingly, the UK’s Manchester Guardian has had some of the best coverage. Of particular note is an illustrated guide to the landing, with time lines and diagrams that show how this incredible act of hubris and bravado came off. Blake Morrison’s essay on the cultural impact of the Apollo project is also required reading; from David Bowie to W. H. Auden to Norman Mailer, he highlights the somewhat mixed reactions of artists to the conquest of the moon:

Among those of a romantic disposition, there had been a fear that the magical connotations of the moon would be destroyed once we set foot on it – one small step for man, one giant leap backwards for poets, lovers and vampires. But romance persisted nevertheless: instead of traditional lunar iconography (madness, mystery and melancholy) being replaced by the iconography of the landings (space ships, silver helmets, an American flag planted in the Sea of Tranquility), the two were able to co-exist.

The Guardian’s Apollo 11 site is rich with media, essays, speculation, and archival materials, a must-visit for all moon buffs.

Scientific American magazine, too, has a lot of great materials. The Exploration of the Moon, an essay from October 1969, assesses the scientific goals of the mission, and considers the questions that are still left to be asked and answered. Apollo and the Moon: The Astronauts’ View offers photographs taken by the landing party. Also on the site is The Moon Landing Through Soviet Eyes, an interview with Kruschev’s son that puts the Apollo mission in the context of the Cold War space race.

NASA is streaming the audio of the mission, in real time, from liftoff on July 16 to splashdown on July 24. They provide other interactive media displays about the moon shot, including an animated comic about the mission and restored video of Neil Armstrong’s landing.

That the anniversary of the moon landing comes in the midst of an economic crisis is disheartening, though. A celebration in Pittsburgh cancelled its fireworks, and a weariness overlays what should be a festive occasion. The Apollo mission’s boldness, though, should really be an example of how a gargantuan project like the moon shot can have far-reaching economic effects: advances in computer technology, rocketry, communications, and, of course, Tang, were all side effects of the mission that have continued to enrich us. Perhaps a similarly bold project that pushes our frontiers–into new areas of energy production, perhaps, or even more ambitious space exploration–could spin off equally amazing benefits. Big dreams are what we need most on this 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

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