For once, you don’t have to worry much about spoilers. If you don’t know that Neil Armstrong
(surprise!) lands on the Moon at the end, I’m not sure what to tell you.
I have heard but not confirmed that Flannery O’Connor was
once asked what one of her stories “meant.” She replied to the effect that if she could
explain the meaning in a few sentences she wouldn’t have bothered writing the
story. This may be apocryphal or it may
actually have been someone else who said it, but in any event, it speaks to a
basic point that is true across art, and I think nowhere more accurately than
in movies. They have the capacity to enter the soul in a different way, to
provide experiences that explanation or description could never reach. You might measure the quality of
a work of art by its inability to be
described. Stanley Kubrick refused to
explain what 2001: A Space Odyssey “meant,”
because it was “meant” to have an effect that couldn't be described any other way. That is, “you have to see it” is one of the
best compliments you could give a movie.
(The best compliment, of course, would be Two Thumbs Sideways’ Stamp of
Approval™, a thing
we invented recently. We’re accepting
applications for logos and artwork and everything. The worst insult, of course, would be to
compare it to a work of Ayn Rand.)
With that background, I’ll point out the futility of this (brief)
post: I can’t describe First Man to you,
so this post won’t have much to say about the movie, other than to say it is a movie in the best sense: it could only
have been a movie, with sights, sounds, and silences that defy explanation. (The first five minutes alone are worth the price of admission, especially in Imax.)
There is irony in that the story itself appears mostly concerned
with the technical capabilities of mankind.
We bolted things together, calculated trajectories, tested things
repeatedly, and reasoned our way to the Moon.
And the journey there wasn’t poetic—it was an outrageously dangerous,
claustrophobic, bumpy ride. The movie’s
portrait of Neil Armstrong is such that you might think he had room only for
hard work and calculation in his head, and it was men like these, with strong
jaws and strong focus but little time for emotional or spiritual wonder, that
made a Moon landing possible. Waxing poetic is nice
for poets, but rationalist engineers get stuff done.
But that’s wrong.
First Man portrays Armstrong as a deeply internal human being, even to a
fault, as he sometimes declines to engage with his family or friends when he should. Nevertheless, he wants to go into space
because the act of exploration teaches humanity things it cannot learn any
other way. You can describe how thin the
atmosphere is, but until you have gone up and seen it, it will seem
huge. You can draw a picture of how far
away the Moon actually is, but to most, it seems comfortably close in the night
sky. If Neil declines to give grand
statements about what it “means” to him to be the first man on the moon, it isn’t
because he doesn’t think it is important.
It’s because it is too
important. Humanity hit the jackpot in that the actual Neil Armstrong, the actual First Man, was a reserved figure. No outsized personality could have done this event justice.
The final arrival on the Moon is handled with a care that
shows that Damien Chazelle understood this point. For all of the sound and fury it took to get
there, the surface of the Moon is mostly defined by silence. No musical score, no visual flare, no
ponderous symbolism could heighten the moment. Likewise, no prolix poetry can get this movie
across.
You have to see First Man.
~Right Thumb
