A thousand years ago, the highest achievements of Western civilization took the form of cathedrals: works of wonder engineered to the highest standards of craftsmanship by anonymous people expressing collective yearning. The cathedrals of the twentieth century were spacecraft, which reached their highest expression in NASA’s Apollo program, culminating in the Apollo 11 moon landing 55 years ago this month.
Fly Me to the Moon, which opens next week, captures some of the magic of this moment in American history. It acknowledges the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the ascendance of Richard Nixon’s cynical presidency. But it also vivifies the glamor and excitement of the American empire as it reached its zenith, expressed most vividly in consumer culture, from cars to clothes.
Fly Me to the Moon also has a distinctively 21st-century spin: it’s a movie about marketing—the plot turns on an effort to film a fake moon landing in case the real one didn’t work out. Here again, there’s some acknowledgment of the cynicism surrounding such an effort (which has in fact become a kind of urban legend about the moon landing) as well as a realistic assessment of the way marketing actually does speak to some deep-seated human desires that lead people to buy Omega watches and Tang (as well as Fruit of the Loom underwear, depicted in one particularly amusing moment). I’m still digesting the message of the film, which I suspect will spark some relatively durable conversation as a document of this moment, whether or not it achieves a place in collective memory as a work of art.
I suspect it might: I liked the movie. That’s because it seemed to me a quintessential expression of a characteristic American art form: the romantic comedy, a genre that has not flourished in recent years in Hollywood. But Scarlett Johanssen and Channing Tatum are real movie stars in the classic mold, ably assisted by old hands like Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano. Rose Gilroy’s screenplay is hokey in spots, but generally well-constructed, and Greg Berlanti’s direction is assured. I suggest you check it out.
Drank some Tang recently. Mich better than Koolaid.