Everyone wants to go to the moon on the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind (at least they did before they decided they wanted to go to Mars). An alternative history drama that asks what might have happened if Russia got there first. The series, the third season of which wrapped in August, is too starry-eyed and ambitious to be dystopian. The moon can be lonely here, even dangerous. But the space race is also an object of intense romance and optimism, a symbol of humanity’s can-do imagination. In other words, it’s basically what President John F. Kennedy imagined when he stoked the country’s passion in 1962, explaining that we choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
The moon hangs over us culturally as well as literally. We see it when we look up in the sky, glowing, appearing close enough to reach out and put in your pocket. It’s right there — except, of course, it’s not. It’s 238,900 miles away. So far, yet so close. On Earth, it’s everywhere you look, on big screens and small. It has tantalized since even before 1902, when the cinema magician Georges Melies sent a rocket through the rock’s eye in his short A Trip to the Moon. (The moon was none too pleased.)
Since then, pop music has pondered the moon’s dark side (Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon) and marveled that man eventually made it all the way up, with a side of Andy Kaufman (R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon”). On TV, besides For All Mankind, there’s AMC+’s sci-fi thriller Moonhaven, in which the moon is home to a utopian colony and an artificial intelligence program that sure would come in handy back on Earth. There’s the disaster movie Moonfall, in which the moon, well, falls. Go back just a few years and you’ll find the film First Man, a melancholic account of how Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) became the first man on the moon.
Reality seems to be catching up: NASA is preparing to launch its uncrewed Artemis program, the first steps of a plan to put people back on the moon for the first time since the Apollo program and construct a lunar space station. After a few aborted attempts, the spacecraft is set to launch on Nov. 14. Such plans mean the space race will not be left to billionaires.
None of the fictional lunar stories present undiluted triumph. In most of them, the moon, and the discipline required to get there, can be extremely lonely. One of the most resonant storylines on For All Mankind finds the fictional astronaut Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) cracking up during an extended stay at NASA’s moon base, Jamestown. Separated from his family, stuck in close confines with the same two people week after week, Gordo starts hallucinating and tries to take off his spacesuit on the moon’s surface. He’s eventually sent home after his colleagues concoct a story to deemphasize his mental instability. The moon of the imagination can be a desolate place. David Bowie’s Major Tom felt the acute isolation of space more generally.
Take Moon, in which Sam Rockwell’s astronaut, working for a company that harvests renewable energy from the moon, uncovers some strange corporate malfeasance. In the 2009 film, directed by Duncan Jones (whose father happens to be Bowie), Sam Bell’s three-year contract has just a couple weeks left before he returns home to his family. At least, that’s what he’s planning on. His only company has been the base’s artificial intelligence program, voiced by Kevin Spacey as a sort of benevolent HAL. But it turns out Sam is expendable — so expendable, in fact, that he’s a clone, designed to save precious resources for the corporation back home. This moon is not a place of optimism or hope. It’s just another resource to be plundered, at great existential cost.
Lest you think lunar nostalgia is lost, there’s Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, Richard Linklater’s recent animated look back at his suburban Houston upbringing in the days leading up to the 1969 Apollo 11 launch. Linklater posits a secret mission to put a child on the moon (NASA made the capsule too small) alongside a richly detailed portrait of a suburban family at the end of the ‘60s. Not all is perfect in this rose-colored world; there’s still corporal punishment in public schools, and, out in the world, some protest of the expensive space program itself. Some family members would rather listen to The Monkees than follow the approaching moonwalk. But the film still has a “those were the days” tone, which is just fine. If you cared about putting a man on the moon, as most did, those were the days.
First Man cuts against that grain. It recreates the horrific Apollo 1 cabin fire that killed crew members Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. It gives heft to the anti-NASA sentiment, bringing in R&B star Leon Bridges to play Gil Scott-Heron and perform Heron’s seminal protest song “Whitey on the Moon.” Gosling’s Armstrong is determined but also broken after the death of his daughter. It’s a fine film, but it’s not designed to make you stand up and cheer, and its courage in staking out somber ground makes it even more potent.
Like President Kennedy said, it’s hard. But it’s a little easier from your couch. The history and the fantasy are right there for anyone with a TV or an internet connection. The moon of the imagination shines brighter than ever.
Chris Vognar is a culture writer living in Houston.
