First Man (2018)

First Man is not exactly a sequel to The Right Stuff, although it picks up the NASA story where that film ended, taking us through the Gemini and Apollo programs. It is more like a pendant to the earlier film, the way a painting of an Old Testament scene by one artist would call forth a response by another painter depicting a New Testament passage, echoing or commenting on the first. In many respects, First Man is a self-conscious inversion or negative image of The Right Stuff. But what the films have most in common is not the sequences of test pilots and rocket launches, but the understanding of the astronaut as stand-in for the artist. And even here they could not be more different.

To begin with the differences. On one hand, films like First Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars all propel a vulnerable human being beyond the limits of our known world, so that the explorer or castaway encounters space not as a complicated individual, but as a specimen of humanity equipped with a basic human toolkit. In 2001, the existential drama concerns whether man (Dave) or machine (HAL) will lay claim to a spurious and limited, in any case homicidal, rationality. First Man and The Martian, products of our moment, tack on traumas and quirks by way of individuation, but without affecting the dramatic premise. In First Man, Armstrong is something of a "yes man," who never asserts himself in any kind of dramatic decision, who is not a figure of destiny but someone slotted into a roster.  

The Right Stuff, on the other hand, is set up a series of epic contests, recalling the funeral games for Patroclus in Book XXII of the Iliad. It is about feats of daring: who can go the fastest, highest, etc., who can lay claim to being "the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen." Everything is a competition: Chuck Yeager versus the sound barrier; NASA versus the Russian space program; test pilots versus astronauts; even the romance between Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard is depicted as a horse race. One constantly has to prove oneself. For all that, it is also a movie about work, about bosses and "climbing the ladder" and problem-solving and team solidarity. (Most other space movies are about survival, so that Robinson Crusoe's constructions are, as Marx pointed out long ago, a paradigm of use-value.)

First Man is not about work but about vocation. As Franco Moretti glosses the concept, "we will find the key to the modern personality not so much in specific activities, but in a peculiar disposition of the soul. This infiltrates little by little into each activity." Armstrong models dispassionate dedication and training. He is self-directed, not combative but relentless. We don't see Armstrong deciding or persuading, just executing. Likewise, science does not work here as it did in The Martian, as a reserve of ingenuity; Armstrong physically wrests control of his craft. Science is not rationality--there is no sense of trying to master the laws of a wild nature--but control, as if the mission were a series of trials of the flesh.

In other words, it is a film about art, as were director Damien Chazelle's previous two films, Whiplash and La La Land. Whereas Silicon Valley has yoked technology to an improving social mission and "open" cultivation of creative capacities, and The Right Stuff marvels at rockets as if they were muscle cars, for Chazelle art and science are neither creative play or indulgent messiness. It is hard to imagine a more constrained--literally and emotionally--character than Armstrong, but this is Chazelle's artistic stand-in. Art is not about vision but dedication, single-mindedness.

This is the main contrast with The Right Stuff. In the Tom Wolfe book, the astronauts are also plainly versions of the artist (the journalist) himself: adventurers, men who strapped themselves in for a wild ride, pyrotechnicists, speakers of a professional dialect, etc. But the game here (in the movie, too) is to inhabit their voice, their attitudes, their cool. First Man takes an opposite and less successful strategy with its artist-astronaut. It does not try to inhabit Armstrong, to take any view from the inside. The climactic moment of the film shows only the mirrored image of the lunar surface on his helmet's reflective mask.