A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
they are insufficiently focused on the dangers and novelties of space travel; and to be sure, some scientific inaccuracy in science fiction film is far from unprecedented. But it is worth noting that films like these have prospered not only because they are aesthetically superior to the spacesuit films—though they usually are—but also because they are more conventional in all respects: films like Star Wars (1977) fit comfortably into any number of well-established literary patterns, though the same cannot be said of Destination Moon or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Further, a lack of realism in fiction does become an issue when the fiction begins to influence real-life decisions—which arguably happened in the case of Star Trek.
That is, during the 1970s, when support for the space program started to fade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration visibly sought new popularity by riding on the coattails of Star Trek. In response to a letter-writing campaign, the prototypical space shuttle was named the Enterprise; members of the Star Trek cast attended several NASA functions, including a well-photographed visit to NASA’s Enterprise; and Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols was recruited to make a promotional film designed to attract women and minority astronauts. All this was harmless enough, but it soon seemed that NASA was also embracing the Star Trek philosophy that space was a safe and comfortable environment, suitable not only for trained astronauts but for “ordinary citizens” as well—the idea that led directly to Christa McAuliffe and the 1986 Challenger disaster. To be sure, the causal chain from Roddenberry’s mini-skirted spacefarers in starships that go “swish” to Challenger exploding in the upper atmosphere is tenuous at best; still, it is at least an unsettling coincidence that the final flight of the Challenger had a seven-person crew whose visible and politically attractive diversity—including two women, an African-American, and an Asian-American—mirrored the diversity of the original seven-person cast of Star Trek. The universe of Star Trek might well provide attractive role models for an embryonic space program, but one should never forget that the actual universe is more strange and deadly than Roddenberry and his successors ever acknowledged.
Today, although America continues to maintain a doggedly conservative pace in human exploration of space, and although Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 (1994-1998), and all their cousins are still going strong, there nevertheless are signs of a possible revival of the spacesuit film. Some might be heartened by two major 1998 films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, which featured heroic astronauts in spacesuits engaged in desperately improvised missions to stop a large object from colliding with the Earth; but despite their scenes of implausible space heroics, these films retain an earthbound sensibility, terrified of space and entering that realm only to prevent a major disruption in our daily routines.
More noteworthy are the recent spacesuit films associated with the genre’s unlikely new hero, actor Tom Hanks. A lifetime devotee of the space program, Hanks was happy to appear as astronaut James Lovell in the big-budget film Apollo 13 (1995), which offered an authentic account of the most spectacular near-disaster during America’s lunar missions. Interestingly enough, one of the film’s most emotional moments, and one of its rare fictional touches, featured a spacesuit: swinging around the Moon in his dangerously crippled spacecraft, Lovell looks at the Moon and imagines himself standing on its surface, wearing a spacesuit, looking up at the Earth. Though spacesuits could not help the Apollo 13 astronauts, in life or on film, we again see a visual linkage between spacesuits and the grave dangers of space travel.
Immediately after Apollo 13, Hanks persuaded HBO to finance a major mini-series, co-written and co-directed by Hanks, recounting the entire saga of the first American space program, From the Earth to the Moon, which appeared to great acclaim in early 1998. Once again, as in 1950 and 1968, audiences eagerly watched films about men in bulky spacesuits awkwardly attempting to survive in a bizarre and harsh new environment. When asked by The Los Angeles Times why he launched this project, Hanks said he wanted to “show people what an amazing and cool thing it is to go up in space.” This was necessary, he continued, “Because in all honesty, that’s been lost.... We’re all awash in Capt. Kirk and Babylon 5 and Star Wars, in which the whole idea is reduced to essentially cowboys and Indians.”19 The contrast between what Hanks was doing, and what others had been doing, was recognized by the interviewer, who then explained: “In other words, Hanks didn’t want to do a thriller or a creepy sci-fi epic; rather, he wanted to film space history, and in so doing bolster a genre that has one benchmark work (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a host of other films that played fast and loose with the facts of space travel” (92). On the day that I first drafted this essay, it was eerily appropriate to stumble upon such overt support for my developing argument.
One more issue must be addressed: in mentioning Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon, I have in a sense gone beyond the boundaries of my announced subject, “science fiction films.” After all, how can films about events that really happened, accurately related, qualify as science fiction films? Yet in placing them in this context, I am hardly alone: Apollo 13 was nominated for the science fiction Hugo Award as “Best Dramatic Presentation,” and television coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing actually won the Hugo Award in 1969. And other fact-based space films like Return to Earth (1976), based on Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, and The Right Stuff (1983), based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the Mercury astronauts, are regularly linked to science fiction film. While this might be only an atavistic response, a lingering feeling that all films about space must be “science fiction,” I suggest that other factors are at work here.
That is, since space is such an unprecedented and outlandish environment, it may continue to seem like science fiction, even when over a hundred people have traveled into space and recorded their exploits in words and on film. The problem is that many people may resist believing, at some level of their consciousness, that this strange realm is actually what travelers report it to be, preferring to believe that it is really similar to Earth, that it will serve as a colorful new playground for stories about cowboy and Indians, or cops and robbers. The films that cater to this illusion, the space films, may be better regarded as fantasies; the films that seek to counter this illusion by depicting space as it truly is, the spacesuit films, are science fiction precisely because the truths they present are still not widely accepted.
Before World War II, science fiction predicted the atomic bomb, but after two of them were detonated with catastrophic results, stories about atomic bombs were no longer viewed as science fiction; everybody now believed in the atomic bomb. Science fiction also predicted space travel, which has been regularly occurring for nearly forty years, yet stories about space travel continue to be regarded as science fiction because people still do not really believe what space is truly like. And so, as long as people can listen to the dramatic “swish” of the Enterprise without protesting, as long as they imagine that Star Trek and similar programs represent a plausible future for humanity, there will remain a need for true science fiction stories to remind them of the ominous silence, and lethal power, of outer space.
13. H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14.
14. Robert A. Heinlein, “Shooting Destination Moon,” 1950, Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, edited by Yoji Kondo (New York: Tor Books, 1992), 120.
15. Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, 1984 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Woodbury Press, 1986), 125. Later quotations in the text are to this edition.
16. Destination Moon (George Pal, 1950).
17. Gene Roddenberry, cited in Stephen Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 116, ellipsis Roddenberry. The book was actually written by Whitfield, with occasional inserted comments from Roddenberry.
18.