A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
(Boston and New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1995), 72.
19. Tom Hanks, cited in Paul Brownfield, “Fly Him to the Moon” [interview with Tom Hanks], The Los Angeles Times, Sunday Calendar Section, April 5, 1998, 92. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
5. THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S PROJECT MOONBASE
Whenever I teach one of my infrequent science fiction classes, I begin by showing my students two short films: Project Moonbase (1953) and La Jetée (1962). These films, I explain, exemplify the two extreme points of the spectrum of science fiction: the juvenile melodrama and plodding didacticism of Project Moonbase, and the avant-garde lyricism and haunting imagery of La Jetée. And those works prepare my students rather nicely for the final movie I show, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—a film, after all, that is not unlike two reels of Project Moonbase spliced on to one reel of La Jetée.
However, the announced reasons I offer my students for showing Project Moonbase are disingenuous; for if my only objective was to display the cinematic equivalent of the original Gernsbackian paradigm—adventure stories with scientific explanations and logical predictions—there are any number of movies that could serve that purpose, including Destination Moon (1950), Riders to the Stars (1954), and Conquest of Space (1955). But while those films have their momens, only Project Moonbase fascinates me—because it is the only piece of celluloid I know of that even partially reflects the writing style and idiosyncratic philosophy of its noted co-author, Robert A. Heinlein.
Of course, this movie has generally not been valued—or even noticed—by filmgoers, Heinlein scholars, or film critics. After being thrown together from an unsold television pilot entitled Ring Around the Moon, written by Heinlein and producer Jack Seaman, the film was only briefly released, and has been rarely seen since; the only time it has been shown on television, I believe, was as part of the Canned Film Festival series of avowedly awful movies hosted by comedienne Laraine Newman. One scholar who prepared a definitive Heinlein bibliography, Marie Guthrie, reported that she had never been able to see the film.
Also, unlike Heinlein’s earlier film Destination Moon, Project Moonbase did not become a Heinlein short story or the subject of a Heinlein article; indeed, by all accounts, Heinlein was dissatisfied with the film and to my knowledge never mentioned it in print. Most critical studies of Heinlein—including Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension (1968), George Slusser’s Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (1976), and The Classic Years of Robert A. Heinlein (1977), and Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology Robert A. Heinlein (1978)—do not even mention the movie, while H. Bruce Franklin’s usually thorough Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) dismisses it in less than a page.
In reference books and studies of science fiction films, Project Moonbase is similarly neglected, either omitted altogether—as in books ranging from John Baxter’s pioneering Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970) to James Gunn’s The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988)—or subjected to brief criticism: in Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978), John Brosnan summarizes the plot and comments that “it’s not a very good film,”20 and in his entry on the movie for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) Brosnan says that its “ambitious idea...is undermined by melodramatics, poor performances, and sets designed for tv.”21 John Stanley’s Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide (1988) finds the film “uninteresting” and “pseudo-scientific,”22 and Phil Hardy’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (1984) complains of its “melodramatic plot” that “contains everything that the makers of Destination Moon tried to avoid.”23 Just about the only positive comment on Project Moonbase comes in Bruce Lanier Wright’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters, 1950-1964 (1993), where, after repeating some familiar criticisms, he says that the film “deserves points for a more adult approach.”24
A recurring theme in these curt commentaries is that Project Moonbase does not display any of the influence of Robert A. Heinlein: Stanley asserts that Heinlein’s “style and themes are not to be found” in the movie (271); David Wingrove’s entry on the film for his Science Fiction Film Source Book (1985) says the film “has little of the zest of Heinlein’s written work of the period”;25 Brosnan in Future Tense suspects that “not much remained of Heinlein’s original” in the shooting script (77); Wright says that “The movie’s overall tone bears little resemblance to Heinlein’s literary work” (28); and Hardy concludes that “the film lacks the sense of confidence that even Heinlein’s worst novels have in abundance” (141).
Still, Hardy does concede that the film is “only of interest for a few of the odd quirks that Heinlein introduced” (141); and while I would agree that Project Moonbase is a terrible movie by conventional aesthetic standards, my own argument, based on repeated viewings of the film, would be that this film is far odder and more distinctive than Hardy’s comment would indicate. Furthermore, in contrast to the bland and rather anonymous Destination Moon, I would maintain, despite the opinions cited above, that the oddities of Project Moonbase can be directly related to themes and concerns expressed in Heinlein’s written science fiction; and for that reason, if only for that reason, the film merits closer consideration than it has previously received.
The movie must first be understood in the overall context of Heinlein’s career at the time. Between 1945 and 1958, Heinlein primarily wanted, as he later reported in Expanded Universe, “to break out from the limitations and low rates of pulp science-fiction magazines into anything and everything: slicks, books, motion pictures, general fiction, specialized fiction not intended for SF magazines, and nonfiction.”26 Whenever Heinlein first entered a new market, he made himself appear very eager to please, and his early efforts in each field seem to conform completely to its usual conventions. However, as soon as Heinlein achieved some success in a given market, he began to push at the boundaries of those conventions, gradually moving toward an approach that combined a conventional surface with unconventional undercurrents. Thus, as is frequently discussed, Heinlein’s juvenile novels gradually moved from the simplistic melodrama of Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and Space Cadet (1948) to the complex tensions of The Star Beast (1954) and Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958); and two of his later stories for the mass-market magazines, which both appeared in December, 1949, had unexpected features: “Delilah and the Space Rigger,” as H. Bruce Franklin notes, “shows a relatively high level of consciousness about one form of the oppression of women”;27 and “The Long Watch,” though originally published in The American Legion Magazine, surprisingly criticizes the military, since the menace in the story is a planned military takeover of the government.
This pattern of initial acquiescence to generic conventions, and later efforts to bend and stretch those conventions, can be seen in Heinlein’s two screenplays. Destination Moon is primarily a straightforward and unchallenging depiction of a first flight to the Moon, with few disturbing elements or unexpected touches; Project Moonbase, apparently a retelling of the same story with some added juvenile adventure, repeatedly offers some surprising features and dark undercurrents.
To describe what is conventional, and what is unconventional, about Project Moonbase, one could speak of a series of tensions between the apparent messages, and the actual messages, in the movie. Four of these are most prominent.
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First, there is the conflict of The ordinariness of space versus The strangeness of space. In most scenes of the movie, there is no particular effort to make the environment of space seem disorienting: as in other films of the