A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
with no discomfiting features. Once they are on the Moon, the space travelers often do not move in any peculiar way in the lower gravity, and the final scene of their marriage ceremony is thoroughly conventional.
However, other scenes reveal the influence of an author who understands just how strange life in space can be. Some of them recall scenes in Destination Moon: the facial contortions of the space travelers during the launch, the effortless lifting of massive weights in the low lunar gravity, and the soundless fall of the saboteur down a lunar mountain. Others are more innovative: when the discovery that one crew member is an enemy imposter triggers both sudden acceleration of the spaceship and a hand-to-hand battle, the fight is carried out in eerie slow motion, as heroic Major Bill Moore (Ross Ford) and the fake Dr. Wernher (Larry Johns) struggle against the force of acceleration to gain the upper hand.
The most striking scenes in the movie, however, take place during the brief visit to the space station. As soon as they disembark, Colonel Briteis (Donna Martell), Moore, and “Wernher” walk down a corridor, to be greeted by a station resident walking in the opposite direction—upside down on the ceiling—which resembles a space scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. They next walk past a sign, “Please Do Not Walk on the Walls,” an example of Heinlein humor.28 Finally, they enter a room for a discussion with the station commanders—who are seated on the opposite wall at a ninety-degree angle to them. While there is nothing impressive about the special effects involved—crudely spliced split-screen footage—these scenes do establish how disorienting it would be to live in a zero-gravity environment, and they do so far more effectively than the later and more expensive film Conquest of Space, which included extended scenes on a large space station with little attention to the effects of zero gravity.29 Wright also singled out this portion of the film for praise, saying that the “sequences set on the zero-gravity space station are rather nice....anticipating similar scenes in 2001” (28).30
More so than many other writers of the postwar period, Heinlein recognized the importance of space stations in the coming exploration of space, and his stories during this time regularly featured space stations (although often in a very minor role).31 It is appropriate, then, that Project Moonbase is, to my knowledge, the first of many films to depict a space station. And the fact that it remains, surprisingly, one of the most imaginative of those films must be credited primarily to Heinlein’s insight.
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The second conflict is Glorification of the American military versus Criticism of the American military. In many ways, to be sure, Project Moonbase presents itself as a glowing endorsement of the work of American military forces. The written prologue that scrolls down the screen proudly describes how the United States military has established a space station “as a military guardian in the sky...to consolidate the safety of the world,” and the film displays America’s triumph over evil foreign saboteurs trying to destroy the station—implicitly arguing that the participation of other nations in the space program would only cause problems. The two space travelers of the film are military officers, under the command of a general. The one civilian added to the mission, a scientist named Wernher taken along to photograph the back side of the Moon, is included, the commander tells his astronauts, exclusively as a gimmick—playing the “science angle”—in order to get the flight approved; and, since enemy agents succeed in replacing him with an imposter who almost destroys the space station, the civilian element is clearly projected as the weak link in the program. When the spaceship crashes on the Moon, orders from the Pentagon establish the site as an American military base. Thus, while other movies at the time at least gesture toward a civilian and international presence in the space program—a character in the original screenplay of Heinlein’s other film Destination Moon announces that “the only Government to control the Moon must be a sovereign government of the whole of man” (cited in Franklin 97)—Project Moonbase appears to celebrate an entirely American, and entirely military, space program as most desirable.
However, scenes in the later part of the movie seem designed to ridicule the military mind. When the stranded space travelers finally establish contact with their commanding officer, General “Pappy” Greene (Hayden Rorke), and inform him that they have unexpectedly crash-landed on the Moon, his surprise and confusion are almost comically exaggerated; he must check with his superiors, he tells them, before he can say anything at all. When he calls them back, his first announcement is that their mission has been officially reclassified as “Project Moonbase”—so their accidental landing is now cast, after the fact, as a deliberate effort to establish a base on the Moon. Only after issuing these incongruous orders does the general tell the space travelers that, by the way, vital supplies will soon be rocketed to them. Surely, the scene is designed to function as a scathing critique of the bureaucratic mind—an overt attempt to disguise a major failure by an after-the-fact renaming which makes it seem a success—and surely any space travelers in this position would be baffled and irritated by the priority given this message. (Imagine, for example, two early aviators on a pioneering military flight across the Pacific who crash on a deserted island; after desperate efforts to make contact with their superiors, the first news they receive from home is that their mission has been reclassified as “Project Pacific Island Base.”)32
This bifurcated attitude towards the military is consistent with Heinlein’s developing philosophy. On one hand, as a former Navy officer, Heinlein had obvious respect and admiration for the military life and attitudes; on the other hand, he evidenced a growing dislike for large government bureaucracies, which he saw as stultifying and repressive.33 It is only logical, then, that Heinlein would show admiration for his astronaut protagonists while seeming to ridicule their seen and unseen superior officers.34
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The third set of tensions involves The continued subjugation of women versus The new domination of women. In this area, Project Moonbase plays a more complex game, offering three distinct levels of argument: an overt, nominal commitment to feminine superiority; a poorly concealed, residual belief in masculine superiority; and a deeper, ameliorative message affirming feminine superiority within certain restraints.
First, a summary of the plot suggests the movie presents a strongly feminist viewpoint. Project Moonbase may qualify as the first—and certainly, it is one of the few—science fiction stories that depicts a woman, Colonel Briteis, as the first human in space; the same woman then becomes the commander of the first circumlunar mission, and when her ship crashes, she becomes by default the first commander of Project Moonbase. Also, the President of the United States is ultimately revealed to be a woman. Apparently, then, this is a future society when women routinely assume dominant roles.
However, three aspects of the movie undermine this proto-feminist theme and instead suggest a more traditional stance. Carefully written dialogue in the film’s early scenes withholds the information that Colonel Briteis is a woman, so it is not until she walks into the room that viewers learn her sex. That the President is a woman is also not revealed until the final scene, when she appears on television to congratulate the newlyweds. Thus, despite these revelations, the film functionally depicts a male-dominated world, with knowledge of the sex of certain major figures deliberately concealed while on-screen men act as the decision makers.
In addition, there is clearly nothing impressive about the way the women characters are depicted in Project Moonbase. Colonel Briteis consistently acts like a spoiled child, given to emotional outbursts; she is belittled by the nickname used by her male comrades, “Bright Eyes”; a comment by Major Moore indicates that she was chosen for the first manned flight solely because she only weighed ninety pounds, not because of her superior qualifications; despite her position, she is rarely observed making command decisions; in the crucial battle with the saboteur, she is merely a