A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
to make her, and not Major Moore, the commander of the first lunar flight is revealed by the final scene to be little more than a woman’s favoritism toward a member of her own sex. Another woman character, a journalist friend of the President named Polly Prattles (Barbara Morrison) who interviews the General, provides comic relief in one scene by displaying her almost complete ignorance of space travel. As for the President herself, she is pictured as a sweet, grandmotherly sort of woman, with no particular aura of authority about her.
Most notably, the conclusion of Project Moonbase seems to overthrow previous pictures of feminine superiority, as Colonel Briteis’s new husband, Major Moore, is immediately promoted to General so that he, not she, can become the commander of Project Moonbase. It is this scene that inspires an arch comment by Franklin about the limited extent of Heinlein’s feminism: “Heinlein has no problem projecting a female pilot or even President, but when a woman relates to a man she has to know who is the boss” (98).
Despite these features of the film, however, it can still be seen as a curious affirmation of female dominance. After all, the General in charge of the space program is under the direct command of the President; she allows him to maintain apparent control over its affairs, while intervening only occasionally with direct orders, like the one which made Colonel Briteis the commander of the first lunar mission. And, it must be noted, Major Moore is promoted to be the commander of Project Moonbase only because Colonel Briteis specifically requests that promotion.
A complex and ameliorative recommendation thus emerges: women should have ultimate control over situations, both in title and in fact; but they should also stay in the background and allow men to have apparent control. In a way, then, the movie appears to affirm old clichés about “the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world,” and “behind every successful man, there is a woman”; the difference is that Heinlein grants women both official and covert power, while enjoining them from overly obvious exercise of that power. It is, then, a solution to the problem of male-versus-female dominance that grants women genuine and supreme authority, while preserving the male ego by granting men the appearance of superiority.
In keeping with the spirit of the film, then, one can anticipate that the marriage of Briteis and Moore, despite Franklin’s remark, will not produce a traditional husband-controlled family; rather, Briteis will continue to make all the decisions, even as she allows Moore to believe that he is making the decisions. And this stance arguably represents one aspect of Heinlein’s later expressed attitudes towards women, inasmuch as two later novels, I Will Fear No Evil (1970) and To Sail beyond the Sunset (1987), both feature assertive female protagonists, totally in control of their own lives, who are nevertheless willing to act subservient in the presence of men.
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The fourth and final conflict is The endorsement of traditional values versus A challenge to traditional values. The President’s final suggestion—virtually a command—that Major Moore marry Colonel Briteis seems to be not only a reaffirmation of male dominance but also a commitment to conventional morality: while an unmarried man and woman on a brief space mission might be tolerable, having such a pair serving indefinitely as sole residents of a lunar base would be an overt invitation to adultery, and therefore unacceptable in the American society of 1953. Their arranged marriage eliminates the possibility of illicit sex, and since Moore and Briteis are revealed to be secretly in love with each other, it is also an appropriate decision in a society that insists that marriage should be a matter of personal choice, not the result of someone’s directives.
Despite its apparent acceptability, however, there are provocative undercurrents in this denouément. In their earlier encounters, Moore and Briteis are constantly squabbling, in a manner that suggests an ongoing competition for the affections of their superior officer, the General. They act, then, not as would-be lovers, but as an older brother engaged in sibling rivalry with a younger sister. Such a characterization of their relationship is strongly reinforced by the fact that both Moore and Briteis regularly address the General as “Pappy,” labeling him as their father, not simply their commanding officer; and the General assumes an especially parental role in the final scenes of the film, when he has separate conversations with Moore and Briteis and gives them each his personal advice as their “Pappy.”
On a symbolic level, then, Project Moonbase is the story of an older brother and younger sister who are secretly in love with each other; and with the approval—indeed, at the urging—of their father, they finally get married and thus establish a sexual relationship. What the movie affirms, then, is not the importance of traditional marriage, but the appropriateness of incest. In particular, the film argues for a sexual relationship between an older man and a younger female relative, a theme that is also apparent in later Heinlein works. Thinly disguised incest of this sort figures in The Door into Summer (1957), where Daniel Boone Davis arranges through suspended animation to marry his twelve-year-old “niece,” Ricky; the story “—All You Zombies—’” (1959), wherein a time traveller sleeps with an earlier, female version of himself; and Time Enough for Love (1973), where Lazarus Long has sex with his young female clones. And in Heinlein’s final novel, To Sail beyond the Sunset, such incestuous love is explicitly endorsed when Maureen Smith’s husband sleeps with his daughter, with her mother’s knowledge and approval.
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It is therefore fitting that the mission of the space travelers in Project Moonbase is to photograph the dark side of the Moon, and that they ultimately crash on the dark side of the Moon, so they must walk some distance to set up a transmitter that can reach the Earth. For, by the conventional standards of its day, the film does indeed have a dark side. Apparently a straightforward affirmation of the routine of space exploration, the American military, male superiority, and conventional morality, Project Moonbase covertly argues for the strangeness of life in space, the absurdity of American military thinking, concealed female control of the government, and socially approved incest. We may never know exactly why Ring around the Moon was rejected as a television series, but it may well be that television executives could dimly perceive in the pilot that there was something disturbing about Heinlein’s vision, something that would not be appropriate in a medium whose involvement with science fiction at the time was otherwise a matter of routine juvenile fare like Captain Video (1949-1955), Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (1950-1955), and Space Patrol (1950-1955).
In sum, instead of dismissing Project Moonbase as a standard Hollywood product that suppressed all signs of Heinlein’s influence, critics should instead embrace the film as an integral part of the Heinlein canon, a film which despite its many flaws significantly prefigures attitudes about bureaucracy, women, and sex that are made explicit in later Heinlein novels. Perhaps, for those who wish to view films solely for their aesthetic appreciation, Project Moonbase will always be a film that must be endured rather than enjoyed; certainly, that is the typical response of my students who are obliged to watch it. Yet there are clearly other reasons why the film should be interesting, especially for Heinlein scholars. Worthwhile projects would include a search through the Heinlein archives for scripts that would reveal exactly how much Jack Seaman contributed to the final film, and for evidence of any further work on story or script development Heinlein might have done for the television series that was supposed to grow out of Project Moonbase. Also, although the initially released film was sixty-three-minutes long, all versions now available were cut to fifty-one minutes. Perhaps, if some enterprising scholar can track down and examine those missing twelve minutes, there will be more surprises in store for Heinlein critics.
20. John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 77. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
21. John Brosnan, “Project Moonbase,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 964.
22. John Stanley, “Project Moonbase,” Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide, Third Revised Edition (Pacifica, California: Creatures at Large Press, 1988), 271. Later page references in the text