Sorry to be so late to this game -- I’m still trying to forget Texas Tech with the new season finally upon us -- but it’s been fun to see so many who shoot moons and run in the buffs.
I watched Neil’s first step live as a high schooler, I met him once, and I saw “First Man” in its first weekend of release, all before reading this discussion. And Reese is right as rain that the Moon Landing was viewed at the time as an absolutely American triumph and provided a tremendous uplift in national pride and patriotism at a time when the country was even more divided than now -- by the war, by race riots, by protests -- going far beyond emotions, with lives actually being lost in each realm. Nothing contrived about that.
Man on the moon literally rose above all. Yet, Ryan Gosling and his movie-makers admittedly chose to emphasize it as “a world event” rather than what it was -- the ultimate come-from-behind victory by the United States over the Soviet Union in the space race. The Canadian actor who wasn’t close to being born has no more right to redefine that accomplishment than for another Canadian to say the “Miracle On Ice” was just a great hockey moment. We won, and that flag-planting was fully iconic, like Iwo Jima. Omitting it was a gross error. The flag shows only in a background view during the lunar exit. That’s like spiking the ball after a sudden-death touchdown in the Super Bowl but instead showing only an empty helmet to the side.
And not only did Gosling look less like Armstrong than the man in the moon, but he played him as an emotionless zombie. Despite movie-makers’ usual tendencies to play to emotions over fact, “First Man” dropped all the national acclaim and real fanfare and made it one long joyless ride. Instead of the aircraft carrier greetings or the later ticker-tape parades by a roaring nation, they show Neil entering a desolate room alone. The End. Get real. The real Neil played with my Purdue tie. He actually smiled. He was humble but human, not way out there in La La Land.
Worst, despite receiving university permissions to show Purdue diplomas and name names, Purdue is never mentioned. Characters talk about college, meeting on campus, being engineers, doing plays … they even present two other Boilermaker astronauts and their demise, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, but the school that gave them all rise, where Neil’s lifetime papers still reside, is ignored.
So, we’ll never erect a statue to Gosling or his killjoy director, but if someone did, I’ll take it and bury it at some other places I’ve been, like Harpers Ferry, Fort Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Fort Donelson, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Fort McAllister, Savannah, Appomattox and Bennett’s Place. The North’s gonna do it again, and I don’t mean Canada.
