Good story, bad story
Not having gone to the moon is a great story. It is, sorry, an even better story than having actually gone to the moon. It has conflict, deceit, complex characters with shades of grey and uncertain allegiances. It has paranoia, deceit, and some amazing villains. Also, it feels naughty. It feels oppositional, like some kind of resistance to official narratives. It speaks to our deep unease about the world. It’s got just the right structure of feeling for the early 21st century.
But first of all, it is a cracking story.
The Moon Landing: a shit story
A documentary about how we built a rocket and went to space and everyone is ace
We want to go to the moon because we want to become what we are truly capable of and it’s a triumph of the human spirit
We build a spaceship.
Pretty much no-one dies except people no-one has heard of.
We go to the moon.
Everyone is ace.
We stop going to the moon.
The Kubrick Fake: a great story
A dystopian science fiction film and cold war genre piece about the complex intermingling of art, media and political reality, which asks questions about truth, reality, and the power of politicians and the media over reality itself. The Kubrick Fake is a dark fantasy about a complex global game of cat and mouse, played out through the character of one of our generation’s most mysterious and complex geniuses.
We want to go to the moon.
We want to beat the Russians in a worldwide game of simmering spycraft and mutual hostility
We can’t go to the moon.
We enlist the help of a magnificent Machiavellian genius known for his complex symbolism and secrecy
We film the moon landing, hidden away from view in the deepest California desert, with people who are sworn to secrecy and will take that secret to their graves.
We pretend we went to the moon. The whole world watches.
People are threatened into secrecy, and among the most famous, heroic, people of the 20th century have to live in secrecy for the rest of their lives, knowing they hold the key to a lie.
Did they make a sacrifice of truth for their country, or did they give up the truth and their integrity for a global power game?
Kubrick makes reference to this throughout his career, having become a total hermit, and it is the key to unlocking the rest of his cryptic cinematic oeuvre.
The secret is there to be discovered and is only now being revealed.
The whole of reality is fiction, a bit like the Matrix but with beards and the CIA.
Which movie would you want to see? Which story would have you spellbound by a campfire, or an iPad, in the middle of the night? I’ve got a movie-boner for the latter one. Indeed, they sort of made it, it’s called Capricorn One, and it’s brilliant. Even without Stanley Kubrick, it is much, much better than First Man, although that movie starred Ryan Gosling, whom I would watch, um, eat soup, or do his tax return, or peel potatoes, for hours, without complaint, all the time with an uncontrollable urge to eat bananas.
In this battle of the stories, Stanley Kubrick is a neck-snapping 2013 Superman to Neil Armstrong’s cuddly and comic-book coloured 1978. Or even, dare we say, Kubrick is Batman to Armstrong’s Superman? The latter’s tale is so genuinely good, so upstanding, and straightforward, that in these days of determined moral ambiguity, and tortured, conflicted adepts and heroes, it seems just, well, boring. The moon landings conspiracy theory is a new ‘darker’ take on the story, a bit like a recent DC movies take on a friendly old superhero. In fact, I suspect the Moon Landings are Marvel movies, and the Faked Moon Landings are DC. (But much better. )
The stories that stick
The stories that stick are often the stories that are most ‘compelling’, not necessarily the most factual. They may indeed speak of a ‘deeper’ truth. We only need to look at (cough) a few world religions to see that. They ‘stick’ especially when they enter a climate of wider beliefs. Conspiracy theories are a very natural, if factually misguided, response to what is actually happening in the world. That’s because people are being duped, they are being misled by much of the media, they are being exploited by politicians who are able to change the whole of reality for their evil and greed-driven gains and the military-industrial complex, or whatever it is now. Just not by someone faking a moon landing.
Mostly, the realities are far from sexy or interesting - but the stories dramatise them in such a way that they are. They find connections that aren’t there, when the stories themselves are already unbelievable. The finding of Dr David Kelly dead on Harrowdown Hill certainly did look pretty suspicious. But the story of a quiet academic, unused to a public spotlight, whose whole career was based on his professional integrity and trust by the powerful, killing himself with pills and a knife is tragic and much less exciting (we might say, prurient) than him being done in directly by mysterious forces. Not least, it may be rather less uncomfortable for the media if he was done away by ‘mysterious forces’ as opposed to hounded to death by the media and scapegoated by the powerful. Given there was a battle between the media (especially the BBC) and the politicians about who was responsible (see the Hutton Report), it’s no wonder some media sources liked to stoke the more conspiratorial and spy-movie side of the story.
Meanwhile, looking in David Kelly’s eyes, in the back of a car, flash bulbs popping in his tired face, you can easily see a broken man who has dedicated his life to disarmament and peace, who now feels his life may be over and his work undone. Perhaps the tragedy is less sexy then the mystery - but it is no less morally abhorrent.
Then there is a sexed up dossier drawn from someone’s student thesis designed to take us to war with Iraq and make lots of money for Halliburton. In fact this whole mess had some great characters, and some pretty grotesquely evil and self-serving people involved, who make great villains. (Indeed, my partner used to call Tony Blair, in the latter part of his reign when he was looking rather, ahem, tired, ‘Skeletor’.) But much of the story was essentially someone googling then cut-and-pasting a word document and hitting print for Blair, then Colin Powell. Pretty astounding, but much less spectacular than the conspiracy theory of the CIA piloting planes into the WTC to create a war in Iraq. The evil masterminds often don’t need to make such spectacular interventions - for example, in that case, you could just wait for it to happen. Extremists had already bombed the WTC once. Admittedly, you could hardly make it up. Dick Cheney’s trajectory in Vice made this quite clear: you respond to opportunities, often in a remarkably linear way (mirrored by the structure of the film).
Structures of feeling
To me, conspiracy theories are a strong expression of what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’ - a prevailing shaping factor in, and expression of, lived experience driven by the mood, conditions, ideas, and ideology of the worlds we inhabit. Homologies in stories and shapes represent the ‘structures of feeling’ of the times, we might say - and they do so in the day to day storytelling of the world, as much as in art per se.
SoF is a famously nebulous concept which sort of ‘feels right’, rather than being something you can nail down. When I was a research student, I poo-pooed it because it seemed so nebulous, and lacked the apparent philosophical rigour of other later critical theories (it was Judith Butler all the way at that stage). Once I had spent some time in the world and realised how nebulous pretty much everything is, I felt much better disposed towards it. There’s a good explanation here:
‘Structure of feeling refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history. It appears in the gap between the official discourse of policy and regulations, the popular response to official discourse and its appropriation in literary and other cultural texts. Williams uses the term feeling rather than thought to signal that what is at stake may not yet be articulated in a fully worked-out form, but has rather to be inferred by reading between the lines. If the term is vague it is because it is used to name something that can really only be regarded as a trajectory. It is this later formulation that is most widely known.’ Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory
That means that the stories we produce, and also, the stories we most like to consume, will be those which match to some of those prevailing ‘structures’ and the feelings they produce. Much as they will also shape those structures and feelings. (Note for the Gramscians out there, he does make it clear that there are multiple ‘feelings’ and ‘structures’ at any one time. Just as certain ideologies come into being, and there are counter-ideologies, or slightly different, tangential ones, or entirely resistant ones, there are often multiple structures and feelings we inhabit and create.)
Note also that certain genres of story, and types, and themes, will have particular affinities with certain structures of feeling - the processual crime TV series for example, the 19th century detective story (see DA Miller’s The Novel and the Police), the twilight-of-the-gods superhero comics of the 90s (eg. The Dark Knight Returns), all of these speak to certain structures of feeling of their times, and may speak precisely against other prevailing structures of feeling of the time. For example, compare the latter with the rah-rah-rah heroism and jingoism of Reagan era media, or yuppie or corporate culture.
Anyway, not only does the faked moon landing story have a genre and narrative structure which has a narrative complexity we associate with the more complex storytelling of the late 20th and early 21st century. (An obsession with moral ambiguity, ‘darkness’ and secrecy, an almost Hollywood structuring of three acts, reversal, characters in conflict, and the rest). It also speaks of a structured and structuring ‘feeling.’ It’s the feeling, perhaps, that the media, business, and politicians, are screwing us blind. This story is about subversion of democracy, the powerlessness of the populace in the face of their unaccountable masters, the flexible and malleable nature of reality in an age of total mediation, and paranoia - in a world where, make no mistake, they really are out to get you.
The Aesthetics of the Moon Landing: Is that it?
It’s well rehearsed by now that the moon landings don’t appear possible because of the vast technological advances we’ve made since. This is almost the opposite of Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic: that shiny, tinfoil, scaffolded box landing on a distant planet is just, well, ridiculous. It turns out that any sufficiently unadvanced technology looks like…. a lie.
Meanwhile, the images are so iconic and overcirculated that they take on a quality of the unreal. What becomes mythic and legendary becomes somehow de-realised. The images have been seen so many times they have become somehow estranged to us, like saying a word over and over until it no longer seems right. (Try saying moon landing over and over again for a minute.) Or similarly, that strange feeling one gets when watching Marilyn Monroe on screen: it’s a real person, but somehow, it feels uncanny, unconvincing that this was a flesh and blood person, when she has become her image, her mythology, a legend.
But most of all, I think the problem is this: the moon is a rather simple, bland, uninspiring place that could be quite easily mocked up in a studio. Something that momentous shouldn’t look like a sandpit with blackout curtains behind it and an admittedly beautifully made globe dangling. It’s as if we arrived on the moon and said, ‘Is that it?’ Because there was not even so much as a pre-existing alien race, Nazi stragglers, or an overpriced gift shop.
We are used to momentous stories being spectacular, especially when they are represented to us on film. For all that it may have seemed spectacular at the time - and I must say that I am gobsmacked by the beauty of films like For All Mankind - film of the moon landings could seem, for all their momentousness, remarkably workaday given the constant inflation of our visual expectations. In the same way we laugh now at the uploading of a virus via a USB stick to the alien ship in Independence Day, or the flashing buttons of the original Star Trek - as if that could possibly be considered high technology! - we laugh at the tin-pot tech of the space race. But that judgment doesn’t work in this case. It turns out crappy out of date special effects can actually get you to the moon and back.
As special effects and cinematography have advanced, we expect the technological to look even more impressive when it achieves the wondrous. When a space ship takes off it does a triple pirouette, the sky explodes, and an alien creature grasps at the horizon. It’s designed to the nth degree. We expect holographic interfaces on our spaceships. We expect fully designed Cameronian 3D worlds of our planets and planetoids.
The moon, meanwhile, looks like a bit like the cat’s litter tray, or even the gravel pit in Surrey that was used for every Doctor Who alien planet for 25 years. The visual momentousness of what is claimed to Man’s greatest achievement doesn’t quite live up to the moment itself. Indeed, like Neil Armstrong’s stumbling over his words (give the guy a break - he was stepping onto the surface of another planet and probably wondering, not only if he would get back alive, but also, whether the ground would swallow him up…..), the whole thing seems much less amazing than we would have expected. Indeed, it was much less mind-blowing than Kubrick’s 2001 a year before. (Perhaps Stanley was up to something after all: ‘Follow that, NASA.’)
The Aesthetics of the Moon: The Documentary Real
That is one aesthetic problem, but there is another, and in a strange way, it’s almost the opposite. I think it can be both, and indeed, could depend on your audience. When you’re looking at potential discourses of realism, alongside the sense of sheer impact of spectacle, there is also a tradition, over the last 50 years, that documentary realism is accompanied by a gritty, grainy, imperfect aesthetic. Indeed, the moon landings helped to create that.
There was a cinematic/ visual move towards towards hand-held cameras and low quality visuals in social realist and documentary reportage film-making. The use of super-8 and similar non-professional cinematic tools to signify a deeper connection to everyday reality, and to a sense of the emotional, or experienced ‘real’. And then there is the referential adoption in modern-day deliberate degradations of visual media - eg. the found footage genre, and the cultural-memory and degraded aesthetics of hauntological texts). At this stage, to give something a sense of reality, it needs to be degraded, inexpertly filmed, accidental, in the sense that it holds some of the textual ‘excesses’ that produce what Barthes called a ‘reality effect’ in the artefacts of its production, like quivering VHS lines, snowy screens, or badly framed shots.
Consider this famously shaky film of Bigfoot. I always consider this one of my favourite films, because I imagine Sasquatch is just on his way back from Tesco with his shopping and wondering why that naked monkey is filming him. Anyway, the shakiness and low quality of the film is part of its allure and its slightly uncanny sense of reality. Now consider this stabilised version. Obviously, make your own judgments, but to me, the sense of reality disappears considerably. I’m not sure the Sasquatch looks any less convincing in itself, I think it’s that the reality effect melts away once the artefacts of production disappear. (Confession: nonetheless, I’m a bit of a Bigfoot fan and would like to believe this one; sorry.)
If I told you I had seen and taken an image of Bigfoot like this, you would probably laugh me out of court. It would be the very image, with the clarity that everyone has asked for, to prove Bigfoot’s reality, wouldn’t it? (Or let’s imagine it’s one of someone standing next to such a perfectly rendered creature in the forest.) And yet, would you believe it? We’re often up against competing discourses of the real when it comes to aesthetics.
Looking back at footage of the original moon landing as it was broadcast on TV, I think there was a sense at the time that this was the image of the momentous, and the aesthetic of absolute authenticity - which, alongside on-site reportage from war zones and so on (especially in and after Vietnam), has become standard. This aesthetic has only continued to be a guarantor of authenticity over time. The moon landing broadcast is pretty much the ground-zero of the documentary (and hence, pseudo-documentary) authenticity effect. The original grey and white, low-contrast, flickering image, rock-bottom grade video transmitted over a quarter of a million miles, is the definitive low-fi capture of an uncanny moment.
It’s worth noting that the framing, with exposed space in the right side, and a staircase entering from the left, comes with a cinematic aesthetic of its own - gothic staircases, flitting half-obscured faceless figures, and a mise-en-scene that suggests a hidden viewer - with space for a killer to enter from behind….
Indeed, someone made a found footage movie in 2011 which pretty much relies on this. (It’s called Apollo 18, and it’s nowhere near as good as Capricorn One, sadly.)
Since then, we have seen better and better versions of media from the moon and the landings. Indeed, there is now a spectacular 4k remaster of the whole thing. Unf. So, since the original broadcast, the film has become colour, the images less shaky, and while never reaching the heights of a full Christopher Nolan 4k remaster of 2001 A Space Odyssey, it certainly has less of the sense of the photo-journalistic reality effect than the earliest footage. The photographs, meanwhile, are spellbindingly perfect, their clarity incredible. Certainly we don’t have such a luxury for Bigfoot.
There are definitely two opposing ideas and aesthetics of the real and the unreal, and the authentic and inauthentic here. If we’re feeling distrustful, we can easily say ‘it looks too good to be true’ - the photographs and better parts of the colour film. Or indeed, we can say ‘it looks so fuzzy/ underwhelming, it could be anything’ - the fuzzy live video, or the accidental glares and wavering flags. Or indeed, we could be so used to seeing the pseudo-documentary aesthetic, that this has lost some of its reality effect.
The intertextual world around us gives us cues as to what we should expect aesthetically, but our ideology - and perhaps, our structure of feeling, will affect how we feel about this. If we can’t trust the media, or reality, or ‘them’, then we can read the reality and aesthetics of stories, the texts that produce and reflect them, according to our own responses - and structures of feeling - around 21st century mediatised truth. We’re always balancing out these discourses of authenticity and realism in our responses to texts and images. But we will tend to read them according to what we feel.
Can we really be over the moon?
So finally, much as a great deal of this comes from a sense of distrust of those in power, I think there is something else. I would hardly be the first person to note that, for some of us, there is a sense of collective cultural disappointment which we can’t quite countenance. I think we can’t believe that, having achieved such a thing, we we would never go back, and that we would not go further.
Space travel, the space age, and idea of ever-increasing frontiers, especially for Americans, was at one point pushed so hard, was made so central to a sense of identity, technology, of achievement. It was, after all, the Final Frontier. So, no wonder that there is a collective sense of disbelief that we could have abandoned what was once considered progress. I think people don’t want to believe that the future happened - but we left it behind.
In my darker moments, I think that too is something of a structure of feeling - based as much on our collective experience, fully articulated or otherwise, of the political, social, and economic climate we now inhabit.
Moon Movies
The absolute tits of moon movies. Try not to gasp.
2001: A Space Odyssey: Suck it, Armstrong.
Ron Howard could make a motorway pile-up you were actually involved in boring. It is a special gift. But this one is less painful than his other ones. But they never get to the moon. Shit, spoiler - sorry.
Massive Nuclear Explosion… Moon torn out of orbit…. Say no more. Worth it for Barbara Bain’s hair alone.
Moon is one of those sci-fi movies that ticks all the spectacle boxes (not least with eye-candy Sam Rockwell), manages to be real science fiction, exciting and moving all at the same time. Duncan Jones’ next film, Source Code, does the same.
Iron Sky is a terrible, terrible film - not even camp, just terrible. But hey, you can’t fault it for a compelling popcorn movie concept. Meanwhile, note here the pseudo-documentary reportage start.
Ryan Gosling is in this film. That is all.
Oh and also, great sixties outfits. Shallow, moi?
My obsession with the real, the authentic, and the fantastical, means I will always have a special place in my heart for such avowedly, marvellously, theatrical and sound-stage-bound productions like this. Plus DYNAMATION! How much cooler is this spaceship, and how much fun do marauding man-size insects look? Give me this film now. This also sticks with the long tradition of HG Wells movies making much better films than they are books.
The men have their pants on. And not a single one of them is Ryan Gosling. Pointless.
Actually, I suppose this is the absolute tits of moon movies.