Take 65: The Right Stuff
I was excited to see The Right Stuff on this list, even though I had never heard of it. It had been awhile since I had a chance to watch and write about a movie made at least within a decade of my birth, so seeing the 1983 release date was a bit of a relief. But when I saw that I had never heard of the director, Phillip Kaufman, I was a bit concerned. When I saw that the run time was 3.25 hours, my stomach plummeted. When I saw that Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, and Jeff Goldblum were all part of the star studded cast, I was elevated again. Finally, when I saw that film was streaming on HBO Max I bit the bullet and tucked in for the long haul.
I’m providing this preamble in part to illustrate the experience of watching this movie. The film is based on a “nonfiction novel” by Tom Wolfe (quotes because, isn’t a nonfiction novel inherently contradictory?). About an hour in, I was so enthralled by the film I went ahead and bought the 15 hour audio book. By the end, I was fairly convinced it could have been an hour shorter. The story is a detailed examination of the space race in America and the men who dazzled the populace as the intrepid explorers of the last great frontier.
Fittingly, the film starts in an arid desert landscape in 1947 where the Air Force was attempting to create a craft that could reach the speed of “mach one” which would mean a human being would break the sound barrier and live to tell about it. We learn about the secretive trial flights and test pilots who braved the risks in order to achieve something that was previously unattainable. We meet our first hero at the funeral of a fallen pilot. He rides on horseback across the base, and is solicited to attempt to fly the fastest plane ever built after the first choice for the engineers refuses unless they paid him some exuberant sum. Chuck Yeager agrees to fly the plane with no additional pay — and later we learn it’s because he wants to become and remain the fastest man alive. His playful relationship with his wife is highlighted and when he is thrown from his horse on their race home, I expected her to chastise him and talk him out of the flight. But she knows it’s who he is and helps him mask the broken ribs as he climbs onboard.
It’s difficult to give a succinct summary of the film and I can feel myself tempted to give a “then this happened…” style play by play. I’ll curb this instinct now and summarize by saying the film gives a delightfully detailed portrait of early American space pioneers and their families. Unlike most movies about astronauts, the film focuses less on the trials experienced while in space — and more on the character of the men themselves and their journey to flight. Yeager is one example of a hardened thrill seeker who is representative of a cowboy persona. He is not allowed to pursue the space program because he did not go to college, in spite of routinely breaking any record in order to maintain his status as the fastest alive. He is a legend on the base, and when Dennis Quaid as Gordo Cooper rolls into town he sees the space fleet as his chance at glory.
There is also Ed Harris at John Glenn. The gleaming smiling star who describes himself as a “Dudley Do-Right” and who in modern parlance would most likely be labelled as a “try hard”. He has an indestructible moral compass and he holds others to his own ideals. This confrontation about how the seven men should behave in their private lives is one of the most interesting and telling in the film. These are pilots, military men used to a culture out of secrecy and confidentiality. And yet, here they are, thrust into the spotlight and instantly vaunted as role models for all children.
This is enough for Glenn to presume they would all maintain the straight and narrow as he does, and yet, it’s not. I’m not passing judgement, I agree that each of these individuals should be free to make their own choices and live with their own consequences. That said, Gus and Gordo summarize why they need to make themselves untouchable in public opinion — in order for the men to go to space they need to remain idols in the eyes of the country, that is their leverage, and if they tarnish their image the men who make decisions about funding and government spending will no longer be motivated to pursue an expensive pursuit with little guaranteed benefit.
This image of astronauts as perfect, moral, and upstanding is pervasive to this day — especially as their lives are continually lost in pursuit of science. We have held on to this belief so strongly that when reports surfaced in 2007 of an astronaut, Lisa Nowak, drove hundreds of miles in adult diaper to confront the other woman involved in a love triangle it was a salacious national news story as if astronauts were inherently above mental breaks.
And while we can all stare in wonder at the night sky above, and while star astronauts like Glenn, or Armstrong, or Christa McAuliffe are rightfully studied and memorialized, there is an underbelly to the story that is rarely examined. For instance, the countless unnamed test pilots who were killed and hushed up, or the fact that we count our win in the space race as a squarely American victory — despite many of the scientific contributions having originated from German scientists somehow displaced during WWII (it was unclear to me, were they Nazi POWs? Were they refugees? More research is needed). Kaufman also highlights just how motivated the US government was by the Russians and the fear of a weaponized space force, this is logical, but does dampen some of the mystique of scientific splendor surrounding the journey and embodied by the men who took up the call.
There is much I can praise Kaufman for narratively and stylistically. Narratively, Kaufman does something that I imagine was rare in the early 80s and remains relatively rare today — which is giving the wives of the stars a focus point in the story. The women are not often given their own motivations or points of interest inherently separate from themselves, but I appreciate the effort Kaufman made to include their full range of emotions in the story. A few of them are particularly well rounded and fully fledged, which shows how by not excluding half of the population, a greater depth of narrative complexity can be achieved.
One of my favorite moments is when a group of wives are discussing an ultimatum one of them had laid out for her husband, that he either quits test piloting or he’ll lose his family, and Kaufman jumps over the standard camera line, giving the viewer a sensation that the orientation of the room had flipped. This mirrors other aesthetic choices we experience from the point of view of the pilots in flight, an inescapable shaking or narrowed vision that works well to evoke the physical disorientation of a human body pushed to unnatural physical and emotional extremes.
What makes the film special is Kaufman’s fearless portrayal of the heroes and the motivations of government for pursuing space exploration in the first place. He, and presumably Tom Wolfe, had a unique ability to present a de-romanticized story of American heroism without losing the majestic awe that many generations experienced watching the space race unfold.
Neil Armstrong is not mentioned in this film which is telling, even as the first ever moonwalk is arguably our most beloved national cultural touchstone, and the most universal pride our country has experienced as the result of a scientific achievement. I wasn’t alive when the moment occurred but the fact that television period pieces I love cannot make it through a season set in 1969 without referencing the impact of that moment (see: Mad Men, The Crown) has helped me understand just how resounding this moment was in a way that those of us who grew up in a time when we expect people to walk on the moon can never fully grasp.
What Kaufman shows us is the long, winding, road that led to that moment. That is why the first act was the best part of the film in my mind. All those test pilots who died namelessly, their black and white images lining the walls of the local saloon, have no extrinsic motivation other than they want to be the first, or the fastest, or to push the limits of their own cerebral existence. They would most likely die, and even if they lived, like Yaeger, there was no glory or immortal legends status to be obtained. These untold stories and unremembered names find a place in The Right Stuff.
