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The Right Stuff
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The
practice of re-releasing films is a common one in Europe, but a much rarer one
elswhere. However, in 1995 the success of the space epic Apollo 13 led to the re-issue of
Philip Kaufman’s 1980s phenomenon The
Right Stuff in several countries. Cinephiles don’t always speak fondly of
the ‘80s, especially in relation to American cinema. This national cinema
seemed to polarise in that period: into either bloated, special-effects
extravaganzas in the wake of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), or modest offerings hidden away in video-shop genres like
horror, thriller and teen movies (all the truly right stuff I regularly defend
and champion).
But
there has been at least one thread in that more mainstream line of movies
where, it seems to me, talented filmmakers still experiment with intriguing,
adventurous forms: those long, sprawling, two-and-a-half to three-hour movies
made by Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee that don’t have a classical, stable
structure, but something more akin to a jazz construction. They follow the
groove of odd, disconcerting rhythms; they have large chunks of plot or
description that seem to suddenly break off, leading to something else that
grows. There are surprising leaps in time, great narrative ruptures, and key
plot events left out of the final montage. And, above all, there’s a daring
play with the contrast and juxtaposition of moods, with a work constantly
lurching from broad comedy to melancholic epiphany.
Philip
Kaufman has long been a bold, jazzy director in this tradition, and The Right Stuff offers his most way-out
and inspired concatenation of riffs. I rate it among the great American films
of the ‘80s.
It’s
also a movie that looks strikingly different 12 years after first viewing it.
The passing of time has put Kaufman’s work into telling relief. I suspect it
has a better chance with audiences in the ‘90s than it did in the ‘80s. Its
bizarre sense of humour has since become a cultural flavour. And its ambiguous
mood – somewhere between sophisticated satire and dumb-joke celebration –
strikes a more resonant chord, feeling more familiar.
It’s amusing to remember
now that The Right Stuff’s initial
release coincided, for some culture buffs (me included), with the
In fact, looking back,
I’d say that The Right Stuff is
categorically the Forrest Gump (1994)
of the ‘80s – and I feel certain that it strongly influenced both the novel and film of Forrest
Gump (after
all, didn't the Gump of Winston Groom’s book get shoved into a space capsule?).
But here I am talking about the Zeitgeist, not cinematic quality – because
Kaufman trumps Robert Zemeckis, in this particular comparison, hands down. (Zemeckis’ own best work came elsewhere.)
The Right Stuff condenses the early
history of America’s space program – from the moment that Chuck Yeager broke
the sound barrier in 1947 to the various solo missions by astronauts undertaken
in the early 1960s. The story is structured as a mosaic of characters,
fragments and vignettes. We see teams of proud, professional pilots confront,
time and again, a sea of “suits”: politicians, engineers, bureaucrats. We see
the generally disintegrating marital and family lives of the astronauts. We see
the entire circus of media coverage of the space flights. And we see the
top-level machinations of White House officials as they look at smuggled
footage of Russian technological achievements, and then plot the next frantic
counter-move in the space race.
Let
us pause for a moment on this now almost comical term: Space Race. Is there any
greater symbol of human or social folly than the time, hopes, dollars, massive
technological labour and expertise poured into this particular endeavour –
followed by the embarrassed silence and void that now accompanies the historic
memory of this weird and, ultimately, wildly irrational quest? What did we ever
actually hope to do, out there in space? Colonise Mars? Chat with aliens? The
fervent space-travel plans of yesteryear now appear as so much sci-fi-fed
nonsense. In Apollo 13 – to give a
feeling of the very different 1990s mood – almost all these dreams have
evaporated: the only glory is in makng it safely back home, where we can
snuggle down with our very own ecological, economic and social catastrophes.
End of parenthesis.
The Right Stuff is, in many
respects, a paradoxical project for Kaufman – and it’s this quality of paradox
that helps generate its unusual, unique power. Kaufman is an American
left-liberal, and openly so. He made a film about the incursion of whites into
Inuit culture, The White Dawn (1974),
and his work is full of gestures of solidarity with feminist women, Native
Americans, African-Americans. This side of Kaufman’s sensibility has a field
day in a particular sequence of The Right
Stuff set in Australia, where a wise band of Aborigines (including David
Gulpilil) dance and chant to help the voyage of a space capsule. It’s a
shocking bit of myth-making that’s not too far from the crimes against
indigenous culture committed by Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders on their
filmmaking jaunts Down Under; but at least Kaufman has the eager courage of his
flamboyant, New Age convictions.
But
how does the politically sensitive Kaufman deal with material that is, for the
most part, brazenly macho, patriotic, militaristic and – when it comes to
depicting Germans and Russians – pretty racist? William Goldman’s original
screenplay, which Kaufman rejected, had an explicitly patriotic intent: to
boost the morale of the American people during the Iran hostage crisis
(1979-1981). Intriguingly, what Kaufman immediately put back in (that Goldman
had left out of his adaptation of Wolfe) was the story of Chuck Yeager,
embodied so memorably by celebrated playwright Sam Shepard in his finest screen
role. Perhaps Goldman considered that too off-centre for a proper Hollywood
narrative line; Kaufman makes it the heart and soul of his movie.
Yeager
gave Kaufman a particular angle on the material: for him, it was all about a
lost America, an America with this man as its vanishing point. Kaufman is
willing to drop or modulate his personal politics to this extent: in order to
honour the rugged, noble, pioneer spirit that animated America when it could
still consider itself the New World. And he’s willing to honour lost ideals of
manhood, camaraderie and patriotism, when they belong to a nation and a people
keen to “invent themselves”, as he put it. And he’s more than willing to honour
the lost American cinema of John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra.
There
are some who have seen the film as a simple apologia for the Ronald Reagan era
(1981-1989) and the sharply conservative turn of American politics during that decade.
Andrew Britton (1952-1994), a British critic I greatly admire, slammed it as a
blunt, reactionary celebration of technology and phallic power, in the vein (he
argues) of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises – that
discussion appears in the posthumous anthology Britton on Film, as part of the famous 1986 essay “Blissing Out”, a
masterpiece of cinema commentary. But I cannot agree with Britton’s analysis in
this case. The Right Stuff is not a
politically progressive film, but it’s not therefore immediately abominable.
Before
we start chopping down every phallus in sight (or mind), we should try to see
what it is exactly that Kaufman finds to be worth honouring in these macho men
of the modern American frontier. And, in fact, they’re a disarming bunch of
dudes, brought to life by a terrific ensemble including Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid
and Ed Harris. They’re maddening, irresponsibly boyish, occasionally
frightfully sexist. But Kaufman imbues them with a rare charm and splendour.
And he gives us a special bonus that offsets all the macho stuff: a very tender
and moving depiction of the fragile relationships between the men and their
partners, a tenderness that occurs even given all the disconnection and
frustration that plays out between these stoic space men and feisty women. (A
splendidly physical scene introducing Barbara Hershey as Yeager’s wife Glennis
is especially indelible in its King Vidor-style high-romanticism.)
The Right Stuff is also a comedy.
Film industry pundits wonder why it didn’t do better commercially in 1983; its
very odd sense of humour must certainly be among the pertinent factors. One of
the most distinctive things about Kaufman as a director is that he likes to
create a form of screen comedy that is, in fact, very close to a certain kind
of cartoon. Not cartoon-action like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), but cartoon narrative (as Brian Henderson
has outlined it) that stretches back to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, Preston
Sturges and Frank Tashlin, and looks forward especially to The Simpsons – not to mention the entire œuvre of the Coen
brothers. For its middle hour, The Right
Stuff is, in fact, something very close to The Simpsons in Space Training (and a prominent voice-artist from
that show, Harry Shearer, gets a plum, goofy role here). Indeed, most members
of the cast were probably chosen on the basis of their (greater or lesser)
cartoonish cragginess and angularity, as if their features had been drawn onto
the celluloid and animated.
Cartoon
narrative per se is built essentially
on exaggerated plot repetitions and symmetries, like in Robert Clampett’s
Warner Bros. animations. Everything in The
Right Stuff goes around and around in a frenzied whirl of repetition. We
see a Russian space craft launch, then we see the long, lanky legs of that
freaky fellow Jeff Goldblum pounding down a corridor, then we see him bursting
through a door to announce the bad news: this happens three times in the film,
each time shorter and more economically than the previous time – and it’s that
very telescoping of the action which creates the gag.
More
generally, it’s a film built obsessively on little verbal mottos and aphorisms:
“Screw the pooch”, “You’re looking at him”, “Spam in a can”, “Fuckin A, bubba”.
In one hilarious scene, the astronauts spend some minutes patiently explaining
exactly what Gus Grissom (Ward) meant when he mumbled a single, incoherent phrase
about monkeys.
The Right Stuff marked the summit of
Kaufman’s career as a director. Before it, his off-beat work such as The Wanderers (1979) and the first
remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) rarely received the attention they
deserved. And after it came misjudged, disappointing, even tedious projects
such as Henry and June (1990) and Rising Sun (1993) – although even the
former has some delicious touches of cartoon narrative, and the latter chugs
along entertainingly enough. But The Right
Stuff is Kaufman’s most perfectly achieved film, and also his most
eloquent, since it creates a precarious but superb equilibrium between
patriotic belief and ironic disbelief, between vulgarity and sublimity, between
experimental filmmaking and the Lucas-Spielberg blockbuster.
Postmodernism
at the movies was rarely this dynamic in the 12 years between the release and
re-release of The Right Stuff. But,
come to think of it, perhaps Kaufman wasn’t as cripplingly self-conscious about
these cultural questions as many filmmakers and arts critics are today.
Another matter: The
Right Stuff is not afraid of mythic references and grand, poetic symbolism.
Kaufman is a little like Francis Ford Coppola in this regard. The big finale
here is mounted like a comparable passage of Apocalypse Now (1979/2001).
Coppola cuts back and forth, with much slow motion and pounding of drums,
between an animal being slaughtered and the death of Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kaufman also gives us
an elongated, heightened, twin-set spectacle. The pilots in the space program
are introduced by Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) to their new headquarters in
Houston; at the highpoint of the evening, a woman appears on stage and does a
grandiloquent dance with huge feathery wings crossing and recrossing her body.
The pilots smile at it, at first, as a bit of high-art ostentation; but they
eventually start gazing at each other rather homoerotically, as if they have
cottoned onto some sublime truth about themselves and their grandiloquent,
only-angels-have-wings profession.
Meanwhile,
we keep cutting back to Yeagar: he’s taking a new plane out on his lonesome to
break the kind of speed record that, as his mate tells him, no one cares about
anymore. He chews his gum, goes higher and faster, reaches that envelope in the
sky and sees the stars in the night before him. Then he falls, ejects himself
into the air with his parachute, while his plane crashes and burns. Back on the
ground, he strides away from the wreckage, proud and stupid, grand and
solitary, as he has always been.
It’s
an amazing sequence about men defying the heavens, daring to steal the fire of
the sun – or, as is stated the very start, about facing the demons that dwell
in the clouds. Go Myth!
© Adrian Martin September 1995 |
