Author: Peter M. Juul

Review: How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders by Suetonius (Selected, Translated, and Introduced by Josiah Osgood)

“For what can anyone expect from someone he has trained in wickedness? A villainous heart does not show obedience for long, and the scale of its crimes does not depend on the orders it is given.”

• Seneca, On Mercy, 1.26.1

“Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”

• Albert Camus, The Plague

From the very first paragraph, it’s impossible to ignore the eerie and disconcerting parallels between some of ancient Rome’s most notorious emperors and President Donald Trump that can be found in How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders. Drawn from the ancient historian Suetonius’s masterwork Lives of the Caesars and translated by Georgetown classics scholar Josiah Osgood, this latest in a series of fresh translations of ancient Greek and Roman works on politics and philosophy never explicitly draws out similarities between these ancient tyrants and their modern doppelgänger. But this uncanny symmetry remains clear, making a persuasive – and petrifying – case that while the times may change, awful political leadership remains timeless.

It’s a hard lesson, and one humanity seems forced to endure time and again. We learn with difficulty that an amalgam of incompetence, malevolence, and egotism in our political leaders sends our societies careening toward catastrophe. Yet time marches on, and these lessons fade from our collective memory. As a result, societies repeatedly find themselves at the mercy of charlatans and misanthropes who cannot even begin to contemplate the public good or consider anything beyond their own egos. Osgood’s selections from Suetonius therefore perform a salutary task, reminding us that dreadful political leadership both remains inescapable and invariably proves disastrous. 

These ancient reminders start with Julius Caesar, the otherwise impressive military commander  who proved too arrogant for his own good. According to Suetonius, Caesar held himself high above those who considered themselves his equal – or at least felt they weren’t as far down Rome’s political and social pecking order as Caesar apparently did. This hubris would prove Caesar’s nemesis, blinding him to those conspiring to assassinate him. Ultimately, Suetonius tells us, Caesar “allowed honors to be awarded to him that were too great for any human being… Indeed, there were no honors he did not receive, or bestow, as he liked.”

Caesar’s pride and vanity may have led to his own murder, but his faults would come to pale in comparison with those of his successors. Midway through his more than two-decade reign as Rome’s second full-fledged emperor, Tiberius retreated from the capitol and relocated more or less permanently to the resort island of Capri. Ensconced there, Suetonius recounts, Tiberius “gave up his concern for public affairs.” He failed to appoint replacements for a wide variety of public positions, up to and including provincial governors for vital imperial territories like Spain and Syria. Enemies nibbled away at Rome’s frontiers, leading Suetonius to charge the “dishonor to the empire was as great as the danger.”

Though modern historians discount the tales told by Suetonius of Tiberius’s sexual debauchery – “Roman history is full of salacious rumors, and we should be skeptical,” the historian Barry Strauss cautioned in his own recent group biography Ten Caesars – his brutality toward his imagined enemies remains largely uncontested. Tiberius earned this reputation with his proclivity for treason trials against those among the Roman elite who criticized him, as well as repression of average Romans over quotidian offenses like changing one’s clothes near a statue of the Augustus. As Suetonius remarks, “To go through all his acts of cruelty one by one would be tedious… Every crime was considered a capital one, even if it consisted of a few innocent words.”

Nor did Tiberius leave behind much of a legacy in stone or marble. “He spent little and was tightfisted,” Suetonius says. “As emperor, he did not build any structures of splendor.” Tiberius did not shower the Roman military or the Roman people with much generosity, even in times of hardship. Suetonius also alleges that Rome’s provinces failed to receive much financial support from their emperor, though he does make an exception for recovery efforts that followed an earthquake in the eastern part of the empire.

But the torpor of Tiberius couldn’t compete with the paranoid and cruel megalomania of his immediate successor, Caligula. This emperor’s behavior as emperor certainly accords with what Suetonius says he told his grandmother: “I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.” Caligula executed family members, relatives, and friends on a whim, “suddenly and unexpectedly” killing his adoptive brother when he confused the brother’s cough medicine for a poison antidote and forcing his father-in-law to commit suicide after he failed to join Caligula on a stormy ocean voyage out of concern for seasickness. No sector of Roman society was spared Caligula’s callous brutality, Suetonius writes; he treated them all “with similar arrogance and violence” for trivial reasons like “being critical of his games.” When notified that he had punished the wrong person due to what Suetonius tells us is a confusion over names, Caligula claimed that the unintended victim “deserved it just as much.”

Caligula’s narcissism and contempt for humanity knew few if any bounds. “I wish the Roman People had a single neck!” he shouted because crowds backed a racing team other than the one he favored. “Over and over,” Suetonius tells us, “he wished for military massacres, famine, plague, fires, or a major earthquake” in order to be able to demonstrate his own greatness. He repeatedly made clear that he could execute random individuals and close relatives whenever he felt like it, telling consuls at a dinner party “that with a single nod I could immediately have both of you executed.” “In short,” Suetonius observes, “no matter how bad a man’s circumstances or low his fortune, Caligula still begrudged him whatever advantages he did enjoy.”

Suetonius does give us an explanation for Caligula’s self-indulgence and cruelty: “overwhelming confidence and, on the other hand, excessive fear.”  The emperor claimed to have no use for the gods, the ancient historian says, but scurried underneath his bed at “the smallest burst of thunder and clap of lightning.” It shouldn’t be surprising that this combustible cocktail of deep insecurity and grandiosity produced such a vicious and volatile personality. Eventually Caligula went too far, insulting a senior officer in the Praetorian Guard and leading members of that elite unit to assassinate him.

Just thirteen years after Caligula’s death, however, the emperor Nero would mount an impressive challenge to his standing as Rome’s worst leader. Under the influence of advisors like the philosopher Seneca and Praetorian Guard commander Burrus, Nero’s early reign showed promise. But just five years in, Nero murdered his mother and began a full-blown descent into tyranny and self-absorption.

Above all, Nero saw himself as an entertainer and an artist. He took up singing, playing the lyre, and driving chariots, moving up previously scheduled games so he could perform in Rome. When Nero later took his talents to Greece, “it was not permitted to leave the theater, even in an emergency. And so some women, it is said, gave birth during his shows.” Suetonius needed just one line to sum up Nero’s extraordinary narcissism: “To many men he offered friendship, or declared an enmity, based on how much, or how little, they praised him.”

“After putting up with an emperor like this for fourteen years,” Suetonius soberly concludes, “the world finally abandoned him.” Even when top Roman military commanders revolted against his rule, Nero remained focused on his own idle pursuits. Upon hearing the news of the rebellion, for instance, the emperor “immediately made his way to the gymnasium and became deeply engrossed in watching the athletes compete.” It took eight days to wrench any sort of orders or instructions from Nero, and Suetonius informs us that even as he faced this crisis “nothing pained him so much as being criticized as a bad lyre-player or being called Ahenobarbus instead of Nero.” 

Even with his throne on the line, Nero could not muster a serious effort to fight his rebellious generals. Rather than concern himself with military preparations, Nero “took most care in choosing carts to carry organs for the theater and in giving the concubines he was bringing with him masculine haircuts.” Oblivious as he was as his regime came crashing down around him, Nero eventually read the writing on the wall and considered his options as Rome’s elites turned on him en masse. After much hesitation, the self-obsessed and theatrical emperor talked himself into taking his own life rather than be captured by his myriad enemies.

In their broad strokes as well as their details, these selections from Suetonius ought to sound disturbing to our modern ears. It’s paradoxically both shocking and unsurprising that humanity hasn’t learned all that much from its experiences with atrocious political leadership over the last two thousand years. Over and over again, societies around the world discover that, as Osgood puts it, “the acquisition of power may not so much corrupt, as the old adage has it, allow our own worst qualities to slide out and harm us.” The megalomania, egoism, and reckless cruelty of such rulers ultimately lead to disastrous consequences for themselves personally and the societies they profess to govern.

Indeed, the trademarks of appalling political leadership Suetonius first identified two millennia ago may well have reached their apotheosis in President Donald Trump. To be sure, there have been some stiff contenders for the title over the decades and centuries since Nero’s death. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his brutal if somewhat ramshackle Fascist regime certainly made a strong showing in the early twentieth century. But Trump’s conduct in the world’s most powerful office leaves the impression that he’s taken Rome’s worst leaders as his principal political role models.

It’s not as if the United States hasn’t had its fair share of poor political leadership. Both James Buchanan nor Herbert Hoover proved wholly inadequate to the severe national crises they faced, leaving their exceptional successors Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt to pick up the pieces of their broken societies and rebuild them. Some presidents like George W. Bush were simply inept when it came to the formulation and execution of public policy, while others like Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon mired themselves in scandal and corruption.

With his melange of vainglorious incompetence and indolence at a time of acute national crisis, however, Trump has managed to outpace his predecessors by a considerable distance. Like Tiberius, Trump spent an inordinate amount of time at his own Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida before it was shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nor will Trump leave behind any “structures of splendor,” despite early promises of substantial infrastructure spending and an “infrastructure week” that’s lasted for nearly three years.

But it’s Trump’s petty cruelty, overweening self-absorption, and obsession with his own image that places him in the company of Caligula and Nero. Like these two terrible leaders, Trump’s narcissism and insecurity function to conceal a weak and unstable personality that has no business anywhere near the reins of power. Trump’s public rallies and adolescent name-calling on Twitter lend credence to repeated claims by those in close working proximity to him – both political allies and opponents – that his personality most closely resembles that of a petulant toddler. Indeed, political scientist Dan Drezner identifies Trump’s temper tantrums, short attention span, and poor impulse control as three of the president’s core personality traits.

Abundant evidence supports the contention that Trump seems to have taken leadership lessons from Rome’s worst emperors, from his insistence that Article II of the U.S. Constitution allows him “to do whatever I want” to his repeated and preposterous claims that no other president has been treated “so unfairly” – not even Lincoln. It’s clear Trump thinks about little else than how events affect his public image and media coverage. During a recent press conference on the coronavirus crisis, for instance, Trump lashed out at a reporter who asked what words of reassurance he’d offer to frightened Americans in this time of national distress. 

Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic illustrates just how disastrous an abysmal political leader like Trump inevitably proves to be at times of crisis. Oblivious to any concerns outside his own ego, Trump repeatedly and consistently underplayed the danger at hand. As the coronavirus began to radiate out from China at the start of 2020, he quickly characterized it as a partisan political hoax. Trump’s own White House “struggled to get him to take the virus seriously” as it rapidly became a global public health threat. In an early telephone call with Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, for instance, Trump abruptly switched subjects from the virus to vaping. When Centers for Disease Control senior director Dr. Nancy Messonnier publicly stated in late February that the virus would continue to spread, moreover, Trump complained to Azar that she had spooked the stock markets. 

As a result of Trump’s narcissism and idleness, the United States government finds itself ill-prepared and struggling to effectively respond to the worst national crisis in recent memory. Even with cities and states across the country locking down and the nation’s heath care system under unprecedented strain, Trump refuses to use executive authority to produce the medical equipment needed to protect America’s doctors and save lives. Instead, Trump categorically rejected any responsibility whatsoever for his administration’s failed response and attempted to shift the blame to his predecessor. Public officials feel they must flatter Trump live on television to keep him on task and his temper down. Thanks to Donald Trump’s utterly appalling political leadership, tens of thousands of Americans – if not more – will likely die while the overall economy will likely suffer its worst collapse since the Great Depression.

The Romans who endured Caligula and Nero were lucky by comparison. Neither bad emperor had to confront the sort of crisis that later emperors like Marcus Aurelius would face later or that the United States faces today. Given the striking similarities between terrible political leaders both ancient and modern, it’s not hard to conclude that atrocious political leadership is just part and parcel of the human condition. Truly awful leaders recur again and again throughout history, and we’d be delusional to think we can somehow immunize ourselves against another Nero or another Trump in the future.

That’s not a call for fatalism or defeatism, however. In previous national crises, Americans got lucky with leaders like Lincoln and Roosevelt. Rome did have an emperor like Marcus to deal with a series of near-simultaneous disasters that included internal rebellion, frontier wars, and the spread of a devastating plague throughout the empire. It may be too soon to do a full and complete accounting of the the Trump administration’s debacles, but it’s clear that the moral failings of terrible leaders often return to haunt them personally – but not before their appalling leadership leads their societies to catastrophe.

“Let me tell you something: don’t. Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship because while you’re there… You can make a difference.”

• Captain James T. Kirk, Star Trek: Generations

Ever since I caught my first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation over twenty-five years ago, I’ve been a huge Star Trek fanatic. Through thirteen films and seven television series, the show has displayed a faith in humanity and optimism in our prospects that’s conspicuous by its absence in a popular culture soaked with irony and cynicism. Indeed, most other familiar science fiction franchises like Terminator, Blade Runner, and Battlestar Galactica veer toward the dark and ominous in both atmosphere and substance. These dystopian worlds tell us not just that humanity can’t get things right or make progress, but that we’re bound to actively make matters worse if not destroy ourselves and the things that matter most to us in the process.

In this dismal milieu, though, Star Trek’s perpetual optimism andenduring faith in humanity stands apart. This hopeful outlook shines through most clearly in The Next Generation, my favorite among all the series produced to date. That’s in large part due to the character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played with aplomb by Patrick Stewart for over three decades. Picard’s nigh-impregnable moral core and ability to express it with remarkable and forceful eloquence grounds The Next Generation’s belief in humanity’s capacity to change for the better.  

So I’m very much sympathetic to complaints and criticisms that the show’s latest iteration, Star Trek: Picard, falls short of the idealism that’s driven Star Trek for more than five decades. As critic Devin Faraci puts it, “it’s become clear that the people running Star Trekthese days want it to be cool” rather than “corny as hell” – and that that desire undermines Star Trek’s core ethos. Beyond question, there’s a real aesthetic dissonance between Picard and its 24th century predecessors. On certain points of style like fashion, for instance, Picard feels more in line with contemporary sensibilities than the admittedly “weird” things we saw on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. More important, however, is that Picard takes place in a Federation that’s failed in spectacular ways to live up to the ideals articulated by Captain Picard himself during the halcyon days of The Next Generation.

But that’s precisely why I find Picard so captivating. It’s hardly a groundbreaking observation to note that Star Trek has always crafted its interstellar morality plays in ways that reflect and refract current events and contemporary conditions. The original series, for instance, featured an episode that illustrated the madness of racial prejudice, while The Next Generation demonstrated that historical enemies could become present-day friends by placing a Klingon character on the bridge of the Enterprise and made the Klingon Empire one of the Federation’s closest allies. In “Duet,” Deep Space Nine shows the futility of holding on to hatred and the necessity of forgiveness for even the most heinous crimes.

The list of episodes and storylines could go on and on, but it’s important to recognize that these themes remain nested within Star Trek’s broader optimism about humanity and its future. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Star Trek: Picard falls directly in line with this tradition. If Picard feels less utopian than its direct predecessors, that’s due to the timely nature of the narrative it tells and the profound questions it sets out to explore. Namely, what do we do when the we’ve failed, the world is broken, and nothing seems to matter any more? What happens when things fall apart in spite of best efforts?

These are the kinds of existential questions Jean-Luc Picard confronts in his eponymous series. When we first come across him again, it’s apparent that Picard isn’t the same confident captain of the starship Enterprise we last saw at the end of 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. This Picard has been puttering away in self-imposed exile on his family’s ancestral vineyards for nearly a decade and a half, writing books of history and tending to the vines with help from a pair of former Romulan intelligence operatives Laris and Zhaban (played by Orla Brady and Jamie McShane, respectively) as well as a pitbull terrier named Number One (portrayed by a rescue called Dinero).

The reason for Picard’s retreat soon becomes clear: Starfleet and the Federation have fallen far from the high ideals of The Next Generation era. Asked in an interview with a Federation news media network why he left Starfleet, Picard first quietly and then angrily responds, “Because it was no longer Starfleet!” Indeed, Picard resigned in protest when the Federation failed to live up to its own ideals and canceled the mission he commanded to rescue hundreds of millions of Romulans from an interstellar natural disaster [1]. Haunted by the most profound personal failure of his career and disillusioned with the institutions to which he had dedicated his life, Picard withdrew to his family’s vineyards and walled himself off from a society that, in his view, betrayed its own fundamental principles.

The fallen Federation we glimpse in Picard nowhere near as as bleak as the dystopia depicted, say, Logan. Most importantly, neither the Federation nor Starfleet have crossed the thin and invisible line into permanent dysfunction and despair. By comparison with other fictional worlds, moreover, the Federation remains a fundamentally optimistic place in possession of more or less functional institutions. Paradoxically, however, it’s on this very account that the Federation of Picard feels much more real and visceral than the relentlessly grim and hopeless fictional universes that tend to occupy wide swathes of our popular culture. Given the high esteem in which both Picard and the Star Trek fans held Starfleet and the Federation throughout The Next Generation era, even minor shortcomings in these previously respected institutions lend Picard and its main themes a moral gravity that’s not truly possible in otherwise comparable narrative contexts. When Starfleet abandons Picard’s mission to save the Romulans, for instance, it’s impossible for us to disagree with his lament that he “never dreamed that Starfleet would give in to intolerance and fear.”

Making matters worse for Picard, the rhetorical brilliance and moral force so often on display in The Next Generation failed him at the worst possible time. Hundreds of millions of lives perished as a result, driving Picard into a paralyzing and isolating spiral of self-doubt and second-guessing. Just before his volatile interview halfway through the first episode, his Romulan caretakers take pains to remind Picard of his own character and history. “After so long, sometimes I worry you have forgotten what you did, who you are,” Laris instructs him.  “We have not.” Zhaban provides more friendly counsel: “Be the captain they remember.” 

As Laris and Zhaban insist, Jean-Luc Picard proves one of the best characters available to explore these themes of personal disillusionment and failure. Throwing an individual with such high moral and ethical standards back into a world that has let those standards down in spectacular ways makes for compelling and engrossing drama. What’s more, having Picard navigate this disenchanted environment without the same respect he once commanded – witness the dressing down the head of Starfleet Command gives him when he requests reinstatement – only reinforces the existential questions Picard raises.

Indeed, the first four episodes of Picard go a long way toward providing answers to these questions. In the premiere, it’s Picard’s encounter with Dahj Asha (played by Isa Briones) that spurs him back into action. He quickly discovers that Dahj is the synthetic daughter of the late Commander Data, the android officer and friend who sacrificed himself to save Picard at the end of Nemesis.

Dahj’s own ensuing death at the hands of a secret Romulan death squad propels Picard forward, forcing him to conclude that he still has a moral obligation to act. “She came here to find safety,” he tells Laris and Zhaban. “She deserved better from me. I owe it to her to find out who killed her and why.” When Laris assures him that he asks to much of himself, Picard retorts that “sitting here, all these years” on his family’s vineyards while “nursing his offended dignity” and “writing books of history people prefer to forget,” he “never asked anything of myself at all. I haven’t been living. I’ve been waiting to die.”

This brief dialogue serves as the moral fulcrum for Picard the decorated but disillusioned former Starfleet captain. But it also serves as a manifesto, a clear statement of purpose for Star Trek: Picard the television series. Picard comes to realize that it’s his duty to take action and make a difference as best he can – even if he’s unable to fix everything or even anything that’s wrong with the universe. He understands that his principles don’t allow him to mark time until his inevitable demise, and that they require him to make a difference in whatever small way he can. This rekindled sense of moral purpose Picard balances against and ultimately wins out over his disillusionment and disaffection with Starfleet.

In due course, Picard learns that the particular method involved in creating Dahj also birthed a twin sister, Soji. Intent on protecting Soji from her sister’s fate, he assembles a crew far removed from his old Enterprise comrades and sets out on a rough-and-ready rescue mission. Intriguingly, Picard goes from trying – and failing – to save hundreds of millions of lives on his final Starfleet assignment to trying to save just one life with a small crew of unusual rogues and flotsam. This turn of events echoes a remark Picard made to Data in an episode of The Next Generation: “You’re a culture of one, which is no less valid than a culture of one billion.” One life or a billion; Picard advises us it doesn’t matter how much of a difference we make as long as we do our best to make a difference.

As much as anything else, though, Picard’s process of personal and moral rediscovery reflects Star Trek’s long-standing view on the central value and importance of human connection. It’s Picard’s relationship to Data that catapults him into action, motivating him to seek out and protect Dahj and, later, Soji. As he tells Dahj, “If you are who I think you are, you dear to me in ways that you can’t understand.” In this way, Picard maintains Star Trek’s traditional faith in humanity. It doesn’t do so via abstract and flawed institutions like Starfleet or the Federation, but instead finds grounds for hope in individuals like Picard and the personal relationships he’s forged. What really matters in a world that falls well short of our highest ideals, Picard tells us, are our moral obligations to ourselves and others – especially those we care about.

Without doubt, Star Trek: Picard leaves plenty of room for criticism – much of it justified. Nor is it difficult to understand why the show might prove divisive among long-time Star Trek fans. But the Starfleet without illusions itdepicts betrays neither Star Trek as a whole nor The Next Generation and Jean-Luc Picard in particular. Indeed, Picard carries on the show’s best thematic traditions, dealing with contemporary issues and grappling with the difficult moral questions that lay at the heart of the human condition. It’s hard to believe otherwise after watching Picard tear down a “Romulans Only” sign at a bar and trample on it despite the rather obvious personal danger involved. 

Ultimately, the strengths of Star Trek: Picard far outweigh whatever weaknesses and deficiencies die-hard fans and casual viewers alike point out. Wherever the rest of the series may go – and I’m eager to find out – Picard has already proven itself to be a worthy addition to the Star Trek canon.

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[1]  This mission aimed to relocate some 900 million Romulans – the Federation’s oldest enemy – before their home system’s sun unexpectedly went supernova, an event that served as the catalyst for the trilogy of alternate timeline Star Trek films that began in 2009 and starred Chris Pine as Captain Kirk. Starfleet called off the mission after an apparent uprising by synthetic workers helping build the rescue fleet at the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars left tens of thousands dead and prompted Federation member worlds to talk of secession rather than continue to rescue operation. As with many things Star Trek, it’s complicated. 

Review: 

Ad Astra dir. James Gray (2019)

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they truly are brothers.”

• Archibald MacLeish, “A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold,” New York Times December 25, 1968

Things haven’t exactly panned out the way MacLeish predicted. There’s no doubt that the Apollo voyages to the Moon still inspire awe and wonder in people around the world. These expeditions allowed humanity to reflect on its place in the cosmos in ways it could only imagine before. But even if his hopeful prophecy of universal planetary brotherhood failed to materialize in Apollo’s wake, MacLeish at least deserves credit for surfacing the profound existential questions that space exploration provokes and engaging in the sort of serious intellectual reflection these questions demand.

So it is with Ad Astra, an impressive yet flawed epic that wrestles with these big ideas and themes but can’t quite do them full justice in the end. The filmfollows astronaut Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt) on his journey across the Solar System to retrieve his father from an ill-fated mission to Neptune that’s believed responsible for a series of energy surges that could end all life as we know it. A cold and austere aesthetic undergirds and reinforces the film’s central motifs, as does the Heart of Darkness-style narrative that structures it. But if Ad Astra  ultimately falls just short of what it hopes to achieve, it should not be criticized harshly. Instead, the film should be praised for its ambition and willingness to grapple with enduring and consequential questions.

That ambition starts with the film’s Heart of Darkness narrative structure, laid out early on in the briefing McBride receives from his military superiors at U.S. Space Command. Soon enough, he’s on board a commercial rocket to the Moon to begin his highly-classified mission. Like the Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, McBride must undertake a grueling and increasingly dark physical and moral journey to the end of civilization and beyond. But where Marlow and Willard went upriver in colonial Africa and Vietnam, respectively, McBride travels beyond human settlements on the Moon and Mars to the outer reaches of the Solar System. In all three odysseys, moreover, the main characters seek out a revered and respected figure gone mad: the deranged colonial official Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, the decorated Special Forces Colonel Walter Kurtz famously incarnated by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, and the legendary astronaut Clifford McBride – Roy’s father, portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones – in Ad Astra.

Beyond the shift in setting to outer space, this father-son dynamic represents Ad Astra’s largest and possibly most intriguing deviation from the Heart of Darkness narrative. After an initial viewing, however, it’s unclear what this particular wrinkle adds thematically, and at times it feels somewhat superfluous given other themes the film works to develop. On a surface level, the film appears to slot this relationship into a well-worn stock narrative of paternal abandonment. Indeed, McBride’s father left his son behind and departed on his ill-fated deep space mission to search for extraterrestrial life some 29 years prior to the start of the film. He later admits, “I don’t want to be my dad.”

It’d be a mistake to view the film’s treatment of this father-son relationship through this rather superficial lens, however. On the contrary, the relationship between McBride and his father drives the action in Ad Astra in ways that prove crucial to the movie’s narrative and wider themes while only landing glancing blows at traditional themes of fatherly neglect. These family ties set the final act of the film into motion, in which McBride defies orders to stay on Mars, hijacks the ship sent to kill his wayward father, and heads out to Neptune for the film’s emotional and thematic climax.

But the father-son relationship also grounds and propels McBride’s own substantial character evolution over the course of the film. When we first meet McBride, he’s remarkably alienated from himself and the rest of humanity. Via voice-over – one of the film’s central narrative conceits and a nod to Apocalypse Now – he tells the us that he’s “been trained to compartmentalize” and it “seems to me that’s how I approach my life.” McBride has clear difficulties relating to other people; he reviews a video message from his estranged wife Eve (played by Liv Tyler), who informs him that “I feel like I’m looking for you all the time trying to connect to you, be close to you and it fucking sucks.”

That’s where McBride stands at the start of the film, and he maintains this isolation from humanity as he travels to the Moon for the first stage of his journey. “All the hopes we ever had for space travel, covered up by drink stands and t-shirt vendors,” he states as he arrives at a lunar colony bedecked with neon advertisements, “Just a re-creation of what we’re running from on Earth.” “Here we go again. Fighting over resources,” he remarks as a running firefight with lunar pirates in the no-man’s-land between the colony and a Space Command base on the far side of the Moon begins.

The further McBride voyages out from Earth, though, the more he sheds this cynicism and grows closer to humanity as a whole. A classified video asserting his father intentionally disabled his ship’s communications leaves him wondering whether what his father discovered broke him or whether he was always broken. After a botched rescue mission that leaves the commander of the spacecraft taking him to Mars dead, McBride sees the same anger and pain he saw in his father in himself and observes that “it keeps me walled off… walled off from relationships and opening myself up and, you know, really caring for someone.” But he admits that doesn’t yet know how to surmount this obstacle.

This moral and philosophical journey accelerates when McBride finds himself traveling alone to Neptune after inadvertently killing the crew of the spacecraft he surreptitiously attempts to board on Mars. In a log entry made en route, McBride admits the “zero-g and the extended duration of the journey is affecting me both physically and mentally. I am alone. Something I always believed I preferred… But I confess it’s wearing on me.” 

Then McBride reaches Neptune and his father’s derelict spacecraft. He boards it, making his way through corridors haunted by flickering lights and floating corpses before confronting his disturbed father. Totally detached from humanity and consumed with his quest to find intelligent life among the stars, McBride’s father flatly states that he never truly cared about McBride, his mother, or anything else back on Earth – or humanity’s “small ideas.” Obsessed with proving that humanity isn’t alone in the universe and unwilling to accept that the data his mission collected proves otherwise, McBride’s father cannot see the reality that what he has been looking for was staring him in the face his whole life.

It’s in this final act that Ad Astra’s weightiest theme fully surfaces: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and humanity’s place in the universe. This momentous theme comes into focus only erratically and infrequently before it emerges in full force at the film’s climax. Through briefings and video messages, for instance, we’re occasionally told that McBride’s father led an ill-fated mission to scan nearby star systems for signs of intelligent life. Still, it’s admirable that Ad Astra raises these far-reaching ideas as strongly as it does in the end.

Indeed, the realization that humanity must rely on itself in a cold and indifferent universe consummates McBride’s own character evolution. Where his father seeks an escape from humanity in his monomaniacal search for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy and mourns his inability to find it, McBride himself grasps the harsh reality of humanity’s ultimate cosmic loneliness. In response to his father’s insistence his son can’t let him fail, McBride tells him he didn’t fail: “Now we know. We’re all we’ve got.”

McBride’s moral and philosophical progress over the course of his journey deeper into space and further away from humanity subtly subverts the traditional Heart of Darkness narrative. Where he starts supremely cynical about humanity and its ability to change its ways for the better, McBride slowly develops a faith in humanity despite the darkness that washes over his voyage. Paradoxically, this budding belief grows in no small part because of the solitude he endures, conveying to him in no uncertain terms the necessity of basic human connection that he previously felt he didn’t need. His encounter and confrontation with his father, isolated and disconnected from humanity, only confirms McBride in his new perspective. As he puts it, his father “could only see what was not there – and missed what was right in front of him.” 

In the end, McBride’s ordeal forces him to rediscover humanity. He quite literally lets his father go after doing his best to bring him back to Earth, leaving him spinning off alone into the vastness of space before riding a nuclear shockwave home. In the film’s final scene, McBride reconnects with his estranged wife and delivers a voiceover monologue (framed as an input to the automated psychological tests that recur throughout) that summarizes his new frame of mind:

I’m steady, calm. I slept well, no bad dreams. I am active and engaged. I am aware of my surroundings and those in my immediate sphere. I’m attentive. I am focused on the essential, to the exclusion of all else. I’m unsure of the future, but I’m not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burdens – as they share mine. I will live, and love.

In its own flawed and frustrating but compelling way, Ad Astra tells us that we’re all we’ve got – and that that’s more than enough.

“I’ll tell you the truth but never goodbye”

Taylor Swift may well be the last legitimate rock star America ever sees. 

That’s not just a matter of album sales or hit singles, though it did take just one week for her new record Lover to become the best-selling album of 2019. Nor is it simply a question of sold-out concerts, though her 2018 stadium tour became the highest-grossing U.S. tour on record – a title previously held by the likes of the Rolling Stones. Then there’s Lover Fest, a pair of two-day music festivals she plans to play next summer in Los Angeles and Boston. It’s a testament to her place in the pantheon of popular music that Swift is one of the few contemporary musical artists or acts that could pull off this remarkable set of feats.

To be sure, Swift isn’t the only rock star on the scene today – but she’ll almost certainly be the last artist to achieve the sort of widespread societal recognition inherent in the term itself. That’s in no small part due to the fact that Swift rose to prominence in the last days before social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter demolished any remaining semblance of shared experience in American society. When Swift released her breakthrough second album Fearless in 2008, Facebook had around 145 million users and Twitter users tweeted some 300,000 times per day. By the time she released her third album, Speak Now, in 2010, Facebook’s users more than trebled to 608 million and tweets per day reached around 35 million.

Social media platforms cannot be held only or solely responsible for wider trends that predated their rise. Instead, they merely accelerated a process of wider societal fragmentation and cultural decoherence already well under way at the time these platforms emerged. But as the linguist and social commentator John McWhorter put it, in roughly 2008 and 2009 the likes of Facebook and Twitter “revolutionized the American conversation about, well, everything.” Though others like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell argue these seismic shifts occurred a couple of years later, there’s little doubt that social media platforms wrought havoc on our national life and helped snuff out the possibility of a common national culture moving forward.

The music industry proved no exception, but Swift didn’t just luckily stumble upon on the last moments before social media devoured society whole. Her body of work displays a level of consistent quality and quantity that parallels that of the golden age of rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, god-like bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin strung together a series of masterpiece albums like Sticky Fingers and Physical Graffiti over a number of years. Prince was perhaps the last artist to pull off such a run, releasing nine albums from his 1979 self-titled record to 1988’s Lovesexy. Likewise, Swift has recorded and released quality albums almost every two years since her own self-titled debut in 2006, only allowing an extra year to pass between 2014’s 1989 and 2017’s reputation despite the demands of massive global concert tours.

That’s the why. The real reason Swift has become the last of the dying breed of rock stars is that she cultivates a real sense of intimacy with her listeners. In part that’s because at her core she’s a singer-songwriter in the tradition of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and, in more recent decades, Sarah McLachlan and the Lilith Fair crowd of the 1990s. By her own account, Swift is a “confessional songwriter” and her latest album as “very, very autobiographical” with “moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.” As she told the audience at her NPR Tiny Desk concert in October 2019, “songwriting is really just like a cathartic, therapeutic thing for me.”

Strip everything else away from her music, and that’s who she is and what she does – and it’s a large part of why she’s earned her place in the pantheon of popular music. It comes through clear in whatever genre she’s writing in: country, pop, and even the electro-detour of reputation. Her songs simply work in ways that are increasingly rare, and do so on their own merits. As she herself remarked in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, “Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling.”

In her songs, Swift bares her vulnerabilities and insecurities to her listeners and invites them to share their own vulnerabilities and insecurities with her. This intimacy can be called contrived or affected, but that’s the opposite of the truth. It may be intimacy at a distance, but it’s a legitimate and very real intimacy nonetheless. Through her own emotional sincerity, Swift allows her listeners to open themselves up emotionally in a culture made callous by unbridled irony and cynicism. She gives her listeners license to feel and express their deepest fears and hopes in ways that would otherwise leave them exposed to ridicule or worse in everyday life. More than anything else, it’s this very real human connection that bonds Swift and her fans.

Swift forges these bonds through the way she tackles universal themes and subjects that strike at the heart of the human condition. She possesses the rare ability to translate her own personal experiences of longing, heartbreak, and self-doubt into a universal idiom that speaks to fundamental human needs for intimacy and connection amidst the often painful struggles inherent in life. As Swift herself put it when discussing the title track from Lover at her Tiny Desk concert, “in life you accumulate scars, you accumulate hurt, you accumulate moments of, you know, learning and disappointment and struggle and all that, and if someone’s going to take your hand, they’d better take your hand scars and all.”

It’s this gift that drives her popularity and staying power, pushing her work beyond the ephemeral and all but guaranteeing her a long career. Her most recent album, Lover, testifies to this singular skill and puts it on full display. The album is also a perfect distillation of the themes and questions Swift has contemplated over the course of her career. Swift understands that we all long for intimacy, we all suffer heartbreak, and we all fall short of our own ideals far more often than we’d like to admit. Lover succeeds in plumbing the depths of these universal human experiences while carrying forward many of the thematic through lines that Swift has explored over the course of her career.

That’s apparent in the introductory note she penned for the album. It’s something of a manifesto for the album itself, her music in general, and her relationship with her listeners. This statement reveals an artist fully aware of what she aims to achieve and why she aims to achieve it.

It’s worth quoting it at length:

In life, we grow up and we encounter the nuanced complexities of trying to figure out who to be, how to act, or how to be happy. Like invisible smoke in the room, we wonder what kind of anxiety pushes you forward and what kind ruins your ability to find joy in your life. We constantly question our choices, our surroundings, and we beat ourselves up for our mistakes. All the while, we crave romance. We long for those rare, enchanting moments when things just fall into place. Above all else, we really, really want our lives to be filled with love.

She continues, advising and encouraging her listeners:

I’ve decided that in this life, I want to be defined by the things I love – not the things I hate, the things I’m afraid of, or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night. Those things may be my struggles, but they’re not my identity. I wish the same for you. May your struggles become inaudible background noise behind the loud, clear voices of those who love and appreciate you. Turn those voices up in the mix in your head. May you take notice of the things in your life that are nice and make you feel safe and maybe even find wonderment in them. May you write down your feelings and reflect on them years later, only to learn that all the trials and tribulations you thought might kill you… didn’t. I hope that someday you forget that pain ever existed. I hope that if there is a lover in your life, it’s someone who deserves you. If that’s the case, I hope you treat them with care.

These messages and themes may seem simple, but in reality they convey a remarkably astute assessment of the human condition and the shared hopes, desires, and anxieties that constitute it. They strike at the most important and profound questions many of us face in life, and address some of the most intense and meaningful experiences many of us will ever have. For Swift herself, these messages ultimately constitute a clear sense of artistic purpose that comes through forcefully on Lover.

That starts with the title track. As a song about the most basic and intimate of human connections, “Lover” sets the tone for the entire album. To all appearances, the song hits a series of happy notes about a serious romantic relationship. But it’s also shot through with self-doubt and uncertainty, as the chorus indicates: “Can I go where you go?/Can we always be this close?” Though the listener presumes the answer of Swift’s object of affection will invariably be yes, the song itself provides no assurances. Swift puts herself in a position of extreme emotional vulnerability, declaring her own feelings about “this magnetic force of a man” with no guarantee her romantic partner will reciprocate in any way. Swift herself explained that she “wanted the chorus [of ‘Lover’] to be these, like, really simple existential questions that we ask ourselves when we’re in love. ‘Can I go where you go?’ is such a heavy thing to ask somebody. ‘Can we always be this close?’ has so much fear in it – but so does love.”

This awareness of an inherent connection between love and fear as well as the knowledge of the ever-present risk of emotional hurt haunts Lover. Indeed, Swift repeatedly exposes her own self-doubts and anxieties throughout the album and invites her listeners to conclude that the pursuit of genuine human connection and intimacy requires facing one’s own fears and insecurities directly.“I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” she asks a new romantic partner on “Cruel Summer,” for instance. With 80s-style synthesizers and a persistent beat propelling her forward on “The Archer,” Swift wonders, “Who could ever leave me, darling…/But who could stay?” Even when relationships are going strong in songs like “Cornelia Street,” Swift hopes she’ll never lose her partner and that their relationship will never end. If it does, she says, the reminders of heartbreak will prove so intense – it’d be “the kind of heartbreak time could never mend”- that she’d “never walk Cornelia Street again.” Then there’s the brutal, uncertain, and protracted emotional process involved in the end of a relationship described by Swift on the aptly-titled “Death by a Thousand Cuts.” All this on a record she rightly considers “a very, very happy, romantic album.”

Above all else, though, Lover reflects Swift’s growing maturity and self-assurance. As she put it when describing the title track, “When young adults go from living in their family to then combining their life with someone else, that’s actually like the most profound thing.” On the ethereal sonic landscape of “Afterglow,” for instance, she takes responsibility for the fiery end of a relationship and regrets hurting her partner in the process: 

Why’d I have to break what I love so much? 

It’s on your face

And I’m to blame

I need to say

Hey, it’s all me, in my head

I’m the one who burned us down

But it’s not what I meant

Sorry that I hurt you

Likewise, on “I Forgot That You Existed” Swift champions moving on from difficult emotional situations and cultivating a healthy sense of equanimity toward life’s struggles. The right attitude to develop toward those who wrong you, she advises, “isn’t love it isn’t hate/It’s just indifference.” Moreover, Swift lets her listeners know there’s a certain joy – a sentiment expressed elsewhere on songs like “I Think He Knows” – that comes from moving past whatever trials and tribulations we might experience, even if these conflicts won’t ever see any satisfactory resolution. Indeed, Swift later proclaims her own version of amor fati (“love of fate”) on “Paper Rings”: “Honey without all the exes, fights, and flaws/We wouldn’t be standing here so tall.”

But Swift’s thematic apotheosis comes on Lover’s final track, “Daylight.” Even more than the title track, this elegant song captures the spirit of the album itself and provides a stellar summation of Swift’s own artistic ambitions. In “Daylight,” she comes to terms with her own flaws and mistakes, discovers the sort of the intimacy we all seek, and steps into the future with an assurance and confidence born of experience. “There are so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven,” she admits; “I wounded the good and I trusted the wicked/Clearing the air, I breathed in the smoke.” She expand on this acknowledgment of personal mistakes and missteps in her Rolling Stone interview, saying that it bothers her “looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it.”

If she’s made the litany of mistakes she lists in the first two verses, however, Swift has forgiven herself and moved on: “Threw out our cloaks and our daggers because it’s morning now/It’s brighter now.” Self-acceptance allows her to cast aside her illusions of what she once thought about love as well as her own self-doubt that she’d ever find the intimacy she seeks. “I once believed love would be black and white/But it’s golden/Like daylight,” she sings. Swift has finally  made the genuine human connection she’s yearned for, and no longer wants to look at or think about anything or anyone else. Our past and our pain don’t define us, Swift counsels. But to truly move forward with our lives and achieve the sort of intimacy she’s discovered and that we all seek, “You gotta step into the daylight/And let it go/Just let it go.” 

So much more could be said about Lover, enough to launch a million think-pieces and academic papers. Swift’s view of romance as a religion in songs like “False God,” for instance, or the recurrence of the color blue in songs like “Cruel Summer,” “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” “Paper Rings,” and “Afterglow” provide fertile ground for even deeper exploration. At its core, however, Lover remains an earnest meditation on universal themes of love, human connection, intimacy, desire, vulnerability, happiness, and maturity – subjects that define much of the human condition itself. That this sort of contemplation can occur in the context of a best-selling pop album testifies to Swift’s talents as a songwriter and ambitions as an artist.

Ultimately, though, Swift’s music in general and Lover in particular serve as a reminder of the things that truly matter in life: the genuine, intimate connections we make with our fellow human beings. Swift prompts us to focus on the people and things we love, and to devote our time and energy to them rather than our mistakes, our pain, or our anxieties. We can do that best when we accept ourselves and let go of the hurt and fears that hold us back. 

As Swift herself reminds us with her parting words, “You are what you love.”

Review: 

American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley

Apollo 11 dir. Todd Douglas Miller (2019)

First Man dir. Damien Chazelle (2018)

Fifty years ago this summer, humanity left its first footprints on another world when American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gently climbed down the ladder of the lunar module Eagle and stepped onto the surface of the Moon. Beyond the stalwart efforts of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, NASA-sponsored events at other science and technology museum across the country, and an upcoming three-part PBS documentary, this momentous milestone approaches with little official fanfare. But the Apollo moonshot and what the historian Douglas Brinkley aptly terms the “great space race” remain indelible cultural touchstones for Americans and, indeed, many around the world.

Brinkley himself has become part of the unofficial public commemoration of Apollo 11 that’s steadily picked up steam over the past year. This output not only includes his new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, but also the films First Man, director Damien Chazelle’s dramatization of Neil Armstrong’s journey from X-15 test pilot to first man on the Moon, and Apollo 11, a breathtaking documentary of the mission pulled together by director Todd Douglas Miller from footage left neglected for decades in the National Archives.

It’s no coincidence that both First Man and Apollo 11 close with President Kennedy’s stirring September 1962 case for Apollo made at Rice University in Houston – and it’s President Kennedy’s space policy that American Moonshot explores. Though it doesn’t reach the same heights as Brinkley’s accounts of the conservationist policies of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt (The Wilderness Warrior and Rightful Heritage, respectively), American Moonshot effectively argues for Kennedy’s personal importance in the politics and policies that set America on a course for the Moon in the early 1960s. Kennedy’s extraordinary competitive streak and faith in the fundamental tenets of mid-twentieth century liberalism – as Brinkley puts it, “America, the richest nation, doing big projects well” – drove his early and enthusiastic support for America’s space program in general and Apollo in particular.

But as Brinkley makes clear, the spirit of Apollo didn’t simply consist of high-flown rhetoric. The actual moonshot required a marshaling of national resources and purpose on a scale the likes of which have not been seen since. President Kennedy didn’t conjure Apollo into existence through sheer will; after all, he told NASA administrator James Webb in November 1962 that he was “not that interested in space” for its own sake. Instead, Kennedy saw space exploration both as a critical component of his own liberal nationalist vision and a central front in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. 

Indeed, national prestige – as refracted through both America’s own domestic politics and its geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union – laid squarely at the heart of Kennedy’s initial and ongoing support for Apollo. As Brinkley notes, “Kennedy was a prestige maven when it came to space-related issues… Refusing to be first in space, JFK would say, telegraphed the wrong signals to Third World countries debating the political virtues of democracy over communism.” Or as Kennedy himself put it on that sweltering September day at Rice in 1962, Apollo would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Yet Brinkley only partially manages to capture the grandeur of Apollo and the “great space race.” Nor does he entirely fulfill the book’s promise to situate Apollo in the sweep of mid-twentieth century American liberalism, despite tantalizing morsels and passing references scattered throughout. Brinkley leaves intriguing lines of thought unexplored, failing to dilate on the idea that both Kennedy and his successor Lyndon Johnson saw the space race with the Soviet Union as both “a challenge to the American democratic way of life” and a “dare to rise to greatness.”

Here, Brinkley misses an opportunity to more clearly show that today’s progressives need not fear constructive forms of nationalism. Indeed, it’s the under-developed subtext of American Moonshot that the nationalist impetus can harnessed and embraced to achieve liberal ends. In other words, today’s liberals and progressives could and should take take a page from JFK’s book and recognize the vital role that large, impressive, and ambitious national projects like Apollo can play in lifting national morale and cultivating a sense of collective national purpose. It’s no accident, as Brinkley himself notes in his preface, that the very neologism “moonshot” has been applied far and wide to such projects ever since the Apollo era. 

To truly capture the awesome nature of Apollo, however, we have to turn to cinema – especially Todd Douglas Miller’s thrilling documentary Apollo 11. Miller’s cinematic tour-de-force combines digitally-restored footage originally filmed for a long-forgotten NASA-sponsored documentary released in the early 1970s with contemporary 1969 audio, much of it consisting of transmissions between the astronauts aboard Apollo 11 and Mission Control in Houston laboriously synced up with the film. Television newsman Walter Cronkite’s broadcast updates on Apollo 11’s progress provide a brilliant substitute for the traditional voiceover narrative found in documentary films.

This minimalist approach works wonders, letting events speak for themselves and bringing those of us born after Apollo as close as we can get to actually experiencing events as they happened. But perhaps more importantly, Apollo 11 manages to place its subject in its proper, awe-inspiring context in ways that the written word simply cannot convey. Video collages, for instance, give brief glimpses into the lives as astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins as they suit up for their epochal voyage – creating a sense of personal and historical perspective in just a few short minutes.

Alternately pulsating and ethereal, Matt Morton’s score – performed entirely on instruments and equipment available in 1969 – adds power and tension to the film’s most important scenes. Countdown to launch concludes with a pulsing heartbeat just as the Saturn V’s massive F-1 main engines ignite to lift the gargantuan rocket off the pad. Thunderous strikes of piano keys accompany liftoff and the successive shedding of rocket stages as Apollo 11 claws itself into orbit. Strings meld with electronic beats ratchet up the tension as Neil Armstrong brings the lunar module Eagle in for a safe landing on the Moon despite constant alarms, ever-decreasing fuel, and a forbidding lunar terrain.

Miller even manages to effectively convey the massive scope of the national effort that sent astronauts from the Earth to the Moon. Shots of the army of workers that made Apollo 11 possible are spliced into the mission’s final television broadcast, with Armstrong offering “special thanks to all those Americans who built those spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their heart and all their abilities into those craft.” It’s supremely fitting, then, that the credits of Apollo 11 close with a dedication“to the thousands of NASA staff, contractors, and volunteers of Project Apollo.”

By contrast, Damien Chazelle’s First Man only rarely manages to capture the same sort of spark. Where the stark presentation of Apollo 11 allows the epochal journey to speak for itself, a similarly austere approach falls flat with this Neil Armstrong biopic. That’s not to say First Man fails altogether: the action sequences – the opening X-15 flight, the hair-raising end-over-end tumble of Gemini VIII, and the launch of Apollo 11 – all thrill. Justin Hurwitz’s score provides a suitable backdrop to momentous events. Perhaps most importantly, Chazelle’s gives a gorgeous depiction of Eagle’s landing and Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. But it’s not clear that the film itself truly earns these moments, and in the end they pale in comparison to the reality conveyed by Apollo 11. 

First Man’s biggest flaw is its cold depiction of its subject, Neil Armstrong. Here the film’s spartan aesthetic works against it: while it purports to be a character study of the first human to set foot on another world, it’s hard to figure out what makes that character tick. It’s clear that Ryan Gosling’s Armstrong is deeply introverted – the line he delivers about standing alone in his backyard if he wanted to talk to somebody about the death of a fellow astronaut resonated strongly with this introvert – but Gosling’s strong performance notwithstanding it’s unclear how or why that made him the astronaut or person he was. 

That may simply be due to the nature of the man himself. Notoriously and understandably averse to talking about himself, Armstrong often felt more comfortable talking about the engineering problems involved in landing on the Moon or flying the X-15 than about what either of those experiences was like. But as any introvert would tell you, there are depths that can still be plumbed. In the end, First Man sells Armstrong short even as it shows that Apollo can still inspire wonder even in somewhat lackluster fictionalized accounts.

If anything, however, the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 should be an occasion for all Americans – and progressives in particular – to reflect on what a constructive nationalism can accomplish when harnessed to liberal ends. Apollo remains a symbol of the America mid-twentieth century liberals like President Kennedy wanted to create, the sort of nation they wanted America to be. They only partially succeeded in that task, but Apollo still instills a sense of collective accomplishment and pride in what America can do when it works together under inspiring political leadership. Even at our current national nadir, Apollo reminds Americans that we once did great things – and can do so again in the future.