"First Man," reviewed

The film works against psychology in that what one has been engineered to expect people to be thinking, is portrayed as exactly what they are thinking. What is Armstrong thinking when he gets to the moon? Multiple, surely, but maybe ultimately chiefly about his daughter. The distant, detached dad, it turns out, has all the time been thinking about his beautiful family, not been somewhat disinterested in them. But parents maybe actually not all that interested in their children was supposed to be one of the errors of that era (remember Larkin?), which was improved upon in subsequent generations as parents began to find their children more interesting, more worth their focusing on, reflected in their spending more time with them. But nope... one of the failings of the era turns out not to be a failing at all -- children-focused, always -- so let's all head back to the 50s, why don't we. (If however we'd been shown Armstrong making a fetish of his daughter... so on his mind always, AS A WAY OF reflecting an essential lack of interest...)

The portrayal of the leftist "doubters" is as grotesque as Richard paints it out to be. Their voice doesn't come across itself as a mark of innovation, of reaching into terra incognita, which is what their interests in social improvement were, ultimately leading to reforms which would seem radical to previous generations. It never comes across as the same voice responsible for not simply viewing the chance to get to the moon a chance to show Russia who indeed has the biggest phallus, and instead, as Armstrong considers why he wants to go to the moon, as a chance to gain... perspective (TRUE enlarged perspective, TRUE extended reach in empathy, we seem to be being instructed, was principally with those all for the space launch too; there is no hint that if those who were speaking for better housing/better food were all there were in society and so reaching out into space... when ultimately done, would be their venture too, that they'd have shown how you really use travel to help broaden). Instead, they're those who'd prey on any moment of doubt in a genuinely impressive enterprise, like the moon voyage, to shut it down, for more money going to the most mundane and known of enterprises -- better housing, better distributed food... yawn, which could surely be administered by any pack of lobotomized bread-dispensers, not requiring anyone of genius, at all. They represent almost the threat of excused relapse, a hiding away from self-actualization under cover of the excuse of due-diligence to home, that a true man must shake his way through if ever to accomplish greatness, rather than an enterprise as worthy and as much built out of adult venturing as the moon launch was. You can have a movie showing an Arthur C Clarke sitting next to a Vonnegut and communicate that on BOTH sides there is terrific innovation... and maybe actually much more on Vonnegut's, who, literary-wise and by common recognition, had some over hard sci-fi Clarke. Here Clarke disappears (did you even notice him?), almost gladly, as if just another part of the tie-wearing, blue-suited monolith that will empower the successful reach of science and Armstrong to the moon, and Vonnegut stands out... as a sweatered, effete liberal, born to tie people up into knots of doubt and self-remonstration; a heads-up of what the infiltration of European theory would soon do to destroy the previously empirically-focused universities. The wife remonstrates them as boys playing with their balsa woods, but this is just the kind of remonstration men like to hear when their wives bonded to them for their undeniable show of responsibility and manhood.

Why climb the highest mountain? It's a question which redeems the dreamer, and it's one that Kennedy AND Trump, both, would ask, but there's differences between the two. The movie doesn't disentangle for us the important differences, so we are left to read Trump and everything he does to shame anyone who would have us mistake great purpose for something silly or sordid, as no more different than the impossible dreams Kennedy helped accomplish. Kennedy made sure Armstrong got to the moon; Trump helped ensure also-beset Kavanaugh got to the highest court... both broke the obstacle at Blaisse Ford to reach through to the Cape Canaveraugh junction.