LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO
“Nothing in the film suggests that Neil is even aware of what’s going on in the world around him. Much of the action in the movie takes place in Jim Crow states where public facilities were segregated, but there’s no hint of this in the film; there’s no hint of where Neil stands on the pressing questions of the time. He has no black colleagues, no female colleagues; meanwhile, a female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, flew a space mission for the Soviet Union in 1963. What did he think? There’s a news report on the Armstrong family TV about the Vietnam War—but, significantly, it’s Janet who’s home while it’s on. Neil is in space at the time—as if Chazelle were suggesting that, while such people as Janet both hold down the domestic front and fret about politics, Neil is too busy to bother with any of it.”
this is SCALDING
“Half the country” may oppose the moon mission, but here Chazelle offers a peculiar, tendentious, and self-revealing cinematic interpretation of that phrase in the form of a montage. It shows Kurt Vonnegut, appearing in a black-and-white television clip, saying that the government would do better to spend the money on such things as making New York City “habitable.” There’s an archival clip of chanting protesters, featuring, prominently, a sign saying “¡Ayuda al Pueblo!” and footage, staged for the movie, of Leon Bridges performing Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 song “Whitey on the Moon.”
With this sequence, Chazelle openly mocks people who thought that the moon money was spent foolishly—those pesky intellectuals, blacks, and Hispanics who go on TV or into the street demanding “gimme” while the likes of Neil and his exclusively white, male colleagues uncomplainingly put their lives on the line to accomplish historic things in the interest of “mankind.” In its explicit content, and by artful omission, “First Man” subscribes to the misbegotten political premise that America used to be greater—and that the liberating and equalizing activism of the sixties ignored, dismissed, and even undermined that greatness.
“First Man,” Reviewed: Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong Bio-Pic Is an Accidental Right-Wing Fetish Object
Published
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