Remembrance of Things Past: “Apollo 10 1/2”

I was tinkled pink by getting a reminder that Richard Linklater’s new film premiered this month. I’m unrepentantly enough of a fan that I tend to take an apologist’s stance on his version of “The Bad News Bears”. I’m inclined to feel that Linklater’s misses are better for what they accomplish than worse for what they don’t but when he’s firing on all cylinders, few come close. Just knowing his pedigree, restores my faith that good things do come out of Texas. 

“Apollo 10 1/2” is a gem that feels very close to my childhood as I lived it. Linklater and I are only a year or two apart and this is one of those movies that feels so organic, I’m not sure if what I saw was based on home movies from my preteen years or not.

The rotoscoping technique that he used in “Waking Life” and “Through a Scanner Darkly” makes its return and captures very much the way life looked in 1969, particularly as the days grew closer to the Apollo 11 launch to land a man on the moon. 

The colors are bright and so tightly registered that I could have been reading a comic book or watching a cartoon. The fluidity of movement of people and objects throughout was naturalistic and dreamlike, like a memory come alive. 

There’s not much of a plot: a boy is enlisted by the government to be the first person to set foot on the moon because NASA made the lunar landing module too small. Between Milo Stan’s incredulous looks as Stan at the agents and Jack Black’s narration as present day Stan, I kind of got the feeling this was going to unspool pretty delightfully. Nor do we spend an inordinate time on the plot, on how Stan’s cover story is already taken care of and how he’ll be ready to go over a three week period (!). 

No, most of what we get is a ground level view of what it was like to be ten in Houston in 1969, the Space City. Sam the Rocketman, vast expanses of subdivisions exposed and open to their lumber finding other uses as forts, and the DDT trucks running through the neighborhoods with kids running behind them in the mist were all very much of the fabric of existence in those days. 

Stan’s family is comprised of his mom and dad, four sisters, another son, and Stan and each person reads as a genuine human being. There’s no major drama here but a lot of well-observed moments from a past I could feel. I could smell the dampness of the air, feel the tar on my feet from the oil-stained beaches at Galveston, and feel once again the contradiction between what the adults tell us to do and what they do. 

Agent Bostick: We accidentally built the lunar module a little too small. But we're not gonna let that set us back.

Stan: How'd that happen?

Agent Bostick: Are you good at math?

Stan: Yeah.

Agent Bostick: Do you get a perfect 100 on every test?

Stan: No.

Agent Bostick: Okay.

And why, for instance, are we bombing the Vietnamese but sending food to “starving Vietnamese children”? 

There are loving odes to sixties TV shows and recreations of news shows and the threat of getting hard swats on the ass for insubordination in school. Dodge ball, soft ball, and Stan’s storytelling during an oral report are as engaging as his training scenes at NASA and his flight to the moon. 

Linklater also reminded me of a couple of other things. We were outside all the time. In an analog world, we kids were set loose to explore, create, play, and fight. There’s a passing line about how we never quite died from our derring-do and while I am grateful for how far we have come to set mechanisms in place to mitigate child endangerment, I am just as grateful for the more dodgy aspects of my play-time that came very close to the precipice of serious injury. 

“I guess I was what you'd call a fabulist, which is just a nicer way of saying persistent liar.” That’s from grown up Stan, but I guarantee you that most Texans with any storytelling capacity could probably meet that definition.

I could whinge on about the nature of the unreliable narrator and maybe spread some palaver about the nature of memory and the intersection of what we experience as children with greater historical forces, but really, I couldn’t do any better than the movie.

Stan’s oldest sister raises questions about racism, the Vietnam War, and doubting if the space race is the most effective use of resources. This is much to the chagrin of her parents (particularly her father, who works at NASA). 

As for Stan’s actual flight, it goes off without a hitch! Linklater glosses over and through it initially, but revisits and weaves it into the fabric of the actual journey in brilliant cross-cutting. Rewatching a capsule review of the Gemini and Apollo missions earlier in the film and seeing Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid on the screen rekindled the excitement of getting up in the morning to watch a launch and later, in school, all of us watching on a TV wheeled out to watch more (nicely recreated in the film, by the way). 

Seeing Cronkite and his other esteemed colleagues reminded me of a time when there was weight and perspective to the news and the idea of constantly shifting “news cycles” didn’t exist. It felt as though equal weight was given to the issues of the day owing to the fact that news programs weren’t seen as part of the ratings business; the broadcast networks offered news as a service. It wouldn’t be until the 80s before news media evolved into the circus of a revolving door of whatever issues draw eyes to the screen and foment rage in the blood. 

It’s pretty easy to see that Linklater’s little look back struck some sweet mnemonic nerve endings with me. I’d be really curious to see how someone born twenty or thirty years later would interpret this film. Would it strike them as fabulist? Or corny? Would the simpler technology - from the toasters to the computers at NASA - strike them as not real or simply antique? Would they share the communal apprehension and distrust of adults that some of us did? I am rather inclined to say they would on this last night. Part of being a kid is watching closely what is said in the light of the actions that follow. “Do as I say, not as I do” was a not unheard refrain.

And for sure, I suppose the tech would be interesting, perhaps, in the same way that I find early manual moving type presses fascinating. But let’s face it, childhood is a strange time for completely different reasons that adulthood is. Everything is fresh, new. If we lose that sensibility in our later years, we have grown old indeed. In childhood, it’s obviously possible that NASA would come calling and pick you to fly to the moon. In adulthood, other possibilities await. 

“Apollo 10 1/2” offers a wealth of insight into memory and how it builds the present. It also offers a treasure trove of how imagination enriches the present and the past. In these aspects, it is very much of a piece with “Dazed and Confused”, “Everybody Wants Some!” and even “Boyhood” in witnessing how magical and weird childhood can be.