The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)
The heart of the film is Yeager and the iconography of the Western. Out in the Mojave Desert, in some godforsaken place, there are a group of pilots whose job it is to test the fastest planes on the planet, risking their lives for measly pay, and spending their leisure time in a saloon. Yeager, riding his horse, comes over the crest and surveys the orange X1, its tail burning, like some sort of beast awaiting its next victim. The next day, ribs broken from a riding accident, he prepares to pilot it past Mach 1, and it is shrouded in steam, like a locomotive in the Western, a harbinger of civilisation and change from the old order. Yeager is the archetypal Western hero. Calm, resolute, and laconic in the face of these challenges, he has a noble, principled bearing, but is ultimately superseded by younger, hungrier characters who ride on the wave of change.
These new men - derisively labelled a bunch of college-trained chimpanzees - take on the challenge of the space program. Put through the ringer, their lives essentially become not their own, but the property of the United States. It's to Kaufman's credit that their situation is so clearly and humorously portrayed, and that their own core nobility and bravery remains unsullied by the three-ring circus that surrounds them. There are the German scientists, who would much rather works with the chimps. The NASA hierarchy, who would much rather work with the chimps. The press corps, who clamber over fences, climb trees, do anything, essentially, to get access to the astronauts, or their wives, and whose presence is accompanied by locust-like sounds of their devices. There's LBJ, desperately chasing after a network covered moment with the wives, but settling for a grotesque stadium extravaganza with the seven astronauts.
It's this extravaganza that sets the ending for the film. Intercut with the hoopla and absurdism that the seven are bombarded with, we get Yeager and his last steed, as he reaches for the stars, the blue of the atmosphere fading ever so slightly into the black of space, before he tumbles down to earth. It's clear that the essential nature of these men remained unchanged, and unsullied, but the media manufacture is sad and deluded.
The film failed at the box office, but it's a brilliant, almost Gonzo-like take on the story of the prehistory and beginnings of the space program, and the spin and bullsh*t of NASA and the media that contrived to shroud these men in the trappings of faux-pageantry and prefab heroism. Kaufman's cheekily iconoclastic, subversive, revisionist and damn hilarious vision of the space program undermines all the sanctimonious rubbish and sentimentality that something like
Apollo 13 foists upon us. Instead, there is a montage of the astronauts-in-training intercut with chimpanzees doing exactly the same exercises. Or of Alan Shepherd really needing to wee, waiting on the launchpad, while Kaufman gives us liquid sight gags: a man hosing the pad, the wives pouring coffee, the control room scientists drinking water and using the bathroom. It's seriously like a screwball biopic, as if Sturges and Anthony Mann colluded to make one last grand, crazed eulogy to heroism and hero manufacture, and it's amazing.
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (T. Minh-ha Trinh, 1989)
An 'experimental' documentary, using various media - photos, text, slo-mo archival footage, acted interviews, song, overlapping voices - to explore the situation of Vietnamese women in Vietnam and the United States. There are multiple layers to this exploration. While concerning itself with the history and experience of Vietnamese women, pre-war and post-war, Trinh also raises issues the politics of identity, translation, fiction, the interview and portrayal.
The first third of the film is essentially made up of abstracted archival footage, the black-and-white frames crawling along as women enter the frame, a poem, a song, an interview overdubbed; photos, a single point framed in a blackened screen, then expanded, or tracked across, from face to face; interviews, re-enacted and stylised, with the Vietnamese women speaking English, but portraying interviews taken in Vietnam by Trinh. What we get from these techniques is a picture of women that is intimate, truthful, and fully aware of the artificiality of its project.
There is the image of the woman and here is her reality. Sometimes the two do not go well together! The truth of experience and real life is juxtaposed with what is, or was expected of women - even revolutionary women - in Vietnam. Of the four virtues (dignity, proper expression, proper appearance and domestic ability) and the three submissions (follow the father before marriage, the husband during marriage, and the son after marriage) that women were meant to follow. A lady first, then a maid, and finally a monkey as the women laughingly put it. They might very well be that way for the first two submissions, one admits, but they're not too sure about following the last.
The men want to keep the better share of the cake. They hold the key positions of power, women only get the leftovers… they have made of us heroic workers, virtuous women, and we are good mothers, good wives, heroic fighters. Ghost women with no humanity! … The image of the woman is magnified like that of a saint!There is uncertainty, though. Is a translated interview a written or spoken object? And grappling with representation, truth and fiction drives the mid-section. Trinh narrates
"Interview: an antiquated device of documentary. Truth is selected, reviewed, displaced, and speech is always tactical… So how many interviews in the overall? Whom do you choose? In one case, 150 interviews were made for the film. Five were retained in the final version… You can talk. We can cut, trim, tidy up. The game often demands a response to the content, rarely to the way that content is framed."The final third is about Vietnamese women in America
"adjusting to their new lives, mastering elevators and escalators, learning wristwatch-type punctuality, taming vending machines, distinguishing dog's canned foods from human's canned foods, and understanding that it was not permissible to wander the streets, the hotels, or anywhere outside in their pyjamas." They talk about their role in the film, and comment on the film itself.
It's great, intense cinema. The re-enacted interviews brought to mind
24 City, and while Trinh may not have the cinematic nous (or budget!) of Jia, her film has its own unique identity and energy, and was immensely enjoyable, and wonderfully thought-provoking. The great thing about it is that it succeeds not only in its political and philosophical interrogations, but also as a document of the voices and images of Vietnamese women. Fantastic.
Verdict: it's a choice between men and women, two different representations of heroism, but shared themes of cutting through the bullsh*t and having some fun while you're at it.
Surname Viet Given Name Nam will move on, with bitter regret at having to kick out something as magnificently funny as
The Right Stuff. Ah well, it's just a game. The real winner is cinema.