Star Bound №8: Making Art From Bad TV and Baseball Cards
Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 1/2
What to make of Richard Linklater’s new movie Apollo 10 ½? It’s a rock in a bucket of rhinestones, to start with. With little concern for the basics of Hollywood hitmaking in the new century, Linklater has fashioned a film with little or no plot, using an offbeat species of animation called rotoscoping, with no sex, drugs, or violence, and not a single pretty face in sight. Neither shoot ’em up, creature feature, nor romcom, Apollo 10 ½ is an extended parade of periodicity, a nostalgic almost-autobiography about growing up beside NASA’s Apollo program in the late sixties. We see kids playing kickball at Ed White Elementary School, kids playing Swing the Statue, kids watching TV and grooving to the Archies, the cartoon pseudo-band that slathered the airwaves in their particular brand of inane sweetness with “Sugar, Sugar.” Parents meanwhile grapple with the significance of the coming mission to the Moon and how to get their offspring to appreciate the accomplishment. “I just want him to be able to tell his grandkids he saw the first steps on the moon,” the main character’s father says at one point, of his sleeping son.
But without historical or scientific context, the only way an eight-year-old can appreciate the event is by imagining it, and this is what our protagonist, Stan, does with a vengeance, dreaming up what comes as close to a plot as we get with Apollo 10 ½. We watch as he’s recruited by NASA white shirts named Kranz and Bostick (call-outs to real-life flight controllers Gene Kranz and Jerry Bostick) to land a lunar module on the moon because, as Bostick says, NASA built the LM “a little too small.” The kid soon begins intensive astronaut training…or does he? It doesn’t matter. As Stan slips in and out of his reverie, the world spins on: a trip to Galveston in the bed of an open pickup; 4th of July with bottle rocket wars; hunting for hippies on a college campus downtown.
Linklater has clearly done his research. There’s a spoken reference to The Singing Wheel, a pre-Outpost beer and pizza joint NASA folks favored, and a visual nod to The Dutch Kettle, a tiny diner on NASA Road One. Stan manages to land the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, the so-called “Flying Bedstead,” where the mighty Neil Armstrong could not. And one of Stan’s simulated landings on the moon is interrupted by a “1201 program alarm,” which of course became a real issue when Apollo 11’s lunar module approached the Sea of Tranquility later that summer. But the movie is generally more concerned with more mundane minutiae. There are extended discussions of bologna sandwiches, sitcom reruns, and elementary school disciplinary methods. We see the Astrodome, and, in some of the best animation in the film, its “moon-suited” groundskeepers and giant scoreboard. Stan and his siblings take a trip to Astroworld, which involves a dissertation on the Alpine Sleighride, and we gaze longingly over Stan’s shoulder at the cover of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s album “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” — as tantalizing a vision now as it was back then.
Any kid who grew up in or near Houston in 1969 can relate. Linklater was raised in Huntsville, seventy miles to the north of the city, so it’s not surprising that his depiction of El Lago, which lies twenty-five miles south of Houston, isn’t entirely accurate. His neighborhood scenes, for example, resemble Clear Lake City more than El Lago. Linklater places an African-American kid in Stan’s fourth grade class. Nope. Ed White at that time was all white. We even had a George Wallace supporter among us (she lived on a street called Confederate Way), though most Ed White students were reliable Nixon supporters, for no particular reason other than that their parents told them to be. Kids at Ed White didn’t play kickball on the asphalt basketball court, but in the grassy fields south and east of the school. And why no mention of the best kickball players of the day? Discussing Ed White’s principal preoccupation without at least mentioning the playground exploits of Kevin Sullivan, Jack Roosa, and Jim Pezoldt seems negligent. Principal Les Talley did indeed administer “pops” on occasion — many occasions, actually — but I don’t recall anyone ever having to put his or her nose in a circle on a wall. Maybe that was Huntsville.
The film isn’t all great. Some of the scenes look like nicer versions of King of the Hill. Occasionally the shout-outs to pop culture (especially to awful TV shows) seem like filler. Nevertheless, the whole warm bath of nostalgia is fun to wallow in. Would someone raised in Louisville, Kentucky feel the same way about Apollo 10 ½? What about someone raised in Houston in the nineties, thirty years after the events depicted in the film? Probably not. The El Lago of Apollo 10 ½ was a sunlit but small pocket of American existence, unique in time and place. Linklater hasn’t made a hit, but something stranger and in some ways more admirable: a confession, a paean, a Remembrance of Things Past in bubblegum pinks and baseball blues.
Stan’s expansive dream life and America’s technological ambitions rocket along in tandem until they finally intersect in Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface. Or, wait: Is it Neil, or really Stan? My guess is that it’s all of us, Stan and everyone else, taking in the bone-white moonscape of the kingdom of sleep and uttering Buzz Aldrin’s description: “Magnificent desolation.” Who needs a plot? The bigger story — the incredible story — is what really happened on July 20, 1969. Linklater may have flunked out of Jerry Bruckheimer’s School of Schlock, and his Apollo 10 ½ is probably too narrowly targeted to be a commercial success, but for those of us Houston kids who lived in the bull’s eye, it’s a gift — and a must-see.
