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Оглавление5. THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S PROJECT MOONBASE
Whenever I teach one of my infrequent science fiction classes, I begin by showing my students two short films: Project Moonbase (1953) and La Jetée (1962). These films, I explain, exemplify the two extreme points of the spectrum of science fiction: the juvenile melodrama and plodding didacticism of Project Moonbase, and the avant-garde lyricism and haunting imagery of La Jetée. And those works prepare my students rather nicely for the final movie I show, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—a film, after all, that is not unlike two reels of Project Moonbase spliced on to one reel of La Jetée.
However, the announced reasons I offer my students for showing Project Moonbase are disingenuous; for if my only objective was to display the cinematic equivalent of the original Gernsbackian paradigm—adventure stories with scientific explanations and logical predictions—there are any number of movies that could serve that purpose, including Destination Moon (1950), Riders to the Stars (1954), and Conquest of Space (1955). But while those films have their momens, only Project Moonbase fascinates me—because it is the only piece of celluloid I know of that even partially reflects the writing style and idiosyncratic philosophy of its noted co-author, Robert A. Heinlein.
Of course, this movie has generally not been valued—or even noticed—by filmgoers, Heinlein scholars, or film critics. After being thrown together from an unsold television pilot entitled Ring Around the Moon, written by Heinlein and producer Jack Seaman, the film was only briefly released, and has been rarely seen since; the only time it has been shown on television, I believe, was as part of the Canned Film Festival series of avowedly awful movies hosted by comedienne Laraine Newman. One scholar who prepared a definitive Heinlein bibliography, Marie Guthrie, reported that she had never been able to see the film.
Also, unlike Heinlein’s earlier film Destination Moon, Project Moonbase did not become a Heinlein short story or the subject of a Heinlein article; indeed, by all accounts, Heinlein was dissatisfied with the film and to my knowledge never mentioned it in print. Most critical studies of Heinlein—including Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension (1968), George Slusser’s Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (1976), and The Classic Years of Robert A. Heinlein (1977), and Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology Robert A. Heinlein (1978)—do not even mention the movie, while H. Bruce Franklin’s usually thorough Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) dismisses it in less than a page.
In reference books and studies of science fiction films, Project Moonbase is similarly neglected, either omitted altogether—as in books ranging from John Baxter’s pioneering Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970) to James Gunn’s The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988)—or subjected to brief criticism: in Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978), John Brosnan summarizes the plot and comments that “it’s not a very good film,”20 and in his entry on the movie for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) Brosnan says that its “ambitious idea...is undermined by melodramatics, poor performances, and sets designed for tv.”21 John Stanley’s Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide (1988) finds the film “uninteresting” and “pseudo-scientific,”22 and Phil Hardy’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (1984) complains of its “melodramatic plot” that “contains everything that the makers of Destination Moon tried to avoid.”23 Just about the only positive comment on Project Moonbase comes in Bruce Lanier Wright’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters, 1950-1964 (1993), where, after repeating some familiar criticisms, he says that the film “deserves points for a more adult approach.”24
A recurring theme in these curt commentaries is that Project Moonbase does not display any of the influence of Robert A. Heinlein: Stanley asserts that Heinlein’s “style and themes are not to be found” in the movie (271); David Wingrove’s entry on the film for his Science Fiction Film Source Book (1985) says the film “has little of the zest of Heinlein’s written work of the period”;25 Brosnan in Future Tense suspects that “not much remained of Heinlein’s original” in the shooting script (77); Wright says that “The movie’s overall tone bears little resemblance to Heinlein’s literary work” (28); and Hardy concludes that “the film lacks the sense of confidence that even Heinlein’s worst novels have in abundance” (141).
Still, Hardy does concede that the film is “only of interest for a few of the odd quirks that Heinlein introduced” (141); and while I would agree that Project Moonbase is a terrible movie by conventional aesthetic standards, my own argument, based on repeated viewings of the film, would be that this film is far odder and more distinctive than Hardy’s comment would indicate. Furthermore, in contrast to the bland and rather anonymous Destination Moon, I would maintain, despite the opinions cited above, that the oddities of Project Moonbase can be directly related to themes and concerns expressed in Heinlein’s written science fiction; and for that reason, if only for that reason, the film merits closer consideration than it has previously received.
The movie must first be understood in the overall context of Heinlein’s career at the time. Between 1945 and 1958, Heinlein primarily wanted, as he later reported in Expanded Universe, “to break out from the limitations and low rates of pulp science-fiction magazines into anything and everything: slicks, books, motion pictures, general fiction, specialized fiction not intended for SF magazines, and nonfiction.”26 Whenever Heinlein first entered a new market, he made himself appear very eager to please, and his early efforts in each field seem to conform completely to its usual conventions. However, as soon as Heinlein achieved some success in a given market, he began to push at the boundaries of those conventions, gradually moving toward an approach that combined a conventional surface with unconventional undercurrents. Thus, as is frequently discussed, Heinlein’s juvenile novels gradually moved from the simplistic melodrama of Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and Space Cadet (1948) to the complex tensions of The Star Beast (1954) and Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958); and two of his later stories for the mass-market magazines, which both appeared in December, 1949, had unexpected features: “Delilah and the Space Rigger,” as H. Bruce Franklin notes, “shows a relatively high level of consciousness about one form of the oppression of women”;27 and “The Long Watch,” though originally published in The American Legion Magazine, surprisingly criticizes the military, since the menace in the story is a planned military takeover of the government.
This pattern of initial acquiescence to generic conventions, and later efforts to bend and stretch those conventions, can be seen in Heinlein’s two screenplays. Destination Moon is primarily a straightforward and unchallenging depiction of a first flight to the Moon, with few disturbing elements or unexpected touches; Project Moonbase, apparently a retelling of the same story with some added juvenile adventure, repeatedly offers some surprising features and dark undercurrents.
To describe what is conventional, and what is unconventional, about Project Moonbase, one could speak of a series of tensions between the apparent messages, and the actual messages, in the movie. Four of these are most prominent.
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First, there is the conflict of The ordinariness of space versus The strangeness of space. In most scenes of the movie, there is no particular effort to make the environment of space seem disorienting: as in other films of the period, the spaceship itself is a typically roomy two-story chamber, an obvious set with no discomfiting features. Once they are on the Moon, the space travelers often do not move in any peculiar way in the lower gravity, and the final scene of their marriage ceremony is thoroughly conventional.
However, other scenes reveal the influence of an author who understands just how strange life in space can be. Some of them recall scenes in Destination Moon: the facial contortions of the space travelers during the launch, the effortless lifting of massive weights in the low lunar gravity, and the soundless fall of the saboteur down a lunar mountain. Others are more innovative: when the discovery that one crew member is an enemy imposter triggers both sudden acceleration of the spaceship and a hand-to-hand battle, the fight is carried out in eerie slow motion, as heroic Major Bill Moore (Ross Ford) and the fake Dr. Wernher (Larry Johns) struggle against the force of acceleration to gain the upper hand.
The most striking scenes in the movie, however, take place during the brief visit to the space station. As soon as they disembark, Colonel Briteis (Donna Martell), Moore, and “Wernher” walk down a corridor, to be greeted by a station resident walking in the opposite direction—upside down on the ceiling—which resembles a space scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. They next walk past a sign, “Please Do Not Walk on the Walls,” an example of Heinlein humor.28 Finally, they enter a room for a discussion with the station commanders—who are seated on the opposite wall at a ninety-degree angle to them. While there is nothing impressive about the special effects involved—crudely spliced split-screen footage—these scenes do establish how disorienting it would be to live in a zero-gravity environment, and they do so far more effectively than the later and more expensive film Conquest of Space, which included extended scenes on a large space station with little attention to the effects of zero gravity.29 Wright also singled out this portion of the film for praise, saying that the “sequences set on the zero-gravity space station are rather nice....anticipating similar scenes in 2001” (28).30
More so than many other writers of the postwar period, Heinlein recognized the importance of space stations in the coming exploration of space, and his stories during this time regularly featured space stations (although often in a very minor role).31 It is appropriate, then, that Project Moonbase is, to my knowledge, the first of many films to depict a space station. And the fact that it remains, surprisingly, one of the most imaginative of those films must be credited primarily to Heinlein’s insight.
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The second conflict is Glorification of the American military versus Criticism of the American military. In many ways, to be sure, Project Moonbase presents itself as a glowing endorsement of the work of American military forces. The written prologue that scrolls down the screen proudly describes how the United States military has established a space station “as a military guardian in the sky...to consolidate the safety of the world,” and the film displays America’s triumph over evil foreign saboteurs trying to destroy the station—implicitly arguing that the participation of other nations in the space program would only cause problems. The two space travelers of the film are military officers, under the command of a general. The one civilian added to the mission, a scientist named Wernher taken along to photograph the back side of the Moon, is included, the commander tells his astronauts, exclusively as a gimmick—playing the “science angle”—in order to get the flight approved; and, since enemy agents succeed in replacing him with an imposter who almost destroys the space station, the civilian element is clearly projected as the weak link in the program. When the spaceship crashes on the Moon, orders from the Pentagon establish the site as an American military base. Thus, while other movies at the time at least gesture toward a civilian and international presence in the space program—a character in the original screenplay of Heinlein’s other film Destination Moon announces that “the only Government to control the Moon must be a sovereign government of the whole of man” (cited in Franklin 97)—Project Moonbase appears to celebrate an entirely American, and entirely military, space program as most desirable.
However, scenes in the later part of the movie seem designed to ridicule the military mind. When the stranded space travelers finally establish contact with their commanding officer, General “Pappy” Greene (Hayden Rorke), and inform him that they have unexpectedly crash-landed on the Moon, his surprise and confusion are almost comically exaggerated; he must check with his superiors, he tells them, before he can say anything at all. When he calls them back, his first announcement is that their mission has been officially reclassified as “Project Moonbase”—so their accidental landing is now cast, after the fact, as a deliberate effort to establish a base on the Moon. Only after issuing these incongruous orders does the general tell the space travelers that, by the way, vital supplies will soon be rocketed to them. Surely, the scene is designed to function as a scathing critique of the bureaucratic mind—an overt attempt to disguise a major failure by an after-the-fact renaming which makes it seem a success—and surely any space travelers in this position would be baffled and irritated by the priority given this message. (Imagine, for example, two early aviators on a pioneering military flight across the Pacific who crash on a deserted island; after desperate efforts to make contact with their superiors, the first news they receive from home is that their mission has been reclassified as “Project Pacific Island Base.”)32
This bifurcated attitude towards the military is consistent with Heinlein’s developing philosophy. On one hand, as a former Navy officer, Heinlein had obvious respect and admiration for the military life and attitudes; on the other hand, he evidenced a growing dislike for large government bureaucracies, which he saw as stultifying and repressive.33 It is only logical, then, that Heinlein would show admiration for his astronaut protagonists while seeming to ridicule their seen and unseen superior officers.34
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The third set of tensions involves The continued subjugation of women versus The new domination of women. In this area, Project Moonbase plays a more complex game, offering three distinct levels of argument: an overt, nominal commitment to feminine superiority; a poorly concealed, residual belief in masculine superiority; and a deeper, ameliorative message affirming feminine superiority within certain restraints.
First, a summary of the plot suggests the movie presents a strongly feminist viewpoint. Project Moonbase may qualify as the first—and certainly, it is one of the few—science fiction stories that depicts a woman, Colonel Briteis, as the first human in space; the same woman then becomes the commander of the first circumlunar mission, and when her ship crashes, she becomes by default the first commander of Project Moonbase. Also, the President of the United States is ultimately revealed to be a woman. Apparently, then, this is a future society when women routinely assume dominant roles.
However, three aspects of the movie undermine this proto-feminist theme and instead suggest a more traditional stance. Carefully written dialogue in the film’s early scenes withholds the information that Colonel Briteis is a woman, so it is not until she walks into the room that viewers learn her sex. That the President is a woman is also not revealed until the final scene, when she appears on television to congratulate the newlyweds. Thus, despite these revelations, the film functionally depicts a male-dominated world, with knowledge of the sex of certain major figures deliberately concealed while on-screen men act as the decision makers.
In addition, there is clearly nothing impressive about the way the women characters are depicted in Project Moonbase. Colonel Briteis consistently acts like a spoiled child, given to emotional outbursts; she is belittled by the nickname used by her male comrades, “Bright Eyes”; a comment by Major Moore indicates that she was chosen for the first manned flight solely because she only weighed ninety pounds, not because of her superior qualifications; despite her position, she is rarely observed making command decisions; in the crucial battle with the saboteur, she is merely a bystander while Moore and the imposter fight it out; and the Presidential decision to make her, and not Major Moore, the commander of the first lunar flight is revealed by the final scene to be little more than a woman’s favoritism toward a member of her own sex. Another woman character, a journalist friend of the President named Polly Prattles (Barbara Morrison) who interviews the General, provides comic relief in one scene by displaying her almost complete ignorance of space travel. As for the President herself, she is pictured as a sweet, grandmotherly sort of woman, with no particular aura of authority about her.
Most notably, the conclusion of Project Moonbase seems to overthrow previous pictures of feminine superiority, as Colonel Briteis’s new husband, Major Moore, is immediately promoted to General so that he, not she, can become the commander of Project Moonbase. It is this scene that inspires an arch comment by Franklin about the limited extent of Heinlein’s feminism: “Heinlein has no problem projecting a female pilot or even President, but when a woman relates to a man she has to know who is the boss” (98).
Despite these features of the film, however, it can still be seen as a curious affirmation of female dominance. After all, the General in charge of the space program is under the direct command of the President; she allows him to maintain apparent control over its affairs, while intervening only occasionally with direct orders, like the one which made Colonel Briteis the commander of the first lunar mission. And, it must be noted, Major Moore is promoted to be the commander of Project Moonbase only because Colonel Briteis specifically requests that promotion.
A complex and ameliorative recommendation thus emerges: women should have ultimate control over situations, both in title and in fact; but they should also stay in the background and allow men to have apparent control. In a way, then, the movie appears to affirm old clichés about “the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world,” and “behind every successful man, there is a woman”; the difference is that Heinlein grants women both official and covert power, while enjoining them from overly obvious exercise of that power. It is, then, a solution to the problem of male-versus-female dominance that grants women genuine and supreme authority, while preserving the male ego by granting men the appearance of superiority.
In keeping with the spirit of the film, then, one can anticipate that the marriage of Briteis and Moore, despite Franklin’s remark, will not produce a traditional husband-controlled family; rather, Briteis will continue to make all the decisions, even as she allows Moore to believe that he is making the decisions. And this stance arguably represents one aspect of Heinlein’s later expressed attitudes towards women, inasmuch as two later novels, I Will Fear No Evil (1970) and To Sail beyond the Sunset (1987), both feature assertive female protagonists, totally in control of their own lives, who are nevertheless willing to act subservient in the presence of men.
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The fourth and final conflict is The endorsement of traditional values versus A challenge to traditional values. The President’s final suggestion—virtually a command—that Major Moore marry Colonel Briteis seems to be not only a reaffirmation of male dominance but also a commitment to conventional morality: while an unmarried man and woman on a brief space mission might be tolerable, having such a pair serving indefinitely as sole residents of a lunar base would be an overt invitation to adultery, and therefore unacceptable in the American society of 1953. Their arranged marriage eliminates the possibility of illicit sex, and since Moore and Briteis are revealed to be secretly in love with each other, it is also an appropriate decision in a society that insists that marriage should be a matter of personal choice, not the result of someone’s directives.
Despite its apparent acceptability, however, there are provocative undercurrents in this denouément. In their earlier encounters, Moore and Briteis are constantly squabbling, in a manner that suggests an ongoing competition for the affections of their superior officer, the General. They act, then, not as would-be lovers, but as an older brother engaged in sibling rivalry with a younger sister. Such a characterization of their relationship is strongly reinforced by the fact that both Moore and Briteis regularly address the General as “Pappy,” labeling him as their father, not simply their commanding officer; and the General assumes an especially parental role in the final scenes of the film, when he has separate conversations with Moore and Briteis and gives them each his personal advice as their “Pappy.”
On a symbolic level, then, Project Moonbase is the story of an older brother and younger sister who are secretly in love with each other; and with the approval—indeed, at the urging—of their father, they finally get married and thus establish a sexual relationship. What the movie affirms, then, is not the importance of traditional marriage, but the appropriateness of incest. In particular, the film argues for a sexual relationship between an older man and a younger female relative, a theme that is also apparent in later Heinlein works. Thinly disguised incest of this sort figures in The Door into Summer (1957), where Daniel Boone Davis arranges through suspended animation to marry his twelve-year-old “niece,” Ricky; the story “—All You Zombies—’” (1959), wherein a time traveller sleeps with an earlier, female version of himself; and Time Enough for Love (1973), where Lazarus Long has sex with his young female clones. And in Heinlein’s final novel, To Sail beyond the Sunset, such incestuous love is explicitly endorsed when Maureen Smith’s husband sleeps with his daughter, with her mother’s knowledge and approval.
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It is therefore fitting that the mission of the space travelers in Project Moonbase is to photograph the dark side of the Moon, and that they ultimately crash on the dark side of the Moon, so they must walk some distance to set up a transmitter that can reach the Earth. For, by the conventional standards of its day, the film does indeed have a dark side. Apparently a straightforward affirmation of the routine of space exploration, the American military, male superiority, and conventional morality, Project Moonbase covertly argues for the strangeness of life in space, the absurdity of American military thinking, concealed female control of the government, and socially approved incest. We may never know exactly why Ring around the Moon was rejected as a television series, but it may well be that television executives could dimly perceive in the pilot that there was something disturbing about Heinlein’s vision, something that would not be appropriate in a medium whose involvement with science fiction at the time was otherwise a matter of routine juvenile fare like Captain Video (1949-1955), Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (1950-1955), and Space Patrol (1950-1955).
In sum, instead of dismissing Project Moonbase as a standard Hollywood product that suppressed all signs of Heinlein’s influence, critics should instead embrace the film as an integral part of the Heinlein canon, a film which despite its many flaws significantly prefigures attitudes about bureaucracy, women, and sex that are made explicit in later Heinlein novels. Perhaps, for those who wish to view films solely for their aesthetic appreciation, Project Moonbase will always be a film that must be endured rather than enjoyed; certainly, that is the typical response of my students who are obliged to watch it. Yet there are clearly other reasons why the film should be interesting, especially for Heinlein scholars. Worthwhile projects would include a search through the Heinlein archives for scripts that would reveal exactly how much Jack Seaman contributed to the final film, and for evidence of any further work on story or script development Heinlein might have done for the television series that was supposed to grow out of Project Moonbase. Also, although the initially released film was sixty-three-minutes long, all versions now available were cut to fifty-one minutes. Perhaps, if some enterprising scholar can track down and examine those missing twelve minutes, there will be more surprises in store for Heinlein critics.
20. John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 77. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
21. John Brosnan, “Project Moonbase,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 964.
22. John Stanley, “Project Moonbase,” Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide, Third Revised Edition (Pacifica, California: Creatures at Large Press, 1988), 271. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
23. Phil Hardy, “Project Moonbase,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, 1984 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Woodbury Press, 1986), 141. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
24. Bruce Lainer Wright, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters, 1950-1964 (Dallas, Texas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1993), 3. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
25. David Wingrove, “Project Moonbase,” Science Fiction Film Source Book, edited by Wingrove (London: Longman, 1985), 185.
26. Robert A. Heinlein, “Foreword” to “The Last Days of the United States,” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, by Heinlein (New York: Ace Books, 1980), 145.
27. H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 70. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
2828. Project Moonbase (Galaxy, 1953).
29. A similar lack of imagination can be seen in other space station films, including the Outer Limits episode “Specimen: Unknown” (1964), The Green Slime (1968), the television movie Earth II (1971), and the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999). Arguably, out of all the filmed depictions of space stations, only Project Moonbase, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Solaris (1971) display any sensitivity to the unusual characteristics of a space station environment.
30. For the record, when she hosted the film for the Canned Film Festival, as I recall, Laraine Newman also noted—facetiously, of course—that the “parallels” between Project Moonbase and 2001: A Space Odyssey were “amazing.”
31. My bibliography of science fiction works involving space stations, The Other Side of the Sky (2009), lists in addition to Project Moonbase twelve Heinlein stories and novels published before 1955—more entries involving space stations than any other writer in that period can claim.
32. In one respect, though, the feeling that the film burlesques the military mind may be the accidental result of later events: the actor playing the General, Hayden Rorke, went on to play the befuddled commander in the television comedy I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970), so it is particularly easy, I suppose, to see him as a buffoon in this movie. Still, I would argue that the comical aspects of his portrayal are to a large extent intrinsic to the film, and do not emerge simply because of the impression left by his later television role.
33. Indeed, elements of this philosophy can also be detected in Destination Moon: early scenes criticize the shortsightedness of the American government and military in failing to mount a space program, and the privately-sponsored flight to the Moon is almost halted by bureaucratic interference. However, these aspects of that film could be interpreted simply as efforts to interject a sense of drama into a narrative that otherwise has very little conflict; in Project Moonbase, a story about enemy agents trying to sabotage the American space program, there was no compelling reason to introduce criticisms of military thinking.
34. Also, while the all-American character of this space mission cannot be overlooked, the two rockets that are launched from Earth to the space station are interestingly named “Canada” and “Mexico.” At least on a metaphoric level, then, there is some international participation in the conquest of space.
