This is a guest post by Dr. Todd Brady, Assistant Professor of Ministry & Vice President for University Ministries.
First Man is appropriately titled. Damien Chazelle’s movie chronicling NASA’s efforts to lead the United States to be the first to put a man on the Moon is more about the man who went there than it is about the race to get there or about the Moon on which he eventually walked.
Before a joint session of Congress in 1961, President John F. Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” President Kennedy was referring to the Moon race’s expense for the country. Armstrong could never have realized how great the cost would be for him personally.
Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong, who led Apollo 11’s Moon Landing on July 20, 1969. Armstrong’s wife, Janet, is played by Clarie Foy. Gosling and Foy do a fine job of expressing what must have been the myriad of intense human emotions surrounding such an occupation. Neil Armstrong is portrayed trying to balance an almost obsessive ambition of lunar pursuits with the daily responsibilities of family life. Watching astronaut friends around her losing their husbands in space race accidents which occurred all too frequently, Janet is seen as a wife who is rightfully frustrated and continuously anxious about her husband’s safety.
First Man is a reminder that there is a cost to achievement. Sure, Neil Armstrong has his name in the history books, but at what cost did the achievement come? Early in the movie, Armstrong’s 2-year-old daughter, Karen, dies of a brain tumor. There is certainly nothing he could have done to prevent her illness or death, but the film seems to suggest that her death fuels his passion to reach the Moon at any cost. One can’t help but watch the movie and wonder if his passion might have been a reckless obsession.
Neil and Janet Armstrong went on to have another child, but Neil Armstrong’s infatuation with becoming the first man on the Moon may have caused him to have what some would say is an unhealthy approach to his own marriage and to the fatherhood of his two boys. The movie does not explicitly tell us, but it does suggest it. Collateral damage often comes with one’s striving after any accomplishment. There is always a price to pay.
First Man seems to be not so much about Armstrong’s striving for the Moon, but about his striving after fulfillment. We all have our “Moons”—those extraordinary things we would like to accomplish—those hopes, dreams and significant endeavors. Often, we think that if we will just make it to that desired place of achievement (in Armstrong’s case, the Moon), then we will finally find fulfillment and everything will be worth it. But sometimes, we arrive at our desired goal and look back only to realize what we lost in our efforts to get there.
Fulfillment is found not in what we accomplish for ourselves, but in what has been accomplished for us.
The movie does not mention the actions of Buzz Aldrin who went to the Moon with Armstrong. While sitting in the spacecraft before walking out to the surface of the Moon, Aldrin “reached into [his] personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which [he] had written the words of Jesus: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.’ [He] poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the Moon . . . . [He] silently read the Bible passage as [he] partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity [he] had been given.” (Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin, 2009) This is a meaningful moment the movie failed to capture.
On the return voyage to Earth, Aldrin read Psalm 8:1-3 over the radio. For all the world to hear, he said, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest him?” For Aldrin, going to the Moon was not about him.
After Armstrong’s Moon adventure, he returns to Earth, and along with Buzz Aldin and Michael Collins, he is immediately whisked into quarantine for three weeks. The movie ends not with major chords of crescendo where Armstrong and his wife jubilantly celebrate his recent accomplishment. Rather the movie ends quietly with each of them silently and pensively staring at one another through the Quarantine Room glass. They say not a word. Each touches the glass, the movie ends and the credits roll. One is left with the feeling that there’s got to be more.
