For All Mankind (1989) & Artificial Distortion

I was not alive when men walked on the Moon. Nor, do I imagine, were you. My parents hadn’t even been born by the end of the Apollo program, which launched its final Moon mission over fifty years ago. Anyone old enough to remember it would be pushing sixty by now, and anyone who was truly there is unanimously elderly or dead. The events therein enter a strange bit of cultural liminality: an increasingly distant past, not yet old history but rapidly consigned to producing no further firsthand accounts.

Not that we’ll strictly need them, of course. If you want to know something about the Apollo program, it’d be quicker to list the information you can’t find. There are gigabytes (terabytes to the world of 1969) of archived materials, from technical documents to full audio recordings of most every Apollo expedition from beginning to end. Every transmission, picture, video, and logistical component of mankind’s trip to the moon is more or less secured for open perusal.

If you want to experience the gravity of Apollo 11, or see the averted horrors of Apollo 13, or even witness our final pilgrimage via Apollo 17, you can do so in real time; if you want to experience the plans for a lost future where Apollo 11 didn’t make it back at all, go ahead; if you want to know how the public reacted to these things, positively or negatively, you have everything from comprehensive news archives to Gil Scott-Heron’s (still relevant) spoken poem titled Whitey on the Moon.

There is, for most of us, no memory at all. Just as many of us lack tangible memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis or Kennedy’s assassination or even Beatlemania— these things persist in innumerably complex forms, gradually weaving themselves into the tapestries of time until our reminders of them come not from survivors but surviving evidence. An endless series of superseding images where “present” moments become past moments in the same moment you’ve started cataloguing them.

Remnants of these pasts, much like literal ghosts, cannot seem to appear in photos without looking more than a little haunted. The Necronomicon put it best: That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.

For All Mankind is a documentary that makes a striking choice in depicting the Apollo program and everything it implied. It isn’t a movie about a single Moon landing, but the Moon landing; the singular, mystical Moon journey abstracted into a sequence of videos and voices from Apollo 7 to Apollo 17 — even a few clips from the earlier Gemini program sneak in. All of this material, largely comprising an aforementioned archive of footage shot between 1968 and 1972, has been arranged in montage to create the illusion of linearity.

Subsequently, the film is unconcerned with “facts” as they might typically be reiterated. Our journey to the Moon was an absurdly technical, wildly complex series of accomplishments — literal rocket science, among a dozen other things. For All Mankind not only leaves aside concerns of scientific context, but even discards basic principles of continuity as history itself bends to a specific emotional texture.

It is the feeling of the thing, not the events governing its physical existence, that the movie aims to recall. It’s a brilliant bit of suggestion, and yet not entirely invisible. It feels designed to draw attention to its own incongruence; even Kennedy’s famous Moon speech, which opens the movie, is altered to just slightly modify the words he says. It forces a little shard of glass into your brain: Did he really say it? Does that feel right?

For All Mankind is a moment distorted, as all other moments are, by memory. Seeing it in this format, drawn from such an abundance of tangible facts outlining its existence, creates a feeling of artificial unreality that complements the facts themselves. It exudes a hazy quality, like a dream whose strangeness is concealing the qualities of a nightmare.

The interviewed astronauts whose speech creates a partial soundscape — one completed by Brian Eno’s indescribable score, which is recognized today as the album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks — are never named or cut to during the film itself, melding them together. They speak plainly, their speech clearly curated in such a way that only allows their raw feelings and primordial thoughts to reach us.

They are like The Goonies or Stand by Me kids: indistinct capital Boys on an adventure away from home. They know they serve as representatives of humanity, but what does that really make them? The astronaut stops being recognizable as soon as its helmet is on, becoming a living symbol of things incarnate, sent on a current of prayers and numbers and dreams and dials. Concepts personified, like a kind of collective fantasy so widely hallucinated that it becomes real simply because we expect it to be.

Their thoughts are, to an extent, predictable. They are frequently in wonder, of course. They wax poetic about how beautiful the Earth is, and how much it communicates the sanctity of human life on our wonderful little dot. This is all very true and beautiful, but as they lament, they cannot stay in orbit around the Earth for very long.

Apollo had a destination.

As they get closer to the Moon and farther from the Earth, other things occupy their thoughts. They talk about the meal plans and the “crude system” that allows them to go to the bathroom. They talk about how beautiful the Earth looks from afar, even as a blackness beyond conception steals more and more of their view. They talk about how each incredible image glanced out of their porthole windows is a slippery, transient thing, superposed with yet more and more heretofore impossible imagery until memory, as it does, finally fails them.

Really, what is it like to remember going to the Moon? Not the things you recollect, but the process of recollection itself. Only a tiny fraction of astronauts returned to the Moon more than once, and a lot of them barely got to hang around for more than a few hours if they touched down at all. Such a memory is obviously potent, but it’s also little more than a moment. How does it feel to be twenty or thirty years removed from it? How about fifty?

To have this thing so obviously and completely define your life, when the preparation it required might feel even more vivid than the event itself; to be a part of a shrinking, stagnant population of people who did something incredible, only made truly legendary by the fact that they decided to arbitrarily stop doing it fifty years ago. There are no successors. There is just you. I wonder if the memory of it is like my own memory of being in an interesting place once — maybe a friend’s weird house or a specifically notable hotel room — and knowing consciously, on some level, that a part of me will always be here when I’m tired or bored or dreaming.

In For All Mankind, we linger with astronauts predominantly in their downtime. Their brains are always occupied by work, but there’s only so much you can do in the three days it takes to even get to the Moon. What creeps into those absences of activity are idle thoughts. Many of them, we discover, relate to dying. It might be the single most reoccurring image that fills the absence of scenery. This makes sense; they are not depressing or dangerous visions but simple, standard concerns of the job.

For an astronaut, death is never very far at all.

The potential cost of space travel was demonstrated fully early in the Apollo program, when the astronauts of Apollo 1 met an unimaginably excruciating end without even leaving the ground. Their horrifying screams and immolated, charred suits (the only thing resembling a body to recover) are forever a part of the same archive that holds mankind’s first steps on the moon. I do not advise seeking out this material, however useless that warning may be. For me, once was enough.

The enduring myth that always underlines such a tragic loss of human life is one about the necessary cost of progressive science. Such a myth holds less water in reality; the deaths were preventable and the top brass at NASA caused them by cutting corners and covering their ears when they heard concerns they didn’t much like. One can take some comfort, at the very least, in the realization that early deaths on the ground likely prevented later deaths on the Moon.

Like a dream, reality in For All Mankind is an encroaching force. Only one scene in the movie is truly “tense,” where a brief interlude briefly mixes in some panicked material from Apollo 13, itself perhaps the closest we’ve ever come to leaving corpses in space. An error flashes and sudden activity follows until, finally, we are assured that everything is okay. The Moon journey continues even as we remember a specific Moon journey that didn’t.

We are reminded that the toll of existing in such an inhuman environment is just that: existing, such that no barrier stands between you and the outside. A sensation so ethereal that it suffocates you and boils your blood and burns your skin. A feeling so beautiful that it tortures your body into brain death, followed by death in its entirety. I often imagine a reality, not too different from our own, where Apollo has made the night sky indistinguishable from a charnel house.

And the Moon, of course. Imagine looking at the Moon and knowing, somewhere in your brain, that you’re looking at an orbiting dead body. Had Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong gotten well and truly stranded on the Moon, there would be no rescucing them. Aldrin and Armstrong knew this well, though they might still have found themselves a little surprised by just how quickly the communications to Earth would be cut. Of all the American presidents inclined to listen to the final words of dying men, Richard Nixon might be the most apt to stick a hose in a drowning man’s mouth just to shut him up.

It is easy to express why space is very, very scary. Scale alone is menacing, both humbling and harrowing. The Moon, to me, is a much stranger object of terror. When it finally appears in For All Mankind, it’s like an abstract pattern that slowly swallows up the non-scenery of space until the camera, now perilune, can do little but show us a disarmingly different kind of nothing.

Pockmarked with craters and seen so closely, the chalky greyness of the lunar landscape is alienating in the most literal sense of the word. These are not the strange alien landscapes of pulp science fiction, where a popular depiction of the Moon was as a richly detailed place filled with large mushrooms and humanesque aliens or perhaps even humans themselves, hiding just out of sight from our telescopes. It’s desolate in reality, but not in an earthly, hardpan desert sort of way. It commands its own series of words: lunar, moonly, waxing gibbous.

Here’s a fun fact: when the astronauts of Apollo 11 came home, they had to sit in quarantine for three weeks. Nobody could be 100% sure that there weren’t microorganisms or toxins on the Moon until somebody touched it and came back. There are fairly large portions of NASA press material designed to reassure the public that, should astronauts bring an alien virus back to Earth, they’ll catch it before the general population is exposed. Probably.

So there was the belief, however small, that something on the surface of the Moon itself would contradict everything that centuries of telescopic evidence had suggested. As we know, there was nothing of the sort. The Moon is a creepily sterile place — we typically find more earthly qualities on Mars than our closest celestial body. This closeness creates a connection we don’t have with, say, Mercury. Find any culture and you’ll find a thousand pieces of mythology about the lunar surface, from polytheistic deities to lunar pareidolia; magic and mystery; worship and fear.

And then comes the Moon itself, so unquestionably awe-inspiring and yet so blank. This thing, so personified and venerated and quantified over thousands of years by hundreds of human cultures, takes on a different kind of power. I struggle to describe what it is: something so close and yet so distinctly far away that we invent words (cislunar) just to describe the distance between us and it. If I want a clear picture of it, I can get thousands. But what do they communicate? No archive can hold the answer among its materials; it is past, present, future, and something else entirely.

The Moon spins, but it spins in such a way that the same side is always visible from Earth. Nobody saw the “dark” side of the Moon until 1959, when a spacecraft finally orbited around and got a picture of it. This being 1959, it wasn’t a great one — something lost to us now is how much of the Space Race was glimpsed by people back on Earth through a haze of static and scanlines and noise, such that these things became the texture of space itself.

They communicate something else entirely. I encourage you to look at what they saw for yourself.

The astronauts depicted in For All Mankind process the Moon with their usual species of poetic eloquence. What they do most frequently is place the Moon in humanity’s image. They think of themselves not as aliens, but welcomed visitors, like men finally finding an expected home under the starless sky.

As always, something lurks underneath. One astronaut has a dream, redescribed in the film, that comes close to uncovering what might be lingering below the surface. In it, he and his partner discover a set of tracks leading across the lunar landscape. Mission Control gives them permission to follow the trail. At the other end of it, they find astronauts in the exact same gear as themselves. They sit motionlessly, somehow serene. Dead. One moves to flip one of their visors up: below it is his own face, just as the other one has the face of his partner. They have discovered their own corpses on the moon.

Unable to fit entire dead bodies into the lunar lander, they return to Earth with pieces of their suits. Those pieces are dated to be around 100,000 years old. They have both, in some form, been sitting timelessly deceased on the Moon for one hundred centuries. The dream ends.

The astronaut who gives this account isn’t identified in For All Mankind, but I know him well enough: Charles Duke of Apollo 16, the youngest person to ever walk on the Moon. As the story goes, he had the dream a few months before the mission itself and only talked about it publicly years later. Nobody knew about it but him.

There’s a moment captured during Apollo 16 where Duke, for no particular reason, seems to scan the lunar horizon. It’s as if he’s expecting to find something.

Like footprints.

We see patterns in expressionless things — human patterns. There is a Sun God, a Sea God, a Death God, and yes, there is almost always a Moon God. Nobody would say the Moon is in the “uncanny valley,” and yet we can’t help but see faces and deities and concepts reflected from its surface to the Earth. The Moon, like the very astronauts upon it, is a concept personified.

If such a concept has a bottom, it might be something akin to a funhouse mirror. You see what you expect to see, but not exactly as you expect to see it. There is a disfiguring quality to the image, such that it becomes a tiny bit startling. As a kid, it’s common to see media that depicts the Moon with a face that winks and smiles and even talks. I never liked it, and moreover, I usually found it horrifying. The closest I can come to articulating why is that I didn’t trust it, as if the Moon itself was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

Astronauts experience something stranger. The distortion touches them and changes them, just as it touched and changed us; just as it has touched everything for thousands of years, whether as Selene, Sin, Luna, the Moon rabbit, Máni, Chang’e, Tēcciztēcatl, or the Man in the Moon. But no response is provoked on the surface of the thing itself except perhaps in fragments of sensations that no archive of Apollo can hold: to squint until, so far from anything resembling home, you see something inhumanely human.

One remembers the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey, likely just as well as many of the astronauts did. What Dave finds at the end of his cosmic journey is beyond description — searing and intense and loud and everywhere — until it becomes uncomfortably descriptive. The secret, perhaps to everything, is hidden behind a simple, relatively human bedroom, where he sees himself becoming a victim of time until he becomes the people he sees and finally dies of old age and becomes reborn.

His new form is very recognizable: he has become a fetus.

Before long, the astronauts have to leave. Their return is not covered in For All Mankind. The dream, in all its wondrous strangeness and eerie illogic, is henceforth over. We wake up from a midday nap, completely removed from our sense of time, and blearily face the world as they did. Astronauts are human, and when the journey is over and the helmets are off they aren’t terribly different from the rest of us, at least outwardly. They pursue a career in politics, write books, get divorced, become involved in controversy, take up painting, become reclusive, and every now and then they get a few new medals to hang somewhere… At least, if they can find any empty space on the wall to hold them.

They have slipped the surly bonds of the Earth, but they can linger no further. They’ll become lost if they do. They return home, having touched the face of God, to die as mortal men.

Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the Moon, and remains the very last surviving member of Apollo 11. For him, the 70s were a lost decade. Just a few years after touching the surface of another world, he was battling alcoholism and depression, selling used cars due to his therapist’s suggestion that he try a “regular job.” His eventual recovery is a happy note, but Aldrin had to help himself. The public largely ignored him, and NASA marginalized him; he was a living legend, and living legends don’t get addicted or sad or go to therapy. They sit like wax statues, as unchanging as the surface of the Moon itself, or they’re thrown away.

Perhaps the ghost that haunts For All Mankind is reality itself. It is an excellent movie that, in emphasizing the most ethereal aspects of the journey, causes absent elements to glow like neon signs. The curation merely draws attention to what has been left out, with American exceptionalism and nationalism and all of those selfsame little devils casting a sickly glow through the cracks of jubilant cosmic beauty.

It’s a reminder that Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was feared as much as it was revered. If the Astronaut was a symbol of faceless hope, then the Cosmonaut was a faceless boogeyman, emerging from the Iron Curtain with technological horrors that would plunge the world into ruin.

It’s a reminder that one of the few names etched on the timeless surface of another world is that of utterly disgraced former president Richard Nixon, who inherited a dream he didn’t much care about as soon as it stopped serving his own ego.

It’s a reminder that, while Apollo soared through the skies, Black people continued to be starved and beaten and murdered on the ground, as they always have been and still are. It was Sylvia Drew Ivie who said that “if America fails to end discrimination, hunger, and malnutrition, then we must conclude that America is not committed to ending discrimination, hunger, and malnutrition.”

“Walking on the moon proves that we do what we want to do as a nation.”

Upon taking humanity’s first step on the Moon, Neil Armstrong said the following words, destined to reverberate through culture until the last person forgets them: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Only Armstrong would later insist that he hadn’t said that, at least not quite. He maintained that he had instead said “one small step for a man,” which has a slightly different meaning. This isn’t a common misquote, because there’s really no auditory hint of an “a” in the original audio. Armstrong would later say that it doesn’t sound like he said it, and he’s not sure if he actually did; someone would later note a transmission lapse in the original recording that may have concealed such a short sound entirely, but there’s no way to confirm it.

A blip in transmission, or a blip in human memory. Perhaps they’re one and the same.

We look up in the sky and see some corner of another world that is forever mankind.