"The Right Stuff" Examination

The key image which sticks in my mind from "The Right Stuff" is Chuck Yeager on his horse. He rides over a hill and below sits the plane which he is going to try and break the Mach 1 speed barrier with. It sits like a monster below him, eerie music playing, almost as if we were suddenly transported to a horror movie. This theme is repeated throughout the film: the distances man is willing to go with technology, but also the danger it represents. One of the first things we see when "The Right Stuff" opens is a plane crashing and the subsequent funeral for the pilot. This urge to push the limits of our capabilities is a thin knife we balance on. Sometimes we fail horrifically, but sometimes we succeed. When Yeager pushes the limits of Mach 2.5, it is as if he is seeing the face of a demon. Surviving, he howls at the moon, taunting his creator with his achievements.

I thought the movie was very well done, if not a bit too long. There's such a huge breadth of material that sometimes I wondered where it would end up. The length stretched over the two and a half hour mark. Looking at Wikipedia, it is 193 minutes long (three hours and 13 minutes)! That's a long time to sit and watch something, no matter how good it is. And "The Right Stuff" is very good. The images of the planes flying through the clouds are simply breath taking. The acting is superb, the starring men and women giving their all to their roles. I was especially impressed with Ed Harris' performance. He sold the personality that is John Glenn so well that the whole audience was rooting for him. Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard was also superb. He gave the role just enough gruff and good humor that I was legitimately concerned when he got in the rocket ship. I was unfamiliar with the history of the NASA pilots, so for all I knew he was going to blow up. I liked how the movie makers played with the audience's expectations. I feel many of us today only know John Glenn's name. Most people watching might assume he was the first American in space. I certainly did.

What the director, Philip Kaufman, was trying to bring to the surface was the power of technology: it can give man so much, but it is also dangerous. The creators oscillate between the Pangloss and Pandoran scenario offered in Benjamin Barber's essay, "Three Scenarios for the Future of Technology and Strong Democracy". Will this new technology bring about the end (as represented by the test pilots crashing down to earth), or will it bring on a new age of illumination? At the onset, it's quick for the viewers to see that we are in store for another Prometheus tale; however, it is unclear whether this was perceived by the makers as a good or bad thing (I wish we would have seen the end). Early on, we see a group of technocrats sitting around a table. They are like a council in King Arthur's court trying to find a hero like Parsifal to save the Fisher King and restore the land—the king and land in this case both being America. If someone can break the speed barrier, the Americans might be able to beat the Soviets at their own game. This is a situation based on pride and honor. Whoever can get the fastest planes, or get to space first will win a symbolic victory. The United States is a dying king, wounded in his genitals by the Soviets' quick technological progression. The only way to counter this is to win a battle in the space war. Initially, the chosen knight to do this is not the one who demands to be paid, but Chuck Yeager, the pilot who accepts his destiny of tempting God. He wants to confront the "Prince of the Air", Satan, Enlil, and Zeus. Others have gone before him, only to crash down to earth like Lucifer for their vanity.

Yeager is at once comfortable with the technology he uses and terrified of it. As I described earlier, he confronts the plane, horror music making the audience uneasy. The aircraft is a bright red. It is a powerful color, representing both aggression and power, but blood, the life-force of the universe. The plane is death, spilled blood. The horse Yeager rides down to greet the plane, on the other hand, is an older, out-of-date technology. It, of course, is dangerous as well. We can see that when Yeager is thrown off the animal when he chases his wife (this also echoes another tale in the Celtic Mabinogian, Pwyll riding after Rhiannon, the beautiful woman of the Otherworld, but unable to catch her no matter how hard he tries), but he survives. As Yeager gets in his plane and pushes the speed barrier, to make a funny pun, it's almost as if he is thrusted into another "plain". The screen suddenly turns into a psychedelic whirlwind. We are reminded of Ahriman, the Zoroastrian demon who was said to hover above Persia fighting the Archangel, Michael. On a second try, this time when he is trying to beat Mach 2, he passes out and starts twirling, spinning down to earth. It is here where we see what Barber calls in his essay, a symbol "of technology's ever-present dark side, the monster who lurks in Dr. Frankenstein's miraculous creation" (587). He rights himself at the last moment, but the image of the two girls playing with toy planes, smoke of a crashed aircraft in the distance, is still seared in the audience's brain. We know the danger this new technology represents. Like Robert Oppenheimer said when the first atomic bomb went off in 1945, "Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"

Throughout the movie, the moon is a driving presence. Yeager seems to be obsessed with it, and one of the bureaucrats says to another, "We can't go to sleep under a communist moon." In the end, Yeager sets a new altitude record but gets burned in the process, walking confidently away from his plane toward the ambulances. Yeager is the urge we all feel to go beyond what we thought was possible. The human psyche has always been attracted to what is above it. The ancients saw the stars at night and made constellations out of them. Throughout the world, man tells myths where the gods or God are spoken to on top of mountains, and even today, climbing to the top of Mount Everest is seen almost as a ritual. In this story, we are made aware of the feats man can achieve but also his hubris in trying. For a democratic society such as ours, this Icarus plot is somewhat alien. We have been taught from an early age that nothing is impossible, nothing is beyond our capabilities, and America today suffers for this hubris. She thought she was invincible, could police the seas, land, and sky, control the world's economy, and continue upwards towards the heavens—but she has failed. We have yet to see whether she shall metaphorically walk away like Yeager, badly burned but still alive. Technology itself, represented in the movie by aircraft and rocket ships, is leading the charge towards globalization. However, this process is often controlled by elites, be they corporate heads, revolving door politicians, or cartel bankers. The TSA is groping our bodies, every six hours the NSA "gathers as much data as is stored in the entire library of Congress," and the CIA, FBI, military, and police are constantly expanding their surveillance, domestically and around the world. Technology has led to a sort of Frankenstein's monster. "The Right Stuff" admonishes that man's hubris can destroy his fragile body, mind, soul, and through extension this beautiful thing called a Republic. Technology can empower as much as it can destroy.