The Lunatic Sleeps Again.

In an earlier post, I mused over the relationship between the moon landings and science fiction through the lens of the Futurama episode "The Series Has Landed." Remember? Yeah, that was fun.

Recently, Ted Gioia argued something similar, though he did it much more eloquently and using examples from Bradbury, Asimov, and Clarke rather than Groening. His point is that once the moon landing was achieved, the postcoital letdown of space travel's science proved equally detrimental to science fiction:

As space exploration disappeared from the front pages, sci-fi lost much of its glamour and most of its readers . . . With the conclusion of the Apollo program, NASA became just another government agency, more bureaucratic than heroic.

Gioia then compares science-fiction authors to stockbrokers -- no, really -- because both make predictions. I think this oversimplifies the difference between fact and fiction, especially since I'm not convinced science fiction authors are particularly concerned with being right about the future (though Gioia seems to think they are). When we watch Blade Runner or The Matrix or Minority Report or read Dune, which Gioia obviously holds in high opinion as hard science fiction from the Golden Age, we're not asking questions about the future so much as we're asking questions about the present. Our present, really -- ourselves. Science fiction then and now is really about what it means to be human: this is why it has aliens, for one thing, because they are ipso facto not human, and provide us an opportunity for defining what exactly human is.

I'm getting a little off-track . . . Another snippet from Gioia:

Science fiction is experiencing a bit of a
comeback these days, but the moon plays a
low profile in the renewal efforts.

Perhaps I would find this more convincing if the most recent science fiction film I've seen were not a little thing called Moon, starring Sam Rockwell and directed by Duncan Jones. It is deliberately low-budget, intensely psychological, and really, really good. (Seriously -- go see it!) Here the moon is no longer a fantasy, but an outpost, a cold colony of one trapped far from the warmth of civilization. And this suggests a new way for science fiction to treat the moon, a way more in line with the current dystopian trend in the genre.

Gioia's discussion of the collapsed lunar fantasy, it seems to me, has strong echoes of the way the exotic East (Arabia, China, Japan, India) has long been mythologized and fetishized in Western culture. The moon is feminine, it is the Earth's Other, it is passive and ocean-associated and romantic and there to be conquered by Western men. (No coincidence that in Moon deposits of Helium-3 are being imperialistically mined from the lunar surface for use powering the cities of Earth.) But plainly speaking, just as Orientalism has gone out of fashion, so we must find something new to do with the moon in our stories.

In fact, without giving too much away, what Moon seems to point to is the possible costs which underlie perfect ideas, whether it's endlessly cheap energy or your memories of a loving family back on Earth. A Fry-like sense of wonder and openness is necessary still -- it's the memory of that loving family that helps Sam Rockwell, um, do what he does (no specifics here) -- but the costs and consequences matter too.

Lunatic Dreams

People don't yearn for the moon like we used to. An entire generation grew up dreaming crewcut dreams of countdowns and dusty craters, but although NASA TV still broadcasts launches, and thousands still line up in person to watch them (wouldn't you?), there is the sense that our reach is farther now, our gaze set on sizeable fellow planets like Mars and Jupiter rather than our own humble follower.

That said, if offered the chance to actually set foot on the moon, who wouldn't be tempted? Who wouldn't follow the example of Futurama's Philip J. Fry and babble a little when asked: "The moon? The moon moon?"

Thrilled, he counts down from ten, but they arrive before he reaches 8; poor hapless Fry counts hurriedly down to "blastoff" in an awed whisper, his eyes saucer-round, unwilling to forgo the ritual.

As this truncated countdown shows, this whole second episode ("The Series Has Landed") is concerned with the gap between our early twentieth-century belief in science/science fiction and our current conception of both as fraught with moral dangers -- a gap I will call either the Oppenheimer fissure ("I am become Death, destroyer of worlds") or, less probably, the Dick abyss (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The Oppenheimer fissure is the point where we lose our sense of the endless potential and promise of science and science fiction after an encounter with the consequences. These consequences are important, to be sure -- but there is a balance to be struck between hope and despair, and it seems to me we are falling too far on the side of the latter.

Billy West, who voices Fry, is quoted in a TV Squad interview: "Here they are, they can go anywhere in the universe, and where do they go? The moon. Because in our heart of hearts, deep within our memory banks, the moon was the place to get to." When he arrives, he excitedly takes the predictable "one small step for [a] man," but finds "one giant line for admission." The moon has become a giant, cheesy amusement park for bored Earthlings who aren't even all that excited about visiting it. Attainment of the dream has collapsed the fantasy, even as the futuristic speed of the spaceship collapsed Fry's initial blastoff countdown. This moon is really no different from Earth. In fact, even the name Luna Park is taken from a chain of terrestrial amusement parks (one was famously located on Coney Island).

Something else significant has been lost: the thirtieth century no longer remembers the original history of man's landing on the moon. An educational ride shows robots inaccurately potraying early astronauts as Alice and Ralph from The Honeymooners, causing Fry to grumpily state that Ralph "was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife." Fry is still in the pre-lapsarian state, where the moon is glamorous and alluring; he has not lost the memory of what the moon once meant.

The narrative is certainly satirical, but it does not aim for bitterness. The appearance of Craterface, Luna Park's mascot, indicates that we are operating in the well-worn territory of science fiction's history in visual media. Craterface is directly pulled from George Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), a very early fantastical film with a fairly self-explanatory title. In the original source, a bottle-shaped spaceship carrying a load of comical umbrella-wielding astronomers crashes into the eye of the drippy cheese moon; here, a surly drunken robot shoves a mostly empty bottle of booze into the eye of the mascot who tries to confiscate it. If anyone could represent the modern desecration of outmoded ideals, it would be Bender -- and yet moments later, when a magnet temporarily scrambles his inhibition unit and Fry accuses him of acting "like some crazy folk singer," Bender turns a wistful gaze upward and sadly intones: "Yes. I guess a robot would have to be crazy to want to be a folk singer." Bender, a walking, talking, swearing, drinking machine, has dreams of his own. He is a product of science, but he is virtually human.

Spectatorship in this world implies sympathy: later in the episode, the Professor uses a telescope to watch Leela and Fry attempting to outrun the threatening edge of lunar nightfall. "I really ought to do something," he says, and although he then decides not to, seeing as how he's already in his pajamas, this reversal is clearly a failure, albeit a comical one. This scene follows an unsatisfying performance by a busted-down set of animatronic gophers who invite the angry, disappointed audience to "address all complaints to the Monsanto Corporation." The relationship between spectator and performer is meant to be mutually dependent, and neither personal nor corporate indifference rise to the occasion.

Ultimately the episode comes down on the side of wonder. Together, Leela and Fry have stumbled upon the original moon lander, which has been lost for centuries. Fry is ecstatic, but Leela chastises him: "Fry, look around. It's just a crummy plastic flag and a dead man's tracks in the dust." Reduced to its mere physical components, the moon is bleak indeed, and Fry's expression saddens as night falls.

As they take shelter in the lunar lander, Leela grumbles, "I still don't see what the big attraction is." Fry explains:

"The moon was like this awesome, romantic, mysterious thing, hanging up there in the sky where you could never reach it, no matter how much you wanted to. But you're right. Once you're actually here it's just a big dull rock. I guess I just wanted you to see it through my eyes, the way I used to."

Fry is a bubble easily burst, but his simple sincerity -- and I am using both senses of "simple" -- often has an eloquence that touches the listener, as now. As his head droops, Leela sees the Earth reflected in the curve of his helmet. This helmet is a screen that allows Leela a spectator's view of Fry's wistful yearnings: she can almost literally see what the moon looks like to him. She turns, and they both look out over that ubiquitous, endlessly fascinating image: the Earth hanging spherical in space while the moon stretches beneath. Earth has become moonlike now, and this somehow purifies the commercialization of the moon, and undoes the disillusionment that made the moon too like the Earth at the episode's beginning. When Leela softly admits that "It really is beautiful -- I don't know why I never noticed it before," it is not entirely clear whether she is speaking about the moon or the Earth.

I prefer to think it's both. Fry's idealistic enthusiasm has a tendency to lead to trouble (which is how they ended up in the lunar lander with precious little oxygen), but Leela's pragmatism needs a little romance to temper it. The moral quandaries necessarily raised by science and science fiction still should not eclipse all the promise of earlier, more optimistic ages.