Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

dir: Richard Linklater

2022

What a movie. As in, how is this even a movie?

Nah, that’s unkind. This animated movie is, as far as I can guess, a version of Richard Linklater’s idealised childhood growing up in the burbs of Houston, Texas in what I like to call the button down Plastic Fantastic era during a time when America thought it could do no wrong, and the space race was going to mean everyone would be living on Venus by 1975 and everything would soon look like the Jetsons.

It was a childhood, based on this flick, typified by being safe, bland and pleasant. The main family as presented and animated here would not have been out of place on the tv itself, perhaps as the neighbours to the Brady Bunch or as the family down the road from the witch in Bewitched or the genie from I Dream of Jeannie. Is it a case of “that’s how it actually was back then?” versus “memory and television combine to transform all experiences into stuff that looks like it came out of a sitcom”?

It’s hard to say. I mean, it would be easy for often great, sometimes not so great director Richard Linklater to say, and he probably has in several interviews, but I hardly want to taint my reviews with actual knowledge from the people that would actually know why something is how it is in a movie they’ve made.

Instead I’ll take the far lazier but much more profitable path of just imagining people’s intentions and motivations, and run with that. That way I can be 400 per cent more opinionated.

This childhood that Stanley (voiced by Milo Coy as the actual boy, but with Jack Black doing the constant narration of a grown up Stanley looking back on his tedious childhood) has, I would guess, was a childhood that many white Americans had during that era, as long as they were of a certain socioeconomic status and background. Culturally, it’s the absence of culture that exemplifies this time and place – everything from where they live to how they live is all about that place as being a tabula rasa – a blank space which was filled in with shiny and new hopes and dreams. The family live in a new development where brand new houses go up in a place outside of Houston.

Who and what was there before these brand new houses?

Nothing, of course. It was a formless, shapeless void that was moulded into something tangible only with American grit, the post WWII boom energy and the promise of a technomagical future that was only barely out of reach.

Duly created, the family creates itself into this space with a father who works for NASA and a mother that tends to house and hearth, and six kids, only one of whom was born in the 1960s. Stanley (the Richard stand-in) is that youngest child. He’s old enough to ride bikes and get in trouble for stuff, but young enough to still fall asleep randomly and be carried to bed by his parents.

The dad is some kind of logistics guy who works at NASA, with tangential involvement with the Apollo program sending rockets up with the intention of eventually landing men on the moon before those damn Russkies get to do it first. He’s not an astronaut, so in the eyes of his son he is less than worthless. The shame of his father being a paperpusher compels the boy, who, by his own admission is something of a fabulist, to concoct an elaborate fantasy by which NASA has stuffed up with one of its lunar modules, and two NASA Men in Black have to recruit a small boy in order to have someone who will fit in the capsule in order to make the next mission feasible.

Stanley is that boy, whose missions coincidentally happens at the time when Apollo 11 makes history (hence the “10 ½” of the title, because he’s half the man he’ll never be), and when he’s asleep, missing the historic moment 600 million other people got to see on the telly.

Is that what actually happened to Linklater? I have no idea, but the funniest moment (not funny ha ha, but more in an ironic way) for me was when the sleeping boy is being carried to bed, and the mother muses that the boy will probably misremember the momentous moment, and think he did actually watch it, with a combination of fantasy, re-watching it later, science fiction movies and general tv foolishness replacing his actual memories of the event.

You know, almost something like this flick. That is in essence what Linklater is conjuring here – something in bright, almost lurid colours with clean lines and no icky feelings about anything, really. It's not that it's a sanitised version of his own past; it's just one in which the optimism and the cluelessness of the era, the expectation that everything would not only be okay but be great, shines through.

Because of the way it's animated there's no separation between his own memories of his life, scenes from movies or scenes from the news - they're all the same in our memories, so why not here?

And the movies and tv shows and news reports animated over (using something like the rotoscoping process, greatly improved, that Linklater has used in other films like Waking Life and the awesome adaptation of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly) that are referenced here? Like the most well known and white bread of movies and films of the last 60 years. References to and scenes from The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and every tv show from Gilligan’s Island to every cheesy show with a soundtrack from an era of 3 tv channels.

This stuff is awfully familiar (to middle class Americans, and, dare I say it, Australians as well), awfully generic and awfully trite. But it’s the almost universal familiarity that (I guess) is meant to say “okay, maybe many of the aspects of my childhood were, if you were white and privileged, the same as they were for plenty of other people, but, however banal, they were from my childhood, and their echoes make me the person that I am today.”

We aren’t much without our memories. These are his. Even if there’s barely any difference to watching this versus listening to any semi-articulate senior citizen talking about their youth while on a bus, or waiting in a GP’s clinic or waiting for your case to be called in court, there is a sweetness here, a gentleness that at least conveys the idyllic feeling of being safe. He and the people around him felt safe, even with duck and cover still being done in schools, or the “threat” of being sent to Vietnam, or noticing that there weren’t many black people around.

And through all that the boy grows up to be a man, and then a director, which just means storyteller, really, and now he gifts the world with films like the Before trilogy which I have tremendous affection for, and, um School of Rock? Plenty of films. And we should be glad, or at least I’m glad.

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood may be a minor trifle, but it’s an enjoyable enough one, for me. We’re not even close to being the same age, and I am not a white Texan, that’s for sure, but some of the joy and boredom of childhood is universal. And if there was no darkness in his life at that young age (beyond the weirdly stylised spankings that are represented), well, shouldn’t we be glad that he and his siblings didn’t have miserable childhoods?

I wouldn’t want the miseries of my childhood visited upon another person, so in not seeing them replicated here, I am not disappointed. Not everything has to be Angela’s Ashes or Where the Crawdads Sing.

Some people were just lucky to have blessed childhoods, I guess.

7 times I too don’t remember the moon landing first hand, but that’s because I wasn’t alive yet out of 10

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“I guess I was what you'd call a fabulist, which is just a nicer way of saying persistent liar.” - Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood