Heroes Are a Virus From Outer Space
Odysseys and Homecomings From Homer to “First Man”
nos·tal·gia, /näˈstaljə/, noun, from νόστος, homecoming, + ἄλγος, ache
a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past
We usually think of nostalgia as the wish to return home. But in this post-holiday installment of “Romans Go Home,” I want to look at the equal and opposite ache to leave home: the restlessness we call ambition, the quests that lodge in our brains like Bulfinch’s Mythology in your childhood bookshelf or rabies in a dog’s saliva.
Because I’ve been bitten by Classics, I couldn’t get Homer off my brain as I watched First Man, a recent film about Neil Armstrong’s moon landing out soon on Blu-ray and hailed as Damien Chazelle’s best.
William Burroughs once called language a virus from outer space. In this view, we humans are just a host species for words that colonize and scramble our neurons, loaning us fleeting illusions of selfhood in order to propagate themselves.
If language is a virus from outer space, what about the ideas that it transmits, encoded in terms like glory, courage, adventure? Did the same alien code that brought the Greeks to Troy, then heroized their deaths, bring us all the way to the moon in 1969?
A funny thing happens if we view ourselves as vectors taken over by memes and manipulated to their advantage as our species and theirs co-evolve through the ages. Space travel becomes a kind of nostos, for us and for them.
Take a breather from the virulent rhetoric on display in the news and our annual conference and let me show you how we harbor and honor the mental infections that kill us, from the first epic to First Man. This is how outbreaks keep populations in check; this is how hydrophobia concentrates contagion in a rabid animal’s dying bite; this is not, I hope, how the world ends.
On this fiftieth anniversary of the manned lunar expeditions, First Man appeals to our nostalgia for times when our nation pulled together to win the space race, instead of turning against itself in trumped-up battles over border security. But it’s animated by an inner nostalgia of its own, not least for the ideals that John F. Kennedy expressed in a 1962 speech:
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? … We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
These words are replaying on TV when, in belated fulfillment of their vision, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) returns from the moon in July 1969. But this vision is already outdated, out of touch with everyday Americans’ priorities and pressing social issues from civil rights to the Vietnam War. Pre-launch protests set to Gil Scott-Heron’s infectious beat snap our heads out of the clouds:
I can’t pay no doctor bills
(But Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
(While Whitey’s on the moon)
The film’s refusal to indulge US patriotism has been blamed for its underwhelming box office performance. But what First Man gets right, like classical epic and unlike the current administration, is its refusal to let us forget the human costs of the quest it exalts. Sure, the Apollo mission was the culmination of man’s “age-old dream of going to the moon.” But such rhetoric, so noble in excerpt, did more than justify defense spending over domestic priorities. First Man reminds us of all the men such words lured into losing their lives on the testing ground before Armstrong’s name was inscribed in history.
While Armstrong’s physical journeys in First Man are directed up toward the heavens, his emotional trajectory is retrograde and earthbound. During centrifuge-induced blackouts, his mind reverts to his daughter Karen, whose death from brain cancer at the age of two renders Armstrong’s home life painful, literally nost-algic, from the start of the film. Yet Armstrong avoids the topic even with his wife, his emotional repression marking the (d)evolution of masculinity since Odysseus wept like a woman whose city had been sacked. Armstrong’s unspoken grief thrusts him away from home and into the cockpit time and again: his daughter’s funeral, a friend’s wake, a failed test flight that raises the guilt-inducing specter of his own death. Just as a satellite’s orbit balances forward motion against gravitational pull, Armstrong’s path counterpoises family obligation and professional drive, the latter constantly threatening to speed him off into deep space.
Director Damien Chazelle underscores the point by intercutting Armstrong’s space odysseys with earthly scenes that become the film’s emotional heart: sun shining, kids squabbling, Armstrong’s wife Janet (Claire Foy) keeping the peace with an anxious ear on NASA transmissions. Through these color-saturated memories and Foy’s oceanic eyes, we see Armstrong’s mission to the hostile, monochrome, soundless moon as alien, absurd. Driven less by ego than clinical loyalty toward facts, Armstrong reinvents heroism for an age of science. But his pietas toward work still represents an escape from domestic emotion, familiar to many of us whose dads worked late at more sublunary jobs. No need to throw a kid under this guy’s plow to make him report for duty.
The film’s palette and set design underscore the literally alienating effects of Armstrong’s obsession. In one sequence, Janet lingers on the margins, watching her husband watch TV as an announcer hails the “sailors of the sky” who make the “great voyages of the earthbound seem, well, earthbound indeed.” The Apollo 11 mission has just been approved; her husband is about to become an epic hero. Janet steps out of the darkness into a sunlit room where her son asks, “What’s wrong?” “Your dad’s going to the moon.” The kid’s casual reply: “Can I go outside?”
Reporters in First Man are constantly asking “whether the program’s worth the cost, in money or in lives.” But what lingers is the emotional cost, from Houston to Ithaca: the black hole between the hero’s kleos, aglow in a cathode-ray tube, and the kids who drift into the background like so much Hawking radiation.
Courage, the virus that writes men’s names in lights, is a plague on families. So Andromache tells Hector in Iliad 6, as she begs him to think of what will happen to her and their son if he dies on the plains of Troy. Hector replies that he fights precisely to avoid having to witness her fate: “May I be dead, and the earth piled above me, before I hear your cries as they drag you away.” Hector’s sense of duty, like Armstrong’s, is a cover for avoidance; it lets him turn his mind away from the home whose heartaches he can’t stop — even quickens, on a visceral level, as his glinting helmet scares the infant Astyanax to tears.
Courage is a virus passed down through genes, incubated in wombs, nurtured in homes to ravage the herd: an autoimmune disease that eats the brains of boys and turns their bodies to dust.
On a moonlit walk through their neighborhood, Armstrong and his fellow astronaut Ed White (Jason Clarke) don’t quite confront their careers’ effect on their families. Ed’s son has wondered if he’ll be lonely up in space, so far from home. But “this whole thing is expanding his horizons,” Ed tells himself. “It gives me faith. Make sense?” As they pass an empty chair swing, Neil mentions that Karen used to have one like that before they moved to Houston. It’s the closest he comes to talking about her death. No, it doesn’t make sense.
What’s funny is that even in this rare moment of intimacy between two men, a kind of binding-song to reassure themselves they’re not hurting their families, Ed is replicating a sound bite. In a TV interview, he once expressed hope that space travel would inspire the young: “I think if a civilization doesn’t look out, doesn’t seek to expand its horizons, we’re not going to progress as a nation.” We hear this only later, rebroadcast in memoriam after Ed and two other astronauts are incinerated in a freak fire during a plugs-out test. Neil receives the news by phone while he’s at the White House, advocating for NASA funding. It’s so silent we don’t hear the glass break in his clenched fist. No, it doesn’t make sense.
Back at the hotel, as he bandages his hand, Neil learns from the news that his friends’ corpses were left on the spacecraft for four hours to aid in the investigation. His widening eyes register the recognition that he and his brothers-in-arms are to the gods of science and state mere flies to wanton boys. What they give him — in return for his flesh and blood — is language that will shroud his death in heroism.
As Neil prepares for his own risky moonwalk, he becomes an eidolon of himself, like Aeneas in the Underworld. He’s proleptically granted a place in history, burial as if at sea, even a pre-written eulogy that casts him less as Icarus than Christ:
These brave men … are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. … They will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
This shrink-wrapped rhapsody, an ideological weapon built to go viral, reveals these “first men” as sacrificial victims for national pride, defense budgets, the conscription of young people into Cold Warrior uniforms and lab coats. The wives and kids they leave behind are just dirt on the lens of history. Long after the casseroles are cleared from Ed’s funeral, the latest in an Iliadic line, it’s a jolt to notice, with Jan, that his wife Pat still lives next door, letting the newspapers pile up in her grief.
Jan’s encounter with Pat spurs a climactic scene that recombines Iliad 6 with Aeneas’ night flight from Dido. As Neil packs for Cape Kennedy, Jan accuses him of “killing time” to avoid the emotional labor of leave-taking. He owes it to his children to “sit them down and prepare them for the fact that you might never come home.” But the scene plays more like a press conference. “So you won’t be here for my swim meet?” the younger son demands. “No. Sorry. Does anyone have any other questions?” This time, more slowly: “Do you think you’re coming back?” Here, like Ed before him, Neil goes on memetic autopilot: “We have real confidence in the mission, and there are risks, but we have every intention of coming back.” The other son is old enough to decipher grown-up-speak: “But you might not.” “That’s right,” Neil says, shaking his hand: the heroic code in Midcentury Modern.
The poet Michael Longley revisits Astyanax’s terror at Hector’s helmet, and Hector’s prayer that “his son might grow up bloodier than him,” to think through the learned codes that override our instincts for self-preservation. But at least Homer’s scene ends in familial laughter. As Neil achieves his kleos, touching down on the desert moon, the silence is deafening. His hermetically sealed helmet reflects only his own shadow, catches only the sound of his own breathing.
Time comes to a halt as we watch him descend from the ladder: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” What is this endlessly replayed scene but Protesilaus’ first, doomed, leap from the Greek ships onto the plain of Troy? Lost in the vacuum of space are all the lamentations that preceded it, long-dead families’ curses on the language and logic that heroize such adventures. The phallic bulk of Apollo 11 is a second first ship, an Argo rebuilt for a nuclear age, carrying no less destruction for women and children than the pines of Pelion.
The glinting surface of Neil’s visor cuts to his memories of Karen, fingers in her hair as they stare together at the sky. It’s for her, it seems, that Neil has made this journey. (No, it doesn’t make sense.) He had joked at a pre-mission press conference that if he could bring anything with him, he’d take more fuel. But he has brought Karen’s charm bracelet, cradling it briefly in his hand before casting it forever into the Sea of Tranquillity. This first act of lunar littering verifies his own premature epitaph: “there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”
The film’s denouement leaves it doubtful whether the mission really brings Neil peace. After reentry, Neil is quarantined against extraterrestrial diseases as his face is splashed across magazines the world over. On her way to visit him, Jan brushes by reporters asking if her sons want to follow in Neil’s footsteps to become astronauts, too. There’s a pregnant pause as the couple confront one another through the glass, much as Penelope ponders “whether she should stand aloof and question her dear husband, or whether she should go up to him, and clasp and kiss his head and hands.”
But the plexiglass partition between Jan and the homecoming hero, much like his helmet, reifies the bubble that separates him from the world: his brain and the beliefs that fill it. The ancient heroic quest has mutated, but it remains as hydrophobic, as destructive of life, as ever. First Man withholds the wave of emotional relief we get from Homer’s transferred simile, that to Penelope the sight of her husband is as welcome as the sight of land to a shipwrecked man. The film leaves Neil and Jan unable to embrace, touching fingers through the sterile glass in an evocation of ET’s “phone home” gesture that highlights their mutual alienation by contrast. Jan’s impenetrable blue eyes become an emblem for this earth, so tiny from the vantage of space, with infinite differences separating the worlds that are ourselves.
They would divorce in 1994.
The shield that Thetis gives her son depicts cities at war and at peace, the latter reflecting the path not taken by the glory-hungry combatants of the Iliad. This transmutes, on Aeneas’ shield, into a vision of Rome’s history and the ways it’s weaponized to bolster beliefs that serve the state. Milton widens the lens to cosmic scale, arming Satan with a shield as “massy, large and round” as the moon viewed through Galileo’s “Optic Glass,” along with stirring classical arguments against the limitations God has set on power and knowledge.
First Man, too, keeps inverting the glass. The enormous energies, expenditures, even names we give rockets — Apollo, Saturn, Mercury, Atlas, Titan — speak to our age-old desire to play god. But Foy’s Janet is right, too, when she cuts NASA management down to size as “a bunch of boys making models with balsa wood. You don’t have anything under control.”
It’s fitting, then, that the perspective-shifting view of Earthrise has become one of the space program’s most powerful legacies and shields. This photo, reprinted on countless environmental posters, has become an emblem of our need to protect our fragile planet. (“We came to explore the moon,” said the astronaut who took the picture, “and what we discovered was the Earth.”) First Man, too, ultimately argues that deep-space adventures can’t fill our inner voids like stories, memories, and loved ones. Great leaps for science mean nothing without the humanities that bring us home.
As Neil’s mind bends back to Karen at the apex of his glory, it follows a time-honored flight path that we all may traverse. In his Latin sci-fi classic, the Dream of Scipio, Cicero suggests that the end goal of fame and achievement is reunion with your loved ones’ ghosts among the heavenly spheres. He, too, must have fingered the charm bracelet of these thoughts and looked up at the moon as he remembered his own dead daughter.
Despite all the technological advances of the 20th century, then, there’s something nostalgic, even primordial about the thoughts that lift us off. You don’t need to believe that terrestrial life was seeded by alien means to acknowledge that, in the words of Joni Mitchell:
We are stardust
Billion-year-old carbon.
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
We leave home, and multiply ways to glorify our departure, because it hurts too much to stay. We’ll never again be one with our makers, mothers, or gods until we rest. The ache of this realization helps spread the contagion of heroic discovery that takes us to Troy, to space, to early graves (or sometimes just the library). But these journeys are, after all, a kind of homecoming. If language is a virus from outer space, then so is selfhood. And we are all made of stars.
This article is part of the “Romans Go Home” column.
Nandini Pandey sends this one out to Michelle Bayouth and our fellow moonwalkers; to those who help us leave, and those who welcome us home.
