The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Philip Kaufman’s epic paean to astronauts The Right Stuff.
Astronauts. What’s the big deal? In America, they’re treated like gods, in almost the same way that Australians suck up to Olympic swimmers. Similarly, neither astronauts nor swimmers actually do very much. Olympic swimmers go up and down a pool as fast as they can, and astronauts sit inside a rocket ship while all the important work is done by the unsung heroes at “mission control”, or whatever the hell it’s called. Then they both live off their momentary achievements for the rest of their lives, writing boring-as-batshit autobiographies, giving tedious TV interviews, and then (more so if you’re an Australian Olympic swimmer than an astronaut) having a public meltdown and blaming it on the pressures of no longer being famous.
Astronauts…they don’t even really have to fly the rocket ship, do they? Do they have to navigate through traffic? Deal with road rage? Toss up how many points they’ve got left? They’re obviously all a bit insecure too, judging by the way that all the boffins and former “space jockeys” from NASA got so indignant about the “factual inaccuracies” in that shithouse Sandra Bullock-lost-in-space movie, Gravity. Come on, guys, it’s just make-believe…like your job!
And if there’s anything more annoying than self-righteous astronauts, it’s a ludicrously over-long and equally self-righteous movie about astronauts. Based on the dishwater-dull tome by American ponce, Tom Wolfe, Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff plays out like a 193-minute hand-job to the space men of NASA. While the powers-that-be get a satirical touch-up, and there is a little nuance in the characterisations, the men who actually man the rockets in the film are presented as nothing short of outer space rock stars, all super cool and heroic. Sure, they’ve got their flaws, but we’re always supposed to look up to them. They are American heroes, pure and simple.
The critics have raved for years about the biting, darkly comic elements of The Right Stuff, but this is essentially a big, fat slab of loving Americana, despite the quirky humour and involvement of Jeff Goldblum. How about a 193-minute paean to bus drivers? Or cabbies? Now, those guys have really got it tough…and nobody is singing their praises!
For a far more positive reading of The Right Stuff, check out Tom Charity’s book-length appraisal of the film as published by BFI Classics and Bloomsbury. Click here for more information.
