Sure, it’s not ‘Ulysses’ length. Few things are. The copy of ‘Ulysses’ I purchased for study was only around 775 pages. Phew! Not quite as gargantuan as I was told. Cue me opening the book and discovering that the text was so miniscule that I’d most likely damage my eyes if I attempted to read it without glasses. Or a magnifying glass, for that matter.
Damien Chazelle’s underrated adaptation is one of my all-time favourites, but I was left wondering how a film under two and a half hours was created from such a behemoth of a tome. Sure, liberties must be taken when you go through the cutting process with James R. Hansen’s extensive biographical material. You won’t be able to fit every miniscule detail into the big screen. But 654 pages? That’s a lot of information to cut right there. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous moments where these details are provided, particularly passages which explain the precise number of materials that were extracted from the moon and lots of general physics jargon that passed way over my humanities-inclined head. As a withering, deadpan Will Self remarked to Vic Reeves in Shooting Stars, ‘When I sit down to write, I see your head and I aim above it’. Not that Hansen was deliberately trying to confound readers, it’s just that I’m probably not the primary audience for taking in all those facts. Funnily enough, those facts don’t make it into the film’s screenplay.
There was, however, plenty of info that I wasn’t aware of such as Armstrong’s military career in the Korean War and the sheer number of times that Armstrong (who was always keen to define himself as an engineer rather than an astronaut) came close to death during his flights. Hansen even has the occasional moment to add a bit of wry humour in between some of the dry material. After briefly considering Carl Jung’s theories of flight and Freud’s assessment of this experience as deeply connected to sexual desire, Hansen asks if men enjoy it purely because it’s exciting. A fair point, presuming you don’t want to dig into that philosophical stuff too much.
But what intrigued me the most was that the film’s emotional core – the loss of Armstrong’s daughter Karen, and Armstrong’s inability to properly articulate his grief on earth – is essentially relegated to a single chapter, given emotional gravitas with its title ‘The Worst Loss’. She’s mentioned a few passing times throughout the rest of the book, but only as a footnote. Yet Karen nonetheless becomes the beating heart of Chazelle’s First Man. The image evoked on the first page of the chapter, where Hansen describes how ‘Karen, two years old, ran through the park in her own great big adventure’ was surely the inspiration for the film’s recurring flashback, where Armstrong walks with his family through a sunny park, happy and content in a way he never seems to be in the rest of the film, playfully puting his hat on his daughter’s head. Hansen speculates that there is something special between a father and a daughter’, hinting at a poignant relationship between the two that Armstrong never openly discussed.
Reading the details about the treatment Karen had to try and neutralise her brain tumour hit home particularly hard, and added an extra level of appreciation for how much technology has progressed in terms of radiotherapy since then. Janet Armstrong’s remark that her daughter ‘took the treatment beautifully’ was incredibly moving and painful to read. This treatment is captured powerfully in the film through the use of a j-cut, where audio from the following scene starts playing during the preceding scene. After Armstrong has completed his perilous flight in the X-15 vehicle, he walks silently through a desert landscape, where only the quiet sounds of wind can be heard. However, the noise of a machine suddenly enters the soundscape that is clearly not connected to the image on screen. We are compelled to wonder where this alien sound is originating from. In the space of a couple of seconds, the camera cuts to an extreme close-up of a hand in a darkened room and images of unrecognisable faces. The sound’s source is still unclear. In the next image, however, we finally discover its origin as a looming machine (presumably a cobalt machine, which was the final, most invasive treatment used to try and save Karen) towers over Karen. It’s small, subtle sonic moments that make First Man a nuanced, tender portrait of unspoken grief.
While I’ve never been fond of using the word ‘battle’ in relation to cancer, it’s still sad to read Hansen’s declaration that ‘On Sunday morning, January 28, 1962, Karen Anne Armstrong died at home in the family’s Juniper Hills cabin after an agonising six-month battle with the inoperable brain tumour’. The term is phrased as if the two-year-old could have survived if she had ‘fought’ harder, whatever that nonsense means. Nonetheless, I understand its use to explain tragedy in a more universal format. Again, the film elegises Karen with a similarly tragic j-cut, where composer Justin Hurwitz’s ‘Karen’ plays as the image of her sleeping face becomes intertwined with the sound of a turning wheel. As before, we have no idea where this sound comes from, and the camera cuts to an outside environment with Janet and her son Ricky’s sad facial expressions, before an image reveals the source of the sound to be a casket-lowering device as Karen’s coffin descends to the ground.
One of the various unknows regarding the Apollo 11 mission was whether Neil brought any items with him to the moon. There has been speculation about Armstrong taking an item of Karen’s, but no confirmation. Joan, Neil’s sister, was quoted as dearly hoping her brother took something of Karen’s with him, but there’s never been a clear answer. According to Hansen, some of Neil’s colleagues privately referred to him as ‘Iceman’ because of his apparently closed-off nature. Intriguingly, Ryan Gosling received similar comments from reviewers about his ‘cold’, unemotional performance as Armstrong in the film, suggesting he played the part well, just not to the desire of those wishing for a more vocal, gregarious performance. Many American patriots weren’t particularly impressed that their flag wasn’t standing in clear view either (as Hansen ironically notes, the astronauts watched as the flag fell down relatively shortly after its placing). One of the most famous men on earth was, unsurprisingly, not willing to be overly vocal about his experiences. Hansen points out this apparently strange fact, also noting that Armstrong was the only member of the crew that didn’t auction off his space memorabilia to any keen buyers.
In the film, however, this idea of Neil taking an item of Karen’s to the moon is fully embraced. We see her necklace for the first time when Neil enters a separate room during his daughter’s funeral service, putting it into a draw before bursting into tears within the private space, marking the only time in the film where he displays vocal grief. It makes its second and final appearance, however, when Neil, alone by a crater on the moon, lifts his visor for a brief moment to reveal his pained facial expression, releasing the piece of jewellery into the abyss, as if finally releasing his grief and allowing himself to move on. That this is only possible away from earth speaks volumes about the psyche of the man himself, a man who remains inscrutable even when his face is on full display.
Finally, its integral to note how Hansen’s small chapter is woven into a poignant emotional tapestry using music. Of course, this musical element isn’t anywhere to be found in the book, but Hurwitz makes it clear to the audience that Karen is very much present in Neil’s mind after her death through his numerous compositions. Recalling Hansen’s description of an excited Karen running ‘through the park in her own great big adventure’, when Claire Foy’s Janet gives Neil the OK to join the Apollo project, she states that ‘It’ll be an adventure’, at which point the light harp of the ‘Karen’ motif begins to resurface. It comes up again shortly after the birth of Neil’s third child Mark, as if to suggest that the hole in Neil’s heart is not yet healed from his loss. It appears another time when Neil is searching for the Agena Target Vehicle in space, and reaches its emotional crescendo in Hurwitz’s ‘Crater’, where the harp sounds have evolved into an otherworldly theremin, an instrument which Ryan Gosling discovered was a favourite of the real life Armstrong.
Fiction may be woven into fact, as is the case with most cinematic adaptions, but it’s nonetheless impressive that so much emotional impact was drawn from a single chapter in one gigantic work of prose.
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