Pirate's Cove

It’s always something with these people. Always some sort of Grievance. Always putting people in boxes. Always finding ways to tear things down rather than build them up

“First Man” Raises Disturbing Reminder of Racial Inequality
Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” plays a pivotal role in the film.

Um, it was whitey on the moon. Funny how the people who complain about raaaaacism so often devolve into being racists (the line does refer to a song that is mentioned later in the screed)

Ryan Gosling grimaces and grinds his teeth and suffers mostly silently as heroic Neil Armstrong in Oscar winner Damien Chazelle’s First Man, out Friday. The title is short for first man on the moon for those who weren’t around in 1969 when the dude took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Or, well, some of it. Fifty years later America doesn’t do such an out-of-this-world job when it comes to racial inclusivity. First Man is a reminder of such inequality.

The early reception for Chazelle’s space epic since its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month has been superlative. Under the National Review headline “First Man is the movie of the Year,” my friend and former New York Post colleague Kyle Smith joined with the majority who found the biopic 82 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. He crowed: “First Man is why we go to the movies.”

To that I ask, “What do you mean we, white man?” as the punchline to the old Lone Ranger and Tonto joke goes.

Nothing like the last month in America shows the cracks in the American melting pot, and the impossibility of a cultural “we.” Most semi-woke individuals sometime during the 141-minute movie will notice the absence of people of color in speaking roles. Not there on the mammoth screen. Not there historically. Not in space. (And possibly absent from the audience.)

Well, most won’t get there now, because they’re teaching their kids to be rap stars, and Democrats are keeping them stupid on the inner city plantations, not giving one damn about the violence, drugs, poverty, babies born out of wedlock and with multiple male (absent) fathers, poor education, and squalor. As long as the vote Democrat through giving them a bit of government assistance is all Democrats care about

It’s the beat that stays with you long after you’ve left the theater. As then, so now, Scott-Heron articulates the disconnect between the space race and the underclass. We can send a man to the moon but we can’t care for our people on the street and in the ghetto. This track, to quote The Atlantic’s Alexis C. Madrigal, “changed the way I thought about the space race forever. It anchored the flight into the heavens, tethering it to the persistence of racial inequality, and pulling it out of the abstract, universal realm in which we like to place our technical achievements….To which America went the glory of the moon landing? And what did it cost our nation to put whitey on the moon?”

It cost out nation nothing. It bettered out country. It vastly increased our scientific and technical knowledge. We did something the Soviets didn’t (nor has any other country), and all these revisionists forget what was happening in that time period.

Over at The Mary Sue, the insightful critic Kate Gardner expresses that feeling that the film is out of touch with 2018: “[I]t feels as though there’s been a tonal misstep; someone didn’t read the room properly. We don’t need apolitical platitudes. We need stories that challenge us, that inspire us, and that tell us that there is a future rather than living in a moment in the past.”

Actually, what we need are just good movies, not SJW screeds.