Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen THE RIGHT SUBJECT JET JOCKEYS, SPACE ACES IN THE BRITISH film Breaking the Sound Barrier, made in the 50's, the big revelation comes when somebody gets the idea that as you approach the...
...Again, the scene is invention on Kaufman's part, a departure from the book, and a heavily romantic vignette with Yeager on horseback in the midst of this primeval landscape...
...Looking Backward from the Film 2001 it might be called...
...Just to look at the plane with its fuel line attached like a tether, its rockets sputtering shrilly in place as they burn off excess fuel, is to understand what the Right Stuff is...
...Kaufman's film gives to the near past the allurement, the mythical perspective, that Kubrick's gave the near future...
...Just to see the plane itself in this early scene is to know that you're in for quite a ride in this movie...
...a tremendous new energy is released from it...
...Hell, Chuck Yeager went on to fly over twenty combat missions in Vietnam...
...COLIN...
...But Kaufman has realized that the excesses of the way he has conceived the scene are almost necessary to balance the sheer presence that the plane itself has, just sitting there...
...The plane hardly seems a plane at all...
...In fact, it was twenty years out of date, and the people involved were mostly yokels, yahoos and straight-arrows of the kind Wolfe could have eaten for breakfast...
...The more hip, with-it and au courant the topics he chose- Haight-Asbury, the "radical chic" of Leonard Bernstein, whatever-the nearer to burn-out his prose seemed to come...
...But that was it...
...And there is in both films something magical and original about the closeness of the time depicted...
...But I can't bring myself to hold Yeager personally responsible-or Alan Shepard, or even someone like John Glenn...
...In The Right Stuff, there's a scene where Yeager rides out on the desert at Edwards Air Force Base and gets his first look at the X-l, the plane in which he is to break the sound barrier...
...It would steal the scene if Yeagei didn't have a kind of Conradian melodrama about him to match it...
...Reagan just got preliminary Congressional approval for his anti-satellite missile program...
...Every time the space shuttle goes up, I watch it on TV...
...Put against each other like this, the vulgarity of the one event and the heroism of the other- Yeager crashed, nearly killing himself-become a kind of critical mass...
...Wolfe's account of the plane offers a better review of the scene than I can write...
...Kaufman has done this by daring to use a kind of movie rhetoric that is sometimes as overwritten as Wolfe's prose...
...Screen THE RIGHT SUBJECT JET JOCKEYS, SPACE ACES IN THE BRITISH film Breaking the Sound Barrier, made in the 50's, the big revelation comes when somebody gets the idea that as you approach the barrier, the plane's controls are reversed...
...But I don't...
...It is an orange dart with two vestigial wings, more like fins really, and "Bell Aircraft" painted on the side in script...
...Nor is this the only echo of the one film in the other...
...The point of Kaufman's aborigines is much the same as of Kubrick's ape...
...The lettering is an inappropriately flowery, refined touch, for this is an unmistakably rough, thunderous, dangerous machine...
...Kubrick showed us space travel as a future we could almost touch, Kaufman shows it to us as history that is already nearly out of reach...
...They keep their own sky watch, and sparks from their fire swirl up to mingle with a field of glowing particles Glenn encounters, inexplicably, in space...
...Any peckerwood who pushed the stick forward at Mach 1 would augur in for sure...
...Wolfe's material becomes fissionable...
...As writer-director Philip Kaufman seems to have realized, the only way to adapt a book as strong and self-possessed as Wolfe's is to appropriate it...
...This is a lot of hog wash, as Chuck Yeager, the American pilot who really did break the barrier, was quick to point out...
...This is in fact so...
...Like Wolfe's prose and Kaufman's movie, the X-1 had to be carried aloft to get air-borne...
...You have to find a way to re-invent the story on your own terms...
...That was what he'd been looking for...
...Our eyes, like Yeager's, go directly to it...
...He has had the insight to recognize that here is a story that can stand up to movie-epic treatment, to being writ LARGE, as almost no other material could today...
...It is being fueled off on a corner of the base somewhere, seemingly unattended, because the alcohol and liquid oxygen being pumped into it presumably makes it too dangerous to hangar with other aircraft...
...Avant-garde filmmaker Jordan Belson, who provided inspiration for Kubrick's time-warp sequence, gets the credit for special effects on Kaufman's film...
...I haven't seen cross-cutting as blatant as this (not any that worked, anyhow) since D. W. Griffith's Intolerance...
...What Kaufman and I share is an absolute awe of these astronaut-pilots, and unabashed enthusiasm for the technology of rockets and space travel...
...A B-29 carried the X-l on its underside, from which the tiny jet was launched like a bomb...
...You have to shove the stick forward, instead of back, to hold her steady...
...He was "booming and zooming" as never before...
...The reason is that the designers had given it the shape of the one "object that was known to go supersonic smoothly": the 50-caliber bullet...
...WESTERBECK, JR...
...You have to follow its lead, but also go off on your own somehow...
...This time, suddenly, his talent took off...
...It looks like a prehistoric bird, a last survivor of some gliding species half bird, half reptile, that has haplessly drifted down from the distant mountains to the desert floor, from which it is now incapable of launching itself again...
...I of course recognize that this all becomes the wrong stuff when it is (in my favorite sixties expression) "co-opted" by the military...
...Still, it worked for Tom Wolfe...
...This is a use of montage as crude and bold as Eisenstein's in Battleship Potemkin, or as Kubrick's cut in 2001 from a bone hurled by an ape to a space station orbiting the earth...
...Then he decided to do a book about a subject that was not fashionable at all...
...If Wolfe could have given his work a different title, so might Kaufman...
...To see that enormous rocket lift off the pad, carrying an entire airplane piggy-back, is just thrilling...
...It's still wonderful...
...The first and last space shot by John Glenn is given similarly risky treatment when Kaufman invents a tribe of aborigines to sit outside the tracking station in Australia...
...It is, as Wolfe so simply and perfectly puts it, "just a length of pipe with four rocket chambers in it...
...Some viewers may feel that his film is derivative of Kubrick's...
...You can't match its achievement by being sycophantic, trying to exploit its success with your deference...
...The Right Stuff makes us realize that we have now crossed a boundary which 2001 first brought into sight...
...He should have called his book The Right Subject...
...He just couldn't seem to find a way to get over the top, to make the literary break-through that his revved-up, rocket-fueled style seemed to promise...
...The plane has a peculiarly foreshortened shape compared to later jet aircraft...
...I can't see the technology as inherently evil, either...
...For years he had been a style in search of an adequate subject, one his writing couldn't overwhelm...
...One of the places where the film departs from the book is by cross-cutting, as if they were simultaneous, the arrival of the astronauts in Houston and the only flight of Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) in the X-15...
...A theme of past and future also runs through The Right Stuff...
...In spite of himself, he couldn't help admiring these jet jockies and space aces...
...That's all there is to it...
...or even if it is in some ways, it doesn't matter...
...They turned out to be a topic with some unexpected resistance in it, just enough to give his prose the lift it had always needed to really get it airborne...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 22
