The Space Race
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The Space Race Remembering Sputnik Autumn. BY JOHN PODHORETZ This is the golden age of the documentary, at least fi nancially, which only serves to demonstrate what a crock the entire genre is...
...The contrast between their manner and the smiling, ironic tone and speaking manner of today’s TV person-on-thestreet is staggering...
...How silly...
...Look at them: Worried about the Soviet threat, when we now know that, 44 years later, the Soviet Union would collapse entirely...
...And where better to revive it than the documentary, whose primary subject is the enduring sinfulness of America...
...Evidently they’re due for a revival...
...As Hoffman tells it, Laika became an international celebrity and figure of great good cheer until it dawned on people that Laika wasn’t going to come down to earth alive...
...A documentary purports to be an accounting of history, or a work of reportorial journalism, but what it most often resembles is a secular Calvinist sermon—an accounting of sins that concludes with either a demand for expiation, a warning of hellfi re, or a defeated resignation at the power of evil...
...But he is not so old that he hasn’t learned the latest in documentary techniques, and they certainly enliven his storytelling...
...Sputnik Mania is full of desktop special effects—old newspapers appearing in animated form, that sort of thing—courtesy of the Avid editing system...
...Those people on Fifth Avenue, for example...
...An entertaining documentary is a crude polemic that turns opposing arguments into vulgar caricatures of themselves for the entertainment of the folks in the pews...
...And yet Hoffman expects us to react to the far more serious material he shows us with the same attitude of enlightened amusement that we bring to watching a TV ad in which someone delightedly blows smoke right at the camera...
...It’s about the American reaction to the challenge posed by the Soviet triumph in space...
...As always with such images, one is struck by the formality with which people dressed half-a-century ago, and also by their earnestness—their unsmiling determination to say something serious...
...But it is so absurd that it hardly even bears discussion...
...Hoffman and his cowriters, Paul Dickson and Lindsey Palatino, set Eisenhower against them...
...Hoffman is old enough to have lived through 1957-58 as an adult with a strong memory of the emotions of the day...
...The founder of Priceline.com, Jay Walker, has put up the money for a documentary called Sputnik Mania, which is a portrait of the year that followed the surprise launch of the fi rst spacecraft...
...We see Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn saying that “America has been humiliated” by Sputnik...
...The footage is terrifi c. There’s a commercial for a new cigarette called Laika in honor of the fi rst space traveler—a dog who went up in the second Sputnik...
...He scoured eBay and YouTube for interesting clips...
...At which point the joy turned to horror...
...He is joined in his concern (according to them) by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier...
...The same is true of the footage offered in Sputnik Mania of Democrats who railed against President Eisenhower because Ike had allowed the Soviets to achieve superiority in the skies on his watch...
...They portray Ike as serenely unconcerned with the military threat posed by the Soviet space-rocket program, and far more worried about the American military’s hunger to militarize the upper atmosphere...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ This is the golden age of the documentary, at least fi nancially, which only serves to demonstrate what a crock the entire genre is and always has been...
...Hoffman takes tiny bits of fact—Eisenhower’s insistence on dividing the space and nuclear programs to keep them out of Pentagon hands—and extrapolates wildly from them to create one of those old-time revisionist histories of the Cold War that went out of fashion at the same time as shoulder pads and neon...
...How dated...
...They prominently feature an interview with Khrushchev’s son Sergei, in which Sergei claims that his father didn’t want lots of nuclear weapons and that his interest in developing rockets with the ability to carry nuclear warheads was purely and entirely defensive...
...Henry (Scoop) Jackson says that Western civilization hangs in the balance...
...Senator Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying, “Soon the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space the way kids drop rocks on cars from a highway overpass...
...Hoffman shows a snippet of an actress named Estelle Taylor (the ex-wife of Jack Dempsey, imdb.com tells me) making a weepy proto-PETA speech about Laika’s fate: “We can only pray that God will be merciful and speed the end...
...A responsible documentary is a bore...
...How retrogressive...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...And the more entertaining the sermon of damnation, the more it uses the baubles and bangles of fi lmmaking, the more questionable and problematic it becomes...
...We can see that their fear is real, but we know they had nothing to fear...
...Well, that’s all very nice, and it fi ts in with the notion that anybody who ever believes the United States is under threat is either a dupe of the powersthatbe or a moron...
...Hoffman has also unearthed man-onthestreet television interviews in which New Yorkers along Fifth Avenue react to the news that the Soviet Union has outdistanced the United States in space...
...But Sputnik Mania isn’t a movie about how people dressed and talked to a camera in 1957, nor is it a nostalgic study of black-and-white cigarette commercials...
...The director, David Hoffman, has been at this game so long that some forgotten fi lm he made 40 years ago beat out Easy Rider for a prize at the Cannes Film Festival...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 27
