[There are a
number of significant
anniversaries in 2019, so for this New Year’s series I’ll highlight a
handful of such historical anniversaries. Leading up to a special weekend post
featuring exclusive AmericanStudier predictions on the year ahead!]
On the moon
landing’s 50th anniversary, two interesting pop culture responses to
conspiracy theories about the mission.
The third leg of
the Cold War triangle of cray cray that includes the Roswell
and JFK
assassination conspiracy theories would have to be the ongoing
and multi-layered theories that the six manned NASA moon
landings between 1969 and 1972 were all
elaborate hoaxes. These theories, which commenced almost immediately after
the first landing, began to be developed in earnest with Bill Kaysing’s book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty
Billion Dollar Swindle (1974); they have since been taken up by the very
appropriately named Flat
Earth Society, have led to numerous other works including William Brian’s
book Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S.
Space Program (1982) and Aron
Ranen’s film Did We Go? (2005), and have most
humorously extended to include a multi-faceted theory
about the landings as a blockbuster film, one financed by Disney and
directed by none other than Stanley Kubrick.
The moon landing
conspiracy theories are perhaps the most implausible of any I’ll engage with
this week (given the sheer number of people who would have had to be in on the
hoaxes and stay silent about them, for example), but a couple of the pop
culture responses to those theories are well worth our time and thought. In
2002, French
filmmaker William Karel created a brilliant mockumentary, Dark Side of the Moon (its original French title was Opération Lune), which explored and
parodied the Kubrick connection at great length, including invented stories of
the assassination of Kubrick colleagues by the CIA (among many other delightful
such details). Karel’s mockumentary is so expertly and carefully done, so rich
with seemingly believable information and interviews, that it has been accepted by many moon
landing conspiracy theorists as an authentic text within their canon of
evidence, perhaps the greatest compliment a mockumentary can receive (although Spinal Tap
songs becoming accepted rock and roll classics has to be on that list as
well).
Karel’s film
isn’t the only nor the first innovative and interesting pop culture response to
the moon theories, however. On their seminal 1992 album Automatic for the People, R.E.M. included the song “Man on the Moon,” a
tribute to comedian Andy Kaufman that uses those
conspiracy theories to engage with parallel ongoing theories
about Kaufman’s allegedly faked death. Filmmaker Milos Forman was so taken
by this metaphorical connection that he subsequently named his Jim Carrey-starring
Kaufman biopic—a film that ends
with a sly wink to the idea that Kaufman survived his “death”—Man on the Moon (1999). And I would argue that the R.E.M. song
and its connection of Kaufman to the moon landing hoax also helps us think
about another side to such conspiracy theories—the ways in which they are
irrevocably tied, as were Kaufman’s life and work, to our age of media and
celebrity, a period in which it has become increasingly difficult to discern
the difference between reality and performance, the simulacra
and the simulations. It’s the truth that we put men on the moon—but it’s
equally the truth that we’ve been creating alternative truths ever since.
Next anniversary
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Anniversaries you’d highlight or predictions you’d share?