Watch It All Decay

I remember the 1970s as an odd, dispiriting time. (Better to have grown up during that decade in America, rather than in contemporary Cambodia or Uganda, but I digress.) The cultural zeitgeist was one of entropy, decadence, and decline. The president was a depressing nobody, tolerated mainly for the contrast he provided to the villainy of his predecessors. Public places all seemed dirty or sticky or too dangerous for children. Adults were angry or drunk all the time. Books were cheap and disposable, television mostly awful, especially children's shows. 

The aura of decay extended to science fiction, ostensibly a genre of hope, and to its real-life manifestation, the American space program. Consider: during my formative years as a reader and media consumer, roughly ages 5 through 10, not a single American traveled into space. The last Moon landing took place when I was a toddler, and I was also too young to remember Skylab or Apollo-Soyuz. By the late 1970s I had come to suspect that even the nascent Shuttle program was a sham. (My father or mother, or perhaps a teacher, had told me that the Enterprise was just a test model that had to be carried on a 747.* I extrapolated from this my belief that the Shuttle program was an expensive fake.) I was genuinely shocked when the Columbia first went into orbit in April 1981, having firmly believed that there would be no more manned American space flights in my lifetime. 

I suspect I wasn't the only person to think this, which perhaps is what makes late '70s films about the space program such significant artifacts. Manned space flight, they suggested, was as obsolete as 40-cent gasoline. Capricorn One (1977), which I saw on my eighth birthday, postulated a faked Mars landing, staged in order to save both NASA's budget and the lives of astronauts who otherwise would have died from botched engineering. Meteor (1979), a B-movie with a cast of has-beens, saw an American deep-space mission destroyed by the eponymous death rock. Facing a world-killing collision of the meteor with Earth, the Americans and Soviets then had to join forces to destroy the oncoming threat with their secret nuclear space platforms. The implication was that space was primarily a place of destruction, suitable mainly for military installations - a point perhaps not lost on future president Ronald Reagan. Salvage (1979), a TV movie that Christopher Mills's blog recently brought to my attention, saw a privately-built rocket travel to the Moon to recover, for sale back on Earth, the remains of one of the Apollo landers. The pride of the American nation had now become just another way for some plucky junkmen to make a buck.

Collectively, such films characterized the United States as a land of failure, shoddiness, ass-covering, greed, and nostalgia. This surely made them successful with adults and critics, but did nothing to inspire children. Give George Lucas this much credit: Star Wars very much cut against the grain of American popular culture and of science fiction during the decade of its release.


(Images above are from howstuffworks.com and Rotten Tomatoes, respectively.)


* Actually, I think I had a toy space shuttle mounted on the back of a 747 when I was 8 or 9. It reinforced my perception of fakery.