Space Craze by Margaret A. Weitekamp

Author:Margaret A. Weitekamp [Weitekamp, Margaret A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

CAPRICORN ONE AND ALIEN

As the 1970s ended, popular depictions of spaceflight conveyed a pervasive sense of disillusionment. The era’s cynicism permeates Capricorn One, a feature film released by Warner Brothers in June 1978. Writer and director Paul Hyams said he had the idea for the film in 1972 but could not get it funded until after Watergate made stories about deceit and corruption more relevant. The thriller depicts a space mission to Mars executed as a complete fraud. As mission control monitors a real launch, a NASA official extracts the unwitting crew, played by James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and O. J. Simpson. After the astronauts are whisked away to a secluded location and the conspiracy revealed to them, Dr. Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) appeals to the crew to perpetrate the deception: “Nobody gives a crap about anything anymore. People close their garages and triple-lock their doors, hide under their beds. They’re even afraid to turn on their television sets for fear of what they might find out on the evening news. There’s nothing more to believe in. You want to blow this whole thing wide open? God knows what it might do to everybody.” As reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) investigates various inconsistencies, the astronauts plot their escape, and the conspiracy begins to unravel. The film ends with a series of suspenseful chase scenes and the imminent revelation of the vast conspiracy underlying the deception.

Likewise, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) offers a dystopian vision of spaceflight. Part of what made the film so successful—in addition to the pacing and effects that delivered shockingly memorable moments—was the way that it deliberately subverted the conventions of the space adventure genre. Working with Ronald Shusett to write the script, Dan O’Bannon turned the genre disruption he had practiced in Dark Star from satiric to terrifying. Indeed, Alien includes several scenes that are so memorable as to be evoked in just a few words: the “face-hugger” and the “chest-burster.” Critics had mixed opinions about the film, but it performed well with audiences during a movie season that Newsweek dubbed, “America’s Scary Summer.” Alien broke the Star Wars record for opening, earning $8.5 million in select theaters before opening nationwide.

O’Bannon and his cowriters deliberately wrote characters that were not clearly identified by race, ethnicity, gender, or other presuppositions. Nostromo’s workers are a racially integrated cast of men and women working together, not because it illustrated some futuristic ideal, as it had in Star Trek, but as a motley, workaday group thrown together by the requirements of their jobs. In this depiction, the adventure and heroics of space exploration transform into the tedium and drudgery of long-haul trucking, driven by profit for the benefit of an impersonal and uncaring Company. Both the casting and the set design reflect this. The actors are collectively almost a generation older than the fresh-faced, earnest young heroes depicted in kiddie space television shows in the 1950s. The workspace is lived-in. Nostromo is not powered by a faster-than-light engine that skips across

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