You have to love any holiday that is celebrated more in the good old USA than the country of its origin, Mexico. Either people will make any excuse to drink excessively or they really hate the French. I'm going with binge drinking as the logic behind the Cinco de Mayo craze here in the states but just incase you're someone who hates the French, Napoleon also died on Cinco de Mayo. So double bonus for you. Drink up.
Also on this date in history the Freedom 7 spacecraft put the first American, Alan Shepard, into outer space. Here's a video which details the Mercury Program's Freedom 7 and Alan Shepard's historic flight.
Side note pertaining to Alan Shepard. I recently finished reading Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. In the book, Goldman dedicates a chapter to his experience of adapting the novel The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe into a screenplay. For those unfamiliar, The Right Stuff is a book about post WWII test pilots and the stories of Project Mercury astronauts selected by NASA for the space program one of whom was Alan Shepard. Point being, The Right Stuff is now on my to read list.
For those of you who don't read, no worries, they made a movie.
Beyond the Infinite
Watching those videos and writing that previous section got me to thinking about one of my favorite movies, 2001 A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick. One of the urban legends attached to the ground breaking and influential film is that the band Pink Floyd was considered to record the soundtrack for the film. The story goes that the band were giving an advanced cut of the film and what today is known as their album Meddle was originally intended to be the soundtrack for the film. I suppose this story came to be when some fan years later popped 2001 into the VCR while listening to Pink Floyd and Wallah! a perfect match. Here is a video that syncs Pink Floyd's song Echoes with 2001 A Space Odyssey - Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. I strongly encourage you to watch the entire video but if you can't handle a 24 minute video I understand, skip ahead to the 15:15 mark.
Room 237
If you thought that theory was bizarre, well, it's only going to get stranger from here on out. Probably the key component for the association between Pink Floyd and Stanley Kubrick's film in the above video was the invention of the VCR. The VCR ushered in a new era of film watching where a fan could now repeatedly watch a film and perhaps find hidden messages or greater themes that may have previously alluded them in a single theater viewing.
The movie Room 237 is a documentary that delves into this phenomena by letting fans of another Kubrick film, The Shining, expound upon their views of what was really transpiring on film. I went to go see Room 237 the week of it's release at the IFC Center in NYC last year. I became aware of the documentary several months prior when a writer I enjoy, Chuck Klosterman, wrote about his experience of seeing a screening of Room 237 at a film festival. Needless to say I was fascinated with one theory in particular that dealt with Kubrick's previous film 2001 A Space Odyssey, NASA, and The Shining. You starting to see how everything is coming together here? We'll get into that theory next though. First, for those interested in viewing the documentary, it is now available for viewing on Netflix. Here is the trailer for Room 237.
Now to the mother of all conspiracies, the lunar landing. One of the theories in the film Room 237 deals with the conspiracy that, after completing his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick was contacted by NASA to help them fake a filming of the upcoming Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The story goes that the US government felt the public would not get behind any space mission without some semblance of live video and/or sound to go along with the mission. Unable to send images and audio directly back to earth from astronauts, Kubrick was brought in to use the techniques he developed for 2001 and create images to package to the American public. I'll leave it at that and hopefully let you discovery more on your own. Here's a documentary, Dark Side of the Moon: Stanley Kubrick and the Fake Moon Landings, that goes into more depth about Kubrick's involvement with the lunar landing.
While I personally, without a shadow of a doubt, believe that the Apollo 11 astronauts completed their mission to the surface of the moon, I also find it highly likely that the images from that first trip were faked on a soundstage somewhere.
Funny that somehow wishing you a Happy Cinco de Mayo quickly escalated to faking the lunar landing. If you needed an excuse to drink today, please feel free to use this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment