Unpacking Propaganda: “Fly Me To The Moon”

This is our first in what we expect to be a series of digs into works of propaganda - film, music, art exhibitions, books, etc. We hope you like it and please reach out with feedback, reactions, and suggestions for other things to cover! Since we know our audience is consummately literate, for further reading of a similar type, one of my favorites (and a lifelong inspiration) is Roland Barthes’ seminal “Mythologies.” Now without further ado, our propaganda review of the 2024 Apple Films historical rom-com, “Fly Me To The Moon.”

Horrible acting, horrible script, and most of all, horrible propaganda. Imagine making a movie about the triumph of the real over the superficiality of the spectacle in the United States of America in the year 2024! “Fly Me To The Moon” is one of those rare films (at least, rare since the Reagan era) that scarcely tries to hide its cringe-ass saccharine imperialist sentimentalism. It could just be that I see fewer shit blockbusters than I used to, but this one hit hard.

So a quick plot synopsis first. We’re in summer 1969 in the run-up to the moon landing, and that’s the big plot event everything in the film is working up to. But we start on Madison Avenue with Scarlett Johansson playing a blond-bombshell Don Draper of sorts, but more comically deceptive in her ad pitching. We the audience are told that we’re dealing with an unscrupulous gal here, but smart as a whip. Meanwhile in Florida, Channing Tatum plays a Big Aryan Hunk With Emotions. He’s a Korean War vet flyboy who, we later learn, fucked the dog on the Apollo 1 mission as flight commander, getting 3 astronauts killed (goddamn it!). How do their stars cross, you might ask. Well in quick work Woody Harrelson (the only decent performance in the movie as a shadowy government agent) convinces ScarJo to run PR for NASA down Florida-way. Down she goes, pitches the moonshot to Congress, making it rain money on the spacemen, and her success is met with a promotion offer of sorts: she is to supervise and execute “project Artemis” - the twin of Apollo. It’s a fake movie moon-landing meant to stand in for the real moon landing film in the event of a failure. She’s to keep this all secret from Channing T. (who, as you might’ve intuited, starts off like oil and water with our heroine and later becomes her sweetheart, but with lies creating a tension between them).

SPOILER ALERT: she ends up coming clean to C. T., he’s big mad but later forgives her because honesty, and get this. They scheme to get the “real” moon landing broadcast from space cuz America is the Real Thing, Baby! But Harrelson is not on board so he like supersedes them. Everyone thinks the fake movie is being broadcast live. But twist. The real one was being broadcast live from THE MOON! How do we know? Because on the fake movie set a cat ruins everything but it doesn’t show up on TV. Woody H. quips, “that’s really the moon? It looks fake!”

[puke noises] So it’s pretty well obvious what’s going on beneath the surface here. This one really disguises itself as a sort of “fun period piece from the 60s.” Maybe something of a “Hidden Figures,” but with only one, marginal Black character amidst a bunch of White Blond Stars. But it achieves multiple propaganda goals. Let’s list them.

• Most obvious: reify and affirm Cold War values. Tar communists as brutal, humorless dictatorship with no freedom of speech. Boost USA in patriotic celebration with unironic rah rah yuck-fest. “WE sent a man to the moon!”
• There’s even a line where Channing rallies the scientistic troops by saying they were all there to “keep one man’s promise to the world.” Referring to JFK. Wow!
• Relatedly, the movie does Nazi erasure. Everybody knows NASA was chock-a-block with goose-stepping sturmbahnführers and obersturmbahnführers and einsatzgrüppekommandos. The Paper Clip scientists made up the backbone of the rocket program. So to set a film in NASA’s Florida campus and not even so much as nod to Wehrner von Braun is to deliberately write him and his cohort out of history.
• Boost the transhumanist techno fascist agenda by praising the God of Science and emphasizing that we need the big geniuses like Elon to do secret and weird shit undercover to advance humanity for us all. We just need it, so don’t question it so much.
• Deboonk in a Very Knowing and Sophisticated Way kooky conspiracy theorists. You think the moon landing looks fake huh? Think it was staged? Well guess what! The government DOES do SOME wacky stuff including try to fake it, but American Science was so good that the fake wasn’t needed. It was real all along.
• Identify (once again - this seems ubiquitous in media lately with movie/tv protagonists being in the advertising industry nine times outa ten) US Empire with the advertising industry. It’s self-aware in a sense, but flips that trust gained through self-awareness to manipulate the viewer into normalizing the most capitalist industry of them all. Advertising/PR is basically professional commodity fetishism. A key link in the logical chain of the reproduction of capital.
• We - America - are just like Scarlet fr fr. Our past maybe not the greatest. We’ve got some skeletons in our closet. But ya know what? We’re fundamentally good. We like a hunka man-meat as much as the next red-blooded American. We’ve got good, Aryan blood, and we’ve got the wits to bounce back from nothing to help do moon commercials. (Apparently, doing moon commercials is incredibly heroic, according to this bullshit.)
• The most insidious message of all: Unaccountable artifice and official deception may be justifiable in the name of a greater good. Especially if that greater good is defeating communism. And in the end, the Real Truth will triumph anyways, and the truth is that WE’RE # 1!!

I don’t want to belabor the point because it’s clear enough on the surface. The propaganda that the system is puking up has reached new depths of cringe. It’s part of this larger technofascist project to inflate a whole separate and independent sphere of reality, utterly divorced from the reality we’re stuck with in real life. The future this film envisions is one where we entrust our tax dollars to some beneficent space project which, even if people can’t see the value in it right away, is good because it just might bring us all together to beat our common foes (the Russians). The movie even ends with a Blue-Beam shout out to the existence of extraterrestrial life “among us” on earth. Somebody check old Scarlet’s stock portfolio, because this third-rate 60s-exploitation piece is exactly what it purports to depict: a psyop to pacify the masses in light of ongoing deception campaigns under the banner of the most facile Reaganite nationalist cheese imaginable.

Soundtrack is fine if predictable and cliched. There, now you don’t need to waste your time watching it.

- Don