One of these days I am going to write an essay called “Two Views of an Exploding Rocket.” It’s going to be about how movies can completely change your life.

Back in 1983, when I was but a lad of 15 living in Santa Fe, the El Paseo movie theater (the first one in the area with lounge seating) showed Koyannisqatsi and The Right Stuff within a few months of each other. Koyaanisqatsi was a meditation about time and timelessness, the natural vs. the artifical, and so much else; it appealed to my nascent spiritual side. The Right Stuff was a paean to the “can-do” attitude; it resonated with the part of me that was the son of a toolmaker and a brother of draftsmen.

Both movies used the same archival film footage of an exploding rocket. In The Right Stuff, the footage is part of a montage showing many rockets fizzling, exploding, and going haywire. The scene, which has a deliciously humorous overtone, symbolizes the progressive (and eventually triumphant) engineering effort to build a reliable rocket. In Koyaanisqatsi, a mch longer version of the same footage appears at the end of the movie, and (at least to me) serves to warn us that our efforts to outperform or override nature are doomed to fail.

Now, anyone that knew me growing up knows that I loved rockets and space travel. They symbolized everything that could be noble about mankind: how heroic engineers will create better and cleaner worlds on Earth and in space, worlds where people will be free to excel, etc. etc. (When you’re 15, you still believe that people are driven only by the purest of motives.) Along comes Koyaanisqatsi and suddenly my symbol of progress has been turned into a symbol of arrogant short-sightedness.

I wrestled with this contrast a lot. Which view was right? Instinctively, I knew that they both were valid within their own frames of reference. Something could be an expression of knowledge and ignorance at the same time.

Could I still cheer for the technological accomplishment while also appreciating the “wrongs” it represented? The answer turned out to be yes. My awareness of the dichotomy did not cause me to reject or invalidate the Right Stuff frame of reference, or force me to deny my fondness for it. By embracing this contradiction, I could in effect grasp something larger than just the single aspect. Someday I may understand how and why I was able to do that.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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