In a recent interview, James Cameron expressed frustration that critics have ignored the fact that the hero of Avatar is disabled. There’s a problem with that thought, of course. Avatar’s hero isn’t really disabled. In Cameron’s story, he runs around, leaps valiantly between giant tree limbs, screws a blue alien babe. (A less-thoughtful interview with Cameron on the subject of alien sexuality can be found here.) In reality, it’s less that Jake Sully is disabled and more that he’s not fully served by technological progress. It is a progress that, at the film’s close, allows him and the people around him to leave behind their bodies for the psychedelic pastures of the mind. In this idea, Avatar expresses the basic hope that technological progress might free us from our bodies and from the limitations of the physical world. It is a hope endemic to (and to some extent, realized by) the wonders of the capitalist free market. It is also a hope that looks good in 3D.

Just when you thought this kind of thing was all Hollywood was ever capable of, you come across a film like Make Way for Tomorrow, Leo McCarey’s Depression-era drama about bankruptcy and aging and the quiet moral failures of the petit bourgeois. In these things and more, Make Way is the anti-Avatar.

McCarey’s movie follows the plight of Ma and Pa Cooper (Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore) as their home is foreclosed upon and they are forced to separate. Ma finds herself in conflict with the loose ways of a younger generation. Pa finds himself unemployed and unwanted, a financial burden upon his already haggard daughter. The plot is a slow study of their inability to find place in a world in which they have no value, and the movie ends simply but wonderfully, with a lyrical sequence in which the couple is temporarily reunited on a date in midtown Manhattan.

All of which is to say, Make Way opens with a home foreclosure and closes on the permanent separation of an elderly married couple. For shear teariness and resistance to the fantasy of unrestrained success, it’s a pretty powerful fruit punch.

Unlike Avatar, whose vision of progress is inseparable from its technological mysticism, McCarey’s film gestures toward progress of a political nature. Make Way was released in 1937, just two years after Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. As the critic Gary Giddins points out in an interview on the new Criterion DVD, it’s hard not to read Make Way as a quiet argument for the institution of Social Security. Outside of the studio, McCarey was a social conservative, but he wasn’t a Fox News merchant of hate. The clear implication of his film is that, with some kind of social safety net, this couple might have lived out their lives at home and with some measure of dignity.

Studio films of the 1930s are often thought of as shiny nickels of escapist entertainment, studied regressions into the dreamscapes of the rich and famous. And with their garish interiors, soft-lit stars, and pressed tuxedos, it’s easy to read them this way. With its high key lighting and terrarium-style neatness, McCarey’s film looks a lot like other studio fare of the era. But Make Way feels a lot less like an escape and much more like simple reality, a kind of looking glass Top Hat. It’s as if, instead of following Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as they tap their way to love and happiness, you just stayed in the living room with Astaire’s parents and watched the slow dissolution of their marriage.

That this idea feels like a surprise is something of an indication of Hollywood’s grand omissions as well as its ongoing battle to achieve some sort of settlement with new technologies. Try to call to mind Hollywood movies about aging and you find that they can be counted on one hand. On Golden Pond (yes), Driving Miss Daisy (sort of), Cocoon (no). Aging, bankruptcy, things not working out — these subjects are not part of Hollywood’s self-image. McCarey was fired from Paramount after directing Make Way and you can kind of see why: in just a couple years, Gone with the Wind would be released in lush color, full of young actors and actresses pushing aside older cast members, and proclaiming a bold vision of tomorrow through a reinterpretation of the past, the end of the Civil War in widescreen.

But if Make Way is the anti-Avatar, it would also be wrong to say that Make Way is without a vision of the future. Unlike Avatar and the fantasy of perfect technological progress, Make Way finds its hope in the things of this world, in its attachment to their surfaces, and in its gesture toward a particularly powerful instance of political progress. There is hope and there is hope, the fetish and the thing itself. We need more of the latter.

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There’s a moment in For All Mankind when a couple of astronauts are wandering around the surface of the moon, collecting rock samples and staring in amazement at the black horizon. They’re giddy with excitement, jumping around like toddlers on M&Ms and acid.
And one of them pauses to sum things up. “Boy,” he says, “is this a neat way to travel.”

The Apollo space missions were mostly science, yes, and a little bit of Cold War politicking, of course, but they were also one of human history’s greatest sensory experiences. You’ll feel this way too if you watch this movie and get as psyched as I did to see a bunch of grown men toss around a small flashlight in zero gravity. Avatar has nothing on lunar travel.

Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary tells the story of the six successful Apollo missions in the form of a single trip from the Earth to the moon and back. The trip has no organizing genius or personality, no Ed Harris to anchor its various events, no invisible narrator to explain even bare dates and times. In For All Mankind, these missions are a truly collective event. The movie’s audio track is composed of interviews Reinert conducted with the astronauts, in addition to several of their transmissions to Earth. Its images are culled entirely from the NASA film archives, and the overwhelming majority of them had never before been available to the public and none of them were previously viewable in the pristine 35mm prints reproduced here.

The images, especially, do not disappoint. They are perfect and unnerving, just like the place in which they were filmed. Reinert includes the famous image of Neil Armstrong hopping onto the surface of the moon like a man test-driving new bionic limbs. But he also includes the discarding of a rocket stages as it was seen by a camera in the tail of the spacecraft, an early spacewalk filmed at what looks like six frames a second, a train of astronauts walking toward the cockpit in preparation for blast-off, each carrying his own Samsonite-sized breathing machine. There are images from the cramped spacecraft cabin looking back toward a diminishing Earth, and even a kind of lunar blooper reel.

None of the audio track is synchronized with the images, and this gives the movie less the feeling of documentary and more that of experimental cinema. In Reinert’s movie, film realism comes full circle. Its images of reality are more fantastic and unreal than the bubble gum dreams given substance by Disney, Pixar, or Carrie Prejean’s breast implants. For All Mankind is indeed non-fiction, and it was filmed entirely on location. But it has more in common with Georges Méliès’s early film fantasy A Trip to the Moon than it does with commercially successful documentary filmmaking. In space, reality becomes surreality.

Of course, the true wonder of this movie is that it was made at all. Its images were not composed for the purposes of making a documentary, not even for the purposes of political propaganda. (That purpose was served by the grainy pictures that were initially broadcast on television.) NASA gave each of the Apollo astronauts a 16mm camera for use on the ship as well as the lunar surface, and their ad hoc movies are amazing. But many of the most striking images in For All Mankind come from footage that was produced for purely utilitarian reasons. Earthbound NASA engineers wanted to see how their very expensive toy worked. The images produced by their stationary cameras — cameras without aesthetic purpose and free of human eyes and hands — are revelatory. They record the odd ballet of the machinery, the treads of the lunar rover, the spectacle of the blue Earth in orbit. They let us see shrill fires expelled from the ends of the Saturn rocket, a powerful vision of an orbital spacewalk, the eerie ridges of the moon’s surface.

At the turn of the twentieth century, film audiences sat in rapt attention to see footage of the distant Ganges or the shadowy figure of Teddy Roosevelt visiting Panama. We have something infinitely stranger in the recesses of our living rooms. The uncanny and pleasurable experience of seeing these images of space owes something to the distance that they traveled to reach us. It is not just the spectacle that is awe inducing, but the feat of their transmission. Part of the visual marvel that occurs deep in your occipital lobe actually starts out here, in the world, in simple amazement at what people have done, where they have been.

The original 16mm negatives that became this movie made a journey from outer space, to NASA freezers, to glorious re-mastered 35mm, and now, thanks to Criterion, to DVD. Really, it’s worth thinking about that chain of events for a minute. This film was captured on the moon, and now it’s in your house.

The miraculous thing is that the eye responds to that fact. When we’ve all been to the moon, For All Mankind will look very different. But right now, I keep thinking, did this really happen?

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Martin has always been interesting to me because of the way he teeters between hilarious and laughably unfunny. Take The Jerk. That movie is genuinely funny, but about forty-five minutes in I always think about going to sleep or ordering a burrito. Cruel Shoes walks this line like Mary Lou Retton on a Russian balance beam. It is perfectly and weirdly confident. On his way across, Martin is going to do some fancy handsprings and a somersault and then nail the dismount. And oh, through it all, he’s going to wear that silly arrow-through-the-head thing. If this is funny, it is also kind of mysterious.

As Andre Breton once remarked, “We are still living under the reign of logic.” To logic, we might add “genre.” Cruel Shoes isn’t really a book of humor. It’s a chapbook of surrealist poetry, a cry from the metaphysical wilderness, and a parody of, well, everything. A parody of parody. A parody so given to parody-ness that it tosses its reader into a lingual laundry machine and spits him out not knowing which way is up, what’s clean or dirty, what’s a poem, what’s a dream, what’s a joke.

Ultimately, it’s this mania that constitutes the book’s mystery. And this mystery, like its humor, is cumulative. What is pedestrian and not-so-funny on page two is somehow bizarre and uproarious by page fifty, sort of like an old photograph of you and your high school girlfriend that kind of gets you down until you realize you’re both wearing the same extra-large Gap sweater. Take the essay (poem? word jazz?) “The Confessions of Raymond to His Goldfish.” The conventional work of literary humor, then and now, is Aristotelian in structure. Not so with “Raymond,” or really anything else in Cruel Shoes. “Raymond” is just a tiny missive from a spaced-out man to his goldfish. No theatrics. No story. Just a promise that, should the fishbowl bust and send the fish flapping to the floor, Raymond will “find the water” to save this fish. I don’t know what that means or even if it’s funny, but I know that I love it.

To extend Breton, then: If Swift is a Surrealist in malice and Sade in sadism, Martin spins his surreality in laughter. You should read this book.

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