When Even Democrats Loved Their Country

A merica, 1968: Dad drinks beer while driving (and gets his kid to hold the steering wheel so he can pop open another). Due to reciprocal agreements, most adults have permission to paddle any children who get up to mischief, and they do so with gusto. Kids on bikes happily ride behind a truck spraying clouds of insecticide in the air. Families of seven and eight are common, so going to the beach means throwing the younglings in the back of a pickup and not worrying too much about what could go wrong. The breaking of limbs was so routine that every kid took his turn wearing a cast.

All of this is pretty disturbing, right? Nah. It’s all part of one great honey-colored, glowing American memory to writer-director Richard Linklater in his utterly charming new animated film Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, which is showing on Netflix.

Those of us who remember the Nixon era (as I do, barely) and the moon landing will be held rapt by Linklater’s memoir-movie, narrated in the first person by an unusually restrained Jack Black as the adult version of Stan, one of six kids growing up in a Houston suburb in 1968–69. (Linklater was born in 1960.) Excitement is growing about the upcoming moonshot, and everything is named “astro-” this or that, including playgrounds, the Disneyland knockoff Astroworld, and the just-opened eighth wonder of the world, the Astrodome.

Stan’s gruff, taciturn dad works at NASA, but only in the shipping department. Stan, an elementary-school student, spins this feeble connection into glorious tales about his dad’s heroics — he tells one class that his father is the man who will actually push the button that launches the rocket into space — and though there is comedy in this, there is also genuine pride. Stan, for all of his bemusement about the world he inhabits, loves his family, his state, and his country.

Apollo 10½ is a very Texas film (wacky side characters include a conspiracy-theorist grandmother who believes JFK survived the assassination attempt) that has the same dry appreciation for weirdos as King of the Hill, and though the memories don’t cohere into a plot, virtually every scene is a charmer. The film is at least as good as Dazed and Confused, a defining Linklater film set seven years later.

Perhaps to counteract the Wonder Years–style lack of structure, however, Linklater does something completely unnecessary and builds a fanciful plot around Stan’s imaginary journey to the moon between the Apollo 10 and 11 missions. We watch as government agents recruit Stan based on his kickball prowess and train him to be the first kid in space. While his family thinks he’s away at summer camp, he’s secretly suiting up and rocketing toward the moon.

These scenes make for frustrating digressions from the much more interesting memory-based scenes — observations about “Frito pies,” being punished for baseball errors by a “firing squad” of three teammates hurling baseballs at you from short range, and what all was on the television in ’68–’69. Bewitched. The Beverly Hillbillies. Adam-12. Most of this stuff was garbage, but Linklater’s authorial stand-in remembers it all as being great, as I suppose I do, too. What’s not to love, when you’re eight? Everything is dewy and new. Even the cheesy black-and-white sci-fi movies and “the scary-eyeball show,” as Stan remembers calling The Twilight Zone, were great, and you knew it was time to go to bed when the TV stations simply signed off, ending the day with the national anthem.

Pride and patriotism were thick in the air then, and they’re all over this movie. Toward the end, when NASA successfully lands on the moon, Stan’s wife tells her husband, “You did it.” Meaning he and NASA. He gently corrects her: “We all did it,” and it’s a beautiful, stirring moment of local and national pride. We all did it. What a feeling.

And what gratitude Linklater has for everything he describes. (Well, maybe not the firing squads or the spankings, but he finds them more amusing than traumatic.) What’s most exotic about the era Linklater describes is that everybody loved their country, even Democrats. Linklater, who includes a brief but not particularly ill-tempered exchange about the lack of diversity at NASA (as though the lack of black engineers were the agency’s fault), is a Democrat, but a grateful one. He doesn’t see his country (or his state) as poisoned by fundamental flaws. Just the opposite. We all did it.

Today only 5 percent of young Democratic adults, and 8 percent of those age 30–49, say America stands alone above all other countries in the world; when Linklater was growing up, this would have been the consensus view even among his fellow liberals. Only a minority of Democrats age 18–29 (45 percent) even agree that America is “one of” the greatest countries. So we’re not even near the top of the charts? I don’t know which is more preposterous here: the lack of knowledge betrayed by this view, or the lack of gratitude.