First Man

The Neil Armstrong biopic affirms the virtues and vices of traditional masculinity - but misses its purpose

This great guest post by New York filmmaker Joseph Holmes is a look at the film First Man, a biopic about Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. It’s a film that’s seen a revival of interest as a positive portrayal of classic masculinity. I’ve been thinking of adding more cultural coverage like this to my newsletter, so please let me know what you think - Aaron.

---

Audio version of this article (AI generated)

The movie First Man has gone through a minor revival of interest lately. Both with film enthusiasts on X and–more interestingly–in conservative and pro-masculinity circles. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh called it “perhaps the best biopic ever made” and Lomez called it a great film “about masculinity, and the costs and requirements of great civilizational achievement”. The consensus is that it promotes a positive view of traditional masculinity that we rarely see in a post-Barbie landscape.

The revival of interest in the movie is well-deserved. The film is deeply underrated, and there is a lot to recommend it to those who are interested in great filmmaking and traditional masculinity. But there is also a good reason it didn’t generate this level of enthusiasm when it first came out.

Directed by Oscar-winner Damien Chazelle (La La Land), First Man follows the true-life story of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), the first man to set foot on the moon, in 1960s America as he and NASA risk death and disgrace to try to put a man on the moon before the Soviets do. He must do this while trying to repair his relationship with his wife Janet (Claire Foy), which has struggled since the loss of their daughter.

First Man is undeniably a stunning piece of filmmaking. Damien Chazelle is one of the best technical directors working today, having the mastery of the craft to capture a perfectly choreographed musical (La La Land) and the chaos of Hollywood debauchery (Babylon). Here, he deftly balances a grounded human drama with a quiet epic scale that puts you in the shoes of the first people to cross the lunar threshold. He seamlessly switches between wide shots of giant spacecrafts and the vast reaches of space with tights and mediums on Neil’s face and his family, making us feel like these tiny normal people inside this big experience. 

Ryan Gosling gives one of his finest performances as he puts us deeply in the feelings of a man who doesn’t like to show his feelings. The brilliance is in that the more overwhelmed he is emotionally, the less he shows. Chazelle guides our interpretation of his inner life in these moments as well, giving us a wide view of Armstrong alone, or holding tight on his face to show how his emotions are shutting him out from other people.

What stands out when you watch the film today is its affirming portrayal of many traditionally masculine traits. Neil Armstrong is a “traditional man” in almost every sense of the word. He’s the breadwinner for his stay-at-home wife and kids. He risks his life with his male colleagues to beat the Soviets to the moon. He’s an engineer far more comfortable with numbers and machines than people. When he’s overwhelmed, he rushes to work rather than talk about what’s troubling him–even when his wife or friends are pushing him to talk.

And yet, unlike Ryan Gosling’s more recent role as Ken in Barbie, these parts of his character are not deconstructed. His role as the provider or his wife’s as a homemaker is never questioned. His engineering skills save his and his friends’ lives when their ship malfunctions in space. When Janet Armstrong admits to her friend she wishes her husband took fewer risks, her friend tells her that her friends with safe husbands are unhappy. Neil works through the death of his daughter by achieving his goal of going to the moon––not by opening up about his feelings. His success silences the voices–from the media, journalists, politicians, protestors, and his friends–who say the journey to the moon isn’t worth the cost.

The movie doesn’t pretend Armstrong’s masculine traits don’t come with flaws. Watching his kids look at him with rejected faces because he won’t pay attention to them is devastating to watch. In one scene he abandons Janet at a party without a word, leaving her to have to get a ride home from a friend. Before his space mission, she has to force him to sit down with his kids to tell them that he might not come back.

But neither Janet–nor the filmmakers–want to fundamentally change who he is. She makes him talk to his boys, but she doesn’t try to make him more expressive or touchy-feely. She treats his bad sides as flawed expressions of good qualities that she loves.

In many ways, social science discourse is catching up to the way this movie handles masculinity. Whether it’s Richard Reeves in Of Boys and Men, Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, Nancy Pearcey’s The Toxic War on Masculinity, Brad Wilcox’s Get Married, or Adam Lane Smith on Chris Williamson’s podcast, More and more popular voices are highlighting the research that shows many of the differences between men and women are–at least partly–innate cross-culturally. These things include an interest in things over people, high competitiveness, high risk-taking, mental health through empowerment over verbal communication, the desire to be the primary provider (something women also desire in their husbands), and a desire to fulfill the “three P’s of manhood” that Dr. David D. Gilmore described in Manhood in the Making: protect, provide, and procreate.

Because so many of these traits are innate rather than socially constructed, any positive vision of masculinity has to affirm the goodness of these traits, even if they can be perverted. This is what First Man portrays.

But there’s one piece of masculinity that the movie misses. This missing piece I think is the key to why the movie has flown under the radar for so long: a compelling purpose.

Men long for a compelling goal and purpose for their life which justifies sacrificing themselves, whether it's their God, their country, or their family. First Man puts the question “Is this mission worth it?” front and center, with politicians, reporters, and activists asking the question “is the mission worth it, in money and in lives?” So it’s not a question they ignore in the story.

The problem is their answer. When the military bigwigs ask Armstrong why he thinks space flight is important, he replies: “When you get to a different vantage point it changes your perspective. I don’t know what space exploration will uncover but I don’t think it will be exploration just for the sake of exploration. I think it will be more the fact that it allows us to see things that maybe we should have seen a long time ago. But just haven’t been able to until now.”

This is, unfortunately, too abstract. Most people won’t die for “perspective”. They will die for concrete things that they love and that matter to them. The Christian Martyrs were willing to die for God. WWII American soldiers were willing to die for their country. In fiction, it's the same. Frodo was willing to die for the Shire. Spider-Man is willing to die to save Mary Jane.

I tried to find if the filmmakers were just quoting from Neil Armstrong himself, but I couldn’t find anything resembling this quote anywhere. The closest I found was this quote from Neil Armstrong taken from the Bill of Rights Institute: “I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul,” This is also a bit abstract, but closer. They do play on this at the end of the movie with a speech by JFK. But by then it’s a bit too late to animate the passion of the audience for the mission.

Imagine if Armstrong had said that he was a part of the space program to beat the communists to protect the world from the soviet threat. Or if he’d said that we need to keep exploring to make a better world for their kids. Those things cut to the heart of men’s values, of protecting (from the communists), providing, and procreating (a better life for his kids and future generations)

Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of those things sound a bit too right-wing for the average filmmaker in Hollywood. Creative people who graduate college tend to be embarrassed by God, country, and traditional family life.  This may be a reason that men are losing ambition. Dr. Richard Reeves noted in his book Of Boys and Men that boys in school are not succeeding partly because they simply don’t have the same drive as their female counterparts do. That’s not surprising if the adults trying to inspire them don’t see things that men value as worthwhile motivations for success.

It’s also probably a reason so many men are moving to the right: conservatives are not afraid to speak to what stirs men’s hearts most deeply. Jordan Peterson, once poetically said that as a man you had “a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter catastrophe of life to face, in truth, devoted to love, and without fear.” There are a lot of problems on the right, but being embarrassed to speak to men’s passions is not one of them.

First Man is an underrated gem of a movie rightly being rediscovered years later. It is a filmmaking marvel and a positive depiction of both the virtues and the vices of masculinity. If only it had tapped deeper into the animating “why” behind one risks their life to go to the stars, it would probably not have taken five years to be recognized.