It Came From Outer Space
"The Martian" is Hollywood's best rebuke to Trump's coronavirus response.
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In Ridley Scott’s 2015 adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel “The Martian,” the only villains to be found are the laws of thermodynamics and gravity. These tenets of nature don’t care whether the titular character, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), lives or dies; they’re not actively trying to freeze, or starve, or “just kind of implode” him to death. They’ll keep doing what they do, whether the person at their mercy manages to survive or not.
This uncaring, undirected villainy is not dissimilar from that of a certain virus now rampaging across the world, and in particular across the U.S. Its spike proteins and strands of RNA don’t care who they invade, or who wears a mask to stop the invasion. And while the coronavirus does not change its fundamental nature based on any particular human response, its spread through the population does wax and wane based on how we react to it. It is a cruel joke of history that the person with perhaps the most power to have altered the pandemic’s trajectory looked out at his personal Martian landscape, and simply punched a hole in the wall and let the freezing and imploding begin.
The tragicomic botching of the pandemic response has made clear that one of, if not the, fundamental, defining characteristic of the Trump administration is its disdain for expertise. He has banished and silenced scientists, elevated charlatans and know-nothing ideologues, and scoffed at every bit of rational maneuvering that might have staved off much of the death and suffering the coronavirus has wrought. With this wasteland as a backdrop, “The Martian” stands as the single most anti-Trump movie in recent memory.
The scientific pragmatism at the film’s root is an early, unintended rebuke to the entire concept of Trumpism, where knowledge and logic are considered ugly and unwanted. It is a paean to expertise. When the cruel and uncaring universe throws X at you, respond with a logical, reasoned Y. Its vision of government and leadership are fundamentally opposite to how the Trump administration has responded not only to the coronavirus crisis but to hurricanes, climate change, and every other issue with even a mildly scientific angle.
On Mars, everything is complicated. Watney has to figure out how to grow food, communicate with NASA back on Earth, extend the battery life of his rover while also not freezing to death inside it, and generally not die until a rescue team can arrive. Back in Houston and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, NASA’s collected experts have to figure out what their Martian is up to, how to feed him, whether his former crewmates could make an ambitious return journey to grab him, and how to send a person into space in a convertible.
And because this is Hollywood, this all, more or less, works! All of the human characters—from the astronauts and the scientists engineering his rescue down to the NASA public relations lead—are portrayed as being fundamentally good at their jobs. The only real opposition comes from the planet itself (“Fuck you, Mars,” Watney deadpans at one point). Even the occasional antagonistic moments from the practical and vaguely bureaucratic NASA administrator (Jeff Daniels) arise from reasoned and even compassionate positions: He wants to bring the astronauts who did escape Mars home safely, and to “keep us flying” rather than risk the entire space travel enterprise on risky rescue missions.
There is no part of the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 that mirrors this sort of reasoned competence. The litany of offenses is now largely old-hat: He wanted to prevent people on cruise ships from coming ashore to keep case counts down; he touted an untested anti-malarial drug because being wrong wouldn’t fundamentally hurt him while being right would be a coup he could tweet about until the return of Halley’s Comet; he suggested that ingesting bleach might treat the virus; he wanted to slow down testing so as to once again artificially reduce case counts; his cadre of whatever the opposite of a PhD is shivved Anthony Fauci in the most public square imaginable; he squandered the weeks and months of lockdowns where a reasonable country would ramp up testing capacity, put PPE production into overdrive, and cultivate a scientifically sound set of public health messages; and he refused to model mask-wearing to a base that reads his every move as god-like perfection until more than 130,000 people had died.
In “The Martian,” Watney manages to grow potatoes with help from his own shit. No one seems to worry too much how one solution or another might make them look, only that it would work.
Mark does suffer occasional missteps. “Well, I blew myself up… because I’m stupid”—where “stupid” means failing to incorporate his tiny bits of exhaled oxygen into a calculation of how to produce enough water for his makeshift Martian farm. The first attempt at sending an uncrewed resupply mission that could feed Watney until the cavalry gets there fails spectacularly, but only because the unprecedented time crunch required that NASA forego inspections that might have caught the problem. The exact parameters of the acute rescue phase once the crew of the Hermes return to Mars orbit to rescue Watney need serious adjustments, to the extent of purposely exploding an actual bomb to slow the spaceship down.
But crucially, none of these errors arise through incompetence or malevolence, but because space travel is hard. Pandemics are hard too. The virus is complicated and blindly nefarious. Its incubation period lends itself to global spread, it can kill in days or leave no mark at all, it can spare children until it doesn’t, can cause symptoms so various as to be nearly unreadable. And still, the best way to describe the Trump COVID-19 response might be “malevolent incompetence.”
One can easily read “The Martian” as a document of its specific time, almost an ode to the scientifically literate administration that left behind a pandemic “Playbook” for Trump to zealously ignore. But among all the technocratic utopianism the film contains almost unlimited reprimands to the administration that followed. There is even a collaboration with China, where the two superpowers willingly cooperate on a massive, expensive undertaking whose only goal is to bring a single person back from a distant planet. The audience is treated to a montage of this teamwork, including the friendly disagreements (“We haven’t done things that way since Apollo 9!”) that are resolved on the way to success. Trump largely eliminated the previous collaborative process between China and the U.S. on pandemic response, perhaps contributing to the original sin of the virus’s rapid spread. He calls the virus “Kung Flu.”
As the crew of the Hermes fly by Mars and attempt to pick up their wayward crewmate, crowds of people back on Earth—in London, Beijing, back in the U.S., and, it is implied, pretty much everywhere else—gather in huge numbers (remember gatherings?) to watch on equally huge screens whether the rescue will be successful. Again, this being Hollywood—spoiler alert—it is. This collective outpouring of concern isn’t about one random guy who none of these people have ever met; it reflects support for an almost quixotic undertaking, an impossible tilt at the universe’s windmill that, if somehow successful, the entire world can rejoice in. A giant leap for all humankind.
It may not have been possible for the U.S. to contain the virus the way that, say, South Korea did. Maybe there are some inherent characteristics of America that doomed it to tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths, even while other large countries—Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom—managed to beat it into at least temporary submission. But the Trump administration’s response rendered even the possibility of success hilariously moot. That response not only managed to kill thousands of people, but also beat to death the very concept of deference to expertise, of the idea that the people who have studied and learned about X should maybe be the ones outlining the Y.
As the cases and deaths mount and the government's failures pile up, "The Martian" offers a reminder that disdain for science and expertise are not a fundamental part of government, even if they are fundamental to the current one.
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Hey, since we’re talking about Mars: Humans are just peppering it with stuff these days. Just in the last couple of weeks, new missions with orbiters or rovers or both have launched from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the U.S.
Bangladesh has long been a poster child for climate change’s impending catastrophe, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem so “impending” anymore. Enormous floods have submerged up to 37 percent of the country’s land.
I won’t blame you if you don’t go read this, but I love this stuff: some researchers have measured the amount of time taken for rubidium atoms to quantum tunnel through a laser barrier. It gets complicated.
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