Posts
A sign affixed to the side of a building that we glimpse right near the start of Frederick Wiseman’s 1987 documentary welcomes us to Space & Missile Country. It put me in mind of the sorts of sign you might see in a tourist area, like one in St. Augustine, Florida, say, proclaiming Welcome to Fountain of Youth Country, or something. But this is not St. Augustine: this is Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, responsible not merely for safeguarding our nuclear missile supply but being prepared to launch those missiles in the event of American enemies launching at us. It is serious, not frivolous, and yet the tone of “Missile” is sober in a kind of prosaic way. Wiseman embeds us with the 4315th Training Squadron of the Strategic Air Command and so many scenes of these new recruits sitting and listening to instructors, the commonplaceness of it all, the little Styrofoam cups of coffee, the way there are couple eager beavers who answer and ask questions while most of them just sit there quietly, will take you right back to every first-week orientation of any job you have ever had, like going to work at America’s nuclear missile silo is akin to starting a job at General Mills. It’s humorous, relatable, and a little unsettling.
“Missile” evokes such contradictory tones throughout its two-hour run time. Trainees are taught the launch angles of ICBMS while also being lectured on the necessity of keeping their workstation clean and not fraternizing with others. They go over the painstaking two-key turn system required to launch missiles and during one of the practice runs, a trainee struggles to insert her key. At one point we even see a trainee being given multiple choice test taking tips, as if examinations on ICBMs are the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. As was Wiseman’s preferred style, scenes like this are not embellished with talking heads, voiceovers, or even music; he lets them lie there for us to make of them what we will. That is not to say, however, that Wiseman (also credited as editor) is not deliberate in how he pieces together his many scenes. Near the beginning we eavesdrop on a classroom discussion about the moral implications of being ordered to launch missiles in which a senior officer stresses to the students not to merely function as unthinking robots.
If this scene seems selected to impress a certain mental and moral weight on this crash course in nukes, it instead foreshadows a gradual sort of circular logic. Even if you are urged to contemplate what it means to be the last link in the intercontinental ballistic missile chain, you are just the last link in a chain, nevertheless, a riddle that can never truly be solved. Indeed, near the end we see a successful training exercise and when the ersatz ICBMs are launched, a small celebration ensues, like the new recruits have just earned the league title in bowling. True, Wiseman concludes with a speech citing deterrence as the main role of all these missile-minders, but at the end of the day, deterrence is just a solemn word for being prepared to bring about The Day After.
