A prompt going around on the internet has been to “name something you remember watching on this,” the “this” in question being a familiar picture for anyone with a public-school education in America: A rolling stand with a TV set strapped to it. “Wheeling in the TV” was one of the best fleeting moments of relief in public education. We’d all exhale, and say to ourselves “Ok, we’re not learning anything today, thank god.” But one particular answer to this prompt struck me, and surely struck many my age: 9/11. By virtue of being seen on the same platform and in the shadow of the event, the movies that we saw on that TV in school had an intrinsic attachment to one of the biggest tragedies of our lifetimes. Especially growing up in Central/North New Jersey, where a large portion of the population commutes to Manhattan for work, 9/11 was an all-encompassing shadow that didn’t really ever lift. One of the immediate films that sticks in my mind alongside it is Joe Johnston’s October Sky. Despite coming out in 1999, it was a movie that, looking back, seemed particularly directed at countering the feelings we teenagers had about the direction the country was going after 9/11—a remedy of sorts, sending us back to an America that existed before “all this” happened.
October Sky has been buried in our memory of Jake Gyllenhaal’s filmography because it came before his breakthrough role Donnie Darko. October Sky’s reviews marked the film as “old-fashioned” and, while it had comparable, marginal box-office success with Darko, its lasting cultural impact was markedly less, particularly because it didn’t have the kind of cult notoriety the latter would acquire. Yet it has stuck in my mind despite it failing to exhibit any remarkable qualities in artistry or entertainment, simply because it’s such a movie of its time, a time which overlapped with the beginning of my adolescence when I was particularly enamored by these kinds of dramas.
October Sky is draped in the genial warmth of burnt-yellow painterly sunsets, the rugged struggle between working class traditionalism—represented by Chris Cooper as a stern coal miner father—and a future of tech and exploration seen in the eyes of his daydreamer son Homer J. Hickam Jr. (Gyllenhaal). The latter, of course, was most important to the school board who assigned it as part of the curriculum: A student inspired by a teacher who believes in his potential. All in all, October Sky lacks the cynicism that began to become more commonplace in post-9/11 cinema.
While October Sky was made and released at the tail end of the 20th century, it takes place in 1957, right at the beginnings of space exploration. The first sequence is a TV broadcast of the Sputnik 1 rocket launch. As Homer becomes more and more interested in rocketry, he finds that support will only come outside of his tumultuous home life, in the form of high school science teacher Miss Frieda J. Riley (Laura Dern). He still pines for his father’s approval however, and the film’s central propulsion comes from the tug-of-war between Homer Jr.’s starry-eyed ambition and his father’s lunch-pail practicality. One major theme throughout the film is to foreshadow the upcoming space race between the United States and the Soviets, though the movie presents Homer as someone genuinely interested in science rather than someone with a hankering to prove American exceptionalism to himself and others. This comes as a double-edged sword, as his curiosity for science runs headlong into an incuriosity for history, one matched by the filmmakers.
Johnston drapes October Sky in symbols of saccharine Americana: Flags, suburban homes, pickup trucks—the constant hum of individualism and self-pride that defines success. While our protagonist may be a genuine enthusiast to whom the exploration of space and the limits of human possibility are enough, Johnston’s film embodies the competitive nature that defined America’s driving reason to race the Soviets. The movie relies on us being naïve about the space race, and it comes to a particularly distasteful head when it’s revealed that Homer’s biggest inspiration in rocketry is Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi developer of the V2 rocket who appears in the film to congratulate Homer himself. Von Braun of course, wanted to beat the Soviets too, and America was more than happy to throw aside any of its morals to make that happen. It was never about human capability, no matter how badly the propaganda wanted to paint it that way. It was always political insecurity. It was as if October Sky subconsciously anticipated in 1999 that America in the 21st century was simply never going to be the same again and wanted to remind us one last time that, from 1957 to 1999, it was a country that changed little in its virtues and paranoias.
Movies like these feel tailor-made to play on those rolling school TVs. They feel educational and idealistic in a way that tries to fend off cynicism in impressionable teenagers—at least until they’re sent off to college. In the early 2000s, many of us were particularly vulnerable. There were too many questions, too much uncertainty and dread about “what comes next” that the only sensible respite became “let’s go back, for at least two hours, to what it was like before.”
That same year, we read Lois Lowry’s The Giver and watched Gattaca, two pieces of media that warn against concepts of utopian society and eugenicist influence in their own artistic renditions. The former considers an idealistic, puritan vision of society where sameness is prioritized and imagination is erased, while the latter’s dystopian future is fueled by a eugenics-based job market. In the attempt to comfort us around the fears, angers and general disillusionment following 9/11, the schools ironically fell back on art that re-asserted the fears that came along with Nazis and Commies for the 50 years prior. Americans, truly, only find comfort in consternation.
Having recently seen Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and the reception it has received—with many, including Richard Brody, suggesting it represented Payne’s idea of the ‘70s as a “simpler, clearer, more humane time”—it seems that the need for the respite of the past is still as strong as it was with October Sky. It is a warm blanket of assuring comfort, telling you that your dreams can be achieved, that the people who don’t believe in you will be won over, and that there are people always willing to fight for your cause. For many, it fills the role of “the kind of movie we need right now.” On the other hand, it can be taken as a childish and historically irresponsible display of nostalgic fantasy. As paved over as the politics of the space race in October Sky was, is Payne’s vision of Vietnam Era sacrifice—filtered through Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s grieving mother—not a similar simplification? But this is the nature of these kinds of films. They take it upon themselves to provide fleeting comfort for when it seems like the world and everything to come is beyond our ability to change.
Soham Gadre is an entertainment and culture writer based in Washington D.C. He has written for Polygon, MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, and Film Inquiry among other publications. He has a Twitter account where he talks about movies, basketball, and food.