The American Government’s sick patriotism has often been its justification for all kinds of evil but on July 20th 1969 its sole motivation became its own downfall. Whilst the actors Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins planted the flag on the moon, they couldn’t resist setting up indoor fans to make the proud stars and stripes flutter in the breeze. The American flag waving was always an iconic image to the overseers who faked our trip to the moon. They thought that the American people would be easily brainwashed by the sight of the flag. But some of us saw through the façade that the Government created as an obvious tool for distracting the American citizens from the disaster of the Vietnam War. It is no coincidence that the manned landings conveniently and suddenly ended around the same time that the United States ended its involvement in the war.
The faked moon landing was undercut by the American Government’s love of the corporations that sponsor and support it. Una Ronald, a resident of Perth, Australia, saw a bottle of Coca-Cola briefly roll across the bottom right of her TV screen. The American Government couldn’t resist Coca-Cola’s demands and allowed them to advertise with subliminal messages during the moon landing broadcast. If it was not for Una Ronald, and the few others who wrote in to complain about this sick display of consumerism, maybe we would never have noticed and just returned to gulping Coca-Cola with a side helping of corporate lies.
A particularly unnerving aspect of the faked moon landing was Walt Disney’s sponsorship and the staging by Hollywood, which used a script of Arthur C. Clarke and the talents of Stanley Kubrick’s directing. After the success of 2001: ‘A Space Odyssey’, which boasted space scenes that were frighteningly realistic for the time, Kubrick was approached by NASA. Kubrick filmed the moon landing with a cinematic technique called Front Screen Projection, and if you look carefully at many of the photos you can still see the photo cross hairs behind the objects in focus revealing the editing and faking of the shots.
Kubrick agreed to do this extravagant faking in order to get unasked funding for the rest of his films. But despite his dirty dealings with corporations, he attempted to leave clues of the forgery he had helped create. A director as masterful as Kubrick would not have allowed the studio lights to point in such a direction that the shadows were incorrect. He knew that on the sun there would be only one light source meaning all the shadows would have run parallel to one another, and would never have allowed the flag to flicker had he wanted the landing to be an undisputed success.
Most tellingly, in his next film, ‘The Shining’, Kubrick left a variety of clues and hints for the more observant viewer. To start off with, the child’s wears an Apollo 11 shirt in one scene. And to top it off, the now famous line on Jack’s typewriter ,”All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, so obviously hints at A11 or Apollo 11 through his utilisation of the word ‘All’. Finally, the mysterious hotel room from The Shining is the number 237. It is no coincidence that it is a mere 238,000 miles from the Earth to the moon, implying that they didn’t actually make the last mile. This is sinister message becomes the most chilling aspect of Kubrick’s horror film.
