Apollo 10 & 1/2, an Adoptee’s Perspective.
A Space Age Childhood (Netflix 2022)
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I’d like to bring to your attention a small section of the film at around 15:15. The following 60 seconds or so has a lot to unpack from an adoptee’s perspective.
Narrated by Jack Black through his grow adult character Stan. Written and Directed by Richard Linklater | 1hr 38min
In the style of rotoscoped animation, this movie is similar to “A Scanner Darkly” starring Keanu Reeves which Linklater also directed.
Storyline
The story follows the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 from two interwoven perspectives. It both captures the astronaut and mission control view of the triumphant moment, and the lesser-seen bottom-up perspective of what it was like from an excited kid’s perspective, living near NASA but mostly watching it on TV like hundreds of millions of others. It’s ultimately both an exacting re-creation of this special moment in history and a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon.
The Adoptee’s Perspective
From 15:15. The following 60 plus seconds for an adoptee is particularly concerning. The obligatory adoption joke, is it harmless? You may think so, but what’s really going on here? Why does society simultaneously declare that adoption is beautiful while using it as either a joke an insult or worse a threat from a parent in times of poor behaviour? What personal belief systems are these people violating to instil doubt, fear, and self-loathing for compliance or submission?
The scene goes like this:
It starts with the Photo reference, then bombshell drops, followed by the denial of the parents, and references to orphans, Stan, (Jack Black) goes on to say his mother got on the pill and never told her priest for fear of being excommunicated. Then he talked about his next-door neighbours who were clearly not using contraception because they were popping one kid out per year. The next scene cuts…
