The analog fix: Nostalgia in Linklater’s 'Apollo 10 1/2' and Paul Thomas Anderson’s 'Licorice Pizza'

An autobiographical fantasy, Richard Linklater's 'Apollo 10 1/2' is set in 1960s Houston, US.

Few American directors can match Richard Linklater’s language of irrigating desiccated memory. Most of the 20 films that precede his latest, Apollo 10 1/2 (Netflix), are free range narratives that leisurely expand the ruses, rumination and existential quandaries of growing up and living in American suburbia - mostly Texas, in the era in which Linklater grew up there. Boyhood (2014), also set in the 1960s, for which he won the Best Director Golden Globe, took him 12 years to make.

The setting for this rotoscoped animation film—more 2D, more handmade, and with much sharper edges than his earlier two animation films Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006)—is a Houston suburb close to the NASA headquarters around the time that the Apollo 11 mission takes off.

His narrator-protagonist Stan (Milo Coy as the child, and Jack Black as the narrator and adult Stan) is the youngest of a family of six siblings. Their father has a clerical job at NASA and his mother is an inventive housewife rooted in the 1960s’ middle-class virtues of frugality and steeliness.

Linklater created 'Apollo 10 1/2' with head animator Tommy Pallotta.

An autobiographical fantasy, Apollo 10 1/2 veers away from certain crucial details of Linklater’s life that informed most of Boyhood—such as the separation of his parents. But it brings alive a lot that made his suburban childhood in Houston—specifically the historic moon-landing year of 1969—what it was.

NASA recruits Stan for a secret trip to the moon just ahead of the Apollo 11 mission, and in a climactic twist, the actual story of the moon landing and Stan’s galactic adventure converge.

There’s not much here in terms of story. When has any of Linklater’s films ever had a great story we remember them by?

Linklater constructs Apollo 10 1/2, with head animator Tommy Pallotta (who was also his collaborator in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly), like a sharply-detailed memory piece. An elaborate, essay-like set of flashbacks narrated—and reminisced with utterly engaging vividness—by Stan form almost half the film. The audience is as intrigued by what would happen to Stan in outer space as by the elaborate architecture of his childhood—the outer world of pop-culture references informing his inner world. Stan calls himself a “fabulist”, which, he says, is another word for “persistent liar”.

Through the fabulist, I relived a lot of my own childhood in the India of 1980s. Their '60s was our '80s. Hippies in bell bottoms fascinate Stan. He says his mom was on “this new thing called a pill” and that’s how his bonded family stopped growing. It is the first wave of the Jello-O mould cakes. With its external antennae catching TV signals, for Stan, “TV itself felt like an ongoing battle”. The TV-enraptured children would take their places in front of the TV every Saturday, waiting for the thematic logos of the government broadcasting channel to make way for the shows. Remember the languorous way in which the Doordarshan logo used appear on our Onidas?

Corporeal punishment in school is common. NASA is omnipresent. They would hear rockets jet off into the sky above their playgrounds and “the sonic boom of the sound barrier being broken”. Smoke and effluvia poured out from chimneys of factories and cars. TV characters and shows, seemingly Linklater’s profound influences during his childhood, come alive through the animation—including a Janis Joplin interview by Dick Cavett, a once-a-year broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, comic heroes (he makes an emphatic mention of Batman) and various sci-fi fantasies, “basically anything with atomic bomb-inducing mutations”.

Linklater and Pallotta capture a pretty analog world through digital means, creating a 2D look that could incorporate the period textures, colour palettes, and graphics associated with screen shows and characters. The film runs like a meticulous, enthusiastic and earnest etching of a giant monument of pop-culture memory. It gives the viewer a microscopic view of what it was like to live in a pre-smartphone world when we were forced to be outside just to be busy:

“I guess it fit the times. Life was cheaper. We were all more expendable, and no one thought too deeply about safety.”

Apollo 10 1/2 is, of course, soaked in Linklater’s needle-drop nostalgia, with tracks such as "So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star" by The Byrds, "Barabajagal" by Donovan, "Down On The Corner" by Credence Clearwater Revival, "Drums Are My Beat" by Sandy Nelson, "Calcutta" by Lawrence Welk and "Baja" by The Astronauts.

Last year, Hollywood was big on nostalgia, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, a poetically visualised and narrated coming-of-age tale set in Hollywood of the 1970s, nominated for Best Picture, Direction and Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. The film won no Oscar, but got the BAFTA for Original Screenplay. Anderson’s film isn’t available to stream on OTTs in India so far.

Besides the fact that both are audaciously original films, it’s perhaps also the time that makes both these movies so gratifying to watch. The world is waiting for a return to the normal, and now celebrating the normal. Nostalgia works in difficult times with a fuzzy logic that psychologists would best explain. Nostalgia often feels bittersweet. A good dose of nostalgia—either of these two films, say—feels happy and comforting, but with a tinge of sadness because we are acutely aware at the back of our mind that these images and manners are a way of life that ended long ago.

It is highly possible nostalgia increases feelings of social connectedness. Watching Kabir Khan’s 83 at a sparsely attended evening show at a Mumbai multiplex was a triumphant feeling of social connectedness returning—some of us who lived through the film’s subject, India’s win at the 1983 World Cup Cricket tournament in London, felt understood, reminded and celebrated together, even if there weren’t many of us at the theatre.

But without irony or any form of engagement with the ugly side of the past, nostalgia can be vapid. Joan Didion once wrote that The Sound of Music was “more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people… Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.”

Both Apollo 10 1/2 and Licorice Pizza are clear-eyed about the experiences that the era presented to its creators—Houston of 1969 for Linklater and San Fernando Valley, California, for Anderson. The title of Anderson’s film is the name of a chain of record stores in California in the 1970s. In both films, there’s a lot of talking, walking, running, driving, dashing off and dropping in—human beings moved a lot in the analog days. But both directors ensure their elaborateness and detailing also engage deeply with the cruelty and injustices of the eras they recreate, making them films that are beguilingly complex. This is nostalgia with gentle defiance—the best kind.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 'Licorice Pizza' is set in Hollywood of the 1970s. (Image via @licoricepizza)