A Thoughtful Gentry Lee Doc

In Dan Farah’s The Age of Disclosure, one of the buzziest documentaries to premiere at SXSW this year, it takes interviews with 34 people from all levels of government and military to make the case that we’re not alone in the universe, and that we should all be paranoid about the vast conspiracy keeping civilians from finding out.

In Robert Stone’s Starman, premiering at SXSW to generally less buzz, only one person is interviewed, but he makes his own case for why we’re not alone, using this conviction to reflect on several decades of human progress and the fact that, no matter what else is happening out in the stars, we only have one Earth.

I’m not really valorizing one philosophical mindset over the other, nor exactly stating a preference for one filmmaking approach or the other. I’m just noting that while The Age of Disclosure is much likelier to stir up controversy and win a bigger audience, the smaller, simpler, more personal Starman, which may only be aimed at a core group of space nerds, has stuck with me on some deep level.

Starman is the story of Gentry Lee, currently chief engineer for planetary exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s 82 today and, like many people of his generation with an interest in math and engineering, he was inspired by President Kennedy to become part of the space race. Over his years with NASA, he has worked on the Viking and Galileo missions, played a key role in sending rovers to Mars and more. He also helped develop the landmark Cosmos television series with Carl Sagan and wrote multiple novels with Arthur C. Clarke.

Gentry Lee is a remarkable man who is also thoroughly unremarkable. He loves nature and baseball and might embody that hoary cliché about how if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life, because Gentry Lee loves his job.

Lee has been part of discoveries and leaps in technological progress that amaze him, but he’s also aware of the gap between what he and NASA and JPL have accomplished and what captures the public imagination. Part of his goal, in the series of wide-ranging interviews that make up the entirety of Starman, is attempting to restore the wonderment that existed in the ’60s and ’70s and may have waned amid expectations of full-scale missions to Mars or bunkers filled with alien spacecraft and humanoid extraterrestrials back on Earth.

As Lee puts it, referring to reactions to the images provided by Viking, “We did NOT prepare for ambiguity!”

That is the essence of Starman and the essence of Gentry Lee, and that’s why it’s a documentary that won’t be for everybody but will probably be subtly moving for some people. He’s excited about ambiguity! He’s excited about the questions he can’t necessarily answer after six decades in this industry. He’s giddy about a hypothetical alien life form enjoying “Johnny B. Goode,” a track on the so-called “Golden Record” that was sent off with Voyager in 1977. He’s thrilled by not having evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, because it means the possibility of finding that evidence still exists. You come away from this journey hoping that evidence is found during his lifetime, because that would probably excite him as well.

Stone’s approach is mostly just to follow Lee’s enthusiasm. The documentary doesn’t lack for archival footage and photography from the various missions Lee has been a part of. But Stone’s as likely to want to turn to footage of classic science fiction films to illustrate Lee’s points, genre touchstones like the Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds, and films like 2001, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Arrival. Because of his collaborations with Clarke, Lee is at the intersection of what happens when the cosmos provides inspiration — it can yield fantastical fictions or realities that would seem pretty fantastical to a time traveler from 1951, but too often leave modern observers cold.

Going back to Lee’s excitement, one thing he and the documentary truly want to do is offer a reminder that we shouldn’t let our excitement for where we’re going — some day, some of us, maybe — cause us to lose excitement for where we are. Talking about Elon Musk and Mars colonies and the like present one of the few things Lee is actually cautious about. “The idea that we can escape the problems that we create on this planet without understanding how we created them and go to someplace else and not make the same mistakes, in my opinion, is a logical fallacy,” Lee says.

Part of the poignancy of Lee’s story is the backdrop of his childhood in New York City, the lack of belonging that he originally corrected through his love of the Dodgers and then through the communities he’s found at work and — subsequently, if somewhat less discussed — through his family. He has found his happy place, and he doesn’t understand the instinct to leave it entirely. He worries about a lack of regard for where we are keeping us from ever getting to where we want to be.

It’s a thesis that’s hard to sensationalize and neither Stone nor Lee try to. Starman just wants you to briefly get caught up in considering it.