a romantic comedy about “selling the moon landing” reviewed by a marketing expert

Fly Me to the Moon is a delicate and witty romantic comedy. It is also a slick and impressive film that reminds us (like last year’s seven-time Oscar winner Oppenheimer) of the astonishing achievements of American scientific and military industry in the 20th century.

It could be said that another, no less significant, contribution of America to the world is the discipline of marketing. And there is a reasonable argument that the film itself is something of a promotional vehicle for NASA at a time when such publicly funded projects are viewed with skepticism.

The marketing industry grew rapidly with the Apollo program. And the development of the market society went hand in hand with the scientific and technological boom that gave rise to the most ambitious project of all: putting a man on the moon.

As novel technologies made it cheaper to produce goods and markets became saturated, manufacturers had to identify novel needs from their customers that they could satisfy. Marketing became not so much a profession as a way of life.

In this Hollywood reimagining of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, Kelly Jones (Scarlet Johansson), a brash Madison Avenue marketing expert, is called in to excite the American public; to “sell the moon.” But it’s the threat of blackmail from shadowy government operative Mo Berkus (Woody Harrelson), alluding to Jones’s criminal past, that convinces her to accept the challenge.

Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) is a stiff-necked mission director at Cape Kennedy who is focused on his own seemingly impossible and underfunded mission to put a man on the moon. But Davis is motivated by higher ideals. At first, he challenges Jones about the product placement deals she’s been making with Omega watches and Fruit of the Loom underwear—she’s not going to turn her rocket into a billboard. Jones assures him, “We don’t have to put any of this in space.”

“So,” he replies, “you’re going to lie.”

“It’s called selling…”

“No, that’s called a lie.”

If there is one vital concept in this film, it is the importance of truth. It is a moral question that haunts us all in an age of conspiracies and fact-checking. Here, that question is juxtaposed with one of the most pernicious lies of the last 60 years—that NASA faked the moon landing.

During these 60 years, the idea that marketing should be a fundamental discipline of business and government was fueled in part by the ideas Edward Bernays. Bernays was the founding father of public relations, whose insight was that all consumer decisions are influenced (if not entirely determined) by subconscious desires. The marketer’s job is to discover and exploit them.

People, as “target consumers,” began to be defined not so much by what they did but by what they consumed—and they consumed what they were told satisfied their deepest desires.

Rocket scientists watching Fly Me to the Moon might be alarmed by such a sketchy portrayal of the Apollo project, or by the suggestion that it might have been a joke. But it’s just as likely that marketing experts will hesitate before making the basic assumption that what Johansson’s character is doing to promote a flight to the moon is indeed marketing.

No one argues that the American public needed Apollo in the 1960s. Public support for the program, Berkus says, was “at rock bottom.” But its success is so vital to the U.S. government that Berkus instructs Jones to create a (top secret) version of the moonwalk, only for a global television audience. This gives rise to the film’s most hilarious, yet most unrealistic scene, as the lunar surface is recreated in a spare hanger on the base, complete with Aldrin and Armstrong’s actors on wires.

At the end of the film, the success of Apollo 11 means that the planned deception is unnecessary. Whereas today, according to testsNASA enjoys growing support from the American public, few consider revisiting the Moon a priority. And despite six lunar landings and 12 lunar walks, the ongoing 18% still believe that the moon landing was faked.

As Scarlett Johansson’s character says, in what must surely have been the film’s pitch to investors, “The truth is still the truth, even if no one believes it, and a lie is still a lie, even if everyone believes it.” As AI threatens the integrity of all visual evidence, this proposition seems increasingly hazardous. Maybe NASA doesn’t need to plan a trip to Mars. A counterfeit landing could just as easily become the truth—if it’s promoted well enough.

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