to make contact with their superiors, the first news they receive from home is that their mission has been reclassified as “Project Pacific Island Base.”)32
This bifurcated attitude towards the military is consistent with Heinlein’s developing philosophy. On one hand, as a former Navy officer, Heinlein had obvious respect and admiration for the military life and attitudes; on the other hand, he evidenced a growing dislike for large government bureaucracies, which he saw as stultifying and repressive.33 It is only logical, then, that Heinlein would show admiration for his astronaut protagonists while seeming to ridicule their seen and unseen superior officers.34
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The third set of tensions involves The continued subjugation of women versus The new domination of women. In this area, Project Moonbase plays a more complex game, offering three distinct levels of argument: an overt, nominal commitment to feminine superiority; a poorly concealed, residual belief in masculine superiority; and a deeper, ameliorative message affirming feminine superiority within certain restraints.
First, a summary of the plot suggests the movie presents a strongly feminist viewpoint. Project Moonbase may qualify as the first—and certainly, it is one of the few—science fiction stories that depicts a woman, Colonel Briteis, as the first human in space; the same woman then becomes the commander of the first circumlunar mission, and when her ship crashes, she becomes by default the first commander of Project Moonbase. Also, the President of the United States is ultimately revealed to be a woman. Apparently, then, this is a future society when women routinely assume dominant roles.
However, three aspects of the movie undermine this proto-feminist theme and instead suggest a more traditional stance. Carefully written dialogue in the film’s early scenes withholds the information that Colonel Briteis is a woman, so it is not until she walks into the room that viewers learn her sex. That the President is a woman is also not revealed until the final scene, when she appears on television to congratulate the newlyweds. Thus, despite these revelations, the film functionally depicts a male-dominated world, with knowledge of the sex of certain major figures deliberately concealed while on-screen men act as the decision makers.
In addition, there is clearly nothing impressive about the way the women characters are depicted in Project Moonbase. Colonel Briteis consistently acts like a spoiled child, given to emotional outbursts; she is belittled by the nickname used by her male comrades, “Bright Eyes”; a comment by Major Moore indicates that she was chosen for the first manned flight solely because she only weighed ninety pounds, not because of her superior qualifications; despite her position, she is rarely observed making command decisions; in the crucial battle with the saboteur, she is merely a bystander while Moore and the imposter fight it out; and the Presidential decision to make her, and not Major Moore, the commander of the first lunar flight is revealed by the final scene to be little more than a woman’s favoritism toward a member of her own sex. Another woman character, a journalist friend of the President named Polly Prattles (Barbara Morrison) who interviews the General, provides comic relief in one scene by displaying her almost complete ignorance of space travel. As for the President herself, she is pictured as a sweet, grandmotherly sort of woman, with no particular aura of authority about her.
Most notably, the conclusion of Project Moonbase seems to overthrow previous pictures of feminine superiority, as Colonel Briteis’s new husband, Major Moore, is immediately promoted to General so that he, not she, can become the commander of Project Moonbase. It is this scene that inspires an arch comment by Franklin about the limited extent of Heinlein’s feminism: “Heinlein has no problem projecting a female pilot or even President, but when a woman relates to a man she has to know who is the boss” (98).
Despite these features of the film, however, it can still be seen as a curious affirmation of female dominance. After all, the General in charge of the space program is under the direct command of the President; she allows him to maintain apparent control over its affairs, while intervening only occasionally with direct orders, like the one which made Colonel Briteis the commander of the first lunar mission. And, it must be noted, Major Moore is promoted to be the commander of Project Moonbase only because Colonel Briteis specifically requests that promotion.
A complex and ameliorative recommendation thus emerges: women should have ultimate control over situations, both in title and in fact; but they should also stay in the background and allow men to have apparent control. In a way, then, the movie appears to affirm old clichés about “the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world,” and “behind every successful man, there is a woman”; the difference is that Heinlein grants women both official and covert power, while enjoining them from overly obvious exercise of that power. It is, then, a solution to the problem of male-versus-female dominance that grants women genuine and supreme authority, while preserving the male ego by granting men the appearance of superiority.
In keeping with the spirit of the film, then, one can anticipate that the marriage of Briteis and Moore, despite Franklin’s remark, will not produce a traditional husband-controlled family; rather, Briteis will continue to make all the decisions, even as she allows Moore to believe that he is making the decisions. And this stance arguably represents one aspect of Heinlein’s later expressed attitudes towards women, inasmuch as two later novels, I Will Fear No Evil (1970) and To Sail beyond the Sunset (1987), both feature assertive female protagonists, totally in control of their own lives, who are nevertheless willing to act subservient in the presence of men.
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The fourth and final conflict is The endorsement of traditional values versus A challenge to traditional values. The President’s final suggestion—virtually a command—that Major Moore marry Colonel Briteis seems to be not only a reaffirmation of male dominance but also a commitment to conventional morality: while an unmarried man and woman on a brief space mission might be tolerable, having such a pair serving indefinitely as sole residents of a lunar base would be an overt invitation to adultery, and therefore unacceptable in the American society of 1953. Their arranged marriage eliminates the possibility of illicit sex, and since Moore and Briteis are revealed to be secretly in love with each other, it is also an appropriate decision in a society that insists that marriage should be a matter of personal choice, not the result of someone’s directives.
Despite its apparent acceptability, however, there are provocative undercurrents in this denouément. In their earlier encounters, Moore and Briteis are constantly squabbling, in a manner that suggests an ongoing competition for the affections of their superior officer, the General. They act, then, not as would-be lovers, but as an older brother engaged in sibling rivalry with a younger sister. Such a characterization of their relationship is strongly reinforced by the fact that both Moore and Briteis regularly address the General as “Pappy,” labeling him as their father, not simply their commanding officer; and the General assumes an especially parental role in the final scenes of the film, when he has separate conversations with Moore and Briteis and gives them each his personal advice as their “Pappy.”
On a symbolic level, then, Project Moonbase is the story of an older brother and younger sister who are secretly in love with each other; and with the approval—indeed, at the urging—of their father, they finally get married and thus establish a sexual relationship. What the movie affirms, then, is not the importance of traditional marriage, but the appropriateness of incest. In particular, the film argues for a sexual relationship between an older man and a younger female relative, a theme that is also apparent in later Heinlein works. Thinly disguised incest of this sort figures in The Door into Summer (1957), where Daniel Boone Davis arranges through suspended animation to marry his twelve-year-old “niece,” Ricky; the story “—All You Zombies—’” (1959), wherein a time traveller sleeps with an earlier, female version of himself; and Time Enough for Love (1973), where Lazarus Long
