Shifting Baselines
(Canada, 100 min.)
Dir. Julien Elie
Programme: Canadian Spectrum (North American premiere)
The prospect of going anywhere near a rocket manufactured by Elon Musk seems ludicrous. Travelling in one spells near-certain death. But even being in the proximity of the phallic 50-story rockets of Musk’s SpaceX operation proves exceptionally dangerous. Julien Elie’s documentary Shifting Baselines observes what happens when gawkers and holdout residents tempt fate by visiting or remaining in the small town of Boca Chica, Texas. It’s a wasteland with destruction that evokes the worst fears of Oppenheimer’s bomb. The birds would likely flee, if Musk’s operation hadn’t seemingly killed them all.
And yet Elie somehow makes the desolate town of Boca Chica and the SpaceX Starbase intoxicating. The film affords the area a sense of grandeur and awe in its first act. As the camera roams the area, the serene black and white cinematography seemingly transports viewers to another world. It’s admittedly hard not to be wowed by the sheer scale of the operation. Elie observes the creation of the massive rockets that SpaceX hopes will one day bring folks to Mars. How can one not grasp the sense of the sublime?
But it’s quickly obvious that the operation proves disruptive. Perspectives from the few remaining residents tell in voiceover how nearly everyone left. People just can’t deal with the volatile tests and shockwaves that, on good days, rattle windows and send laundry flying off the lines. Boca Chica approaches ghost town status, and that’s clearly what Musk wants in his megalomaniacal gambit.
Starbase accentuates its alluring aura with an effort in public relations that’s as tall as its rockets. Crowds flock to the site like parties eager to witness the launch of Apollo 11. There’s palpable awe as the tourists ride the bus to their otherworldly place. T-shirts extol an enchanting Musk and slogans about putting men on Mars. In voiceover, people speculate that the sky no longer marks the limit of human endeavour: it’s simply a matter of time before humans colonise another planet.
The sense of amazement one finds in this Kubrickian tour of interplanetary empire quickly explodes with a bang, though. Shifting Baselines observes as the crowd of onlookers shifts from collective reverence to horror. They’ve arrived to witness a rocket launch, but the spaceship explodes. Elie doesn’t present an image of the money shot. Instead, the cameras train on the faces of spectators, nearly all of whom are recording the event on their phones. It takes a second for everyone to process the disaster. Eyeballs peek from behind the phone to confirm that, yes, that spaceship is now a ball of flames in the sky.
Expansion of empire, even in space, obviously means fallout. Elie considers what an operation of Starbase’s scale means for the surrounding environment. If rockets that stand 50-stories high explode, they leave an obviously massive wake of wreckage.
The sense of grandeur returns to Shifting Baselines with a truly horrifying lens. Boca Chica’s public beach now serves as ground zero. Huge pieces of debris and shrapnel scar the land. So too do massive chucks of concrete that the rocket dislodged and dispersed whilst exploding. The corpses of birds litter the sand and there’s not a squawk to be heard. It’s eerily quiet in Boca Chica aside from the faint sounds of an environmental activist or two searching for wounded animals. It’s as if life on Earth has simply given up.
However, Shifting Baselines gives the endeavour credit as it illustrates how communities across the world benefit from SpaceX’s StarLink satellites and the internet they provide. The arresting cinematography by Glauco Bermudez and Francois Messier-Rheault builds a sense of unease as Elie takes audiences away from Boca Chica to observe different corners of the globe that thrive without really seeing the consequences with which SpaceX achieves progress.
Elie’s film asks why this collective amnesia occurs. The concept of shifting baselines comes from Professor Daniel Pauly, who explains his idea in voiceover. He speaks of an exercise in lowered expectations where one generation simply accepts a diminished quality of life than the one before it had. Musk’s dystopian vision, and the enthusiasm it inspires, perfectly illustrates this idea. Rather than fix Earth, spending billions of dollars to conquer Mars and leave the mess behind seems ideal from the SpaceX perspective. But it doesn’t need to be this way, as people like Musk have the capacity and resources to improve life on Earth if they really want to. This fascinating observational film proves a provocative time capsule for the moment: giving a care about the planet really does offer a life or death prospect.
