A psychological investigation of isolation from the perspective of NASA scientists studying long-range space missions. We break down THE LONGEST GOODBYE by Ido Mizrahy through the lens of 12th House of exile, and how social connections tether us when we’re a long, long way from home, and the sacrifices made in pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Sundance 2023 Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition Distribution: Select Theaters on May 12, 2023, PBS Independent Lens on May 24, 2024
From Sundance’s website: Ever wondered what the reality of spending months on a spaceship might be like? Not the romanticized, exciting vision of a space mission, but the fundamentals of day-to-day reality: the isolation, confinement, and lack of privacy and social contact. Sounds similar to our pandemic lives, you might think. But in this case, it’s your job, and sadly you can’t escape to the woods when you’re feeling blue.
In his engrossing, heartwarming, and beautifully contemplative documentary, Ido Mizrahy ponders the conflict between our need for connectivity and the urge to explore the unknown. Scientists predict that we will have the ability to send humans to Mars (and to return them safely) within the next decade. Dr. Al Holland, a senior NASA psychologist, studies the effects of prolonged separation of individuals from Earth. The Longest Goodbye offers us an opportunity to witness as Dr. Holland investigates the ways to provide support and coping mechanisms to the red planet-bound explorers in order to prepare them for the actuality of becoming a long-mission astronaut.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.498] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our series on Sundance 2023, looking at the different documentaries. And today we're going to be focusing on a documentary called The Longest Goodbye by Ido Mizrahi. Ido is actually from Israel, so this is in the world documentary competition, but it's actually about NASA and a lot of things that are happening in the United States. So, this film ends up focusing on some of the more soft sciences within NASA, meaning the social dynamics and isolation that happen when you have these long range missions to Mars. I think it would take around six months to go to Mars and then they would come back for another six months. So, you're talking about as long as like three years. And so, you're talking about really extended periods of time of isolation. On the International Space Station, the people that are on those long-range missions are still within real-time communication capabilities. So they can still be in communication in real-time with their family. But when you start to put people on these long-range missions to Mars, then you have these other different social dynamics. So this was a film that was really looking at some of those different aspects of the science and technology and innovations that have to come up, but also what is the psychological impact of people being isolated in these different ways. And so some interesting inside looks of astronauts giving different testimony of their moments of isolation, but also some of the technology solutions that are possible. So yeah, it was kind of an interesting blend of looking at the more sociological and psychological aspects of of space travel and some of the institutional dynamics of NASA that discourage the astronauts from being fully authentic as compared to some of the other science and technology innovations that are being developed in order to solve some of these goals. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial thoughts on this piece.
[00:02:03.966] Wonder Bright: Well, I loved it. First of all, I really, really enjoyed it. As an astrologer, if I have a thing that I'm the most obsessed with, it is deeply connected to what I talk about in our first podcast in this series around this experience of what becomes invisible. And one of the main ways that astrologers look to discover what becomes invisible is when we look at the 12th house. And the 12th house is the house that has to do with loss, sorrow, longing, exile. I remember taking an astrology class with Deb Holding. where she was teaching us how to use astrology to, for instance, find lost objects. And she said, if you discover that the object you're searching for is located in the 12th house, then it is a long, long, long, long ways away. It's so far away that you will never get it back. And so I always think about the way that she said that when I think about things that are found in the 12th house, because if they're found in the 12th house, they can't be found. And this is a film about what it's like to be exiled so far away that you cannot be found. And the thing that is so fascinating about that film because this idea of exile and like you were saying in previous episodes, erasure is something that really permeates a lot of the films at Sundance. This film is actually talking to a psychologist, a NASA psychologist named Dr. Al Holland, who studies the impact of what it takes for people to go into exile. So this is an example of exile where it is studied as a phenomena of the human species. And how can we help people survive long periods of exile? And so it's this very rarefied expression of what it takes for a human being to sustain themselves when they're so far away that they have lost contact literally with the earth at points. like physically lost contact with the earth, not just mentally, which like many of the subjects in the films at Sundance could say about themselves, that we're gone. We don't exist on this plane. But no, these people have literally lost contact with the literal earth at points. So it's a very 12th house film, but similar to A Still Small Voice, which is another feature that we saw in this slew of films at Sundance this year, similar to A Still Small Voice, they're looking at the psychological impact of that kind of grief or loss on a human being and they're trying to find ways scientists and psychologists are trying to find ways to alleviate the issues that come up and to help tether people to something meaningful so that they can return again. So it's a very compelling film for anyone who's ever felt lost or been lost in terms of really asking themselves, what does it take to stay tethered? What does it take to survive this exile?
[00:05:36.475] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's 12 houses and different meanings. And typically you look at the third house for short travels, neighborhoods, short journeys, the ninth house for long journeys where you're going away. And I don't know if astrologers would think of the 12th house as extra long journeys. I know it's connected to exile and say refugees who have to go on these long journeys, but untethered from their home. Would you typically see that space travel is generally a 12th house venture?
[00:06:01.964] Wonder Bright: Well, I never did before. But now, yeah, absolutely. Forever, I will.
[00:06:06.239] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that there's some really interesting psychological research and the impacts of that. Like I mentioned earlier, NASA is using the international space station, the ISS as a bit of a testing grounds for people to go up and start to study both the physiological and psychological impacts. And so they feature pretty prominently Katie Coleman's trip up to the ISS. And, you know, they have these live stream communication dispatches that she has with her family. And this is something that is normally pretty private, you know, you wouldn't have access to this. And so you get this unique insight into the dynamics, both the technical difficulties that they have during this time, but also, Katie Coleman had a young son that she left behind. And so what's the impact on her family as she's leaving? But also, what are the ways in which her family is or is not supporting her? It's a bit of a paradox where it seems to be that the NASA psychologists see that one of the key things that is a predictor of a successful mission is that they have strong connections to friends and family, specifically their family, and that they maintain their contact with them. So it seems a little bit paradoxical to me, at least, because you would think that someone who is single may have an easier time because they're not feeling like they're letting anybody down and not having any direct connections to people that they're obligated to. But yet at the same time, they do better when they have those families. So you're asking people to be in these tight familial relationships, but yet you're potentially sending them off for as long as like three years in some of these different missions to Mars. And so you're talking about an extreme disconnection of what does that mean for someone's relationship to have that type of dedication to service to country, service to science, but also this exploration part that people feel drawn to, what does that mean for the interpersonal relationship? So that was another dynamic that was being explored here was what is the relationship to say the fourth house family and the 10th house career of this tension between those two things.
[00:08:06.247] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it's interesting to me because I think in our culture, we have this idea that the explorer or the pioneer or the adventure or the action thriller hero is someone that is self-sufficient, doesn't really need other people, is an inventive thinker and genius and able to solve everything all on his own. And of course, they have like supporting players played usually by like a very sweet woman who tethers us to the hero in the narrative by making them relatable. But that's not because the hero needs that emotional support. It's sort of couched in this way as if the audience needs to have that emotional through line to the hero, but the hero remains discreet and autonomous and independent and does not need us, even though they're fighting for us. And I think what was really fascinating about this film is the way that Al Holland, the psychologist in the film, really explores how, what a myth that is. And that one of the things that they look for in their astronauts is not just absolute obvious like genius level IQ brilliance and not just a level of athletic ability that you would expect from an adventurer or a hero, but also this ability to really stay connected, which immediately makes sense if you realize these people are going to be together in this little teeny bubble floating around the earth or beyond for months at a time, potentially. Like they need to be able to problem solve as a group. They need to be able to collaborate. They need to be able to connect to one another. And they need to remember why they're out there. Of course, they need to be tethered to someone on the ground, to people on the ground, ideally. And that connection needs to be protected. Like there's no point going out and fighting for something unless you care about the thing you're fighting for. So whether that's space exploration or education or whatever it is, there has to be a reason that you care about it. So once again, we get this sort of like seemingly impossible contradiction to navigate because first of all, you have to want to leave the Earth But then you have to want to come back. Right. And just, you know, huge shout out to Katie Coleman and her entire family, because. the kind of love that they express for one another and the caring and the curiosity. You know, her family really supports Katie Coleman's need to leave, which I think is kind of hard. You know, I think it can be really hard for people to love someone who wants to leave them or needs to leave them in Katie Coleman's case. And yet perhaps that offers the capacity to leave yourself. Maybe you need to leave in your own way. The way that this story is told really brings you into the heart of this experience of leaving and returning. Like, I can only imagine the kind of homesickness that takes over when you're homesick for Earth, for the planet itself, and for the people who live there.
[00:11:28.216] Kent Bye: I think I have a little bit of resistance to the idea of going to Mars. When I hear Elon Musk, for example, talk about he wants to colonize Mars and it being contextualized as this is a potential solution to global warming that we could all just sort of up and move everything from Earth and move into Mars, which I feel like is kind of a ridiculous and preposterous idea. Even if we were to do that and terraform Mars, then what's to say that we wouldn't have the same behaviors that would do the exact same thing to Mars that we had done to the Earth? And so, there's a kind of an inner resistance that I have about some of the discourse that we have around going to Mars from that colonial perspective But this film in particular, I think, is looking at some of the underlying foundational science aspects that I think are intriguing because it's creating a context under which that you're trying to push the limits of the human capacity, but also the limits of what we need to be functioning humans if we're isolated from the earth and the different ideas of like, maybe there's some dormant aspects of our DNA that allow us to be in hibernation. And what would it mean to go into hibernation for five or six months? What if there's something that goes wrong? What does it mean to completely check out for what's going on in the world for six months and then wake up and have to catch up with everything? And so Dr. Al Halland ends up being pretty skeptical of this idea. But at the same time, there's other ways in which that they're discovering aspects of the human dynamic and human psyche that they're able to apply directly to when there's a coal mining accident. NASA takes some of their technologies and their learnings that they've been researching and actually directly deploy it into something that is on earth and something that is real and happening right now when you have these coal miners stuck in the mine for what they thought could be up to five months. And how do you maintain this connection for them to maintain this sense of purpose to get out and have the family there? And so they actually implemented a lot of the similar learnings that they had. So that's just one example of how you never know what type of insights you may be getting from this foundational research of psychology and sociology that can be applied to other contexts that are more mundane and here on earth. So, yeah, I feel like the film does a really good job of blending this aspirational goal with the types of problems that need to be solved. And in some ways, intractable problems, but some that are very human problems of just how do you get people to cooperate and you're stuck on this mission and disconnected. can't have real-time communication. And so they actually have a virtual reality pioneer, Dr. Jackie Mori, who was researching different aspects of how can you use virtual reality technologies to start to create volumetric immersive experiences that maybe have asynchronous messages that are being sent. But Dr. Al Holland's resistance to that, to some extent, is what happens if you have a communication breakdown and you're not able to get that, is that you actually do more harm to have a sense of that connection. And then all of a sudden, you're cut off from that connection and And they actually did research around what happens when you have this long-term isolation and you have lack of communication. So yeah, I feel like there's a lot of really interesting insights about the nature of what it means to be human. And at the end of it, there's only going to be a handful of people if we end up going to Mars that actually go to Mars. at least in the near or middle term, maybe long-term that'll change, but the types of insights they're getting from that research and how that can apply to our lives today, especially when we think about our lives under lockdown and COVID, what are the impacts of that as well? Also, I just wanted to give a shout out to Nikki Giovanni because she has a whole thing of going to Mars where she's using that more as a poetic metaphor to talk about how black women are at these different intersections and that if you were going to go to Mars, that you should definitely send black women because They're the ones who would be the most familiar and comfortable with having to navigate all these different alien contexts and what better ambassadors to what could be some potential alien life forms than black women to be on this journey. So I think it ties back into other films, the Nikki Giovanni project and going to Mars, which ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize here this year at Sundance.
[00:15:42.833] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I'm so glad you said that because I would say that part of the reason her idea fits within the context of the longest goodbye is because the other thing that black women have been able to do is to be connected with one another. in these spaces where the world is disconnecting from them. And so there's an experience of exile within that from the mainstream culture. And yet they're able to still stay connected, stay tethered, be together and be resilient. So to me, this is another message from both Nikki Giovanni and the longest goodbye. So if we think about going to Mars to save humankind or just because we're avidly curious, I experience like disconnection when I hear Elon Musk talking about it, because it just seems like we're going to go explore and that's going to gratify my ego needs. I can't. That's just how I hear it when he talks about it. But if I heard Katie Coleman talking about it, I would have a different experience. When I hear Nikki Giovanni talking about it, I have a different experience. And it's because of that level of connection to the earth, to people here, to belonging rather than not belonging, right? Like it's a way of straddling the experience of exile or not belonging through belonging. And it's the thing that brings us back. So I also just wanted to touch on something you'd said earlier about astrology showing short distance journeys, long distance journeys, and that the 12th is a journey place. It is a place where we travel. It's just a place where we travel, where we may not get home, which is why if you're looking for a lost object using astrology, if you see it in the 12th house, that means it won't return. And yet I think we are beginning to think about what that means in a new way. And so the idea of exile, like a lot of what we're seeing in these films and this crop from 2023 at Sundance, is the experience of people who are exiled in one way or another, and how are they finding their way back home? Sometimes it's literal exile or annex or segregation. In the case of Millicent Tondu or twice colonized or murder in Bighorn, there's conversations about indigenous people and black people who are segregated or exiled. But in this case, we're talking about an exile from Earth. And because it's happening within the realm of NASA and science, and these are all white people studying it from a position of privilege, they're thinking about it in a different context and in a different way. And yet it shines light on what it takes to survive that exile. And that is something that's very fascinating to me about it because they're coming to the same conclusion. What it takes to survive exile is connection. It's witness. I see you. You see me. We see this. It's witness.
[00:19:05.215] Kent Bye: Yeah. And speaking of that witness, there's sort of other dynamics of that witness, which is that these astronauts are being monitored and watched 24-7. So there's almost like this big brother surveillance of their lives. They do have these private elements that I think that in the ISS, that even in some of the different documentaries that Felix and Paul have made, that the private quarters still remain private. And so the astronauts still do maintain some degree of privacy, except for maybe in emergencies, maybe there's cameras or whatnot. But the point being is that there's a way in which they're being observed and being observed by this almost hierarchy of people that are watching and perhaps some of the actions that astronauts do are just going to go back to their different supervisors and be implicated by if something goes wrong, there's like a chain of who's responsible. You have this weird dynamic for astronauts who want to try to maintain their actual authentic feelings in a way that they don't want to reveal too much information that's going to put into danger their future missions. They don't want to actually say what's going on. They're very private because whatever they say, if they are having troubles, then that may exclude them from future work. they actually show some research that they were doing, I think had like 10 different astronauts that were willing to share their private journals. And so you get this insight as to what was actually going on with astronauts, but they're not willing to speak on the record because they're still in the midst of wanting to continue their work. And so you have this weird dynamic where you have a difficulty of really cracking this nut of focusing on some of these more soft science aspects of the psychological and sociological impacts on astronauts. when their careers could be negatively impacted with what they disclose. And so you have these other moments of like, there's this artificial intelligence entity called Simon that is trying to be kind of like an AI that these astronauts can start to talk to. And they show this really comic going horribly wrong where these astronauts are just trying to have these conversations and AI just starts to be almost like this needy accusatory, like, why are you being so mean? And so, it ends up being like the end result is that the astronaut just feels like, why should I talk to you when whatever I say could lead to some sort of algorithmically driven decision that whatever I may share with this AI agent is going to exclude me from future work. And so, you have this fear of algorithmically driven decisions that are made by the technologies that they're interfacing that may still try to sabotage their future aspirations for what they want to do. So you have this weird big brother privacy, what is private, what's public, and what's actually happening with their emotions and their psychological impact. And so this film in some ways gives you a bit of a peek by looking at the conversations that they have with their family. Even at that moment, they may not be fully describing what's happening. And what may appear to be one story ends up being another story. Yeah, I feel like that was another dimension of what's public and what's private in this context, and the ways in which the scientists that are working here are kind of fighting against a long institutional culture that is not encouraging or rewarding people for being completely authentic with what's happening inside of their experiences.
[00:22:25.237] Wonder Bright: Which, by the way, is also a 12th house issue. 12th house is where we're exiled because we're identified by others as being a misfit in some way. And so we're sent off. want to be sent off or people who have this experience of being essentially alone or enjoying their solitude are people who are 12th house denizens. They're people who will, you know, Katie Coleman, I'm sure has an electric 12th house because there is this way in which she seeks that experience of solitude, of contemplation, of being far away. And yet, as you're describing, if you're being scrutinized, how far away can you get? And if everything that you say or write down is being observed, then what kind of privacy can you have? So it's this really strange tension where in order to be an astronaut at this time, you not only have to be able to be alone and solitary for long periods of time, but you have to be able to have that capacity inside yourself to be alone and to know your truth, no matter who's observing you or no matter where you are or what the context is. that whether someone's observing you or not, you still trust your own experience. You're still connected. You're tethered to the earth, but you're also tethered to yourself.
[00:23:58.463] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I guess as we wrap up, what I want to bear witness to in this film is the impulse of scientific inquiry is a theme that people are doing this for the sake of knowledge about what it means to be human and what their limits of what it means to be human. And so I feel like there's themes of science and technology, but Each of the people that are working in this context are doing different types of foundational scientific research, whether it's the astronauts on the International Space Station, or the psychologists that are looking at the limits of human psychology, or if it's going to Mars and all the different scientific innovations that we have to come up with in order to do that. So I just want to appreciate and give a shout out to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and what people will sacrifice in their own lives in order to give to this greater body of knowledge that we have of what it means to be human.
[00:24:52.431] Wonder Bright: And I would like to bear witness to the cosmonauts, astronauts, 12th house denizens, exiles of all kind who have that capacity to reach inside themselves and find that connection to themselves that also allows them to connect to others so that they can both be alone and bear witness to our planet. I think of the famous Earthrise photograph which another film is now asking me to look at differently. another film that we saw called Fantastic Machine. We'll talk about that later in a different podcast. But I'm thinking about Earthrise and that experience of contemplation and perspective that an astronaut might have about the Earth from being away from the Earth, from being exiled, from being in that space of so far away that you can't actually be found. And that there are people in all walks of life who have an experience of that, whether they're astronauts or not. And I just want to say a shout out to my fellow 12th housers. Okay, so thanks so much for joining us today as we talk about The Longest Goodbye by Ido Mitsurahi. This is Wonder Bright and Kent Bye from Story All the Way Down. And if you want to learn more about any of the films, or any of the connections that we have made, or to support the pod, you can check us out at storyallthewaydown.com. Thank you so much.
[00:26:36.994] Kent Bye: Thanks, everyone.
