It is not ideal for your loved ones to live far away from you.
But it’s a whole lot better than it used to be.
From the Bronze Age until approximately 1935, the fastest way to reach your far-flung relatives was by boat. And those boat trips must have been long, boring, and dangerous.
In total contrast, domestic airline flights are one of the utopian miracles of the modern age. You can get anywhere in the lower 48 states in just a few uneventful hours. And, incredibly, you are safer in the clouds than on your commute to work.
We owe this miracle, in part, to the brave visionaries of the early 20th Century who believed in the potential of air travel. And the safety of air travel.
Early in the film, Charles Lindbergh is at a bankers meeting trying to raise funds for his solo flight across the Atlantic. The pilot respectfully takes a cigar he is offered.
The bankers are skeptical. “We don’t want to be seen as the men who bankrolled a suicide.” “Suicide never occurred to me,” Lindbergh chuckles. “Until I started smoking this cigar.”
Even though he was attempting something that everyone else had died trying, Lindbergh (Jimmy Stewart) never feels like a young daredevil. He’s just a guy who believes in himself and his experience of safe flying.
There is a telling flashback scene where Lindbergh is trying to teach an old priest how to fly. “Would you like to hear the prayer I have for landings? It’s out of Psalms.” “No, thank you, father.” “Don’t you ever pray?” “Well, I don’t have to,” Lindbergh smiles confidently. “I know how to land.”
This is the way writer/director Billy Wilder addresses his biggest challenge: how to address Charles Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies without making us hate him. Wilder found the way.
The film presents young Lindbergh as singularly confident about himself, the future of aeronautics, and the future of mankind. The pilot is informed by the optimistic progressive vision of the Social Darwinists. And like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, he has no need for sentimentality or religion.
It’s fair to say that Charles Lindbergh had the same philosophical background as Nazis. But definitely not the German Nationalism or militarism. Lindbergh wanted to fly to Paris, not conquer and occupy it!
And fly to Paris he did. “The Spirit of St. Louis” does an outstanding job of making the audience feel how arduous the 33-hour journey was. I wondered how on earth Lindbergh went to the bathroom. And I wondered why on earth he didn’t take amphetamines to stay awake and focused.
This is a much better film than I was expecting. We already know the pilot is going to survive the journey. But it is still intensely suspenseful. When the wings of the plane started icing up over the North Atlantic, I could barely watch.
In less than a century, flight went from an experimental new technology to the safest method of travel. We owe a debit of gratitude to great visionaries like Charles Lindbergh. My parents live in Florida and I fly to visit them once a month. If I had to take a boat there, I wonder if I’d ever go.