Mock Up On Mu
Sunday, 4:00 pm, Vinegar Hill Theatre
Director: Craig Baldwin
Writer: Craig Baldwin
Cinematographer: Bill Daniel
Cast: Damon Packard, Michelle Silva, Kal Spelletich, Stoney Burke
Running Time: 110 min
Mock Up on Mu is the latest offering from veteran avant-garde filmmaker Craig Baldwin, a collage film pieced together from old science fiction and monster movies, Bell Science documentaries, corporate promo films, and bits of new footage shot by Baldwin. Voiceover dialogue crosses over clips in a way that is both disorienting and illuminating. The same characters are represented by different figures in clips from different sources; the audience has to decide how the images are linked, and why a sentence starts off connected with an image of ’50s sci-fi star Richard Carlson (who gets more screen time here than in any film since the ’50s) but is finished by a different man in a documentary clip, using the same voice. If there are characters here, who are they? They are (or were) real people, and the film bears at least some resemblance to their almost unbelievable real lives—but not much.
Baldwin is particularly fascinated by Jack Parsons, amateur rocket scientist, solid rocket fuel pioneer, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, occultist, and legend. With Parsons at the center of the film, Baldwin also brings in Parsons’s better-known friend, spiritualist Aleister Crowley; Parsons’s wife, artist Marjorie Cameron, sometimes called the founder of the New Age movement; and especially L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology founder who conned Parsons and ran off with his wife (the one before Cameron). In addition, there is the utterly fake character Lockheed Martin, a nebbishy composite representing the aerospace industry.
With Hubbard in the mix, Scientology plays as large a role here as the free-love paganism in which these folks dabbled in the ’50s. Indeed, “mock up” is a Scientology term (both noun and verb) for false mental images (or the act of creating them), and “Mu” is Hubbard-speak for what the rest of us call the moon. Baldwin’s Hubbard is a flabby con man trying to use a brainwashed Cameron to lure Parsons into business ventures on the moon. Hubbard’s easily offended disciples will not relish this portrayal of him, but this not a documentary on Scientology or a heavy-handed attack on Hubbard. Rather, it is an immersion in a bizarre borderland where the world of government- and corporate-sponsored science (spotless labs manned by dedicated, patriot scientists who produce the technology to keep us ahead of the Reds) mixes uneasily with the world of spiritual outsiders, artistic outlaws, rebels, and—let’s face it—loonies.
