On Sunday 9 March, at the hands of a science documentary, millions of Americans experienced 44 sustained minutes of collective emotional catharsis culminating in a massive and mystifying group cry. The event was Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which debuted 34 years ago and has since been viewed by 600 million people, shaping our fundamental notion of how science can be popularly presented.
We were all excited, but I don’t think anybody was prepared for the visceral emotionality it would unleash. Thousands of people inundated Twitter with reports of breaking down into unabashed tears of joy and remembrance. How is it that a nature documentary sparked such an intense reaction?
The American humanist obsession with the original Cosmos is a hard thing to explain. Most of those people I know who were crying while watching the new show were not even alive when the original debuted, and didn’t in fact see it until well into their twenties (I’m a science teacher and didn’t see my first full episode until I was 28). And yet, when we speak of it, it’s with that same wistful sense of a return to bygone days that we usually reserve for He-Man and Saturday afternoon baseball.
There’s something telling in the reverential yet giddy tone we millennials employ when talking about Cosmos, almost as if Sagan returns us to a sense of wonder we wish we had had when younger but didn’t for one reason or another. It’s our grand chance at an existential do-over. Watching Cosmos, listening to the reassuring rhythm of Sagan’s distinctive delivery, provides us a moment of recovered childhood as it Ought To Have Been that other popular scientists have sought to emulate but somehow can’t quite capture in the same way as those grainy frames of Sagan standing on a beach talking about Star Stuff while warbling synthesizers mumble in the background.
That’s part of the obsession that manifested itself so suddenly over Twitter, but I think it’s also an issue of that desperate American need for an origin story. “Where did we come from?” is in some ways the only question we ever ask, dressed in manifold different words, but always with that same urgent plaintiveness that renders us both so wonderfully vulnerable and exasperatingly touchy.
For the humanist stratum of Americans, the question is doubly keen, and so we tend to flock with seemingly inexplicable enthusiasm to anything that hints of, “This, THIS is where we started.” Amidst all of our massively self-destructive tendencies as a movement, Cosmos is something we can agree upon, our touchstone of unassailable purity and goodness that has a power to unite us in spite of everything else. It’s the roost we can all return to when we need to feel confidence in each other again. Just like comic book fans can always say, “Still, Jack Kirby was The Man” during the most virulent of conversations to settle everybody back to a default state of mutual good will, so has Cosmos come to be the thing we have all agreed best represents us, our aspirations and our way of approaching the world. It settles us in our skin, and gives us a place to point to and call home.
Besides, Cosmos is a great show. I use clips of it with my students, and have listened with delight as phrases from the show pop up in their graduation speeches. For a 35-year-old documentary to have an impact like that upon a 140-character-limit culture speaks to its raw power and palpable honesty. All those moments: The googleplex roll of paper. The big bucket where Sagan had us believing for a fraction of an instant that he was going to mix up a human being. The cosmic calendar. The crab story. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch...” Even the Library of Alexandria shtick holds up pretty well. For rhetorical unity and confidence in the symbiotic grandeur of humanity and science, I can’t really think of any show I like better. It has earned its spot in the television pantheon, but to explain its unique emotional resonance in the US, you have to realize the full extent of our longing for scientific inspiration in the midst of memories of suburban mundanity, and our particular organizational need for an agreed upon, unblemished set of images and sound clips that bring us all back to a state of mutual understanding and personal comfort no matter how hard we lash out at each other.
We brought all of that emotional complexity to the table for the Cosmos premiere, and with it a crushing weight of expectation that we had every right to suspect would be dismally underserved. Then the amazing thing happened: the new Cosmos turned out to be everything we wanted, and even a few things we didn’t imagine that we wanted until we saw them. I don’t want to ruin any surprises by getting too specific, but rather will share a story that sums up the whole experience.
I watched it with my family, my wife and older daughter sitting with me on the couch while my younger daughter (6 years old) was sitting off at a table on the side. During the first third of the show, when Tyson was taking us on a tour through what we know about Earth’s place in the universe, my youngest had her head down, scribbling away at a piece of paper. It seemed she wasn’t paying any attention, which was sad, but the rest of us were so spellbound it didn’t really register. Then, at the first commercial, she came up to us and produced perhaps the single most beautiful thing I’ve ever had handed to me by another human. It was her picture of Earth and the universe, a gorgeous rendering of a child trying to fit in the vastness of what she just witnessed on one slim sheet of paper. While the rest of us were just sitting there, stunned by the gorgeous immensity, the youngest of us all was so moved that she had to try and get it all down at once and share it with everybody right away. We’ve watched Planet Earth and Beakman’s World and all manner of other great science shows together, but this is the first time she was ever so purely taken by the vastness of science and the universe. I saw her experiencing exactly what Sagan’s Cosmos made me yearn to have experienced as a youth myself. Tyson, only a third of the way in, already showed himself to have beautifully succeeded in carrying on Sagan’s work.
Sure, the middle section grinds a bit (the depiction of Giordano Bruno’s life was something of a whitewash, if a gorgeous one.) But then we find our feet again with a return to Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar, which is every bit as fresh and powerful as the original. Then, well, something truly touching happens, something small and human and fragile that illuminates everything that came before, and you’ll just have to see it for yourself to understand.
So, yes, we all had ourselves a nice cry and, at the end of 44 minutes, found perhaps a bit of that curious peace that comes from knowing what you’re about and where you come from. To be able to sit at this moment in time, and watch on a computer monitor while millions of people come to the simultaneous realization, “Yes, this is us” is a privilege. Humanism has a beautiful history guided by many solitary lights, but comparatively few moments of overwhelmingly mutual recognition. The Cosmos premiere was one such.
And that was just episode one.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is airing in the UK on National Geographic
