High In the Sunlit Silence

The enduring glamour of aviation

Virginia Postrel | December 22, 2004

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The Aviator portrays the glamour of aviation and Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s, but it also plays to our modern skepticism. It lets the movie audience in on the public relations manipulations, while hiding them from the audience within the film. The movie shows us Hughes as the world saw him in his golden years but also Hughes as only his intimates knew him. "No one sees him like this," his business partner orders when Hughes suffers a breakdown.

The Aviator thus allows us to simultaneously revel in glamour's power and know that there's more behind the scenes. Reviewing it for The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern inadvertently complimented the movie. It is, he wrote, "a production more concerned with theatricality than with realism or biographical truth." It is indeed. The Aviator is all about theatricality, all about glamour.

We don't need to see the hideous end of the story, because we already know it. That tragedy informs all of The Aviator's glamorous moments. From the early scenes of Hughes filming Hell's Angels, the movie is about the cost—and the insanity—of imagining perfection.

In The Aviator, Hughes strives for greatness in aviation and movie-making, both crafts that depend on a million tiny details. He creates technical marvels by demanding absurd perfection: cloud-filled skies to show the speed of his air force in Hell's Angels, aircraft with bodies so smooth he cannot feel a single rivet. He ignores the constraints of money and time. He obsessively tries to make the idealized, glamorous world real.

And the perfectionism that makes Hughes great proves his fatal flaw. He can be content only in a pristine, frictionless world, a world that can exist only in the imagination. Perhaps, the film hints, movie stars understand the limits of glamour's illusions better than engineering geniuses. "Nothing's clean, Howard," Ava Gardner tells him, "but we do our best."