Rhetorics of employee empowerment in Ad Astra : Scientific ambition and the familial costs of emotional labor

In a reemergent space age, such as the contemporary space race driven by the technological moguls, scientific progress is associated with technocratic outcome for the future of lunar territory. In the ambition of scientific progress, emotion is often identified as a weakness. Amid the context of this dichotomy, James Gray’s (2019) film Ad Astra captures the duality of human emotion pinned against institutional duty. The display of competing emotions and familial sacrifice in the service of technologically ambitious organizational employment as the content for the film’s prologue and culmination speeches. Although the two speeches are nearly identical, the second adopts a tone of resistance to institutional loyalty that comes at the cost of familial responsibility, whereas the first is delivered mechanically, emotionless, and at the service of employer expectations. The two speeches demonstrate astronaut Roy McBride’s character arc, illustrating the empowerment of the individual found in resistance to employer expectations. As the second version of the speech celebrates liberation from emotional labor, the rhetoric of individualism over institutional power is utilized. Capturing the cost of familial relationships through loyalty to institutional ambition, the film exudes a rhetoric of family rights in the age of an employee-empowered workplace.