Welcome to Boca Chica, Texas.
This is where Elon Musk has built his SpaceX launchpad. Boca Chica is a vivid mosaic of the romance and the hazards of space exploration. Or rather…it was.
The unincorporated community of Boca Chica Village, located in southern Texas, was renamed Starbase on May 3, 2025, becoming a newly incorporated city.
Mars has captivated our imaginations for centuries. We speculate about intelligent life…out there.
More recently, NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) have been sending robots to Mars to analyze soil and to probe for water. Maybe even discover Marvin the Martian. (Bugs Bunny would hate that so much.)
This is the unvarnished reality of going to Mars:
To colonize Mars we’re gonna hafta colonize Earth.
SpaceX looks to increase the number of launches at its Texas site from five to 25 per year. (The May 2025 decision followed an environmental review finding no major impact, despite local ecosystem concerns.)
That means Starbase, Texas is going to become a SpaceX campus.
SpaceX has been buying land in the area and homes for company housing and SpaceX facilities have sprouted up. They gotta design the rockets, then build the rockets, then launch the rockets and then return the rockets to Earth.
This isn’t a car factory in Detroit; this is a much bigger, more ambitious scheme.
“Unbelievable. It gives me goosebumps. Truly it does, doesn’t it? It’s like the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa María and we’re watching them being built. And we can anticipate the history that’s gonna come out of them.”
That is a fantastic quote from Shifting Baselines.
That’s a 2025 feature-length documentary directed by Quebec filmmaker Julien Élie. The 100-minute black-and-white doc contemplates the environmental, social and philosophical impacts of SpaceX’s Starbase project on the coastal village of Boca Chica, Texas.
I saw it at Hot Docs.
To understand the scope of this impressive Space Is The Place aspiration, director Julien Élie began documenting the various perspectives and experiences unfolding in Boca Chica, Texas.
The result is a documentary called Shifting Baselines.
What’s fantastic about Shifting Baselines is that it’s not necessarily a damning documentary. If you’ve been on social media the last couple of years you know how lazy people get criticizing Elon Musk. That gets so boring so quickly. Nobody—especially online, which is just the worst—is saying anything new. And the online discourse about him is so saturated and polarized that it’s not caustic so much as claustrophobic.
Shifting Baselines allows you to think freely, to—ironically—enjoy a space free of subpar hot takes and middle class resentment of Musk’s wealth. It’s one of the valid reasons why I’m recommending the doc.
Gently, the documentary traces the legitimate environmental concerns with these SpaceX launches. You see farmers struggling with debris from failed rocket launches. Shifting Baselines injects the audience into the area letting the ambient sounds—all the nature speak for itself. And sometimes as the environment shifts, there’s an uneasy silence. What’s going on with all the nature? I dig his use of ambient and natural sounds.
Shifting Baselines also captures the public enthusiasm for Mars. In this attached My Summer Lair conversation I refer to these characters as space hippies who are spellbound by rocket launches. (The above “the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa María” quote is from a SpaceX fan/space hippie.)
You know how NFL games have tailgate parties in the stadium’s parking lots? Picture that only for rocket launches. There’s no facing painting, though. These Mars tailgaters are rooting humans can reach Mars. Or the Moon.
(Truly, a rocket launch is captivating. It’s the impressive culmination of human curiosity combined with scientific endeavour. It’s one of the coolest things humans do. To defy gravity? That’s boldly impressive.)
Julien Élie shot in Boca Chica for just over two years, but even during that brief period, the gentrification was astonishing. A sprawling Pac-Man steadily consuming the town in service of this singular, obsessive focus.
It all circles back to that stark observation:
To colonize Mars we’re gonna hafta colonize Earth.
Space is worth it. Just by going to the Moon, we’ve returned with GPS, Velcro and dozens of everyday innovations that make our lives better and easier.
As a word, space isn’t limited to outer space and hurtling towards Mars. It also relates to our space and what we want to do with our space.
I have lovely friends who are currently undergoing one of those move out of the house renovations. They’re expanding and revising their…space. Just as SpaceX is renovating what we used to call Boca Chica, Texas.
This idea of our space—and what to do with our space—meant I came back to the recent Ontario Place documentary.
Your Tomorrow, directed by Ali Weinstein, mirrors Shifting Baselines.
Here in Ontario, thanks in part to Premier Doug Ford, Ontario Place has become a politically charged topic. Similar to Elon Musk and his space place in Texas.
However, culture is more valuable than politics.
What’s fascinating about Your Tomorrow is seeing people use Ontario Place for different things...to walk and to plant tomatoes. Ontario Place closed in 2012 as a destination with rides and concerts at The Forum. Yet it remains this odd public park, actively used by people who are shaping its value. As Ali Weinstein’s documentary reveals, many gatherings have formed a community, which as all good communities do is creating culture. (Ontario Place has become a Third Place. Do you know that social theory? After work, go to Starbucks with some friends and discuss it.)
And in Shifting Baselines, space nerds are doing the exact same things. They’re planting roots and cultivating the land so humans can leave this Earth.
Premier Doug Ford’s vision for Ontario Place is a multi-year, multibillion-dollar transformation of Toronto’s waterfront into a year-round, mixed-use recreation and tourism destination. That’s his vision for that unique space.
Just as Elon’s vision in Texas is to overhaul that coastal area into a massive SpaceX campus.
Rejecting either of those dominant visions isn’t enough. That’s just more political white noise.
Show me…don’t tell me.
Show me an alternative vision that is as captivating as a rocket launch.
Show me how we can deftly balance touch grass disconnection while meeting physical realities.
Show me a compelling environment for humans that cares for the environment.
I appreciate that both docs are simply observational documentaries steeped in ambient sound. You can hear the space speak for itself. (Translation is another issue for another day. Listening is just a smart start.)
Your Tomorrow and Shifting Baselines are offered like a time capsule. They’re portals balancing where we’ve been and where we want to go. (Here on Earth and all the way to Mars.)
Spaces change.
Visions can undergo gentrification.
One of the internet’s most inane narratives is an idiotic variation of “if Elon Musk gave everyone in the world $1 million dollars he’d have whatever $$ leftover.” (The one I just saw on Facebook was “If Elon Musk gave every person on earth $1 million, he would still have $724 billion.”)
What a brutally stupid thing to say out loud.
I don’t resent people for having wealth.
That’s what I appreciated so much about Shifting Baselines. It doesn’t launch into another trite Elon Musk is the worst human since Hitler performative rant. It calmly tells a Musk story that isn’t so much about Musk.
(Even this entire dispatch, I’m clearly far more annoyed by the loud and clumsy Musk haters than by Elon Musk. It’s not that I’m an avid defender of Musk or believe in his staggering genius…it’s just that I crave less stupid in my life. It’s the exact same issue with President Trump, Fox News, CNN etc. Honestly, don’t you want less stupid in your life?)
One of my core cultural principles is if you’re gonna hate, ya gotta hate properly. Hate is not a shortcut for the lazy. That’s like reading headlines, not articles, and presenting yourself as informed. And so much of Elon Musk hate is just dazzlingly lazy.
Be informed.
Do The Work.
Think Well.
As such, I’m curious about Alex Gibney’s four-hour Elon Musk opus Musk screening at TIFF this September.
(Though I’d rather see Gibney’s other 2026 documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie. Still, this is what TIFF is offering so I accept.)
You probably know Alex as the filmmaker behind Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, a 2015 doc that made lots of noise and lots of clickbait.
(I’ve seen Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014) and Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (2015). I recommend the Sinatra doc.)
As I’m super curious I’m also super cautious: Nuance > Noise.
“We’re talking about someone who has a Marvel villain-like level of power over our lives, from electric cars to space travel to AI to government to social media,” the fest’s doc chief Thom Powers told The Hollywood Reporter.”
Sigh. So much for nuance, eh?
And good gravy…Musk as a “Marvel villain” is irresponsibly lazy. Like what…he’s Thanos? Just because Elon Musk evilly ran The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) doesn’t exactly put him on par with the God of Mischief, Loki. Musk as a Marvel villain is a lazy liberal shorthand. See what I’m saying…don’t you desire less stupid in your life?
Clearly, TIFF is courting controversy after last year’s polarizing efforts with The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue.
It reeks of inferiority complex and TIFF should do and be better. (That’s a big ask. The same online types who eagerly post if Elon Musk gave everyone in the world $1 million dollars also actively post the reminder: when people show you who they are, believe em. Which isn’t even corny pop psychology it’s just pop.)
Following TIFF, Musk will premiere in cinemas on October 16 and then later stream on HBO (and probably Crave.).
I’m not expecting something as rich as Shifting Baselines but I can go into Alex Gibney’s Musk with some openness. Let’s see what ya got to offer.
Be sure to watch this space…as more TIFF 2026 #PantsWorthy recommendations are coming.
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Nuance Is The Sweet, Fragrant Musk I Wear To All TIFF Screenings—It’s My Obsession…
Sammy Younan
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Sammy Younan is the affable host of My Summer Lair podcast: think NPR’s Fresh Air meets Kevin Smith: interviews & impressions on Pop Culture.
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