A few weeks ago, I started a series on some of the genres of entertainment that are popular on television, and what they show about what is good about our culture. "What is important in assessing the reserves of strength in the culture," I wrote, is "the outlook on life that is constantly being reinforced in the entertainment people seek out on a daily basis."
I am talking, of course, about "Star Trek."
It is common, I know, to dismiss "Star Trek" as cheesy or to deride William Shatner as a bad actor—especially in recent years, since he descended into the special Hollywood Hell of self-parody. (Have you seen a Priceline advertisement lately?) All of these complaints are exaggerated. I have been watching some of the original "Star Trek" episodes recently—I was delighted to discover that you can watch them on demand on the Internet via IMDB—and while some of the episodes certainly had their problems, they were generally well done, and the best of them (e.g., "Balance of Terror" or "Space Seed") are classics.
But good scripts (when they had them) and memorable characters were just a small part of the appeal and cultural impact of "Star Trek" and its many offshoots. In my view, the original series had three main virtues.
The first virtue was an optimistic projection of the future. Remember that "Star Trek" was on the air from 1966 to 1969. During those years, you could watch the evening news and hear about the latest updates on the Apollo missions—and then you could wait for "Star Trek" to come on to show you how we will all live after another two or three centuries of man's conquest of space.
But there is another respect in which "Star Trek" would have been a refreshing contrast to the evening news. Not only did the series assume that there would be extraordinary technological advances (communicators, transporters, "warp drive," and all of the other imagined "treknology"). It assumed that these advances in technology would be matched by advances in human relationships. That was the point of secondary characters like Chekhov and Uhura. In the middle of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, "Star Trek" projected a future without war, dictatorship, and racism, in which the nations of earth are united and working peacefully and productively together. It went even further, projecting a benevolent Federation of Planets, an interstellar alliance of free worlds who have also achieved a similar degree of progress. The main function of Starfleet is the peaceful exploration of space.
The message was: we're going to get through all of the current turmoil, and we're going to have a bright and successful future ahead of us. All of the problems we have today can be and will be solved. What science-fiction story today projects a similar confidence in human progress?
The second virtue of "Star Trek" was its creation of an iconic, uniquely American hero. Captain Kirk embodies all of the distinctive qualities of the American character: self-confident and decisive, independent-minded and impatient with authority, a love of adventure and a willingness to take risks. It is significant that he is the one in charge and that he sets the tone for the series. Gene Rodenberry was something of a utopian liberal, so his optimistic view of the future is often founded on wrong premises about how such a future is to be achieved. Thus, it is clear that the Federation of Planets was supposed to be based on the United Nations. But it was unlike the UN in one fundamental way: the Federation is what the UN might be—if America was clearly in charge. That's what the character of Kirk implies: the future belongs to us, i.e., to the American spirit.
Finally, a key virtue of the "Star Trek" series was its use of a science fiction setting to explore grand philosophical themes. In looking at IMDB's summaries of the original episodes, I realized how much the series owes to "The Twilight Zone," which aired from 1959 to 1964. It would have ended just a few years before "Star Trek" began and clearly provided some inspiration for the new series' approach to science fiction.
"Star Trek" episodes weren't just action-adventure shows. They attempted to deal with profound themes. If you search around on the Internet, you can find whole essays arguing that the main characters of Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Captain Kirk represent the tripartite division of the soul into reason, emotion, and will. Given a science-fiction premise, the creators of the show used it as an opportunity to, for example, project a race of aliens who are devoted to logic and have thoroughly suppressed their emotions, and then use this as a basis to explore the (supposed) conflict between reason and emotion, and even to make a few tart comments about the consequences of emotional repression.
I didn't always agree with the messages these shows conveyed, but I appreciated the fact that the series thought it was important to take on such ambitious themes.
All of these virtues were present to greater and lesser degrees in later permutations of the series. "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987–1994) very nearly didn't survive its first season because Gene Rodenberry's utopian liberalism led him to experiment with a kind of captaincy by committee. (The idea was mostly dropped, Rodenberry was sidelined, and the series survived for seven seasons.) I pretty much missed "Star Trek: Voyager" (1995–2001) and "Star Trek: Enterprise" (2001–2005), but I was a fan of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (1993–1999). In the 1990s, however, we started to see a less benevolent view of the future. "Deep Space Nine" was set on a space station located at the intersection of galactic empires, so it presented a darker future in which the Federation is locked in deadly conflicts with powerful adversaries. Nevertheless, the core elements of the franchise were largely maintained.
All of this brings me to the new Star Trek movie, which essentially re-launches the original series with slightly younger versions of all of its core characters. So how does the new Star Trek measure up to the old?
What struck me first about the new film was that the casting for the three main characters—Chris Pine for Kirk, Karl Urban for McCoy, Zachary Quinto for Spock—was perfect. They are all thoroughly believable as younger versions of the same characters. More important, the filmmakers mostly understood the essence of these characters. Crucially, they got the character of Captain Kirk right, though they make him slightly more reckless, brash, and rebellious. Bringing back the character of Captain Kirk—rescuing him from Shatner's cartoonish image in recent years—is no small achievement, and it definitely recharges the old series and makes it available for a new franchise.
(The same thing is accomplished by an overly complicated time-travel plot which places the new Star Trek in an alternative universe, an altered "history," so to speak. This is an all-purpose escape hatch that allows the filmmakers to modify the established timeline of the previous Trek series.)
Unfortunately, this is the only one of the three elements of the original series that the new film manages to draw upon. There is a touch of modern malevolence in Kirk's rebellious youth as a kind of juvenile delinquent (a creation of the new Star Trek "history") and in the film's extraordinarily high body count. It used to be that you needed to threaten the loss of a large number of lives in order to raise the dramatic stakes in an action film. Since sometime in the 1990s (my wife dates it to earlier, to the disaster films of the 1970s), it seems that you have to actually kill a large number of people in order to make an impression on your audience. But I find it much harder to celebrate the hero's victory amidst the rubble of an entire planet.
Moreover, the film lacks the deeper philosophical probing that was such an important part of the series. This was a real missed opportunity. The film shows us several episodes from Kirk's and Spock's childhoods, but offers virtually no new insight into the formation of their characters. The story focuses primarily around the relationship between Kirk and Spock, who is portrayed as "a bit of a self-righteous prig" (as Roger Ebert nicely put it). This makes sense as an immature version of Spock's character, and it sets up a clash with the brash young Kirk. In working together to fight off a common threat, the two young men learn to respect each other and become friends. That plot is fine as far as it goes, but other than that, this film is just a shoot-em-up modern action film set in space. In the old days, by contrast, time travel would have been used to pose some kind of philosophical conundrum, not as a mere plot point to advance the action. Roger Ebert's review overstates it a bit—but only a bit: "The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals, or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action."
But the virtues of the Star Trek franchise are still out there, available to the new filmmakers if they care to draw upon them. And given Star Trek's healthy box-office take in its opening weekends, we can expect more films in the franchise. Let's hope the filmmakers put them to better, more ambitious, more idealistic use.
It is more than Star Trek that needs rejuvenating, in my view. It is the whole science fiction genre. The Star Trek franchise provides plenty of material for inspiration—if its current owners can rediscover all of its virtues.
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