star trek
Star Trek Is…: The Cage
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| Rare Playmates Cage-era “Innerspace” toy prototype. |
“The Cage” occupies a strange space within Star Trek lore: As a pilot created by Gene Roddenberry and those closest to him to demonstrate to NBC what they envisioned Star Trek to be all about, but one that never actually aired on television, it is at once the progenitor of the entire franchise and also the only part of it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the series’ canon. “The Cage” is a very strange specimen indeed then: It’s not quite Star Trek, at least not the Star Trek that fans would come to recognise and love years later, but, by virtue of it being a pilot designed to embody the show’s core values and themes made before executive compromises changed the tone of the series, it is in many ways the purest Star Trek of all.
The one individual irreducibly linked to “The Cage”, what it is and what it does, far more so than in anything else bearing the Star Trek name, is Gene Roddenberry. Over the years mainline fandom has all but deified Roddenberry, and people tend to hold him up as a figurehead for everything they want Star Trek to embody and strive for (particularly so in the years immediately following his death in 1991 and the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005). This is also not helped by muddy and at times completely contradictory historical accounts of key moments in Star Trek history and Roddenberry’s own biographical details perpetuated by what can frankly best be described as rampant hearsay and cult of personality. As a result, it can be hard to actually get a solid critical handle on who Roddenberry was, what the extent of his contribution to Star Trek was and what exactly he wanted it to be.
“The Cage” then really is the best place to talk about Roddenberry and his influence on Star Trek, because no matter what Star Trek is going to become over the next several decades it will never again be as closely tied to Roddenberry’s personal conception of it as it is here. There are several reasons for this, the most immediately obvious one being its aforementioned status as a pilot, but also the fact that even as of the early Original Series Gene Roddenberry had a lot of help and input in shaping the direction of Star Trek that he didn’t have as much of here. The fact he was willing to entertain and genuinely listen to everyone’s ideas for, and criticisms of, his project is telling, but so is the fact their influence has been all but effaced from the history of the franchise to the point Roddenberry is, implicitly at least, held up as the source of every single good idea the series ever had, which is simply and flatly not true. But there is a reason Majel Barrett called “The Cage” her favourite episode and “Pure Star Trek”, and anyone who is seriously interested in the history of the franchise and Gene Roddenberry’s “vision”, whatever that may turn out to be, really ought to study it.…
Fall and Rise
There was a fair amount of media chin-scratching last year about a supposed glumness and seriousness creeping into popular movies. The real trend, I think, is not towards the ‘serious’ but towards the reactionary.
For one thing, there’s recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a ‘nuanced’ form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots. The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran. Always handy, being able to demonise Iran. (Modern Iran’s origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present ‘the West’ in a good light… which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.) The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers. It misrepresents ‘enhanced interrogation’ as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers. To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture. The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt – the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality – and very normalising.
These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world. Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium’s cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring. This isn’t anything new. The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the ‘War on Terror’ and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of ‘painful self-examination’ and ‘angst’ about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium. The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects.
The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery. Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices. It’s not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.) Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington. The reality is that Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening ‘on the ground’ as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. …
What’s in a Name?
Why do some monsters have names while others don’t?
The best place to start may be with the Cybermen. After all, they went from having names to not having names. Moreover, they did it more or less within one particular story, ‘The Moonbase’ (if I remember rightly, they had names in the script but these were not mentioned on screen).
The first thing to mention is that this is the story in which they went from being threatening because they are emotionless and logical to being threatening because they’re one of those “terrible things” bred in those “corners of the universe” that “we” have to fight, when they were no longer fighting to save their planet but to steal ours, when they lost their human hands, when they started (so early!) saying things like “Clever, clever, clever!”, i.e. when they became overtly and deliberately evil. But there has to be more to it than that. After all, vampires keep their names. Loss of humanity and the acquisition of evil intent are not enough to strip them of their names.
Moreover, the Cybermen are not the only Doctor Who monsters to lose their names. There’s also the Daleks, who lost their names when they stopped being Kaleds (or Dals).
This loss of name is very important. In the ‘Moonbase’ Cybermen, it seems more like the final stripping away of individual identity. It works similarly for the Daleks as for the Cybermen, and has similar wider connotations when it comes to both these races.
(Notice, by the way, how blithely one talks about ‘races’ in this sci-fi context… a way of putting things that would be wholly unacceptable in Western liberal discourse nowadays if applied to, say, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians… which isn’t to say that the racialist patterns of thought don’t still pertain in the attitudes of many, just that they are not usually openly stateable anymore. This is an example of an entire cultural discourse – in this case, that of racialism – taking refuge in a ‘pocket universe’ within culture once the wider culture has largely rejected and banished it, or at least talk of it. The discourse of racialism hides out, in disguise, in the SF ‘Recycle Bin’ once it has been guiltily deleted from the cultural ‘Desktop’. Sometimes such things even get deleted from the Recycle Bin but, as we know, they remain on the hard drive, waiting to be forensically recovered.)
Veering back to the point… notice how the conversion of Lytton or Stengos into Cyberman or Dalek involves the loss of identity, thus the loss of name. When Stengos sees his daughter, his first word is her name. He remembers her name, and hence his own, which is what launches his psychological struggle against his Dalek conditioning.
The named/nameless distinction maps roughly onto the biological/robot-or-cyborg distinction, and both are really about individuality vs. the loss of individuality. The Daleks and Cybermen act far more on a kind of groupthink than, say, the Silurians. …
Playing with Dolls
UPDATE, 25/09/12: If you read this post, please read on through the comments too. Some astute readers used the comments section to set me straight on some issues both of fact and interpretation. As a result, my attitude towards ‘Night Terrors’ is now considerably more negative than my initial reaction (which you can read in the main review below). In fairness to myself, I do spend most of the piece saying what I don’t like about ‘Night Terrors’, including identifying some of what I call the “latent hostility” towards working-class people… but I failed to notice the wider context of the episode and so also the scale of the problem. I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong (of course, I do really) but I hate that I blogged before giving myself sufficient time to think.
Okay, my foolhardy project of catching up with all the Doctor Who I’ve not seen in order to re-synch with the new stuff (and hopefully provide myself with blogging material) continues.
Last night I finally watched ‘Night Terrors’. Much to my astonishment, I didn’t absolutely hate it. I mean, it wasn’t particularly good… but it wasn’t actively offensive most of the time either. Which is fairly good going for Moffat-era Who written by Gatiss.
I was horrified by the idea that the Doctor now hears and answers prayers like God, with the pleas of a little boy travelling up to him through the heavens, but that was somewhat neutralised later by some technobabble explanation that made it sound very much like a special case. In the end, I liked that the Doctor actually seemed comparatively less full of himself, and more like a guy making it up and thinking it out as he went along. Matt Smith should be encouraged to slow down a bit more often. He had some nice, quiet moments (inbetween all the usual frenetic gibbering) that were very likeable. He does ‘kindly’ rather well.
There were cliches galore, of course. An old lady complains about her knees. A yobbo guy with a pitbull. Hoodies, etc.
Where would any mainstream BBC drama be nowadays if it had to try and depict a housing estate without the employment of hostile cliches? I think the latter stages of RTD’s depiction of Rose’s estate are the last example of such places being sketched without such latent hostility.
But… there was an interesting visual stress on the uniformity and blandness of the housing estate, bathed in that sickly yellow night-time street-light aura.
And this made the opulent but fake interior of the ‘mansion house’ into a fairly interesting visual counterpoint.
Of course, it was entirely predictable that the mansion would turn out to be a dolls house. But even that was kind of covered when the Doctor immediately realises it when he ends up there, treating the conclusion as though it’s self-evident. It looks like evidence of two tracks of thought at work in the story. We’re more on the Doctor’s wavelength than the other characters… which is not self-evidently the wrong way to do it. …
Enterprise & Initiative
Star Trek is liberal bourgeois to the bone.
Show me more of this Earth thing called “shopping”
The Federation is supposedly post-capitalist, post-money, etc., yet it has many of the important hallmarks of advanced capitalist social organisation. A highly organised and stratified division of labour, a deep separation between workplace and home life, work shifts, career promotion, private nuclear families, a socially-separate education system providing training and qualifications, a professional liberal media, massive military expenditure (of resources if not money), hierarchical political and military arrangements combined with liberal ideology, a separate political class, etc. In one of the films, someone even mentions “opinion polls”. So, the Federation clearly has what looks like a capitalist state, capitalist superstructure and capitalist social arrangements. What of the economy? Well, they still have privately owned and run restaurants, for example, though supposedly people run them for the love of it… and in DS9, the Federation people mesh perfectly into the economy of Bajor, with its Ferengi businessmen, etc… to the point where you have Federation officers trading goods and paying credits for booze. When they want to make a ‘darker’, grungier version of their utopia, they take characters from the utopia and cast them amongst the money-using barbarians on the frontiers. But the Utopians have little difficulty dealing with the money-users in a natural way, whatever their occasional disdain. The facile nature of the pretence that the Federation is post-capitalist is revealed by the ease with which the Federation types merge into Quark’s bar.
Meanwhile, capitalism is turned into a kind of quaint pathology, espoused as a blatant and impudent ethic of acquisition, by a race that it’d be easy to mistake for a bunch of submerged Jewish stereotypes (even down to ballbusting mothers). The utter misunderstanding of capitalism – indeed, of all human history – is best expressed in the scene where Quark, tired of being endlessly patronized and insulted by the holier-than-thou humans, compares his culture with the culture of Earth, pointing out that Ferengos (or whatever the silly place is called) has no history of things like concentration camps. The implication is that humans must blame their own species-nature for the horrors of the 20th century… which fails to notice the role of competing capitalist imperialisms and fascist reaction (against socialist challenges to capitalism) in creating the wars that lead to concentration camps. Capitalism itself is absolved, since it has been practiced by the Ferengi and lead to no comparable horrors, merely social eccentricities. Even the sexism of Ferengi culture is seen as a mere cultural malformation, with DS9 repeatedly showing female Ferengis achieving liberation through their equal ability to participate in ruthless trade, etc., whenever they manage to trick or force the men into giving them a chance. Capitalism is thus so entirely acquitted of any involvement in patriarchy that it is instead offered as a way of defeating it. This is entirely consonant with the heavily peddled ideas that free markets will eventually result in populations of free individuals, that the liberty of trade is the liberty of people, that liberalisation of market economies brings liberalisation of societies, that personal self-promotion is the best way to overcome cultural disadvantages. …