Star Trek’s Lost Legacy of Literary Pretension

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[22 May 2009]

By Kit MacFarlane

I’ll take Shatner or Ricardo Montalban diving into some big emotions and chewing up the scenery over polished Next Generation actors dryly intoning ‘culture’ any day; literature is always best served by engagement rather than reverence.

But Trek hasn’t always been that way; while The Next Generation‘s quotations are as stilted as the characters that intone them, the original series seemed to be sincerely trying to engage with its often passionate use of quotation and allusion. No doubt some of this may have been caused by the presence of William Shatner, who seems to be incapable of not being passionate and engaged with anything (just take a listen to his too-fun-to-be-ignored Transformed Man album), but tracking back a little further shows that series writer and creator Gene Roddenberry had a solid pre-Star Trek foundation in one of the most literate shows ever to air on television.

Although commonly described as ‘Wagon Train to the stars’, much of the underlying tone and approach (albeit not the content) of the original Star Trek can perhaps be seen as a logical extension of Gene Roddenberry’s work as a writer on Western series Have Gun - Will Travel (for which he wrote 24 episodes between 1957 and 1963). Have Gun‘s scripts and production demonstrate an unusually strong for the time focus on central-character consistency, one of the elements in Star Trek that helped it evolve so easily from a ‘series’ into a ‘universe’. Just as importantly, Have Gun - Will Travel stands out from its contemporaries by combining its standard TV liberalism with an active and often disruptive participation in its social dramas (often involving violent intervention).

Likewise, the original Star Trek sometimes seemed to revolve around some serious attempts (failed or otherwise) to engage with current and potentially difficult social issues beyond mere passive observation. The Enterprise crew often found themselves directly and willfully entangled in the problems they were supposed to be observing, leaning towards an interventionist stance and having only a tenuous reliance on the ‘prime directive’ of non-intervention that supposedly dominated their mission (it’s always a good laugh when Kirk all of a sudden feels bound by the Prime Directive after having already broken it four times before breakfast).

And, perhaps most importantly, Have Gun - Will Travel featured the most honestly cultured and literary character that’s ever lived inside the small-screen (that’s including the great poetic quoter, John Mortimer’s Rumpole). Quotation and allusion were key features of the Western series, beyond mere passing superficial references, and Kirk’s impassioned recitations don’t seem too far removed from Have Gun - Will Travel lead Paladin’s dramatic (and somewhat more restrained) tendency to view the problems he encounters through a prism of literary culture.

Star Trek‘s quotations were never as evocative, obscure (they tend to be fairly obvious) or naturally-integrated, but the sincerity behind the scripts and the intent, if nothing else, at real cultural connection seems clear. But if that connection is speculative at best, Trek really established its own pursuit of a literary core a few decades later, with two excellent films featuring the original cast and directed by Nicholas Meyer: 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (almost indisputably the best of the films, exciting and engaging even to non-Trek fans). The Wrath of Khan draws primarily on two fairly obvious and well-worn sources, A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick, but wins out through clear passion and direct application of these texts to the underlying themes and unique resonances of its story and universe.

The allusion to Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities in combination with Spock’s notion of sacrificing the good of the few for the good of the many isn’t surprising or extraordinarily insightful in itself, but it at least makes a perfect complement to Spock’s character and sacrifice: embracing his own death with the ultimate logical pragmatism that nevertheless broadcasts a paradoxical but irrefutable compassion. (And, of course, this opens up Kirk’s reversal of the quoted maxim in the following film, where the ‘good of the many’ is risked for the ‘good of the one’—a charming if not fully explored extension that nicely sums up the dual outlooks bubbling away under those well-worn characters and their long-established but slightly evasive friendship).

More excitingly, Khan’s use of Moby Dick in the film’s finale really latches on to the underlying emotion of its source with that uninhibited audacity that’s often dismissed as merely ‘camp’. I’ll take Shatner or Ricardo Montalban diving into some big emotions and chewing up the scenery over polished Next Generation actors dryly intoning ‘culture’ any day; literature is always best served by engagement rather than reverence. Nothing kills culture more quickly that a bunch of overly serious poseurs, desperate to prove their own profundity (and killing off the great hams in the process).

What really makes Meyer’s film special is the fact that this quote so cleverly and carefully emphasises the underlying repositioning of the characters and our potential sympathies in the film. After all, Kirk has essentially become the White Whale to Khan’s Ahab. Khan may have, like Ahab, become some almost inhuman creature driven to obscene vengeance, but it’s Kirk and the clean-cut Starfleet crew whose cavalier indifference and untouchable resilience have helped propel him to this state. Khan is, in fact, fairly justified in his hatred (after Kirk abandoned him on some miserable planet and wandered off, carelessly disposing of an entire race) and, thus, in getting the best lines. The lines from Moby Dick nicely define Khan as an being bound by monomaniacal rage in pursuit of an enemy as philosophical as it is tangible, but it is a rage that, like Ahab’s, contains the undeniable possibility of being, at times, our own.

“From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”

Importantly, this hatred hurled towards Kirk reflects not just upon the character but also on the show’s own underlying logic. As a result, it also challenges those elements we take for granted about Star Trek‘s approach to its scenarios. After all, didn’t we just as dismissively watch Khan abandoned on that planet, ignore the ethical dilemmas and then forget him completely as we tuned in for the next adventure? Much of Khan’s rage flies out at the shaky logic of always-justified and responsibility-free action that propels the Star Trek universe itself. Meyer doesn’t simply have his characters speak lines long dead, but instead suggests that we transpose, if only for a moment, the breadth of the logic and passion in Melville’s story onto this space-opera.

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Kit MacFarlane has a PhD in English Literature, Film and Popular Culture, and teaches English as a freelance academic. He writes cultural criticism, commentary and relentless tirades, and has published regular cultural and higher education commentary in Australian media. Off-the-clock, he shouts at the TV incessantly.

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Comments

The thing I missed most in the new Star Trek movie is the deception tactics, actually.

The Corbomite Maneuver, that romulan episode I don’t know the name of, that episode where everyone aged rapidly.  Kirk always overcame superior force by tricking them or otherwise outsmarting them.  In the new Star Trek he just sort of beamed into the middle of a crowd and shot everyone.

JJ Abrams did a great job directing but the script was a problem for me.  I would have rather seen a Star Trek movie that held onto it’s brainy idealistic roots than a popcorn action flick.  I want to see Ron Moore write the next one.

Comment by Chris — May 23, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

Forget the review. This article is ostentatiously written and too twee. How can I appreciate any of your points when they are dressed up to impress beyond any real need?

Comment by Brian from cooperstown, ny — May 24, 2009 @ 11:55 am

Brief preface: the analysis of the pretentious literary reference in general unfolds beautifully here—the following should in no way detract from the force of this acclaim.

But Dr. MacFarlane has nonetheless unfairly grouped The Next Generation together with the original Shatner Star Trek, and I say so because Patrick Stewart not only has many pithy, sensible, and wholly unpretentious literary allusions throughout his series, HE IS HIMSELF A GREAT ACTOR AND INTELLECT (Shatner…not so much).  The article makes no mention of the fact that Stewart is himself a Shakespearean actor (both brilliantly and actively—his performance in Rupert Goold’s 2008 mounting of Macbeth was not only critically acclaimed, but the whole production was heralded as the best mounting of Macbeth to date) and brings all of his stage talent to the television screen. And the plots of several Next Generation inspired Star Trek films reflect this.  First Contact borrows Ahab from Melville’s Moby Dick to elaborate Picard’s past relationship with the Borg, a particularly pointed comparison given how easily we might analogize the loss of a leg to the biomechanical intervention into Picard’s psyche, and how fluidly Picard quotes the text of Moby Dick following his confrontation with Lily in the war room.  Moreover, the quotation doesn’t look like an insecurely erudite writer’s intervention into a character’s mediocre intellect (and MacFarlane is quite right to criticize Shatner on that one), but rather elegantly attests to Picard’s wholly secure erudition, a trait that flourishes throughout the show (again, wholly unlike Shatner/Kirk) because Stewart is himself a highly accomplished and extraordinarily well read Shakespearean actor!!  Watch one episode—any episode—of Next Generation; now watch any episode of Shatner’s Star Trek.  It may be that Next Generation beats out the original in the frequency of its allusions, or that it more often distributes them to undeserving members of the crew.  But as soon as one compares the captains—easily the most enthusiastic alluders of the bunch—its clear that Picard has read everything he quotes, and that Kirk has not.

Which makes paragraphs like the following one seem, well, wrong as hell:

Calling these throwaway moments of literary pretension ‘Star Trek quotes’ may be a little unfair to Star Trek, but Star Trek: The Next Generation was so often guilty of filling its cardboard characters’ mouths with references to Shakespeare or some other definitively-cultured piece of literature to show just what knowledgeable and insightful individuals they all are. The actors, and presumably the writers and audiences, would nod seriously and sternly at such serious and pithy references, just to make sure we all knew how pithy and serious they were.

Again, no one “fills characters’ mouths” when they choose one of the most accomplished Shakespearean actors working on the cutting edge of contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare’s texts to play the ship’s captain.  That’s just an improvement in the literary character of a television show in its second instantiation. 

Now find me a single character in any episode of Law and Order or the original Star Trek that competes with Patrick Stewart, and I’ll concede Dr. MacFarlane’s oversimplification.  But no matter how hard you try to fit The Next Generation and Picard into this admittedly palpable television trope, you will never make it so.

Comment by James Murphy — May 25, 2009 @ 12:39 am

This article leaves me confused—should we be surprised that J.J. Abrams’ new take on Star Trek is full of a “continuous flow of hyperbolic and fairly predictable melodrama, punctuated by cutesy character shtick”?  I’m pretty sure that’s why I went to see the movie in the first place.  But pointless indictments of action movies for being action movies aside, I’d like to address the real mistake of this article: analyzing television and popular film so seriously as to appear surprised by their banality.

First, one gets a sense that MacFarlane betrays his own critical insight (“a few concessions to minor rebellion really just help cement the overall authority of a conservative institution”) when he decides to devote so many words to decrying the forced, faux intellectualism of popular television—must we even take the time to respond to the literary missteps of TV shows, and in doing so, don’t we just affirm its cultural hegemony?  Go read a book instead. 

Second, MacFarlane misses a perfectly good opportunity analyze the Star Trek franchise more seriously, taking into account its real cultural significance.  Several decades ago now, Frederic Jameson provided a penetrating reading of Star Wars in which he laid bare its now characteristic post-modern strategy of allusion and pastiche.  Abrams resurrection of Star Trek is essentially a tale of origins, and if, as MacFarlane contends, it appears to be a series of unconnected vignettes, it is because the emphasis was never really supposed to be on the plot; rather, it was intended to bring us back to 1960s, to connect us once more with the characters who first boldly took us where no one had gone before.  In this sense, it is an homage, and THAT is where we ought to begin invoking people like Barthes and Zizek in a conversation about Star Trek.  If the film is so successful, what accounts for that success?  What is the state of culture and of our collective historical memory if the lost objects we are seeking are popular 1960s television shows? And, perhaps most importantly in light of Roddenberry’s original vision, should we not think twice about a movie whose affect is nostalgic when its beginnings were in the imagination of a socially and technologically liberated future?  I am seriously disappointed MacFarlane does not address any of these themes and instead decides to play a game of literary one-upmanship with movies and TV.

Comment by Ben Schacht from Nowhere — May 25, 2009 @ 9:16 am

STAR TREK also enjoys making fun of itself, and its pretensions. From STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER:

KIRK (looking lovingly at the ENTERPRISE, as they approach in a travel pod): “All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.”

McCOY: Melville.

SPOCK: John Masefield.

McCOY: Are you sure?

SPOCK: I am well-versed in the classics.

McCOY: Then how come you don’t know “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”?

:)

Robert J. Sawyer, co-editor (with David Gerrold) of BOARDING THE ENTERPRISE

Comment by Robert J. Sawyer from Toronto — May 29, 2009 @ 4:14 pm

I agree with James that the criticism of the Next Generation seems a bit unfair. I have always loved Star Trek’s pseudo-intellectualism in all its forms, because it strived to not only be great entertainment, but also (like all great science fiction does) to place simple truths about our society and the human condition in a context removed from our own in which they could resonate more clearly. I see no harm in trying to accomplish these goals by incorporating (if occassionally with heavy hands) meaningful quotes from our literary history.

Speaking specifically to the contrast pulled out by the author, between Khan’s words of anguish in Star Trek II and Picard’s references to Moby Dick in First Contact, I don’t think it’s clear to me that the Star Trek II approach was the better one. Khan’s lines and delivery are (intentionally) hammy, and I don’t know that they give the same sort of weight to their source material than Patrick Stewart does when seriously (and, for fans of the show familiar with Picard’s even keel, shockingly) considering sacrificing everything and everyone close to him for the sake of personal revenge.

Additionally, as pointed out above by Robert, these references can be self-conscious and still successful. The author mocks the Moby Dick reference without pointing out the most illustrative passages in this scene. Picard gazes out of his ship, and in his moment of realization that he has let himself become consumed, recites to himself:
“And he piled upon the whale’s white hump, the sum of all the rage and hatred felt by his whole race, if his chest had been a cannon he would have shot his heart upon it.” When Lilly looks confused, he explains “Moby Dick,” to which she sheepishly replies “Actually, I never read it”.

I think it’s unfair to pile upon the Next Generation for being over-serious about this stuff. They made a conscious decision to have a very different and much more cerebral type of captain from Kirk, and along with that is bound to come more intellectualizing and less wise-cracking.

Comment by Aman G. from Virginia — July 13, 2009 @ 2:55 pm

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