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Star Trek’s Lost Legacy of Literary Pretension[22 May 2009] By Kit MacFarlane The Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact The later series of Next Generation films more or less remade The Wrath of Khan in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), but it ended up something of a lifeless shell without the hammy intensity or audacity to engage with the underlying sources and themes of the original. And just take a look at the laboured Moby Dick reference in Star Trek: First Contact:
What insight. Where Wrath of Khan attempts to channel Ahab’s intense fury, simultaneously human and inhuman, First Contact merely recites a quote and proudly points out its own reference. Khan aims to propel us into that contradictory realm where driven obsession is destructively horrific but still cannot allow itself to fall into retreat (nor could we accept Khan’s retreat, having embraced his passion), and where impossible hatred overrides the mundane flow of regular life. First Contact, meanwhile, takes this core and spits out a trite statement of ‘Ahab was nuts, guess I’d better lighten up’. Like all those more concerned with displaying their own culture and good taste, it’s too busy analysing its own relevance to cut loose and truly engage with all the vibrant and often difficult inherent contradictions. Lest it seem like some random quirk, Meyer continues his subtle repositioning of viewer sympathy and understanding in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Here, Kirk’s inherent military us-and-them racism is brought to the fore as he damns his enemy and hopes for their annihilation as a race rather than pursue proposed peaceful co-existence (the key scene here is effective in its simplicity: old friends and allies Kirk and Spock address each other across an empty conference room, an emphasis on the ideological distance suddenly between them. ‘They’re dying,’ says Spock. Kirk replies bluntly: ‘Let them die!’.) The quotation use in The Undiscovered Country is particularly frequent, the film’s subtitle taken from Hamlet, although it’s perhaps not as directly integrated into the action as in Khan. Nevertheless, it provides at least one interesting nugget of conversation and dramatic interest: with old enemies the Enterprise crew and a Klingon party sitting down together at the dinner table, a toast to ‘the Undiscovered Country’ is interpreted by one as a toast to ‘the future’. Often presented as a ‘goof’, since Shakespeare’s ‘Undiscovered Country’ referred to ‘death’, it actually nicely and literately represents the dual possibility of the narrative’s, and Kirk’s, trajectory: the choice between a necessary ideological shift (the future) or a traditional Trek military mindset (death). Once again, the quote asks us not to merely admire long-dead words, but to accept that the subtle conflict between ‘death’ and ‘the future’ inherent in the scene relates to the very nature of Star Trek itself. Not only does Kirk need to re-evaluate his ideological outlook on his universe to turn from death to the future, but, as a result, so do the viewers who have embraced the underlying ideology of this universe for so many decades. The supposedly-goofed ‘Undiscovered Country’ quote is a neat bit of dramatic irony that pays off nicely for the literate viewer. It’s a simple optimism perhaps, but it’s hard not to admire a film that would have the audacity to redefine Shakespeare for its own purposes (whether or not it actually succeeds). There’s plenty more Shakespeare in the mix of The Undiscovered Country (though not necessarily essential to the proceedings) and a nicely effective and perfectly delivered ‘Don’t wait for the translation! Answer me now!’ quotation as General Chang (Christopher Plummer) interrogates Kirk, drawn from a famous United Nations Security Council exchange during the Cuban Missie Crisis. But it wouldn’t last. Meyer may have turned the original Star Trek‘s sometimes dopey but passionate recitals into subtle and literate challenges to the Star Trek universe, but they were quickly absorbed into the passionless and self-consciously cultured world of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The inter-species referential playfulness of The Undiscovered Country, with a dinner table suggestion that ‘you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon’ and an ‘old Vulcan proverb: only Nixon could go to China’, quickly became in The Next Generation marks of a universal mono-culture of self-seriousness. Whether or not Abrams will go on to tap into Star Trek‘s legacy of cultural engagement and/or pretension remains to be seen. For the moment it seems he’s willing to tap into a slightly more recent cultural source. Just take a look at those John Ford movies, glorifying conservative military men who started out as hot-headed young rebels for some Abrams Star Trek prototypes; just replace John Wayne in the first half of John Ford’s 1957 The Wings of Eagles, or Errol Flynn in Raoul Walsh’s 1941 They Died With Their Boots On, with the new Kirk and you’re just about done (after all, Abrams is the man who simply took all the jokes out of True Lies and called it Mission: Impossible III). Incidentally, unlike Abrams, Ford knew when to slow down for a moment or two. Compare Abrams’ overblown opening where Kirk’s father and mother are separated: ‘The ship’s being attacked! She’s pregnant! Systems are off-line! She’s giving birth! Wheel her to the escape pod! The Captain has to stay on board! It’s a boy! Ramming speed! Let’s call him Jim!’ For all its mad rushing about (and it’s not too bad an opening, really) it can’t compare to the simple couple-separation scene in They Were Expendable (1945), where John Wayne and Donna Reed are quickly and efficiently cut off their final phone call with neither fanfare nor emotional farewells. The quiet and brutally efficient moment lingers long after Abrams’ big pile o’ melodrama has been forgotten. Even when quoting from its own universe, Abrams doesn’t seem to be especially willing to let Star Trek engage in any insightful way. When Spock from the future (Leonard Nimoy) greets young Kirk with an originally sincere and emotional line from his death scene in The Wrath of Khan, a line that resonated with an odd sincerity after so many decades of cultural presence, Abrams can’t manage to give it any weight. ‘I have been, and always shall be, your friend’, says Spock (somewhat flatly), recognising Kirk and briefly explaining the friendship they will form. ‘Bullshit!’ responds Kirk, a cheap laugh or two flittering through the audience. But if Abrams has merely recreated the conservative foundation of Star Trek, has tapped into the enclosed ideology without reaching for the philosophical possibilities that Star Trek sometimes sought (though rarely achieved), then at least the chance remains that it might all be overturned once again in future installments. If nothing else, Nicholas Meyer’s Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country proved that, with a careful hand behind it, a combination of literary sources and Star Trek doesn’t have to end in either pretension or disaster. And, with all this quotation talk, I might as well get a little pretentious and end with one of my own. Abrams spends a lot of time telling us how strong the bond is between Kirk and Spock, but never really actually show us: a thoroughly literal attempt to engage with one of modern culture’s oft-remembered and slightly abstract relationships. Maybe a little literary pretension might have suggested that such an archetypal and evocative image of friendship can never truly be verbalised in such a literal way. As Henry Thoreau wrote of friendship: “Our actual Friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged. We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.”  
  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. Related Articles
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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