The new Star Trek movie is good, much better than I had anticipated. After the abominable Star Wars prequels, I was sceptical about the recent trend for “rebooting”. But, as with James Bond and Batman, this new movie maintains the spirit of the original series while adding some fresh touches. The casting of the young crew of the Enterprise seems spot-on; although I was never really into the original Star Trek, or the earlier movies, fans to whom I have spoken seem also to approve (hearing the words “to boldly go” have made me alert to split infinitives – a little old-fashioned tangled word order is surely preferable – “boldly to go”? or just “to go, boldly”).
There is, however, something unpleasant about the movie, something that seems to me inherent in its world and its world-view, and that was also present in the original series. I’m not talking about the silly non-science it employs to justify the futuristic technology and plot-lines. That’s part of the fun; one has to suspend one’s disbelief and enjoy the ride. The problem is, for me, that some of its values are abhorrent. I suspect the things I dislike about it are exactly what James Pinkerton likes about it. Let me count the ways.
The glory of war. Never mind the Federation’s code of non-interference or whatever it’s called (Trekkies, feel free to shoot down my ignorance in the comments). The fact is that the Federation starships zoom around the galaxy armed to teeth. Of course the enemy fires on them first; that’s the standard justification for militarism, an external threat that must be defeated. This is not unusual in Hollywood, but something like Star Trek, that has at least pretensions to belonging to the canon of speculative fiction, it is not unreasonable to hold it to a higher standard. Kirk’s father drives his starship into the enemy: he ends his life as a suicide bomber. You can’t get much more militaristic than that.
The world galaxy united under the US Federation. The crew of the Enterprise – both in the original series and in the movie – is a microcosm of a world in which different races and species are represented: the pragmatic Scot in the engine room, the dispassionate Vulcan as second-in-command, even (oh the daring!) a Russian navigator / pilot / whatever. But of course you need a rule-breaking, dare-devil American cowboy figure in the captain’s seat. Other countries may well do the same thing, but given the fact of American political hegemony, it’s pretty nauseating to project this phenomenon thousands of years into the future.
Anti-intellectualism. The Vulcans are the straw men in a silly argument Star Trek continually has with itself, in which time and time again, “logic” is shown to be insufficient without human emotion. Of course it’s insufficient. The Vulcans’ own code of conduct appears to be based in a certain kind of ethics, which itself is based on values that must ultimately rest on some emotional basis, or at least a basis that is not amenable to logical analysis. Logic is a tool of one’s values. This pseudo-debate’s most recent incarnation in the movie is perhaps a little more subtle (Kirk’s deonotological argument for doing the “right thing” versus Spock’s utilitarianism) than before, but it’s still flogging a dead horse in a way that is tiresome and plays into a reflexive anti-intellectualism that puts “gut feelings” ahead of reasoning, ignoring the fact that every piece of reasoning is based on some kind of emotional response to the world. I would contrast this unfavourably with, say, Doctor Who’s recurring theme of pacifist humanism and the triumph of the Doctor’s impassioned ingenuity over various forms of militaristic jingoism (often on both sides of a given conflict). I suspect that Doctor Who would not work in US films or TV, though, where the intellectual cannot be the hero, but must act as the geeky sidekick for a less thoughtful but more capable hero (Star Trek, Numbers, Thunderbirds, even that most geeky of shows, X Files).
Manifest destiny. The mission of the Enterprise – “to boldly go where no man one has gone before” – is a transparent celebration of the tradition of imperialism that created the “New World” on Earth, a process of “discovering” previously “uninhabited” parts of the world (because the previous residents, presumably, did not count as human beings) and colonising them, in the process carrying out some of the most heinous acts of genocide in the history of humankind. Barack Obama, in his now famous speech about race in the US, referred to slavery as his nation’s “original sin”. This overlooks the ethnic cleansing, wholesale slaughter, and theft of land perpetrated against the indigenous people of what became the US (and the rest of the Americas, and other places like Australia). Building a nation on the graves of the original inhabitants of the land may not be uncommon historically, but nonetheless, it builds a certain ugliness into the national character; ideological statements like:
That claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
have the effect of constructing a view of the world in which such vileness is honourable and sanctioned by God (or destiny, or what have you). It is understandable that such an ideology would derive from a colonial state derived from genocide – no one wants to think of their society as based on evil violence, so some other more fanciful narrative is constructed – but that makes it no less repugnant. When Hitler began to attempt the conquest of Europe under the name of the need for Lebensraum, it was rightly deplored. European colonialism of the rest of the world, on the other hand, was justified (by the Europeans themselves) by appeal to noble-sounding sentiments. Star Trek suggests that the imperialist impulse (exploration, expansion) can be retained without the historical bloodshed and aggression that has always accompanied it. The fact that the Federation fleet is always running into implacable bad guys who have to be blown away for the good of the universe simply repeats the story of imperial aggression and the myths that accompany it.
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