May 13, 2009
By Andrew O'Hehir
In perhaps the most famous "Star Trek" episode of them all, Capt.
James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Cmdr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) stand
in their stretchy mock-turtle uniform shirts, lady-pleasin' tight
pants and pointy-toed Beatle boots on one of those studio-lot sets
designed to evoke a prewar American city. People shuffle past in
shabby clothes, and a black automobile with large, curved fenders
crawls down the street. "I've seen photographs of this period," says
Kirk. "An economic upheaval had occurred."
"It was called 'Depression,'" says Spock, raising one painted eyebrow
in archetypal distaste. "Circa 1930. Quite barbaric."
As many of you will have spotted already, this is from "City on the
Edge of Forever," a time-paradox yarn written by science-fiction
legend Harlan Ellison (who has feuded with the show's producers and
their copyright heirs ever since). In it, Kirk falls in love with a
kittenish Salvation Army type, played by Joan Collins, who envisions
a future of space travel and peaceful global cooperation, and wants
to rescue the world from the threat of impending war. Kirk comes from
that future, of course. Not only can he not tell her that, he must
also allow her to be run down by a bus to avoid a fatal disordering
of the space-time continuum that would result in Hitler conquering
the world and the Starship Enterprise never existing at all.
In its narrative ambition, its talky, theatrical density, its
high-minded moral tone and its nerdy philosophizing, that episode
captures a great deal about what made "Star Trek" such a potent
cultural force. I guess that's why it's included, along with three
other episodes, on "The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series," a
new DVD/Blu-ray release presumably meant to lure viewers of J.J.
Abrams' hit film back to the source material. No "Star Trek" fan
could possibly be happy with such a mini-collection -- where, I ask,
is "Mirror, Mirror"? "The Doomsday Machine"? "The Devil in the Dark"?
-- but I enjoyed watching this tremendously.
Watching "Star Trek" in 1970s syndication was such an important part
of my childhood and adolescence -- I've seen every episode at least
five or six times, and some many more than that -- that I'm not
capable of assessing the show's uneven, low-budget craftsmanship with
any degree of detachment. For me, "Star Trek" and the Rolling Stones,
as much as they might appear to be polar opposites -- one supremely
American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the
other Dionysian and pessimistic -- were the cultural phenomena that
made the pre-punk-rock early '70s tolerable. A person interested in
those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or
"Happy Days," had conceivably read a book not required by teachers
and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.
Even if some of its flaws look more glaring 30-odd years later, I
think the original "Star Trek" still has a passion and vitality that
partly stem from its cheapness; the threadbare sets and effects
created a coherent, suggestive atmosphere, and forced your attention
onto the storytelling and the characters. It stands out, even after
all this time, as something unique in television history. Of course
"Star Trek" can never be the cultural lodestone it once was. Having
spawned four official follow-up series, 11 feature films (and
counting) and countless non-canonical works -- if you haven't heard
about K/S porn or the immense and disputatious fanfic universe, I'm
not helping you -- and inspired an entire genre of serial
intergalactic futurism from "Space: 1999" to "Babylon 5" to
"Battlestar Galactica," the novelty of Gene Roddenberry's creation
has pretty well worn off.
In the middle of the Cold War, Roddenberry imagined a
radical-progressive, Enlightenment-fueled vision of the human future,
one in which the conflict between capitalism and communism had been
long transcended, along with other earthbound forms of racial, ethnic
or religious strife. Strikingly, there is no religious or mystical
dimension to the "Star Trek" universe at all, at least until much
later in its development. (Roddenberry regarded himself as an
"agnostic atheist," and banned any religious references from the
show.) It was based around the chronic tension between reason and
emotion, represented of course by the tension between Spock and Kirk
and the actors who played them, the immeasurably gifted Nimoy and the
hambone, cocksure Shatner (a second-rate Canadian Shakespearean,
before his "Star Trek" celebrity).
Roddenberry's vision of what "Star Trek" could and should be, even if
it was indifferently realized, was pretty close to Richard Wagner's
conception of the "Gesamtkunstwerk," a work of art that would
incorporate drama, poetry, philosophy and music. He worked with the
best writers he could get, despite his borderline-tyrannical
reputation and various controversies surrounding his handling of
royalties. Ellison wrote "City on the Edge of Forever," and Theodore
Sturgeon, another big-name sci-fi author, wrote "Amok Time" (also
included here), the famous episode in which Spock goes into some kind
of Vulcan estrus and must return to his home planet in order to mate.
(The principle that Spock has no emotional life is something like the
edict in Greek mythology that no living human can enter the
underworld; it must be flouted at every opportunity.)
In the arid landscape of late-1960s television, largely devoted to
quasi-realistic forms like the family sitcom or the police
procedural, "Star Trek" was new and startling in several different
ways: a science-fiction series that was literary and imaginative and
heavily allegorical, that ladled out historical and political
messages by the quart and that delivered a distinctive undertone of
adult sexuality.
OK, yes, it might be better described as a swaggering, Hefneresque
and profoundly sexist version of semi-adult, semi-repressed
sexuality. Preening Kirk, arguably the most sexualized male character
in TV history, tomcats from one interstellar honey to the next. In
Season 1, beehive-haired Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) seems to
serve as his personal concubine, but for that matter there's
something haremlike about the female personnel aboard the Enterprise
in toto. They all apparently departed on a five-year space mission
directly from their other jobs as go-go dancers behind Smokey
Robinson and the Miracles.
Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett, later Roddenberry's wife) moons
pathetically for the chaste and logical Spock, who is himself locked
in a sub-rosa competition with the bitchy and sexually ambiguous
"Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley) for Kirk's attention. Spock pretends
not to notice Chapel, but behaves like an outrageous tease; in "Amok
Time," he strokes her tear-stained cheek and murmurs, "It would be
illogical for us to protest against our natures."
But hey, this stew of delightful and appalling ingredients produced
the first black-white kiss in the history of American narrative
television, the aliens-made-them-do-it snog between Kirk and Lt.
Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in the 1968 episode "Plato's Stepchildren."
(Contrary to legend, that smokin'-hot moment did not produce
widespread outrage in the American South. Widespread arousal,
certainly.) In the same scene, Chapel finally gets to kiss Spock,
while protesting the whole time that she really, really didn't want
it to happen like this.
One could lazily argue that the breakthrough of "Star Trek," which
was first a cult show and then a mass phenomenon, led to the much
bigger breakthrough of "Star Wars" a few years later. Beyond a loose,
generic connection, I see much more opposition than similarity
between the two. George Lucas' space dramas are a bastardized
mishmash of 1950s serials, classic quest mythology, film history and
J.R.R. Tolkien, all elements pretty much absent from "Star Trek." Of
course there's some crossover, but the two things appeal to different
generations and different sensibilities
If Lucas is defiantly pop-cultural in orientation, delivering
archetypal structure and fast-paced action rather than plot and
conversation, Roddenberry skews much closer to traditional high or
middlebrow culture. Despite the speculative-fiction surroundings,
he's really an old-fashioned tale-spinner, with roots in the short
story and the theatrical stage. In the second season, Roddenberry
introduces a Russian navigator named Chekov, and as distant as "Star
Trek" may seem from "The Cherry Orchard," I don't think the name was
picked out of a hat. His near-namesake Anton Chekhov was a master of
the sudden reversal, the ironic sting in the tail -- devices
Roddenberry's writers use over and over.
In an effort to make the original "Star Trek" relevant to
contemporary viewers, whatever that's supposed to mean, CBS/Paramount
has rejiggered some of the cheesy effects, remastered the whole
series in disconcertingly brilliant high-definition, and made them
available on Blu-ray, iTunes, XBox Live and no doubt other platforms
yet to be devised. I don't object to such things, and the four
episodes on this disc (the one I haven't mentioned is the lamentable
"Trouble With Tribbles") look amazing, even if the increased
resolution exposes the thick makeup on Shatner and Nimoy, making them
look even more like drag queens out of uniform than they did before.
But "Star Trek" worked just as well, and maybe better, on a
black-and-white secondhand TV pulling in signals from two cities away
through an untwisted coat hanger. To those of us watching that way,
with a couple of friends and some lukewarm Hamm's beer, it offered a
tiny oasis of imaginative escape. It wasn't an escape into a mythical
realm of impossibly perfect heroes and implacably evil villains, but
into a future of global techno-humanist harmony. It seems ludicrous
now, yes, but in that simultaneously chaotic and innocent time it
hovered just over the horizon as a distant possibility. A future
where we would all agree that war and poverty and economic depression
were barbaric, and where the girls would all wear miniskirts and nylons.
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