The Not So Subliminal Message of Star Trek

The new movie Star Trek came out of Friday, and I would love to do a review, but I'm probably going to wait until I can see it on DVD. That's because Mary Ann and I have a kind of agreement to not drag each other to movies that don't rate at least three stars by Roger Ebert. He gave it two and a half. Close, but if I tried to drag Mary Ann to it, she could retaliate by dragging me to "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" (**) or "The Soloist" (**1/2).

So no review of the movie yet, but since I am not Roger Ebert, I don't need to see a movie to write something.

Star Trek came out the first year I went to university, and I was a fan right away. It didn't seem at all cheesy to me, and in addition to the visual effects, there was also social, and psychological commentary. But no real scientific interest. At the time I was also a fan of science fiction which usually has some interesting scientific "what if" observations. As far as I could see, Star Trek had no scientific observations. The sliding doors, the warp drives, the photon torpedoes, phasers, the teleporters were all just a way of projecting what was essentially a nineteenth century warship into the future. The nineteenth century just keeps coming back in our collective psyches - the era of cowboys, the new frontier, steamships, and Pax Britannica. It seems like everyone who has a solution for the ills of the modern world wants to go back to that time of alleged human perfection.

The main social commentaries in Gene Roddenberry's version of Star Trek were on the unity of all humankind (as we called it "mankind"), and the relationship of advanced civilizations to primitive in the Prime Directive. Psychologically, we were examining the thought process of a Vulcan, who was more logical and less emotional than a mere human. Spock, the Vulcan, was contrasted with the other more emotional members of the Crew, including Kirk, the captain. If things were really fair, Spock probably should have been captain - but then Kirk's crazy escapades always resulted in success. How are you going to beat luck like that?

I think we were always a little muddled on the social commentary. According to the Prime Directive, the Federation of Planets (i.e. the crew of the Enterprise) were not supposed to meddle in any way in the development of primitive planets. These were sometimes defined as planets who had not developed deep space travel - ironically kind of like Earth even now. And yet they often did meddle, and usually some justification was found in an obscure sub paragraph of the original directive that we never heard of before. You could certainly draw a parallel back in the sixties to the colonial system - and the Vietnam war.

Then what about the racial and national integration of the crew? Russian, Chinese, Black, even a half Vulcan from another planet. Also a woman - although she was just a communications officer (i.e. receptionist). But at the time it was breakthrough stuff, and it made us think. Notice there were no Canadians in the crew, which we in Canada found quite normal - although we could always remind ourselves that William Shatner was originally a Canadian. (And so was Scotty!! -update Dec 2012)

According to Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura), Martin Luther King felt that Star Trek was the first show to portray a black person as an equal. And he asked to her to not quit the show after the first season.

What happened to the idealism of the baby boomers during the late sixties, with peace, love, protests, and drugs? We thought we were going to change the world. Here we are forty years later, and what have we accomplished? We started with a muddled view of protesting the "Establishment" then gradually we got absorbed by the consumer culture. Because people today prefer entertainment to preaching idealism, the same watering down had to happen to the Star Trek message.