Science fiction routinely gets away with subversive gestures that would never be allowed in any realistic program. Thus it is that people who don’t watch Star Trek are probably unaware that its vision of our future is socialistic, anti-imperialist and passionately committed to expanding the list of sentient life forms who are judged to have rights and acknowledged to be persons. (If you think this question applies only to hypothetical androids and blobs and has nothing to do with you, you haven’t been watching Star Trek, which makes it clear that its disfranchised beings are surrogates for people of color, colonized workers, Palestinians–yes, there was an entire plot arc devoted to Palestinians–disabled people and others.)
I’m speaking of the post-Kirk Star Treks, of course, and the “socialism” I’m referring to is limited, more a matter of providing food, housing and medicine to everyone than preventing some from getting richer than others. But it’s still pretty damn good to see a popular series proposing that everyone is entitled to healthcare and abundant, no-shame-attached welfare. And in the sphere of race the show has been bold, exploring racial self-hatred, exploitation and cultural imperialism more acutely than almost any realistic series.
Star Trek‘s audience has always been far bigger than the hard-core fan base widely mocked for wearing Vulcan ears, or more precisely, for the intensity of their commitment to a shared communal fantasy. In its thirty-five-year history–with five television series to date, nine movies and hundreds of novels and comic books as well as unauthorized, but wildly popular, fiction by fans–it has shaped how most Americans see space travel, our eventual contact with other civilizations, even the future itself. NASA astronauts have asked for tours of Star Trek ships because to them, as to most of us, Star Trek is spaceflight.
The first series, which began in 1967, was an odd amalgam of manly Buck Rogers adventure, cold war pro-Americanism and utopian social drama influenced by the civil rights movement. When Star Trek was revived for TV in 1987 with The Next Generation, the show’s tagline was tellingly updated from “where no man has gone before” to “where no one has gone before.” And the changes went far beyond gender. Trek‘s depictions of racism and caste exploitation got acute, with a series of amazing shows about workers treated as things, and it explored torture and official violence daringly, bitingly criticizing them even as it showed our own implication in them. (TNG also utilized the skills of a heart-stoppingly talented Shakespearean actor, Patrick Stewart.) The next two series, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, steered Star Trek onward into the 1990s. (Voyager in particular took Trek forward, having three aggressive women as the show’s main characters, and also making them the sharpest scientific minds on the ship.)
So, watching the first season of the latest Trek vehicle, Enterprise, I’ve felt…nausea and horror. It takes Star Trek so far backward that it’s like Buffy becoming a sex slave chained to a bed for the rest of her television career. Set in Trek‘s “past,” 100 years before Kirk’s time and just 150 years after our own, Enterprise depicts the first humans to have contact with alien races. Emphasis on races: the interplanetary politics seem to have been framed by Pat Buchanan. Though there are two token humans of color on the ship, humans are heavily coded as white and male.
Popular
"swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe →
All the previous Star Trek series, over three decades, have been about becoming progressively more catholic, more aware of the astonishing diversity of the galaxy, the provincial limitedness of one’s own assumptions and one’s own potential to harm people who are different. The newest offering is a frank vehicle for white male suprematism and resentment.
Let’s start with white. The titles, set to a hymn that combines the first Christian references ever heard on Star Trek with some boasts about resisting alien domination, show drawings of the ships of fifteenth-century European colonial powers and European maps and globes from the same period. On one is scripted “HMS Enterprise.” This jibes neatly with the plot, the first ever on Star Trek in which racism is applauded. The normal, virile, white spacemen of Earth are being held back by the ridiculous sensitivities of the Vulcans, pushy, geeky aliens who want them to respect the cultural differences of all the alien races.
The Vulcans have withheld scientific information from “us” because they are envious, effete dominators who can’t stand our vitality, our creativity, our closeness to life. Want me to spell it out? What they really hate is our balls. In this way, they are straight out of Nazi propaganda about Jews, so that I almost expected to see little comics of Vulcans poisoning the wells of Aryans and strangling Nordic farmers with their moneybags. Mr. Spock, the Vulcan in the original series, has been widely read as either a Jew or an Asian, but he was also the sexiest and most popular character on the show. If he represented a nonwhite race, he was one that the viewers desperately wanted to be. No such luck here. T’Pol, the Vulcan science officer that the humans are forced to serve with as a condition of getting Vulcan astronomical charts, is a caricature of a bitter woman of color, obsessed with human (i.e., white) evils, bleating endlessly about self-determination for Klingons and other people whose names sound dumb to humans. She’s the unworthy affirmative-action hire foisted on “us” by cowards and spineless administrators.
The moral center of this roiling race opera is Capt. Jonathan Archer, who hates Vulcans because they prevented his astronaut father from perfecting the first big human ship with warp drive. “I’ve been listening to you Vulcans telling us what not to do my entire life,” he shouts at T’Pol. “I watched my father work his ass off while your scientists held back just enough information to keep him from succeeding.” There’s a heavily Freudian element in all this: His father’s failed big ship is referred to in most episodes, and we get frequent flashbacks of little-boy Jonathan playing with a remote-controlled toy rocket with his father, literally trying to get it up. In the show’s iconography, T’Pol represents a castrating woman as well as a scheming racial inferior, and when he talks to her, Archer often sounds like the hero of a 1950s movie beating back the heart-freezing bitch who’s trying to crush his vitals: “You don’t know how much I’m restraining myself from knocking you on your ass.”
Did I mention that he uses the word “ass” a lot? It’s sort of like the way George Bush Senior boasted that he had “kicked a little ass” in the debate with Geraldine Ferraro. This is the first Star Trek really interested in punishing women. And the first Trek that makes women really punishable: A typical scene has T’Pol talking up how stupid and crude the crew are, telling them that they’ll never be able to accomplish their mission, while trying to eat a breadstick by cutting it with a knife and fork. T’Pol is a sort of Kryptonite, wielding a wilting female discipline against their freewheeling male joy: She can’t enjoy food, can’t enjoy sex, can’t enjoy violence. And this Trek, as though someone had joined together Gene Roddenberry and the WWF, wants to cheer on men for sticking it to her on every planet the crew visits. It apparently works: The show has achieved astronomical ratings with male viewers.
The treatment of T’Pol isn’t the worst part. If women aren’t harridans like her, they’re sexy, exotic alien wenches, completely inhuman, who only, only, only aim to please. I thought I was in some different science-fiction universe altogether when, in the Enterprise pilot episode, two male crew members spent lots of time watching scantily clad alien dancing girls with three-foot long tongues flicking at insects and each other. “Which one would you prefer?” the manager asked the men. In my recollection, this is the first Trek on which Starfleet officers have ever considered buying women. The women were like insects themselves, fuckable insects, and in the time we spent mentally fondling their soulless, bouncy bodies I felt, for the first time, that Star Trek didn’t consider me a person.
Oh, I forgot, there’s one other possible role for women on the show. Hoshi, the one human woman on the ship, is an Asian who’s supposed to be great with languages, but she spends most of her time as a sort of secretary who relays messages from other ships. And, surprise, she’s as sweet and smiling as Uhura, the black woman in the original series, who was also supposed to be a highly trained officer but only ever got to get Starfleet on the phone. Now, this is allegedly set 150 years in the future, but somehow Hoshi hasn’t been trained in self-defense, even though Starfleet is partly a military operation. In one episode enemies are chasing the crew, and the captain has to call two officers to “get Hoshi” inside. It’s clear that she could never save herself.
Vulcans know how to do a very cool self-defense maneuver that involves making people unconscious by pinching their necks from behind, but T’Pol somehow never gets to do it. (She never gets to do the very cool Vulcan mind-meld, either.) And Vulcans have, in every incarnation of Star Trek until now, been supersmart. They aren’t anymore. Every Vulcan on the show has been dumb as a rock.
Why the gods of Star Trek have seen fit to radically change the show’s politics is a question I’d love to be able to answer. Enterprise was birthed before September 11, but it seems tailor-made for this time of alien-hating and macho heroism. The show actually has its mouthpiece characters say outright that Americans are better than other people, which even the first Star Trek had the taste to avoid. (At this rate, Star Trek won’t admit the existence of gays and lesbians until 2150.)
I can only think that this Star Trek was set in the past–uh, I mean 150 years into the future–so as to give it a convenient excuse for turning back the galactic clock on race and gender. But given the place Trek holds in so many people’s imaginations, the shift of the Trek world to the right makes it feel as though the future has suddenly been foreshortened.
