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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Ahem. Anyway, "Star Trek" was very ... pointy. In addition to the boots, and Kirk's package, there were pointy sideburns, pointy breasts, pointy ears, pointy Federation logos, pointy lettering in the credits, and also the pointedly pointy mission statement: "To boldly go where no man has gone before," which of course was bluntly de-sexed by "Next Generation" to "...where no one has been before." Perhaps this is why the "Next Generation" crew were dressed like flight attendants on a particularly dull 1980s airline -- one that went bust because the synthetic fibers and padding produced so much static electricity that insurers refused to cover them. "Voyager" became much pointier, and more watchable, when in later years declining ratings beamed aboard the streamlined and coolly logical Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), promptly massaging up the Nielsen points. (Perhaps that is why "Enterprise" features the similarly spaceworthy female Vulcan first officer T'Pol, her uniform snugly inhabited by Jolene Blalock.)
"Star Trek" uniforms remain timeless classics, ones that seem to have directly inspired '70s glam rock -- Ziggy Stardust, for instance, looked as though he would have fit in on the Enterprise. Certainly Kirk would have shagged him.
It seems ironic, given the kind of people who are Trekkies -- bed-wetting idealists for the most part -- that the post-'60s incarnation of the series has become perhaps the symbol of corporate culture, globalization and "American imperialism" -- though generally dressed in the drabbest kind of political correctness. The spinoffs have produced an empire of nerdiness. Give me a stripped-to-the-waist Republican Kirk in full-body makeup, trying to remember to suck in his waist while battling a rubber lizard-head alien with half-learned karate and pro-wrestling moves, any day of the week.
And then I spy it, like a mirage: the bridge of the original USS Enterprise. It's roped off so I can't ride the turbo lift, fire Sulu's phasers, mess with Spock's science station, or put my butt where Kirk's has gone before and take "the con." I suspect that in this instance I wouldn't even if I could. You can get too close to something that has been so important to you for so long. In fact, there is something so venerable about this silly wooden set that I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is, after all, the holiest shrine of TV culture, of much more importance to the contemporary world than, say, the Church of the Nativity, Shakespeare's Globe or even Lucille Ball's living room.
They really knew about the future in the '60s. They really cared about it. It was, of course, a time when people still believed in it, a time when "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow" was not necessarily a self-consciously retro slogan. Perhaps that is why the original series, with its female crew members (albeit in submissive jobs) and racial harmony (ditto -- except for Spock, the Jewish Vulcan), was rather more adventurous and progressive for its time than its spayed spinoffs.
More important, in the '60s they also knew how to make buttons and dials that, 35 years on, are much more "futuristic" than anything seen since. Not only that, they made them for next to nothing. ("Star Trek" cost about $100,000 an episode; Enterprise costs $6 million.) From where I'm standing, those buttons and dials look like the most precious and promising jewels in the universe. By comparison, the "Next Generation" bridge displayed next door looks like the foyer of an expense-account motel.
Naturally, true Trekkies prefer the more recent series, precisely because they have much bigger budgets, more special effects -- and no William Shatner. Apparently Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (and much of the original cast) despised Shatner and the way he played Kirk. He was too aggressive, too violent, too sexist, too vain. The anal-retentive goody-goody Jean-Luc Picard, played fastidiously by Patrick Stewart, was much closer to what Roddenberry had in mind.
It was Shatner's Kirk, with all his magnificent flaws and vanities, however, who made "Star Trek" more than just another canceled '60s sci-fi series. He saved the show from its own appalling virtuousness -- or, to put it more pretentiously, he was the Dionysian bass line to Roddenberry's Apollonian synth music. (By the same token, Cmdr. Data's quest to become human on "Next Generation" is comic, since his colleagues seem to aspire to be androids.) Shatner was rock 'n' roll -- his post-Trek album-cum-aural breakdown, "The Transformed Man," notwithstanding. It was his perversity, his Napoleonic ego, that made "Star Trek" an epic for our times. Not for nothing was his pre-"Trek" project a canceled series called "Alexander the Great," starring Shatner as the lovable Macedonian psychopath himself. Shatner has earned his place in the pantheon of postwar virile degeneracy: What Brando did for the cinema and Elvis did for music, Shatner did for the small screen.
In fact -- and I think I can say this with no fear of insulting Jim Carrey, himself a helpless Shatner fanatic -- Bill is simply the greatest actor that Canada has ever produced. Although he was (and is) an outrageous ham, applying the "skills" he developed performing in Canada's Shakespearean theater ("I combine English technique with American virility") as indiscriminately to "Star Trek" scripts as LBJ did Agent Orange to the jungles of Southeast Asia, bafflingly stressing words and syllables that mere mortals might think had no importance, pausing painfully in the middle of sentences while rushing headlong over their conclusions, there is something oddly powerful about many of his performances. Even something believable and human, especially in the slightly camp context of a series like "Star Trek." Even Shatner's vanity is sympathetic. The tasteful, restrained, mannered -- and, let's face it, bourgeois -- seriousness of Picard and "Voyager's" Capt. Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) seems faintly ridiculous by comparison.
