Mr. Spock, Get Us Out of Here!
Even as a child I could see problems with the original Star Trek, particularly in terms of social and psychological concepts not only in the characters but also in the narratives and assumptions about progress. Technology had made amazing breakthroughs. Social relationships were, however, more than stagnant. They seemed to have gone backwards.
Hierarchy was the most obvious example. Why were there still ranks and titles and some above others, others expected to be subservient? Sex roles also seemed set in Victorian stone. The 1920’s had more aggressive exploration of gender than any of the worlds, let alone the star ship milieu. Even in episodes in which these relationships and identities were questioned, the questions were posed less aggressively than, far short of, the questions being posed by people in the streets of the real world.
What could have happened in the time between, to humans and to the extraterrestrials, to make them less assertive of equality than the real world everyday life of the 20th century? Why were they less aware of identity and how arbitrary definitions do not always allow individuals to express who they genuinely feel themselves to be?
A far more disturbing quandary for my child mind came up. It still persists to irk like an irritant grain in my sensitive craw to this day, inspiring me at last to write these things out. I was and am still partly ashamed of my fellow human beings for not having more sense about these matters.
I was reflecting on how unbearable most TV shows and movies are. I was wondering why anyone watches them, let alone loves and extols these ill-conceived representations. There are sufficiently good examples to raise the question, Why not more like that? But the disturbing question, although it might have been about the lack of intelligence and discernment being brought to bear on what serves as entertainment and particularly creative, fictional fare, was actually focused on the character Mr. Spock and further implications about the human mind when viewing obvious contradictions.
Spock is half Vulcan and half human. He is the offspring of an Earth woman and a Vulcan man. The extraterrestrials in the original and even subsequent Star Trek series and movies are almost all merely shifted representations of human racial and ethnic groupings.
Indeed, the races and nationalities represented by the crew of the Enterprise are only slightly removed from 20th century stereotypes: A black woman whose original language is Swahili; a Japanese man; a Russian man and a Scotsman with heavy accents. Are we to believe the noticeable impact of broadcast media for eliminating parochial differences would not persist in the future to ameliorate such superficial and readily changeable features of speech?
In the central cast of characters, Spock is the lone non-human. He stands as prominent in casting as Cosby did in I Spy, a ground-breaking role for an African-American. Spock fits right in, and he was accepted by the audience including myself as a wonderful second fiddle to Kirk’s prima donna. He’s always still a likely target for the humans’ teasing and amusement, the way WASP-minded Americans still often look at other ethnic, religious, or racial groups.
Think of the typical ethnic joke (if you are of an age and can recall them). That’s the attitude embodied in Spock’s relationship with the other wholly human characters. His quirky logical limitations – Oh, those Vulcans! So much like slavishly overly seriously adolescents! – serve as the focus of this bemused secret superiority all the humans feel about his alien-ness, despite the display of his enormous advantages, physical and mental, over the dominant Earth humanoid group members.
But that was less apparent to me as a child and less questionable than this: How could Spock be half human and half Vulcan, the progeny of an Earth woman and a Vulcan male if Earthlings and Vulcans were not the same biological species? Even as a child I understood the fundamentals of evolutionary biology. Apparently the writers on the show did not.
Setting aside the explicit differences in actual biology, Vulcans having different organ placement and different blood composition, the idea that different creatures from different planets separated by unknown measures of time could breed together is something out of a previous time of magical thinking. This unscientific gaff goes well beyond typical suspension of disbelief. I have never heard or read anyone point this out.
But we should not be surprised really, that it was there, like a sore thumb, on this innovative, sci-fi show. Science fiction is always actually about the present. How could it be otherwise? It is a projection of now onto an imaginary future which is really just the present revealed, stripped of illusions and apologies for its failure to live up to potential. Technology and other changes, whether utopian or dystopian, are commentary and critiques about the present state of things. Why don’t we have cars that fly and women who are still sexy to a 14-year-old boy but also nerdy smart and lethal?
The mid-twentieth century existed culturally and intellectually as a holdover hybrid of Victorian and medieval ideas, and a sprinkling of more enlightened ideas here and there. Concepts of race and sex were still patriarchal and Caucasian Eurocentric. Battles for changing mores and struggles for equality were being waged on a 19th century battlefield along lines defined in the late 1800’s at best.
The authentic 20th century arguably began throughout the decades of latter half of the century, following WWII, when certain understanding and awareness of class, sex, race, etc., collided with unprecedented optimism and material prosperity and was then translated into actual behavioral changes and a shift of values, but consequently resulted, starting in the 1980s, in a resurgent backlash against those changes. I’m limiting this to the United States, although arguably the rest of the world was and is still behind, whether we like to accept that or not, in these attitudes about race, sex, and gender identities.
But getting back to poor Mr. Spock, consider his character’s unscientific origin. Is it not just a transfiguration of the dominant human attitude toward the familiar other? Spock isn’t an Asian. He’s not a Jew or a darker skinned fellow. He is like and unlike us. We like him because he’s our Vulcan, almost like a pet.
We can unleash his amazing capabilities, the nerve pinch, the mind meld, his savant-like abilities to calculate and draw conclusions and also build things on the spot from flotsam and jetsam and a bit of that foreigner magic stereotypes about traditional ethnic groups we sadly still cling to. It’s just amazing what those folks can do with stuff! The voodoo magic of those people, whether with spices in the kitchen, plants in the garden, medicinal knowledge, sexual prowess, you name it.
All of that occurred to me as a child but it did not broach my sense of indignity until later. My incredulity that the creators of the show could miss the specifics of biological accuracy, and also could have technological vision without concomitant social change, dominated my childish impressions. I was just stuck on the fact that hierarchy is portrayed as immutable. Antagonism of groups based on physical and cultural differences, as well as rival power structures seeking to be the top dog, remained inevitable, eternal, a will to power. I did not believe that.
Well, perhaps you have to address the audience where it is first in order to get them to move somewhere further along. Sure, and shucks, let’s all be morons, which, of course, apparently when it comes to this stuff, we are. And yet the examples also remain, the great works that almost by magic flash insight about human nature in the way the characters in their full human dimensions leap off the page or screen. How can we be blind to those stark contrasts, or do we just set aside the memory of better fare because we are so hungry for anything at all, something novel, that we settle for a quick fix after the indignities of our day?
I don’t have an explanation for why most of us, if not all of us, do not see the obvious and yet can make constant leaps of innovation in our own lives, let alone why we watch these horrible and depressing shadow plays, the food for our own hypotheses and frames, our lenses on ourselves, others, and the universe.
These obvious distortions in fictional characterization and narratives are in a sense mirrors for our own idiocy. Like the ideas we embrace and reject in our actual lives and choices, in our attitudes and behaviors, what piques our interest and tickles our fancy in entertainment, all of these reveal what’s genuinely going on in our minds and helps delineate our active psychology and engagement with ourselves, others, the universe of phenomena, in short, with our lives.
Finally, I think of Spock making a radio out of junk and being able with the touch of a hand on the face and head to get into the mind of another. That’s a metaphor, a magic moment of imagination, for this whole meditation. Why can’t we be more like Spock, not only in the choices we make for entertainment, but also in our lives and the way we go about understanding the actual world in our own creation of reality in consciousness, which serves as our vision of now and what we can be?
I still prefer Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice remains the greatest miracle of human character, fully dimensional, presented on the page, with all its limitations. Too bad perhaps the author did not have a more fantastical inclination. What kind of sci-fi could she have produced to rival Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? But we have to meet our authors and the audience at the place where they are, where they live, even if we might imagine further along where they, and we, could be.
KLK
2/16/24
I Dwell In Possibility 