Article theme: A Love From Outer Space - A.R. Kane
Most famously, but least interestingly, Star Trek showed us a multicultural liberal utopia of the future:
Oh wait, no, sorry, that was from reality. In
Star Trek it looks like this:
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| San Francisco, famous for its low crime and perfect sanitation. |
Fortunately, haters of by far the best thing to emerge from the franchise - 1979's Star Trek the Motion Picture - are correct in their main beef with it: it's Star Trek in name only. The production design gives the nod and a wink to this, as the familiar crew's famous uniforms from the 60s TV show have been replaced with deliberately generic duds, as if to say this could be any show we're commandeering for a grander purpose. Sure, there's the absolute bare minimum acknowledgement of the series' legacy, but after the first half hour or so the Star Trek stuff basically melts away into the background, and the stage is set for some real, surprisingly cerebral, cinéma.
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| Cheer up, Leonard. Everyone remembers you as errr in ummm... |
You could even say the conflict between Kirk, taking control of the refurbished (repurposed) Enterprise, and its new captain Decker, was a sort of meta nod to this brazen co-option, except it probably wasn't, but if it works that way, that's good enough for me. Likewise, Spock's arc seems like an extended raised eyebrow in the direction of the whole Vulcan concept, which kind of neatly demonstrated Roddenberry's blind hubris in that perfectly logical characters as written by imperfectly logical human writers will be imperfectly logical, and come across as laughable caricatures to anyone with any grounding in logic at all.
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| Hey grandma, what's the FACTS and LOGIC behind these dorky fucking robes? |
But the anti-Star-Trek stuff is just icing and not too heavy-handed, for the movie's ponderous grandeur gives the impression of an overweening confidence content to speak for itself. Dropping two years after Star Wars, there must have been no small pressure to speed things up and throw in some old-fashioned brainless shootouts, but Star Trek the Motion Picture proceeds at a glacial pace compared to Lucas's Flash Gordon knockoff. An immense cloud of energy, possibly concealing an ayylmao vessel of vast and mysterious powers, is heading toward Earth, and Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekov and the rest are heading out to see what can be done about it. At this point we have to get into spoilers, so tear yourself away from my blo§ and 23 tabs of reduced price Temu bat'leths and amputee porn, watch the movie, then come back (to the blô§).
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| ...But I can't seem to see the little man in the canoe anywhere. |
Sure, everyone can make the obvious joke about the giant space vagina symbolism, but there's an archetypal subtext I suspect bypassed the filmmakers' conscious intentions entirely. A feminist NPC might pompously declaim that the ayylien space vag signifies those awful m*n's othering of the feminine (while feeling transparently pleased to include herself in the cool, exotic category of The Other), but the film-in-itself actually undercuts this hilariously self-aggrandising narrative by framing it within the recursive gnosticism at the philosophical core of the franchise: the dIvInE fEmInInE is a child-queen; a godling revealed to be made in man's own image.
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| Following Spock's mind-meld with V'Ger, he reveals it has no concept of beauty, but when V'Ger clones Ilia to communicate with the Enterprise crew, it swaps her bland space scrubs for an outfit that shows off her legs, complete with high heels, meaning the feminine-coded V'Ger subconsciously moulds its presentation to the all-powerful Male Gayze. We can't keep getting away with it!!! |
In the even-less-regarded Star Trek V, Kirk faces down another demiurge claiming to be God. What tends to fly over hipster gnostics' heads is that the gnostic tradition reaffirms the exceptionality of God by correctly identifying small-G gods as not-God, and thus basically just people with extra powers, like any baron, mob boss or tribal chief. Man, made in God's image, makes woman in his, who then makes him a demiurge (tHe PaTriArChY, or whatever), who then makes her a goddess (tHe DiViNe FeMiNiNe), and so on, in an idolatrous feedback loop that can only be broken by retvrning to the First Commandment. You're supposed to be a soul-patched gnostic douche in college just like you're supposed to be a fedora-tipping reddit atheist until midnight before your 14th birthday (but not a second longer).
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| >tfw no bald gf (to hair-mog) |
After an infamously slow buildup, Star Trek the Motion Picture pays off in a Jungian Kubrickesque orgasmic finale in which anima and animus become one, not unlike Lifeforce, Fight Club, Kontroll and others. Psychological archetypes, 3deep5you philosophy and an affirmed religiosity resound from this unlikeliest of kinos.
