2. The Evolution of Gene Roddenberry
I watched the 1960s on my parents television
--Ann Beattie
Gene Roddenberry created
Star Trek,
and was involved in some way in its various TV and movie incarnations
right up to his death in 1991 at the age of 70. During that time, he or
his creation was often described in the press as "optimistic", a view
I'm not sure jibes with his own output on the show. Determining who did
what on a TV show can be a bit tricky. Scripts are constantly
re-written, and when you have a "producer", an "executive producer", and
an "associate producer", as well as a "story editor", anyone of them can have a say on the finished
product. Still, going by the names in the credits, I have some idea of who did what.
Roddenberry was the line-producer, or as it's called in the trade, the
"showrunner", meaning he made the day-to-day decisions, for the first
two pilots and ten subsequent episodes, after which he promoted himself
to executive producer, which he remained for the rest series' three-year
run. As a writer, his name appears on 11 episodes, including the first
pilot, though in some cases he only contributed the story whereas someone
else wrote the actual script. Let's see what we have:
Pretty
scary stuff, for starters. The first two
Star Trek episodes the
public-at-large got to see were "The Man Trap" and "Charlie X", the
second of which Gene Roddenberry provided the story. These are
essentially little horror films. Extremely effective horror, but since
when do we look toward that genre for optimism? "The Man Trap" concerns a beautiful woman who is in fact a hideous monster who
sucks salt out of humans, the first in a long line of aliens on the
show and in future movies that can change their appearance. Doctors looking to encourage their patients to limit their salt intake should prescribe this episode. "Charlie X", like the show's second pilot "Where
No Man has Gone Before", again features a human endowed with God-like
powers, this time a moody teenager named Charlie who'd been marooned on
a planet since age 3. Rescued by the Antares, the crew members
of that starship seem all to eager to transfer the lad to the
Enterprise, speaking highly of him as they do so. The praise is to no
avail, as the Antares blows up soon after. It takes awhile for Kirk and
Co. to discover that it's more than hormones bothering this kid.
Actually, hormones
do play a part, as the teen becomes smitten
with Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney, the show's resident sex
symbol for the first half of the first season, until it was decided that
a different scantily clad female a week might work better.) He even
turns another girl--one closer to his age that Kirk had fixed him up
with--into a lizard as a gift for Rand. Possibly expecting flowers and
candy instead, she spurns Charlie's advances, and is immediately
disintegrated. An angry Charlie then goes on a rampage through the
Enterprise, making more people disappear, turning others old, and--this
still sends shiver
s down my spine--completely wiping out a young
woman's face! Kirk, meanwhile, is at a loss of what to do, and Spock's
no help, as Charlie's got him quoting poetry. The Thalians to the
rescue! The ancient alien race had endowed Charlie with the powers as a
survival skill. Now they undue all the damage (including
re-materializing Rand) and decide to take Charlie back home with them,
much to Kirk's protestations, as he still feels the unruly adolescent can
be rehabilitated. Good luck finding a social worker willing to take
that one on, not if they want to hang on to their eyes, nose, and
mouth. Still, it hard not to feel sorry for Charlie as he gradually
vanishes, crying out as he leaves:
"Oh, please, don't let them take me. I can't even touch them!
Janice, they can't feel. Not like you! They don't love! Please,
I..want..to..stay!"
From one kind of horror to another.
The remaining eight
episodes Roddenberry directly oversaw in that first season aren't quite
that chilling, but only the aforementioned "The Cobermite Maneuver"
(not aired, perhaps tellingly, until another line producer took over)
treats the Unknown as anything other than a nasty surprise. It's not for
nothing you have to
boldly go where no man has gone before.
Monsters, the criminally insane ('Dagger of the Mind"), mad scientists
("What Are Little Girls Made Of?"), enemy aliens ("Balance of Terror"),
and pimps lurk around every asteroid. Actually, "Mudd's Women", the one
with the pimp, ends rather sweetly, but as it deals with prostitution,
assumes outer space has a seamy as well as a scary side. As for future
technology, the transporter malfunctions and we get a good (but wimpy)
and evil (but macho) Captain Kirk! All Roddenberry's fatalism, as
exciting as it was to watch in the comfort of one's own living room,
couldn't help but have a negative impact on the way the character of Spock
was written. If aliens couldn't be trusted, why trust him?
Before he became a TV writer, Roddenberry (
above, center) was a
cop. He worked for the Los Angeles Police Department from 1949 to 1956,
around the same time another TV writer-producer (as well as actor) Jack
Webb was extolling it as the very finest law enforcement had to offer
in the radio and TV versions of
Dragnet. Roddenberry, at first a
motorcycle cop, was promoted to sergeant in 1951, and eventually became a
speech writer for LAPD Chief William H. Parker. A policeman can have a
skewed perspective. They deal with criminals much more than the average
person (assuming the average person doesn't live in a crime-ridden
neighborhood.) As Robert Ryan tells Ida Lupino in the 1951 film
On Dangerous Ground:
"
You get so you don't trust anybody." Cops tend to be conservative in
the dictionary sense of the word. Sometimes in the political sense as
well.
Though it has fans across the political spectrum,
Star Trek has often been described as a
"liberal" show,
due to such factors as women serving along side men on the Enterprise, a
multicultural crew, and that Earth in the future, when it's mentioned
at all, is now at peace. I think this is basically true, but it's a
highly qualified liberalism.
13 years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Six years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Three years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Roddenberry indeed may have had an enlightened view toward women. A
former secretary of his, D. C. (Dorothy Catherine) Fontana, wrote many
episodes, served as story editor for the second season, and was involved
with several later
Star Trek incarnations, including a Saturday morning
animated version. That was behind the scenes. On-screen, the show's
famous opening informed us that the Enterprise gang was going "
...where no MAN has gone before". Now, you can chalk that up to the times (the same times that led
Fontana to use initials and sometimes male aliases, such as Michael
Richards), except that
Star Trek is often lauded for being
ahead of its time. Less than 21 years ahead
. That's when
Star Trek: The Next Generation
changed "man" to "one". It is true that on the original series women
were allowed to serve alongside men on the Enterprise, as long as they
were beautiful, had great figures, and wore thigh-hugging mini-skirts.
You may have objected to me referring to
Susan Oliver as a "hot chick" when describing "The Cage" in Part 1 but the show pushed female pulchritude
wherever it could, the various women Kirk and crew encountered on alien
planets tending to dress like they came right out of a Victoria's Secret
catalog. I don't want to make too much a big deal about this. The
entertainment industry has always excelled at providing us with an
endless parade of beautiful females, and, with less fanfare, handsome
males. If we're honest with ourselves, it's one reason why we go to movies and watch TV. And, lest we forget...
...there
was a Sexual Revolution going on at the time.
A revolution that
Star Trek
couldn't help but reflect, even if the only thing NBC's Standards
and Practices would allow was not the picture immediately above but merely the suggestion that Captain Kirk got
some needed satisfaction on a regular basis, and especially during sweeps. I
myself think the Sexual Revolution was a good thing, even a progressive
thing. However, if you're not careful, the gains of one progressive movement...
...can sometimes interfere with those of another. How careful was
Star Trek? Read on
.
The last original
Star Trek
episode to air had an arguably anti-feminist slant as well as a "story
by Gene Roddenberry" in the credits. Answering a distress signal from an
archaeological planet that's been devastated by disease, Kirk beams down
and finds that one of three survivors is an old flame from Starfleet
Academy days, Dr. Janice Lester. Seems they split up when Kirk got to be
a starship captain and she didn't. Trapping Kirk in an alien
body-switching machine that she found as part of the dig, he becomes she
and she becomes he. A rather radical response to thwarted ambition.
Could it be that Lester suffers from gender dysphoria, that she's what
was once known as transsexual, now defined as transgender,
à la Chaz (Chastity) Bono,
Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner, or if you go far enough back in time, a Bronx
youth named Christine (George) Jorgensen? That Lester's a man trapped in
a woman's
body, and this is a kind of high tech gender reassignment surgery, once
known in the vernacular as a "sex change operation", that she's just
performed on herself and an unwilling James T. Kirk? Except that
throughout this episode she-as-he acts hysterically, or, in male
chauvinist jargon, as "a typical woman", while he-as-she remains calm
and resolute, i.e. stereotypically masculine, in the face of
mascara-blush-and-lipsticked danger. So, in this episode's rather unique
view, is Lester's real problem that she's a woman who wants to be a man
but is trapped in a (stereotyped) woman's personality? I'm not even
sure what that means. She could be merely a crossdresser, the alien machine the only way to get her hands on Kirk's clothes. Maybe we're better off with thwarted
ambition, after all. Of course, an evil male who flunked out of the
academy might behave in the same abominable manner. As a woman, however,
Lester can always blame sexism. With some justification. The future
here is portrayed as being just as disadvantageous toward women as the
era in which the episode aired, which contradicts the more feminist view
of
Star Trek. As Roddenberry only wrote the story and not the actual script, and maybe wasn't around to oversee things, this
originally could have had
a feminist message, and that message itself got reassigned. The
episode as a whole doesn't really tell you if a subservient role for
women is a good or bad thing. Once he's a man's man again, Kirk states,
"
Her life could have been as rich as any woman's. If only... if only..."
If only what? If only Starfleet had been less sexist? Or she had stayed
in the kitchen? That's not a force-field but a glass ceiling that's got
hold of the Enterprise.
12 years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Three years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
The show's on firmer ground when it comes to multiculturalism. On
board the Enterprise you had a black female communications officer
(Lieutenant Uhuru, played by Nichelle Nichols), an Asian senior helmsman
(Sulu/George Takei), a Scottish engineer (appropriately named
Scotty/James Doohan), starting in the second season, a Russian
navigator (Chekov/Walter Koenig), and, of course, a Vulcan First (as
well as Science) Officer. That may seem to put the show ahead of its
time, until you consider the times. It was the Civil Rights Era, and that was starting to effect what you saw on TV. Bill Cosby may be a
controversial figure nowadays, but a year before
Star Trek first went on the air, liberals applauded the comedian as the first black man to co-star (opposite Robert Culp) in a dramatic series,
I Spy. And while
Hogan's Heroes may seem a couple notches below
Star Trek on the profundity scale, it premiered the same year as
I Spy with
its own multicultural cast, which included a Brit, a Frenchman, and an
African-American. The last was Ivan Dixon as Kinch,who usually did more
in an average episode of his series than did Nichelle Nichol's Uhura in
Trek. However, Nichols did have a groundbreaking moment that may have
trumped every one of Kinch's espionage missions. She and Shatner shared
network television's very first interracial kiss. Not that the characters
they played wanted to as they were forced into it by a bunch of
telepathic voyeurs. As for a bright future where the different races,
and ethnic groups now got along as one, that was true as long as they
were races and ethnic groups that had originated on Earth. In outer
space they showed the same fears and distrust of the aliens they
encountered as a suburban cop does toward a teenager in a hoodie. Nor was the
alien they encountered every day on the deck of the Enterprise
immune to such xenophobia, as Spock often faced verbal abuse by one
character in particular, whom I'll get to in a later installment. This abuse may have been in the interest of good drama (and occasional comedy), which I'll also get to in Part 3, but it
did make the future a bit less open-minded (but maybe more believable.) New worlds, new
civilizations, new prejudices.
Four years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Two years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
War and Peace. In interviews he gave in the decades after the original
Star Trek
went off the year, Roddenberry insisted that Starfleet (a subsidiary of
the Federation) was not a military organization and the Enterprise was
not a military craft, photon bombs and phasers notwithstanding. Except that in
"Errand of Mercy" the Federation and the Klingon Empire are on the
verge of war, a war only averted when a God-like alien species called
the Organians force a peace treaty on the would-be combatants. Despite the treaty, a state
of cold war exists between the two sides for the rest of the series, as
it also does between the Federation and its other major foe, the
Romulans. True, peace on Earth is often alluded to on the show, meaning
peace between the nations of the world, but seeing as our small blue
planet has given up at least part of its sovereignty to belong to this
Federation, and thus its citizens always facing the possibility of some sort of military action, I'm not sure that's something we should get
all sentimental over. Not unusual for a man born in the 1920s,
Roddenberry had his share of war, namely World War II, flying some 89
army combat missions in the Pacific Theater. Much later, in 1964, when
he got a chance to produce his first dramatic series,
The Lieutenant, he
had it take place in a stateside Marines Corp base. In one episode the
title character, William Rice (Gary Lockwood) defend his choice of a
career in the military by stating that "
as long as there is a need for a
cop on the beat there will be a need for what I do." Despite his
protests to the contrary, and I do take those protests seriously, you
think maybe military veteran and former cop Roddenberry saw part of the Enterprise's mission as not just exploring but policing outer space,
always on alert in case war were to break out? Many episodes would lead
you to think so.
In "A Private Little War", (teleplay by Gene Roddenberry) the
Enterprise is on a peaceful enough mission to a primitive planet where
the people still live in tribes, and the most advanced weapons are bows
and arrows, mostly used for hunting. Or so Kirk and co. thought. They
discover that one of those tribes now have flintlock rifles, a good
thousand years ahead of schedule, and that has put a rival tribe at a
disadvantage. The question of how one group of natives obtained such
weapons is answered when a Klingon ship is sighted within the planet's
solar system. The story then takes a rather bizarre turn as Kirk is
chased by a white gorilla with a scaly back and a horn on its head. The good captain
eventually dispatches the beast with his phaser, but not before getting
bit in the arm. Following this, a sorceress administers a treatment that's in fact
a love potion that temporarily robs Kirk of his free will. Meanwhile,
back on the Enterprise, Spock is in sick bay getting slapped silly by a
dumbfounded Nurse Chapel, who's only following a substitute doctor's
orders. Once all this nonsense is over with, Kirk finds that the
Klingons have supplied the one tribe with even more advanced weaponry
and he now needs to do the same with the rest of the planet's
inhabitants, lest there be a flintlock gap, adding ruefully that they're
"
serpents for the Garden of Eden. Beam us up, Scotty, we're very
tired." Should we interpret Kirk's need for a nap as a pacifist
statement? Don Ingall's original story is said to have been a allegory
about the Vietnam War, going so far as to describe one character as a
"Ho Chi Minh-type". Roddenberry's rewrite downplayed Vietnam (though one
character does refer to the 20th century brush wars that "
went on year
after bloody year."), but kept the emphasis on the arms race, the
Klingons a stand-in for the Russians. Ultimately, the message seems to
be, if the bad guys do it, then so do we. In 1967, that was a reasonable
enough stance to take. It's how the government saw it back then, as
well as the mainstream press. So mainstream, in fact, did the message
really need to be concealed in a science-fiction allegory so as to dodge
network interference, ostensibly the reason Roddenberry created
Star
Trek in the first place?
If "A Private Little War" is about maintaining a balance of power,
then "The Omega Glory"--this time both story and script by Gene
Roddenberry--is about an imbalance. Searching for a missing starship,
the Enterprise comes across a parallel Earth (one of several during the
show's run) in which the Communists have won the Cold War, and the
Americans, the "Yangs", are now hunter-gatherers living in the jungle.
The victors, the "Kohms", are little better off as they live in a
village, albeit one with no electricity or any modern convenience. The
Kohms, incidentally, look Asian, an indication that Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Mihn may have
given Roddenberry more than a few sleepless nights. Except the Cold-War victors
are now having sleepless nights themselves, as their modest village is
under siege by the Yangs (Yankees). A rogue Starfleet commander (one of
several during the show's run), now sides with the Kohms, causing Kirk,
somewhat inadvertently, to take up with the white savages, whom are in
fact freedom-fighters, except that they're totally clueless about what
freedom actually means. It's just a word that's been passed down through
the centuries that they unthinkingly revere. Along with an old American
flag and a copy of the Declaration of Independence that they ritually
brandish while mangling the words to the Pledge of Allegiance ("
Ay
plegli ianectu flaggen, tupep like for stahn...") Even though time has
proven this bit of paranoia wrong in at least one respect--if we Americans
end up living in caves in the jungle, it's obviously not the communists
that are going to drive us there--I find this episode compelling
nonetheless. For all his later reputation as an optimist, Roddenberry
knew how to craft one helluva post-apocalyptic dystopia (not for the
last time, either--
Genesis and
Planet Earth, two unsold pilots of his that aired as made-for-TV movies in the 1970s, both took place in the aftermath of a nuclear war.)
When talking about war and peace and
Star Trek, we shouldn't
overlook this fellow, Captain James Cook (1728-1779). What does a
real-life historical figure from the 18th century have to do with the
fictional exploits of a bunch of fictional people living in a fictional
future? Just this. It's how Gene Roddenberry derived the name "James
Kirk". Furthermore, Cook left this entry in his diary: "
Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go" which Roddenberry simplified to "
where no man has gone before."
In 1966, and perhaps these days as well, Cook was best known as an
explorer who discovered (i.e. mapped) in whole or in part the Hawaiian
Islands, the Southern Sandwich Islands, Australia (the eastern half),
New Zealand (he was the first Westerner to circumnavigate it),
Southeastern Alaska, the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and
thousands of miles of a then-uncharted South Pacific, along the way
making numerous contributions to botany, biology, and anthropology. It's
easy to see why Roddenberry might want to model his fictional
protagonist on Kirk. However, what Roddenberry may not have known
(though I suspect he did) is Cook didn't just discover strange new lands
and new peoples, but, acting as a representative of the Royal Navy,
claimed them for the British Empire, claims that occasionally came at
the end of a musket or cannon. In fact, Cook was killed when he
attempted to hold a Hawaiian king hostage. Now, Captain James Kirk never did anything of that sort. Still, like his quasi-namesake, he rarely came across a
strange new culture ("The Return of the Archons", "A Taste of
Armageddon", "This Side of Paradise", "The Apple", "A Piece of the
Action", "A Private Little War", "Patterns of Force", "The Omega Glory",
"Spock's Brain", "The Cloud Minders") that he didn't think could use a
little improvement.
Ten years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Nine years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
Two years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
On January 14, 1967--halfway through
Star Trek's first season--somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people showed up for The Human Be-In that was held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a stone's (or stoner's) throw from the low-rent neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. What exactly was this Be-In? A few months earlier, California had banned
lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychoactive drug better known as LSD that allowed those taking it to visit strange new worlds without having to first book passage on a starship, and so this was a protest of sorts, though pictures of the event shows very few people carrying signs. Mostly they're dancing and appear to be having a very good time. Maybe that
was their way of protesting. Whatever they were doing, it caught the attention of the national, and even international, media, which tentatively portrayed the event as a humorous sideshow to the serious issues of the day. There was a problem, though. What to call all these young people? Well, just calling them
young people sounds OK to me, but perhaps that wasn't good enough copy. According to the writer Tom Wolfe, who kept close tabs (no pun intended; he was strictly an observer) on this scene, a good many of those young people liked to refer to themselves as
acid heads. That wouldn't do for a family publication. Nor would another term they like to use,
freaks. Newspaper Readers might get the mistaken impression that 20,000 Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, and bearded ladies had shown up in Golden Gate Park. A 50-years old local columnist by the name of Herb Caen came up with a suitable alternative:
hippies, and the term stuck beyond a Madison Avenue copywriter's wildest ad campaign. Within a few weeks, "hippie" had become a household word, even used by those who wouldn't let a hippie in their tool shed much less their house. The only people who weren't using the term were the hippies themselves, and even they eventually had to give in rather than disappoint all those teenage runaways now arriving weekly in Haight-Ashbury by the busloads, thanks to all the publicity the low-rent neighborhood had gotten (indeed, it soon became the most famous low-rent neighborhood on the planet.) Though he certainly helped popularize it, Caen didn't actually invent the term "hippie". The words "hip" and "hep"--both meant you were in the know--had been in use in the African-American community since the early 1900s. White kids were introduced to the terms via swing music during the '30s and '40s. As a minority of those white kids got older, especially if they were artistically inclined, or maybe were just
different from anybody else (otherwise, what's the point of a subculture?) they moved to places like Greenwich Village, or North Beach in San Francisco (before rents went up and they all had to relocate to the more affordable Haight-Ashbury) where, since the middle of the 19th century, they were called
bohemians. Not that that's what the Bohemians called themselves, at least not in the beginning. Those who didn't like artists, or people who were just
different, sarcastically compared such folks to Gypsies, in the mistaken belief that the latter group had originated in Bohemia. Yet that label had gotten old by the middle of the 20th century, and so a few Bohemians took to calling themselves
hipsters ("
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection" as one young poet put it.) "Hippie" was coined around the same time, probably by some unsung
beatnik. Not that the unsung beatnik would ever have called himself a "beatnik" (at least not until the teenage runaways began arriving in Greenwich Village and North Beach by the busloads.) That term, too, was coined by the enterprising Herb Caen, though a friend of Jack Kerouac's by the name of Harold Huncke had come up with the "beat" part a decade earlier. So many terms, so many ways to attract teenage runaways, so many ways to scare the hell out of Middle America.
However, it wasn't what you called them, or what they called themselves that mattered. It was the sheer visibility that was so unsettling. Sure, there had always been Bohemians, but nobody gave them much mind until their numbers all of a sudden seemed to increase a thousandfold (thanks, no doubt, to post-World War II birth rates.)
Difference had never loomed so large. The mainstream media could no longer treat it as a comedy side show. It WAS the serious issue of the day. In one respect, though, it still was a sideshow. They
were freaks, as least as
far as the non-freaks in the (soon-to-be prefixed as "silent") majority
were concerned. Long hair on men was especially frowned upon. As was
facial hair. Combine the two and you have what to 1967 Mainstream
America would have resembled a bearded lady. That some of these strange, new people might differ from
each other went unnoticed. Eventually, the hippies, Yippies, flower children, folkies, mods, Jesus freaks, back-to-nature hedonists, campus radicals, Weathermen, fugitives, hustlers, rioters, flag burners, bra burners, draft card burners, draft dodgers, doves, panhandlers, dope peddlers, Merry Pranksters, junkies, Transcendentalist Meditationists, Marrakesh backpackers, hitchhikers, organic farmers, communal dwellers, THE END IS NEAR (or NIGH) picketers, rock stars, rock concert promoters, sitar players, groupies, dee-jays, Sunset Strip go-go dancers, exhibitionists, Satanists, underground newspaper publishers, underground cartoonists, health store owners, head shop owners, cellar cafe owners, coffeehouse (but not coffee shop) owners, street performers, Off-Off-Broadway producers, avant-garde stage directors, experimental film directors, free-form poets, cut-up novelists, pop artists, potty-mouth comedians, Marvel superheroes, graffiti artists, New Journalists, public intellectuals (unless your last name happened to be Buckley), vegetarians, American Southwest desert nomads, gay liberationists, Maoists, Che Guevara admirers, Hell's Angels, Black Panthers, Black Muslims, dune buggy drivers, Volkswagen drivers, any Oregonians not employed by the logging industry, and last, but certainly not least, teenagers, were all filed (or lumped together) under a heading fraught with sociological meaning:
The Counterculture.
Though many of its adherents would find much to like about the show,
Star Trek wasn't
always kind to the Counterculture. Peacenik graffiti is one sign
of the insanity that's overtaken the crew in "The Naked Time". An
extraterrestrial love-in is overtaken by bad vibes in "This Side of
Paradise". Much more odious, though, is "The Way to Eden" in which a
bunch of hippies led by a defrocked academic (think Timothy Leary) knock
out the crew of the Enterprise with a supersonic blast (think "Purple
Haze") and hijacks the ship to a supposedly paradisaical planet called
Eden (think Haight-Ashbury) where one of the young bohemians succumbs to
a poisoned apple (think bad trip.) This episode could have been written
by Rush Limbaugh, but it wasn't. He was still in high school. It may
not have even been written by someone who thought of themself as
conservative. Actually, D.C. Fontana (b.1939) wrote the first draft, but
had her name taken off when it was re-written by an older
fellow
by the name of Arthur Heinemann, who got his start in show business by
story-boarding Disney animated features in the 1940s. Roddenberry was
phoning in
his executive producer duties by this time, so maybe had nothing to do with this one. But I'm
not sure he would have had a problem with it, even though he
considered himself a liberal.
34 years before
Star Trek first went on the air.
You
have to remember that in the mid-60s, an over-30 liberal was much
different than a liberal of any age in 2015. There were liberals,
including the one that was then in the White House, who supported the
Vietnam War. If you associate liberalism with the Democratic Party, as
many do, well, it was a Democratic Convention in Chicago that Abbie
Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and a host of other peace protesters converged on
in 1968. And it was the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley,
who sent helmeted police officers to said convention to bust heads. I
don't know what Roddenberry thought of that, but many Democrats born the
same year as he (1921) would have approved. These Democrats would have
come of age during the Great Depression. The New Deal would have been
their liberalism. Once all those long-haired, dope-smoking, draft
card-burning, loud music-listening radicals showed up, there was suddenly
something to fear other than fear itself
.
Of course a person can change, their views can evolve. Take a look at this ad that appeared in the back pages of a
Star Trek fan magazine. Please read the small print:
Brotherhood
of Man? Union of the unlike? Infinite Diversity in Infinite
Combinations? Are you sure this isn't love beads they're selling?
Soon after
Star Trek began, Roddenberry and future wife Majel
Barrett started a mail order catalog company on the side to market
merchandise based on the show, such as toy phasers, toy tricorders, etc.
In the case of the IDIC pendant, it's said Roddenberry dreamed that up
at least a year before the above ad appeared, and used his executive
producer privileges to shoehorn it and the accompanying philosophy into
the third season episode "Is There No Truth in Beauty" over the
objections of much of the cast and crew who saw it as crass
commercialization. Aw, c'mon! A Presidents Day sale is crass. "Infinity
Diversity in Infinite Combinations" has resonated with generations of
Star Trek fans, and more than anything else is responsible for giving the show its liberal cred.
Well, maybe there was some commercialism involved. Like any science-fiction series,
Star Trek's small
but loyal fan base skewed young, and Roddenberry must have intuited
that at least some of the young fans were the long-haired types that
"The Way to Eden" had warned about. That episode itself had hedged its
bets by having Spock give a closing word of encouragement to the future
bohemians (
"It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I
have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.") With its freaky planets and freakier aliens,
Star Trek may
have been as close to a psychedelic experience as you could get on
network television in 1968 (a psychedelic experience that led to brief
recording careers for two of the series star players, neither one of
whom ended up at Woodstock, but, hey, it's the mind expansion that
counts) I've spent much of this post so far focusing on
Trek's
reactionary streak, but there was, depending on what producer was
calling the shots, an idealistic, pluralistic streak as well, one
that's proved much more enduring, that survives in even the most
reactionary of reboots. That idealistic streak isn't really represented
in any of the scripts that Roddenberry wrote himself, but in the end he
was won over by it. Read these statements he made in the years, decades,
after the original series went off the air, and tell me he doesn't come
across as some kind of hippie guru:
“Star Trek
was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and
wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a
special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.
[…] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to
take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind,
here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and
meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”
"I'm in a period of growth and expansion. I'm taking long, hard looks at
the world and what's happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I'm
trying to become acquainted with the universe--with the part of it I
occupy--and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it
is."
"Reality is incredibly larger,
infinitely more exciting, than the flesh
and blood vehicle we travel in here. If you read science fiction, the
more you read it the more you realize that you and the universe are part
of the same thing. Science knows still practically nothing about the
real nature of matter, energy, dimension, or time; and even less about
those remarkable things called life and thought. But whatever the
meaning and purpose of this universe, you are a legitimate part of it.
And since you are part of the all that is, part of its purpose, there is
more to you than just this brief speck of existence. You are just a
visitor here in this time and this place, a traveler through it.”
Groovy! But back in the '60s, Roddenberry blinked.
Still, I think his transformation from hard hat to flower child was a
sincere one. For one thing, he made some of the above comments during
the Reagan Administration. The
Star Trek franchise--as it's come to be
known--still skewed young, but the young were no longer so much into
peace and love. Threats to the American way of life were now to be taken
seriously. Also, there was now competition for those young minds from
the
Star Wars franchise, and as the title indicates, those movies weren't about peace negotiations.
Star Trek now
had its own movies (of which Roddenberry had minimal involvement) and
took note of this cultural shift by replacing the transcendent opening
theme music from the original series with John Philip Sousa-like
marches, and the Enterprise crew's pullover shirts and mini-skirts exchanged for Marine Drum and Bugle Corps
uniforms. In that more martial atmosphere, Roddenberry could have easily
touted the '60s show--with enough episodes to back him up--as a paean
to the national security state, but chose not to.
(Then again, Reagan had his own Age of Aquarius moment, didn't he?)
Roddenberry finally got a chance to put his latter day idealism into motion when
Star Trek: The Next Generation
came along in 1987. Though he doesn't seem to have been involved in the
series on a day-to-day basis, as Executive Producer he had a large say
over what happened in this new update. He decided this generation's
Enterprise should be family-friendly, so he allowed children aboard
(fans of
TNG--ever notice how the kids disappear whenever the
starship's in any real danger?) He also wanted as little violence as
possible, never mind the original series rather high mortality rate ("
He's dead,
Jim.") In fact, Roddenberry now wanted the Federation and Starfleet to
be so utopian in nature that he sent memos to showrunner Rick Berman and
others forbidding any arguing on the bridge of the Enterprise, never
mind that some of the most entertaining moments of the original series
had Spock and another character sniping at each other like two
plaintiffs standing before Judge Judy. This led to a rather bland first
season that often had Captain Picard and his crew sitting around a big
table as if they were Board of Directors for a company that manufactures
mothballs, calmly discussing various options no matter how dire the
threat. The following is a mere approximation (meaning I made it up),
but should give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Imagine it's Captain Picard speaking:
"Well, it now appears that the gelatin monster is
about to consume this ship whole with us in it. Data, do you have any
ideas how best we can extract ourselves from this
predicament?...Hmm...Interesting...Thank
you, Data. Now, let's hear from you, Worf...Hmm...That is indeed a
novel solution. I will definitely take it under consideration, but first
let's hear from Counselor Troi. Oh, I see La Forge has his hand up..."
(No reflection on Patrick Stewart, a wonderful actor. It's just what he had to work with early on.)
Does
Star Trek even need to be utopian? Don't get me wrong. I've
got nothing against utopias. I wouldn't mind living in one someday.
It's just not all that conducive to drama, that's all. Can't
Star Trek have
an idealistic point-of-view but at the same time show a warts-and-all
future? Most who have seen it would agree the popular '70s sitcom
MASH
had an anti-war message. Yet it didn't take place in Switzerland, but
1950s Korea . Be it comedy or drama, a utopia shouldn't be an
established fact but a goal, one that takes a bit of time to achieve.
Five years, say.
Also, if you present the Federation/Starfleet as being utopian in
nature, and anything bad or unsettling as coming from the outside, you
may end up making a compelling argument in favor of imperialism, whether
you meant to or not.
I know I've been kind of hard on Roddenberry, but I actually
think he was a very talented guy. Several episodes with his name as writer--"The
Cage"/"The Menagerie", "Charlie X", "Mudd's Women", "Breads and
Circuses" and--dubious as I am about its politics--"The Omega Glory", as
well as an episode he did not write but directly oversaw as line
producer, "The Cobermite Maneuver", are among the best the series has to
offer. (There's also the somewhat awkwardly constructed "Assignment: Earth", actually an unsold pilot for another series, that had Kirk and Spock along for the ride. I'll talk a little bit about that one in a future installment.) But in trying to figure out what made
Star Trek Star Trek, and,
more specifically, what made Spock Spock, how did he go from the vaguely
antagonistic character of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" to the more
noble figure he eventually became, I feel I have to look elsewhere. Of
course, I do give Roddenberry credit for creating both
Star Trek and Spock. I should
have
mentioned it earlier, but Spock is said to have been based on someone
Roddenberry actually knew. No, he was never abducted by Vulcans. The fellow he knew was
an Earthling, William H. Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police
Department from 1950 to his death in 1966. Parker was known for his
taciturn style, a style that admirer Jack Webb infused into his famous
Joe Friday character. Indeed, the program Friday appeared on,
Dragnet,
which ran first on radio from 1949 to 1957, and
then on TV from 1950 to 1959 (there was also a late '60s version), and
even made into a movie, was on the whole pretty logical and unemotional.
Every
character in it, including the guy arrested for disturbing the peace,
talked in a flat monotone. Spock seemed like Jerry Lewis by comparison.
As his speech writer, however, Roddenberry knew Parker better than
Webb did, and seems to have had mixed feelings about him, mixed feelings
that could explain his gradual shift from
just-the-facts-ma'm-just-the-facts propagandist to New Age philosopher.
Remember me telling you in
Part 1 that it was a female character
played by Majel Barrett in the first
Star Trek pilot who was originally supposed to be logical
and unemotional? When his time came to immortalize Parker,
Roddenberry gave his old boss a sex-change operation. Freud would have
had a field day.
Nine episodes into the first season,
Roddenberry decided to promote himself to executive producer, relieving
him of the day-to-day grind of running the show. And it was his replacement,
an ex-Marine a decade-and-counting past the age of 30, who may have been the true hippie guru of
Star Trek.
Next: A Different Gene
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