Star Trek and Family

https://youtu.be/Xox2IVxvIJw

The idea of a starship crew being a kind of family seems absolutely essential to Star Trek, locked in – you can’t think about Star Trek without it.

In Voyager, Janeway makes it explicit – on more than one occasion, she tells us that “this family” is not going to be broken up by whatever forces menace our pals that week. And Discovery, I think, tries to think through the implications of a (quasi – or maybe wholly) military hierarchy being a family (something for a later post).

But where does the idea come from? Was the Enterprise crew (the original gang) always a family? Surely not, right?

I think you can date it right back not just to The Motion Picture, but to one of William Shatner’s characteristically unusual choices.

(Generally I like The Shat. I like his unusual choices. I like the evolving Kirk, even as, by the time we get to what we might call Shatner’s late style – V through Generations – a kind of knowingness begins to insinuate itself into the performance. It’s a note that could easily be mistaken for self-parody, but I think it’s something more nuanced, strange and gentle. I’m not yet quite sure what to call it.)

The things that catch my attention – things I like to write about here – are often details of text that I haven’t noticed on a first (or fifth, or whatever) reading, but when noticed, seem inexplicable to me. Here, it is Kirk adopting a Scottish accent. “They gave her back to me Scotty,” says Kirk. Scotty says he doubts it was that easy; and Kirk, inexplicably putting on a Scottish accent, says, “Ye’re right.”

What on earth?

What was Shatner thinking? What is this meant to signify? Has Kirk ever imitated accents or voices before? I have many friends who speak with many different accents, dialects, idiolects – the idea that I would suddenly, in the course of our everyday conversation, lapse into one of those accents is bonkers. They would look at me like I had gone mad.

We were talking before about Barthes and S/Z, the codes that structure acts of reading and interpretation. The hermeneutic code, for Barthes, structures enigmas within a text that may or may not be solved. Not so much the mystery of the detective story (which is plot – the proairetic code), as the mysteries that cluster around the mystery, especially when there are many possible answers (Why does Macbeth murder Duncan?).

So when we hit an uninterpretable nugget like this, I reach for the hermeneutic code. But: this code deploys itself when the text is interested in the mystery it opens. The central hermeneutic code for Star Trek: The Motion Picture contains all the questions around whether humans can evolve and remain humans – in other words, the code gives us things that are consequential. But this weird bit of accent play? This means almost nothing. It is in the text, but the text is not interested in it. Nothing structural, thematic or narrative comes from it. It is like rhythm, per se – that is, when we learn poetry criticism at school, we often say that a certain rhythm creates a certain feeling, which we then argue is keyed to a theme, concept or metaphor. But rhythm  per se means nothing – the thematic reading that we do in school recuperates a  physical phenomenon (of the mouth, tongue, teeth – “where breath most breathes”) that is a kind of abyss-like pleasure: rhythm pleases, but for no reason accessible to consciousness, and it does this pleasure-work utterly separately to any thematic meaning we may wish to impose on it. (I think Kristeva calls these elements of a text – that are independent of meaning – the semiotic.)

So there is something of a non-signifying rhythm or semiotic about Shatner’s weird accent choice. The difference here is that I’m not sure it’s pleasurable. It’s just too odd – and brief – to be anything other than a kind of stumbling block, a snag in the text that the mind gets caught on. (Perhaps this is also an instance of what Derrida calls the “true secret” of literature – the text can never say more than it says. We can interpret away, but we cannot know why Macbeth killed Duncan.)

I digress. (Sorry.)

Let’s put this moment back in context. Off we go to the Enterprise, Kirk imitates Scotty’s accent; they chuckle in recognition of that fact that Nogura certainly did not give Kirk back the Enterprise at the drop of a hat; Scotty affectionately squeezes his arm. Now, even if you have not just spent 600 odd words wondering why The Shat affects a Scottish accent for precisely two words out of the entire canon of Star Trek, you might also think: Whoaa – Kirk’s an admiral! He is Scotty’s superior officer! How come they’re so pallsy-wallsy?

Well, because they belong to a family-like structure, right? But: was that there in the TV show? Kirk and Spock have this great friendship of course, and the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate has always had a kind of mythic power to it. But I don’t think there’s anything in the original series that insists we think of the command structure as anything but a command structure.

In other words, I wonder if this moment is the first time we get a sense of these guys as family.

Which means that Star Trek had to go away and come back in order for it to feel like this. Kirk’s awe, an experience of something like the sublime, at seeing the Enterprise again plays out the audience’s feelings at having been away from Star Trek for a decade: the pleasure of saying, “we’re back.” The time apart (our time away from them, the actors’ time away from the show) helps to reconfigure this group as a family. We have been longing to see them – there must be a way to register this on screen. The way to do it is to show that they are people who can show affection to one another, regardless of rank. This crucial part of Star Trek, then, is in part an effect of something off-screen. Something real is in the text.