by Ryan Britt
Star Trek and Star Wars view personal failings differently, and though both are broad and metaphorical, they’re starkly opposed in the way they depict forgiveness. In Star Wars, you have to be forgiven by other people. Darth Vader is redeemed because Luke forgives him. Han stops acting like a clown because Leia forgives him for it. The audience constantly forgives C-3PO. You get it. But that’s not how Star Trek deals with personal responsibility at all. Instead, in Star Trek, the asshole side of everyone (the Dark Side) is encouraged and acknowledged as an active part of everyone’s regular life, meaning Star Trek is constantly talking about what a jerk everyone is and how that’s actually normal. Personal guilt is so central to all of Star Trek that Star Trek: Voyager constantly depicted its primary protagonist—Captain Kathryn Janeway—grappling with her own personal guilt over accidentally stranding her ship on the wrong side of the galaxy. Nearly every week, with a cup of black coffee in her hand, Janeway would lecture someone on an unethical ploy to get the starship Voyager back home faster, and then as soon as that person left her office, she’d turn around and stare into space (people do this literally in Star Trek), letting us know she, too, is constantly right on the edge of breaking all the damn rules.
James T. Kirk has been a dangerous figure in my life for precisely all the moral relativism Star Trek accidentally exposes. Unlike Luke Skywalker, Kirk isn’t really a hero who thinks too much about what kind of person he is, but instead a person who focuses on what he can get away with. Kirk is an interesting leader, but he’s no role model, and I’ll never be able to shake the fact that he reminds me of my father. In Chuck Klosterman’s famous Star Wars essay “Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth,” he points out that so many people connect with Star Wars because we’re all afraid of or hate our fathers. Debating this would be pointless because it’s so totally accurate that it’s not even funny. And yet, I think people’s fathers are Darth Vader on some days and Captain Kirk on others.
When my father died in 2012 of advanced liver cirrhosis caused by drinking way too much, I reacted like a lot of people would: I drank too much. And almost six months later, I found myself staring at an empty bottle of wine I’d consumed by myself alone in my room. It was just like when Luke sees Darth Vader’s severed robotic hand and then looks down at his own: we’re the same kind of asshole! Children inherit the flaws or the potential flaws of their parents like fucking gangbusters, and popular science fiction either makes this fact way better or way worse. Luke is able to kick the Dark Side of the Force habit because he’s a great guy, but sometimes being a great guy isn’t enough to make you into the person you want to be. Plus, just forgiving Darth Vader doesn’t make what Darth Vader did okay, and had Luke been able to keep him alive, you can bet everyone would want to put Vader on trial for terrible war crimes. I have issues with my dad, and maybe you do, too, but most dads aren’t war criminals.
However, many dads are like Captain Kirk.* People who are in control of a seemingly pointless enterprise, who were once the boss of you, and who have occasionally unforgivable mood swings. In the 1966 episode “The Enemy Within,” Star Trek presents perhaps what is my favorite meditation on humanity, when Captain Kirk is split into two people: his good half and his evil half. Initially, this is viewed as pretty cut-and-dried; Kirk’s evil half must be stopped at all costs! He’s going around drinking too much and acting like a complete barbarian. This is a version of Kirk without any boundaries, one without self-control, who’s totally aggressive, dangerous, and cruel. And yet, the “good” side of Kirk slowly becomes a complete loser in this episode. Good Kirk is ineffective at making decisions and looks like he’s going to cry at the drop of a hat. Say what you will about William Shatner and his overacting, but this episode of Star Trek alone shows he’s capable of at least some kind of range. With Good Kirk a weakling and Bad Kirk a menace, the only solution to this problem is for the good side to acknowledge the bad side and for them to literally hug it out until they’re one person again. James Kirk essentially realizes that without all of his bad tendencies, the tendencies he controls, he wouldn’t be the person he is. The omnipresent potential for total self-destruction is partially why he’s such an effective, confident, and successful person. Kirk isn’t cool in spite of his negative side, but because of it. If you hate your parents because they fucked up their lives, this, to me, is the same thing. I’ll never be able to forgive my father completely in the saintly way Luke Skywalker forgives his, but I am willing to acknowledge that the part of my dad that lives inside of me is a little bit like “evil Kirk.”
This is an idea Star Trek goes hog wild with throughout its entire original 1960s run. In “A Taste of Armageddon,” the Enterprise rolls up on a planet that has seemingly eliminated war, only to find that the society there simulates war with computers, but still demands that “casualties” report to incineration booths every so often. Furious with this bullshit, Captain Kirk runs around the planet proclaiming what a “barbarian” he is and blows up incineration booths left and right to prove the point that actual violence is why war should be avoided, and that factoring war into a natural equation is essentially inhuman. The big Shatner speech in this one is all about realizing that maybe we are all “killers,” but maybe “the instinct can be fought.” Every day we can wake up and decide not to be an asshole. Sometimes we’ll succeed and sometimes we’ll fail, but Star Trek posits that it’s in this struggle where our humanity is the most real.
I think my dad dug this. At least he did when I was a little kid, though he clearly forgot as he grew older. In Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader tells Luke that “it’s too late for me,” which is probably the saddest thing in all of Star Wars. It’s easy to think of Star Wars as a family tragedy and Star Trek as a positive political infomercial, but it’s more nuanced than that. The going argument is that Star Trek is a hopeful vision of the future because of the peaceful nature of the Federation and the equality and equity it depicts among people (and aliens!) of various ethnicities and backgrounds. But Star Trek is also the most hopeful science fiction thing ever because it asserts that you can win the internal struggle of being your own worst enemy—that it’s never too late for anyone. Which is why there are no fallen angels like Darth Vader in Star Trek and people are forced to forgive themselves, not one other.
Whenever The Wrath of Khan was on television in my house (all the time), my father would crank up the volume on the sound system to unreasonable levels. He would futz with the bass and treble endlessly until the walls would rattle and creak like the trash compactor on the Death Star. Dads have a weird thing they do with sound systems. It’s as though making another human being also requires you to pretend like you know anything about speakers. Anyway, my dad would specifically love to crank everything up during the big finale of The Wrath, right when Khan is delivering the Ahab speech. Naturally, for years, I never knew this speech was borrowed from Ahab, but knew it had some kind of importance. And somehow, I knew it was a quote out of context. What I didn’t know then was that my father didn’t know where the quote came from either.
A few years after I moved to New York, I was home in Arizona visiting my family over the holidays and somebody mentioned the idea of watching The Wrath on Christmas. During the climactic battle, as Spock rushes to jump-start the engines of the Enterprise and Khan waxes Melville, I said, “You know, I just reread Moby-Dick.”
“What?” my father said.
“Moby-Dick,” I said. “Khan is quoting from the ending scenes in Moby-Dick.”
“It’s Shakespeare,” my dad said, sipping from his eggnog.
“Dad,” I said, “it really isn’t.”
“Whatever,” my dad said. “You were only a baby when this movie came out. I think I know what it’s about.”
My mom and my sister excused themselves to bed early, and my father jacked up the volume a few more notches. It was dark and almost Christmas and there wasn’t any snow outside because there’s never any
snow in that part of Arizona. I thought about all the snow that shows up in the desert in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and how Spock comes back to life first as a child and then as a teenager, and then as Leonard Nimoy. People didn’t expect Spock to die in The Wrath, but they also didn’t expect Khan to quote Melville or for the movie to end with A Tale of Two Cities. They remember Spock dying, though. And a few people remember him coming back in the next movie.
Everyone always forgets that Kirk has a son in The Wrath, too. And though the death of Spock is talked about a lot for obvious reasons, we tend to brush aside the fact that Kirk’s son is killed in The Search for Spock. For Star Trek to go back to being Star Trek, Captain Kirk, it seems, had to stop being someone’s father. If Kirk was David’s father, then he stopped being everyone’s father. In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, written and directed by William Shatner, Kirk and Bones joke that “other people have families,” pretending that the story of their lives is more important than the people they are related to, which, if we’re being honest, is exactly how a lot of people view their lives.
When the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie started being promoted in 2009, one of the taglines in the trailers was “Not Your Father’s Star Trek!” which is hilarious. Before my father died, he saw and LOVED Chris Pine’s iteration of Captain Kirk. Pine’s Kirk was handsome, funny, and a total douche bag. This, I think, was my father’s idea of what I could have grown up to be: a kind of mash-up of his generation and my generation. I’m only speculating, but there are a lot of overt father issues in both the J. J. Abrams Star Treks, which is maybe why daughters and fathers as well as sons and fathers bond over them. But maybe I’m wrong and my dad liked Chris Pine’s Kirk for another, easier reason. Maybe it gave him hope.
Because, after quoting Dickens, do you know the very last thing Kirk says in The Wrath of Khan?
I do. It’s “I feel young.”
Hipster Robots Will Save Us All
It’s 2008. I’m twenty-seven years old and standing on a roof in Bushwick, Brooklyn, wearing my favorite vintage elbow-patched blazer on top and nothing but my boxer shorts on bottom. I’m attending an “underwear” party, where in addition to a cover charge of five bucks, you’re also supposed to take off your pants. If you’ve seen any episodes of the TV show Girls where there’s a loft party with lots of drugs, I want you to imagine that, only dirtier.
A cool nighttime summer breeze goes through my legs as I’m led—hopping—to the roof’s edge. I say hopping because my feet are duct-taped together, creating a sort of upright caterpillar situation that is made all the more difficult because my arms are also duct-taped across my chest mummy-in-a-sarcophagus style. There is duct tape over my mouth, too. I’m being led by two women who are wearing cobbled-together dominatrix outfits, which aren’t the porno-quality dominatrix outfits you’d see in the window of one of those sex shops, but more like what dominatrices would throw together in a postapocalyptic Mad Max world or perhaps in omitted chapters of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We’ve all just met on the roof and have done a bunch of drugs and they casually ask me if they could tie me up. I say what anyone says when they are twenty-seven and attending an underwear party on a rooftop in Brooklyn and someone asks if they can tie you up. I say, of course you can tie me up. Sounds like fun.
Mr. Spock once noted that “having is not such a pleasing thing as wanting,” and if you apply that to fake dominatrices coked out of their minds who are toying with your life, you start to wonder why you should ever be allowed to make any of your own decisions at all. But as the doms bring me to the edge of the building and whisper in my ear, “We could kill you, you little bitch, just drop you off this roof,” the thought that goes through my mind is not oh God, please, I want to live. But instead: Oh hell yeah. This is going to make a great story for my blog. I’m twenty-seven and totally clueless, and in looking across at the distant Manhattan skyline, I’m also absurdly considering that I probably won’t die anyway because I’ll just wake up in a new robot body like the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. If I die and my consciousness gets downloaded into an exact robot duplicate, will I be depressed or will it be awesome?
Unlike the clunky robots of antiquity, the contemporary Battlestar Galactica Cylons are interested in looking less like robots and more like human beings,* complete with simulated flesh and blood. In the reality of BSG, the Cylons began their evolutionary existence as shambling, shiny robots reminiscent of walking toasters but “evolved” into more faux-organic human-looking forms. (The slurs the show uses to differentiate these kinds of Cylons are “toasters” for the robot-robots and “skin jobs” for the human-esque ones.)* In a sense, an advanced robot wanting to become human is a slightly inefficient move, like trading in a fuel-efficient vehicle for a gas-guzzler. This fact is outlined by the Cylon character Cavill (played fantastically by Dean Stockwell), who rants about his faux-human body to one of his creators in the fourth season: “I don’t want to be HUMAN!” he screams. “I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays, I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am?” His artificial intelligence is inherently limited by his humanoid structures, which royally pisses him off because he’d rather be a more roboty robot. In Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made out of Meat,” superintelligent machines discuss the grossness of life on Earth, seeing us as no more than “talking meat.” These are the attitudes of robots who can easily become killer robots, the kind who, if they do happen to be in humanoid form, are only this way because they have to be. The robots in the Terminator movies are like this: if left to their own devices, maybe they’d just be pools of liquid metal, but when the terminating needs to be done, they’ll get it together to look like they’ve got arms and legs. In his essay “Robots,” Chuck Klosterman says that if humans lose a war against robots we really have no excuse because he “can’t imagine any war we’ve spent more time worrying about.” This is the mode of thinking most popular in speculating about robots: the idea that they will rise up and destroy us. But it doesn’t have to be this way if we think about robots a little harder.
Most people have fucked-up ideas about Isaac Asimov’s original collection of robot stories I, Robot, partially because the Will Smith movie of the same name sends an opposite thematic message to the one Asimov was going for in his book. Just days before the release of I, Robot in the theatres in 2004, I happened to see science fiction legend and longtime Asimov friend Harlan Ellison speak at a community college in Arizona.* He begged me to skip seeing I, Robot for the sake of Isaac’s memory, but because I had to know, I saw it anyway. Other than the car chases reminding me I needed to change the break-pads on my pickup truck, the movie was fairly thin. It was a by-the-numbers robots-are-going-to-kill-you movie in which Dr. Susan Calvin was changed from being a smart older scientist into some kind of dumb sexpot companion of Will Smith. The Will Smith character, a cop investigating a robot murder, is a fabrication and not present in the book version of I, Robot at all.* The point is, before I, Robot came out most people had the idea that the book was about robots rising up to kill us, and after the movie came out, their ideas were totally reinforced. And with very few exceptions,* most big sci-fi TV shows and films have a default setting when it comes to robots. Watch out for the killer bots!
However, Asimov’s impetus in writing his robot stories at all was that he was sick to death of sci-fi stories about killer robots way back in the 1930s. Check him out in his essay “The Perfect Machine”:*
The science fiction writers could not rid themselves of the notion that the manufacture of a robot involved forbidden knowledge, a wicked aspiration on the part of a man to the abilities reserved for God. The attempt to create artificial life was an example of hubris and demanded punishment. In story after story, with grim inevitability, the robot destroyed its creator before being itself destroyed . . . [and] it was not until 1939 that, for the first time as far as I know, a science fiction writer approached the robots from a
systematic engineering standpoint. Without further coyness, I will state that science fiction writer is myself.
Nineteen thirty-nine! Seventy-six years ago, Dr. Asimov was hell-bent on starting an intelligent revolution in science fiction, one in which the robot story would no longer be a Frankenstein’s monster story. Wow. How’s that one going, Dr. Asimov? Because despite writing excellent books about robots and their various machinations, the killer-robot-how-dare-we-play-God thing is still what most people think a robot story is all about.
The robots in Asimov stories aren’t without conflict; it’s just that the conflicts don’t deal with the end of the world. My favorite story in I, Robot is hands down “Liar!” in which a randomly telepathic robot struggles with his programming. Based on the “laws of robotics” this robot (named Herbie) cannot allow a human being to come to harm. Herbie internalizes “harm” to mean emotional harm, and in order to make everyone feel better, he starts lying to them like crazy. You’re going to get that job! That person does love you! It’s not only a hysterical short story, but a heartbreaking one, too. And it proves you don’t need killer robots to have conflict in your robot story.
But if we put authors’ intent of various robot tales aside (as the filmmakers of I, Robot did), what is the net philosophical value of robots in mass culture? Everyone is not really as technophobic as science fiction movies and television would have you believe, because if they were, they certainly wouldn’t be as comfortable talking to their smartphones. If looked at through the humanist lens of Asimov, the worst robot movie is The Terminator and the best is that oh-so-twee artificial intelligence 2013 romance Her. This isn’t to say that the Terminator movies are bad (at least not the first two) but, more specifically, that the malevolent AI Skynet presents the conventional way movies always portray robots—they’re gonna take over. True, there is emotional subtlety between Sarah Connor and the Terminator in Judgment Day, but I’d argue this good stuff is working from a narrative deficit of Frankenstein’s monster ontology. To put it another way: the Terminator films are mildly subversive of their own genre.