Alice L. George
Like the Iowa homesteaders who were his forefathers, Captain James T. Kirk is a pioneer, pushing the boundaries of his civilization ever outward. As his opening prologue to the original Star Trek indicates, space is the final frontier, the last new territory to be explored or claimed. Confronting the mysteries that exist on the edges of known space is a key part of Kirk’s mission, but as we try to understand his connection to the American frontier, we find that he is not so much tethered to the real history of the West as he is hog-tied to the mythical Old West. Hiding behind the mask of the proper twenty-third-century starship captain is a Kirk who is part cavalry officer, part riverboat gambler, part lawman, part gunfighter, and part frontier preacher. He has earned a reputation as a man who takes chances and almost always wins. Whether he is sitting in the captain’s chair or exploring the wilderness of an alien planet, Kirk is a “white hat,” roaming the range with the best of intentions and the worst of suspicions.
Among white Americans, the Western is the only myth truly born from seeds planted on this continent. Its defining elements are an emphasis on the movement of peoples; the isolation of individuals or small groups, far from “civilization”; and the slow development of cultural order across a territory. Star Trek made its debut at a time when Western TV series and movies were quite popular. During the series’ first season, Bonanza (a Western) was the nation’s most-watched series for a third year in a row. What Star Trek’s producers found was that Western tales’ simple depictions of good versus evil adapted easily to science fiction. Both genres examine life on the edge of settled territory, and at the hearts of both genres are the quests for survival.
Western Culture Lassos Eastern Hearts?
Thanks to the Beadle & Adams dime novels, the first Westerns became widely available in the United States around 1860. Thus, the West’s mythic existence began before its history had fully unfolded, since the settlement of the Western territories by white Americans continued into the late nineteenth century. A growing popular culture focused on celebrities made Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Armstrong Custer larger than life. Before most Americans had a chance to learn the facts about Western settlement, Cody was traveling the country with the Wild West Show, which featured Sitting Bull, the chief of the Sioux. The West thus became performance art at the same time that it was becoming history. Three years after the superintendent of the U.S. Census declared the frontier closed in 1890, historian Frederick Jackson Turner put forth his thesis that the unique experience of settling the frontier had played a pivotal role in molding the character and values of Americans. Although the frontier no longer existed, Owen Wister and Zane Grey furthered the Western narrative with their popular novels published during the early twentieth century, and Louis L’Amour and other writers created hundreds of new Western tales later in the century. James T. Kirk is just one of many fictional characters shaped by the patterns that emerge from the Western mythos.
Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, jokingly characterized the concept as “Wagon Train to the stars,” and Kirk seems to be cut from the same cloth as the hero of Wister’s Virginian and Bret Maverick of TV and film.1 Kirk’s capacity for innovation is an essential skill as he patrols the galactic frontier, exploring uncharted paths, defending isolated outposts, and attempting to bring order to untamed sectors of space. In the traditions of the Western hero, Kirk does not shy away from trouble: he gallops toward it, eager for the exploits that await him. Like Western heroes, Kirk fights for freedom from domination and for the rights of the individual. As viewers see Kirk’s startled look when he becomes the first human captain to confront a huge alien spaceship, they are witnessing the same wonder found in the eyes of a frontier farmer who looks into the sky and sees a swarm of locusts bearing down on his little piece of the planet Earth. The sudden intrusion of the unknown is an integral part of the frontier experience.
It is probably no coincidence that one of the synonyms for adventure is enterprise, the name of Kirk’s indomitable steed. The ship’s sensors and the universal translator are Kirk’s scouts, telling him what lies ahead and helping him to communicate with the natives of distant worlds. Two episodes explicitly occur in settings intended to mimic the Old West. “Spectre of the Gun” is blatantly a Western, with Kirk and his colleagues being forced to replay the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. “The Paradise Syndrome” approaches another side of the Western myth—the portrayal of Indians as noble savages. In this episode, Kirk loses his memory and joins Native Americans transplanted from Earth to a distant planet by a Preserver race. Over the course of a few months, Kirk marries and impregnates an Indian priestess named Miramanee. He revels in the simplicity of his primitive life. Eventually, of course, his colleagues relocate him. Because Kirk’s memory has been restored and because Miramanee has been killed, he is free to return to his life on the Enterprise. Media studies scholar Daniel Bernardi characterizes the decision to kill Miramanee as part of a standard Euro-Indian miscegenation narrative. “The native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn’t shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind.” Bernardi believes that this episode, apparently intended to celebrate Native American culture, actually reveals racism among the show’s producers, who stereotyped the Indians as noble savages, showing no progress among them during the centuries since they had been moved to the planet.2 In this episode, the amnesiac Kirk crosses a line between meeting a new civilization and becoming a part of it. Like some white drifters who found a home among Native Americans, he experiences a totally different frontier culture.
Barely disguised Western motifs surface in other episodes as well. For instance, in “Mudd’s Women,” the beautiful ladies are stand-ins for the mail-order brides of yore, and they are on their way to provide companionship for dusty dilithium miners who look very much like the eighty thousand ragged-but-hopeful forty-niners who swept westward in the California gold rush of 1849. The bar on Deep Space Station K-7 in “The Trouble with Tribbles” seems more like a Western saloon than an intergalactic way station. And in “Charlie X,” when the adolescent raised by aliens cannot fit into human culture, he is like the freed Indian captives who had trouble finding a place for themselves among whites after spending years in Native American cultures.
In his book, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Richard Slotkin argues that the popular Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s provided the perfect backdrop for the Cold War era, in which all of the issues were presented in terms of black versus white, with little middle ground for shades of gray. Slotkin notes that Star Trek is particularly reminiscent of “empire” Western films of the 1930s and 1940s, where individual action is decisive in solving a cosmic struggle. He finds particularly strong parallels in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which follows an established format in which an evil chieftain, “half-savage, half aristocrat,” attacks, tortures, and massacres innocent beings, leading the forces of good to make a suicidal “charge” to save civilization. In the film, Khan Noonien Singh is a product of late-twentieth-century genetic engineering, marooned by Kirk years ago on a planet with other genetically enhanced humans. A change in the planet’s orbit and attacks by deadly indigenous creatures give Khan great motivation to plot his revenge against Kirk. When Khan escapes and gains control of a Federation starship, he almost glows with an obsessive need to defeat Kirk.
In their initial engagement, now Admiral Kirk fails to follow protocol and raise his ship’s shields when another Federation ship approaches without any communication. With the Enterprise’s shields down, Khan is able to cripple the ship, but Kirk’s riverboat-gambler persona outwits Khan and the Enterprise is able to escape, only to find that Khan has tortured and killed members of a scientific team working on Project Genesis, which is intended to turn a lifeless planet into a lush paradise. Kirk goes to the center of an asteroid where the actual Genesis experiment is under way
, and again, he fools Khan, making him believe that there is no escape from the asteroid. As the film progresses, Kirk’s desire for revenge against Khan comes to equal Khan’s vengeful sentiments toward him. In the end, Khan dies, but in a final desperate act, he sets off the Genesis device, which will destroy all life within its range. The loyal Spock makes the ultimate sacrifice, exposing himself to lethal radiation to save the Enterprise and his friend Kirk. The film ends with the famous Kirk/Spock farewell that includes Spock’s declaration that “I have been, and ever shall be, your friend,” and the axiom that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” Kirk, who has cheated death many times through cleverness, is paralyzed by his closest friend’s willing surrender to the Grim Reaper.
Noble Savages in the Neutral Zone
As William Blake Tyrrell asserts, the white man’s confrontation with the Indian represents the heart of the Western saga. In Kirk’s galaxy, other warrior races such as the Klingons and Romulans embody the frontier’s savage element. The Klingons are most often stereotyped as ruthless and uncivilized people in the original series, but the later versions of Star Trek reveal the civilized code that shaped their culture.
In rare moments, alien races show the nobility that white Americans so want to bestow on savages. While they attack and oppress the weak, their actions are often guided by a code. The Romulans, for example, show more nobility and less savagery than some other alien tribes encountered by the Enterprise, but they remain inscrutable and powerful foes. In “Balance of Terror,” Kirk finds several Earth outposts destroyed in the borderlands of the Romulan Neutral Zones, and he enters a battle of wits with a Romulan commander, whose cloaked ship emulates the Indian’s mythic ability to disappear into the landscape. One of Kirk’s goals is to catch the Romulans in Federation space as evidence that they have violated a treaty and have victimized poorly protected and poorly manned Federation bases along the frontier. In the end, Kirk wins, and rather than leave evidence of this encounter, the Romulan leader fully displays his alien nature by destroying his ship and everyone aboard. Over the course of his other missions, Kirk interacts with a wide variety of aliens who represent “the other” lurking in the darkness just out of sight. Some he befriends, but despite the Federation’s own commitment to peace, there are races, such as the Romulans, with whom lasting peace is impossible.
Other humanoid races are not the only challenges that threaten the Federation’s space pioneers. In Westerns, the villain is frequently a corrupt rancher, a vicious outlaw, or an enraged Indian chief; however, the kind of domination that Kirk often struggles to defeat is that which propels his faithful mount—technology. The first rule of the Western adventurer is self-sufficiency, and if all Kirk needed was a pack and a horse, technology would not be cast so often as a villain. However, by accepting technology as an essential partner in human endeavors, twenty-third-century man has embraced a high level of dependency, and in plotlines shaped by twentieth-century anxiety about mechanization, that reliance on technology can be dangerous. Kirk repeatedly faces a computer or an android or a weapon that develops a mind of its own and turns against human interests. He faces this sort of enemy in several TV episodes, including “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” “The Doomsday Machine,” “The Changeling,” “Return of the Archons,” “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” “I, Mudd,” and “The Apple,” as well as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Like the typical Western villain, these machines possess single-mindedness and lack depth. Because they do not possess Kirk’s creativity and his ability to reason outside the box, the machines suffer from obvious weaknesses that he can exploit. As he faces a technological enemy, the tension builds toward a showdown in which human intuition and imagination manage to conquer the clockwork precision of a machine mind.
Another often repeated theme is the incompetence of bureaucrats “back home,” who do not understand the frontier. Like a cavalry officer receiving orders from a Washington-based official who has never been out West, Kirk rankles at interference from those who do not comprehend the realities of daily living on the fringes of civilization. These hapless city slickers range from Ambassador Robert Fox in “A Taste of Armageddon” to Commodore George Stocker in “The Deadly Years” to Nilz Baris in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Living on the edge as he does, Kirk must assert his independence from bureaucrats and out-of-control technology. Kirk’s occasional rebellion against the Federation and Starfleet officials also reflects an element in the real history of America’s West, where dependence on federal spending nurtured strong antigovernment feeling among its independent people, who resented the fact that Washington’s largesse (granting homestead and mining rights, railroad subsidies, and other resources) made them dependent.3 Kirk’s contemptuous neglect of orders reaches its apex in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, when he directly violates orders by stealing the Enterprise. “The word is ‘no,’” he tells his crew. “I am therefore going anyway.” It is not surprising that Kirk takes his biggest career risk on the glimmer of a hope that he might revive his lost friend Spock, without whom he is not whole.
The ties that bind Kirk and Spock to one another resemble the close partnership between the frontier scout Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend, Chingachgook, in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.4 Like Natty Bumppo, Kirk faces danger in a frontier laden with unknowns, and in his friendship with Spock he is most capable of exercising his individuality and expressing his emotions. Like Bumppo, Kirk must also retain his killer instinct, but at times, he covets Spock’s ability to eschew emotion and follow logic, just as Bumppo admires Chingachgook’s stoicism and seeks to replicate it within himself.5 Representing within themselves two different cultures, both heroic pairs function effectively as they blaze new trails together, and their “otherness” reinforces their ability to thrive. Their closeness allows each to profit from the mysteries of the other’s world and to gain access to that realm without losing touch with his own individuality. Although each would claim close ties to civilization, Kirk and Spock have forsaken the possibility of leading settled lives on their home planets, in a manner that mirrors the lifestyle of Cooper’s characters. Following in the path trodden by the backwoodsman and his Indian ally, Kirk and Spock heed a call of the wild that feeds their explorer spirits.
Like the homesteaders who toiled for years trying to eke out a decent living, Kirk is prepared to work hard and take risks in order to maintain the kind of life he wants. More than once, he rejects the idea of an easily obtained utopia. In “This Side of Paradise,” people much like the Western settlers leave Earth to establish an agricultural colony on Omicron Ceti III, but they abandon their goals when they are given the opportunity to enjoy an artificial utopia. Once they discover alien spores that infiltrate their bodies and bring a sense of happiness and belonging, their ambition and desire to work hard dissolve. After the entire Enterprise crew mutinies in order to share in this Shangri-La and only Kirk remains unaffected, he finds a way to disrupt the effect of the spores. “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise,” he says. “Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of the drums.” He also argues that “man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.”
The typical Western hero adapts by becoming more like the frontier, absorbing some of its savagery and turning from a civilized man into a lone wolf, capable of surviving in this new environment. Part of Kirk’s mission is to learn—and he does. Like Shane and other Western heroes, he is not afraid to engage in physical combat against a single opponent; however, he devotes a great deal of energy to his sometimes unsuccessful struggle to remain loyal to the high ideals of his culture. Nevertheless, one of the key arguments of Star Trek is that men in the future will evolve beyond beings that operate on instinct. They will struggle to apply reason to their act
ions, but unlike Spock, real men always will feel the magnetic pull of those impulses, sometimes surrendering to them and sometimes overcoming them with the help of intellect. With his killer instinct intact, Kirk struggles with the temptation to engage in conflict whenever he meets adversity. Spock’s insights sometimes help him find the course he is seeking. As he tells the Eminiar in “A Taste of Armageddon,” “We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes.”
In spite of his many similarities to Western heroes, it would be wrong to ignore the obvious differences. The biggest distinction between James T. Kirk and the traditional Western hero is that Kirk is not alone. He reflects the American ideal of individualism, but he is not a lone gunman facing off against his enemy at high noon. Instead, he both leads and represents his colleagues on the Enterprise, and to a degree, he epitomizes the people of Earth. He and Spock may sometimes function as two men isolated from all others, but at the end of the day they are responsible for more than four hundred men and women and billions more on Earth. Kirk relies on members of the crew to strengthen his moral compass and to bolster his strategic planning. Another key element separating Kirk from the Western hero is his close ties to civilization: Western heroes often represent instinct as opposed to culture, but like many other science fiction adventurers, Captain Kirk is promoting a more advanced culture that embodies higher ideals.6 Furthermore, the search for material wealth often fuels Western settlement, and that drive is entirely foreign to Kirk.
The Federation’s Manifest Destiny
The lofty ideals of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet are not powered by monetary motives; nevertheless, there is at least a whiff of Manifest Destiny in Kirk and in the missions assigned to him. Whether acting under orders or not, Kirk sometimes tries to force his way into other races’ territories and to mandate contact. For instance, he ignores a warning buoy in “The Corbomite Maneuver” and invades First Federation space. In “Spectre of the Gun,” he receives a clear message that the Melkotians want no contact with humans, and yet, he proceeds into orbit around their planet. In “A Taste of Armageddon,” under orders from Ambassador Fox, Kirk seeks to force contact with the inhabitants of Eminiar VII. Like the white Americans who continued moving deeper and deeper into Indian territories in violation of treaties, Kirk sometimes sees only his own goals—not how they affect the peoples who happen to be in his way.
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