What Went Wrong? Hitchcock's Vertigo, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, and Gene Wolfe's Peace

What Went Wrong?

Hitchcock's Vertigo, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, and Gene Wolfe's Peace

"What went wrong? That is the question, and not 'To be or not to be.'"

-Gene Wolfe, Peace (1975)

These are times when nearly everyone in America is engaged, it seems to me, in asking one question: what went wrong? 

This is not, I should say, a question confined to either Right or Left on our soi-disant political spectrum.  Trumpists think about nearly nothing about went wrong under Biden, and Obama, and since Harry Truman; and, increasingly, about what has gone wrong and is going wrong under Trump. Progressives, looking at their electoral defeats, looking at Trump's America, ask themselves virtually the same question. Leftists, social conservatives, Distributists, Communists, Integralists--even the tiniest sub-factions of American politics seem to spend more time analyzing how things have gone wrong than how they might possibly go right. 

Yet for all that, virtually no one, it seems to me, actually tries to answer the question in any comprehensive or philosophical or even historically satisfactory way. People produce, say, accounts of ways in which government has gotten less efficient; or how regulations have impeded economic growth; or, at best, how cultural movements or technological developments have caused kids to be less happy or art to be less good. These are all, though, from my perspective, so many discussions of symptoms rather than diseases, of effects rather than causes. 

To understand any human phenomenon, no matter how technical, one must understand human motivation and action. And considered in that light, apparent oppositions frequently conceal unities, and apparent triumphs already hold the seeds of their own downfalls. Most fundamentally of all, one cannot solve a problem until one has recognized what the problem is; nor can one undo a mistake until one understands what the mistake actually was. 

In my next post (probably), I will write about the more political and social side of this question. Today, though, I want to write about three works of art that are, in my mind, at least, connected by precisely their attention to more hidden and human seeds of harm and destruction, the ways in which these seeds grow and unfold, and the destruction they wreak when full-grown. All three films are in at least some sense tragedies; and hence all pose the same basic question of their characters' downfalls: what went wrong? 

The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain:
There are souls more sick of pleasure, than you are sick of pain.

There is a stir of unquiet in the air. We have, at last, gotten through an election that is in political terms perhaps the least interesting and impactful of my lifetime--but, in symbolic reality, and, therefore, in real world effects on the psyches and emotional selves and actions of people, among the most extreme. We are living in the greatest Empire the world has ever known; an Empire currently embroiled in two astonishingly bloody proxy wars, wars that our government seems to have little or no interest in controlling or containing or bringing to any kind of conclusion, wars that at this writing continue and escalate and spiral ever downwards, killing thousands of innocents, with no end in sight.

In such a night, what do we dream of? And what troubles our dreams?

I am not going to write, today, about either wars or elections. The suffering and death of the innocent are with God; but if we are to stop the killing, and even the psychological mass-media damage caused by a profoundly silly election, we need to ask ourselves more fundamental questions. We need to ask ourselves, first and foremost, why we are doing what we are doing. For only when we know what we are doing, and why, can we choose to stop doing it.

As I have argued, in recent months, I have seen a vision of the failure of America: a failure born merely of the mainstream, of mass media, of fantasy untethered from reality. The most horrifying thing about present moment is neither Trump nor Kamala's alleged wicked plans to destroy America, but rather their utter lack of any kind of political plans at all; not any particular American hatred or greed or racism or conquest or cowardice manifested in Gaza or Ukraine or Lebanon, but rather our seeming inability to feel anything at all about the wars we pay for and enable, to take any action at all and not contradict it, to take any responsibility at all for the people we have killed and the deeds we ourselves have done: to decide if we are at war with Russia or not, if we want Ukraine to invade Russia or surrender or negotiate or advance or retreat, if we want the government of Israel to keep fighting or stop fighting or expand or retreat, to decide if we want the people of Gaza to live or die or be occupied or be ruled or merely to cease to exist: to have any relationship at all to those who, at least, fight or suffer or hate or fear or die and have some idea why. 

The most troubling thing about the present American moment for me has nothing really to do with the election or our limited choice among media figures; it is simply the inability of our rulers and would-be rulers, of all parties and all groupings and all colors, to do anything, say anything, decided on anything for good or ill. A profound paralysis in fact grips our most powerful men, a profound indecision, an inability to grasp reality, an incapacity to evaluate it on any terms whatsoever: a existential vagueness about law, morality, governance, and life itself.

Anyway, all that is to say that today's post will be about two works of art about bored unhappy wealthy attractive white women living in New York City in the past.

Column 06/13/2024: Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity

Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity

"He's dead, Jim."

Star Trek: Discovery is over. Somehow, some way, it ended, lurched to a stop, was euthanized, put out of its misery, executed by firing squad, shot out of an airlock by a vengeful Admiral Adama, kicked over a cliff into erupting lava by Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. You pick your metaphor.

It seems, almost, beyond belief. How could Star Trek: Discovery end? 

A better question: how or when did Star Trek: Discovery begin? Did Star Trek: Discovery in fact take place? Jean Baudrillard, please answer your pager.

Here is a strong claim that I completely stand behind: watching Star Trek: Discovery for five (okay, four and a half) seasons has challenged me intellectually and personally as no other work of art has ever done before. It has tormented me, infuriated me, angered me, disgusted me, dispirited me, inspired me, filled me with joy and hatred and loathing and annoyance and, ultimately, love.

Let me start with a disclaimer. I am not someone who dislikes bad art; I am not someone who dislikes stupid art. I have long had a profound fondness for the unintentional humor and joyful creativity of many works of art that are, on the face of it, badly put together by artists in profoundly imperfect control of their artistic elements. 

Discovery is different, though.

To explain how, let me offer a strong claim: it is nearly impossible to comprehend Star Trek: Discovery as a work of art, the result of human intelligence and creativity and intentionality, at all. Star Trek: Discovery is not a substance, not even an artificial substance-by-analogy, the work of a demiurge human or divine. It is not an essence unfolding teleologically through time; it is not a story, a narrative with a beginning and an end; it is not even an event, an assemblage of elements held together by loose networks of simultaneity and cause-and-effect; it is not even  a Gnostic emanation, a failed attempt at conceptual realization birthing other abominations in turn. Star Trek: Discovery is, rather, most fittingly likened to the unintelligible forces of time and chance and matter themselves, contrary elements devouring one another in the dark, splitting and dividing without end in a chaos of Ovidian language, Plutarch's dark Typhon, Aristotle's potentiality awaiting act, the waters over which the spirit hovered before the beginning of creation.

It is, in other words, a really, really, really stupid television show.

As an obnoxious intellectual man, I have all my life believed strongly that intelligence--or rather, what intellectuals call intelligence, mental facility and speed in processing information and analysizing it and commenting on it and performing simple problem-solving tasks--is, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. Intellectuals are, by and large, self-deluding, self-aggrandizing bastards unable to see out of the boring detritus of their own minds and into the real world, even when it surrounds them and pounds them repeatedly into the metaphorical sand of reality like waves on a beach. In contrast, people colloquially described as stupid are usually prime exemplars of humanity, with their lack of internal preoccupations allowing them to simply accept and take stock of reality and respond to it in ways that are uniquely personal and so, by and large, both interesting and delightful, people adept at understanding and therefore intelligence in the true sense. In my experience, in this proper sense, stupid people are generally much more intelligent than smart people.

Nonetheless, stupidity is, as they say, said in many ways--and stupidity as a (relative) personal quality defined by intellectual receptivity and lack of speed in information-processing and verbal creation is quite distinct from stupidity in the sense of the total rational incoherency often found in intellectual objects and artifacts and beliefs. Human persons are always rational, even when they are unconscious, dreaming, or dead; receiving the world via the intellect is simply what they do. Concepts, ideas, and stories, however, are rational only by participation in human reason and its objects; and they can, to quite a large extent, fail to participate in that reason at all. Insofar as they fail to do so even minimally, they fail to exist.

Star Trek: Discovery is, in my limited experience, the work of art that most fails to participate in any form of human reason. Hence, it is, I would argue, impossible to analyze Star Trek: Discovery in any of the terms typically applied to human artifacts and narratives. 

Because of this, I aim to discuss Star Trek: Discovery not in terms of a unified work of art, a narrative, a set of characters, a plot, a set of themes. I will discuss it, rather, precisely in terms of stupidity, incoherence, and the roots of these stupidities and incoherences in the world around us--first in the stupid, incoherent shadow world of pop-cultural trends, then in the broader, incoherent world of American society itself, and finally in the real world as it actually exists. 

In the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that Star Trek: Discovery's stupidity and incoherency is not, in fact, a bizarre, unique aberration in an otherwise pristine media landscape. In fact, the main note of popular culture in recent years has been precisely the same sense of fundamental incoherency found in a more extreme form in Discovery. Understanding where this incoherency comes from, is, I think, somewhat important for understanding where we are as a society, and for understanding how to prevent things from getting much, much worse.

For the very fact that Star Trek: Discovery exists at all, that it ever existed in even the most minimal sense, that it persisted, and that it ended tells us a great deal indeed about the world we live: and hopefully, what to do about it. 

To sum up Star Trek: Discovery, the stupidest work of art I have ever seen, I will make use of the stupidest format I know of. Here, then, in listicle format, proceeding from the most obvious to the most profound, are Ten Ways in Which Star Trek Discovery Illuminates the Profundity of Stupidity. 

Column 05/25/2024: The Millennial Sovereign, The Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

The Millennial Sovereign, the Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

What is it that makes a human person more than just another human person?

This is a rather important question, to which many highly conflicting answers have been given. 

We are, most of us, surrounded by people day in and day out, both in person and through media and social and political structures. Most of these people we do not, really, know particularly well. Some of these people want things from us; from some we want things; and some of these people will not just want something from us: they will want us. So how do we decide, among all these people, who we will pay attention to or not pay attention to, trust or not trust, listen to or not listen to, obey or not obey? How do we decide who we give ourselves to, as friends, lovers, helpers, leaders, followers, servants? 

This is a crucial question when it comes to individual relationships and individual lives; but it is in many ways even more crucial when it comes to the lives and destinies of whole groups and peoples and nations and Empires. In our personal lives, we can (if we choose) exercise prudence and wisdom and take our time and think our way through who we trust and who we give to and who we give ourselves to. When it comes to the realms of public culture, political culture, especially mass-media culture, we frequently are under far more pressure, and have far less to go on. How do we decide who is telling the truth in a public war of words between two politicians or influencers or apologists or academics talking about something we know nothing about? How do we decide who to trust, to whom to give our money, our time, our attention, our vote, our obedience, our trust and love and devotion, when our choice actually matters, for ourselves and others?

There are many answers to this basic question, ranging from the rational to the romantic to the utterly insane. One common answer throughout history is charisma. 

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

"I left a woman waiting:
I met her sometime later.
She said: 'I see your eyes are dead.
What happened to you, lover?'"

"I'm fucking nothing. I'm not even a person."

The above quotes come from two extraordinarily different works of art, created by two extraordinarily different artists more than thirty years apart. They are, nonetheless, about precisely the same thing.

Let me start over. One of the primary purposes of art is to aid in the extraordinarily important process of reflection and processing of our lives and selves and experiences. We all live out of and based on what we receive of the world; yet before we can act truthfully, we must first understand truthfully what we have received. And this is by no means easy.

One of the greatest problems with the contemporary regime of mass-media in American life is that it renders this process all but impossible. It does so in the first place by simply deafening and overwhelming people with narratives and experiences that are totally foreign to their own lives, which they have no ability even to begin to process, and which thus leave them no space and time to process their own lives and selves and the world itself. It does so in the second place by giving them narratives of the world that falsify their own experiences, causing them to understand their own lives in ways that are false and harmful, and hence, inevitably, to act in ways that are false and harmful.

One of the primary realms where this is true is, of course, the domain of human relationships and desire, insofar as, as I have argued in this space, the primary form of artistic production of our civilization consists of the manipulation of human desires for the purposes of pornography and advertising. For this to be effective, people have to absorb and internalize a sense of their own persons and identities and desires that is maximally manipulable by media. This, while existing in different ways in different areas, is fundamentally a mode that is de-personalized, de-relationalized, momentary, intense, atomized, repeatable, interchangeable, quantifiable, and totally separated from any sense of truth or reality. The ideal subject of this type of desire is someone who responds with maximal intensity to any given stimulus, at whatever time, whoever it involves, whether it is in reality or only via media, does whatever that stimuli tells him or her to do (such as buy a product), and then is ready to respond in the same way a moment later to a totally unrelated stimulus.

A great deal of American mass-media, consequently, is dedicated to portraying this type of desire as supremely positive and affirmed and fulfilling, and the type of person who is defined by such desires as supremely affirmed and fulfilled and happy. 

And yet the reality, which we have all at some point in our lives seen plainly either in others or in ourselves or both, is that this person is definitionally and maximally unfulfilled and lonely and miserable and unhappy. Since most people in America process their own experiences of themselves and others largely or entirely through mass media, though, many people are entirely unable to grasp this obvious reality or acknowledge it or process it or derive any conclusions from it or take any actions based on it. Indeed, even people who are obviously and enormously unhappy for precisely this reason are, in my experience, almost totally incapable of actually seeing themselves as unhappy and hence of taking any steps, large or small, to remedy their situation.

The first step to ceasing to be unhappy is to recognize that one is in fact unhappy. This is trivially true, but in fact, in practical terms, is one of the most common obstacles to personal happiness in many contemporary American's lives. People are frequently driven to go very far into the depths of personal dysfunction and the Internet alike before they can find media that allows them to reflect on themselves to even this very minimal degree--and then frequently the sectarian or conspiracist or victimizing or pseudo-psychologizing Internet narratives they end up consuming about their own unhappiness are just as false and destructive and conducive to further unhappiness. 

Even more cruelly, perhaps, the reality of contemporary American life is that many, many, many people do in fact have the materials of fulfilling, meaningful, even happy lives, but live their entire lives in the shadows, ashamed, and made unhappy precisely because their lives do not measure up to mass-media fantasies of people who are in fact profoundly, deeply miserable themselves.

It is precisely because of that that there is an enormous need for works of art that clearly and effectively and truthfully portray the unhappiness of people who are in fact unhappy, in such a way that people who are not like these people can recognize them as unhappy and not try to emulate them or be ashamed they are not like them, and so people who are in fact like these people can come to see their own unhappiness and act on it.

This is yet another unnecessarily long-winded and philosophical proem to two works of art that I like very much, both of which center on the utter misery and loneliness of famous, attractive, successful, promiscuous men. So here goes.

Column 03/13/2024: Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse

 Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse

In art and life alike, it is important not to confuse the supernatural with the preternatural.

The supernatural, what is super naturam, "above nature," refers, properly speaking, to the genuinely transcendent--that is, what it is distinguished from the natural not by a straightforward conflict or addition, but by totally superseding it, nullifying it, prefiguring it in its totality, and/or drawing it up whole into itself. The genuinely supernatural cannot be anticipated by the natural, or portrayed in terms of it: it can only, to a limited extent, be conveyed by its action on and through the natural. Hence the proper mode(s) of the Sacred Scriptures and other theological and mystical writings.

The preternatural, what is praeter naturam, "next to nature" or "outside" it, is not like this: most properly, it refers to those things that do not transcend the natural, but rather exist alongside it, adding something to it or in some way operating outside its normal bounds. It is the preternatural that is the more common purview of human art and literature. 

Even here, one can distinguish two senses of the preternatural, one of which is more proper than the other. In the first place, the term preternatural is often used for entities that, while not properly supernatural, are nonetheless more spiritual or powerful or higher in some sense, and thus have greater power to act on and even against nature: demons and angels and ghosts and human persons. 

In itself, though, there is nothing unnatural about these entities, which are in the most immediate sense simply one group of created natures among others. I have never seen a ghost, but I have had a few encounters with demons--and I can assure my readers that there is nothing particularly exciting or artistic about such experiences. The existence of an entity that is strong or difficult to detect or even very intelligent and who wishes to harm you may be frightening, but there is nothing intrinsically interesting about it, any more than about a cockroach or charging rhinoceros or human murderer. 

Still, while these entities are not beyond nature in a strong sense, the reality is that if we examine the bulk of art about spiritual beings, indeed the bulk of art about even threatening human beings or animals, we find that it is layered with a great deal of strange, eerie "preternatural" effects. The reason for this, though, is found in the relationship between such entities and the preternatural in the proper sense. 

Hence the central thesis of this essay, namely that the "preternatural" in human and artistic terms refers precisely to the interiority of human experience and action, and in particular to two troubling features of this interiority: (1) its frequent opacity, and (2) its susceptibility to being acted upon and affected.

A human person does not merely exist as an entity in the world, one object among other objects acting and being acted upon: they exist, rather, by receiving and interiorizing the world, and then communicating what they have received.

Hence the essential paradox of human life and personhood as such: every human being lives in the same objective world, yet every human being exists in a sense in their own world, which is not merely a "subjective" as opposed to "objective" world, or a false as opposed to a true world, but which is precisely the world as received and related to by themselves. As both Trinitarian theology and Christology in their several ways show, the person in its actual, particular existence and relationality is precisely what cannot be comprehended within nature, but exists "outside of" it, "alongside" it. As an intellectual entity, an entity that fundamentally is intellect--that is to say, a pure receptivity that is actualized and exists only in its receiving and relating to and even becoming what is other as other--every human being simply is the whole world received according to a particular relation. 

In theory, there is nothing dangerous, nothing even false or non-objective, about this state of affairs. Each person receives the world according to their particular, truthful relation to it, characterizes that world comprehensively according to that relation, and then gives that world back as their own to other persons. In this giving and receiving of the content of the world and all things according to real and true relation, this essentially Trinitarian dynamic, is the whole glory and beauty of intellect and personhood and, in its most perfect and transcendent form, the very life of God himself. 

Yet in the world as we find it, this reality of personhood can go very badly wrong. Each person lives in, lives as, a world: but these worlds are frequently constituted as much by falsehood, disconnection, privation, and malicious intention as by true and objective relation. When we encounter people, when we start to understand them, we get not so much a sense of their psychology or their identity in a straightforward sense: we get, rather, a glimpse of the world in which they exist, the world as which they exist. Without a doubt we have all had the experience of encountering someone (perhaps even ourselves) and getting a glimpse of the world in which they lived--and finding it a hellish, illusive wasteland.

At the same time, the worlds we construct or exist in are never merely our own creations, based merely on our own relations. As persons, starting from the time we are infants, we all form our senses of the world and our personalities through receiving from and relating to others. Without this, no true relationships among people are possible, and indeed we cannot really function as rational beings, cannot really live in the world or form our own sense of it. We are beings that by our very nature and inmost operation are aimed at receiving other peoples' worlds, other peoples' interiorities, and reconciling and uniting them to our own. 

At its best, this process of communication is a constant ongoing process, a constant reception and correction and expansion and integration of our sense of the world that brings us deeper and deeper into relation with each other and the depths of being. At worst, though, this process of receiving our worlds from without can become the most brutal type of violence, a violence that threatens to efface our inmost selves. We have all almost certainly had the experience of being overwhelmed, deafened, deadened, perhaps even totally annihilated by someone else's hellish interiority, someone else's false sense of the world and their and our place in it. 

It is here that the less proper sense of the preternatural relates directly to, and is only comprehensible in terms of, the proper sense of the term.  In principle, everything in the world has some power over our interiority, some place in the worlds we form. The more something--a time, a place, an object, a melody, a work of art, a relationship--directly impacts our interiority, shapes and characterizes and constitutes it, the more we perceive that thing as somehow "beyond nature," strange, wonderful, luminous, eerie. 

"Spirits" and human persons alike are not preternatural in any sense that transcends this--they are simply entities in the world with the capacity to impact our interior lives. Yet as intellectual beings with interior lives, thoughts and intentions and designs and worlds of their own, they are entities who have a great deal more power to shape and even dominate our interiorities than any other. In the final sense, indeed, only other persons, other intellectual entities, are or can be preternatural. Only they can give us our senses of the world, alter them, or destroy them. 

Hence, it is quite true and even quite literal to say that for the saint the world is heaven, and that for the evil man one and the same world is hell. Indeed, the saint in a real sense is heaven; his whole existence and personality is found in the communication of the world as given and received and lived in beatitude; and as evil men grow more evil, they in a real sense become Hell, their existence consisting in little more than the communication of their own misery and damnation to others. It is this interplay and drama of personality, of the communication of whole cosmoses, that constitutes most of the actual substance of our lives in this world.

To illustrate the point, I will now turn to examining a few works of art that bear on this question, and show how they all reflect, to varying degrees, this fundamental reality of human life: and how their use of "preternatural" elements in the exterior sense is ultimately a mask and means for examining the ways in which people's interior lives are impacted, illuminated, deformed, or destroyed by the world and other persons. In these stories, ghosts and demons and other people alike are ghostly, not because they threaten us without, but because they threaten us within.

Column 12/02/2023: Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is a Disturbing Affirmation of Humanity

Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is a Disturbing Affirmation of Humanity

What do we want, and why do we want it? And what would happen if we got what we want?

These questions are, in one way or another, the heart of all of Sofia Coppola's films--as, indeed, of many films. What sets Sofia Coppola apart from practically all filmmakers of her (or any) generation is two things: (1) her almost exclusive focus on female desire and perspective, and (2) the honesty and empathy of her portrayal of desire and of the people caught in its spell.

From this perspective, Priscilla represents the peak of her career. This is, paradoxically, because it is by far her most restrained film, the film where she most lets go of typical auteur control and its accompanying obsessions and allows another person's perspective to fully take center stage. To take a small, but telling example, Sofia Coppola, like other auteur directors, has a stable of actors and actresses she uses repeatedly in her films; and Priscilla contains none of them. Yet Priscilla is at the same time a film that profoundly reflects, and fulfills, Sofia Coppola's prevailing style, aesthetics, and overriding obsessions. I honestly cannot think of any other director, any other artist, even, who could have created anything remotely like this film. And that is no small praise.

Column 11/04/2023: American Ghost Story: The Shining, The Jazz Singer, Invisible Man

American Ghost Story: 

The Shining, The Jazz Singer, Invisible Man 

I've been sick recently, and have thus had the time and lack of energy to do two things I rarely do: not think and watch movies. 

However, being me, and feeling better, these movies (and a novel I read at the same time) have inevitably sparked an enormous number of thoughts in me, which I will now inflict on you, dear reader. 

To be a Ghost

The Shining (1980) is a great horror movie that is centered on the rejection of almost everything that has made horror a popular genre. There are no jump scares in the movie--there is precious little gore--there is even little or no psychological horror in the conventional sense. And yet it is precisely when Kubrick does deploy such elements that the uniqueness of the film becomes most striking.

Column 08/26: Homo Vanus Patiens: On The Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

Homo Vanus Patiens 

On the Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

The passing of Gene Wolfe in 2019 went, like much of his literary career, mostly unnoticed by the world at large. As before, plaudits were published by his admirers--a piratic crew of literary critics, academics, fellow science fiction authors, Catholics, and nobodies--declaring him, for the umpteenth time, the greatest [blank] of his generation--with the blank to be filled in, depending on one's personal preferences, with "literary sci-fi writer," "sci-fi writer," or even just "writer." These praises make for odd reading, and I imagine would be odder for anyone who had not read him before: as they consist usually of writers struggling to find the right adjectives and express just what about this guy was so good. And usually failing.

Gene Wolfe, it must be said, is hard to describe. He is also, at least for some, hard to read. As I write this, the top prompts for "Gene Wolfe" on google include the plaintive cry, "How do I read Gene Wolfe?" 

How do I read Gene Wolfe? This is very emphatically the right question to ask. Most classic works of literature are, at heart, exceedingly simple in content--love story, adventure, horror, relationship drama, novel--even if frequently daunting in execution. For most such books and authors, the right advice is exactly the opposite of what we were taught in high-school English class: relax, forget all about symbolism and subtext and social and cultural context, and try to enjoy the book exactly as you would Animorphs. The paradox of Gene Wolfe, however, over which many literary critics and random forumgoers have struggled in the decades since he began his career, is that despite writing for a "pulp" genre shared with Animorphs, he is the rare author who does, in fact, demand to be read carefully, thoughtfully, analytically, considerately. 

Column 08/01/2023: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity 

Movies are back.

This, it seems, is what everyone is taking away from the unprecedented Barbenheimer phenomenon, which out of nowhere rocketed ticket sales from post-pandemic lows back to blockbuster levels. Two bizarre and bizarrely ill-matched movies released on the same weekend that somehow, instead of undercutting each other, ended up boosting each other, entirely through the power of Internet memes. 

What a strange time to be alive.

There is, really, nothing quite like modern Internet culture, a culture where incongruity and bizarreness and the power of a single ephemeral joke are valued, literally, above all else--and are powerful enough to get millions of Americans out of their homes and into movie theaters. Chesterton in the 1910s said that there had never been a power like the modern press: and he was right. But he hadn't seen nothing yet.

This is supposed to be an essay about the movie Oppenheimer, but discussing Internet memes is not a bad place to start. For what makes Oppenheimer so horrifying, at least for me, is the degree to which it associates and intertwines and simply and precisely treats as the same thing the power of mass media and the power of mass destruction.

Let me start over. I saw the movie Oppenheimer recently, and hated it as I have never hated any work of art produced by human persons before. It is the only film I have ever watched that made me absolutely livid with rage and sick to my stomach and unable to speak coherently for hours thereafter. I am still mad about it.

This is not precisely because it is a bad movie. In matter of fact, it is a clumsily made movie in many obvious repects--but rehearsing these would be largely besides the point. This is very much a film that does what it sets out to do, that makes the point it wants to make, that conveys what it wants to convey, to such a degree as to almost qualify as a genuine revelation. 

That being said, what it aims at, what it reveals, what it piously and intently worships, is, in my humble opinion, evil--and not just any evil, but precisely the evil of our time and place and society, the underlying belief and devotion and preoccupation behind all the most central and mainstream trends and all the most wasting moral and intellectual and social and political diseases of the world since 1945. And the movie loves this, and wants us to love it, too. And that is why I hate the movie.

Column 07/19/2023: Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

[Warning: the following contains spoilers for the shows and movie Twin Peaks. I would highly advise watching it first, as it's quite good and very worth watching.]

There is something very strange about the human mind. 

One thing that, for me, makes Chesterton such a valuable thinker is that he is one of the very few authors I have ever read who actually seems to understand modernity--because he sees it, properly, not in terms of technology or mythical historical processes or even more mythical economic discoveries, but in terms of fundamental anthropology and human psychology, which is perhaps the only way to ever understand any human epoch or civilization. 

One of his more misunderstood quotes is the famous tag that the world is divided not between dogmatists and anti-dogmatists, but between conscious dogmatists and unconscious dogmatists. This is not merely, as it may seem, an ironically clever taunt, but a reflection of a much broader anthropological theme. Man, as Chesterton puts it, is defined by the making of dogmas; he is homo dogmaticus; which does not mean merely a creature that has beliefs or that codifies them, but first and foremost an entity whose mind, in some strange way, cannot think at all, cannot function at all, cannot even exist, without an entire universe to sustain it. Mind implies, desires, demands world: in his Thomas Aquinas he compares the meeting of the two to a marriage. As in a human marriage, in seeking the world, the mind becomes one flesh with it, incorporating it into itself and itself into it, relating to it as the defining context and atmosphere and background and content for all its own acts of thought and apprehension and speech. World in this sense is not merely a mechanical or abstract construct, an equation in physics: it is all those materials of reality and being and atmosphere and emotion and, in short, content, within and through which the mind moves and acts and exists.

A marriage between real world and mind is the ideal, the telos--but it is not always achieved. Even when the marriage fails, when the mind is cut off from the real world, it does not cease to dream dreams, see visions, and construct, out of its own desire and lack and disappointment, worlds of its own. The mind must exist in a world to exist at all--if only in a world of its own making. And yet, even in their deformities and absences, such universes reflect, inevitably, the shape of the one real world.

Column 05/10/2023: Why Star Trek Generations is the Best Next Generation Movie: Or, Against the Art of Simulation

Why Star Trek Generations is the Best Next Generation Movie: Or, Against the Art of Simulation

Before I begin this week's post, I would like to offer a formal apology to my Dear Reader for the fact that, of late, this blog has been decidedly academicish in character, featuring posts on such topics as academic theology, theoretical physics, and even (alas alas) identity. To reclaim my status as a Man of the People, therefore, I have decided to return to the thing that this is blog is actually about: Star Trek.

(I have written about Star Trek a lot before, including a whole long series of posts. To find them all, click here.) 

However unfortunately I have to then immediately destroy all my cred as both a populist and a critic by engaging in a spirited praise of the most generally disliked of the Star Trek The Next Generation films: Star Trek Generations.

I will confess: I have always liked this movie, despite or because of its critical and fan shellacking. When I watched it as a kid, I liked it without any particular critical discomfort. As a Youth, beginning to be educated in the narratives and techniques of filmmaking, I came to recognize both the many technical flaws with the film, and the fact that in the Grand Myth of Star Trek it was seen as a Lesser Film, a disappointing murder of the great Kirk leading into the actually Great Film Star Trek First Contact. Now, as a man, I have come full circle to the deep, profound truth underlying my original uncritical liking of the film, and now see it, with deepened sight and far more wisdom, as the best of the TNG films. 

I was confirmed in this belief by a recent visit to my brother and sister-in-law, both of whom are visual artists who have made short films and who together run a glossy art magazine. Neither, it should be said, are Star Trek fans in any conventional sense. My brother grew up with it, but generally views most of the Canon with disdain; my sister-in-law has seen relatively little of it. They are also people who value very much the weird, the bizarre, and the original in art. And they both absolutely loved Star Trek Generations.

I was also spurred to write this by my recent experience watching the modern generations of Star Trek, and in particular Strange New Worlds S1 and Star Trek Picard S3, both of which could be quite fairly characterized as "nostalgia" or "fanservice art" and both of which have been highly praised by both fans and critics--certainly more than poor Star Trek Generations. And in comparing my reactions and thoughts in watching all of these examples in short succession, I began to come to some more general theses on contemporary popular entertainment and why it often leaves me cold.

After all, popular American art has by general agreement reached something of a nadir. The latest Marvel movies have been badly reviewed and disliked by fans; even the Mandalorian S3 has met with a similar reception; Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was a grave disappointment; and so on and so forth. And Star Trek Generations is, truly, a major turning point in the history of franchise filmmaking. The lessons allegedly learned from the critical and fan dislike of this film fundamentally defined all later Star Trek films, and through them franchise filmmaking at large. And those lessons, I firmly believe, were all wrong.

To anyone interested in any of the above, then, I present a series of theses on Why Star Trek Generations is the Best TNG Movie and What We Can Learn From It About How to do Popular Franchise Entertainment and Why A Lot of Recent Stuff Sucks.

Column 03/08/2023: Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day

Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day

[In this column, I will again return to the mini-art-criticism format by discussing three works of art which I have read/watched over the last several months, which I believe are extremely connected to each other. Obviously there are lots of spoilers.]

American Psycho (2000)

"I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine..."

My story parallels those of many other men of my generation. I finally watched American Psycho recently after years of seeing business card memes on the Internet. 

American Psycho is what is known as a "cult classic."

Like many other critics to write about American Psycho, I am haunted by the fear that I may sound as nonsensically bullshitting as its protagonist, stereo aficionado Patrick Bateman, does in the key scene in which he energetically monologues meaningless critical jargon about Huey Lewis and the News while dancing around with an ax. 

This cult-classic critical indie darling...*axe noises*

Column 09/03/2022: Mini-Art-Criticisms: Star Wars, Fellowship of the Ring, There Are Doors, Star Trek The Motion Picture

Mini-Art-Criticisms: Star Wars, Fellowship of the Ring, There Are Doors, Star Trek The Motion Picture

[I am experimenting with various formats in this column as I continue to be quite busy (and also because experimenting with various formats is what this column is all about). This week, I decided to collect some thoughts on a few books and films I have read/watched recently.]

In the last week or so, I have read the following books in their entirety, and watched the following films. The latter is a bit unusual, as I rarely watch films these days. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that they really dovetail in various ways quite nicely.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Or, There Are Weasels Under the Coffee Table: Or, Is 19th Century Liberal Imperialistic Utopianism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Before I get finally and totally buried in the depths of the Dissertating Lifestyle, I present to you, my dear, long-suffering readers, the long-promised, oft-longed-for Deep Space Nine Mega-Post. This is my favorite of the Star Trek series, and so I have, as you might imagine, a fair bit to say.

In Defense of the Awful, Terrible, No-Good Terrifying Alienated Surrealism of the First Two Seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation

Alright, stop the presses: I want to write something in defense of the first two seasons of TNG.

Now, before everyone stones me through the Internet (hundreds upon hundreds of virtual packets of communal sacred violence winging their way through the ether(net) to end the Contagion and reestablish order in society), allow me to explain exactly what I mean, and also what I don't mean.

Most notably, I do not mean that the first two season's of TNG (with the exception of a few episodes) are actually good seasons of television, let alone (Waru avertat) well-written seasons of television. For the most part, the dialogue is stilted, the characters unlikeable, the plots bizarre and frequently incoherent, and the overall setting stultifying to most ordinary forms of drama. On all these fronts, the later seasons of TNG are undoubtedly better.

Nevertheless, I have come to think that, when all is said and done, there is something to be said for the prevailing vibe, the portrait of a people and a universe, the cinematic and fictional and science-fictional qualities of Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and 2. Some of this even emerges out of the otherwise negative qualities of the show--and if I had to use a single word to name the elusive yet omnipresent value offered by these seasons, it would undoubtedly be "surrealism."

Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and (especially) 2 is, frequently, a glorious tour de force of surrealist entertainment, bordering frequently on horror.

Almost everything about the show, the characters, the plots, serves to reinforce this overriding sense of alienated surrealism 

Imagine: the human race, centuries in the future. A vast, powerful starship travelling through the blackness of space, crewed entirely by men and women in spandex jumpsuits and skirts who talk slowly and blankly and seem to be constantly concealing high levels of tension and mutual hostility. The society they live in, everything we see of it, is stamped with the same strange, sterile vacuousness that they themselves display, buttressed by a fanatical, ideological belief in its own absolute moral perfection.

Nevertheless, all is not well in paradise. All the sexuality displayed by the characters is marked by a bizarre combination of the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s liberationism combined with the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s sexism. Most of the character's backstories seem to feature some kind of tragic violence, especially death or estrangement from parents, as well as romantic relationship dysfunction. A number of the crew members seem to obviously dislike one another, but it can be difficult to pin down, because these dislikes are never expressed aloud, since all the characters interact, even when off-duty, with an odd sort of tense formality, like actors in a highschool production of Shakespeare. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact all of their emotions are being constantly monitored by the alien female psychiatrist in the skin-tight jumpsuit seated next to the Captain on the bridge. Her job, besides monitoring the psychological health of the crew, is to emote in an exaggeration fashion on behalf of the unfathomable the alien entities they encounter, breaking out into uncontrollable expressions of others' terror or horror, sadness or joy, as everyone else stands around and impassively watches her. For leisure, our heroes can make use of the perfect AI-created virtual-reality machine helpfully provided for their amusement, a machine that can display a perfect facsimile of any person or scenario and also has the power to create sentient life. They can also sit around their quarters alone and listen to classical music.

These bizarre people, in this bizarre society, are travelling through space into the unknown. This unknown, it seems, largely consists of unfathomably-powerful superbeings bent on judging or controlling or testing the human race, or at least our heroes. Each one of these superbeings, who have no obvious relationship with one another or any larger cosmic order, has the power to bend the very fabric of reality and accomplish incredible feats--and their own nature, purposes, etc, are rarely if ever clear. One of these intelligences puts the human species on trial to prove its worth, one just experiments on them like rats in a maze, one underwrites the arbitrary laws of a hedonistic society, one constructs a perfect artificial environment based on terrible 20th century pulp novel. Their power and purposes are, for the most part, equally unfathomable.

What the hell even is this? Well, for the most part, it's the result of the combination of a number of behind-the-scenes things that didn't work out very well. For Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was an aspirational fable about a perfect evolved human race proving itself worthy at last, reaching ever-higher levels of existence through technology and scientific exploration, while giving a middle-finger to God and all other judgmental superbeings along the way. This didn't work out very well, though, and no one in particular could make sense of it or turn it into drama, so over time a succession of writers did their best to work with this idea, coming up with any number of one-shot high-concept science fiction storylines. The most competent of these by far was Maurice Hurley, whose fingerprints are all over the second season in particular. What he realized more than just about anyone else was that the Enterprise characters, as mostly blank ciphers of power and knowledge and perfection, really worked best (or at least most dramatically) when their power was challenged by superior power, their knowledge was stretched past its limits, their perfection revealed as a sham. So he wrote a number of stories where just this happens; a superior power acts, and our heroes do not understand how or why, nor can they do anything to overcome it: all they can do is escape or submit, and so survive, for a while. 

"Time Squared," perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is essentially a horror story. There is a power, an intelligence, that appears out of nowhere to threaten the Enterprise with destruction: but our heroes never make any sense out of it, what it is, why it's doing what it's doing, or how they can relate to it. Captain Picard, our arbiter of normal reality, is confronted with another version of himself, seemingly thrown six hours back in time, where he lies on his back, unable to focus on the world around him, but screaming in helpless terror, sure only of the need to repeat the cyclical events that brought him here. Picard, our Picard, is terrified: and in a key scene, he admits that despite all evidence, he recognizes nothing of himself in the person he sees. As if to underscore this, in the plot's pivotal moment, he shoots and kills his future self, then pushes the Enterprise to take a seemingly senseless action--and it works. They are all alive, free: for now, until the another inscrutable higher power makes them the object of its attention. 

"Where Silence Has Lease" is perhaps the most outwardly nasty of the episodes in the first two seasons: a horror story where our heroes are trapped in a starless void by a sinister intelligence who experiments on them like lab rats. In one such "experiment," an illusionary version of the Enterprise appears, that when beamed over to is all fun-house mirrors and illusions: our heroes exit one bridge directly onto another, looking through a door and seeing themselves from behind. Then an Enterprise crewmember dies in screaming agony, curled in a fetal position with his eyes wide and staring. Finally, the intelligence listens to Picard explain the mystery of death to two blank, illusionary versions of Data and Troi (the two strange, alien characters of the crew), and releases them again. Victory--of a sort.

 It is not just our heroes who are vulnerable to the terrifying powers of the universe, however, but their whole (supposedly superior) society. In "Conspiracy," the whole structure of the utopian Federation is infiltrated and taken over, without a shot being fired, by fathomless alien parasites who cannot be understood, cannot be negotiated with, but can only be defeated with brutal violence. The Federation is saved, for the moment. Still, they (and things much worse) are out there, waiting. 

The best of these episodes, and in a sense the climax of the whole theme,  is "Q Who?," Maurice Hurley's tour de force, which introduces the Borg, and makes the point emphatically that the Enterprise crew's ideological insistence on their own evolved perfection is a hollow sham in the face of a universe full of deadly powers they can neither control nor understand. It is, again, essentially a horror story. Q, the infinitely-powerful, mocking, judgmental superbeing, says the Enterprise crew are weak and arrogant, and cannot understand or control the universe as it is; and then he proves the point. Picard must beg, literally on bended knee for the help of this, mocking and judgmental but at least interested and sympathetic, superbeing against the fathomless, mindless power of the Borg. Their friendly superbeing has saved the day for them--this time. But the Borg are coming. 

These are (most of) the good versions of this story. There are bad versions as well, mostly (but not always) where Gene Roddenberry himself is calling the shots. "Royale," which has an interesting premise (fathomless superbeings kidnap a crew of astronauts, accidentally kill most of them, and then create an entire illusionary world based on a shitty novel for the one survivor to live out his life in misery), but which is otherwise a badly-paced mess; "Justice," where a race of child-like hedonistic sex-fiends turns out to be protected by an unfathomably powerful machine-god that nonetheless responds submissively to a moralistic lecture by Jean-Luc Picard;"Hide and Q," where Q is defeated and humiliated by yet another moralistic lecture on the perfection of humanity by the aforementioned Jean-Luc Picard; "The Last Outpost," where an ancient superbeing judges Riker worthy after he recites a line from Sun Tzu; et cetera. 

The benefit of this when it works, though, and even often when it doesn't, is that the strangeness, the surreality, never quite leaves you--and many aspects that might otherwise be considered straight-up "bad" can and do aid in that effect. The characters are written badly, taking on contradictory traits, likes, and dislikes, episode to episode and scene to scene, speaking and reacting in ways that no recognizable human person would do: but then, that helps with the sense of unreality, the sense that these are not human beings, not as we know them. Obvious conflicts among characters exist, but seem to have been deliberately edited out (as they often literally were by Gene Roddenberry's rewriting), or else resolved in the strangest possible ways: but we can treat this, too, as a sign of the dysfunction and alienation of a future society. Episodes are often heavily padded and paced glacially--there are shots featuring Captain Picard sitting on the bridge staring off into space and doing nothing; when an action is suggested, it is discussed in much more detail than is necessary; we watch in real time as mundane technological tasks are carried out; et cetera. But this, in a sense, is helpful; we can watch the unreality and strangeness of these characters and their world play out, and have time to focus on it, not merely on the shiny colorful plots and their supposed sense of excitement.

Whatever sense of the world, of Star Trek, we get from these seasons is quite far away from the bright, colorful character action-adventure of the contemporaneous original-cast Star Trek film series; and even from the pulpier, weirder world of TOS (which had its own share of superbeings). This is, genetically and dramatically, an idea of Star Trek that sits the closest, perhaps, to that of Star Trek the Motion Picture: an evolved humanity, composed of blank, unpleasant careerists, makes surreal, trippy contact with beings yet farther along the terrifying path of evolution, with vast intelligence and unfathomable power. A step beyond, and this is an idea of science fiction drawn in large part from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's distancing parable about contemptibly small and petty evolved apes forcibly transformed by an unfathomable alien intelligence toward an isolated, distanced transcendence. Beyond that, in turn, this vision of Star Trek stands a lot more closely to the world of '60s and '70s sci-fi, The Twilight Zone, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke: stories about ideas, about the alienation of man in technological society, very often edging into outright horror.

And isn't there something about all this quite a bit more relevant, in our particular alienated, technological society, than the warm family and political drama of later TNG? The late-TNG and beyond Federation may be less of a utopia, but it is undoubtedly a much nicer place. In DS9, we eventually find, genetic engineering and experimentation is strictly banned--but in TNG Season 2, the Federation itself is carrying on such experiments, and accidentally creating deadly plagues in the bargain; and there is talk of conspiracy at the highest levels of Starfleet...

Later TNG largely replaced all this with stories about recognizably human characters existing in community, and then about politics and drama on a more human scale: cold wars and civil wars and family feuds and coups. This was executed a lot better than anything in the first two seasons of TNG, was a lot more interesting and thought-provoking and even meaningful, most of the time. Because of this it's easy to see the first two seasons as little more than an embryonic version of what was to come, picking out the elements that are the same rather than focusing on the differences--or just dismissing these two seasons altogether. The point of this blog post, though, is that it's worthwhile, also, to acknowledge that if a lot was gained, still something was lost in that transition as well. The first and even more so the second season of TNG were in many ways a recipe for a totally different show, a totally different vision of science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular. A better one? No. But one with an attraction all its own.

So: even if we (reasonably) decide to skip right over the first two seasons of TNG, let's acknowledge, for just a moment, the true surreality, the alienation, the horror, presented all too often in these episodes. Sometimes it is merely laughable, shoddy, obviously fake--but every once in a while, it becomes something more: genuinely disturbing. 

Anxious men in purple spandex sit alone in their padded rooms listening to Mozart, while outside in the darkness and silence limitless intelligences do unimaginable things for reasons no one can fathom--and watch, and judge.

Who can say why anything happens in such a world? Who can say what it means to be a human being in such a society? Causation has broken down, as have ordinary ideas of character and personhood. All there is to do is keep watching the alienated technological patients continuing to travel space, continuing to (hopefully) survive each encounter with their terrifying alienated universe.

Caveat spectator.

Note: if this interests you, I wrote a much longer & more comprehensive piece on TNG a few years ago which can be found here, as well as a shorter piece reviewing a few random episodes here. 

Pakleds and Klingons and Riker Rapidly Losing His Mind, Oh My!

So once again, after many years (months? minutes? I dunno, folks, I'm bad at math), the much-heralded, much-longed-for return of the Nathan Israel Smolin/Captain Peabody Star Trek Oral(?) History Blog Post Series Extravaganza! 

Continuing where we left off, here are a few mini-reviews of episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation. As with my TOS reviews, the idea is to skip over the most famous ("Best Of") the series, and instead highlight a few episodes that are not on any big lists, but which showcase aspects of the series as a whole, its strengths and weaknesses and special qualities. So without further ado, let's begin with one of those Weaknesses I just mentioned.

Star Trek as Imperialist Literature

I've watched and read and thought about Star Trek a lot more than is probably healthy, but here's something that only very recently occurred to me, at least in an explicit form.

Star Trek, of course, has its origins in the art and literature of Imperialism, in the first place from the naval and colonial literature of the British Empire ("a tall ship and a star to steer her by"), in the second place from Westerns and other literature of the Age of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, and in the third place from Cold War, Kennedy-era art about superpowers and proxy wars. Yet I hadn't noticed that even in in-universe terms, there are literally NO non-Imperialist powers, and virtually no non-Imperialist entities, in the Star Trek universe. That is, there are no governmental entities that are not aimed essentially at unlimited expansion, or could not expand without limit.

The majority of both the villains and the allies of the Star Trek universe are single-species Empires whose raison d'etre is unlimited colonization and conquest by this single species over vast swathes of space and other species: hence the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Empire, the Cardassian Union, etc. This much is obvious.

What is less so is that the Federation is also a specifically Imperialist state, only one based on equality and liberal democracy and the extension of these principles. As the various series make clear, the Federation is constantly engaged in expansion, through exploration, colonization, and the frequent induction of new member planets. "First contact" with other species is carried out with the intention of eventually making them part of the Federation; and in many episodes we see new planets in the process of being absorbed into the Federation, with Bajor in Deep Space Nine only the most prominent example. The Prime Directive and the general Federation refusal to engage in wars of conquest is, at least in theory, a limitation on this--but in practice, it hardly seems to prevent or even slow down Federation expansion. A number of wars in the Star Trek universe, for instance, seem to have originated in the encroachment of new Federation colonies on the borders of other powers.

The United Federation of Planets is, in design, a version of the United States of America (down to the "Federation Constitution" with its "Guarantees" a la the Bill of Rights and its strict egalitarian policies banning caste systems and other non-egalitarian social structures in member worlds)--but it is a vision of the USA during its period of Manifest Destiny, that is, as a constantly expanding Imperialist entity aimed at a constantly-expanding "frontier." There is no inherent limitation to this expansion at all (such as a Galactic UN or any kind of necessary tie to a particular territory or culture), and no larger whole that the Federation considers itself subject to; in the long run, there is no reason besides force of arms and diplomatic policy why it would not absorb the Klingons, the Romulans, and every one of its rivals. In fact, if there's an underlying progressive arc to be discerned in the history of the Star Trek universe, its telos would seem to be the entire Galaxy (and beyond) as part of the Federation.

In the long run, as all the Star Trek shows make clear, the Federation, with its egalitarian policies and purported policy of non-interference, is simply far more effective and successful at Imperialism than any of its rivals. The Klingons, after all, no matter how much territory they may conquer, are still all finally bound to their sacred homeworld of Qu'on'os and the particular traditions and culture and religion of their species--and all these things are, in the end, limitations to the indefinite extension of their political power. The Federation, though, has no such equivalents.

There are apparently independent planets in the Galaxy, to be sure, though they get relatively little attention. Most of them are clear targets of the Federation's expansion, future member worlds to be enticed with economic and cultural and military benefits. A few are "neutral worlds" that exist on the margins of larger powers and generally are portrayed as havens for crime and the like. But even most of the "independent nations" we see are also expansionist Empires of various sorts. DS9's Dominion is a multi-species Imperialist federation with unlimited expansion as its goal. The Ferengi are an example of economic Imperialism, their goal unlimited business expansion and exploitation of resources. The Orion Syndicate is an expansionist organized crime group founded by a single species but incorporating many and operating within the network of Imperialist powers that dominate the Galaxy. The Borg, of course, are the ultimate "absorbers" and "assimilators" of species and people. And so on and so forth.

The Star Trek Galaxy, then, is dominated by dueling Imperialist expansionist powers, and everyone else has to find their place in the margins. Independence is, seemingly, scarcely an option--in Deep Space Nine, Bajor really has little choice but to join up with the Federation, since independence (as many episodes make clear) would immediately lead to annexation by a far less attractive Imperialist power (the Cardassian Empire). The Federation would not (and did not before) protect an independent Bajor--the price of safety is assimilation. The formation of any larger institution or whole over and beyond the Federation and its rivals is never even contemplated.

This is a dynamic that, to its credit, Deep Space Nine seems to get, and plays with a lot. The best example is in the speech I've posted here (which is a slight spoiler), as well as in the various non-Federation characters we see.

The normal critique of the Federation you tend to see is that it is economically Communist or really deep down violent and repressive (a la DS9's Section 31) or even just human-dominated and speciesist (a la Star Trek VI). I don't think any of these things are necessarily true--the Federation as portrayed in the various series and movies is clearly very committed to its egalitarian principles and codes of individual rights and principles of tolerance and multi-species cooperation and its very liberal-contractual theory of non-interference. But is the Federation intrinsically and by definition Imperialist? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. There's really no question.

Silence: An Exercise in Film Criticism and Cultural Jeremiad

Note: Every possible kind of spoiler exists herein. Proceed at your own risk.

The elusive, controversial American Catholic filmmaker Martin Scorcese spent roughly thirty years trying to adapt Silence, a novel by the equally elusive and controversial Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo. After momentous efforts and many false starts, the film was finally released last year, to general bemusement and a box office take of roughly 16 million (on a 40 million budget). The film’s distributors, perhaps hoping to avoid controversy, promoted the film very little, and released it only in a heavily limited number of theaters for a very short run. The film was ignored by all major cinematic awards, garnering no Golden Globe nominations and only one Academy Award nomination (for best cinematography), which it did not win. Although it had its vociferous defenders, including most top film critics, it also garnered its share of controversy and vicious criticism, from a number of very different sources. For all intents and purposes, the film sank like a stone, leaving few ripples in its wake.

Still, I saw it, and I also followed the buzz surrounding the film fairly closely; and I found both the film and the responses it provoked almost equally fascinating. I read the novel the film is based on a number of years ago, and, as with Scorsese it has stayed with me ever since; and this in turn inspired me to read a moderate amount about the historical situations that inspired the novel, as well as other works of its author, Shusaku Endo. I also come at both film and novel from the perspective of a practicing Catholic who studies intellectual history academically and also (while by no means being an expert) reads a great deal of Catholic theology, present and (mostly) past. All this has given me, I think, a perspective on film and book different from the average American. It is my basic contention, then, that the film, being what it is, has a great deal to tell us about the perspectives and basic orientations of the people who watched it. And this in turn has a great deal to tell us about the current state of our society.

The Next Generation of Television; or, It's Tough Being the Bastard Child of a Legend; or, How Gene Roddenberry Destroyed Star Trek; or, How Michael Piller Saved Star Trek; or, One Big, Happy Family; or, Meat Loaf and Mashed Potatoes

When last we encountered the intrepid hero of our articles--the mythic property "Star Trek"--he found himself at last in a truly enviable position.  Having braved the dangerous world of big-screen cinema, he had carved out a place for himself as a fun, character-driven franchise for the 1980s.  Star Trek IV, to no one's real surprise, was an absolute mega-hit, reaching an unprecedented audience of ordinary, movie-going Americans and thoroughly delighting them with its clever character comedy about a crew of misfits and their adventures in the contemporary world.  This was a film that anyone--emphasis anyone--could understand and enjoy, from the most fervent Trekkie to the most hardened Queen fan.  Star Trek was now an indelible part of the cultural mainstream--and it was also on a roll.

Faced with such unprecedented success, the studio rubbed its metaphorical hands together, and contemplated what to do next.  That there would be yet another big-screen Star Trek adventure was all but a given--and in a future post, we will consider that film and its sequel in turn--but Star Trek now was so popular that executives began to wonder if its audiences could not, perhaps, handle even more Star Trek than this.  Perhaps it was time to diversify the franchise, and take it back to its roots.

Star Trek was going to return to television.

There was, however, one big problem with this: or rather, a whole set of cascading problems, all leading to one extremely unpleasant conclusion.  First and foremost, the cast and crew of Star Trek, now much older and much richer, were not at all willing to return to the back-breaking 14-hour days of television, nor did the studio have any intentions of not making more films in order to let them do so.  If Star Trek was going to return to television, then, it would have to be on the basis of an entirely new cast, and thus probably an entirely new crew and setting.  This, however, presented its own set of problems; for Star Trek the film series had, over time, come to rely almost entirely on the strength of these original characters and their associated actors.  Star Trek IV had been a character comedy; and what it showed was that Kirk, Spock, and company were now so iconic and so beloved that they could be plunked down in 1980s San Francisco and still hold audiences riveted.  Casting a new crew, with new characters and new actors, would be a massively difficult undertaking, and would face significant opposition, not only from the hardcore fans for whom the original cast were gods of a sort, but also from the public at large, for whom Star Trek had become indelibly linked with these particular names and faces.  Even if this problem were overcome, any revival of Star Trek would also face an extraordinary, uphill battle in establishing itself as a television show; for by the 1980s, science fiction was, once again, basically extinct on television--meaning that any new Star Trek show would have to rely largely on the large and growing Star Trek fanbase, and not the general television-watching public, for its success.  This, though, presented its own problems; for the original show's fervent fanbase had watched and rewatched and scrutinized the original 79 hours of TOS so many times, and with such devotion, that virtually every deviance from the original would be noticed and criticized.

Hence, the studio quickly concluded, any new Star Trek show would have to possess some utterly undeniable imprimatur of true Star Trekness--something that would ensure that both the general public and the most hardcore fan alike would accept it, not just as a random sci-fi or drama show, to be judged on its own terms, but as Star Trek.

Faced with this dilemma, the studio, finally, was brought to take a very difficult and very dangerous, step; they went to Gene Roddenberry, and asked him to make the show for them.