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.
Thesis #1: Atmosphere is Everything
Believe it or not, I was not in fact the person to suggest to my brother and sister-in-law that they watch Star Trek Generations. It was my brother's suggestion, based both on the acknowledged fact of my Trek fandom, but also on his own memories of the film from childhood. When you watch a movie as a small child, details are blurred together, plot points lost beyond recall, plot holes ignored or forgotten, even characters frequently somewhat hazy. But the works of art that stick with you, or at least those that stick with me, are those that have a clear, definite, consistent atmosphere.
By atmosphere I mean that most intangible, but most essential aspect of life: the feel, emotional and material and even intellectual, of people, places, images, faces, voices. This is the stuff of which our memories and selves and dreams are made of.
Atmosphere in this sense is a lot like personality, and indeed indelibly tied to it. When we know and love a person, we are not merely loving physical features, locations, mannerisms, expressions, or even the emotional reaction to all these things elicited in ourselves--we are loving that one indelible, overpowering thing that is expressed through all of these things, and in theory could be expressed and will be expressed through an enormous variety of visual, physical, and temporal phenomena over the course of our life and theirs. As Augustine pointed out, the human person is not merely a thing like a mathematical object; it is more like a piece of music, extended and developed in time, out of innumerable notes somehow directed and harmonized together into a single reality.
The best works of art are those that have a personality of this sort: a consistent feel and emotional line and identity expressed through music, visuals, acting, and story. Such works can contain and thrive off of shocking incongruities and breaches in mechanical logic and construction.
I confess that I have utterly despised practically all "fandom" art criticism I have seen over the past decade. Practically all of it has consisted, either of gushing affirmation of each and every product of fandom art, or else the incessant pointing out of "plot holes" and mechanical errors in "storytelling" or "plot mechanics." Such art criticism treats a work of art as a technological machine governed by a rigid set of technical constraints and goals, and thus makes of artistry a kind of technical discipline like engineering. This is from my perspective an enormous and monstrous error. Art aspires, not to the kind of mechanical efficiency characteristic of a tool or a drug, but to the excess and harmonious multiplicity characteristic of a personality.
This is in reality what I love most about Star Trek Generations: that it truly has a personality, that it has atmosphere. This is a film about old age, about loss, about regret, and about death; and it expresses this not only in its storyline and themes, but also in a thousand indelible particularities: most of all through the beautiful, surrealistic visual style of the film, which takes the familiar sets of Star Trek TNG and bathes them in the overwhelming, darkening splendor of sunset, and through its acting, closeups of the faces of aging, regretful men overcome by emotion, William Shatner and Malcom McDowell and Brent Spiner and above all Patrick Stewart.
In both of these aspects the film feels not only out-of-step with current entertainment trends, but practically archaic. Marvel movies all have the same "franchise" visual style, bright colors and super-suits and handsome actors in designer clothing standing around large brightly-lit rooms--in other words, the style of advertising. Even at its best, though, much recent franchise art has centered around what can only be called "television design"--that is, straightforward, unchanging, consistent design based largely around characters and settings rather than particular themes and stories.
A recent example of truly excellent television style and design is Strange New Worlds, which brilliantly accepts the '60s Mid-Century Modern style and colors of TOS and fleshes them out in glorious detail, in perfect keeping with the requirements of an ongoing episode television show, but with little or no real variation for tone and style and theme and particular stories. A much less effective example is the recent Star Trek Picard Season Three, torn between a somewhat shallow idea of "filmic cinematography" that mostly consists of turning down all the lights and an overpowering need to recreate past Star Trek television design work. TNG similarly had a very direct, easily-grasped visual style--but also a large number of truly stylish directors who did shape their filming and lighting for the requirements of the particular story.
David Carson, the director of Star Trek Generations, was one of these television directors; and in making the first TNG movie, he quite obviously decided that the thing to do in finally being let loose to make a whole motion picture was to go even farther stylistically than ever before, to make that style particular to this story and its themes, to make it extreme. The idea that one might make a motion picture based on a television property and above all desire to take the style of the show and twist and bend it for the one story to be told in this one film, seems, in the contemporary scene, truly bizarre.
Star Trek Generations is not an enormously well-written a movie; it has a set of themes, and a central, somewhat clumsy plot device that literally exemplifies those themes, and a number of scenes where characters state those themes fairly directly. What actually makes those themes effective, however, is not so much the writing as David Carson's filmmaking, striving to convey tone and emotion and atmosphere through a thousand overpowering, surrealistic touches. And it is this which makes me remember it, remember its atmosphere and emotions and indelible images, with a strange, nostalgia-like wistfulness, both waking and in dreams, above every other TNG movie.
Thesis #2: Give Your Characters a Story
I just insulted the writers of Star Trek Generations, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, by calling it a not particularly well-written movie. I will now complement them by saying that, in the basic choices they made for the very first Star Trek The Next Generations movie, I have enormous admiration for both their courage and their wisdom.
Generations was the first big-screen movie based on the most popular television show in America: and again, I am amazed, in comparing it with the current generation of popular entertainment, about what it chose to do in making that step.
Put most simply, the writers of Star Trek Generations decided that the thing to do, when faced with a big-screen motion picture, was to tackle bigger and more potent themes and more drastically challenge and develop and alter the characters.
These are, frankly, stunning ideas--and also somewhat counterintuitive. Television is in general terms a more character-based medium than film, thanks to its greater amount of time, repetitive episodic format and less time and budget for experimentation. In making a film, then, over the past few decades it would seem that the generally-accepted idea is to give the characters more of a backseat, find a compelling plot with powerful visual and cinematic elements that would make an impact on the big screen, and call it a day.
This is, more or less, what Star Trek First Contact does. It takes the Borg, a popular villain from the show, and uses them for the first time to their full visual potential; while at the same time totally contradicting their original thematics by embodying them in a preening, sexy, visually-striking "cinematic" villain, Borg Queen. The film's central character arcs are given a relative backseat, and mostly consist of character reactions to this central plot and villain. Picard (who has by far the best arc in the film) has a visceral, easily-grasped arc moving from an obsession with desired revenge to a measure of acceptance to fortuitously achieved revenge; Data has a much less effective arc moving from sensual temptation by the (bizarrely "sexy") Borg Queen to apparently effortless, but cinematically surprising, rejection of that temptation. They are also both "status quo" and "external conflict"-type arcs, typical settled characters disrupted by hostile antagonistic forces and then restored again by the defeat of those antagonistic forces in time for the next film.
Star Trek Generations, however, does what very few franchise films have ever done: it allows its characters to drastically change from within, based overwhelmingly on internal conflict, and in the process it makes permanent changes to its characters that will have to be followed up down the line.
On the one hand, Data's arc in Star Trek Generations has only thematic connections with the film's main villain and main plot. He decides, based on his own reasoning, to have an emotion chip installed, thereby altering his character forever. His arc for the remainder of the film consists overwhelmingly of his own internal conflict with and over these emotions. External events and the actions of the film's villain shape these conflicts, but they do not define them, and the defeat of the villain does not end them. Indeed, the very point of this arc, as driven home by its final, beautiful scene, is that Data has to learn, not to defeat or overcome his emotions, but accept and live with them and the distress and disturbance and conflict they occasion--for the rest of his life.
Picard's arc is somewhat less effective in the base sense that it is set off, not by an internal character choice, but by a rather random external event: the unrelated, off-screen death of his uncle and nephew. Nevertheless, once it has been triggered, the good Captain's emotional and personal conflict again has nothing at all to do with the villain or his actions, but is an internal process of regret and grieving and loss and sorrow over his choice to embrace career and so lose out on family and children and the continuation of his family name and tradition, giving way finally to acceptance of these hard realities.
What makes the film boldest of all is the way in which it chooses to center itself almost entirely around these character arcs and themes. It would be truer to say that the villain himself is yet another thematic echo, a minor character undergoing a less effective version of our heroes' emotional conflict, than to treat him as the driver of the film's underlying plot. He is another lonely old man filled with regret over missed opportunities, who merely happens to be hamming it up a lot while reacting in a way that sets up a few mechanical plot crises.
Then, too, the film takes Captain Kirk and for the first time since The Wrath of Khan dares to actually treat him as what that film revealed him as: a selfish, lonely, shallow old man. The film is hated most of all among fandom for bringing Kirk back only to kill him off--and I certainly see the point. His death in plot terms is entirely superfluous, accomplishes little, and is not given the kind of emotional weight as Spock's in TWOK.
Still, the film's overall perspective on Kirk is straight out of TWOK, and ends in the only possible way that the unregenerate Kirk of that film could end. After TWOK, as the other films demonstrated indelibly, Kirk had not taken the opportunity to change, had not accepted finality or limitation or death, but had gone on living the shallow, lonely life of a Boomer hero. Generations' Kirk, while less well-written, manages to convey a very straightforward (if unflattering) character arc in not all that much film. Kirk is a lonely old man who has lived only for career and so, as our film begins, has been left with nothing but an empty, miserable life and the desire to relive past glory. The only options left to him, then, are to live in the past, in pure, egotistical fantasy represented by the Nexus, or to reject that, accept his choices and their consequences, have one last bid at glory, and die. The film grants him the dignity of that choice, and mercifully rewards it with death.
Kirk cannot move on from his shallow heroics; but the universe, and all of us, must. If Kirk cannot change, then a meaningful, at least somewhat sacrificial death is the only possible salvation for him. It is not Spock's regenerating death of love in TWOK; but it is, at least, a way for Kirk, as he says, to "make a difference" again, and have some "fun" one last time.
The film's real "villain" and plot driver is not Soran, or even Kirk, but the "Nexus," which is merely a barely-disguised plot contrivance to explore these themes in a sightly science-fictionish way. While appreciably surreal and dream-like, it is not really all that effective: but again, what fills me with admiration is the writer's incredible courage in choosing a central sci-fi plot mechanic that only serves to further underscore these characters and their emotional and internal conflicts. What was the last blockbuster franchise film to do this? Does anyone even remember?
How, I ask, could I possibly not love a Star Trek motion picture that takes the two most popular characters from one of the most popular television shows of all time and presents them as emotional wrecks who can barely hold themselves together enough to enlist the help of an emotional-wreck cultural legend to defeat the film's emotional-wreck villain and die?
Most of all, I long for a world where pop culture blockbusters actually believed that the way to treat franchise entertainment was to center films on the internal emotional conflicts of their characters, change them forever, and bring them to their final ends.
Thesis #3: The Simulation is Not the Territory
If Generations is blamed for anything among fandom, it is for two ultimate sins against fandom culture and its obsession with the worship of symbols: killing Kirk, and killing the Enterprise. Fans do not like it when you kill their gods, or indeed change them all that much. Hence, of course, the current generation of "nostalgia" entertainment, which reached perhaps its genuine peak with the recent third season of Star Trek Picard.
Star Trek Picard Season 3, I want to emphasize, is really pretty good. It tells a coherent story that is in some genuine way about the characters and their emotions. While it belongs to the genre of nostalgia entertainment, it is something close to the best of that genre, not the worst. This makes it quite useful as exemplar.
Perhaps the most exemplifying single moment of this exemplifying season came when the entire cast of Star Trek The Next Generation, including a resurrected Data, trooped onto the meticulously reconstructed bridge of the Enterprise, destroyed in Generations, and took their original stations.
If viewer numbers and online commentary is to be believed, this moment was reacted to with fervent pleasure by millions of fans, casual and hard-core, around the word. And this moment, I confess, filled me with visceral horror.
I have pondered long and hard over my reaction to this kind of thing, which has been growing more and more prevalent in popular entertainment, which apparently is extremely popular with the general viewing audience, but which, as I said, seems to have precisely the opposite effect on me that it has on everyone else. I had a similar reaction, if not even stronger, to the season finale of Strange New Worlds featuring an extended, central, almost line-for-line reenactment of the classic TOS episode "Balance of Terror." And the less said about the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy the better.
I find this puzzling on both sides because I am, in general, someone rather obsessed with memory, recollection, and history, both personally and professionally. I certainly have nothing against nostalgia, nothing against continuations, sequels, franchises, shared universes, and so forth. Indeed, I glory in them.
So why do these modern examples fill me with nameless dread, horror, and a deep, haunting feeling of disappointment?
Upon reflection, I think the answer is this: that these instances do not represent nostalgia or memory at all, but rather something like its opposite.
When you remember, when you remember a person, a place, a work of art, anything existing in time, especially when you remember a specific time, you are remembering something that, per the discussion of atmosphere above, is above all particular. Like a person, a good work of art is by nature irreplaceable. To remember is above all to seek after and glory in this irreplaceable, atmospheric quality in things, which is above all their actuality, their being.
More and more, however, as Baudrillard recognized long ago, we live in a culture of simulation: which Baudrillard in America defined precisely by analogy with rebaptism, that is, the attempt to repeat something which is by its nature unrepeatable, and the belief that this faux repetition is in some way better or more real or at least more desirable than the thing itself. Simulation in this sense is really the precise opposite of memory, and the opposite of nostalgia.
Whether or not we accept this full definition, we can recognize, I think, that what underlies many recent works of art, starting with the Star Wars sequel trilogy but going far beyond it, is the desire to recreate an older work of art, not merely to tell another story with the same people, have them go on to have other adventures, but to somehow, impossibly, redo a single moment of time, to position the same people in the same place doing the same thing, and declare that it is really the same. This is, artistically, a very strange thing: like looking at a fuzzy picture and thinking it's a picture of your family, but finding that it is actually a picture of a herd of cows, or seeing a face in a crowd, thinking it is your wife, but finding that it is a complete stranger: or, indeed, like dreaming of being back in the church on the day of your wedding, with a different bride, and different guests, and a hundred tiny details not quite right. This is what I mean by saying that there is something intrinsically dreamlike about all art based around simulation.
I watched Balance of Terror as a child, many times; to see a bunch of actors, playing similar, but not quite right, characters, on similar, but not quite right, sets, saying similar, but not quite right, lines, does not fill me with warm fuzzy feelings. It is at best merely disappointing, a failure to reach a remembered goal; at worst it is simply a nightmare.
To bring things around back to Star Trek Generations, I appreciate very much that what I laid out above is, in fact, almost precisely the moral of the film. Kirk, Picard, and Soran are all tempted by the Nexus, which has the ability to "transcend" time by allowing people to infinitely relive and repeat illusory versions of any moment in their past, or indeed any potential moment in their past. This overpowering drug allows Kirk to relive his brief time with a particular lover, and leap a horse over a fake ravine again and again; it allows Picard to live out a fake life with the wife and children he never had. It allows them, so to speak, to have their cake and eat it, too; to enjoy the life and self and "fun" of having chosen career first and foremost, while at the same time enjoying what they sacrificed in making those choices.
In other words, it does precisely what simulations as I have discussed them above do: it allows us to replace the actual, indelible, unrepeatable persons and times and places of our life with repeatable, consequence-free, and so ultimately unreal and meaningless simulations. In other words, it replaces life with the Internet.
Thesis #4: Time Is The Fire in Which We Burn
In Star Trek Generations, we have one fundamental model of what a franchise film can be. The theme of the film is time, the change and death it brings, and whether this is fundamentally good, to be accepted, or evil, to be resisted and rejected at all costs. And in its treatment of its story and characters and setting, it shows one model of how to unfold a story and setting and characters within time. Characters must change, must develop, as Data develops, in precisely the positive, but difficult way in which his character always aspired to in his quest to become more human. They must also, eventually, die, and not come back, as Kirk dies and goes to his rest and does not come back. Places and settings must be destroyed, as the Enterprise-D is destroyed, and their passing accepted.
Alas, this vision was rejected--and replaced with a much shallower one. Hence, in consequent films, Data's emotion chip was all but ignored or explained away, allowing him to stay precisely the same as in the series. Picard, far from accepting aging, became an invincible action hero. And (with a very few exceptions) none of the characters developed or grew or lost anything ever again.
Again, I consider myself second to none as a fan of Star Trek, and indeed a fan even of these characters. But this is not how genuine love is expressed. When one loves a person, one wants to see them develop, grow, unfold, and in that unfolding remain themselves and be brought to their proper fulfillment. The very last thing one wants is to see them merely left as perpetual might-have-beens, frozen in a single unfulfilled moment, never reaching the end: or rather, the very last thing one wants is to see them simulated, replaced with a timeless, infinitely repeatable illusion.
Thus, to conclude, what fills me with barely-disguised fear and discomfort about the entire current era of franchise entertainment is precisely what seems to fill others with joy. That in its rush to find and simulate every indelible work of art and character and setting and story within Star Trek as I once knew and loved it, it will in fact merely replace it all with simulations, and in so doing sully it. Star Trek Picard killed Picard, and then brought him back to life as a simulated synthetic version of himself; Data died in Nemesis, the last Star Trek movie, and then Star Trek Picard brought him back to life, twice, in three seasons. The Star Wars sequel trilogy strove to repeat every object and character, even the central saga arc, from the OT, and in so doing destroyed all the original significance of these events and these characters and their choices.
Again: I am above all else a person preoccupied with memory. And if the desire of memory is to somehow reach a thing as it really and truly was, in its actuality, in time, the fear of memory is that all that actuality and being and atmosphere and savor will be finally lost, replaced by pale, unreal shadows. And that is what I fear from popular entertainment.
This fear is more psychological than real, thankfully. For there are real things, unrepeatable things, and every day brings an infinity more such. And even trivial works of art have a certain reality, and can be enjoyed and known in that original reality, however much they are simulated.
So whenever I get too annoyed or upset or horrified by the current generation of entertainment, I can always watch Star Trek Generations one more time.
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