I exploded Stephen’s spaceship moments from arrival on the Desert
Planet with a smuggled load of fresh water. I used the antimatter bomb I
had purchased from a shady ex-Federation weapons scientist, and just before
he entered the glow of the atmosphere his whole vessel turned a dull orange
and flew apart in a swirl of white pixels. This was revenge for his
betraying our carefully hammered-out agreement to divide the interstellar
black-market in unrefined dilithium, and revenge was indeed sweet.

This game is our latest obsession, our most current technique for
escaping the consequences and the ethical relevance of day-to-day life. We
cross into the world of this game, as we have crossed into the world of so
many others, and we shed the kind, thoughtful, honor-coded,
categorical-imperative-driven and secular-Christian virtue that our
parents, schools and neighbors have worked so hard to inculcate in us. This particular game came from the Web, and it takes place in the
underbelly of the squeaky-clean “Star Trek” universe, a universe of
smugglers, arms dealers and unpredictable idealists. The temporal and
spatial anomalies, the inter-species romances and the chance to save
backwater civilizations that are so much a part of the Enterprise’s
experience are few and far between here. Instead we accumulate
practically unimaginable wealth; we hone our cutthroat bargaining and business
skills; and (as I have described) we blow each other up.

Entertainment like this really has no boundaries. We take a
deliberate step by crossing into it, but once we’ve cast off the restraint
that held us at a distance from its playful space, the way back into the
responsible everyday world is no longer clear. The game seeps into the
time that we pretend to work, and eat, and plan, and socialize. When we
were playing 3-D battle chess I learned to dream about it, anticipating
Stephen’s countermoves and planning openings for the next day. At parties
we would move through living rooms according to the laws governing knights:
two steps forward and one to the right, finding ourselves in who-knew-which
tangle of kids discussing the impeachment, or the new DeLillo book, or
where they were when they heard Jerry died, or — if the kids were younger — Cobain.
When I destroyed the water-smuggling ship, Stephen lost not only the
black-market price of the goods, the depreciated value of his vehicle and
the life of a scrupulously crafted avatar, but also the chance to be taken
seriously when we bicker about who’s a faster driver, about who obeys the
traffic laws a little too exactly.

“Yo, what took you so long, asshole? ‘Boy Meets World’ in 30
seconds.” This is the problem: an everyday afternoon TV schedule that you
had better not be late for. Stephen was not angry, but he can’t pass up a chance to criticize. At first I could think of no defense:

“Why don’t you shut up? Where’s the popcorn?”

“Popcorn? Why don’t you fucking get home in time to make your own?”

Then I remembered the great coup I had won above the surface of
the Desert Planet and I cashed in on it to terrific effect.

“Get home in time? Listen, at least I don’t explode for no obvious
reason two seconds before pulling into the driveway.”

At this point my roommate’s impatience ceased to be a personal
affront and became just one of a long list of pitiable qualities, a
reminder of my strategic superiority. I was no longer threatened by his
competent fashion sense (in contrast to my own) or his bottomless
fund of insults and obscenity. Stephen’s very impulsiveness became a
reassurance that the hyperspace shipping routes were safe for my own
trans-galactic monopoly, that in our squabbles of one-upmanship I would
always have a rejoinder.

But risks and reassurances like these are nothing compared to our
first experiments in joyful mutual destruction, such as when we used to
play Marathon. When we were freshmen, a guy named Ian knew how to download
games from a site in California. He came over to the apartment every
couple of days to help us get set up: first Marion, who he had a crush on,
and then Louisa, her roommate, and then Stephen and Leo and me. The girls
soon lost interest (both in Ian and in the game) but Stephen and Leo and I
became enthralled. As few as one or as many as 10 people could enter a
simulated maze inhabited by homicidal aliens equipped with machine guns and
disintegrator rays. We were at a delicate age, prey to the contingencies
of early college love-affairs and responsible for the first time for the
serious organization and delineation of our own lives: work and play,
friendship and desire, rivalry and hatred. Play was through the school’s
ethernet system, so everyone could sit at a computer in his own room,
ganging up on the aliens.

“I’ve got napalm! Look out, Leo. Oh shit, now you’ve got it all
over yourself.” I made some of the first discoveries in the world of the game Marathon — including the notoriously powerful napalm launcher — but never quite learned to control many of them.

“Yo, what the fuck are you doing. Look, I’m dying.”

When a character had absorbed too many bullets, fragments of
shrapnel or disintegrator hits, the animation on his screen would grow
surreal, suffuse with red and finally go blank. If he wanted to get back
in the game he had to log back on. And the other players had to approve
the log-on if a game was already in progress.

“Yo, let me sign on, dude.” Victim of my clumsiness, Leo was now dead.

“No way, Leo. Look, I’m about to win.” Ian’s competitive streak
was graceless and explicit. After a while we stopped inviting him over.

“Yo, don’t be an asshole,” Leo pleaded.

“Hold on, I’m about to waste these guys. PLOW!”

“Dude, you gotta let me on. You come over my house, use my
roommate’s computer, now you won’t let me in the game.”

“Why are you such a pussy, Leo?”

It didn’t take long for the aliens themselves to become a
distraction in the increasingly serious business of annihilating one
another. Stephen and Leo battled every night, refusing to play in the same
room, bellowing at one another through two sets of open doors. Then they rehashed the previous night’s duel at lunch. By this time Stephen had found
out that Leo’d slept with Jessica who worked at the bookstore, and although
Stephen had no right to be jealous or protective (since she’d shot him down
simply and politely and never spoken to him again), the game was not
exactly all in fun.

“By the way, Leo, I found the atomic land mine again, so tonight I’m
going to make you cry.”

“Dude, shut the fuck up,” replied Leo, bored.

“No, I mean it. I’m gonna booby trap the second level where you’ll
never find it. If you don’t stay the fuck off of the second level you’re
gonna be toast.”

“Just shut up. You’re so full of shit your eyes are turning brown.”

This particular game did not seem to encourage moderate, tasteful
speech. In fact, I’ve never heard such loud, prolonged obscenity outside
of Leo’s telephone calls with his family. In any case, after a while the
calls home were just another game. Instead of napalm he could ask about
his brother’s torturous junior-high love life, about his mother’s tedious
job. After a certain amount of abuse his family members would hang up on
him: kick him out of the game.

But as Jessica who worked in the bookstore disappeared from our
lives again, our interest in Marathon faded. Plus we found some kids from
Villanova who could kill all of us (working as a team) in less than
90 seconds every time we played. I was never much good at the game,
and when we met the ‘Nova kids I had started doing the reading for my
philosophy class again, so there was less time for practice, but Leo
especially was at the top of his form, killing Stephen and me predictably
every time. He had learned how to speed up the aliens, and could take on
as many as six at once. Leo was the “goddamned KING of fucking Marathon,”
the cyber-athlete we all tried to be.

The guys from ‘Nova blew him up with a recoilless rifle in less
than a minute, and he walked out of his room stunned and ashamed. I never
even fired a shot. That was the end of Marathon for us.

The end of the rest of the story is the water-smuggling debacle,
and the present search for a new game. After a while one wins not only a
great victory in a given game, but even bragging rights to the whole
territory of that game. Out of Stephen’s disgusting mouth it is not
unusual to hear, “Yeah, but I’ll make you my little bitch in Battle Chess!”
In some obscure way this is good and proper, but it makes the search for
new games constant and insatiable. For Chanukah I just bought him a
remaindered copy of Myst, and also he found something called Moto-Racer
pre-installed on his new computer. He’s been having some trouble with job
applications and his thesis, and he’s been a little down on himself. Right
now he’s in his room, shouting again and again, “I SUCK AT MOTO-RACER,” and
giggling when Marion tells him to shut up. I worry about this, but I also
suspect that he’s trying to hustle me.

Yep, he’s gay. In an interview in New York magazine this weekend, Zachary Quinto, the 34-year-old actor who’s made himself a nerd icon over the years with his roles in “Heroes” and “Star Trek,” officially identified himself as “a gay man.”

What makes Quinto’s disclosure unique isn’t that he’s finally acknowledged his sexuality. It’s that his announcement came after nearly a decade of high-profile success — and consistently terse refusals to discuss his private life. Just a year ago, while he was performing in the revival of “Angels in America” and speaking out passionately for the Trevor Project, he told the New York Times, “The fact that these things are such hot-button issues right now, socially and politically, I would much rather talk about that than talk about who I sleep with. I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, ‘Let’s talk about something that matters.’”

A still from “Star Trek: The Animated Series”

Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave. Or he would be if he had one; his ashes were shot into space in 1997. (Wait, I’m confused. Does that mean he’s always spinning in his grave?) With Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry (Nurse Chapel in the original “Star Trek”), now both dead, control over the “Star Trek” franchise has devolved onto a slithery nest of interlocking corporate interests. Which accounts for a troubling press release I received on Friday, announcing the creation of something called “Star Trek Live.”

Although the “Trek” franchise presumably has renewed Hollywood viability after this summer’s lively and successful J.J. Abrams prequel — the 11th “Star Trek” movie overall — it long ago entered a decadent phase of creative and marketing metastasis: Spinoffs producing spinoffs, actors becoming directors becoming authors. (I’m still waiting for a film version of “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” or a Web-only series based on William Shatner’s co-authored “Trek” novels. Somebody’s probably working on them.)

That provides some context for the genesis of “Star Trek Live.” But what the hell is it, exactly? My first guess, while cagily inspecting a press release that’s crammed with merchandising buzzwords and light on specifics, was that somebody who hadn’t been reading the paper lately was following through on some three-year-old scheme to launch a “Star Trek” Broadway musical. Now, that sounds like a pop-culture disaster of heroic and delicious proportions, so I’m sorry to report it isn’t happening. With discretionary spending in free fall and the recent closure of “Shrek: The Musical,” Hollywood studios are backing away from the Great White Way as an ancillary revenue stream.

No, “Star Trek Live” is something else, “an interactive stage show” that’s “targeted for a run in theme parks and performing arts centers across the country.” The show “combines cutting-edge special effects, unmatched audience interaction and an exploration of real space-age technology,” taking “audiences of all ages on an exhilarating journey with Captain James T. Kirk and Vulcan science officer Spock.”

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: ZOMG! This is what Roddenberry’s atheist-Apollonian vision of the future has come to! Unemployed dinner-theater actors in Kirk and Spock drag and plastic tricorders, doing a laser show for the kiddies! At Waldameer WaterWorld in Erie, Pa.! It will bear the same relationship to any actual “Star Trek” incarnation as that teeny-tiny Stonehenge in “Spinal Tap” bears to seeing Led Zeppelin play live in 1973! And you’re absolutely right.

OK, OK, let me pay some lip service to journalistic fairness by reporting that “Star Trek Live,” while a property of CBS Consumer Products, will actually be created by the Mad Science Group, a “science enrichment provider” that creates shows for schools, camps and other youth venues. It’ll be some kind of hybridized edutainment product, in which Kirk and Spock train a fresh group of “Starfleet cadets” on their first day at the Academy. Learn, learn, learn; science, science, science. But wait, enough of that, shorty — the Earth is under attack from unknown aliens! Put down those curly fries and shoot those bastards!

I’m not backing off my initial, bigoted assumption that this latest bastardized effort to grub a few more dollars off a canceled 1960s TV series is an idiotic debasement of the already-flaccid “Star Trek” legacy. But, hell, that’s nothing new. And let’s face it, fellow parents: If these people can bottle even 0.5 percent of the Trekker spirit, in a package that appeals to the science-nerd kids who are too chicken for the vomitous coaster rides, we’ll all be grateful. If they can end it with a group line-dance number — hopefully led by “Kirk” and “Spock” doing the Robot — I take back everything I just said.

 

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Early odds on the Oscar derby

"Up," Clooney, "Precious," "Lovely Bones," "Nine" all leading contenders. Plus: Is indie dead? (Part 174)

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A still from “Up”

It’s an autumnal phenomenon, as predictable in its own way as the first signs of red and gold in the treetops: As dozens of new movies flood the fall marketplace, most of them without a hope in hell of reaching a paying audience, people in the industry begin to protest that the film economy is finally and permanently broken. This year the alarm has been sounded by indieWire blogger Anne Thompson, long among the most levelheaded and reality-based of Hollywood reporters, and that fact has momentarily transfixed the attention-impaired elite of movieland.

“The old independent market is over,” wrote Thompson last week, summing up the aftermath of the just-completed Toronto International Film Festival, which saw only a handful of modestly scaled distribution deals. “A new one will take its place. But we are smack in the middle between the end of one paradigm and the start of another, and it’s a scary place indeed.” Added Thompson, “I saw one movie after another [at Toronto] that was unreleasable in the current climate,” predicting that most of the 145 films for sale at Canada’s huge film marketplace “will wind up streamed, downloaded and viewed on a small TV or computer or mobile screen.”

As one New York indie-film publicist told me recently, once you get below the level of the handful of quasi-independent pictures that will be released by big Indiewood players like Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia, Weinstein or Miramax, the market these days is mostly about self-distribution. In practical terms, that means filmmakers paying to get their movies into theaters briefly, in order to generate some reviews so they can generate a little money from those small-screen venues Thompson is talking about. While I’m sure that method will pay off for occasional movies, it isn’t much of a business model for the indie industry.

With Toronto in the rearview mirror and the New York Film Festival opening on Friday — always the unofficial kickoff to award season — it’s time to ask another question about this year’s movie marketplace: Where the hell are 10 best-picture Oscar nominees going to come from? The Academy’s brilliant and/or desperate decision to double down for 2010 looks especially strange in a season that so far is bereft of either Oscar-friendly middlebrow hits or “Dark Knight”-style pop smashes with artistic pretensions. Needless to say, I don’t know what the final list of nominees is going to look like, but I promise you this: One or two of them are really going to be from the moon.

But let’s not get ahead of the game; it’s only September. Here are the contenders as I see them right now (and I haven’t seen all of them yet, not by a long shot). The list is organized solely according to what you might call the Rorschach principle; I thought of movies, and wrote them down, in this order:

“Bright Star” Universally beloved by critics, Jane Campion’s Keats-in-love comeback vehicle sounds like a viable Oscar candidate, at least in theory. In practice, its opening week was tepid at the box office, and my hunch is that the Academy has turned away from costume romance, no matter how well executed, since the days of “Shakespeare in Love.”

“A Serious Man” Low on movie-star wattage, this ambiguous fable set in 1960s Midwestern Jewish suburbia is the most overtly personal film Ethan and Joel Coen have ever made — and I’m not alone in thinking it’s one of their best. (More to come next week, including an interview with the Coens.) IndieWire editor Eugene Hernandez has declared “A Serious Man” to be the sleeper of awards season, and he could well be right. Having swept the floor with “No Country for Old Men” just two years ago, however, the brothers may be at a tactical disadvantage with Oscar voters.

“Broken Embraces” Do I actually believe that Pedro Almodóvar’s latest overheated Spanish melodrama has a shot at Oscar gold? Well, no. But I do believe that having 10 best-picture nominees opens a slot for a token foreign-language film, and it might as well be a bubbling-over potboiler with Penélope Cruz in it, playing the doomed lost love in a story-within-a-story told by a film and literary icon (Lluís Homar) who was blinded in a terrible accident. Got all that? Haven’t seen this yet; needless to say I can’t wait.

“Up” Another lovely, wistful kid-adult crossover from the Disney/Pixar factory, and in any earlier year it’d be automatically consigned to the animated feature category. “Up” will still win that award, but given widespread disappointment over the non-nomination of “Wall-E” last year, it also seems just possible that this heartwarming tale of two outcasts on a quasi-mystical balloon journey will garner a nod for the big prize.

“The Hurt Locker” There was considerable Oscar buzz around Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq bomb-squad flick after its release, which largely reflected Hollywood’s affection for the oft-overlooked ex-wife of James Cameron, as well as a collective sigh of relief that somebody had finally made a movie about the Iraq conflict that audiences would actually pay to sit through. You hear a lot less of that now. Like most of Bigelow’s movies, it’s a terrific mind-fuck actioner, probably best viewed with the dialogue dubbed into another language. I’m thrilled to have her back, but a best-picture nominee? Probably not.

“Up in the Air” Two words: Oh. Yeah. Now, I haven’t seen Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s tragicomic novel about a corporate downsizing consultant (George Clooney) and maybe I’ll decide it sucks. But word out of Telluride and Toronto has been outstanding, and from a strategic-positioning point of view, everything about this project — the pedigree of star and director, the seriousness of the theme, an acclaimed supporting cast featuring Jason Bateman and Vera Farmiga — feels right. Oscar front-runner, until something else comes along.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” This is the season’s other Clooney vehicle, in which he stars alongside Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges in an implausible-but-not-quite-true story about a secret psychic unit within the United States Army. Sounds like a pretty darned entertaining premise, but there must be a reason that virtually nobody who has seen it is talking this one up as Oscar fodder.

“Get Low” One of Toronto’s few breakout films, this directing debut for Aaron Schneider was just collected by Sony for probable year-end release. A folktale-flavored Depression-era yarn about a small-town Tennessee eccentric (Robert Duvall) who stages his own funeral while still alive, “Get Low” also features Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black. In other words, as much rural Americana and indie cred as you could possibly want, with some left over.

“An Education” This winsome little surprise about a teenage girl’s coming-of-age in pre-swinging London was the unexpected delight of Sundance last winter, but it’s the kind of movie that won’t stand much hype. Suffice it to say that Carey Mulligan gives a star-making performance — she’s the Oscar nominee here, frankly — and director Lone Scherfig handles the period, and Nick Hornby’s screenplay, with tremendous finesse.

“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” This is the first film ever to win audience awards at both Sundance (where it was shown as “Push”) and Toronto, mainly because most movies that generate buzz don’t remain on the festival circuit for more than nine months. Still, a picture that was initially perceived as an unmarketable downer — the story of an overweight, illiterate, twice-pregnant Harlem teenager, made by little-known director Lee Daniels — has gradually been transformed into a bona fide Oscar contender. Having Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry as executive producers hasn’t hurt, but even infotainment magnates as powerful as they cannot control audience response — and the response to this movie, and its leading performances by Gabby Sidibe and Mo’Nique, has been electric.

“The Lovely Bones” I haven’t even spoken to anybody who’s seen this, and it remains faintly possible that Peter Jackson’s screen version of Alice Sebold’s narrated-from-the-other-side bestseller won’t be ready for pre-Christmas release. Still, with that pedigree and a cast headed by Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon, Jackson will have to screw it up pretty badly not to be included in the Oscar conversation.

“Nine” No, not “District 9″ or “Cloud Nine” or “9,” but director Rob Marshall’s screen version of the hit Broadway musical inspired by Fellini’s “8 1/2.” If you’re confused, you’ve identified one of this mega-production’s potential pitfalls. With seven credited writers, eye-popping production values and a cast that features recent Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard, along with Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren, producer and distributor Harvey Weinstein’s got to be hoping for major hardware to get this expensive project into the black.

“The Road” Redolent of artistic seriousness, this post-apocalyptic fable from Aussie director John Hillcoat (“The Proposition”) is adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel and stars Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron as its protagonists, dubbed only “Man” and “Wife.” (Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall also star.) Film-festival response has been superlative, and Mortensen and Theron have established themselves as beloved stalwarts of the Hollywood left. They’re both in the running for acting awards, but my sight-unseen guess is that “The Road” may prove too unforgiving for best-picture voters.

“Inglourious Basterds” Kind of a cool idea, but I don’t buy it — and only partly because I didn’t much like the movie. Christoph Waltz is absolutely going to be nominated as a supporting actor, but Hollywood simply ain’t giving its big prize to a spectacle this disorganized, anarchic and sadistic.

“Star Trek” Exactly the sort of film the extra best-picture slots were supposed to benefit. J.J. Abrams pulled off a neat rebooting of the franchise, and I quite enjoyed it. But best picture? Nah. “Star Trek” is a nicely made summer popcorn movie that will reap the usual benefits, those being in the technical award categories.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009 10:53 AM UTC

Why the original “Star Trek” still matters

Cheap, sexist and nerdy? Check, check and check. But the original Kirk and Spock offered an erotic, Apollonian beacon of hope amid the darkness of '70s culture.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment

Images from “The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series.”

In perhaps the most famous “Star Trek” episode of them all, Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Cmdr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) stand in their stretchy mock-turtle uniform shirts, lady-pleasin’ tight pants and pointy-toed Beatle boots on one of those studio-lot sets designed to evoke a prewar American city. People shuffle past in shabby clothes, and a black automobile with large, curved fenders crawls down the street. “I’ve seen photographs of this period,” says Kirk. “An economic upheaval had occurred.”

“It was called ‘Depression,’” says Spock, raising one painted eyebrow in archetypal distaste. “Circa 1930. Quite barbaric.”

As many of you will have spotted already, this is from “City on the Edge of Forever,” a time-paradox yarn written by science-fiction legend Harlan Ellison (who has feuded with the show’s producers and their copyright heirs ever since). In it, Kirk falls in love with a kittenish Salvation Army type, played by Joan Collins, who envisions a future of space travel and peaceful global cooperation, and wants to rescue the world from the threat of impending war. Kirk comes from that future, of course. Not only can he not tell her that, he must also allow her to be run down by a bus to avoid a fatal disordering of the space-time continuum that would result in Hitler conquering the world and the Starship Enterprise never existing at all.

In its narrative ambition, its talky, theatrical density, its high-minded moral tone and its nerdy philosophizing, that episode captures a great deal about what made “Star Trek” such a potent cultural force. I guess that’s why it’s included, along with three other episodes, on “The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series,” a new DVD/Blu-ray release presumably meant to lure viewers of J.J. Abrams’ hit film back to the source material. No “Star Trek” fan could possibly be happy with such a mini-collection — where, I ask, is “Mirror, Mirror”? “The Doomsday Machine”? “The Devil in the Dark”? — but I enjoyed watching this tremendously.

Watching “Star Trek” in 1970s syndication was such an important part of my childhood and adolescence — I’ve seen every episode at least five or six times, and some many more than that — that I’m not capable of assessing the show’s uneven, low-budget craftsmanship with any degree of detachment. For me, “Star Trek” and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites — one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic — were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early ’70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or “Happy Days,” had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.

Even if some of its flaws look more glaring 30-odd years later, I think the original “Star Trek” still has a passion and vitality that partly stem from its cheapness; the threadbare sets and effects created a coherent, suggestive atmosphere, and forced your attention onto the storytelling and the characters. It stands out, even after all this time, as something unique in television history. Of course “Star Trek” can never be the cultural lodestone it once was. Having spawned four official follow-up series, 11 feature films (and counting) and countless non-canonical works — if you haven’t heard about K/S porn or the immense and disputatious fanfic universe, I’m not helping you — and inspired an entire genre of serial intergalactic futurism from “Space: 1999″ to “Babylon 5″ to “Battlestar Galactica,” the novelty of Gene Roddenberry’s creation has pretty well worn off.

In the middle of the Cold War, Roddenberry imagined a radical-progressive, Enlightenment-fueled vision of the human future, one in which the conflict between capitalism and communism had been long transcended, along with other earthbound forms of racial, ethnic or religious strife. Strikingly, there is no religious or mystical dimension to the “Star Trek” universe at all, at least until much later in its development. (Roddenberry regarded himself as an “agnostic atheist,” and banned any religious references from the show.) It was based around the chronic tension between reason and emotion, represented of course by the tension between Spock and Kirk and the actors who played them, the immeasurably gifted Nimoy and the hambone, cocksure Shatner (a second-rate Canadian Shakespearean, before his “Star Trek” celebrity).

Roddenberry’s vision of what “Star Trek” could and should be, even if it was indifferently realized, was pretty close to Richard Wagner’s conception of the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a work of art that would incorporate drama, poetry, philosophy and music. He worked with the best writers he could get, despite his borderline-tyrannical reputation and various controversies surrounding his handling of royalties. Ellison wrote “City on the Edge of Forever,” and Theodore Sturgeon, another big-name sci-fi author, wrote “Amok Time” (also included here), the famous episode in which Spock goes into some kind of Vulcan estrus and must return to his home planet in order to mate. (The principle that Spock has no emotional life is something like the edict in Greek mythology that no living human can enter the underworld; it must be flouted at every opportunity.)

In the arid landscape of late-1960s television, largely devoted to quasi-realistic forms like the family sitcom or the police procedural, “Star Trek” was new and startling in several different ways: a science-fiction series that was literary and imaginative and heavily allegorical, that ladled out historical and political messages by the quart and that delivered a distinctive undertone of adult sexuality.

OK, yes, it might be better described as a swaggering, Hefneresque and profoundly sexist version of semi-adult, semi-repressed sexuality. Preening Kirk, arguably the most sexualized male character in TV history, tomcats from one interstellar honey to the next. In Season 1, beehive-haired Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) seems to serve as his personal concubine, but for that matter there’s something haremlike about the female personnel aboard the Enterprise in toto. They all apparently departed on a five-year space mission directly from their other jobs as go-go dancers behind Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett, later Roddenberry’s wife) moons pathetically for the chaste and logical Spock, who is himself locked in a sub-rosa competition with the bitchy and sexually ambiguous “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) for Kirk’s attention. Spock pretends not to notice Chapel, but behaves like an outrageous tease; in “Amok Time,” he strokes her tear-stained cheek and murmurs, “It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures.”

But hey, this stew of delightful and appalling ingredients produced the first black-white kiss in the history of American narrative television, the aliens-made-them-do-it snog between Kirk and Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” (Contrary to legend, that smokin’-hot moment did not produce widespread outrage in the American South. Widespread arousal, certainly.) In the same scene, Chapel finally gets to kiss Spock, while protesting the whole time that she really, really didn’t want it to happen like this.

One could lazily argue that the breakthrough of “Star Trek,” which was first a cult show and then a mass phenomenon, led to the much bigger breakthrough of “Star Wars” a few years later. Beyond a loose, generic connection, I see much more opposition than similarity between the two. George Lucas’ space dramas are a bastardized mishmash of 1950s serials, classic quest mythology, film history and J.R.R. Tolkien, all elements pretty much absent from “Star Trek.” Of course there’s some crossover, but the two things appeal to different generations and different sensibilities

If Lucas is defiantly pop-cultural in orientation, delivering archetypal structure and fast-paced action rather than plot and conversation, Roddenberry skews much closer to traditional high or middlebrow culture. Despite the speculative-fiction surroundings, he’s really an old-fashioned tale-spinner, with roots in the short story and the theatrical stage. In the second season, Roddenberry introduces a Russian navigator named Chekov, and as distant as “Star Trek” may seem from “The Cherry Orchard,” I don’t think the name was picked out of a hat. His near-namesake Anton Chekhov was a master of the sudden reversal, the ironic sting in the tail — devices Roddenberry’s writers use over and over.

In an effort to make the original “Star Trek” relevant to contemporary viewers, whatever that’s supposed to mean, CBS/Paramount has rejiggered some of the cheesy effects, remastered the whole series in disconcertingly brilliant high-definition, and made them available on Blu-ray, iTunes, XBox Live and no doubt other platforms yet to be devised. I don’t object to such things, and the four episodes on this disc (the one I haven’t mentioned is the lamentable “Trouble With Tribbles”) look amazing, even if the increased resolution exposes the thick makeup on Shatner and Nimoy, making them look even more like drag queens out of uniform than they did before.

But “Star Trek” worked just as well, and maybe better, on a black-and-white secondhand TV pulling in signals from two cities away through an untwisted coat hanger. To those of us watching that way, with a couple of friends and some lukewarm Hamm’s beer, it offered a tiny oasis of imaginative escape. It wasn’t an escape into a mythical realm of impossibly perfect heroes and implacably evil villains, but into a future of global techno-humanist harmony. It seems ludicrous now, yes, but in that simultaneously chaotic and innocent time it hovered just over the horizon as a distant possibility. A future where we would all agree that war and poverty and economic depression were barbaric, and where the girls would all wear miniskirts and nylons.

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Monday, May 11, 2009 4:35 PM UTC

The utopian economics of “Star Trek”

The young Spock's movie shout-out to "new growth theory" isn't just a nifty inside joke -- it's a bold statement of confidence in the promise of technology.

By Andrew Leonard

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There are many clever moments in the thoroughly satisfying new “Star Trek” movie, but the one that has economists chattering is more than just smart: It strikes right to the core of what the Star Trek future is all about.

The scene comes early, when a pre-pubescent Spock is undergoing the formidable educational process inflicted on all Vulcan children. We see and hear him say the words “nonrival” and “nonexcludable” (and we can imagine his computer tutor nodding encouragingly).

And then we move on, without explanation. To my children, and, I imagine, to most Trekkies, the moment was just one more jargonistic outburst in a franchise that has always delighted in excessive indulgence in meaningless techno-gibberish. But the economists in the audience all started high-fiving each other: Whoa, who could have expected a shout-out to economist Paul Romer’s breakthrough paper, “Endogenous Technological Change,” in a “Star Trek” movie? Awesome!

The words jumped out at me, because a few years ago, I had the good fortune to read economics writer David Warsh’s superb chronicle of how Romer’s paper defining “new growth theory” changed the course of economic thought, “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.” As Warsh notes in his preface, the first paragraph of Romer’s paper states:

“The distinguishing feature of … technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; its is a nonrival, partially excludable good.”

A “nonrival” good can be shared without losing anything. An apple, say, is a rival good: If one person eats it, the other person can’t. A pirated download of the new “Star Trek” movie is nonrival — it can be copied endlessly. Excludability refers to whether you can prevent someone from sharing, as with, for example, copy protection or a jail sentence.

As Warsh explained to me during an interview three years ago, Romer’s great contribution was that he mathematically proved “that the economically important thing about knowledge is that it is ‘nonrival’ — everybody can use it at the same time.”

Romer put it this way:

Economists studying public finance have identified two fundamental attributes of any economic good: the degree to which it is rivalrous and the degree to which it is excludable. Rivalry is a purely technological attribute. A purely rival good has the property that its use by one firm or person precludes its use by another; a purely nonrival good has the property that its use by one firm or person in no way limits is use by another. Excludability is a function of both the technology and the legal system. A good is excludable if the owner can prevent others from using it. A good such as the code for a computer program can be made excludable by means of a legal system that prohibits copying or by means of encryption and copy protection schemes.

What does this mean for “Star Trek?” The Star Trek universe is built on a fundamentally optimistic premise : Technological growth will lead us into a future of abundance and prosperity. Transporter beams and warp drive-capable starships are just the beginning. Any society that enjoys the benefits of replicators able to produce any food or beverage the consumer might desire at the merest voice command is a society that has pushed the nonrival, nonexcludable benefits of knowledge diffusion to the maximum extent possible.

Here’s some more from Romer’s paper:

The raw materials that we use have not changed, but as a result of trial and error, experimentation, refinement, and scientific investigation, the instructions that we follow for combining raw materials have become vastly more sophisticated. One hundred years ago, all we could do to get visual stimulation from iron oxide was to use it as a pigment. Now we put it on plastic tape and use it to make videocassette recordings.

Of course, who needs videocassette recordings when you have holodecks?

Technological change — improvement in the instructions for mixing together raw materials — lies at the heart of economic growth … Technological change provides the incentive for continued capital accumulation, and together, capital accumulation and technological change account for much of the increase in output per hour worked … [But] instructions for working with raw materials are inherently different from other economic goods. Once the cost of creating a new set of instructions has been incurred, the instructions can be used over and over again at no additional cost.

To some people, the implications of Romer’s work are all too visible in the restructuring of the music industry and news business. Anything that can be digitally copied is nonrival and very difficult to exclude. So anyone whose job depends on the processing or delivery of information is feeling a great deal of stress right now about the difficulty of devising business models that thrive in a nonrival, nonexcludable operating environment. But in the long run, suggests Romer and as potentially demonstrated by “Star Trek,” the benefit of expanding knowledge and technological change will be widely distributed prosperity: an end to scarcity, a future where the fundamental challenge of providing for our basic needs has been solved. (Although, one hastens to note that there will always be insane Romulans and all-devouring Borg invaders to deal with — so life will never be perfect!)

In these times of economic disarray and incredible environmental threats and devastating energy constraints (Where do we find the dilithium crystals that power everything, after all?), it might be hard to see that abundant Star Trekkian future anywhere else but in a movie theater. But the policy prescription inherent in Romer’s work is that the best way to provide for long-term growth is to invest in education, in the training of scientists and engineers, in the production of knowledge — new sets of instructions — that benefit everyone. It’s a theme that President Obama echoed last week when, while announcing some changes in how the government handles unemployment benefits, he stated that “education is the best bet we can make as individuals and as country.”

So, to quote his predecessor: “Bring it on!”

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Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

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