Plasma Pool

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Captain James T. Kirk and Commander Spock

Anthony Lane was assigned to review J.J. Abrams’s recent Star Trek film for The New Yorker. He does not like it. His substantive comments on it, however, are limited to bashing the excesses that come of J.J. Abrams’s kid-in-a-toy-store enthusiasm for his role as “rebooter” of “old myths and tropes that feel overloaded or fried.” Lane laments, for instance, the addition of a backstory for the childhood of James T. Kirk that (at least as Lane paints it) may as well have gone for broke and rechristened Kirk’s father Jor-El. Abrams, Lane says, “gorges on cinema as if it were one of those all you can eat buffets, piling his place with succulent efforts, whether they go together or not.” (Abrams would probably prefer Lane stick to his mystery box metaphor.) Setting aside Lane’s jollily unexamined equation of stereotypically working-class suburban food with cinematic crap, he’s correct that this newest Abrams film is, like many past ones, a fumblingly quixotic overreach.

But that’s his sole point about the film, and the sole point on which he dismisses it. The rest of Lane’s review—aside from an ecstatic erotic meditation on the new “youthful Spock” embodied by the “commanding” Zachary Quinto¹—amounts to philinistic jokes about Star Trek’s general, indisputable dorkiness and digs at its audience, many of them anchored in Lane’s ignorance of the Star Trek world, an ignorance he wears almost as a badge of honor.

Lane’s ignorance is especially conspicuous because he begins by positing himself as reluctant defender of the original series’s integrity, asking, “What happened to Star Trek,” that “quick and wry” series in the late sixties that ran for three seasons, “injecting the frontier spirit into the galactic void” while “managing to touch on weighty themes without getting sucked into them and squashed”? Well, Lane tells us what happened: Star Trek “was slapped back to life and forced to undergo one warping after another: five more television series (including an animated version) and no fewer than ten feature films.” Each of these series and films, we’re left to assume, must have been a horrendous mess, not to mention entirely irrelevant to the film currently under review, for Lane doesn’t say anything about why or how they bear on his current questions. His sole reason for bringing them up, it appears, is to dismiss them in one motion, with a joke about the centrality of humpback whales to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Oh no! says Lane, They’d already run out of ideas by the fourth movie!

Feel that? That’s you being struck dumb by Lane’s superior taste. Bask, ye masses of the Old Country Buffet!

Lane’s whale joke is telling because it’s used as the fulcrum of an unsuccessful omnibus dismissal, but more telling because the way in which he uses it simply doesn’t fly. The Voyage Home may have had whales in it, but it’s queer that Lane would choose it—widely acknowledged to be one of the best of the films, if not the best—to demonstrate the “thinness” of the franchise. This is but the first of many statements on Lane’s part that have a fraught relationship with the simple facts and history of Star Trek.

It’s not that the particular details Lane cites don’t necessarily exemplify what he says they exemplify. It’s that his reading of those details never goes beyond pointing to and mocking their cheesiness or gimmickyness. Take his criticism of the new transporter effect:

Not being a Trekkie, I didn’t particularly mind how he refashioned the gizmos, but it was still surprising to learn that, when beaming down to planets and up to the ship, the crew members no longer vanish with the old granular shiver but, instead, whip around and around, aided by cartoonish whirling strokes, as if planning to reconstitute themselves as fruit smoothies at the other end.

The place the Star Treks of the nineties hold in the development of my psychology and subjectivity (as, for instance, a touchstone of and tutor in elementary ethics in childhood) makes me a fan—nay, a partisan—of the granular shiver. (The new effect is, as Lane says, cartoonish; but more in sound than in sight.) But lest we think Lane’s reasons have anything to do with a fidelity to the franchise, next comes, “They even get to communicate, as they did in the nineteen-sixties, via these marvellous little phones that you actually hold up to your ear! Isn’t the future great?”

The new transporter effect

But what is this to signify in the context of the argument Lane’s purporting to make? What does the fact that the new communicators—which, as a responsible critic should know, inspired the cellular telephone—are (relatively) faithful to the design of the old communicators demonstrate about the film? A moment ago, he impugned the film, in supplanting the tested and tried gimmick of the granular shift with that of the cartoon smoothie, for insufficient fidelity. But now he impugns the film for…what exactly? For too sufficient fidelity? Or for too-closely imitating the current-day portable phone that is itself an imitation inspired by the original Star Trek communicator? In the first case Lane is inexplicably inconsistent (as opposed to explicably); in the second, he is simply ignorant. In either case, he’s overreaching.

Soon afterward, he blazons his ignorance anew by dismissing Ensign Pavel Checkov’s Russian accent—”he mixes up his ‘v’s and ‘w’s, (’wektor,’ ‘inwisible’)”—not as as affected, which it clearly is, but rather as a misguided innovation of the film under review, as “a tongue-slip that Dickens pretty much exhausted for comic value in The Pickwick Papers, but,” Lane continues, “I guess the old jokes are the best.” Old yes, but not Dickens old. We can date Checkov’s affected accent solidly to—imagine this!—the original Star Trek. Did Lane not bother to discern this before implying that Abrams, et. al., were cheesily importing Dickens? If any cheesy importing took place, the importer was Gene Roddenbery in the sixties, not J.J. Abrams today. And in Roddenberry’s moment, callously and unfairly mocking Russians wasn’t cheese; it was a crucial component of a nationalistic Cold War political program—one that Roddenberry was, as anyone familiar with the genesis of the franchise knows, himself set on impugning through the artistic and political means offered by his “Wagon Train to the stars.” Checkov’s silly accent has a specific cultural context and political purpose; it is not simply an “old joke.”

There are many good reasons to object to Checkov’s silly accent, but Lane doesn’t give us any. Instead he speaks with force about subjects he clearly has not bothered to familiarize himself with. But Lane’s admirably tight, eloquent, plucky argumentative style does not compensate for his insufficient knowledge of his subject matter. If he does indeed have all this knowledge, his treatment of the film’s gimmicks as novelties born of Abram’s reboot is thoroughly disingenuous. Either way, the casually counterfactual conceptions that pervade Lane’s analysis make him incredibly difficult to take seriously.

But why, really, should we expect Lane to take the film seriously as an object of critical inquiry to begin with? These are only Star Trek fans, after all, who as we all know spend all their time dressed up as aliens at conventions full of other latex- and spandex-clad geeks. Surely Lane needn’t condescend to learn about the thing he’s supposed to be reviewing. I mean, this isn’t Wagner or The Waste Land or even Wes Anderson. It’s only Star Trek. Surely no one will mind if Lane neglects his critical obligation to know what he’s talking about and tosses one off instead. Isn’t it enough for you masturbating potato-chip-eating computer-assembling antisocial science fiction wierdos that he’s talking about the movie at all? Good god, people. Get a life.

***

1. An ecstatic erotic meditation worth quoting in full:

Zachary Quinto, whose very name sounds like the sacred text of a superior race, and who, in his role as the youthful Spock, is the most commanding reason to see this film. He alone prepares the gray matter. Bowie-thin, solemn but not humorless, tacitly quoting Sherlock Holmes, and nipping around like a sixties groover in his skintight costume, he wipes the floor with Kirk, while making time for a Vulcanizing smooch with Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana), the resident linguist, who is said to have “exceptional oral sensitivity.”