The 9/11 Imagination
by Giampaolo Bianconi

(The recent DVD release of this summer’s Star Trek film deserves some consideration and–ta-da!–here it is.)

Star Trek, dir. J.J. Abrams (2009)

“Each epoch,” said Jules Michelet, “Dreams the one to follow.” That dream rests on our conception of ourselves, now. As a genre, science fiction has always rested upon our vision of ourselves in the future. This is a responsibility from which the Star Trek franchise—consisting of television shows both live-action and animated, many films, and various incarnations—has decidedly never shirked: Star Trek in the 1960s was suave, sexy, and cool—just like us. Pavel Checkov, the Russian aboard the Enterprise, let us know that in the future the Cold War had ended and (don’t worry) we won. Later tales, which featured Patrick Stewart’s Shakespearean pomp, were more self-important though decidedly less political: it was the late 80s/early 90s, late Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It signaled the arrival of the comfortable Clinton years.

Its most recent imagining is no different. From its first scene, Star Trek touches on our memory of 9/11 itself: Nero (Eric Bana), the rogue Romulan, has intruded on our timeline, our narrative, causing it to branch off and create an entirely new narrative. Captain Kirk’s father, moments from death as he guides his ship into Nero’s much larger vessel, links to his wife and new born child: I love you, he tells her, moments before his ship explodes. It’s a moment that would have been impossible without our cultural imagination: fathers calling their wives, their children, from their seats on the planes. The movie is about intertemporal terrorism.

J.J. Abrams’ television work has always played off of the relationship of the past to the present, so it’s unsurprising that his take on the Star Trek franchise uses that as its starting point: the new timeline created by Nero’s intrusion means not only that the future into which they/we travel is unknown, removed from the comfort of the future they/we already knew, but also that there is another narrative where everything has gone just as planned (one where, as Kirk remarks, he knows his father).[1]

At the center of the movie is the rivalry between the passionate high-wire act run by Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock’s (Zachary Quinto) steely rationality. Kirk is in many ways a rightwing firebrand, following his threatened gut to the end, refusing to surrender to the realities of defeat; Spock, on the other hand, is all reason, calm intelligence permeating his every move (so much so that it causes sexual coldness between him and Commander Uhura, played by Zoe Saldana). Much was made of the John McCain/Barack Obama comparisons: McCain as the weathered “Maverick” and Obama as the reasonable university professor. We know the story here, even if it differs from the story that took shape in November 2008: Kirk becomes Captain. In this light, it could be said that the movie manages to make McCain young in a way his campaign never could.

When the film came out this summer, many reviews lamented the change in tone from older Trek ventures: gone, asserted the The AV Club, were the previously “plainly stated humanist virtues;” while an article in Newsweek wondered whether this film indicated that Trek had “lost its moral relevance.” Those looking to the film to challenge moral norms and blaze the way are mistaken: Star Trek has never challenged our conception of ourselves; it’s merely projected it onto the future. In the 80s, we dealt in universal humanism, but America doesn’t deal in humanist rhetoric anymore: we no longer imagine ourselves serving any Prime Directives. Instead, we’re the brash, hotheaded Captain Kirk: no one believes us, but we go it anyway, alone if we have to. Eventually, Spock falls in line. If Brecht conceived of art not as ”a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” Star Trek is as bold a counterstatement as it has ever been: a mirror, an artifact of our collective imagination.

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[1] Much like the essence of my favorite Star Trek film, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where the Star Trek crew is challenged with a hot-button environmental issue: saving the whales. They return from the future to 1980s San Francisco and rescue two endangered humpback whales, letting us know that just in case we don’t save the whales, The United Federation of Planets will—in the future.