Rambles around Star Trek: Into Darkness [spoilers], movies these days, and Richard Armitage

As I mentioned last night, I went to see the new Star Trek film. As I was watching it some things sort of started to gel … or something …

Anyway.

I. Reading the entertainment world through Armitage preoccupations

Do you ever find yourself reading the news differently from the Armitage fan perspective?

I’ve been a Vanity Fair reader for about twelve years, because I enjoyed the writing and the more serious cast on entertainment and celebrity news. It’s sort of a New Yorker for news of the frivolous, a nice thing to read on a plane or when trying to fall asleep. I’m not a subscriber anymore, but I still pick it up in the grocery store occasionally.

A few weeks ago I was reading the June 2013 issue. It had two articles that I’d have read entirely differently before Armitagemania. First, a long piece called “Brad’s War,” about Pitt’s struggle to bring a film called World War Z to the screen and give himself a franchise to star in. (Summary: Pitt was not a very smart producer.) Normally, the extent of my musing would have been to think, “huh, interesting,” but this time I found myself thinking, “Maybe action franchises aren’t all they are cracked up to be … maybe it’s good that Richard Armitage hasn’t moved in that direction so far.” Then, “The Road to Manderley” discussed a financing scam around bringing a popular Viennese musical, Rebecca, to the Broadway stage. This piece presents, among other things, a totally unexpected tale of sock puppetry in the name of attempted virtue, which would have fascinated me on its own, but this time I found myself remembering that I’d heard some gossip among fans about the possibility that Armitage would appear in the London version of the musical, and thought, “Oh, my gosh, well, he has to be really careful then, doesn’t he, if he goes back to the stage via Broadway. Scams are everywhere!”

As I was reading I mused over these novel reactions and laughed at how invested in his interests I’ve become.

So what does this have to do with anything? Remember, I said this was a ramble.

II. me + Star Trek: Into Darkness

I had decided I was going to give this film a miss, but a friend’s opinion changed my mind. Also, I used to go to the movies a lot, in my last city, and thought to myself, “As rare as entertainments are in your life, maybe you should get yourself back in the habit.”

I’d skipped the hype for the film in advance (hadn’t viewed the trailer even once) and was a bit late getting to the theater, so I only saw three previews. The first was for something called “Despicable Me 2,” and I have to say, I didn’t understand the trailer. The second was for “Ender’s Game” — I understood this trailer, but I thought, “Aha, Harrison Ford cashing in again,” and “What is this with the dystopian films?” The third trailer I saw was for “World War Z,” which recalled to mind the article about it that I’d read, completely verifying the point that Pitt et al. overspent on extras, and looked mostly like crowds of people running around trying to escape things. (When I told my students about this in class today — all of whom are excited about the latter film — they explained that the crowds of people were at least partially made up of zombies. Okay, then.)

So I started watching Star Trek: Into Darkness in a bit of an alienated mood. Yes, I know they pitch the trailers to the target audience in the theater and so that’s why all the dystopian science fiction. But I’d just read some comments a few days earlier from Steven Spielberg about the impending implosion of the U.S. movie industry that more or less squared with the discussion I was having with FilmProf several months ago. I thought, “The first film doesn’t even require humans — entirely computer generated, and eventually they’ll figure out how to do voices without actors. These other trailers could basically have all been made with CGI. And the stories are essentially not about humans — they’re about organizations, or evil supernatural beings.”

Maybe I should also say that while I’m not an original-era Trekkie (I was born right around the time NBC was canceling the original series), I watched it in syndication very early. I saw and remember the original broadcast of the animated series. All of the Blish stories were in our public library (I read them, as I did the Pocket Books novels as they appeared). I wrote a story about me + Star Trek when I was around twelve (now I realize that’s called “fan fiction”!) As a teen I had a Spock poster in my bedroom till my mom made me take it down. And while I haven’t seen every film, I saw at least the first five in their theater appearances — including the one this piece most closely touches on, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In college and grad school, I was a fairly devoted watcher of The Next Generation, as well. And I saw the 2009 prequel to this film.

So I’ve been watching Star Trek off and on for approaching four decades. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, while I didn’t follow the series very closely after I moved to Germany, and I’ve long last track of the universe timeline (so I’m not going to comment on the plausibility of this plot, because I had forgotten about the alternative timestream created in the 2009 film), and while I wouldn’t call myself a Trekkie, I nonetheless do care — particularly about these characters, who introduced me to the world of the twenty-third century.

I can’t explain exactly why I was a Star Trek fan as a child (as opposed to Star Wars, which I saw and enjoyed but never fell in love with, let alone a lot of the more concentrated, serious science fiction), but I’m sure it had something to do with the stories. As silly as they often could be, even the terrible ones made interesting (if occasionally simplistic) points, and they were often intensely emotional, a tendency enhanced by William Shatner’s at times overly theatrical style. There were some truly horrid episodes, especially in the third season (remember “Turnabout Intruder”?). But when they were good, they were very, very good.

All of which probably says that I’m hardly hostile to cheap sentiment. I might even like it. Remember, my favorite book as a girl was Little Women.

The beginnings of Star Trek: Into Darkness were thus not reassuring for me. I’d walked in late, felt alienated watching the trailers, and then the film started with an awful chase scene ooga-booga paternalistic naïve natives broken Prime Directive beginning. They saw the Enterprise and threw away their sacred papyrus roll and from now on they worship a drawing of a starship. Blerg. That’s not really how cultural change works even in less developed societies. Sigh. Didn’t these scriptwriters notice the responses to the physiognomy of the natives in Avatar? Boys, playing on a starship, it seemed to me, facilitated by the most trite scriptwriting ever. Who cares about the Prime Directive? Not James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), it seems. Of course, you already knew that if you watched the original series, but here he states it baldly. Good, that that’s finally out in the open.

It did get somewhat better for me, from there, especially as I realized that the opening scenes were supposed to demonstrate exactly that — that this Kirk was a kid playing with a really amazing toy, a man still much too immature to be commanding a starship. Even so, I thought, as the movie moved along, this is still going to be a film for — well, who, exactly? Even teenagers have some access to honest emotion. A film for video game players, I thought, as the library in London exploded, and then again, as the meeting at Starfleet Command was attacked by the villain, “John Harrison” (Benedict Cumberbatch). A film for teenage boys, I thought, when Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) disrobed to bra and panties for no reason at all (the dustup in the press about this was, in my opinion, totally justified — not least because it heavily cheapened the character of Carol Marcus for me.)

It’s not like they weren’t trying. In the brief debate on the question of whether Harrison (who turns out to be Khan in this new timestream) can be torpedoed where he’s lurking on the Klingon homeworld, or must be captured to be returned to the Federation for trial, one could catch a faint gesture in the direction of our debates over the acceptability of killing our enemies with drones (although the virtue of hand-to-hand combat is more and more often agreed to be overstated). And as the script needed a structuring metaphor for the parallel it was going to draw to Spock’s death scene in Star Trek II, it chose emotionality and the apparent decision by Spock (Zach Quinto) not to feel anything or to say anything to Uhura (Zoe Saldana) as his death was threatened on Nibiru (a name with an interesting series of connotations that connote that sequence of scenes as jokingly ironic) as its setup. That moment could have been an iconic one for me — when Spock tells Uhura, as they travel with Kirk on the shuttle to Kronos, that he chose not to feel anything on Nibiru not because he did not care, but precisely for the opposite reason. That is something I often think myself, and that people who know me well occasionally observe — that my merciless sarcasm in certain situations provides a defense mechanism against emotional allegiances that would be too troublesome (for whatever reason) to express. I thought it was a brave script choice at that point and Quinto delivered the lines with sharp, stinging effect. I only wish that kind of honesty had held up in the end.

But the film ultimately did not ring true for me on the basic level of its connection with the simple emotionality that characterizes the best of the series. At its worst and its best, for me, Star Trek trumpeted a certain flavor of honesty about its own commitments (however simplistic they might have been) that this film simply undercuts, relentlessly, almost as if it wants to encourage the viewer not to believe in the very values its script wants to underline — leadership, heroism, self-sacrifice. Part of the problem is the trajectory for the Kirk character here — he’s still and always reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru simulation, cheating the odds, doing the most daring thing — until all of a sudden he’s not. It’s hard for me to believe that the person who’s playing various games, who falsifies his reports of events on Nibiru, castigates Spock for telling the truth, tries to make him feel guilty (which doesn’t work on a Vulcan), engages in near-constant daredevilism, and quite honestly can’t remember the names of his sexual partners has the guts or the honor to climb into the warp core in the face of certain death. My James Kirk had was a scoundrel as well, but he had at least a little more honor than this man does. He considered moral principle regularly — not just when his friends pushed him to do so. That Chris Pine simply doesn’t sell Kirk with any energy beyond that of the surly post-adolescent doesn’t help Kirk’s case. If that’s his major addition to the Kirk canon, I am emphatically uninterested.

In the end, I found myself agreeing with reviews that noted that Benedict Cumberbatch was the only person in this film who showed that s/he really can act. I don’t want to blame it on Pine, Pinto et al., either, however. I think the problem is that those actors are still way too tied to the personas and acting styles of their predecessors, down the point of quite obviously being cast in most cases with strong resemblances to them along the lines of physiognomy and coloring. Pine is thus not playing Kirk — he’s obviously playing William Shatner playing Kirk, and the pieces of Shatner’s performance he likes to copy most frequently are apparently not the serious or sincere moments. But even so, no matter how well it’s executed, this style of acting can’t help but looking like ironic imitation. Given that they’ve apparently opted for the mousetrap as a general strategy, the most successful portrayals fall into two groups: First, those by actors who really succeed at that task completely, so that we really believe that Karl Urban is a young, slightly fleshier DeForrest Kelley (Simon Pegg as Scotty is another great success in this regard). Though: what artist would want to be praised for being a successful imitator of the acting style of a group of people who were widely considered by critics to be — at best — hacks? As much as I disliked Pine in this role, I understand completely that he doesn’t want to be typecast as Shatner. The second group of successes are those who seem not to be trying very hard at all to imitate their predecessors at all — like Zoe Saldana, who reminds me not for one second of Nichelle Nichols.

Of the entire cast, Cumberbatch is the actor most divested of his connection to his predecessor in the role, not least because he enjoys the advantage of not having been cast for his physical resemblance to Ricardo Montalbán (googling reveals that the filmmakers –reasonably– didn’t want to cast yet another dark-skinned villain). And Cumberbatch (this is the fourth role I’ve seen him in, and while I’m still not wild about him, I’m starting to get why people are) is indeed strong. He manages Khan’s obsessive energy, but adds his own chillingly frigid twist. Cumberbatch displays an amazing charisma and energy; his elocution is frightening in its precision; his eyes transfixing; his body icily rigid in both its violence and constantly impervious response to abuse. No problems there — but no real thrill for me, either. The problem for him, I think, is that the character is simply scripted so poorly. Khan Noonien Singh, in his previous (with the new timestream we must now say — subsequent) incarnations, was a seductive character. Montalbán’s Khan was charming as well as cruel, espousing a particular sort of (mistaken but) attractive higher ideal in “Space Seed” (in which the script compares him to Lucifer in Paradise Lost); or betrayed and angered by his imprisonment on Ceti Alpha V, which had turned into a desert by an astronomical accident, leading to the deaths of most of his crew and his wife, in The Wrath of Khan (where Khan quotes Moby Dick repeatedly to justify his obsessive, (self-)destructive pursuit of Kirk). Montalbán’s Khan was frightening in the scorching heat of his obsession — but we knew what he was obsessive about. He had his reasons, particularly in The Wrath of Khan, and the ambiguous shades of his commitments especially in the film made him magnetic. In contrast, Cumberbatch is frightening in appearance, speech, and propensity to violence — but the script simply gives us no clue as to what drives the character beyond a rather simplistic notion of having been betrayed by Admiral Marcus. Like the villains that populate our newspapers today, this Khan is just, and only, bad. He has no actual motivation other than his desire to hurt us — a post-9/11 villain for a nation that can no longer be persuaded to ponder or evaluate the motivations of terrorists?

And now I have to get at the thing that bothered me the most about this film, and this is going to be hard to write about. It’s the citation of Star Trek II. The Wrath of Khan was definitely an iconic moment of my preteen years (I was thirteen, and that was a hard time for me). I’m not sure I can fully describe in words how Spock’s death scene in that film affected me. But a great deal of the effect — aside from the points about aging, losing one’s friends, and the utilitarian philosophical commitments involved in crisis decisionmaking (the needs of the many vs. the needs of the individual) — stemmed from the fact that I actually believed Spock (Leonard Nimoy — at left) had died [ETA: and that Kirk was truly aggrieved]. Not only because of Spock’s sacrifice — an unreservedly noble death genuinely motivated by his absolute devotion to his philosophical and ethical principles, and marked by his decision to remind Kirk of their friendship as a secondary moment — but also for their effect on Kirk. The point of the Kobayashi Maru exercise in Wrath of Khan, as Kirk explained to Sa’avik (Kirstie Alley) was that it teaches you how to lose — a lesson that, despite the many vagaries of his career, Kirk had never truly assimilated and was forced to learn by Spock’s death. Now, I’m not saying that Star Trek III didn’t undercut the significance of Spock’s death by using the deus ex machina of the Genesis device to bring him back. But Kirk had to make a sacrifice in order to achieve that — his son, David, for his friend. In Star Trek: Into Darkness, in contrast, no one really sacrifices anything. The script makes Kirk die of radiation poisoning via a stunt that could be as much gamesmanship as sacrifice — Spock’s words that he’s now failing at choosing not to feel transform his words to Uhura in the earlier scene into transparent lies (indeed, he simply wasn’t attached enough to her that he lost control at the thought of losing her; he loves Kirk more than her, something we’ve always known) — McCoy finds an immediate solution to the problem of Kirk’s death, Spock and Uhura slug it out with Khan to get his blood — Kirk comes back to life and as the unstained hero, he’s the one preaching the platitudes at the end of the piece.

How can I believe any of these characters’ emotions if they last for approximately eight minutes before the script says, “Oh, no, don’t take that seriously?”

As a viewer, I found myself reminded of my reaction to Kirk’s write-off of the Prime Directive in the opening scenes. Once upon a time (in the future), Kirk said he believed in the Prime Directive. He railed against it and broke it. He proved his loyalty to it, even if often in the breach. In this film, he just comes out and says he doesn’t care. The script seems to be implying that Kirk is saying that friendship is more important than abstract principle. Kirk goes back to get Spock because he values his friends over the abstract principle of protecting the development of the inhabitants of Niburu. But nothing in either Pine’s performance or the script itself convinces me of any genuine philosophical conflict at work. This Kirk is simply not deep enough for that. He only gives in to philosophical questions when his friends chivvy him into it.

Lest it be objected that I’m quibbling about the superficiality of something that was always meant superficially — that once again, I’m taking something too seriously that was always mostly a joke — let me say the following. On the level of response to acting and art, my conclusion is this. Once upon a time, in Star Trek, the interpreter was forced into some sort of emotional distance — into making jokes — by the extremely histrionic quality of both the storytelling and the acting. (Indeed, sometimes the actors, particularly Shatner, seemed to be doing that themselves — drawing back from heavily emotional or preachy moments in the script by making jokes.) Emotional distance was a choice the viewer made. Now, we’re all much smarter, and the scales have fallen from eyes. We don’t believe in the values of Star Trek anymore but more importantly, neither does Star Trek. The film steps away from the emotion so we don’t have to. In the closing scene, the man who does what he can to explicitly write off the values of Starfleet in the first scene preaches to a uniformed audience about values that his own words and actions deny. The actors engaged in this drama play actors who played roles of forty years ago, whom everyone now laughs at. In the end, where once there was emotion and irony as refuge from things too deeply felt to be said out loud without ironic distance, now the emotions and the things that motivated them are revealed to be meretricious from the start. Nothing remains to be believed or rejected. Only irony — and a bit of female skin, and a lot of CGI — are left.

Depressing. A depressing watch. There was nothing wrong with the film — but also nothing inspiring, nothing great.

As I walked out of the theater to drive home, the first fans were assembling in their Superman costumes to line up for Man of Steel. Excitement was in the air and a policeman was leaned up against his car, watching in enjoyment. “Evening, ma’am,” he said, as I walked past. “Not staying for the big show?” I may be wrong, but I think that any generation that can dress up in the costumes of its most admired superheros is not only attuned to irony — but also open to the sort of unabashed love that laughs at the people who’d laugh at sincerity. It’s a generation that deserved a more honest film than this one. Then again, perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Spielberg is right — filmmakers will only make blockbusters with effects and plenty of signs that they don’t believe in the messages of their own films, and cinema will become like live theater, confined to a small group of people with specific tastes and the money to pay for them. The rest of us will stay at home and watch intimate dramas — provided anyone is still scripting them — on our computer screens.

That’s how I felt last night, anyway. Disappointed. Not in an angry way. In a tired way. Star Trek: Into Darkness left me — tired.

III. me + the entertainment news + Richard Armitage

There’s a final point here, from my drive home — but I’m getting kicked out of my café. More tomorrow afternoon. Feel to discuss / object now, of course!

[Note — I edited this slightly for typos the morning afterwards.]

~ by Servetus on June 15, 2013.