OT: So, Mr. Nimoy

Posts from fellow fans that also recount their memories: from Fabo — My first alien crush — and at I’m a Lady Butterfly (in French, machine translation here), which has a lot of images I hadn’t seen before.

Maybe it’s not appropriate for me to write about Nimoy in the same way that I did about Richard Chamberlain, insofar as it wasn’t that kind of crush. I’ve been smiling at the many friends in my RL Facebook feed who have been reminiscing about watching “In Search Of,” because while I remember that, I had forgotten that that, too was Leonard Nimoy. And he went on to other things in his life — so that many constituencies remember him well.

For me, Nimoy was solely about Mr. Spock, and Mr. Spock had no physical or romantic attraction for me, or at least not in the mass I would experience it later. I had a poster of him on my closet for a few years (before my mom asked me to remove it). The image was something like this one from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, if I remember correctly:

Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, on Vulcan after his resurrection in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The plot was stupid but the thing it spoke to — Kirk and Spock’s friendship, stressed to the point that Kirk sacrificed his son in the process of trying to save his friend — was not.

The poster was right under a little plaque I received from a Sunday School teacher with the Bible verse, “Commit thy way unto the Lord.” I think mom had been talked by someone into being worried about Spock’s ears. That’s really not what she should have been worried about, I think; rather, potentially, anyway, the problem with Spock from the standpoint of conservative Christianity was more that by that time he was turning into a Christ-like figure, with a sacrifice to save his comrades that killed him, and then a resurrection in that film.

Thinking back now, two things occur to me that were important at the time, although I don’t think they were clear to me then. The first was the question of Spock as half-human and half-Vulcan but raised as a Vulcan to have mastered his emotions (something he didn’t always succeed in doing, and a motif that reappeared in the first Star Trek film, when he rejoins the Enterprise crew after failing at the Kolinahr ritual to purge himself of any remaining emotion). That was an always productive axis for me to think about — both my feeling in general that I needed to suppress and master my emotions, but also my mixed feelings about that process. Mr. Spock offered a model to think about.

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After he thinks he has killed his friend, Kirk (William Shatner), Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is overjoyed to discover that he’s alive, in Amok Time.

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Secondly, however, there’s the whole question of friends who love each other so much that they are willing to risk death, even to die for, each other. Kirk’s clueless attempt to support Spock during the pon farr in Amok Time leads to his temporary death at Spock’s hands, for instance. And, in The Wrath of Khan, explicitly mentioning a utilitarian maxim, Spock decides to expose himself to radiation poisoning in order to repair the damaged warp drive so the Enterprise can get away from the Genesis device.

But this is not, as far as we know, only a utilitarian calculation — because Spock cares about all of his friends aboard that ship. His decision to sacrifice himself is motivated equally by logic and emotion. And the notion of a friendship that could surpass romantic attraction: that is, and remains, hugely attractive to me.

~ by Servetus on March 2, 2015.