Trekker and Fanboy: no conflict


First up, I need to apologize to you and to me for breaking my rule about weekly regularity last week. In my defence, I took the time that I would’ve spent blogging by reading through, mulling over and preparing for a possible submission to Eleven-ThirtyEight about the new Darth Vader comics. I’ve been avidly collecting the whole 2015 Marvel Star Wars run, which currently includes a Princess Leia miniseries, a main storyline and the Vader run set just after Episode IV, and a series set during the Jedi purge at the end of Episode III. Due to a quirk in the shipping or printing schedule or something, the latest issues in all three come out today.

So thus far I’ve been blogging exclusively about Star Trek, which has been great because I love Trek enough to call myself a Trekker, and makes sense because I finished watching through DS9 a few months ago and have taken the time to regurgitate some of the themes I wanted to explore. But there’s something I need to confess, something you all know already:

I’m also a massive Star Wars Fanboy.

Star Wars was a part of my childhood as much as Trek, and as I’ve grown up into intellectual maturity it has provided just as much fodder for reflection as Trek. The fact is, I really don’t understand the problem with loving both equally. I don’t understand how the anger, the conflict, other paths to the dark side, are as necessary as they seem to be for most people (well, necessary at all). J.J. Abrams seems to agree, and part of the reason I’m so excited about The Force Awakens is because Abrams has done such a great job with the recent Trek films. He has managed to be a fan of both creating films for fans of both, yet with the relevant edge and marketing slickness to appeal to a wider audience.

Now, its true that the fan—public dynamic is different in Trek than it is in Wars. Before the reboot, Trek fans were more willing to stick with things after much of Enterprise, Voyager and Nemesis fell flat: they could still enthuse about First Contact, DS9 and TNG, and even Insurrection and the often-brilliant final stretch of Enterprise (not counting that sickening series finale). The general public was not so rapt, and basically consigned Trek to cult-following status. It was really a matter of boredom and irrelevance. Star Wars fans, of course, were the opposite of dispassionate in the irate vitriol spewed in Lucas’ direction when the prequel trilogy came out. However, despite the genuinely sub-par quality of Phantom and Clones (I will ardently mount a defence of Revenge of the Sith in a future post, here or elsewhere), Star Wars still managed to remain lodged in the public consciousness, continued to tap the nerve it originally struck in 1977.

What Abrams seems to get, and the reason I can love both Star Trek and Star Wars, is that they both struck a similar nerve. This despite the vastly different world views and methodologies they represented. In short, Star Trek and Star Wars both embodied the return of coherent, imaginative story to the public consciousness. By the late 70s/early 80s, Trek’s optimism (which I have previously critiqued) and Star Wars’ unembarrassed good-guy-romp nature captured a public imagination that had grown tired with everything from Vietnam to Watergate and all the fake cold-war posturing in-between. The recent Vanity Fair cover story on The Force Awakens (no, not that Vanity Fair cover) captures Star Wars’ sci-fi revolution succinctly:
After 10 years of haunted, pessimistic, even nihilistic hits such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The French Connection, The Godfather, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, and Taxi Driver—films in which more often than not the heroes, such as they were, ended up compromised, defeated, or dead—there was something radical about a movie where the good guys win an unambiguous, bell-ringing victory, and receive medals in the final scene to boot.
Similarly, Star Trek VI presented the idea that the Cold War could actually come to an end and be replaced by a peaceful alliance. In 1991, such hopefulness was nothing short of prophetic. First Contact, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, in espousing diplomacy and cooperation over knee-jerk confrontation (Sisko even hoped for a peaceful solution to the Dominion) continued this prophetic strain, and remained compelling in the struggle to live up to its goals.

The bottom line is that I love story, love being gripped by a dynamic plot (even a predictable and possibly even porous or campy one), with tension, conflict and hopefully resolution. And if it is set in space, if it means that I get to see and hear worlds and technologies and spacecraft that do not exist, then all the better. If it means that I get to encounter ideas and beliefs—familiar or not—expressed through the creativity required to develop New Worlds and New Civilizations or the story of A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away, then I will Boldly Go, and learn the ways of the Force.

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