Let the world around us just fall apart

[austin_dern]

We've started seeing movies again. We hadn't meant to stop, we just went a couple months without anything looking particularly appealing and what with stuff keeping us busy, well, who had time to go see something we just weren't looking for? We turned out to be wrong about this, because we'd have gone to see The Croods sooner if we'd known something key about it, but we learned about that fact only after planning to go see Star Trek Into Darkness. I don't believe there's any plot spoilers here, but who knows where comments will lead, so, be warned.

Something which bugged me about the film: as in the first, there's travel between one planet and another at warp speed that takes maybe like five minutes. Not five minutes of screen time --- I know no movie however overlong is long enough to sustain that these days --- but like five minutes for the characters. This bugs me because it's the final surrender of the last bit that made Star Trek a Space Western: the sense of remoteness, isolation, separation from civilization which could put Our Heroes in a spot where they're so overwhelmed by the forces of chaos arrayed against them that no one would ever know they were there to be defeated. The Original Series traded on this most heavily in its first season --- where the sense of isolation is most palpable, and precious, and rare among space-action shows --- and later shows nearly forgot it, but it had been there, and while it may be fun Space Opera to have the remote parts of the galaxy closer to me than East Lansing is, it's still a closing-off of something that made the original special. How can Our Heroes be on their own if Home is four minutes away?

The other bothersome thing is that, early on, Kirk breaks a Rule. This produces scenes of him being chewed out for Breaking Rules and hasn't got any real relevance to the rest of the movie. This sort of scene happens a lot, in Star Trek and in other franchises, and you probably guessed, nobody thinks to say anything about why the Rules are important. Why not? Well, because in Pop Culture, the Rules are just ways that the Hero is slowed down from Doing What's Right, is why; it's a pro-vigilante, anti-organization motif that focus groups found successful so we mustn't dare violate their edicts.

It's easy to make a case for Rules, though. For example: it's hard to think of everything, particularly in a moment of crisis; how do you know you're not overlooking something important --- a life, a principle, the entire point of whatever it is you're doing --- in that rush? How do you know you're not doing something that looks promising but which experience --- or foresight --- indicates will lead to catastrophe? How do you know you're not just making life, actually, harder for yourself later on? The best Rules are safeties against the world's ability to overwhelm our good judgement; they're good judgement made secure and tucked where you can't miss them. They shouldn't be ignored without knowing the context, purpose, and reasoning behind them, and without understanding of why they might not be appropriate in this case; and if I can whip that up, surely the Admiralty can give Kirk a couple sentences to that effect.

There's good stuff, of course; particularly, they've let the people making alien costumes run wild with very good effect. The parliament-of-(humanoid)-aliens probably hasn't ever been done better on Star Trek, especially as so many of them are implicitly part of the starship's crew. And there's pretty good use of sets that look lived in, and the casual use of neat or eye-popping technology without dreary expository lumps. The plot also keeps edging its way towards being thoughtful, as if it's trying to be a better movie than it is.

Trivia: Around 1830, Britain produced four-fifths of the world's coal. Source: Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese.

Currently Reading: Squeeze This! A Cultural History Of The Accordion In America, Marion Jacobson. I'm quite enjoying the book, but it can say stuff like ``[ Viola Turpeinen ] may not have been he only Scandinavian accordionist to become a celebrity, but she had the most appeal beyond that community.''

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

oooo.. so did ya see The Croods? :9

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

We did, later that week, (http://austin-dern.livejournal.com/882924.html) and I have less involved thoughts about that.

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

Personally I suspect the real reason he got chewed out wasn't so much that he broke the Rule, but that he didn't report having done so. In doing so, he forfeited his chance to justify his actions. Would you trust a captain that didn't report honestly to his superiors and stand by his decisions? But you're right; in the end, it's all about the chair, and not so much the reason for the bridge it's sitting on.

The commentary to the original (new) Star Trek spent most of the time talking about how they managed to get the camera shaking and lens flare working, which seemed equally applicable to its sequel.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I have to both echo this, and wish it were more expressly state in the movie. It needed twenty seconds of dialogue akin to:

"I want you to break the Prime Directive-- and then come back here, look me in the eye, and tell me exactly WHY you broke the Prime Directive!"

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I confess to being a skeptic that minor, transient appearances, like fifteen seconds of seeing a starship, are going to produce substantial changes in a culture. Yeah, they might discard the Sacred Scroll of Sacredness today, but two weeks from now, the scroll's going to be there still and everyone who wasn't in that party is going to be saying, ``all right, so when is this thing supposed to come out of the water again?'' Moreso if the Enterprise leaves behind a team of anthropologists to explain and try to contain the damage. (It's mentioned a few times in various Original Series episodes that after overthrowing the totalitarian computer-god oppressing the Species of the Weekians they leave behind experts to smooth the transition to a ``more normal'' society.)

Granted they should try to minimize the harm done, and that it's admirable they were putting themselves at risk to save people from certain and imminent death that got them into trouble in the first place. But I wanted more on-screen justification for thinking they did break the Prime Directive, or that in this context the apparent harm done was the great and irreparable destruction the plot requires it to be.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I didn't specify what Rule it was he broke to be temporarily reprimanded. The Prime Directive is the obvious one, and one that needs defending; but the apparently bureaucratic ``trivia'' Rule about reporting what one does and why is the one that's probably more important to a functioning organization. If one doesn't know what decisions are made and why then they can't contribute to the collected wisdom that is so much the point of having an organization.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Your analysis of the function of rules is astute. Of course, there is a further implication: the rules, if they are to substitute for the reflective wisdom that we lack in a crisis, must be the product of wise reflection. Is the Prime Directive in fact a good rule? If it is, we should be given more reason to think so. It more often is set up as the voice of dreary and heartless authority.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

A further problem with the Prime Directive is there's no guessing what the writers think it ought to be, and there's apparently almost no attempt by Trek writers to figure out what it should be other than ``something they say they have to break in order to do the obviously right thing''. Case in point: that Next Generation atrocity where Worf's brother saves a people from imminent and complete extermination and everybody acts like he's the jerk; or, worse, the Enterprise one where Archer sets off the local version of World War III because he lost a communicator and he refuses to break the Prime Directive that doesn't even exist yet and can't possibly make sense in this context.

The rough principle that any species has to be given as much control over its own destiny as it can have, and that it shouldn't be forced to adapt to the Federation's mould if that can be helped. That sounds fine and it seems to match roughly what we see in the Original Series, including obvious exceptions like when Kirk promises the Organians aid in development if they'll let the Federation use the planet as a base against the Klingons (since the Organians' lifestyle could be assumed to be destroyed by a Klingon occupation). But they try too rarely to make an actual story out of that, and when they do, it ends up being the Next Generation one where the Barely Clothed Space People From Some Dopey 70s Hedonist Utopia discovered Wesley fell on their Space Azaleas and was also Wesley Crusher so they had to execute him.

If the writers thought through what a guiding principle like that meant, they might figure out how it should plausibly guide people's actions, and maybe build a story where it's not just an arbitrary exercise in slowing down doing what everyone knows they're going to do.