Happy 40th Birthday, Star Trek

Why Captain Kirk's story is the story of America

Tim Cavanaugh from the August/September 2006 issue

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Just what was that society in which Adams and millions, in America and around the planet, put so much confidence? On many of its aspects we should look with horror. The Star Trek universe can be called libertarian in but one important way: It never pretends to be a utopia. As University of Virginia professor of English Paul Cantor has explained, the society of the Federation is the kind of thing that might spring fully grown from the hernia scar of Lyndon Baines Johnson—a galacticized Great Society. A vaguely militarized government makes all decisions. Any time the Enterprise crew encounters a private entrepreneur or contractor, that person will almost certainly turn out to be a thief, a swindler, a coward, or all three. (Roger C. Carmel's mincing, scheming Harry Mudd is Star Trek's idea of a businessman.) Entire planets and populations are wiped out at a time by disease or invasion. Despite frequent references to a "noninterference" directive in contacting alien civilizations, Star Trek eerily predicts the era of total interventionism, as James T. Kirk, an interstellar Gen. Tommy Franks, routinely smashes planetary autocracies, promising (sometimes) that others will come along later to do the nation building.

While some of these attitudes are rooted in a certain '60s peak of big-government confidence, Star Trek was an old-fashioned show even in its own time. Gene Roddenberry pitched it to NBC as "Wagon Train to the stars," and it is Roddenberry's original vision, for better or worse, that has informed every iteration of Star Trek. Many people contributed to the franchise's success. Dorothy C. Fontana, a story editor and writer, created such favorites as the aforementioned space hippies, the Vulcan death grip, and "Charlie X," the dangerously psychokinetic teenager, a precursor to the Columbine killers, played with icy longing by Robert Walker Jr. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer had a hand in the three most successful of the movies. The producer Rick Berman kept the franchise moving after Roddenberry's death in 1991 at the age of 70. In different ways, fans have insufficiently appreciated the contributions of Fontana, Meyer, and Berman (and others). But Roddenberry's was the individual intelligence behind Star Trek.

Two books help flesh out that intelligence. The former nun novitiate Yvonne Fern's Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation establishes the self-described "Great Bird of the Galaxy" as an original though not always profound thinker (and a strong opponent of religion, a trait that comes across in a striking number of Trek episodes). Joel Engel's unauthorized, unfriendly, and largely persuasive biography Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek, documents him as a hard-drinking TV tyrant who repeatedly rooked his collaborators out of money and credit, manipulated the personal loyalty of the show's fans to insinuate himself with movie and TV players who would have preferred to lock him out of developing Trek projects, and through megalomania and general nuttiness managed to obstruct as much as he created.

During World War II, Roddenberry, born in 1921, piloted B-17s in the Pacific and suffered a takeoff crash that killed several crew members. During the 1950s he served on a Pan Am plane that crash-landed in the Syrian desert, killing several people. Later, he served the Los Angeles Police Department as a flack and was mentored by legendary Dragnet creator Jack Webb in the art of TV screenwriting. By the time of Star Trek, Roddenberry had already produced a series called The Lieutenant, with Gary Lockwood as a young Marine officer—and though that show performed well in the ratings, it was canceled after one season, according to Roddenberry because the Vietnam War had made present-day military dramas toxic for television.

Through the first run of Star Trek and in the no man's land that followed, Roddenberry held on doggedly, working the fan conventions and struggling to get new projects off the ground. (Who can forget—or more accurately, who can remember—Genesis II, with Mariette Hartley as a futuristic babe with two belly buttons, or the mind-blowing Questor Tapes, with Robert Foxworth as an android rookie with the LAPD?) At one low point in the mid-'70s Roddenberry took a gig writing a script for the Circle of Nine, a New Age channeling cult in Ossining, New York. What emerges from this life is a character many Americans, and especially many Angelenos, will recognize: a hard worker to whom a stingy helping of success arrives maddeningly late in life and who never overcomes the pettiness and resentment bred of being an outsider among big shots less talented than himself.

Yes, Star Trek was the product of a man's midlife crisis, which by good luck hit during a time of great cultural ferment. Even the most ardent Trek hater must acknowledge that the show is a wonderful reading text for the tensions of late-'60s America. Star Trek engaged the Cold War obliquely (with an episode wherein the Federation and the Klingons must arm opposite sides in a planetary proxy war), directly (with a hokey time travel episode, brightened somewhat by a young Teri Garr, in which America circa 1968 narrowly avoids a nuclear exchange with the Russians), and tragically (with a planet where the superpowers have already pressed the buttons, and the Yankees and Communists are now reduced to iron-age "Yangs" and "Coms"). Through it all, Roddenberry accurately predicted the U.S.-Soviet conflict would be resolved peacefully and that Russians, personified in the Enterprise's never-believable Ensign Chekhov, would go on being Russians long after they had stopped being Reds.

The show's gestures toward the counterculture and the sexual revolution are more intriguing. Star Trek approached what was then called the "generation gap" from radically different angles. In the legendary space hippies episode (which is both disdained as a low point in series quality and beloved as unintentional comedy), the crazy longhairs come close to destroying the Enterprise in their kooky search for a California-style "Eden." In another, Kirk, following orders he never really questions, breaks up an idyllic settlement whose residents enjoy practically Mennonite contentment under the influence of mood-elevating, and entirely benevolent, flower spores. Discontent, not dilithium, is the real driving force of Star Trek, but the show is open-ended and curious, embodying an over-the-hill producer's simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the ways of the flower children.

Star Trek's sexual politics at first seem even more embarrassing, a Hugh Hefner fever dream of middle-aged authority figures scoring with beautiful and compliant young women. In its treatment of gender roles, however, Star Trek is underrated, and its vision of luscious Lt. Uhuras in miniskirts and go-go boots may be the show's most visionary and subversive element (and not merely for featuring the fabled "first interracial kiss" on television—a Kirk-Uhura moment so hot it may melt your picture tube). Postwar science fiction was as male-dominated as any field in American culture, and a classic like Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy features long stretches where women are as silent and invisible as they are in the streets of Riyadh. Star Trek countered that view with a world where women are independent, competent characters capable of command and occasional self-defense, and it did so in a way that bypassed the budding women's movement of the '60s and went straight to what we now think of as third-wave feminism, a society wherein women are recognized as equals while remaining entitled to sexiness and traditional gender roles.

If that point seems tangential, it contains the most important kernel of Star Trek's appeal: its rejection of the notion that progress would leave us diminished, less sure of our genders, our free will, or our humanity. The representative science fiction film of Star Trek's era, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, paints a largely bleak future of dull, robotic humans, hostile and powerful central computers, and an endless Cold War; the movie's only note of optimism comes at the end, with the possibility that a human being might leave behind his body and his humanity, and be reborn as a cerebral super-being. Star Trek's future, skeptical of super-beings and dehumanization alike, shows progress and technology mostly allowing people to be more human, not less—more manly or womanly, better fed, smarter, healthier, and wiser. Its important message, as one Reason Online reader put it, was its simplest: "Technology solves problems." And even when high tech causes problems it won't defeat us, as Captain Kirk proves in countless episodes that have him arguing computers into self-destructing—the most ludicrous being an incident where he disables the Enterprise's powerful electronic brain by having it compute pi (3.14) to its final digit.

This optimism, more than any correct guesses about wireless telephony, police use of Tasers, or the shape of 21st-century neoconservatism, was the dangerous message of Star Trek. The dystopian science fiction of the late '60s and early '70s (to which Star Trek was a rare exception) shares something with contemporary hysteria over stem cell research. Both claim to fear that the advance of science will hurt us, but their real fear is that it won't hurt us. Because if human life really is getting better, then maybe you've wasted your life fearing the unknown, clinging to useless traditions, missing out on better things ahead.

One useless tradition of the '60s, a decade that began with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minnow's description of television as a "vast wasteland," held that mass media were turning Americans into passive, hypnotized zombies. This view had dissenters at the time, the Canadian philosopher Marshall MacLuhan most prominent among them.

But nobody did more to smash the myth of the passive audience than the fans of Star Trek. More than anything else, Star Trek was about participating. "It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden," Spock tells the space hippies after their quest has crashed and burned. "I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves." That's what the fans did: They made it themselves, in immensely ambitious and creative ways, through the films and fiction mentioned above, through the conventions and communities and three-dimensional chess leagues. The clearest expression of the fan phenomenon is not found in Star Trek or even in Paramount's fun but perfunctory documentary Trekkies but in the 1999 spoof Galaxy Quest. That film's conceit holds that a civilization of real aliens, so persuaded of the truth of the television broadcasts emanating from planet Earth that they shed a tear for the hapless castaways of Gilligan's Island (another essential building block of the America we love, as Paul Cantor argues in his book Gilligan Unbound), have patterned their society on a long-canceled Star Trek-type show. As the alien leader appeals for help from the show's cast (wittily depicted as slightly pathetic has-beens working the convention and superstore-opening circuit), he expresses the fan's deepest, most shameful, most admirable wish—that it all might turn out to be real:

"For years, since we first received transmission of your historical documents, we have studied every facet of your missions and strategies. For the past hundred years our society had fallen into disarray. Our goals, our values had become scattered. But since the transmission we have modeled every aspect of our society from your example, and it has saved us. Your courage, and teamwork, and friendship through adversity! In fact all you see around you has been taken from the lessons garnered from [your] historical documents."

The Trekkies built their world in an era when science fiction thrillers did not yet command vast budgets, when Hollywood was not yet desperate to stroke "viral" and "grassroots" support for its properties. Entertainment has since become a two-way street, and the Trekkies helped make it that way. Star Trek fans endured decades of ridicule on the path to the glorious present (including an infamously mocking sketch by William Shatner himself on Saturday Night Live), but when Trekkies and Galaxy Quest hit theaters in the late 1990s, the films felt less like a vindication of fandom than a victory lap. Science fiction fans, you had nothing to be ashamed of all those years. It was those others, those techno-skeptics, those narrow-minded, pig-headed anti-Trekkies, those mere spectators, who turned out to be history's real losers.

The interactive, on-demand media environment the Trekkies helped create has been with us just long enough that we're beginning to take it for granted. Fan conventions are a regular feature of popular entertainment. "Slash" fiction, the fan genre named for the gay Kirk/Spock romances, now flourishes to the point that virtually any two TV characters you can nam e are getting it on somewhere out on the Internet. As the WB and UPN networks have found out during their merger, fan lobbying to rescue favorite shows has become extremely sophisticated, involving massive fund raising, bribery attempts, and skywriting campaigns. Entertainment properties are now routinely conceived in multimedia terms, with video games, action figures, merchandise, and labyrinthine back stories. Captain Kirk is the little acorn from which this mighty oak grew.