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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But in a real way, Star Trek itself is over. When the series Enterprise went off the air last year, it ended an era, stretching back to the early Reagan administration, during which some version of Star Trek had been continually in at least pre-production. Paramount will give Trek XI its day, and there will probably be an audience around when that happens. But the circumstances were unique. It's unlikely we'll see a similar fan phenomenon in a world of endless entertainment choices and eternal afterlives in home video (and if this birthday tribute has moved you to nostalgia or curiosity, be advised that Paramount has brought out all of Star Trek on DVD, with the original series packaged in a handsome set of color-coded tricorders).

The culture has moved on too. Technological change and greater personal freedom are now widely accepted as positive forces, rendering much of the Trek message superfluous. The romance of space travel that accounted for much of Star Trek's appeal (the original show went off the air two months before Apollo 11 landed on the moon) has withered; and the problems of the Yangs and the Coms seem quaint in a world where the Coms have signed onto a perverted form of capitalism. And who can get exercised about the hippies and the squares at a time when only Islamic fundamentalists are wearing beards?

It's even less likely we'll see another popular entertainment with such proudly mythic elements: thunderous musical cues, larger-than-life acting, props and special effects so basic they function more as symbols than as on-screen visuals. This article would be incomplete without an appreciation of at least one of those elements: the acting. If you still believe Shatner is just a laughable ham, nothing will convince you otherwise. People of refinement know better and recognize Captain Kirk's total commitment, his vein-popping intensity, his refusal to be cooler than the material, as the acting equivalent of the right stuff—an indefinable quality, not quite stagy, not quite cinematic, at once too big for TV and just right for it. On a fresh viewing, it's striking to see how ably Shatner, Nimoy, and the late DeForest Kelley sell Star Trek. Because even if you never believe those tinfoil props are really phasers or communicators, you never doubt for a second that they believe it.

That theatrical quality dwindled in the later, desexualized spin-off series. (At times in the 1980s, it almost seemed the execrable Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, with its paunchy, wisecracking leading man and bevies of perverse and exotic beauties, captured more of Star Trek's daffy spirit than the Star Trek franchise itself.) In all its iterations, Star Trek continued to provide juicy guest roles for some of the greatest character actors ever to chew Styrofoam scenery. What other series would give radical attorney Melvin Belli a job playing an androgynous angel? Where else but on Deep Space Nine could Andrew Robinson, the loathsome "scorpio killer" in the original Dirty Harry, have found years of work playing an alien in bumpy-forehead makeup? But it wasn't merely acting styles that passed the franchise by. Star Trek was a work of innocence, a relic of the mythic past lingering in a more wised-up, ironic age.

It seems very wistful, very un-Star Trek, to be looking back fondly on that mythic past, but on this one occasion, we can let our human halves overpower our Vulcan halves. Once upon a time, when our nation was in trouble, many brilliant people came together to produce a humble entertainment that was more than a sum of its parts: The most retrograde and prescient, the most religious and agnostic, the most male and female, the most heroic and absurd, the most rarefied and popular, the most American television show ever made.

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