The Star Trek Conversation
The other day I went to Frenzi, a cafe near the Rembrandt house in Amsterdam. It is a pleasant place to sit down at a small round table and enjoy a moment away from the computer. Frenzi overlooks a canal, and contrary to its name, it is on a quiet street.
I often go to a cafe to get away from the pressures of the freelancing work I do. I usually am juggling six or seven clients, each one with specific requests for digital marketing strategies that require that I learn their business and provide them with a way forward to enhance and grow their digital audience. I haven’t found a way to do that kind of work through a template. It takes a lot of work to get it right and sometimes a break is called for, although it is very difficult to ‘just stop’ solving business problems for other people.
A change of scenery is called for, then, and a cafe in Amsterdam is a perfect counterpart to the sterility of sitting in front of a computer most of the day. My drink of choice in these occasions is a medium-sized cafe americano without any extra milk. Usually, I’ll order some small snack to go with it. Some bread and olive oil. Or a simple vegetarian sandwich.
On this particular occasion, Diana, a friend of mine, came to share my table. She was on her way back from an appointment at the University of Amsterdam Linguistics department. She speaks about 5 languages and is always looking to learn another one. At that time, Diana had started working on learning Japanese.
It wasn’t a surprising development on her part. Diana loves Japanese anime and learning Japanese would enhance her experience of the super-kinetic programs on television. Diana’s choice of languages isn’t always tilted toward the pragmatic: she has a keen interest in ‘fabricated languages,’ languages created for works of fiction like Elvish in The Lord of The Rings, or Klingon for Star Trek. Structured languages with real grammar, orthography, verbs and nouns, but created entirely to exist in a restricted universe far from the every day.
Perhaps that’s how we got into the conversation about Star Trek.
I watched Star Trek when it was fairly new, in the 1960’s. I was living in Lima, Peru, at the time, and television was broadcast in black and white. The episodes were all dubbed into Spanish. At the time, watching Star Trek wasn’t something that you admitted to in polite company. Watching television was frowned upon in my school, and watching a television show about people with pointy ears, ‘star ships’, and other strange made-up plantes, was an invitation to be ridiculed and ostracized by everyone else with the more important interests in life: belonging to the right group, worrying about their parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, and all the other things that, somehow, didn’t connect with me at the time.
Star Trek connected with me. I absorbed the lessons, both explicit and implicit, in the episodes that showed, on repeat, every day after school. I found myself longing to belong to an organization that valued exploration and, technically, research, above all else, and that was prepared to defend those values against pressures, both internal and external. I liked the clarity of thought that filtered through every episode, even when doubts appeared about what course to take on individual circumstances, eventually, a clear route to a solution came through.
I also liked how the characters talked to each other: the respect that each one showed to the other, even through banter or jokes, and the strength they had to be able to present their views to each other and change their minds — most of the time, so they could learn from each other about themselves. You could say that the crew of the ship created their individual selves by sharing and lending parts of their individuality, guided by the common trust that the insitution that created the ship provided as governance for the relationships within it.
It was a very, very different world from the one I saw every day and I ate it up.
The beauty of my relationship with Star Trek at that time was that it was untouched by merchandising. If I had lived in the US at that time, I could have bought Star Trek magazines and books, and toys that resembled the props from the show. Living in Lima, there were no such things anywhere to be seen. The only ways that I could make the world of the Enterprise jump into my own was by drawing the ship as it traveled through endless space, and by recreating it, or something like it, with a couple of free-form Lego kits that my father had bought me in one of his European trips.
As I grew older and Star Trek had to recede into something that I did when I had time to spare, I learned about other people who had had deep experiences while watching the show. It is almost a cliche to say that a lot of the technology of today (January, 2020) was and continues to be influenced by the things some of us saw in Star Trek when we were growing up. Google, for example, is well known for wanting to recreate the computer onboard the Enterprise.
I also was around when Star Wars came about. This was a completely different thing, of course. Semi-mystical, colorful, with many more strange names and many more ‘strange new worlds,’ to show in a short span of time. Diana is a big fantasy and fantasy science fiction fan. I mean, she has a reading list that probably reaches to top of her door by now, and she likes to read physical books.
It isn’t difficult to get Diana to talk about some long running fantasy series that she enjoys. And when it comes to Star Wars, she has solid opinions grounded on years of reading and understanding the nature of a well-told story. She can get mad when the Star Wars movies seem like cobbled together by a committee that doesn’t care about any of the details that matter: character development and consistency, for example.
Naturally, Star Trek has the same flaws, truth be told. I supposed that, statistically speaking, if you create N number of episodes, books, movies, animated shows, etc., you are bound to create some less than stellar efforts. This is all to be expected and it isn’t a bone of contention between Diana and I.
On that day, between bites of bread and sips of coffee, I realized that I had never asked anyone about the Star Wars fandom. It is well-known that Star Trek has inspired people to go into science (and continues to do so to this day). Scientists from many countries can trace their desire to study science to their admiration for Mr. Spock, or Lieutenant Commander Data, or even Doctor McCoy (those would have been encouraged to enter medicine, of course).
A question bubbled up in my head. Probably because I had Diana to ask. If Star Trek had encouraged people to go into the sciences, what had Star Wars encouraged people to do, outside of reading or consuming more Star Wars. As I mentioned to Diana: Star Trek seemed to have encouraged people to look out at the real world beyond the show itself while Star Wars seemed to have captured people’s attention and kept it sealed inside a bubble. Nothing seemed to satisfy the craving for Star Wars except more Star Wars.
Diana kind of smiled at me. This is the type of question that she loves to parry. She had the answer almost as soon as I finished posing it: Yes, Star Trek encouraged people to go into the Sciences. Star Wars, on the other hand, encouraged people to go into the arts: people who moved beyond Star Wars itself did so because they wanted to re-create the magic they saw on screen in their own way, with their own creations.
Some of them became special effects specialists. Others makeup artists. Others, writers. Star Wars, according to Diana, was a doorway for people to gain respect for arts that did not involve hard mathematics, at least not in an overt manner.
Star Wars has, of course, revolutionized the motion picture arts. From specialized cameras to innovative uses of models and painting, to eventually, incredible CGI work that brought to life things that no one had ever seen before. All of it lovingly created by people who had acquired their first love for those things by watching Star Wars and studying it as a subject that they could deconstruct and put together again, in their own way.
I did what I believe Spock would have done. I finished my coffee and ‘half-smiled’ at Diana, then I threw one eyebrow up and said: “Fascinating.”
It felt like the right thing to do.
