Nemesis

Star Trek: Nemesis affords a natural occasion to reflect on the Star Trek franchise, the SF genre, and the definition of drama.

I suppose that like almost any American male who came of age during the second half of the 20C, I enjoy the SF genre. I’m old enough to have seen the classic Trek series in its premier broadcast. And I’ve monitored the franchise in its films and sequels. I’m not a fan, much less a Trekkie. To me it was never more than dumb fun. I’m now older than the lead actors were when they began the franchise or its sequels, and even the entertainment value has worn rather thin for me.

Star Trek achieved iconic status in the pop culture long ago. That is one reason it’s worth reflecting on. But one question is how deep that runs. Is it limited to bumper stickers and a sub-cult following?

Star Trek acquired its niche by riding on the crest of the counterculture. Roddenberry’s vision of the future was very much in sync with the Summer of Love. Drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll would usher in the Aquarian Age of love, peace, and brotherhood, baby.

It seems hopelessly naive, now, but there were many back then who took this quite seriously. That was, in part, because the counterculture was youth-oriented, and the young tend to be idealistic.

This may seem to be all very nostalgic and passe, but the fact is that many people still share Roddenberry’s vision. All they’ve done is to substitute the UN or the EU for the Federation. They think that education, international law, and the welfare state will reap the Millennium.

They think that nurture trumps nature; folks are not born to hate; no, they learn to hate, so that they can be taught not to hate. And even if this were ingrained, they believe that sooner or later science will reprogram human nature. Between social engineering and genetic reengineering, utopia lies ahead.

Another variant on this optimism is the hope that first contact with an alien species will civilize our Darwinianly-challeged humanity. ETs shall be our guardian angels and savior gods.

Let us now turn to Nemesis. It isn’t the best of the Star Trek movies or the worst. But I found the film distractingly flawed. There were to many inconsistencies, or artificial consistencies, or arbitrary assumptions.

One problem is that Nemesis is a spinoff of the TV series. As such it feels the need to carry over the same cast members. Now, when you start a new TV series, you don’t know in advance which characters and actors will click. In the final shakedown, Data and Picard were the principals.

La Forge was a token, Troi and Crusher were decorative, Worf supplied comic relief, while Riker was a cardboard cutout.

Nemesis is cluttered by the felt need on the part of producers to give everyone in the original cast a little piece of the action. There are even distracting cameo appearances as Wheaton, Mulgrew, and Goldberg cycle in for their Kodak moment.

This weighs down the drama. It means nothing to the uninitiated, and, frankly, I wonder how much it means to the devotees. It would be better to either kill off the secondary cast members or promote them to off-stage positions. Then the director and screenwriter could concentrate on the more interesting characters.

The cast is getting to old and out of shape. Star Fleet is a quasi-military institution, but Riker, for one, left his battle trim several candy bars behind.

Picard is also too old. Isn’t there a mandatory retirement age for Star Fleet captains? Realism is not augmented when we see Picard in a fistfight with his younger self. Gee, who would win that tussle—Grampa or his twenty-something clone?

Of course, this is a necessary compromise in the sense that the franchise is committed to Stewart. But it would have been more plausible if Star Fleet has taken Picard out of retirement for a special mission.

The screenwriters try to make a virtue of necessity by making this a sort of swan song in which Picard confronts his own mortality. Even so, the underlying incongruity remains.

But the problem is not just that Stewart is looking rather long of tooth. He sounds tired. To judge by this performance, Stewart is at that point in life where he can no longer summon the vital energy to project his character. It is a wonderfully mellow performance, but not a commanding performance. Too grandfatherly by half.

There is a similar problem with Data. An android is ageless, but Spiner is not. Jowly, baggy-eyes, sagging neckline. He should have gotten a face lift before reprising his role.

I’m not being supercilious about this. Actresses do it all the time. If betrays an unprofessional indifference to the part that Spiner doesn’t go under the blade to look the part.

Because Picard and Data are the fan favorites, they’re given essentially separate storylines. Picard has a double (Shinzon) and so does Data (B4). This is too pat to be plausible. And it is also awkward to make parallel plots converge. Why does the Enterprise go to Romulus? We are given two reasons: Star Fleet ordered the trip at the invitation of the Romulans; B4 was bait to lure the Enterprise to Romulus. But surely one reason would suffice. The redundancy only exists as a clumsy way of reconnecting Data’s story with Picard’s.

Why does the Reman Viceroy commit a telepathic rape of Troi? This seems to be a set up so that Troi can later reverse the process and detect the cloaked ship. Okay, but the telepathic rape makes no dramatic sense on its own.

And, while we’re on the subject, how does telepathy enable the Enterprise to track the Scimitar? How does telepathy interface with technology?

Shinzon’s character seems to be the product of a committee. He looks too soft, full-lipped, and doll-like to be a warrior. And the effect is not diminished by his uniform, which looks a bit too much like something from Liberace’s wardrobe. The same goes for his uppercrust accent. Did he pick that up in the Dilithium mines as well?

Another, rather effeminate moment, is when he rebuffs the advances of Donatra. What normal man would be offended by a female of her attributes stroking his cheek? Is Shinzon a hypochondriac? Oo! Girl's germs! Girl's germs!

Actually, as the product of a germ-free lab, our clone might well be a hypochondriac. There are some dramatic possibilities here. But it hardly fits with his career as a soldier. There is nothing especially antiseptic about hand-to-hand combat. The only reason he rebuffs her is, I guess, to establish that he’s a real mean dude—and maybe explain why she changes sides.

Now, the producers are committed to this antagonist because the character is the alter-ego of the protagonist (Picard), so he must look and sound like a youthful version of Stewart. But, again, that doesn’t relieve the underlying incongruity.

Why, exactly, does Shinzon want to destroy Picard? The reaction seems out of all proportion to the provocation. What is so unbearable about being a clone? Does a twin feel this way about his brother? Does a twin feel it necessary to kill his own brother in order to assert his own individuality? Seems sort of extreme to me. How common is fratricide among twins, anyway? Surely Shinzon can make a name for himself regardless of Picard’s reputation.

Shinzon is naturally curious about Picard. Okay, so why be in such a hurry to polish him off? And why does he never go through with the blood transfusion?

Why, exactly, does Shinzon want to annihilate life on earth? We seem to be given two reasons. This is another rejection of his humanity as he bonds with the Remans. But we’re also told that it strikes a mortal blow at the heart of the Federation, paving the way for the conquest of the entire quadrant. But why do we need two reasons when one would do the job?

For that matter, how would the destruction of the earth destroy the Federation? Surely the remaining members of the Federation could muster enough military might to defeat the Scimitar or even the whole Romulan fleet.

One also wonders what the need is for a new Doomsday weapon. Don’t you suppose that 24C military technology already had many ways of committing genocide? How much high technology does it really take to wipe out a biological organism or entire species? We could have done it to ourselves with 20C (nuclear) technology.

We’re told that Shinzon was exiled to die in the Dilithium mines for fear the Federation would uncover plot and instigate a war. Really? Would the peace-loving Federation wage war against the Romulans if it discovered a defunct espionage plot involving a clone of Picard? Doesn’t sound much like the Federation I grew up with.

On another note, why do so many of the space craft look like the paper airplanes I made in grade school—complete with wings and cool-looking tail-fins? And why do they operate with jet propulsion? Is aerodynamic design important in a vacuum? What are those back burners pushing up against? What is holding the Enterprise in place while the Scimitar pulls away?

Of course, these common sense objections could be leveled against many SF films. But, that itself, is a question. Why is it that in movie after movie after movie, including high budget films, that no matter how often these elementary blunders are pointed out by critics as well as the fan base, nothing every changes? Why don’t producers respect their core constituency and develop a few simple conventions that don’t constantly overtax the willing suspension of belief?

There are many movie genres which are perfectly coherent. For example, many SF films merely resituate the Western genre. Yet the Western genre is rarely counterintuitive. So what is it about SF that seems to invite chronic incoherence?

Let’s finish our review with a couple of other cavils before I try to draw some broader lessons. Why the ubiquitous fire fight battle in outer space? It also gets to be unspeakably tedious to have these split-second narrow escapes. How many times have we seen the clock literally ticking down to the last nanosecond before the hero rides in right in the nick of time to avert disaster and save the crew for the sequel? The shields are down, warp drive is off-line, and the fuse is within a hair’s-breadth of the bomb.

Yes, this time Data is finished for good, but, no, not really, because he lives on in B4. So his demise is emotionally risk-free.

Again, why do we so often end in a match up between the hero and the bad guy?

Now, in fairness to SF filmmakers, the critics often seem to be just as incoherent in their objections. On the one hand, you have the usual jibes about cowboys in outer space and glitzy
FX. On the other hand, critics are often quite hostile SF films that ponder existential questions and raise the intellectual level of the dialogue. They dismiss this as just so much pseudoprofound didacticism.

It is possible to offer some very banal explanations for some of these deficiencies. Producers make movies to make money. They punch up the action to sell tickets. They fall back on formulaic writing because they’re under time constraints. They make aliens looks like humans, and spacecraft look like racing cars and fighter jets, because it’s easier to stick with what’s familiar and not challenge the expectations of the audience.

Maybe, but that doesn’t explain everything, and even for what it does explain, I not sure that there isn’t a deeper answer.

A teleplay often resorts to stock dramatic devices because the screenwriter is facing such a tight deadline to hand in the script. Also, in an hour-long show (minus commercial breaks), you want to deliver the goods in a hurry.

But movies are a different beast. There’s plenty of time to write a good screenplay. One doesn’t have to reach for instant gratification and the most threadbare plot devices.

Unlike moviegoers in general, many SF viewers are quite literate in the genre, with a command of popular science as well, if not a major in the field. The same often holds true for the screenwriter, director, and producers.

So it isn’t clear, from a practical or commercial standpoint, why so many movies in this genre should be so careless about the illusion of consistency. And their core constituency likes to be challenged to imagine the unimaginable.

Moreover, the predictable formulas and obvious dramatic devices are boring and irritating rather than exciting. This is one reason so many high-budget movies bomb every year. So commercial success can’t be what is driving this from start to finish.


Having found the pat answers a little too thin, let’s consider a few other explanations. One concerns the definition of drama. It is a cliche to say that conflict is the essence of drama. More precisely, conflict resolution is held to be the essence of drama. So the dramatic arc sets up the conditions of conflict, and then relieves the conflict for better or worse.

That is why so many TV series constantly return, many times a year, year after year, to dramas about cops and robbers, private-eyes, doctors, lawyers, and firemen. The simple idea is to situate the story is a naturally dramatic setting, with life-and-death struggles and their attendant emotions. Before the advent of cinema, this was the stuff of grand opera and the penny dreadfuls.

That’s the reason that Nemesis resorts to the same dramatic devices. It isn’t just because that’s such a quick and easy way to write, or because it delivers a big emotional payload at the end. Rather, that’s the reigning definition of drama, of what makes a gripping story or page-turner. And the definition controls the product regardless of whether the formula actually works or not.

This suggests that the definition itself is defective. It is too stereotypical. The average viewer becomes emotionally numb. We can always see what’s coming next, so our feelings are not engaged.

C.S. Lewis once said that you can’t begin to really enjoy a good book until you read it the second time. The first time you read it you’re too curious about what’s going to happen next and how it all comes out, to really appreciate the quality of the writing. Only after your superficial curiosity is sated are you able to sit back and savor the book at a deeper level.

I would suggest that we need to revolutionize our definition of drama. It isn’t that the old definition is wrong, but that it is much too narrow and shallow.

And this isn’t a difference between the literary and cinematic medium. Why do film buffs have favorite films? Why do they watch the same film many times? It isn’t for the high-tension drama, because that depends on an element of suspense, which depends, in turn, on an element of surprise, that is lost after the very first viewing.

And there’s another reason we need to broaden our definition, because the old fashioned, operating definition is too proscriptive and prescriptive rather than descriptive of life. For drama, in the narrow sense, is only a small part of life, and often not the most important part of life.

Life dictates to art, art doesn’t dictate to life. Art is about experience, and not about winnowing down the raw materials to fit an a priori definition. Drama, if it is to be true to life, to be a true interpretation of life, ought to be open to a broader range of experience than the amusement park or circus act. Why not take life as it comes to us, touching it up a bit, but without radical surgery?

Another answer goes to limitations inherent in the SF genre. SF has certain conventions that lend it some flexibility, in terms of what it posits to be possible. But, by the same token, SF raises expectations that are hard for SF to satisfy. It imagines other worlds, but the only world that supplies the standard of comparison is, of course, the real world, and, in particular, the provincial little world we know on earth. So SF is literally a disguised version of an utterly mundane experience. Its extraordinary vision is only an extension or projection of ordinary sights and sounds. The aliens are never very alien.

This is one reason that Star Trek is so banal. All the aliens are humanized. The Vulcans, Klingons, and androids are humanized. Space exploration becomes a cheesy version of an expedition or safari to some exotic locale on terra firma. Space explorers domesticate the headhunters and civilize the savages of other alien species.

Still another reason for the thinness of the SF genre is that, as a rule, it exemplifies a secular outlook on life. A stock theme in Star Trek is the exploration of our humanity. And how do we define the essence of humanity? In Star Trek, personal autonomy and individuality is the essence of humanity.

But even if we were agreed on this definition, where does that take us? What does it mean to be an individual? Is an individual self-defining, or does the pressure of other persons supply the mutual surfaces and shared boundaries of his own identity?

Again, what do we do with our freedom? Is freedom an end it itself, or a means to the end? In Nemesis, this is a quest to be more than we are, to be better than we are. But what is the frame of reference? What are we supposed to be reaching for? What supplies the vertical axis of aspiration along the horizontal axis of humanism? Gazing at a mirror doesn’t offer an ideal alternative—even if the ideal were obtainable.

SF is not so much a secular vision as it is a secularized vision of something else—a stripped down version, with pseudoscientific trappings, of apocalyptic eschatology—with a climactic battle between the Christ figure (e.g., Picard) and the Antichrist figure (the Borg queen, Shinzon, Khan), terminating in heaven-on-earth (the Federation) for the victors, and a lake of fire (flaming space ships) for the vanquished. The Star Wars saga follows the same pattern.

Therein lies both the dramatic power and the broken promise of the SF genre. The source of conflict and resolution is essentially religious in aspect, but in a suppressed and censored form.