As everyone knows, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise spends all his time lost in space, getting picked on by morally inferior aliens. Space, in Captain Picard’s scientifically suspect world, is a place where sound travels and where lasers shoot in short, modest spurts, like a 17-year-old. Space is also a place where fires and explosions can occur without the apparent presence of oxygen.
The tale of Captain Picard is based on the rather annoying split infinitive: “To boldly go where no man had gone before.” Indeed, in reality no one can go to Picard’s space….because it simply cannot physically exist. You do not have to read Hawkins to know this either, I laughed at this long before I ever laughed at the idea of matter being smeared around the edges of a black hole…but that is a tale for another day.
Fair enough, the original 1966 film was founded on the old post-apocalyptic rule: man destroys earth and uses sheer wit and brilliance to wander off into the unexplored wastes of outer space in search of nothing more than knowledge and moral superiority. It’s all a bit insecure really, one has a hard time believing that a society that spawned the quiet, steady hand of Captain Picard could possibly have destroyed Planet Earth. It is like saying that Jane Austin fell pregnant by a heathen and never went to church, we all know Jane is far too didactic and sensible. To top it off it’s predictable: really very much an exaggerated Armageddon tale in the vein of: War of the Worlds and even (to a lesser extent) prophetic entertainment such as Dr Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Point being, in this day and age (and certainly in the politically uncertain 1960s) one would come to expect a Jean-Luc Picard, someone with quaint yet strong French name, who is about as French as a football hooligan from Manchester (hey, if your not a Mank you’re a wank).
So why the raging success? My first instinct is always to hit the ‘idiot’ button, but in this case I am overwhelmed by the sense that Star Trek is essentially a very good story. And a very well formulated story in the style of a heroic novel and a post-apocalyptic yarn of hope. How does this happen? Well most literature is formulated, and most of these formulas work. Going back as far as Beowulf, Chaucer and the Pearl Poet we discover that each of these writers wrote in a high heroic style, emphasised by characters who served as allegories of morality and heroism.
People love it! They don’t know it…but story telling has, through the centuries, devised ways to get them to love it. The hero must die, he must be from rather mysterious or unfortunate beginnings (usually without parents), he must journey, have an epiphany, and make tough choices. I am not sucking this out of my thumb or speaking from observation, these are hard-and-fast rules.
Frankly, I like Picard but I am also deeply bored by him. He is character cooked up by recipe, and as such he is profoundly two-dimensional and any last-ditch attempts to explore his deepest, darkest, innermost complexities in later day cinema releases failed quite spectacularly. No one needs a winging hero with a conflict of self, it sort of defeats the purpose.
Nowadays, all literature is post-modern, arse-upwards emotionally confusing things (thanks JM Coetzee), and even though this is often more edgy…it is also in a sense deeply boring. There is always a climax, but none of the revelatory kind of culminations that we used to get. The story also does not have to reveal itself or explain anything. Authors like Pynchon will keep you guessing and then leave you hanging, and you have the faintest suspicion that you are being duped once you hit the end of it.
I guess my point is that I miss antiques like Picard and his one-sided morality. I miss the predictable safety of that formula. There is a time for sound in space, and if we keep our ears to the ground of modern literature, we run the risk of hearing nothing.
