from the new frontier to the final frontier: star trek from kennedy to gorbachev

From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier: Star Trek From KennedyTo GorbachevRick Worland

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies,Volume 24, Numbers 1-2, 1994, pp. 19-35 (Article)

Published by Center for the Study of Film and HistoryDOI: 10.1353/flm.1994.0001

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Film & History, Vol. XXIV, No's. 1-2, 199419

From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier:Star Trek From Kennedy To Gorbachev

Rick Worland

In 1962, two weeks before John Glenn orbited the Earth in FriendshipSeven, scientist Werner Von Braun was scolded by a woman for his spacework: 'You folks ought to stay at home and watch TV like the Lordintended for people to do'.1

Today it seems difficult to imagine life without Star Trek. While the originalseries continues as a syndication war horse, two spin-off programs, Star Trek: The NextGeneration and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, prosper in the ratings, six theatrical films havebeen produced, and Paramount will begin a Next Generation movie series in late 1994,initially uniting the casts of both old and new TV shows. A third series spin-off, StarTrek: Voyager, begins in early 1995. Indeed, Star Trek has become an expanding, free-floating post-modern text that has proliferated simultaneously as original fiction, comicbooks, computer games, toys, and numerous other licensed products including Christmastree ornaments, the last very nearly elevating Star Trek to the realm of the sacred. Theshow's popularity is led by, but is not restricted to, a core of devoted fans whoseactivities, including writing amateur fiction and organizing conventions, have become theparadigm for "fan culture" which has received intense scrutiny from journalists andacademics. Thus the immensely popular text of Star Trek has thrived through nearlythirty years of rapid, often tumultuous changes in the society that originally produced it.As historian Richard "Slotkin and others have argued, the major terms of a coherentmythic system such as the American Frontier Myth-itself highly germane to Star Trek-once, established and disseminated, are varied, even reversible, permitting a wide varietyof permutations, uses, and implications.2 The enduring popularity of Star Trek isilluminated through the varied sources of American historical and cultural mythology itevokes and negotiates.

Throughout the twentieth century the Frontier Myth and American sciencefiction have enjoyed a closer ideological kinship than has been generally recognized.3Star Trek explicitly connected with the Western in the opening title sequence whichdefined outer space as "the final frontier." The metaphor's attractiveness here is enhanced

Rick Worland is an Assistant Professor of cinema at Southern Methodist University. Histeaching has included courses on the Hollywood Studio Era, Film Theory, Documentary,Film Genres and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. His current interests include therelationship between popular media and social history of the Cold War era.

20 Worland / Star Trek From Kennedy to Gorbachev

by the limitlessness of this particular frontier, one certain to remain open forever. DuringStar Trek's original production in the 1960s, more direct impetus for the popular genericshift from the Western to science fiction was provided by the national prestige and publicattention devoted to the manned space program that culminated in the first lunar landingin 1969. The conception of Star Trek as a latter day successor to the Western wasconsciously articulated by Gene Roddenberry who described it to network programmersin 1960 as "Wagon Train To the Stars."4 Yet Roddenberry also acknowledged a debt toCS. Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower novels, which describe the exploits of thecaptain and crew of an eighteenth century British naval vessel. "Hornblower In Space"was an alternate designation for the series indicating that, in addition to scientificexploration, starship Enterprise frequently acts as a powerful gunboat in the service of avast socio-political organization, eventually known as The United Federation of Planets.5"Wagon Train To the Stars" (the Western) plus "Hornblower In Space" (romantic talesof the British Empire) combined to make Star Trek a distinctly American parable ofinternational politics and domestic social issues of the 1960s.

The Cold War Context

Originally telecast on NBC from 1966 to 1969 at the height of the Vietnam war,Star Trek allegorized the geo-political Cold War conflict: Captain Kirk and the Federationrepresent America and "the Free World" locked in Cold War struggle with implacableideological enemies-the Klingons and Romulans-analogous to the Soviet Union andMaoist China. Containing the spread of "Klingonism" increasingly occupied the starshipcrew as the superpowers of outer space competed militarily and politically for theallegiance and resources of Third World planets.6 The historical figure uniting thesevarious ideological and thematic lines with the fictional world of Star Trek is PresidentJohn Kennedy, who began the decade with the promise of a New Frontier, pursued anactivist foreign policy aimed at challenging Communism in the Third World, andchampioned a massive effort to advance national prestige through the manned spaceprogram. Converted to the cultural realm through the generic tropes of science fictionand the Western, genres proven adaptable to many historical and ideological shifts, StarTrek carried the mythos of the New Frontier to the final frontier, virtually reincarnatingJohn F. Kennedy as James T. Kirk.

Star Trek's connection to the Western was explicitly divulged in "Spectre of theGun" (originally aired 10/25/68). Seeking to understand human behavior, an alien racedrops Kirk and his top officers into a morality play drawn from images in the Captain'smind. The designated genre of the test-drama is revealing: Their phasers replaced byholstered six-guns, the Enterprise men are cast as the infamous Clanton gang in a replayof the "gunfight at the O.K. Corral." The action takes place in an eerie, dream-likefrontier town, its mood enhanced by noir lighting, oblique camera angles, and obviously


artificial sets devoid of back walls. The setting visually conveys fragmented impressions-which is to say bits of history and movies-from Kirk's consciousness. Yet what's mostremarkable is that when aliens probe the mind of the earthmen's leader (Kirk makespointed reference to "my ancestors") they find.. .the American Western.

Star Trek's evocation of the O.K. Corral was a revisionist version of John Ford'sMy Darling Clementine (1946). Inverting the saga of the kindly Earps versus the wickedClantons in Clementine, our heroes are cast as the bad guys while the Earps and DocHolliday are portrayed as vicious, unsmiling killers. Strangely, too, the townsfolk-chuckling over the unfailing wit of the "Clantons" who now insist they are really spacetravelers-openly urge Kirk to rid Tombstone of the oppressive Earps once and for all.Most important here is Kirk's attitude toward the Western. From the moment they areplunged into this bizarre "Tombstone," these eminently rational men realize it's only anillusion. Kirk's dismissal of western lore as an historical curiosity is in essence ajudgement on the genre itself as obsolete and irrelevant, and in any case deceptivelyromanticized, hence the "corrected" reading of My Darling Clementine that demystifiesWyatt Earp. In retrospect, this particular segment might be noted as the point at whichscience fiction began to supplant the western directly in popularity while reworking andassimilating many of its core themes and problematics. Whether new or old, frontiericonography, language, and thought was so central to the cultural and political life ofAmerica in the 1960s that both sides in the growing national schism increasingly drew onit even as they tried to renounce or redefine it, as "culture" and "politics" grewincreasingly indistinguishable.7

John F. Kennedy and James T. Kirk.

Alongside Lincoln, John Kennedy has become one of our most mythologizedPresidents. Yet historical interpretation of the promise versus the record of the Kennedypresidency remains contradictory and unresolved. He served less than three years in aperiod we now recognize as a watershed in our history, with his assassination markingthe beginning of a traumatic decade of violence and disillusionment. Yet since hismurder, this very indeterminacy, indeed impossibility of ever coming to definiteconclusions about so many aspects of his tenure has rendered the historical Kennedy afigure eminently malleable to a variety of political and cultural ends. In his insightfulstudy of the Western film, Phillip French distinguishes the stylistic and ideologicalorientation of post-war westerns by retroactively identifying the films with the publicpersonae of four influential politicians of the 1950s and 1960s-Kennedy, LyndonJohnson, Barry Goldwater, and William F. Buckley. He argues that the ideologicalcurrents that informed westerns of this period were variously represented and embodiedby these four prominent political figures as well. French describes a "Kennedy Western"as follows:


The content of a Kennedy western would tend to feature the followingingredients: a slightly diffident hero, capable of change and development,with a rather unostentatious professionalism, though prone to a sense ofanguished failure; there would be an accent on the need for community;minorities and aliens would be viewed sympathetically, compassionately;opposition would be expressed to the notion that man is essentially ornecessarily violent; there would be an implication that one should lookto the past for guidance toward the creation of a new and bettercondition in the future; the underlying argument would favour a wryoptimism about the future development of society.8

Though French had in mind the liberal Anthony Mann/James Stewart westernsof the 1950s when he proposed this schema (e.g., The Far Country [1954], The Man FromLaramie [1955]), Star Trek is perhaps the ultimate "Kennedy Western." French's lineabout sympathy for "aliens" is particularly droll in regard to a science fiction show inwhich a pointy-eared Vulcan became the emblematic character. When added to hiselaboration on the style of a Kennedy western--"... its rhetoric would be elegant, ironic,laced with wit... its moral tone would be sharp and penetrating; its mood would be coolwith an underlying note of the absurd or tragic sense of life.. ."--it would be difficult toderive a more insightful description of the ethos of Star Trek and especially the characterof Captain Kirk.9

Science fiction would seem the most logical form for the Kennedy Western givenhow JFK skillfully re-conceptualized traditional frontier symbolism in ways meaningfulto modern people in the most advanced industrial nation of the mid-twentieth century.One of Kennedy's first uses of the phrase that defined his administration was explicitlyconnected with space. In a 1960 campaign article in the scientific journal Missiles andRockets, he wrote, "This is the age of exploration; space is our great New Frontier."10Since Sputnik, the space race had been widely recognized as an important front of themulti-faceted Cold War struggle, and from this grew the young President's decision to goto the moon. Star Trek similarly envisioned space exploration bound up with a securitymission.

The Kennedy administration's flair for deploying culturally evocative metaphorswas perhaps best demonstrated by its creation of particular heroes who were variationson the theme of the New Frontier. Attracting the most media attention were those twinsymbols of excellence and elitism so strongly identified with Camelot, the Mercuryastronauts and the Army Special Forces, or Green Berets. Both groups first took shapein the Eisenhower years, yet Kennedy made them his own. In The Right Stuff, TomWolfe argued that following the Bay of Pigs disaster in mid-April 1961 (only threemonths after the inauguration), Kennedy consciously embraced the Mercury astronauts


as "the knights-errant of the New Frontier" to generate as much political capital aspossible from the exemplary heroes.11 Perhaps more importantly, less than a weekbefore the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets had scored a major technological and political triumphin space:

...when Yuri Gagarin went into orbit, the Soviets were able to present tothe world just the image that Kennedy desired-that of a young, vigorous,successful nation reflecting the characteristics of its leaders. "Kennedycould lose the 1964 election over this," warned [NASA Director] HughDryden in the aftermath of the Gagarin flight.12

Though the Army Special Forces had been created in the Korean War, the groupcame into its own under the auspices of JFK's defense doctrine of "flexible response,"specifically in application of the counter-insurgency theory to Vietnam. Kennedypersonally authorized the unit to wear its trademark cover, prompting Armytraditionalists generally opposed to elite forces to malign the Green Berets as "JacquelineKennedy's Own Rifles."13 The Green Berets touched a nerve in 1960s America; to armand train the storied frontiersman with modern technology and send him alone and insmall groups to convert the "wilderness" of the Third World provided explanation andrationale for American involvement in southeast Asia that was both satisfying andpersuasive. These new frontiersmen in Vietnam thus drew on our deepest cultural mythsand ideals, translating the complex historical and political dilemma of a foreign land intothe familiar and conventionalized narrative terms of the key myth of American historicaland cultural experience. In most Star Trek scripts involving conflicts with the Klingonsover less developed-planets such as "Friday's Child" (12/1/67), Captain Kirk promisedaltruistically to bring scientific, economic, and political progress to those most in need ofit, yet this was in any case backed by a tacit threat of vast military power, and with theFederation's own interests foremost in importance.

Given the allegorical tendency of science fiction, Star Trek eventually produceda Vietnam War parable called "A Private Little War" in which the treacherous Klingonsattempt to subvert an Edenic planet by arming one native tribe and inciting them toattack their peaceful neighbors. The situation seems to force Kirk to supply the otherside with a proportionate amount of weapons in a classic containment strategy. Theepisode originally aired February 2, 1968, which happened to coincide with the fiercecombat of the Tet Offensive, now considered the turning point of the war, and by whichtime Vietnam had completely polarized American society. Though not without somesoul-searching, Star Trek finally endorsed America's Vietnam policy and its officialjustifications. A scene in which Captain Kirk, clad in fringed buckskins, taught theprimitive "Hill Men" of planet Neural to shoot a flintlock rifle created a culturallyrevealing pastiche of Natty Bumppo Meets the Green Berets in Outer Space.14

Aside from the fact that Jack Kennedy and Jim Kirk have the same initials, they


share other attributes as heroes. Describing common characteristics of the NewFrontiersmen in A Thousand Days, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., sometimes called the "courthistorian" of Camelot, listed four major aspects, traits which suggestively parallel thecharacters and mission of Star Trek. First, the New Frontiersmen "...brought with themideas of national reconstruction and reform."15 Star Trek, is of course, unflagginglyliberal, promoting social, sexual, and racial equality, putting strong faith in rationality andexpertise, championing individual freedom and promoting democracy. These ideals arepersonified by the multi-ethnic, sexually mixed Enterprise crew, which implicitly reflectsthe united Earth of the twenty-third century. Though America was increasingly riven byracial and political conflict in the late 1960s, the Enterprise crew and mission conveyed anidealized projection of contemporary American society.

Second, the New Frontiersmen "...aspired, like their president, to the world ofideas as well as to the world of power."16 Like FDR before him, Kennedy surroundedhimself with a coterie of intellectual advisers, "the best and the brightest." Continuingthis tradition of Uberai leadership Kirk employs a brain trust of his own~the ScienceOfficer, the Doctor, the Engineer, and an entire crew of specialists who lend theirexpertise to the Captain as needed. For the subsequent reception of Star Trek, this aspectis crucial. The stereotype of Star Trek fandom as a refuge for "nerds" is in one sense easyto explain: This is one of the rare forms of popular culture in which intellectuals areheroic, effectual, and sexy; accordingly, Mr. Spock, the show's most intelligent character,is also its most compelling. Moreover, like JFK, Kirk is characterized as an erudite manwho wears his learning easily, an exceedingly scarce attribute of heroic figures inAmerican culture, real or imaginary. Schlesinger speaks of Kennedy's "...desire to bringthe world of power and the world of ideas together in alliance~or rather, as he himselfsaw it, to restore the collaboration between the two worlds which had marked the earlyrepublic."17 Commanding the bridge of his formidable starship, surrounded by hisexpert advisers, Captain Kirk oversees a potent combination of the worlds of ideas andpower at work in the interests of the Republic, or here, the Federation.

Third, Schlesinger proudly records that a majority of the New Frontiersmen hadfought in World War II.18 They were the most celebrated of their contemporaries ofwhom the President described as "...born in this century, tempered by war, disciplinedby a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage~and unwilling to permit theslow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed..."World War II and the resulting tensions of the post-war years were much on the mindsof the Star Trek characters. In "The City on the Edge of Forever", Kirk and Spock musttravel back to Earth of the 1930s to correct an accidental tampering with history thatwould have allowed Hitler to win the war; in "Patterns of Force" Kirk re-enacts thedefeat of Nazism on a planet where a misguided Federation historian has recreated theThird Reich in the name of "efficiency." (So much for elevating intellectuals!) Referencesto World War II occur in many other episodes, often in the context of providing relevant"lessons" from the past that can guide us in the future.


The fourth vital attribute of the New Frontiersmen was their "versatility" saysSchlesinger, detailing the literary, scholarly, artistic, and vocational sidelines of Kennedyadministration officials.19 What he means of course, and modesty ever so slightly forbidshim from stating directly, is that Kennedy and his lieutenants were Renaissance Men.Clearly Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew merit this appellation as they must act byturn as explorers, soldiers, scientists, diplomats, and cultural emissaries throughout thegalaxy. Kennedy and the poet-soldier-expert-politicians of Camelot are further reflectedand varied in overlapping and complementary ways with the unconventional warriors ofthe Green Berets, the idealistic volunteers of the Peace Corps, the space pioneers ofProject Mercury, and eventually, the fictional crew of the Enterprise.

Reading Star Trek as a cultural echo of the New Frontier, we can even pin-pointa particular story in which the torch is passed from John F. Kennedy to James T. Kirk."The Savage Curtain" (3/7/69) presents another alien race testing the mettle of theFederation. This time Kirk and Spock are teamed with what are in essence fantasyprojections of their respective heroes-Abraham Lincoln for Kirk, the Vulcan holy-manSurak for Spock. To compare the human conceptions of good and evil, the aliens pitthem against some of (Star Trek's) history's worst bad guys including Ghengis Khan, afictional twenty-first century tyrant, and Kahless, the original nasty Klingon. Surak is astrict proponent of non-violence, Gandhi with pointed ears, whose example and leadershipset the warlike Vulcan race on the path to peace and rationality. Lincoln's role as moraland political exemplar is similarly reinforced and enlarged. When the contest is over,Team Evil is vanquished but Lincoln and Surak have sacrificed themselves for theirproteges. Kirk says solemnly that even though he never completely believed in the realityof this "Lincoln," it was still painful to watch the great man die all over again. When thisepisode was first telecast in March 1969, many viewers would have associated Lincoln andSurak, the martyred men of peace and progress, with the murdered Kennedy brothers andDr. Martin Luther King, Jr., just as pop singer Dion had connected the struggles of"Abraham, Martin, and John" in a melancholy hit single in 1968. We no longer haveLincoln, the Kennedys, King, or even Surak/Gandhi to guide us. But implicitly, CaptainKirk and Mr. Spock will follow in their footsteps and continue working for (truly)universal justice.

As the Vietnam War was ending in a pervasive atmosphere of frustration anddespair, revisionist historians began to wipe the shine off the brief, shining moment ofCamelot. Studies such as The Kennedy Promise (1972), The Kennedy Doctrine (1972), TheBest and The Brightest (1972), and America In Our Time (1976), took a fresh and soberedlook at the New Frontier and found in its words and deeds the blueprint for the Vietnamdebacle. The ringing oratory of the inaugural address with its challenges to the youngpeople of America was seen by the revisionists as culminating logically in defeat anddishonor in southeast Asia. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what youcan do for your country," serves as the bitter epigraph to paralyzed veteran Ron Kovic'sVietnam memoir Born On The Fourth ofJuly (1976).20 Yet however valid such revisionist


histories may be, the legend of Camelot endured culturally and politically. In his May1961, address to Congress on "Urgent National Needs," Kennedy pushed for the lunarlanding program saying, "...Now it is time to take longer strides-for a great newAmerican enterprise-for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievementwhich in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth."21 In Star Trek, it is asif a few years after his murder, the fallen skipper of PT-109 was reborn as the Captain ofthe great new American starship Enterprise, the bearer of pluralist democracy and freeenterprise throughout the galaxy.

Star Trek in the Seventies.

Considering the prominence and popularity of the movie and TV Western in thepost-World War II period, the most profound change in American cinema after Vietnamwas the stalwart genre's precipitous fall from favor. Declining numerically since the mid1960s, Westerns had all but vanished from American movie and TV screens by 1976.Genre analyst Carlos Clarens spoke succinctly on the demise of the Western in the wakeof Vietnam:

It was inevitable that the western would eventually disappear... from theAmerican screen as soon as the response of the mass audience ceased tobe predictable. To a large segment of the American public in the sixtiesand seventies, the Western suddenly stood for everything imperialisticand genocidal about America.22

Yet it was at precisely this moment in the early 1970s that Star Trek fandombegan snowballing rapidly until the world of Star Trek became a permanent fixture onthe cultural landscape, its beginning often marked by the first fan-organized conventionheld in New York City in 1972.23 It's instructive to recall that Star Trek garnered onlymediocre ratings during its network run and was nearly cancelled in 1967 after its secondseason. The Star Trek cult initially surfaced and grew just as Americans were beingshaken by the overlapping crises of Watergate, the energy shortage, and humiliating defeatin Vietnam, a trio of dislocating shocks that reverberate in our political life today. Theshow's renaissance was less a search for "innocence" or escapism than for the nearlyunassailable confidence (or hubris?) of the very recent past. Moreover, as the optimisticand heroic Star Trek generally went against the grain of the mainly pessimistic cinematicscience fiction of the early 1970s-the Planet Of The Apes series (1968-73), A ClockworkOrange (1971), Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Zardoz (1973) etc.-theenormous success of the neo-traditional Star Wars films would not have been possible orat least as intense without the growing influence and visibility of Star Trek fandom andthe shift in ideological perspective and generic preference it portended. As critic WilliamBlake Tyrell remarked in 1977:


Star Trek is a product of the dreams and nightmares of the '60s. It cameto those who needed the triumph of confidence of the American past,while fearing a present that foreboded the disappearance of the Americanway. The need has become stronger in the diffident '70s. ..Star Trekcreates a future world where the glories of the past are pristine andfailure and doubts of the present have been overcome. It gives us ourpastas ourfuture, while making our present the past which, like any historicalevent for the future-oriented American, is safely over and forgotten(emphasis added).24

Originally produced in an era when real space explorers were officially lionizedas national heroes, by the mid 1970s, as the jargon and iconography of the series becamewidely disseminated, Star Trek began to turn back and influence both Americans'conceptions of space flight and NASA itself. Since 1974, the twelve-feet long Enterprisemodel used for special effects shots in the series has hung in the Smithsonian's NationalAir and Space Museum, the same building that houses the Wright Brothers' first airplane,Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, and the Apollo 11 Command Module. No one intends aTV show spaceship to be thought of as equal in importance to the Wright Brothers' flyer,but the presence of that old prop in the same museum attests to the power of popular artto shape people's impressions of space exploration; the starship Enterprise has thusassumed an important, distinctly American place opposite the Myth of Icarus in popularchronicles of the dreams and realizations of human flight.25

In 1976, Star Trek fans launched another grass-roots letter-writing campaign likethe one which flooded NBC in 1967 to save the series from cancellation, and successfullypetitioned NASA to christen the first space shuttle orbiter Enterprise. When the spacecraftwas publicly exhibited to the press in the fall of 1976, Gene Roddenberry and severaloriginal cast members were present as honored guests.26 As there were no U.S. mannedmissions between 1975 and 1981, one suspects that in the face of severe budget cuts inthose long, dry years as the space agency worked outside the limelight to ready thecomplicated shuttle system, NASA was only too happy to gather as much free publicityand goodwill as possible from association with the most famous science fiction show ever.To that end, in 1976, actress Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) began to work for NASA usingher celebrity to help recruit women and minorities for the shuttle program.27

Though an interested observer of the space program, like most Americans lulledinto complacency by the many shuttle missions of the early 1980s with their larger andincreasingly faceless crews, I paid no particular attention to the January 26, 1986 launchof shuttle Challenger beyond noting that this was the mission when they were sending upthe grade school teacher. In the aftermath of Challenger's destruction, however, as thenetworks, newspapers, and magazines repeatedly ran photos and films of the ill-fatedcrew, I was struck by nothing so much as their demographic resemblance to the principalofficers of starship Enterprise. Continuing the fugue-like exchange between Star Trek and


NASA, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, released in November, 1986, began with a titlededicating the film to the memory of the Challenger crew. Star Trek has thus assumed acertain casually accepted place in "explaining" space travel to Americans in a fashionanalogous to the way the Frontier Myth was marshalled to make ideological sense of theGreen Berets mission in Vietnam. This suggests once more not only how the sciencefiction genre has become the logical successor to the American Western, but furtherunderscores how popular culture as narrative can be easily adapted to and co-opted bychanging historical circumstances and expressly political uses.

At Theaters Everywhere.

The truly stellar box office performance of the feature films in the 1980s markedthe next phase of the historical and textual transformation of Star Trek, whose ideologicalorientation changed perceptibly when shifted to the big screen. While the original NBCseries was imbued with the liberal rhetoric of the Kennedy-Johnson years, the Star Trekmovies seemed more of a piece with the age of Reagan. In Star Trek II: The Wrath ofKhan(1982), whenever middle-aged Admiral Kirk self-consciously dons wire-framed readingglasses, the film quietly alludes to the famous scene of Captain Brittles' Qohn Wayne's)army retirement in Ford's She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949). The subtext of both filmsasks whether the aging heroes of bygone days can yet endure and act effectively in achanging world. For Star Trek, the answer is of course that they can, but only by goingback to the past. After literally returning from the past in The Voyage Home, Kirk'ssalvation of the entire Earth rates a demotion-he's busted from Admiral back to Captainand given what he really wants, command of a starship once more. "My friends, we'vecome home," says the new Captain as he and his officers bypass the newfangled, henceunreliable starship Excelsior and sight the new/old Enterprise.

Both The Wrath of Khan and Yellow Ribbon ultimately side-step the age issue.After heroic effort to avert full-scale war with the Indians, Nathan Brittles is spared fromhis forced retirement by a deus ex machina promotion to Chief of Scouts, becoming akind of elder statesman to the Cavalry. Kirk, like Brittles, is supposed to pass commandto a younger generation of officers but similarly must step in to save them, proving hiscontinued effectiveness and vitality. Just as Democratic opponents in 1980 and 1984 triedunsuccessfully to disqualify the septuagenarian Ronald Reagan as too old to be an effectiveChief Executive, the character of James T. Kirk thus effectively bridged theKennedy/Reagan dialectic: Maturity, retrenchment, and defense of tradition becamevalued over youthful vitality, progress, and the new.

When Reagan in an address to fundamentalist Christians in 1983 described theSoviet Union as an "evil empire," he was characteristically drawing on phraseology frompopular culture, traceable to sources in pulp science fiction such as Emperor Ming theMerciless in the Flash Gordon comics and Darth Vader's wicked Empire in Star Wars.Yet the link between the nemeses of Flash Gordon and Luke Skywalker was Captain


Kirk's old foes, the Klingon Empire. When the Klingons first appeared in "Errand ofMercy" (3/23/67), the omniscient beings of planet Organia predicted that humans andKlingons would one day become friends and allies. Throughout the Star Trek movies ofthe 1980s, this seemed no more possible than it had in the 1960s. If anything, theKlingons became irreconcilably Other, even animalistic, their make-up design significantlyaltered from the early days to give them a surly reptilian appearance.

Hostility between the Federation and the Klingons in the movies centered oncontrol of the awesome Project Genesis. Introduced in The Wrath ofKhan, in Star TrekIII: The Search For Spock (1984), Genesis was finally proven a failure in its intendedfunction, the creation of life ex nihilo; instead, it devolved to an apocalyptic weapon ofmass destruction. While Kirk referred to "the Genesis technology" or "device," theKlingons, recognizing the tremendous destructive capacity, not irrationally dubbed it "theGenesis torpedo." When the torpedo was fired into a barren moon in a stunning specialeffects sequence, the resulting surface impact assumed the ominously familiar shape of ahydrogen bomb cloud. As with the contemporary controversy over Reagan's StrategicDefense Initiative, there was a peculiarly semiotic conflict as to whether one wasdescribing Genesis or Armageddon, a "Peace Shield" or "Star Wars." In any case,considering how the original Star Trek had routinely denounced the nuclear balance ofterror as mankind's ultimate folly in the bad old days of the twentieth century (i.e., thepost-Cuban Missile Crisis era of nuclear detente), Genesis represented a re-invention ofThe Bomb and renewed dedication to the Cold War in the 1980s. Reverting to type, theKlingons were prepared to lie, cheat, and kill to possess the weapon that would ensurethe Federation's final destruction.28

The Reganesque thrust of the features was further pronounced in how thegovernment and bureaucracy of the Federation, once the proud and assured solution togalactic problems, suddenly became part of the problem itself.29 This unusualdenigration of Starfleet and the Federation as meddlesome, out of touch bureaucracies wasperhaps best symbolized in The Search For Spock by the imposing starship Excelsior whichthreatened to obsolesce the Enterprise and its aging heroes. Touted for cutting edgetechnology, larger, faster, and better armed than the Enterprise, staffed by a novice crewand smug bureaucrat of a Captain, Excelsior might be seen as a metaphor for thestumblingly ineffective liberal "Big Government" Reagan and his supporters sodetested.30 Accordingly, the wondership is easily sabotaged by the resourceful EngineerScott before it can even leave space-dock to overtake the fugitive Enterprise. Cuppingthree tiny widgets in his palm, Scotty says with a broad grin, "The more they over-thinkthe plumbing, the easier it is to stop-up the drain."

Indeed, the large and diverse Enterprise crew receded in importance in the filmsuntil the seven central cast members remained the only force that could ever truly becounted on. Increasingly functioning as an outlaw group, their moral authority nowderived less from the ideals of the Federation than from personal loyalty to their leader.In The Search For Spock, the protagonists actually became fugitives from the no longer


enlightened Federation authorities. In the midst of a new Cold War, once-benevolentStarfleet Command has turned paranoid, as witnessed when irascible Dr. McCoy becomesa security risk, shadowed and nearly arrested by a plain clothes agent because he's seenthe power of Genesis and may be mentally unstable. Of course we know all aboutgovernments that declare dissenters mentally ill, so we cheer when our heroes literallysteal back the Enterprise in order to search for Spock, deny Genesis to the Klingons, andsave the deluded Federation from itself.

Star Trek's allegorical relationship to the Cold War at last came fully into theopen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). By the time of the film's releasein late 1991, the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union and the eastern Europeancommunist bloc had unexpectedly superseded the GUsnost theme of the story. Beginningwith a tremendous explosion on a Klingon moon devoted to the Empire's energyproduction-transparent allusion to the 1987 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster thataided Gorbachev's reformers against Stalinist hardliners-the film chronicles the efforts ofKlingon Chancellor Gorkon (get it?) to conclude an epochal peace opening to theFederation before the Empire collapses from the energy shortage. Yet peace is not easilyaccepted by suspicious forces on either side, perhaps most surprisingly by Captain Kirk.In the end, Kirk of course repents his hatred, Klingon and Federation reactionaries aredefeated~by good old-fashioned space battles and fist-fights-and the Cold War is declaredover.

Produced in a considerably altered geopolitical climate from that of The Search ForSpock, which came at the high-tide of Reaganism, The Undiscovered Country could assumea lighter, more self-conscious tone that explicitly admitted the Cold War subtext that hadlong underpined Star Trek despite constant talk of "adventure," "progress," and"exploration" without historical or political dimension. When Kirk demanded to knowwhy Spock recommended him to meet Gorkon's peace mission, Spock replied, "There'san old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon can go to China." The script generally is a self-conscious catalog of intertextual references and jokes that simultaneously point up"allegory" itself as the meaning of Star Trek while critiquing the belligerent attitudes ofthe original series, now viewed as outdated.31 Yet even in ending the Cold War, Kirkremains on the side of the angels. In the penultimate scene, after Kirk's flying tacklesaves the President of the Federation from a Klingon assassin (a significantly invertedallusion to The Manchurian Candidate [1962] and/or the Kennedy assassination?), theCaptain quips to his officers: "Well, once again we've saved civilization as we know it."That this romantic-ideological aspect of the series is both celebrated and slyly satirizedfinally indicates that these characters and their world have at last nowhere else to go.32Appropriately, Captain Kirk's final order from the Enterprise bridge ("Second star to theright and straight on till morning") sets her course for Neverland.

Conclusions.


Given the seven prosperous seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation and itsanticipated leap into features in late 1994, indications are that Star Trek will do what onceseemed unthinkable-continue indefinitely without Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, let aloneGene Roddenberry, who died in 1991. The question repeatedly asked by allcommentators is "Why is Star Trek so popular?" Considering the format's textualmultiplication over the past thirty years, there can be no single or simple answer to that,and as this analysis has suggested, the question in any case must be addressed historically.Members of "Generation X" are unlikely to detect the vibrations of New Frontierism inCaptain Kirk. That which attracted Star Trek fans of the late 1960s may or may notengage contemporary viewers of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or the authors ofrecent fan fiction.33 Yet even as the new show reaches out to younger viewers,presenting greater possibilities for women and minorities within the format, The NextGeneration reserves particular room for the altered concerns of a certain segment of olderfans as well. In addition to hosting regular drop-ins by parents of the main characters,the new Enterprise carries dependents-spouses and children of crew members who oftenfigure in the stories. While Kirk's brief fatherhood was never convincing, the new seriesincreasingly accommodates the generic territory of Family Melodrama as most of theprincipals have experienced troublesome parent/child psychodramas in the course ofexploring outer space. In one episode, The Next Generation tellingly adapted a situationstraight from Thirtysomething in which Lt. Worf, the scowling Klingon crewman, rushesfrom a meeting with his troubled son's elementary teacher to arrive sheepishly late fora briefing room conference. That family versus career pressures have replaced allegorizedanxieties over Cold War and nuclear holocaust may be decried as more Yuppieism, buton balance, is not altogether a bad thing.

The original Star Trek remains an historically and culturally revealing documentthat forcefully expresses the unbridled confidence and optimism of mid-century America,a reveling in power and capability that was at once unprecedented and taken for granted.Consider that when the series premiered in 1966 America was at once the technologicalleader and economic engine of the world; pledging to eradicate poverty and socialinequality at home; maintaining international political leadership through a globalstrategic military policy; waging a (paradoxically) massive and "limited" conventional warin Asia; and lofting one successful manned space mission after another toward the moon.In retrospect, that this widespread empire was simultaneously threatened with collapsefrom hubris, over-extension, and massive internal contradictions that ignited broad-basedsocial protest movements seems almost inevitable. In The Wrath ofKhan, Kirk receivesa birthday present of A Tale of Two Cities, whose famous first line, "It was the best oftimes, it was the worst of times," says much about the larger context that produced StarTrek and the subsequent fan phenomenon. Enduring mythologies are founded on justsuch historical contradictions, so it's fitting that Captain Kirk seems to have so much incommon with President Kennedy or rather, the "Myth of Kennedy" within the larger"Myth of the Sixties," and its volatile combination of near-utopian idealism, traumatic


failure, and ossifying nostalgia. Its narrative and dramatic givens firmly anchored to thekey cultural and social concerns of American life, what will the many worlds of Star Trektell us in subsequent decades about America at the end of the twentieth century?

Notes

1 Patt Morrison, "25 Years Later, Mercury Team Launches New Task", Los Angeles Times 5 May 1986sec I: 1+

2 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (NewYork: Antheneum, 1992) 5-16.

3 The Western was perhaps first shown to lead directly to science fiction in Edgar RiceBurrough's initial adventure of John Carter, Under the Moons of Mars (1911). While battlingIndians on the frontier. Carter is somehow magically transported to Mars and embroiled in aplanetary struggle with pointedly racialist overtones there. Slotkin 197-207.

It's worth noting that Roddenberry had previously worked as head writer on the successfulwestern Have Gun Will Travel (CBS, 1957-63) starring Richard Boone, and that Star Trek wasconceived and developed in the midst of the period 1957-64 in which Westerns dominated thenetwork schedules and regularly topped the Neilsen ratings.

5 Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek (1968; New York:Ballantine Books, 1972) 21-28.

6 Regarding the Cold War subtext of the series, note that the first appearance of the Romulansin "Balance of Terror" (12/15/66) explained that humans and Romulans had fought an inconclusivewar a century before Star Trek's setting. That, coupled with the visual and cultural codingof the aliens as "Asiatic" might suggest an evocation of the Korean War. The Korean connectionwas reinforced by the episode "The Enterprise Incident" (9/27/68), adapted from the NorthKorean seizure of the U.S. Navy spy ship Pueblo in 1968. For more on the series as a politicalallegory of the 1960s, see my article "Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior", Journal of Popular Film andTelevision 16.3 (1988): 109-117.

For further discussion of the Frontier myth culturally and politically in the Vietnam era,see Slotkin 441-ff. For analysis of the Frontier myth in popular films of the period,especially the notion of the "corrected genre film," see Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency ofthe Hollywood Cinema, 1930-80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), especial Iy chapter8, "The 1960s: Frontier Metaphors, Developing Se If -Consciousness, and New Waves" 247-95.

8 Phillip French, Westerns: Aspects of A Movie Genre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)29.

Though it's less apparent today (especially after Patrick Stewart's subdued portrayal ofJean-Luc Picard on The Next Generation clashed with William Shatner's increasingly manic takeon Kirk in the movies) but the original Captain of the Enterprise was clearly designed to bemore thoughtful than hot-headed. Ever the professional, in private moments, the Captain wasstill known to confess his self -doubts and second-guess his own decisions, especially whenlives were lost. Such a scene occurs early in the first Star Trek pilot, "The Cage" (1964) inwhich Captain Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) anguishes over battle casualties with Dr. Boyce(John Hoyt): "Sometimes a man will tell his bartender things he'd never tell his doctor," saysBoyce, consoling his troubled Captain with a convivial drink. There is a very similar scenebetween Kirk and Dr. McCoy in "Balance of Terror" and exchanges in this spirit in other earlyepisodes. Recall too that this characterization of the Captain preceded the popular elevationof Spock to prominence in the series, which altered the subsequent depiction of all three majorcharacters.


10 John M. Logsdon, The Decision To Go To The Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970) 66.11 Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979; New York: Bantam Books, 1983) 227-29.

Logsdon 158. Logsdon, who interviewed many of the principals in the lunar landing decisionand had access to previously confidential NASA records, supports Wolfe's assessment ofKennedy's need to use the astronauts to recover politically after the Bay of Pigs. Logsdonnotes however, 100-101, that explicit mention of the failed invasion cannot be found in themajor documents of Kennedy's decision. Both Wolfe and Logsdon set great store by the successof the Gagarin flight (April 12, 1961) as a major impetus in Kennedy's relatively quickcommitment to Project Apollo (May 25, 1961).

13 Charles M. Simpson III, Inside the Green Berets. The First Thirty Years: A History of the U.S.Army Special Forces (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1983) 63.

In another odd coincidence, actor George Takei (Lt. SuIu) had taken a leave of absence fromStar Trek around this time to appear as a hardened ARVN officer in John Wayne's The GreenBerets (1968). Also, see The Gene Roddenberry Collection, Box 18, folder 2, "A Private LittleWar", UCLA Theater Arts Library, Los Angeles, for a number of internal letters relating to thescripting and production of the episode. Everyone involved understood the script as a Vietnamallegory which seemed to present no problems as such. Treatment, however, became the issue.The top executives of the series (Roddenberry, Robert H. Justman, Gene L. Coon) frequentlydiscuss the allegorical story with reference to the politics of the Cold War and containmentstrategy, producing quite conflicted analyses in trying to sort out how the script shoulddepict American commitment to Vietnam. Coon took the standard Cold War line about fallingdominoes, emphasizing that the Soviets were the real enemy in Vietnam: "We have always played[the Klingons] very much like the Russians.. .In the current situation in Vietnam, we are inan intolerable situation. We are doing what we are forced to do, and we can find no other wayto do it. ..If we are to honor our commitments, we must counter-balance the Klingons. If we donot play it this way, the Klingons will take over and threaten the Federation, even as thesituation is in Vietnam, which is as I remember, if Vietnam falls all southeast Asia falls."Letter from Gene Coon to [original script writer] Don Ingalls, p. 7, August 21, 1967.Regarding a revision of the original script by Ingalls, Robert Justman chafed at an impliedmoral equivalency between the Federation and the Klingons vis a vis power politics on anunderdeveloped planet: "I fail to see the sense of setting up the Klingons to be nasty fellowswho are interfering in the affairs of this planet and then setting up our own Captain Kirk andcrew as nice fellows who are interfering in the affairs of this very same planet. I also resentthe fact that Captain Kirk has full realization of the fact that he is doing what he doesn'twant the Klingons to do." Letter from Bob Justman to Gene Coon, September 5, 1967. GeneRoddenberry's initial reaction seemed to forget the Federation's Prime Directive, whichsupposedly forbids interference in the natural development of alien worlds. Reading theoriginal draft, Roddenberry fumed in a letter to Coon, "What is [Ingalls] saying here--don'tscrew up simpler societies? If he is aiming for a Vietnam theme that certainly can't be it.The things at stake in Vietnam are much more important and powerful than a charitable attitudetoward simpler people in the world." Letter from Gene Roddenberry to Gene Coon, May 8, 1967,p. 2. The letters collectively suggest that the top executives of the series were highlyuncomfortable with American policy in Vietnam but in producing their own Vietnam parable couldpropose no other solutions beyond the conventional arguments offered by the government itself.The paradoxes are laid bare in another part of Coon's long letter to Ingalls: "At this point,it should be evident to everyone that we have essentially been talking about Vietnam. . .Whatwe are trying to sell is the hopelessness of the situation. The fact that we are absolutelyforced into taking steps we know are morally wrong, but for our own enlightened self-interest,there is nothing we can do about it. Plus the fact that it is also to Tyree's [Kirk's friendand leader of the Hill-Men] own best interest that we are doing these things." Coon to Ingalls,August 21, 1967, p. 13.

M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston:


Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1965), 210.

Schlesinger,210-11.

Schlesinger,109.

Schlesinger,211-12.

Schlesinger,212-13.

16

17

18

19

20Henry Fairlie, The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation (New York: Doubleday and Co.,1973); Louise Fitzsimons, The Kennedy Doctrine (New York: Random House, 1972); DavidHalberstam, The Best and The Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972); Godfrey Hodgson, AmericaIn Our Time (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1976); Ron Kovic, Born On The Fourthof July (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

21Logsdon 128.22Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies: An Illustrated History (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1980),13-14.

23Joan Winston, The Making of the Trek Conventions (1977; Chicago: Playboy Press, 1979), 17-27.

24William Blake Tyrrel, "Star Trek As Myth and Television As Mythmaker." Journal of PopularCulture X (1977): 711-19. Tyrrel also develops other intriguing connections between Star Trekand the Western describing the series in terms of Fenimore Cooper's Frontier myth with theRomulans and Klingons representing the good Indian/bad Indian dichotomy. This distinction isessentially complementary to my reading of Captain Kirk's enemies as the Chinese and Soviets.

25The Enterprise model has been on almost constant display since its donation in 1974. InFebruary, 1992, The National Air and Space Museum presented an exhibition curated by MaryHenderson simply titled "Star Trek" that featured over eighty props, costumes, and artifactsfrom the series along with filmed interviews with the cast members discussing the series inits historical context of the Vietnam years. In early 1993, the exhibit traveled to the HaydenPlanetarium in New York and returned to permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian in 1994.Interview with Mary Henderson, Curator of Art, National Air and Space Museum, November 8, 1993.

26Allan Asherman, The Star Trek Compendium (New York: Pocket Books, 1986) 151. Star Trek'sassociation with NASA actually began during the show's original run. In March, 1967, LeonardNimoy attended the Robert H. Goddard Memorial Banquet in Washington, D. C. at the invitationof the space agency, and was seated at the head table alongside John Glenn, Vice PresidentHubert Humphrey, and NASA Director James E. Webb. Later, NASA cooperated in the production ofthe episode "Assignment: Earth" (3/29/'68), a time travel script set in 1968. Gene RoddenberryCollection, Box 37, folder 13, "NASA". UCLA Theater Arts Library, Los Angeles.

27Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: Official Movie Special (New York: starlog Press, 1986), 28.Actor Christopher Lloyd notably was cast as Kruge, the Klingon captain trying to nab Genesis

in The Search For Spock. Lloyd's star persona, beginning with his portrayal of Rev. JimIgnatowsky on TV's Taxi, was as a half-mad and thoroughly unstable man with an implied hiddendark side. Thus the thought of this fellow as a Klingon in possession of the ultimate weaponautomatically ruled out hope of any rational negotiation between the Federation and KlingonEmpire. Accordingly the issue was settled by a brutal fist-fight culminating in Kirk kickingKruge back into a virtual pit of hell.

Ronald Reagan set the ideological tone for his tenure when he declared in his first inauguraladdress: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government


is the problem." Reagan's First Year, (Washington D.C: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1982),109.

30Excelsior's captain was portrayed by James B. Sikking, then currently playing Lt. Hunter,the SWAT commander on NBC's Wi 7 7 St. Blues. Though a conservative, militarist figure, Lt.Hunter was explicitly characterized as a Vietnam veteran, and his buffoonish, martinetportrayal in both Wi 7 7 St. and The Search for Spock, may have offered a subtle intertextualindictment of the failure of "the liberals' war" in Vietnam. (By the time of Star Trek VI: TheUndiscovered Country [1991], SuIu was the presumably worthy commander of Excelsior.)31Interestingly, if Kirk were once implicitly "Kennedy" (whose cold warrior credentials werein any case secure) by 1991 he had explicitly become "Nixon": the staunch anti -communist andred-baiter who nonetheless made the historic opening to Maoist China. Either way, thecontemporary textual and popular consensus seems to favor the exit of this character and hisparticular ideological style. See note nine above.

32Leonard Nimoy's appearance as Spock in a two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generationin the fall of 1991, similarly involved the character in an effort to aid a reformist factionamong the belligerent Romulans, who replaced the Klingons as the major threat to the Federationin The Next Generation.

33For varied discussion of the Star Trek fan phenomenon see Robert Jewett and John SheltonLawrence, The American Mono-myth (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), and HenryJenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge,1992).

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