Issue 7, June 1, 2009
— Wider
Screenings, Star
Trek, Star Wars and the Triumph of Scientific Humanism
In this issue:FEATURE: Wayne W. Dyer, Excuses Begone!Guy Finley, Liberate Yourself Jeanie Marshall, Asking Empowering Questions Yasha, The Body-Mind Connection Sharon Elaine, Affirmations: Hopes and Dreams Jim Donovan, Don't Push Your Goals Away Gabriella Kortsch, Tending Your Inner GardenSong Chengxiang, One Fundamental Law of SuccessWider Screenings, Star Trek, Star Wars...EventsReviewsEarlier issues
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Star Trek, Star Wars and the Triumph of Scientific Humanism
in US Sci-Fi
JUNE
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Two
great American populist screen franchises compete at the Hollywood
box-office this week and a comparison is most instructive. Angels and Demons,
reviewed in last week’s column, is the latest Dan Brown adaptation,
continuing the playful re-mythification of Catholic “history” first
shown in The DaVinci
Code but consolidating rather than threatening orthodox
Catholicism. And, quite probably next screen over at the
local multiplex, is Star Trek, a re-launch of the screen series by JJ
Abrams. Abrams is the sci-fi fan’s current “golden boy”, an
enterprising (no pun intended) producer now turned feature film
director in what Hollywood is banking will ensure the viability of the
Gene Roddenberry franchise by restoring it to the original Enterprise
crew now that the distractions of Star
Trek: the Next Generation have rescinded into cable
residuals. Although one might admire the capacity of an
initially limited run cult TV series to continually re-invent itself
for every successive generation of Americans, what remains perhaps
unique to the Star Trek
franchise (and the reason for its longevity) as opposed to George
Lucas’ Star Wars
franchise is their respective treatment of theist mythology and their
juxtaposition between rationalism and religious mysticism. In
that, oddly enough, the rationalist vs. theist oppositions in the Star Trek / Star Wars
films function in a similar way to the opposition between science and
religion in Angels
& Demons’ re-invention of the Illuminati as the
embodiment of the threat of science to religious faith.
Indeed, science fiction is a genre which evolved in tandem with the
advance of scientific rationalism. One of Star Trek creator
Gene Roddenberry’s contemporaries Richard Matheson (who would write for
Rod Serling’s The
Twilight Zone as well as being the source for one of
American film’s essential screen romances Somewhere in Time {read more}) wrote a sci-fi horror
novel about a plague which turns humans into vampiric victims – I am Legend.
In the first screen adaptation, The
Last Man on Earth (read more) atheist anti-hero
Vincent Price was a scientific Rationalist confronted by a world in
which superstitious myth is his only frame of reference: consumed by
myth he dies in a Church, renouncing any desire to save the world’s
afflicted whom he considers subhuman. In the second screen
adaptation, The Omega
Man (read more) atheist anti-hero
Charlton Heston was a psychotic narcissist – a scientific rationalist
with a Messianic complex who dies saving the few survivors from a
Luddite cult so resentful of science that they loathe the humanity
behind it. In the third screen adaptation, the recent I am Legend,
scientist Will Smith sees a sign he takes is from God and willingly
sacrifices himself (in a Christ allegory) so the survivor can reach a
new community, at the centre of which is a Church with bells
ringing. The thoroughly Christian revision of what
essentially began as Rationalist screen sci-fi myth is Hollywood
propaganda of the same magnitude as the endorsement of Patriarchal
Catholicism in Angels
& Demons: an endorsement of sacrificial
scapegoating.
Yet, this blockbuster revisionism of rationalist screen myth to suit a
theist agenda is defiantly resisted throughout the Star Trek
franchise. Gene Roddenberry’s original Enterprise crew were
pioneers of scientific rationalism and decidedly humanist in intention
– the show’s motto was, after all, “to boldly go where no (hu)man has
gone before”. Space exploration represented the wonder of
scientific discovery: the new “frontier” was outer space – there was no
“heaven”, just an infinite wonder of scientific curiosity.
When the Star Trek
franchise fell to Robert Wise for the first big screen adaptation in
1979, in response to the phenomenal success of George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars, Wise
chose to develop a religious analogy: the Enterprise crew were
confronted by a God-like V’ger – in turn revealed as the creation of
scientific advancement. But Wise was a skilled religious
allegorist – in the original 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still
(recently remade with Keanu Reeves and discussed in No Limits issue #5)
his depiction of an alien as Christly messenger drew so much protest
from religious authorities (primarily Catholic) that he was forced to
make script modifications (read more). Not only
that, Wise was a humanist – the US Defence Dept. refused him
co-operation on The Day
the Earth Stood Still because of its pacifist politics and
Wise used the success of his most known films (the musicals Sound of Music and West Side Story) to
convince the studio to bankroll a young Steve McQueen in the humanist
triumph and anti-Vietnam War, anti-American and pro-China epic of The Sand Pebbles (read more). Wise used a
religious analogy in Star
Trek (as distinct from the allegory of The Day the Earth Stood Still)
to explore what was a humanist conceit – the yearning to be God – in
defiance of the quasi-spiritual mysticism of the earlier Star Wars.
V’Ger in Star Trek,
although a machine, was the ultimate symbol of scientific rationalism –
sentient technology. Yet, as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
debated whether V’ger may be psychotic, for Wise it was V’Ger’s God
complex that was the cause of its malevolence. This device
Wise lifted from popular radical underground sci-fi of the 1970s –
sentient technological menace featured in the malevolent computers of 2001: A Space Odyssey,
The Forbin
Project and Demon
Seed and in each case the threat posed by technology to
humanity was the result of a sentience that embraced the concept of
absolute omniscience. The theist belief in absolute
omniscience and the scientific pursuit of technological perfection
fused in the original Star
Trek screen nemesis, driven mad by the desire to achieve a
God-like perfection. Yet, as always in Star Trek, there
was a logical explanation for any event: no matter how strange, there
was a scientific rationale – even when Spock died and was
“reincarnated” there was a sound explanation behind the appropriation
of the Christian resurrection myth. Indeed, the Spock
resurrection saga in Star
Trek 2-4 was spun by director Nicholas Meyer into a
repudiation of Biblical Genesis mythology which grounded in future
science the myths that Christians accept as spiritual Creationist
truth. But where Wise was an optimist, Meyer was a pessimist:
he came to Star Trek
after making the telemovie The
Day After about nuclear war, which the US government
(echoing the Defense Dept’s treatment of Wise on The Day the Earth Stood Still)
tried to suppress lest it give the impression that nuclear weapons were
undesirable.
In contrast to Star
Trek’s “science explains all” approach in the Wise and
Meyer takes on spiritual superstition, Star Wars initiated
a rival approach. Just as filled with wonderful alien
life-forms, Star Wars
took scientific advancement as a given and proceed to use it as a
springboard to mythologize a new religion – Jedi. Instead of
finding drama in the conflict between scientific advancement and
humanity, as Star Trek
did so admirably, Star Wars merely postulated a new supernatural
omniscience, “the Force”. In contrast to the elaborate
philosophical issues and ethical paradoxes in Star Trek, Star Wars was an
effectively escapist children’s fantasy: it used the pretense of
science-fiction to create an admittedly entertaining but superficial
myth, essentially ground in pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo that appealed
to the non-discriminating. One cannot blame George Lucas for
this capitulation to spiritualism over science however, his early film
THX 1138 had depicted the horrors of an anodyne, science-based future
in which humanity had lost all individuality. A flop, when
Lucas latched onto religion and gave humanity hope in alliance with
“the Force” (the equivalent of a theist sentience) in Star Wars, he
equated individual perfection with religious transcendence and a
gullible American populace lapped it up, embracing it to the point
where fans declared their religion to be Jedi: Obi Wan Kenobi died for
our sins!
So, in a climate where the rationalism of Richard Matheson has been
turned into feel-good summer Christian allegory and the sly ridicule of
Catholic lore in the Dan Brown ethos has been turned into an
endorsement of Catholicism after all in Angels & Demons
(read more), JJ Abrams takes on Star Trek in an
effort to re-launch the franchise. And, thankfully, he does a
splendid job. Stripped of all but the barest of religious
analogies, Star Trek
is a welcome return to humanist philosophical quandary, ethical
dilemma, time-travel paradox, grandiose passion (provided by
Australia’s Eric Bana) and scientific explanations for unknown and
inexplicable phenomena, rendered in spectacular visual effects as
befits the best of the genre. Abrams has taken a fan
favourite and thoroughly renewed it: his re-interpretation is again a
rationalist vision of the relationship between science and humanity,
shorn of religious belief. Indeed, Abrams proves here that Star Trek may just
have a longevity where Star
Wars has already become a passé fad: resisting the clash
of science and religion in Angels
& Demons, Star
Trek explores scientific rationalist speculation with an
attention to humanism – its consistent denial of supernatural
explanation in favour of speculative science ensures that what is
essentially an apocalyptic scenario is never eschatological in the way
that both Angels
& Demons and The
Day the Earth Stood Still remake are (explored in No Limits column
#5). Amidst Hollywood’s current crop of mediocre religious
soul-searching and Patriarchal banality, JJ Abrams re-vision of Star Trek is in the
firm tradition of grand rationalist entertainment established by
Rodenberry.
FEATURE: Wayne W. Dyer, Excuses Begone! 
