Let's just say (and without any spoilers), Avatar does a lot right that I said Star Trek does wrong. I was a little off in saying the movie does everything right, as I did in an overexcited tweet a couple days ago after seeing the movie. Star Trek might be the most lengthy popular meditation on what it means to stay within a world created by an SF series--and for that it deserves some serious credit, even if, by the cheap postmodern device of trauma (cheap, that is, when made formalistic--not when it appears as content) it often reduces this world to what is called a "franchise." Avatar instead is a mashup of all sorts of (properly) SF and fantasy devices (I mean to imply that trauma is not a generic-specific device, but one that typically disrupts things all across the board), from "unobtainum" to the concept of the avatar itself.
This doesn't mean at all that the movie is a ripoff--SF and fantasy, like any genre, work in this self-reflexive way (a way I don't think many commentators on the movie so far have really recognized, which is odd). I hesitate to call this way "intertextual," because that horribly vague concept precisely overlooks everything specific about genre (and more specifically form, but that's another post) which needs to be brought to bear upon any consideration of such works. Indeed, condemnations of the film as racist have to proceed as if it did not occupy any particular generic space. Thus, "Avatar is just Dances With Wolves" is the equation through which this critique makes its first steps, while it is only in reflecting upon that generic space (making allowances of course for the fact that it is pop-SF, or "scifi"--perhaps even "syfy"--that we're considering here, though that also opens up a question of genre from the inside as it were) that a condemnation really would gain its force. Of course, there are simply discursive codes that are racist, and there isn't any need to be more specific about them (one of the ways to remove the problems of racism is to suggest the accusation is only superficial): but the point is that the concept of code (when it remains only at the level of a wide-ranging discourse, and nothing more specific, like a filmic or even SF/fantasy code) may dissolve the presence of different racist elements in the work--and especially emerging elements, ones that don't fall into codified pattern.
Thus, what seems racist about the film is not the general portrayal of the Na'vi as othered in typical ways, but, I'll contend, the particular logic at work in their bodies as they intersect with the device of the avatar. The most important line of the film, for me, was the throwaway one which made this explicit: "I had to trust my body," the protagonist says. And is the properly SF situation that makes such a statement really weird and interesting and problematic: what does "my" mean when that is actually the body of something or someone else (the thing/person status of the avatar itself--a body grown for another--is really quite uncanny and disturbing when, even with the use of a pronoun, one begins to restore to it something like the capacity for its own control of itself)? Once we see that the whole colonial problem that is the main focus of the film emerges here in this scene of education in appropriation, the problems provoked by the presence or absence of racist codes have to transform.
But it isn't just appropriation that is at issue here, and this is the first way that the transformation occurs. What is almost more important than the question of who controls this body, or who is proper to this body in any vague sense (the sense in which postmodern theory stretches Heideggerian themes to sometimes foreclose less seemly questions of who owns this body--a question I'll just leave on the table, or take up later), is the way the body works in the film. The new motion capture cameras invented to shoot the picture most definitely come into play here--as well as the fact that it really a film made for 3D (I really recommend you see the film in 3D: if I saw it in 2D I think it would just be somewhat ordinary). It'd be crude to read the whole avatar concept, as deployed, as an allegory for this new motion capture technology (de Manian allegory is always a reduction of content to form masquerading as an opening of form--which mysteriously turns into language itself via a mystification of rhetoric--to content), but if this can give you a sense of the connectedness between the film's use of this technology and the issues central to the story and its development, then it might be worth suggesting. The technology quite simply signals the death of Jar-Jar, allowing for the seamless transition between closeups and full-body CG rendering of action, and then from CG to non-CG shots of the actors. The CG characters thus lose their CG-ness, and I'm actually quite certain that reports of the uncanny-valley experience still being made by people who have seen the film are really just mistaken registrations of the uncertainty produced by the concept of the avatar itself--in other words registrations of the plot. With the introduction of this technology, the valley frankly has been crossed, though of course by a sort of cheating--you are, through the CG, watching actual faces after all--which actually betrays the fact this isn't a technological "advance" (as it is being characterized and marketed, in a typical determinist manner) so much as a proper displacement of the old problem into an area where it now opens up new avenues (think of what the rumored Ghostbusters 3 would be like if it used aspects of this technology for ghosts!). And what this all allows is first and foremost--and finally!--a subordination of your interest in the CG-ness of the characters to your genuine concern with their activity. No longer, that is, do we care about the fact that a character is more or less "realistic." This is important because the suspension of the question about reality lets in fiction itself (and which makes possible something so far only really attempted by Pixar and others with natural scenery --vraisemblance).
When this is combined with the fact that the film is made for 3D, the effect is to make the problem of the body distinguish itself from the problem of any sort of representation of that body. For in these elaborately built 3D spaces, full of palm fronds, vines, waterfalls and bugs in the foreground that your eye avoids, and backgrounds of stars, planets, or huge mechanical spaces into which you are drawn--in a spatial sense, almost on the level of basic motility (these spaces are brought closer to you, one critic rightly said)--the avatar body can move and interact and refuse to sit there as a spectacle. In other words the 3D aspect of the film stratifies or complexifies the environment against which the body is moving as much as the new motion capture deals with the body's most important surface aspects, such that both become something you deal with rather than look at (as you would deal with a landscape as opposed to a landscape painting: there are multiple points of entry into the former, say, while the latter--even if painted in the picturesque tradition--only attempts to give you those). This differentiation achieved, the problems in the representation of the body can return as part of the problems raised by those bodies.
Thus, within your experience of these bodies on-screen, you begin to notice that the avatar body, and the alien species of which it is a modification, take on problematic shapes. Besides the fact--way, way underutilized--that the Na'vi are about twice as big as humans, they remain somewhat boringly humanoid, except for their little neural hook-ups that connect them to the planet eco-network (but I won't get too specific). This is different with the animals, which are simply the most amazing things in the film because they blend SF and fantasy so well: they remain sufficiently alien while they also behave almost like magical companions--and yet the balance always is tilted in favor of the alien (it can only be tamed through work, not through immaterial communion with it) but without the easy move of making the animal into a monster. One gets the sense--and it is the real achievement of this film--that the creatures work in many different and interesting ways. I think Cameron wanted the Na'vi to be something similar: thus their larger catlike ears, eyes, and, of course, nose (the most significant sign of differentiation), and their tails. But the film seems to founder here: a culture has to be built, and that seems to do the work of erasing the animal in them. Or, more probably, a vitalism and spiritualism--to which we'll return--comes in to take over the animal aspect, and dissolve whatever was interesting about it in the bodily realm.
And now is when we begin to notice that the aliens all remain exceedingly fit, slim, and trim--there's not a pudgy one in sight. And it is here that I think a critique can be levied--now that we have also hit a terrain also familiar to feminism: fitness is allied with race here in a weird way, to do the work of making this alien body alien. In the place of something like a completely different anatomy (always a possibility, though it is perhaps the easiest--and indeed it is explored with the animals themselves), or any other qualitative difference, we have some implication that the aliens experience their bodies more. And this sheer quantitative differentiation does not produce any significantly different "trust" of the body--which is what, I think, would be required here for a genuine experience of the alien as opposed to what it can always (and too easily) be dissolved into: race and sex. The film tries to balance this (along a technology/nature binary) by setting up the colonizers as fit and powerful (something like a different kind of fitness)--even to the extent that they make the protagonist's body get a little flabby the more time he spends as his (increasingly fit) avatar--but it's not really convincing when we gawk at sweaty seething flesh moving rhythmically in ritual (like in Riefenstahl's weird and obsessive late photos). Everything gets leveled to some sort of bodily experience aligned with a re-discovered naturalness (that is, artificiality--or rather the artificial flow between them which can magically partake of both) and then to sexuality, which--besides lacking any gender differentiation or play (women are either reduced to Amazons [i.e. men] or lusty nubile objects)--offers less bodily possibilities precisely as we're meant to think it offers more (and in a way that seems similar to how many theorists talk about "the bodily," taken as a site of pure, uninterrupted or uncitational production).
But, these problems now have to be routed through plot, insofar as the real subordination made possible by the new technology's subordination of spectacle to action is that of all the visuals to the story. What I thought was really lamentable in Star Trek was that this relationship to plot was never set up. Characters were there only, surrounded by a really interesting visual experience. And while characters can generate plot (the best example being Arrested Development), Star Trek decided to turn in circles with the most minimal story--that of trauma. In fact, it even subordinated the most interesting character to this story, as if the character himself wasn't interesting enough: we become familiar with Spock through his trauma, as if the only real relationship with a character that we could have is that of a shared and ultimately minimal void... While this perhaps cleanly avoids issues of race that the alien brings up by draining all of those problems--remember, Spock is an alien--into a trauma that is apparently pan-species (an old, and typical, postmodern displacement of humanism: the "everybody's trauma" or formalistic/constitutive trauma of Cathy Caruth) I'd frankly rather risk an encounter with that (and isn't the possibility of that encounter precisely constitutive of SF itself as a genre?) to see a genuine story--or something, at least, that will make issues out of all these minimal markers. While the plot of Avatar might be a bit too old and oversimple (Cameron himself admits as much), this is what the movie achieves. The real feeling of an "advance" in the technology I think stems from this: that now the CG people and the actors can be on the same team for once, and try to tell a story together through the technical setup. It's in this sense that Jar-Jar is really dead (along with, perhaps, Shrek and Nemo: animation itself can now go down a really interesting route that rotoscoping perhaps only really traveled on seriously before).
So when it comes to plot, the problematic racial relation to the body is solved by a disturbing ending, that affirms the pleasures of conversion into this avatar body rather than make it interesting. Here religion (into which fantasy elements easily slip, though--like in Harry Potter--they don't have to) come back to interrupt whatever was properly sci-fi about the whole situation (though religion and science fiction are also not opposites: see VALIS for the most amazing, if perhaps too soft-SF and self-reflexive, example). And, more than that, they make us question what was scifi to begin with about the various biological neural "networks" that connect the whole planet together: the scientific explanation only really becomes science-fictional when it loses its ties to empty spiritualism. And while the whole movie provides an immersive ecological experience that is sure to drive the importance of biodiversity home to anyone who sees it (and counter cynical religious anti-science drivel), unless it provides something more than an optional scientific explanation for relations between the Na'vi body and its environment--for that is how it is presented--we regress. Something like a real experience of this relation (which is what is required) is, indeed, brought home right before the ending--in the planet-wide rebellion against the colonizers (I try to remain vague so as not to spoil), on a scale that is large enough to render nature itself alien (again). But then the ending kills that off and makes these relations spiritual and familiar.
Showing posts with label SF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SF. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Star Trek
So I finally saw the new Star Trek last night. For various reasons I just couldn't make it to the theater over the summer--though one of those reasons was that when I could, my ambivalence over the whole thing kept me from going. You see, I'm a bit of a devotee (i.e. fan!). TNG has always been my favorite series, since I prefer its more hard-sciencey sort of focus and the more thorough concentration on the issues of managing the flying space city that the Enterprise has become (a focus that we see throughout Galactica, for instance). It's space opera become a problem--I like that. Plus it makes social issues come into focus on a wider scale, and the encounter with "new life and new civilizations" much more representable (instead of just sticking in an alien here and there, as in Star Wars or, actually, in this new movie, you get a focus more on cultures, collectives). Of course, this was also possible because of the money pumped into its special effects, but the storytelling was also usually pitched at that level. Like any good science fiction program on TV, it tended to wobble away from that if a better, weirder, more thought-provoking situation came up and could be explored--in a way not unlike many of the original series episodes, which occasionally seem more like The Twilight Zone's great one-off thought-experiments. So while I liked TNG, the original series, was still great, since it had solid stories, solid characters, and was often true in spirit to the inventive, pulpy, and indeed literary mode American SF, even if it could only build its worlds on a smaller scale (the recent reissue of the original series, with its suped-up special effects [and wonderfully remastered sound] tries to undo this and wonderfully fails, though it allows us to focus away from what is most obtrusive and lends to parody--in a way that makes one realize, as we did in a negative way watching the horrible new Star Wars movies, that the stories are what produce the need for representation of this future reality).
So I had Trekkie issues. But it wasn't so much that I thought the old characters should be forbidden to be taken up again, or indeed the whole canon itself forbidden to be messed with, as much as I was worried about the remake becoming only what it indeed turned out to be: an action movie. Now, TOS was, let's be honest, not always the more cerebral political meditation that one found in TNG (best exemplified in the unbelievable episodes on torture) or Deep Space 9 (which, by the way, is underrated). And TNG (especially in the movies) certainly had its share of pure action. But maybe it'd be good to distinguish between action and adventure, and say that in the original series, regardless of all its fights, it remained closer to the latter. It never made that leap towards the pure action film without some serious loss: it never turned into, however thin the plot was, that typical action-movie form where story becomes merely an excuse tying together pure spectacle, choreography, or violence (which is why the fight scenes--the best being, of course, with the Gorn--are often laughable for their length more than their low quality).
This has huge ramifications, I think, when it comes to the representation of space itself, as we'll see in a moment, but adventure turning into action was what I feared and what the movie actually did. Maybe another turn of the screw is appropriate, though: what we found in the new movie was not action purely, but adventure, become action, now trying to become adventure again. So it's not a pure opposition, but something like the the action movie trying to regain its roots (something that happens--with typical nostalgia for WWII times--in Indiana Jones, say).
It's sad, though, to see that this effort has so limited the resources with which such a revival could be accomplished to the postmodern high formalism J.J. Abrams lives and breathes (there's certainly another sort of postmodern content--anxiety about recursiveness and hallucination as such, which we find in the new excellent remake of The Prisoner--a content that, to defend it, is much more rich... but this is always less appealing to Abrams, unless it is the effect of a formal problem). For it's this formalism that we find, I think, in the old characters themselves: not so much a pleasure in their new content as some sense that their slots have been filled--or the fetishization of the fact that they can be filled at all and their story can be different. I'll get to Spock in a second (perhaps the only exception to this--but even then this is only accomplished through the most bare formal pressures), but you see that indeed this logic is so impoverished it actually has to take the most expansive form of the clunky plot itself, with its time travel and alternate universe production. Never mind the fact that it tries to push the burden of its clunkiness on the ties of the series to science in the first place, in the overcomplicated explanation future Spock (Nimoy) gives to Kirk in an ice cave--which I think just amounts to an insult, playing off notions that the series, because it just was SF in general, was therefore overcomplex and intellectual (early in the movie, Kirk's use of the word "syntax" is depressingly used as a code for deep learning). Never mind that: what's disturbing is that this also makes the whole movie into an allegory for the marketing-like dilemma the re-creators faced in the first place (and which some of them obviously didn't sweat about so much that it would prevent them from shoving a Nokia phone into the beginning): can we make anything different than the original, with these poor characters and this overburdened series, when the original is actually still doing so well? The dilemma becomes one of rebranding when it's not even necessary. Now, it's not that I don't like anything different done with the characters--though that's precisely the insulting sort of false-problem the movie produces for Trekkies and which it would love them to fume over (while they document each new technical change made to their beloved universe) while it rolls in the cash (Why don't you want anything different done? You were supposed to love these characters! You just don't want them shared with anyone other than yourselves!--suchlike phrases/overtones even became a way to market the film... and I think the anger of Trekkies is usually about this having nothing to say back to this more than anything). No, that's not my problem. It's that, when this inversion is transferred to the level of the plot itself, the movie ends up evacuating itself of anything different it really could have done, difference now simply having become newness and vice versa (a problem Jameson rightly sees as central to postmodernism). This is what makes me happy they are doing another movie, where the question of difference can actually be pursued in terms of a less-formal and auto-referential plot (getting its motivation not even from the bad guy, whose superfluity is so extreme that I think he becomes relevant again, in that he gets stuck in there precisely to draw our focus away from the real center--the time-travel dilemma--and its turning in place). Though this is exactly the minimal affirmation, minimal hope, such an empty formal work desires to produce.
Form become content, then, our attention is shifted back to the cinematic medium itself--which indeed has been filled with all sorts of thickness that the plot and the characters (again excepting Spock--but actually I think he's just a form too, as we'll see at the end) are lacking. Here, indeed, is something genuinely fascinating and which strikes out in a genuinely new direction. The profusion of light in the movie, that complete inversion of noir which is so striking when it comes to the bridge of the Enterprise, when projected onto space turns it into another animal altogether. While on the Enterprise, indeed, it remains a great homage to the smallness of the original show: light comes in to delete the space of all those old props, and represent the expansiveness of the original vision which it couldn't actually pull off with its gray cardboard-like consoles and bleep-bloop blinking computer buttons (which again, I think, represents another moment where SF ties to technology get seen as over-intellectual, doomed to become obsolete [not in function but in representation, in look, not feel--but that's a difference symptomatically passed over here], and therefore able to be eliminated altogether--along with their ties to futurity itself and its even more futuristic afterlife, which, let us remember, is again what the whole "plot" is meant to accomplish!). Where there is finally some representation of this old hulking ship, the great tubes, canisters, vats code it wonderfully (and comically) as steampunk--what happens when SF meets pastness itself. This is welcome, but besides the tubes (which crisscross in a weirdly unsmooth fashion that jars a bit with the rest of the movie sleek surfaces--though because these surfaces are ultimately thick and fleshy, as I'll show in a moment) this like the light takes a form subtracted from the visual by its addition, which is that of the wonderful static, crackling sound of transportation (the single best thing in the film, I thought) and the pop of warp speed. All this produces an unbelievable non-nostalgia for 60s-ness (or even late-50s-ness): in the space of the 60s (which, reaching its climax in in Kubrick was full of light--and remember 2001 was hugely ripped off by the first Star Trek movie), it gives us some other feel (non-Kubricky), which is welcome because makes us think hard about what it could be at the same time as it allows us to understand the 60s-feel as such differently, perhaps more thoroughly. Since the association of Star Trek with this old technological code is what the film is perhaps most intent on preventing (another purely negative goal--accomplished by so much being left out and only the crudest associations with primitive elemental forces [water, metal, electricity] put back in), or because this non-nostalgia is so pervasive, the movie doesn't push far in the latter direction.
But back to space, where the payoffs, I said, were the greatest. Space in the movie becomes thick, fleshy, multilayered: the Enterprise itself must keep floating through debris, being shrouded in the light of the warp speed (like on the poster), or emerging out of the bath of Titan's atmosphere (which is dwelt upon almost too long, so that we even feel something like the touch of space, its caress, and everything becomes vaguely sexual). No longer is space a void, an emptiness, a vast beyond: rather it envelops us. We are all Star Children, but precisely because space isn't black anymore: it's yellow, green, blue, anything but that stark black or the hardly different purple--which, represented in the new film, takes on associations with bruises before it seems like any cloud of space-dust. The most striking shot of the film brings this home (you can find some of it here): the Enterprise blasting itself out of the black hole by dropping the warp core (old trick, I think used once in TNG), being chased for a moment by an expanding cell membrane made of blue light which comes to push it on and or absorb it... this shows us the camera has become a microscope and we have completely passed into the realm of biology, of Innerspace, rather than the physics space of old. Space is body in this film, embodied, and while it'd be relevant here to bring up Fredric Jameson's discussion of the body as the real horizon of postmodern thought, I'll do that more in detail at a later time. Needless to say this applies here: we wonder at our bodies in this movie and their disintegration, not at space in any classic sense, and while this might represent something of a progression, something that makes space something closer to the more pliable realm SF has always seen it as (and the physical universe in general, nature itself), because it is a device for producing that reinvestment of action with adventure (and not the other way around) it seems to me a bit regressive. I'll be more specific: physics-space causes wonder, while the biology space of this movie is still sheer spectacle, since space is evacuated of its limitlessness, or made (however wide the shot) only so big, while none of the problems of this swath of light's management (what makes it alien, hard to deal with) emerge (we find in it only sheer enjoyment, or sheer terror). Moreover, given this body, it isn't filled with anything, anything like people, ships, space stations and devices or what have you, despite the appearance of one in the beginning. This space isn't the space of technology and people, of possible civilization, but something like weak nature, which peoples you more than you people it. Again, maybe that's an advance: it's certainly an aesthetic advance, mirrored more on the most unbelievable pictures we get from the Hubble or the orbiters of Mars, and makes possible a new representation of futurity as full of wild being, as it once was called by Merleau-Ponty, full of light and warmth, half-glimpses of stars and worlds (which could be interesting if it were pushed back into technology: we would get less of an on-board experience of journeying--and we don't really get this 19th century naval experience here, which is so prevalent in TNG--and the man-made would flit by with a less visible, though light-filled, tactile pressure and pull than the current visual explosiveness, tending towards the anarchy of Transformers or the obsessively over-detailed Star Wars, that we sometimes still see here and which still relies on simple equivalence between personal perception and the third person objective camera). But, put to the ends of this movie, it all tends to merely mirror our act of gazing at our (nonalien) bodies more than it does any sort of encounter with nature itself (which is why at the end, all the rest of the universe can just be gone through in a series--star system after star system impeccably modeled and chaotic rolling by merely with the credits), and make humanity less of a blip in the cosmos as the natural inhabitant of the universe (space merely as atmosphere)--taking it over without thinking (it's interesting how quickly Starfleet itself is coded as a military organization--like the Air Force, to keep going with the space-to-atmosphere reduction--more than an interstellar forum for diplomacy with an academic institution as its training academy: and while Kirk's final exam has always been seen as a sort of daring mixed with smartness, here the movie tries to code it as the lower class breaking a big bureaucratic intellectual institution through--not even cockiness, but pure assholery [the sign that it'd rather not represent lower class intellect at all, or see it merely as the frat-boy behavior it isn't]).
It's interesting on this point that the movie is so casual with things like planets and civilizations themselves, despite the use of Saturn: no fundamental break is seen between humanity on Earth and humanity in space, between the stars. And this brings me, finally, to Spock and black holes themselves--the real enemy of the movie. These puncture space and take away representation (though they also weirdly--because the plot needs to begin--seem to allow passage from the alternate Trek universe... such clunkily inconsistent physics doesn't even pose a problem for the movie but seems all the more to tie things together without really doing so--the typical formal postmodernist move), and they only work if space has become so very thick and bodily such that we can see this as threatening, sad, or profound. So back on the level of content (that is, form), within the plot, this is precisely what gives Spock himself something new, something only somewhat interesting: trauma. While this makes Spock into a different character altogether, this seems to me to be the most hackneyed way of doing so, since the non-representation of the death of of six billion people and their entire civilization in all its rich complexity seems more a formal requirement of the film--given its pure aim to be different--than anything really thought-provoking for either the character or us. Or maybe it provokes some thought, but this thought is about representation itself rather than any of the more substantial things (legacy, memory, social structure, the alien--remember, Vulcan was the first alien contact humans had, according to the canon) that might appear in further movies (and again, this minimal affirmation is all that the movie is after here). Here, they seek to give new meaning to the old Vulcan dilemma itself, as if it weren't rich enough (with all its racial overtones) beforehand, and this makes such a complex exploration of what this all means take the mere form of yet another prelude to action (big statues, once signifying something, are more interesting because they come crashing down on a poor figure as Spock rescues the Vulcan High Council).
In the end, if you think that this overcomplication does indeed invest the movie with some less formal content, you might be right. It certainly ends up, through all these maneuvers used to extricate itself without extricating itself from the canon and series, as perhaps a more complex meditation on revisiting older aspects of franchises than some of the more recent comic book restart movie-epics. But then again, it also doesn't, in some sense, since this is again all tied up much too neatly: one has to ask whether one wants this affirmation to be so minimally and formally represented--and there only by absence--rather than played out in a richer plot integrating the achievements at the level of the medium itself. And this not in a future film, but in the future of this present one.
So I had Trekkie issues. But it wasn't so much that I thought the old characters should be forbidden to be taken up again, or indeed the whole canon itself forbidden to be messed with, as much as I was worried about the remake becoming only what it indeed turned out to be: an action movie. Now, TOS was, let's be honest, not always the more cerebral political meditation that one found in TNG (best exemplified in the unbelievable episodes on torture) or Deep Space 9 (which, by the way, is underrated). And TNG (especially in the movies) certainly had its share of pure action. But maybe it'd be good to distinguish between action and adventure, and say that in the original series, regardless of all its fights, it remained closer to the latter. It never made that leap towards the pure action film without some serious loss: it never turned into, however thin the plot was, that typical action-movie form where story becomes merely an excuse tying together pure spectacle, choreography, or violence (which is why the fight scenes--the best being, of course, with the Gorn--are often laughable for their length more than their low quality).
This has huge ramifications, I think, when it comes to the representation of space itself, as we'll see in a moment, but adventure turning into action was what I feared and what the movie actually did. Maybe another turn of the screw is appropriate, though: what we found in the new movie was not action purely, but adventure, become action, now trying to become adventure again. So it's not a pure opposition, but something like the the action movie trying to regain its roots (something that happens--with typical nostalgia for WWII times--in Indiana Jones, say).
It's sad, though, to see that this effort has so limited the resources with which such a revival could be accomplished to the postmodern high formalism J.J. Abrams lives and breathes (there's certainly another sort of postmodern content--anxiety about recursiveness and hallucination as such, which we find in the new excellent remake of The Prisoner--a content that, to defend it, is much more rich... but this is always less appealing to Abrams, unless it is the effect of a formal problem). For it's this formalism that we find, I think, in the old characters themselves: not so much a pleasure in their new content as some sense that their slots have been filled--or the fetishization of the fact that they can be filled at all and their story can be different. I'll get to Spock in a second (perhaps the only exception to this--but even then this is only accomplished through the most bare formal pressures), but you see that indeed this logic is so impoverished it actually has to take the most expansive form of the clunky plot itself, with its time travel and alternate universe production. Never mind the fact that it tries to push the burden of its clunkiness on the ties of the series to science in the first place, in the overcomplicated explanation future Spock (Nimoy) gives to Kirk in an ice cave--which I think just amounts to an insult, playing off notions that the series, because it just was SF in general, was therefore overcomplex and intellectual (early in the movie, Kirk's use of the word "syntax" is depressingly used as a code for deep learning). Never mind that: what's disturbing is that this also makes the whole movie into an allegory for the marketing-like dilemma the re-creators faced in the first place (and which some of them obviously didn't sweat about so much that it would prevent them from shoving a Nokia phone into the beginning): can we make anything different than the original, with these poor characters and this overburdened series, when the original is actually still doing so well? The dilemma becomes one of rebranding when it's not even necessary. Now, it's not that I don't like anything different done with the characters--though that's precisely the insulting sort of false-problem the movie produces for Trekkies and which it would love them to fume over (while they document each new technical change made to their beloved universe) while it rolls in the cash (Why don't you want anything different done? You were supposed to love these characters! You just don't want them shared with anyone other than yourselves!--suchlike phrases/overtones even became a way to market the film... and I think the anger of Trekkies is usually about this having nothing to say back to this more than anything). No, that's not my problem. It's that, when this inversion is transferred to the level of the plot itself, the movie ends up evacuating itself of anything different it really could have done, difference now simply having become newness and vice versa (a problem Jameson rightly sees as central to postmodernism). This is what makes me happy they are doing another movie, where the question of difference can actually be pursued in terms of a less-formal and auto-referential plot (getting its motivation not even from the bad guy, whose superfluity is so extreme that I think he becomes relevant again, in that he gets stuck in there precisely to draw our focus away from the real center--the time-travel dilemma--and its turning in place). Though this is exactly the minimal affirmation, minimal hope, such an empty formal work desires to produce.
Form become content, then, our attention is shifted back to the cinematic medium itself--which indeed has been filled with all sorts of thickness that the plot and the characters (again excepting Spock--but actually I think he's just a form too, as we'll see at the end) are lacking. Here, indeed, is something genuinely fascinating and which strikes out in a genuinely new direction. The profusion of light in the movie, that complete inversion of noir which is so striking when it comes to the bridge of the Enterprise, when projected onto space turns it into another animal altogether. While on the Enterprise, indeed, it remains a great homage to the smallness of the original show: light comes in to delete the space of all those old props, and represent the expansiveness of the original vision which it couldn't actually pull off with its gray cardboard-like consoles and bleep-bloop blinking computer buttons (which again, I think, represents another moment where SF ties to technology get seen as over-intellectual, doomed to become obsolete [not in function but in representation, in look, not feel--but that's a difference symptomatically passed over here], and therefore able to be eliminated altogether--along with their ties to futurity itself and its even more futuristic afterlife, which, let us remember, is again what the whole "plot" is meant to accomplish!). Where there is finally some representation of this old hulking ship, the great tubes, canisters, vats code it wonderfully (and comically) as steampunk--what happens when SF meets pastness itself. This is welcome, but besides the tubes (which crisscross in a weirdly unsmooth fashion that jars a bit with the rest of the movie sleek surfaces--though because these surfaces are ultimately thick and fleshy, as I'll show in a moment) this like the light takes a form subtracted from the visual by its addition, which is that of the wonderful static, crackling sound of transportation (the single best thing in the film, I thought) and the pop of warp speed. All this produces an unbelievable non-nostalgia for 60s-ness (or even late-50s-ness): in the space of the 60s (which, reaching its climax in in Kubrick was full of light--and remember 2001 was hugely ripped off by the first Star Trek movie), it gives us some other feel (non-Kubricky), which is welcome because makes us think hard about what it could be at the same time as it allows us to understand the 60s-feel as such differently, perhaps more thoroughly. Since the association of Star Trek with this old technological code is what the film is perhaps most intent on preventing (another purely negative goal--accomplished by so much being left out and only the crudest associations with primitive elemental forces [water, metal, electricity] put back in), or because this non-nostalgia is so pervasive, the movie doesn't push far in the latter direction.
But back to space, where the payoffs, I said, were the greatest. Space in the movie becomes thick, fleshy, multilayered: the Enterprise itself must keep floating through debris, being shrouded in the light of the warp speed (like on the poster), or emerging out of the bath of Titan's atmosphere (which is dwelt upon almost too long, so that we even feel something like the touch of space, its caress, and everything becomes vaguely sexual). No longer is space a void, an emptiness, a vast beyond: rather it envelops us. We are all Star Children, but precisely because space isn't black anymore: it's yellow, green, blue, anything but that stark black or the hardly different purple--which, represented in the new film, takes on associations with bruises before it seems like any cloud of space-dust. The most striking shot of the film brings this home (you can find some of it here): the Enterprise blasting itself out of the black hole by dropping the warp core (old trick, I think used once in TNG), being chased for a moment by an expanding cell membrane made of blue light which comes to push it on and or absorb it... this shows us the camera has become a microscope and we have completely passed into the realm of biology, of Innerspace, rather than the physics space of old. Space is body in this film, embodied, and while it'd be relevant here to bring up Fredric Jameson's discussion of the body as the real horizon of postmodern thought, I'll do that more in detail at a later time. Needless to say this applies here: we wonder at our bodies in this movie and their disintegration, not at space in any classic sense, and while this might represent something of a progression, something that makes space something closer to the more pliable realm SF has always seen it as (and the physical universe in general, nature itself), because it is a device for producing that reinvestment of action with adventure (and not the other way around) it seems to me a bit regressive. I'll be more specific: physics-space causes wonder, while the biology space of this movie is still sheer spectacle, since space is evacuated of its limitlessness, or made (however wide the shot) only so big, while none of the problems of this swath of light's management (what makes it alien, hard to deal with) emerge (we find in it only sheer enjoyment, or sheer terror). Moreover, given this body, it isn't filled with anything, anything like people, ships, space stations and devices or what have you, despite the appearance of one in the beginning. This space isn't the space of technology and people, of possible civilization, but something like weak nature, which peoples you more than you people it. Again, maybe that's an advance: it's certainly an aesthetic advance, mirrored more on the most unbelievable pictures we get from the Hubble or the orbiters of Mars, and makes possible a new representation of futurity as full of wild being, as it once was called by Merleau-Ponty, full of light and warmth, half-glimpses of stars and worlds (which could be interesting if it were pushed back into technology: we would get less of an on-board experience of journeying--and we don't really get this 19th century naval experience here, which is so prevalent in TNG--and the man-made would flit by with a less visible, though light-filled, tactile pressure and pull than the current visual explosiveness, tending towards the anarchy of Transformers or the obsessively over-detailed Star Wars, that we sometimes still see here and which still relies on simple equivalence between personal perception and the third person objective camera). But, put to the ends of this movie, it all tends to merely mirror our act of gazing at our (nonalien) bodies more than it does any sort of encounter with nature itself (which is why at the end, all the rest of the universe can just be gone through in a series--star system after star system impeccably modeled and chaotic rolling by merely with the credits), and make humanity less of a blip in the cosmos as the natural inhabitant of the universe (space merely as atmosphere)--taking it over without thinking (it's interesting how quickly Starfleet itself is coded as a military organization--like the Air Force, to keep going with the space-to-atmosphere reduction--more than an interstellar forum for diplomacy with an academic institution as its training academy: and while Kirk's final exam has always been seen as a sort of daring mixed with smartness, here the movie tries to code it as the lower class breaking a big bureaucratic intellectual institution through--not even cockiness, but pure assholery [the sign that it'd rather not represent lower class intellect at all, or see it merely as the frat-boy behavior it isn't]).
It's interesting on this point that the movie is so casual with things like planets and civilizations themselves, despite the use of Saturn: no fundamental break is seen between humanity on Earth and humanity in space, between the stars. And this brings me, finally, to Spock and black holes themselves--the real enemy of the movie. These puncture space and take away representation (though they also weirdly--because the plot needs to begin--seem to allow passage from the alternate Trek universe... such clunkily inconsistent physics doesn't even pose a problem for the movie but seems all the more to tie things together without really doing so--the typical formal postmodernist move), and they only work if space has become so very thick and bodily such that we can see this as threatening, sad, or profound. So back on the level of content (that is, form), within the plot, this is precisely what gives Spock himself something new, something only somewhat interesting: trauma. While this makes Spock into a different character altogether, this seems to me to be the most hackneyed way of doing so, since the non-representation of the death of of six billion people and their entire civilization in all its rich complexity seems more a formal requirement of the film--given its pure aim to be different--than anything really thought-provoking for either the character or us. Or maybe it provokes some thought, but this thought is about representation itself rather than any of the more substantial things (legacy, memory, social structure, the alien--remember, Vulcan was the first alien contact humans had, according to the canon) that might appear in further movies (and again, this minimal affirmation is all that the movie is after here). Here, they seek to give new meaning to the old Vulcan dilemma itself, as if it weren't rich enough (with all its racial overtones) beforehand, and this makes such a complex exploration of what this all means take the mere form of yet another prelude to action (big statues, once signifying something, are more interesting because they come crashing down on a poor figure as Spock rescues the Vulcan High Council).
In the end, if you think that this overcomplication does indeed invest the movie with some less formal content, you might be right. It certainly ends up, through all these maneuvers used to extricate itself without extricating itself from the canon and series, as perhaps a more complex meditation on revisiting older aspects of franchises than some of the more recent comic book restart movie-epics. But then again, it also doesn't, in some sense, since this is again all tied up much too neatly: one has to ask whether one wants this affirmation to be so minimally and formally represented--and there only by absence--rather than played out in a richer plot integrating the achievements at the level of the medium itself. And this not in a future film, but in the future of this present one.
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