Excuse My Absence

I've been pounding away at a screenplay lately, and between that and my kids I just haven't had the energy. I did, however, think I'd bang away at a couple of geeky topics--STAR TREK and STAR WARS. This will go on for a while. So settle back, fluff your cushions and begin.

STAR WARS first.

Kevin Smith (he of CLERKS, and CHASING AMY fame) gives us a fan-boy's eye view of STAR WARS: EPISODE III here. I can't honestly debate whether the movie is, in his words "fucking awesome", because I haven't seen it yet, but the terms on which he recommends it need comment:

"'Revenge of the Sith' is, quite simply, fucking awesome. This is the 'Star Wars' prequel the haters have been bitching for since "Menace" came out, and if they don't cop to that when they finally see it, they're lying. As dark as "Empire" was, this movie goes a thousand times darker - from the triggering of Order 66 (which has all the Shock Troopers turning on the Jedi Knights they've been fighting beside throughout the Clone Wars and gunning them down), to the jaw-dropping Anakin/Obi Wan fight on Mustafar (where - after cutting his legs and arm off, Ben leaves Skywalker burning alive on the shores of a lava river, with Anakin spitting venomous sentiments at his departing mentor), this flick is so satisfyingly tragic, you'll think you're watching 'Othello' or 'Hamlet'."

To begin, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was notable not so much for its darkness as for the quality of the writing. I can, even today, quote a number of memorable dialog exchanges among the characters that bring smiles to my otherwise grim visage. The characters themselves were charming, witty people who could hold up their ends of the conversations. None of this is true of the last two STAR WARS movies, and I doubt it will be true of this one. (Unless Lawrence Kasdan came back and script doctored for Lucas, as a favor to him and the movie-going public at large). The scripts for the last two STAR WARS movies violated all eighteen of Mark Twain's rules for romantic fiction. A quick sample:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

What, exactly, did the last two STAR WARS movies accomplish? They delivered little in the way of news about the characters, and scarcely anything about what drove them to make the decisions they ultimately made. This movie series was always going to have to problem of a certain lack of suspense--because everybody knows what's going to happen to everyone. But the solution for this problem was to find greater character depth and a sense of irony, both of which are uttlerly lacking here.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

None of the incidents in the previous two STAR WARS movies can be called necessary, because there was no central point to develop.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

Jar-Jar Binks is the most egregious example. His mannerisms may have been irritating, but I could have lived with him if he'd added something to the tale, instead of functioning as a bumbling distraction.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

I can really only remember two bits of dialog from the last two STAR WARS movies, and neither one for admirable reasons. They are part of Anakin's attempts to seduce Senator Amidala.

"I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating... hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me... what can I do?- I will do anything you ask."

And...

"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth."

Sound like human talk? Is such talk as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances? Interesting to the viewer? Help out the tale? Each one strikes out. I can't imagine anyone, under any conditions, say to someone he cares about "I'm haunted by the kiss you should never have given me." The passive voice makes it sound unnatural. A more reasonable line would be "Why did you kiss me? Just to torture me?" "Should never have given me" sounds inappropriately formal. It should appear in the sort of letter a person would send Amazon.com when he's received 5000 copies of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by mistake. "You should never have given me these books, and if you fail to take them back, and pay postage, I shall insert them sideways into your rectum." As for the "Sand" line, of what possible interest would that be to someone you're trying to flirt with? It's clear the "soft and smooth" part refers to Amidala, but it seems frustratingly indirect and even creepy, as if Anakin had transformed into Torgo, the shaky-handed groper of "Manos, the Hands of Fate". Compare this style of flirtation to this, taken from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK:

[a tremor knocks Leia into Solo's arms]
Princess Leia: Let go.
Han Solo: Shh.
Princess Leia: Let go, please.
Han Solo: Don't get excited.
Princess Leia: Captain, being held by you isn't quite enough to get me excited.
Han Solo: Sorry sweetheart. I haven't got time for anything else.

Now that's the stuff. Simple, direct, flirty. A little bit of Beatrice/Benedick style cut and thrust. Wit and charm. And the last line is an exit line. I like these people, and I want to spend time in their company. Which brings me to the last and most devastating rule breakage.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of [Star Wars Episodes I & II] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

With the early STAR WARS movies, I cared about the fates of Luke, Han, Leia, and the others. When Han Solo was dropped into the carbon freeze unit, I feared for his life and checked the film magazines from the time EMPIRE closed to the time RETURN OF THE JEDI opened to see if Ford had been cast, and if so, whether that meant that Han Solo would return for another movie. My reaction to his freezing was much the same as that of the little boy in THE PRINCESS BRIDE when his grandfather tells him that Wesley is dead.

The new STAR WARS movies have left me with no one to root for or worry about. The characters aren't really characters. They're just plot points, marking time until Anakin puts on the black armor and gets medieval on the Jedi. When Anakin and Amidala fell in love, they brought as much passion to it as they would have to signing complicated insurance forms. I didn't believe that they were in love. I believed that the plot required them to say that they were. (I've polled a number of my female students on this, and they assured me that anyone who laid this "kiss you never should have given me" line on them would have been given the friend speech or been kicked to the curb. This line is better birth control than any doctor can prescribe.) I don't like these characters. I don't care what happens to them, and the one upside of Episode III that I can see is that I can watch a good many of them die horribly.

Enough of that. On to STAR TREK. Orson Scott Card takes a moment to dance on STAR TREK's grave in an LA TIMES column.

Now, I don't take much of what Mr. Card says seriously...amend that, I don't take anything Mr. Card says seriously. (You should read his political columns sometime. It's like Ann Coulter, only longer. Much, much longer.) But I did want to get at his premise that STAR TREK was grade school science fiction from which we have graduated.

What must be understood about STAR TREK is that when it came out, it was the first major prime-time television science fiction series that wasn't aimed primarily at small children. It was also the first science fiction television series to give us a self-contained, internally consistent world where we saw a large number of science fiction concepts (Space travel, time travel, talking computers, transporters, aliens, advanced weaponry, wireless communications, and medical scanners) used simultaneously as if they were a natural part of the scenery. It came out at a time when most people outside the very small universe of science fiction fans looked down on science fiction if they bothered to look at it at all. Conversely, science fiction fans tended then, as now, to regard themselves as members of an exclusive enclave where the masses weren't welcome. In the introduction to Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology, Ellison describes the state of affairs as they were in the 1960s:

"It is 'steam engine time' for the writers of speculative fiction. The millenium is at hand. We are what's happening.

"And most of those wailing-wall aficionados of fantasy fiction hate it a lot. Because allofasudden even the bus driver and the dental technician and the beach bum and the grocery bag-boy are reading his stories; and what's worse, those johnny-come-latelies may not show the proper deference to the Grand Old Masters of the field, they may not think the Skylark stories are billiant and mature and compelling; they may not care to be confused by terminology that has been accepted in s-f for thirty years, they may want to understand what's going on; they may not fall in line with the old order. They may prefer 'Star Trek' and Kubrick to Barsoom and Ray Cummings. And thus they are the recipients of the fan-sneer, a curling of the lips that closely resembles the crumbling of an old pulp edition of 'Famous Fantastic Mysteries.'" (1967)

"Star Trek" functioned, for science fiction writers like Harlan Ellison, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch and, Asimov, as a kind of pop culture acknowledgement of science fiction (itself a creature of pop culture, but a more obscure and varied one than television is). They knew that for the first time their work was being taken seriously in a place that could deliver a mass audience. Ellison, Bloch, and Sturgeon all wrote for the series. (Ellison wrote one episode, the experience leading to an understandable estrangement from Roddenberry. Sturgeon wrote two episodes, and Bloch wrote three.) Asimov, in an essay describing the "Star Trek" conventions, said this:

"These were the enthusiastic people of all ages who had taken part in the STAR TREK experience, who had been and were participants in the most sophisticated example of science fiction on the television screen, and a little of whose lives had been permanently marked as a result.

"The trekkies are intelligent, interested, involved people with whom it is a pleasure to be, in any numbers. Why else would they have bene involved in STAR TREK, an intelligent, interested, and involved show?"

Of course, this describes the trekkies of 1976. I don't think he met the woman who refused to take off her uniform for jury duty...still...my point is this. If STAR TREK was relatively simple science fiction by literary sf standards, it's because it had to be. Most of the audience members weren't also members of fandom. (Most weren't trekkies either.) They, as Harlan Ellison put it, "wanted to know what was going on." And why shouldn't a show that needs twenty million viewers a week to stay on the air let them know what's going on? If TV science fiction has grown more than an inch or two conceptually in the intervening years, I need proof.

As for the lack of series-long through-lines which became fashionable in later decades of television, STAR TREK was hardly unique among shows of its era in that respect. "The Avengers", "The Saint", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Gunsmoke", "Paladin" and most other shows of the era were bascially anthology shows with a continuing cast. (Limited run series like "The Fugitive" and "The Prisoner" are exceptions.) While many of them maintained a level of series continuity--Opie aged, STAR TREK and "The Saint" had sequels to episodes--the shows couldn't manage through-lines because of the nature of production in those days. Most producers felt, and I'm not knocking the theory, that audiences wouldn't want to come into the middle of a show that had already started if they needed to understand too much backstory. (For this reason, among others, I've never watched an episode of "24" or "Lost".) Also, because series were filmed rather than taped, processing the shows often made it necessary to deliver or show episodes out of sequence, fouling up any prospect of maintaining a through-line. This would be especially true on a show like STAR TREK, which not only had to process and color correct the film, but would also need to prepare optical and sound effects for insertion into the live footage. Depending on the episode, this could take some doing. This would also complicate any serious changes to characters during any given season, because there was always the chance that another episode, filmed earlier but shown later, would violate continuity. A character could change, but it would have to be a change that would take place after a good number of episodes had aired, in order to be safe. Now Mr. Card may not like this. I don't especially either. But that was how things worked at the time, not just for STAR TREK, but for everyone.

The subsequent STAR TREK shows did pick up on the fashion of longer term through-lines. I remember several in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and DEEP SPACE NINE. I don't know VOYAGER or ENTERPRISE as well, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

What killed STAR TREK was not, I think, that science fiction on television became more sophisticated. It is rather that the later STAR TREK series tended to rely on a variety of deus ex machina endings to survive from week to week, and that the characters were, like the characters in the last couple of STAR WARS movies, simply less interesting. Frequently, a contemporary STAR TREK show would end when some technician said, "Oh, all we have to do is re-phase the positve ion capacitor in order to restore containment in the anti-matter pods, allowing us to move at warp speed and get away from the guys with weird brow ridges." This happened more often than a Fenimore Cooper character stepped on a twig. Suddenly, whoosh, the ship comes to life and the crew lives to do it all again next week. This flaw might, however, be forgivable, if the characters engaged us in some way. Mr. Card may not like Kirk, Spock and McCoy, but lots of other people did. If nothing else, it was fun to watch them argue, even if the episode was generally subpar. I found, however, little pleasure in the company of the later STAR TREK characters. Hadn't the writers ever met anyone fun, or witty, or charming? Did they not know what charisma looks like? I seldom watched VOYAGER or ENTERPRISE because I simply didn't care about the characters on the show.

In spite of what Mr. Card says, STAR TREK is not gone. You can watch it on DVD or the Sci-Fi channel almost any time you like, an indication that large numbers of people haven't graduated from it (though they may, as I do, watch BEING JOHN MALKOVICH along with it). Paramount just isn't making new episodes, and while that's as fine with me as it is with Card, our reasons are different. I think that, if Paramount can't find people who can make newer episodes of STAR TREK as compelling as what's come before, they should leave us with what we have. All shows end, and it's best if they do so before they become stale. I actually think the British have the right idea in ending TV shows after six episodes. It keeps the material fresh. It's a model HBO has more or less copies for their originial series. Do you imagine THE SOPRANOS would be nearly as good if David Chase and company had to produce thirty shows a year? Card, conversely, seems to feel that the world might have been better off if STAR TREK had never existed in the first place.

In a sense, it may be true. Without STAR TREK, science fiction might never have achieved the level of mass popularity and acceptance it has since enjoyed; and Orson Scott Card might never have lived long or prospered as a best-selling writer of the form. Since I've never been able to endure more than a few pages of his work, I might consider this a blessing undisguised.

Still, history is immutable, so I'll have to consider the co-existence of STAR TREK and Scott Card a fair bargain.