Things That Have Been Bothering Me

As a comedian, I really want to stand by the idea that nothing can’t be joked about, that no word should be off-limits, that anything can be funny and should be allowed to be examined from a humorous stand-point. For my world to function, it’s something I NEED to be true and I NEED to believe in.

There’s still something, though, that gives me a sick, unpleasant feeling when I hear someone use the word “faggot,” “nigger,” or “cunt,” in a joke and then say, “You shouldn’t be offended, a word is just a word” when the comedian happens to be  white, male, and heterosexual.

Now, I know a bunch of you are rolling your eyes right now thinking “Oh, a white, heterosexual male who’s going to tell other white, heterosexual males how to act so he can ease his own guilt.” Please understand that, yes, I have heard the Louis C.K. bit where he talks about “nigger,” “faggot,” and “cunt,” and I laughed and enjoyed it. I am not about to call every white, heterosexual male (let’s just use WHM from here on) comedian a vile, racist, homophobic misogynist. I just want to ask where we get off telling other people that they shouldn’t be offended.

I was at an open mike where a guy was on stage had a joke about hipsters (already he’s losing me with a hack topic) and he had the line “looking like a faggot doesn’t make you hip.” There wasn’t much set-up or pay-off, that was just supposed to be the joke by itself. I, feeling like he had crossed a line, made a loud scoffing noise, prompting him to indignantly respond “Oh, really?” like I was being some prude and I was insulting someone who was being as much of a virtuoso as C.K. himself.

Now, just think about it this way: If you are a WHM, and someone calls you a nigger, faggot, or cunt, those words can never hurt you or dehumanize you the way they can when directed at a black person, gay person, or woman person. None of those words attack fundamental parts of your being, rather, they’re insulting you by comparing you to those inferior groups, and you always have the luxury of shrugging those insults off by saying “hey, I know for 100% sure my skin’s not black/I like women/I indeed have a penis.” A black person can never escape being black. A gay person has the luxury of hiding his gayness from other people, but he can’t escape from the truth of his reality. A woman may have to squat over a mirror to SEE her vagina, but she knows it’s there, and can’t pretend it’s not.

That’s why we WHMs have the luxury to view those words as just words, because to us that’s the only thing they’ve ever been. You can’t expect somebody else to just as easily view them as harmless and meaningless when they’ve actually experienced what it’s like for those words to have destructive meaning.

The bottom line is, it’s not US who gets to grant people permission to use those words. We don’t decide when it’s okay, because we’ve never been hurt. It’s like a guy making a rape joke. You’ve never had the experience of walking down the street in fear simply because of your sex, and having to deal with the reality being that who you are makes you a potential victim at any moment. So when your joke triggers a bad response from someone, how do you possibly have room to say “Hey, it’s YOUR fault you got offended?”

The honest truth is I don’t hang around a lot of people of color in my circles of the comedy world. I tend to hang around people who are typically white, college-educated nerdy types, and venues like UCB and the Creek and the Cave which are mainly populated by those types. I think this actually allows some open-mikers to talk in a pretty cavalier and insensitive way about race and sex (and class, as well, but that’s another post) because they know nobody in the audience is going to make them answer for it. So the only people I see jump to chastise people for being offended by words are people who can’t come from a place of empathy, and emphatically refuse to acknowledge it.

I have seen a few gay comics sign off on the word “faggot,” but as far as “nigger” goes I just don’t get the chance to really witness a black audience member’s reaction to it, and frankly, I think a lot of the comics who throw the word around on stage wouldn’t have the integrity to actually try it in front of one. I would be more comfortable with all this casual use if I did see a sign that it was actually okay, and it wasn’t just us deciding that being sensitive was too much of a burden on us and we didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Talking about words like “cunt” and “rape” leads me to something else that’s been bothering me this week: The way male comedians casually talk about women’s bodies in a degrading way. For example, I was at an open mike where a comedian was telling a joke about going to finger his girlfriend, but then she said “no, you don’t get to do that yet.” He then got indignant and asked why she should say “get to” when she’s the one benefiting from it when all he gets are “smelly fingers.”

I physically cringed at the joke because all I could think was, if I was a woman in the audience, I would be thinking “My God, what if my boyfriend or any guy I’m with just thinks of my vagina as a disgusting thing that he only touches out of some Herculean feat of selflessness? Am I really that gross?” It made me think of how many male comics tend to do jokes where they talk about going on a date with a particularly ugly girl or particularly fat girl and basically go on to shame that person for committing the crime of being a woman who’s not sexually pleasing to them.

To tell you the honest truth, I don’t have very much of a “type” when it comes to women I find attractive. I’m dating a very skinny Asian girl right now, but my last girlfriend was a dark-skinned Greek who was probably heavier than I was at the time (this was in high school), and I have been strongly attracted to people who have been heavier than the norm. When a comic tells a shaming story like that, it doesn’t make me feel bad just out of sympathy for women or out of a need to be a white knight, but it makes me personally feel ashamed for not having the super-discriminatory taste in women that supposedly makes a man a real man. It makes me question if it’s simply a function of my low self-esteem that I don’t seem to view any sexual encounter with a woman as me doing HER a favor for letting her be with me, or if it is what it really is, that I don’t think a woman’s external appearance is her most valuable trait and that the onus isn’t on her to earn the privilege of my intimacy.

If my moral stance on the issue doesn’t convince anybody, then maybe I can get you from a creative viewpoint: As my friend Reid Faylor said when I was talking to him about it, it’s simply lazy comedy to just use a shocking word or to make fun of someone else for a laugh. The C.K. bit about nigger, faggot, and cunt, was about examining those words, and his own lack of self-awareness in how he used them in his life, and the examination was done artfully. That’s the thing, anything can be funny and anything can be joked about, but only if done artfully, with skill and thought. If you want to write a joke that has those words, or to describe your own taste in women, it should be written well enough that you won’t need to clarify it by saying “listen, it’s just a word, no need to get upset about it,” because it will be self-evident in how thoughtful and creative the presentation of the joke is.

So to the open mike-er who bristled at my disapproval of him saying “faggot,” I say, yes, really, because I’m not saying that the word you used is off-limits, I’m saying that if someone is going to use that word in a way that’s productive and actually funny, you’ve proven it’s not going to be you.

Re: Eddie Brill

In summary, for you guys who aren’t comics/following comedy news: Veteran comedian Eddie Brill, who was the stand-up booker for The Late Show with David Letterman, stepped down from his position following a shit-storm of criticism over comments he made in an article profiling him in the New York Times that seemed sexist/dismissive of women comedians.

Now, as when any issue around something like gender or race comes up, people on one side are characterized as hyper-sensitive whiners who want any excuse to act like a victim, and the other side are characterized as ultra-reactionary assholes who interpret any plea for consideration or sensitivity as entitlement. I’ve seen people attack Brill for the fact that not that many women comedians have appeared on The Late Show, despite the valid argument that women are still a minority in comedy, and that comedians who make it to The Late Show are THEMSELVES a minority, so Brill could just be a simple victim of statistics. Then I’ve also seen other people blast anyone who takes umbrage at Brill’s comments as people who have a “everyone gets a trophy” kind of mentality that are just bitter that THEY haven’t made it onto TV.

Frankly, I think both sides have missed the point a little. People’s knee-jerk reactions have yielded just as much noise as signal, if not more. What should be discussed, I think, has nothing to do with who gets booked on Letterman or whether or not Eddie Brill is a decent human being, but instead we should take a break from yelling “SEXIST!” or “FEMINAZI!” at each other and maybe consider there are some problematic attitudes implicit in what he said and how that can reflect on the comedy community as a whole.

I take the following quote as my case in point:

“There are a lot less female comics who are authentic,” Mr. Brill said. “I see a lot of female comics who to please an audience will act like men.”

I have a whole lot of problems with the phrase “act like men.”

See, I grew up with a mom who basically did everything physical around the house. If something needed fixing, Mom got out the tools and got it done. Something needed moving? Mom was helping you out. I can’t remember a time I ever went to Home Depot without my mom. In fact, even the last time I was in Miami, she was, despite being a sexagenarian cancer survivor, still putting in the elbow grease around the house, taking out pipes to unclog the kitchen sink.

This is why the show “Home Improvement” was a particularly confusing premise for me as a kid, because it tried to establish tools and doing anything with your hands as an exclusively male domain. So was my mom “acting like a man” when she did all those things? Was she being insincere and inauthentic when she lent me her drill set when I needed it to build robots?

In middle school, before I got into wrestling, my predominant interest was cooking and watching cooking shows on TV. My sister often asked me for advice when shopping for clothes. Most of my friends were female. Other guys didn’t call me “inauthentic,” they just called me “a faggot.”

Maybe I’m being a little extreme, but that goes to show what kind of problems there can be with saying that there’s a certain way men or women should act. What KIND of comedy behaviors is Mr. Brill assigning as being “like men?” Being dirty? Talking about sex? Being mean or insulting? What is it about a Y chromosome that makes those behaviors somehow more inborn? Any way you slice it, the very statement sets clear boundaries that there are certain behaviors that are only okay for men and others that are only okay for women, and that is the very definition of sexism. The remark wasn’t made out of malice, I’m sure, but it’s a naked admission of the fact that he doesn’t believe there is (and possibly shouldn’t be) a level playing ground.

What ensues from that is the fact that female comics are also trapped in a serious “damned if we do/damned if we don’t” scenario. If a woman tries to make an attempt to relate to male audiences, she gets called insincere; however, I’ve also heard (non-comedian) people complain that female comics do “nothing but period jokes.” Meanwhile, a friend of mine who does stand-up recently showed me his notebook, and there was one page that simply said “my penis.” Nothing else. This wasn’t even the last page he had written on and simply failed to write more notes on. There were notes on the page afterward and notes on the page before, but “my penis” stood alone on this page as, I guess, a necessarily large chunk of material, which is perfectly acceptable and natural.

Then there’s the whole question of how this mentality applies to any kind of queer comedians. Should a gay man act more like a man to compensate for his transgressive nature? Or should he actually act more feminine to fit with the already established perception of people of his sexuality? I have friends who are transsexual, meaning they already struggle with people criticizing them in their ordinary lives for being insincere or inauthentic just because they’re not acting in the way prescribed by their biological sex. I can only imagine how frustrating it would be if they were comedians and had to deal with that criticism in their professional lives as well.

(Maybe I’m full of liberal arts BS and am just white-knighting. That’s also a possibility.)

Should Brill have been fired? No. When you simply look for someone to decapitate just so you can put his bloody head on a pike and dance around it, you don’t get anything done. It’s kind of like what Louis C.K. said about the Tracy Morgan situation. A lot of anger on both sides is just anger with no productive result. There needs to be both acknowledgment of something potentially destructive AND a level-headed, reasonable approach to correcting it.

Women are still a minority in comedy, and the problem is we have not decided if we want to admit that comedy for women by women is its own unique culture that should be recognized and given its own space or if we should measure female comics and comedy that appeals to females by the EXACT same rubric as that for males, and I think Brill’s remarks show that very confusion. The truth is, comedy is subjective, and while comedy that caters to a certain audience is just as valid as any other, there still happens to be a persisting perception that the only comedy that can be a “mainstream” success is that which plays to a white male audience.

Maybe it would be easier for women comics to get ahead if they actually knew what it is people wanted from them.

Paul Simon Teaches Me About Death, Fear, and Honesty

“We come and we go. That’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head.”

I don’t talk a lot about music, at least not on this blog, save for an old post where I basically talked about resenting people who play guitar, but that’s not because I don’t like music. I think it’s mostly because I have a hard time finding music that both resonates with my particular emotional spectrum and hasn’t been talked about to death. There has been one album, however, I’ve been listening to a lot.

Let me try and characterize what’s going on with me without getting mopey and LiveJournal-y: It’s winter, which means I feel burnt out and my thoughts are centered primarily on death. I hear Christmas music, and instead of feeling festive, I ask myself how the FUCK the year is already almost over, and begin to think about how I’ve wasted another year and have allowed myself to be pushed closer to the grave having accomplished nothing. These thoughts don’t tend to result in either aggressive rage of the aggro-metal I tend to listen to or complete nihilistic detachment of the hipster rock some of my friends like, it leads just to introspection and an increased puzzlement, with the sole hope that I can find the absurdity in it all and become bigger than my rock.

You know what album’s helping me out with this a lot right now? Paul Simon’s Graceland.

Now, to be fair, maybe there are some pre-existing bias here: My mom listened to this album a lot with me when I was growing up. I’ve known most of these songs for a long time, so perhaps listening to them again has allowed me to hearken back to childhood and cling to that familiarity, but I don’t think I was paying attention that much to the lyrics when I was 8, so listening to it now at 23 has added an additional dimension to my appreciation beyond pure nostalgia.

Here’s the thing about Paul Simon’s lyrical style, at least on this album (I’ve actually only listened extensively to this one and his latest, “So Beautiful So What“): It’s like getting into a conversation with a complete stranger who talks to you with warmth and familiarity that assumes you already know what he’s talking about, even though you kind of don’t.  There’s a specificity to the way he writes the characters in his songs, but he doesn’t spend time setting them up or introducing them, so each lyric seems like a very disparate idea. However, the very specificity of each of those ideas is meant to provoke certain feelings and associations that make the listener become aware of the very cohesive emotional whole of the song, like the seemingly separate dots of a Seurat painting, when viewed farther back, producing a detailed tableau. The product is something personal and sincere and relate-able without being cliched, forceful or, to borrow screen-writing jargon, too “on the nose.”

The quote at the top of this post is from the album’s third track, “I Know What I Know.” Let’s look at a whole verse from the song:

She looked me over
And I guess she thought
I was all right
All right in a sort of a limited way
For an off-night
She said don’t I know you
From the cinematographer’s party
I said who am I
To blow against the wind

The specificity I mentioned is in the naming of “the cinematographer’s party” here. It’s an oddly specific, almost random detail to suggest, right? That one bit of specificity, however, is all we need to flesh out the rest of the subtext in everything else the characters say to each other, because of all the assumptions it leads us to make. We can already envision the woman as some kind of show-business socialite, which informs why she would assume the narrator would be acceptable to her only on an “off-night.” That’s all Simon needs to write for him to proceed like we already know these characters, because we do know them.

When she tries to initiate interaction with him based on some dubious level of familiarity, we then get the seemingly non-sequitir response of “Who am I to blow against the wind?” But if we consider the established context: an otherwise unlucky, undesirable guy is being approached by some popular beauty, he’s saying “I might as well go with it.” This is followed by the chorus:

I know what I know
I’ll sing what I said
We come and we go
That’s a thing that I keep
In the back of my head 

So the narrator has just decided to fully embrace this chance encounter and not “blow against the wind,” then here in the chorus decides to be completely honest about himself to this person. He can only know what he knows, and will make no pretense to anything greater or more glamorous, he is himself. Then the next thought is “We come and we go.” It feels like his decision to stick to his guns immediately and incongruously leads to a thought about mortality.

This might be where my interpretation is unique to myself only, but it makes perfect sense, because the thought of deciding to be completely honest with oneself to someone else, anyone else, is FUCKING HORRIFYING. Just as horrifying as death.

So much of the ritual of human interaction is about dishonesty. When we court, we create giant masks for ourselves where we hide the less desirable things and accentuate the things we think other people might find desirable about us, even though we have absolutely NO idea what they truly would find desirable. The masks are really just as much armor as they are advertising. Then, if a pairing is achieved, both possible mates begin to build a pile of shit where they both put all of  their truth, their flaws, their wants, their needs, and their hang-ups, and then proceed to dance in a circle around it, only seeing the pile but not touching it, and only looking at each other through the masks. We are aware there’s the pile of shit between us, and aware that there are weak, shriveled up people behind the masks, but we do our best to ignore both of those things until somebody trips and both end up cracking their masks and falling head-first into the pile of shit, and that’s supposed to be love.

I’ve had to deal with multiple situations where the choice to be honest about myself has felt painful and horrifying. With comedy, it’s been whether or not to be completely honest about myself on stage to my audience and say “Listen, instead of just saying what I just THINK you guys are going to find funny, I am going to just to tell you what I find funny and present it to you in the hopes that we make a connection. I know what I know, and I’ll joke what I joke.” That inevitably leads to the risk of rejection, and there’s a reason that silent rejection is called “dying” on stage, because it is as towering, painful, and horrifying as death.

I’ve also had to learn to be honest about myself with a lot of other things, too. I’ve been in a relationship with another person for four years, and there are times where I still try to keep my mask on, and still try to hide things. However, when you spend that much time with a person you love, unless you are a REALLY good liar (I’m not), that person will find out every evil, nasty, dirty, animalistic thing about you, and that truth puts you at TREMENDOUS risk of rejection, and THAT rejection, to me, is even WORSE than death. The thought of her ever breaking up with me never feels like it could be a simple admission of incompatibility, but rather a scathing condemnation of myself as a person for failing to reach the standards of a proper boyfriend. So that’s the thing I keep in the back of MY head, that I might come and SHE might go.

I’ve had to learn to be honest about myself TO myself, as well. After a year and a half of regular therapy, I realized the hardest thing I’ve had to admit to myself is that I HAVE self-esteem issues, that I AM really bad about bottling up my bad emotions, and I DO actually have more trouble talking to people about my problems than I thought I did. For a long time I thought I had a firm grasp on myself and that I was emotionally balanced, but that was simply me doing a solo version of the mask dance around the pile of shit, because I was afraid if I took off my mask and looked at the pile, that I would reject myself. I would declare myself irreparable, irredeemable, and useless. To a degree, I might already have, which is what has lead me to my preoccupation with my own death.

But then I have to realize exactly WHY Simon’s narrator keeps the fact that “we come and we go” in the back of his head. Yes, it’s paralyzingly frightening, but ultimately, our mortality is the best excuse to BE honest and be vulnerable, because, no matter how hard we try to protect ourselves from the pain and discomfort of honesty, we will still die, and we can’t change that, so it’s best to just avoid the REAL pain caused by self-deception and refusal of the reality of human existence. You know what you know, you sing what you say, and that makes it easier to deal with the fact that you come and you go.

Somehow almost all of the songs on this album manage to strike similar chords with me, similarly centering on the specificity of a single lyric. Take this example from “Gumboots.”

I was having this discussion
In a taxi heading downtown
Rearranging my position
On this friend of mine who had
A little bit of a breakdown
I said breakdowns come
And breakdowns go
So what are you going to do about it
That’s what I’d like to know

I’ve had to deal with a lot of my friends going through similar emotional crises, and upon realizing how draining it can be, I become aware of how draining I must be when I expect similar support from them, and I begin to demand the same solution to the crisis from myself that I selfishly demand from them.

Now an example from “You Can Call Me Al”:

He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
Bonedigger Bonedigger
Dogs in the moonlight
Far away my well-lit door
Mr. Beerbelly Beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore

I could do a whole other post about this song, so I’ll just post bullet points of things that this verse triggers:

• Guilt over gaining weight as a result of my emotional distress
• The need for external validation
• The simultaneous want to not be perceived as a distorted version of myself created just to please someone else (the “cartoon”)
• I’ve dealt with so many pet deaths that having dogs or cats around distresses me more than comforts me.

I’ve managed to find some crevice in every lyric in every one of these songs for my mind to nest in, and it’s been just as cathartic to listen to as any comedy album I own and more so than most other music I’ve listened to.  So that’s probably the longest you will get me to talk about music at any one time.

 

2,709 words about Star Trek? Sure, here you go!

This week has left me mentally and emotionally exhausted with talking politics, so now I’m going to steer my blog towards one of my other passions: science fiction movie criticism.

I’m a huge Star Trek fan. It kind of pains me that Star Trek is no longer on television, and that Dr. Who seems to be the franchise that mainstream nerd culture focuses on, because it means I really don’t have a lot of people to talk to about Star Trek anymore. Last month, as a gesture of renewing my faith, much like a good Christian reads his bible, I celebrated the month of Spocktober by watching all 6 movies featuring the Original Series’ cast (not all in one sitting, though, only a REAL loser would do that). Over the course of doing so, I came to the conclusion that the Star Trek movies would be an ideal series if only, somehow, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier could be retroactively scrubbed from continuity.

I wondered why those two movies in particular kept sticking out to me as the ones that didn’t fit, because it didn’t necessarily have to do with them being bad movies. Well, don’t get me wrong, The Final Frontier is garbage. The storyline is hokey (even for science fiction), the special effects are sub-par, and William Shatner and Laurence Luckinbill seem engaged in a competition to see who can be more hammy and melodramatic, but The Motion Picture is a fine film. The pace really slows down at some points (several minutes of long panning shots of space ships have made fans give it nicknames like “The Slow-Motion Picture” and “The Motion Sickness”), and it does feel like an overblown episode of the Original Series (which it technically is, since the story is taken from an idea for the rejected Star Trek: Phase II sequel series), but it was acceptable as the first attempt to do Star Trek on the big screen, especially since it was attempting to compete with popular sci-fi movies of the time like Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So why lump the two together? I think it’s because, if you manage to ignore those two, and view The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home, and The Undiscovered Country (all of these, perhaps not coincidentally, works born of the collaboration and influences of Leonard Nimoy, Harve Bennet, and Nicholas Meyer in some capacity or another)  as a contiguous, uninterrupted unit, you get a series of films that explores and encapsulates American post-nuclear, post-Cold War anxiety: the anxiety that if mankind is to be destroyed, it will be by its own hand.

You’re undoubtedly saying “Wait, you’re including The Voyage Home in this? The one with the whales?” I do personally enjoy the film more than some, but I will make an honest attempt to relate it to my thesis. Not immediately, though, so bear with me.

Among these four films, you have two major plot elements: the Genesis device, and attempts to make peace between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. This chronology fits well with that of the real world, as the introduction of nuclear weapons gave way to the Cold War, and eventually to US/Russian peace, as tenuous as it may now be.

We are introduced to The Genesis Device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It is originally presented by a group of scientists as a terraforming device: it can be launched onto a moon or dead planetoid, and instantly transform it into an inhabitable world. Of course, the story gives way to the reality of human nature that any advancement of technology and science will be exploited by some for destructive ends, as it is revealed that if the device were to be used on an inhabited world, all life would be erased in favor of the new life the machine would create. Much like Einstein hoped his theory of relativity would yield mankind’s betterment, but instead yielded the hydrogen bomb, Genesis is hijacked by Khan Noonien Singh with the hopes of using it as a weapon of terror.

The fact that Khan is a product of genetic engineering only underscore’s the movie’s fear of man’s own scientific capabilities. Nuclear destruction and the dangers of cloning were often treated independently in science fiction before this film, but here we saw them combined to prove how our innovations can end up being our own undoing.

Of course, Khan is defeated, Spock sacrifices himself, and all the nerds cry until the next film when he is brought back to life. But it is in The Search For Spock that we see the bridge made between the importance of the Genesis device and the attempt to end hostilities with the Klingons. Of course, the film focuses primarily on the drama of reviving Spock and the emotion of, as McCoy puts it, “using death to make a fighting chance to live,” so it is a seemingly minor piece of dialogue when the main villain, the Klingon commander Kruge (played by Christopher Lloyd), states that “while [the Klingons'] emissaries negotiate for peace, [they] will act for the preservation of [their race]” by attempting to obtain Genesis for themselves.

There are several implications there. First, that there had already been some attempts to turn the fragile armistice between the Klingons and the Federation, which had started with the Organian Peace Treaty in the episode “Errand of Mercy,” into a full-fledged alliance, and that, since Kruge was so desperate to obtain info about Genesis, there had been an arms race going on at the same time between the two parties. There had been some threads alternatively picked up and dropped during the original series about cloaking technology being part of a competition between the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans, but this movie was the first sign that it was as desperate and heated as the nuclear arms race of the 20th century.

We actually see the moment when Genesis literally blows up in all of their faces, as the living planet created by the device’s detonation at the end of the last film becomes unstable and deteriorates. David Marcus, one of the scientists who worked on the device (and also Kirk’s son), admits the instability is because he used “proto-matter,” an unpredictable (fictitious) substance, to complete the device, since otherwise it would have taken years to finish. Saavik, his Vulcan shipmate, responds with this question:

“ How many have paid the price for your impatience? How many have died? How much damage have you done, and what is yet to come?”

The camera zooms in on her face when she says it, and by having a non-human character say this line to a human one, the movie essentially asks this question directly to the audience. Our impatience to become more advanced and more powerful has led to our own downfall, and we do, indeed, ask ourselves, “what is yet to come?” It is then fitting that David himself is killed by the end of the film, stabbed by a Klingon soldier who took him hostage, his quest for something too great for him to handle becoming his undoing. Perhaps, if he had known, he would have become a watchmaker instead.

That carries us into the fourth film: The Voyage Home. I’m not yet ready to talk about how the whales fit in, so I will just talk about the plot elements surrounding that part. The movie is introduced by a Klingon ambassador addressing the Federation Council about Kirk being the supposed creator of the Genesis project and declaring that “there will be no peace as long as Kirk lives.” We then cut to the planet Vulcan, where Kirk states the crew must return to Earth in their hijacked Klingon Bird of Prey because “it has a cloaking device that cost [them] a lot.” So, in Kirk’s mind, whether or not Genesis was a failure, the whole ordeal will yield some chance to gain a technological foothold over the Klingons.

So then let’s skip over The Final Frontier, which features The Enterprise shooting God in the face with a photon torpedo, and proceed to The Undiscovered Country, which leads to the real trigger of Klingon/Federation peace: the explosion of the Klingon moon Praxis, their chief mining facility.

Now, I’m not breaking any new academic ground by saying Star Trek VI is a metaphor for the Cold War. Nimoy and Meyer both described it as “the Wall comes down in space,” and some critics of the film say it’s too ham-fisted and blatant an allegory, with lines such as “in space, all warriors are cold warriors.” What I’m saying is that the more obvious allegory of this film is actually just the more subtle allegory presented to us in II, III, and IV coming to a head. While our universe had Hiroshima, followed by the Cold War, and then Chernobyl, followed by the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Star Trek universe had Genesis, the bitter struggle to attain its secrets, and then the explosion of Praxis and the Khitomer Accords.

Now, whereas II, III, and IV dealt with larger and more cosmic kinds of destructive power, VI, being at heart a political thriller mystery, caps off this story arc by showing that the ultimate destructive power is human scheming and treachery. The would-be founder of Klingon-Frederation peace was Gorkon, the Klingon High Chancellor, who was the movie’s stand-in for Gorbachev. Now, where it diverts from being a straight-up allegory here is that Gorkon is assassinated, which threatens to derail the peace talks entirely. Kirk is found guilty of the assassination and imprisoned, but eventually freed, leaving the heroic crew of the Enterprise to reveal the true culprits.

It is discovered that the murder was the product of a conspiracy that involved both Klingon and Federation personnel, particularly two higher-up military figures: Admiral Cartwright and Colonel West (a nod to Oliver North, one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal). However, beyond a few scenes, we really don’t see the Federation side of the conspiracy investigated or paid attention to. The principal villain of the film is presented as General Chang, the Klingon played by Christopher Plummer. Perhaps this was done to make the story less on-the-nose, so the movie doesn’t seem like it’s grabbing the audience by the ears and screaming “HEY, HUMANITY, LOOK AT YOURSELVES!” It also made more dramatic sense because it played on Kirk’s prejudices, and makes Kirk realize that he has to overcome his racism if he is to become a better person, unlike Chang, who never let go and was killed in the end because of it.

The character of Chang himself, however, is a very clever device. He distracts us from thinking about humanity but simultaneously directs our focus right back towards it. Some of the reasons for this came about serendipitously. General Chang is, aesthetically, different from many of the Klingons we have seen in this film and in previous films. He is bald, save for a tiny ponytail in the back, whereas most Klingons have rather wild manes of hair, and his forehead ridges are severely diminished compared to the others. I’m sure some fans have tried to create a canon explanation relating to the Augment virus introduced in the prequel TV series Enterprise (which explained why the Klingons of the 60′s TV series had no ridges at all), but the real reason for this was simply because Plummer himself asked for it, saying he didn’t want to have to act through the heavy makeup prosthetics, so he could give the nuanced performance he wanted (and definitely delivered). What his choice yielded, though, was a very human-looking alien. It was indeed, very easy to look past the head-ridges and imagine Chang as one of us.

This aesthetic choice ended up being very consistent with Plummer’s performance of the character as well. By the time this movie came out, Star Trek: The Next Generation had been on the air for several years, and Michael Dorn’s performance as the Klingon Worf had given audiences a pretty fleshed-out and consistent characterization of what Klingons are like: gruff, blunt, and to the point. Chang, on the other hand, is quite eccentric and florid in the way he speaks. He uses every exchange with Kirk to indulge in quoting Shakespeare (which he suggests is best read in “the original Klingon,” reinforcing the metaphorical link between the Klingons and humans) and be blustery and bombastic in a way that severely distances him from all of our preconceived notions of Klingons and brings him so much closer to our notions about ourselves. Chang is human because he represents everything Kirk and the audience fears they could become, something just as frightening as Khan or Genesis.

So with all of that, it might seem less of a stretch to see how the whale story in Star Trek IV fits in with this. After the threat of the Klingon ambassador that “there will be no peace,” an alien probe approaches Earth, beginning to evaporate its oceans and de-power any starships that approach. Kirk’s crew, returning in the Bird of Prey they hijacked, figure out that the probe is speaking in the language of humpback whales, which, by the 23rd century, had long been hunted to extinction. That is what leads them to travel back to 20th century San Francisco and retrieve a pair to bring back to their present time. The message here is pretty blatant that, if they had not been able to get those whales, humanity would be destroyed and it would be its own fault, due to its lack of foresight and greed.

At the time of the movie’s release, it seemed more like this was Star Trek’s chance to do a more timely and topical story about environmental issues, but when viewed retroactively as part of our four-movie story-arc, it starts to have a little more meaning within Kirk’s own time. The movie starts with the Klingon ambassador’s admonition, and the starship where most of the action takes place  is a Bird of Prey, so that, even though the Klingons are not the villain of this story, we are subtly reminded of them throughout. It then culminates with the Klingon vessel as the very instrument of human salvation, as it carries the whales in its cargo hold until they return to the 23rd century, where it crashes into the ocean and sinks, but not before Kirk is able to release the cargo hatch and let the whales swim out. The Bird of Prey, with its animal-inspired shape, ends up symbolically giving birth to the whales, like a compassionate act of sacrifice before it succumbs to its fate in the depths of the San Francisco Bay.

Again, if we were able to block out Star Trek V and see VI as immediately succeeding IV, this would make the whole story of The Voyage Home seem to foreshadow The Undiscovered Country, since in both, humanity might seem doomed to die from its own follies, but is rescued when it learns to embrace the Klingon otherness and use it to better itself.

So that is how those themes present themselves in II, III, IV, and VI, and act as the thread which joins them all. You could say TMP had a bit of anxiety about humanity potentially destroying itself, since V’ger threatens to destroy Earth before it’s revealed to be Voyager 6, Earth’s own creation, but the movie ends up establishing V’Ger as, like Spock calls it, “a child.” So its threats to destroy Earth end up coming off as more petulant and not as serious. TMP is more about a personal journey of discovery and evolution, and ends up being more about optimism than anxiety, clearly showing the legacy of the emotional feel of the original series. Then, Oof course, The Final Frontier… Look, God lives at the center of the galaxy and the Enterprise shoots him in the face with a torpedo. I think it’s best if we all ignored it.

Jesus. If you read all the way through this entire essay, let me know so we can sign the suicide pact.

The Occupy Movement and Phones

I don’t intend this to be a very long post, since I turned it into one upon realizing it was simply too long of an idea to be a Twitter or Facebook post.

I am agitated right now because, among people who disagree and criticize the Occupy Wall Street movement (with which I plan to show solidarity tonight by joining the protesters in person), there has been this meme of criticizing them for having iPhone and iPads and other electronics or brand name goods. The oversimplifying argument is that, if they seem to be protesting rich people, they should not but things made by rich people. I have my responses to that argument and they are such:

1) Utilizing whatever communication technology is available is the smart thing to do for any protest movement.  It allows the movement to stay on their toes and know where to meet. If there is some kind of mass-accessible commercial medium of communication, it is their prerogative–or maybe their responsibility–to use it. Otherwise, they would indeed be as disorganized and directionless as their critics wish they were.

2) The possession of mobile devices is no longer as strict a marker of class as it used to be. Such devices flood the market, and as such, prices have gone down.  I actually just saw someone post an article about how, worldwide, more people have mobile phones than have toilets. So it’s not that ironic an image to see someone expressing economic discontent through a keyboard or touch screen. Otherwise, how are they going to bitch about not having the toilet?

3) OWS is NOT protesting against the production or consumption of consumer goods. It is protesting wealth inequality and the fact that politicians are bought out by lobbyists and no longer represent their constituents’ best interests. To assume this is some broad anti-capitalist and anti-money protest run by a few trust-fund hippies is nothing more than an overgeneralizing, dismissive harumph that would more befit a 70-year-old retiree than the fellow 20-somethings I hear using this argument. It’s an ad-hominem argument, pure and simple.

4) Even IF some of the protesters are only able to access these devices because of their financial comfort, shouldn’t it be commended that the people who AREN’T in a shitty position realize that, while the system may work for them, it doesn’t work for others, and throw their efforts in to change the system so that everyone gets more of a fair shake? Why should ONLY the people who are in the bad position realize that it’s a bad position to be in?

To expect everyone who is materially comfortable to just keep quiet and be satisfied is like the parent who goes “Why are you crying? Yeah, I know you only see me on Saturdays and I’m usually drunk, but HEY I GOT YOU AN XBOX! SHUT UP AND PLAY YOUR XBOX!”

Actually, people who are well off joining those who aren’t in protest would make it seem like it’s an exercise of–uh–what’s that weird thing called? You know, the thing you’re supposed to lose when you get everything you want?

Oh, yeah. Compassion.

Okay, I’m done. I was thinking about writing something funny instead, but I figured, “why start now?”