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I don't know, I won't know till I've found it and I'm grounded
Michael Chabon has a beautifully written piece in the latest New Yorker about the recent death of his father and his relationship with Star Trek; it is worth reading and I had to remind myself that he was not writing it for me, because I disagree with him about Spock just as strongly and for much the same reason as I disagreed with Gene Roddenberry:
Many early fans tended to despise Nurse Chapel, in particular the female fans who essentially created modern fandom—arguably the dominant cultural mode of our time—in the pages of Spockanalia, The Crewman's Log, and other pioneering zines. They saw her as unworthy of the formidable Mr. Spock, embodied by Nimoy with banked fire and clean-limbed grace. But, if Christine Chapel was a relative nullity, there was nonetheless an insight, canny and poignant, in the Chapel-Spock dynamic, the tension between one who longed for recognition, connection, and a return of love and one who was, by training if not by nature, incapable of delivering those things. That incapacity, and the hope that it might be cured—the imperturbable perturbed, the ice thawed—was a crucial element of Spock's attractiveness, and not only to women, and not only in a sexual sense.
Spock was unreachable, disengaged, remote, forever caught up in his research and his work. He sought relaxation in solitary intellectual pursuits, and seemed ill at ease in a crowd. He was loyal, and steadfast in the face of trouble, but he was not available. And yet now and then, in extreme situations, often under alien influences, Spock would be seized by transports of rage, or joy, or sorrow, the emotions disinterred from their burial site inside him. The feeling was there, deep and molten—volcanic—held in check by dint of constant effort.
In "Star Trek"'s imagined future, amid the rocks and under the red alien skies of Spock's home world, Vulcans called that unflagging effort a "philosophy," enshrined its founder, Surak, and looked with cool condescension on those who did not submit to its regime. But, as I would discover as an undergrad in the halls of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pittsburgh, a redoubt far stauncher than the planet Vulcan of a logic far fiercer than Surak's, the Vulcan way had little to do with philosophy and even less to do with logic, and there was certainly nothing alien about it. It was just good old repression, of the sort practiced by human fathers, among others, for many long and illogical centuries.
In terms of interpretation of canon, I much prefer Diane Duane's arie'mnu, "passion's mastery." But I also take it sort of personally every time it is suggested, in person or in fiction, that there is one way only to have emotions about things. Roddenberry couldn't believe that Vulcans didn't have (neurotypical-)Earth-type emotions just tamped down under the surface, but I call that a failure of empathy, not to mention imagination in a show about new life and new civilizations. I suppose Chabon shares it, if he describes Spock as incapable of communicating love, in need of a "cure"; that rather tanks my interest in seeing any version of Star Trek that he's written. I know I am reacting with especial sharpness because I had an interaction this afternoon in which it became clear, after the fact, that I had been expected to demonstrate a particular emotion which it happens I genuinely don't feel, but even on days when I haven't been reminded that I would be considered more alien than some fictional aliens this construction of the character irritates me. I guess it is the common one. It is not what was so important to me, watching Star Trek as a child just as Chabon did. It was not what I saw. And one of the reasons I study how people see things differently is that I am as puzzled by it as by the ways that people expect me to feel.
Many early fans tended to despise Nurse Chapel, in particular the female fans who essentially created modern fandom—arguably the dominant cultural mode of our time—in the pages of Spockanalia, The Crewman's Log, and other pioneering zines. They saw her as unworthy of the formidable Mr. Spock, embodied by Nimoy with banked fire and clean-limbed grace. But, if Christine Chapel was a relative nullity, there was nonetheless an insight, canny and poignant, in the Chapel-Spock dynamic, the tension between one who longed for recognition, connection, and a return of love and one who was, by training if not by nature, incapable of delivering those things. That incapacity, and the hope that it might be cured—the imperturbable perturbed, the ice thawed—was a crucial element of Spock's attractiveness, and not only to women, and not only in a sexual sense.
Spock was unreachable, disengaged, remote, forever caught up in his research and his work. He sought relaxation in solitary intellectual pursuits, and seemed ill at ease in a crowd. He was loyal, and steadfast in the face of trouble, but he was not available. And yet now and then, in extreme situations, often under alien influences, Spock would be seized by transports of rage, or joy, or sorrow, the emotions disinterred from their burial site inside him. The feeling was there, deep and molten—volcanic—held in check by dint of constant effort.
In "Star Trek"'s imagined future, amid the rocks and under the red alien skies of Spock's home world, Vulcans called that unflagging effort a "philosophy," enshrined its founder, Surak, and looked with cool condescension on those who did not submit to its regime. But, as I would discover as an undergrad in the halls of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pittsburgh, a redoubt far stauncher than the planet Vulcan of a logic far fiercer than Surak's, the Vulcan way had little to do with philosophy and even less to do with logic, and there was certainly nothing alien about it. It was just good old repression, of the sort practiced by human fathers, among others, for many long and illogical centuries.
In terms of interpretation of canon, I much prefer Diane Duane's arie'mnu, "passion's mastery." But I also take it sort of personally every time it is suggested, in person or in fiction, that there is one way only to have emotions about things. Roddenberry couldn't believe that Vulcans didn't have (neurotypical-)Earth-type emotions just tamped down under the surface, but I call that a failure of empathy, not to mention imagination in a show about new life and new civilizations. I suppose Chabon shares it, if he describes Spock as incapable of communicating love, in need of a "cure"; that rather tanks my interest in seeing any version of Star Trek that he's written. I know I am reacting with especial sharpness because I had an interaction this afternoon in which it became clear, after the fact, that I had been expected to demonstrate a particular emotion which it happens I genuinely don't feel, but even on days when I haven't been reminded that I would be considered more alien than some fictional aliens this construction of the character irritates me. I guess it is the common one. It is not what was so important to me, watching Star Trek as a child just as Chabon did. It was not what I saw. And one of the reasons I study how people see things differently is that I am as puzzled by it as by the ways that people expect me to feel.
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You know, one thing that being around fandom for so many years ended up eventually bringing home to me is that in fiction, and especially in a collaborative medium like TV, each person sees it through their own lens, and that is valid. Especially with something like Star Trek, that's been reimagined by so many creators over the years. I've heard it said that we are all watching subtly different shows and, well, we are, to a degree.
I still find myself digging into fiction and trying to fathom the creator's intentions, because that's interesting and meaningful to me. I want to know about the process that went into making it; I want to know what they intended with every raised eyebrow and set-design choice, and in general I incorporate that into my personal understanding of a work. But sometimes it's going to conflict with what I got out of it, including the aspects that were most meaningful to me. Sometimes it's just going to defy all logic and expectation, like Ray Bradbury's insistence that Fahrenheit 451 isn't about censorship. There's nothing wrong with being willing to put your foot down and say "No, maybe you intended this, but I saw this, and it is as real for me as that is for you."
To be completely honest, I'm not quite all the way out on the "all interpretations are equally valid; there is no underlying truth" end of the spectrum (like a lot of people in fandom are) because there is some amount of underlying canonical reality that is there. Believing that the entire show is actually, in-universe, a simulation or a dream doesn't mean that anyone else is compelled to accept that this is as canonically likely as the events of the show being "real" within their universe. The author is not entirely dead. On a personal level, I want to be in harmony with the creator, in general, and feel a frustrating dissonance when it turns out that I'm not.
But character motivations and emotions are as subjective as they come. Most people are responding to various aspects of the canonical work in the way that strikes a resonant chord for them, and you know, even if the creator later says that's not what was meant to be there, you still saw something, didn't you? You weren't wrong; they don't have a right to say that you didn't feel what you felt, or recognize what you recognized, or take from it what you took. You saw that; they can't make it not real for you. They can't unimagine it for you.
And in particular for works in which you saw yourself -- nobody can go back and say, "No you didn't" or "What you saw isn't really there." If they do, they're wrong. The personal truths that you find in fiction are never wrong, can't be wrong, by definition; you might change your mind about it yourself later on, but nobody can change it for you or has any right.
(A bit of personal truth: as someone who grew up in a very socially isolated, lonely situation, never really met anyone my own age or experienced what might be considered a normal social setting until I was 19, and had to pick up almost everything about social interaction on the fly in my early 20s, I relate hard to the TV version of Danny Rand. I understand that the character is a cliche in certain ways, I even agree with some of the criticism, but I've also never seen certain aspects of my own 20-something ways of relating to the world depicted that closely on TV before.)
Anyway ... isn't "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" also a Roddenberry-ism? He didn't achieve that on the actual show because he was also dealing with the constraints of network TV in the 1960s and the personal limitations of his own worldview. The lack of it in practice is definitely a failure of empathy, but the empathy was meant to be there; maybe it takes the viewers to put it back in. The beauty of Star Trek and the thing that's kept it alive for so long is that it can be reimagined, reinterpreted, and re-seen. The phrase "Orion slave girl" rings very differently for most people in 2019 than in 1967; so does the sight of a ship's bridge in which the only woman is playing a secretarial role. But that's okay. Time rolls on. What you saw in Spock is there. And sure, there are Spocks out there in spinoff media (and fanfic) who are going to feel shockingly wrong -- I don't blame you for not wanting to experience Chabon's Spock -- but they cannot unimagine the original, and somewhere out there are almost certainly Spocks who are "yours" too, because someone else saw and resonated with the aspects of the character that you did.
Spock
Re: Head-canon
What you saw isn't really there… They're wrong
Role-playing games used to be like that; some may still be. You were encouraged to interpret or alter whatever you saw fit of the setting and even the rules - so long as it was understood that your personal changes were personal, not official.
(I was still flattered as all hell when M A R Barker, creator of The Empire of the Petal Throne, told me that he liked my implementation of the semaphore-telegraph along the Imperial roadways. Me! Wow.)
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Yes: For example, if an observant creator sensitively portrays a servant-employer interaction, but due to (lack of) personal experience doesn't have particular insight into the servant's mindset, someone who's **been** a servant might be able to get from the scene all sorts of feelings bubbling up in the servant character that the creator couldn't have consciously been putting there, but because of good observation and good writing end up there, for someone in the know to find. And the viewer might say, "Hey, I loved how you captured all the complicated feelings the servant is having in that moment," and the creator might say, "I don't know what you're talking about"--and yet there they are.
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I used to be completely in agreement with the death of the author concept. That has recently become modified, largely by this excellent video. It argues that, while there are usually many "right" answers, some answers are just wrong. To paraphrase from memory: At the end of The Sopranos, you can validly say that "Tony lives" or "Tony does"; it is not reasonable to say "Tony becomes the Dalai Lama".
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Parenthetically, I dig your groovy icon, like, the most.
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I appreciate the reassurance and I feel I may not have been clear. I don't think it's possible for disagreement even by the creator of a canon to invalidate what resonated with me in their work, because the fact is that intended or not, it did; I don't worry that I read the show wrong or that someone is going to take the importance of the character away from me. I have spent most of my life coming at stories from unintended angles. It's just not something I feel bad about. I know that narratives are always a kind of Rorschach; I know that something that resonates deeply with me may be inconsequential or hurtful or not even visible to someone else. We've just been agreeing that all reactions are valid, so I'm not going to ding Chabon for feeling a particular way about the character of Spock and the fictional culture of Vulcan. It just seems such a flattening way to read them and it's tied so hard into an idea about people in the actual world that I run into far more often than I run into disagreements about favorite characters that I don't want to see it reified in new canon because of what it says about fictional Vulcans and real humans both. It was so very useful to me to see Spock's difference as a child. What is the point of erasing that?
I am in total agreement that even when the author is literally dead, context is important and includes things like budgets and schedules as well as creative intent. Especially in the case of a medium as collective as film or TV, I know a story does not just fall right out of a writer's, director's, producer's head into mine. Watching a bunch of Val Lewton last month really brought it to mind, since when I say "Val Lewton" I actually mean "the Lewton unit" and I didn't even make that shift until I started thinking about it.
I understand that the character is a cliche in certain ways, I even agree with some of the criticism, but I've also never seen certain aspects of my own 20-something ways of relating to the world depicted that closely on TV before.
That makes sense to me. Also, that's really neat. I'm glad you have that. It seems a useful thing to point to and say, "No, really!"