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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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One of the lines that got stripped out of the superfluously longer, original version of this post was how Chabon seems to have gotten experience and expression of emotion confused, and I should have kept it in, because yes.
I'm simultaneously glad and angry on her behalf that Kirsten Beyer is still involved in STP--glad because I think she gets Spock (and by extension, one hopes, the Romulans) much better, angry because why the fuck was Chabon brought in other than to be a dude on set.
I have really enjoyed several of Chabon's novels and now I'm having the sliding, resettling experience of wondering if what I saw in them was what he meant to put there, because we don't even seem to have been watching the same TV show.
You have brought an excellent icon to this conversation.
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I have really been feeling that lately with mcu and natasha romanoff. The more the writers and directors talk, the worse it gets.
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FWIW, I enjoy his books too, and I don't think the one thing invalidates the other thing - I mean, it might inform a fresh reading, but I don't even agree with people I'm friends with on every reading of every book or character. Even people whose tastes very closely approximate my own really hate some things I love, and vice versa. I like some books that were written by people I can't stand in real life, and I haven't enjoyed books by people I really like personally. So ... I think it's possible to virulently disagree with the author on some points and yet appreciate some of his other points.
Maybe the most extreme example I can think of: I absolutely love Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. It's a gorgeous, evocative, weird novel that was one of my favorites when I was a teenager. I found out when I grew up that the author is apparently a raging right-wing reactionary whose personal politics are awful. But I really don't see any of that in the book. (It's a weird book in a lot of other ways, and parts of it really haven't held up for me as an adult - but other parts have.)
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Yes: everyone's lines are different. There are some people where my knowledge of their lives interferes with their art, others where it doesn't, and I think we may have backed into the problematic fave conversation, although I appreciate your point that just as often it goes the other way.
Maybe the most extreme example I can think of: I absolutely love Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale.
Okay, for a minute I had this confused with Helprin's A City in Winter and the rest of his also deeply weird Chris Van Allsburg-illustrated Swan Lake trilogy, but then I placed it. I haven't read it since high school! I seem to remember most strongly the bridges and the bridge-builder who dreams of repairing the world to perfection, even though the fragments are where we live. Ellis Island and Other Stories worked for me as recently as grad school and I don't think I've read anything else of his since. Agreed that his politics are a city dump fire.
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I don't have to agree with a writer's views on their own work to be sure (this is the whole point of the author being dead), but it does make me side-eye them at the very least.
Re: the icon, admittedly I love Star Trek: Discovery but I would even if it had done nothing else besides bring The Animated Series back into canon.
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Man, I wish he'd written that novel about Percival Lowell on Mars.
Re: the icon, admittedly I love Star Trek: Discovery but I would even if it had done nothing else besides bring The Animated Series back into canon.
Oh, yeah?
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I love TAS (the weirdest and a very feminist Trek in some ways?) and I think everyone should watch it, so this pleases me greatly.
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That's excellent! I saw it as a child in the same scattershot way I encountered most TV and remember almost nothing of the plots, but I have vivid memories of characters and species whose special effects a live-action series couldn't have afforded and for some reason an enormous tribble occupying the captain's chair.
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Somewhere in the Star Trek universe must be some people who interacted with tribbles once in a completely non-shenanigans fashion and no one from the Enterprise believes them.
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Oh, that's a really hard call. I can see arguments both ways!