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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