As I was sitting in my local cineplex and waiting, not very
hopefully, for the new Star Trek movie to begin, I watched
in the space of about 10 minutes seven separate previews of coming
attractions, all of which are on the summer blockbuster sched ule
and most of which will have opened by the time you read these
words. Here, in order, is what they advertised:
• An animated feature produced by Tim Burton called 9
featuring cute, goggle-eyed, animated humanoids battling giant
machines which is set in a post-apocalyptic world and opens,
barring an intervening apocalypse, on September 9th: 9-9-09.
• Land of the Lost, a comic-adventure with Will
Ferrell, based on a ’70s TV series and involving time travel to a
world filled with dinosaurs.
• Another comedy adventure by Harold Ramis called Year
One in which Michael Cera, Jack Black, and others show us the
allegedly comic truth behind a number of biblical and other ancient
legends.
• Terminator Salvation, another post-apocalyptic romp with
Christian Bale, who is supposed to be what Edward Furlong in the
last Terminator turned into; its tag could serve for any of these
movies: “Forget the Past.”
• The sequel to Night at the Museum (2006), subtitled
Battle of the Smithsonian, which copies its predecessor in making a
museum’s exhibitions come to raucous life once it is closed.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, in which the patriotic
doll also comes to life as a whole co-ed “elite force” fighting for
an international organization against an arms dealer; the striking
line from the trailer is: “When all else fails, we don’t.”
• And, finally, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,
also based on a child’s toy and involving space travel and warring
robots.
Now what do these seven movies have in common, both with each
other and with Star Trek, which followed them? All were
the most childish sorts of fantasy attended by audiences that were
mostly, at least chronologically, adult. Yet anyone venturing to
suggest that our children’s exposure to this Niagara of nonsense
throughout their formative years might be detrimental to them is
likely to be seen as a religious nut.
You don’t have to be religious, however, to question the general
assumption that fantasy is harmless or even healthy, and
indistinguishable from such self-evidently salutary fictions as
Greek myth or biblical legend. The new Star Trek, says
Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, is, among other
things, “a testament to television’s power as mythmaker, as a
source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves,
who we are and where we came from.” The original TV series, she
adds, was also “a utopian fantasy of the first order”—as if this
were entirely consistent with the alleged “myth” she had just
described. And, in a way, I suppose it is, for utopianism is by its
very nature a form of fantasy and one which, as I pointed out in
this space last month, is enjoying a certain intellectual vogue of
its own. For the many who now suppose that “the American dream” is
a form of utopianism, I guess it is “where we came
from.”
But if Star Trek the movie is to be counted among those
“fundamental stories,” it’s hard to see how it suggests anything
real about who we are or where we came from—unless who we are turns
out to be intergalactic half-breeds, while where we came from is
alternate universes where the familiar orderings of this one are at
best haphazard. Myth is generally supposed to embody some kind of
truth about the world, but I have not yet seen explained, by Ms.
Dargis or any of the other critics who gave Star Trek a
rave, what truth the movie contains, beyond the most banal, nor any
acknowledgment that the absence of such truth counts as a
detraction from this or any of the other new legends’ mythic
power.
A day or two earlier, I had spent an unhappy evening at the
theatre watching the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s painfully
unfunny revival of Noël Coward’s 1931 comedy, Design for
Living. This, too, was a utopian fantasy, reeking of the
now-dated revolutionary sensibility of the 1930s. How could anyone
take seriously, even as comedy, a giddy representation of the
Bright Young Things of the period reinventing marriage and morality
as if this were a thing unheard of? And yet the noticeably elderly
audience laughed and clapped heartily all the way through the sorry
spectacle. Perhaps these people were old enough to remember when
the jokes still sounded fresh and, well, daring. As it seemed
improbable to me that they could have been laughing at them
qua jokes, I guessed that there was an element of
nostalgia, too, of reliving their youth in the ’40s and ’50s when
the remembered naughtiness of the ’20s and ’30s seemed, as Star
Trek does today, like good harmless fun.
Yet fantasy is not always harmless. Here, for example, is Gideon
Rachman in the Financial Times, apologizing for President
Obama’s apologies on behalf of America and noting that “Mr. Obama’s
willingness to acknowledge past American errors is a sign of
strength, not of weakness.” He offers no evidence for this
remarkable assertion. The word “sign” suggests that he is writing
about a form of communication, as does his recognition that “when
Mr. Obama suggests that the U.S. has made mistakes in its dealings
with Europe or the Muslim world, he is quite deliberately sending a
signal.” But there is nothing to support the implication that the
signal, as received, is one of strength rather than weakness.
Instead, he merely notes that “a willingness to discuss your
country’s history self-critically is a mark of an open
society.”
Well, so it is. But what has that got to do with signaling
either strength or weakness? What he means, presumably, is that in
his own mind and the minds of other liberal-minded people an open
society is better than a closed one (like Russia or China, which
are the two examples he gives) and, therefore, somehow, it must
also be stronger. This is sloppy thinking, but sloppy
thinking of a particular kind: namely, fantasy. As far as Mr.
Rachman is concerned, the fact that neither Russia nor China nor
any other country he can name will read the signal as he reads it
is not a relevant consideration. He wants to believe that openness
equals strength, and therefore, to him, it does.
His exercise in solipsism reminded me of what I still think of
as the most revealing of President Bill Clinton’s remarks. When he
was told that not retaliating for some terrorist outrage or other
would make us look weak, Bill replied, according to Bill himself in
self-congratulatory vein: “Can we kill ’em tomorrow? Because if we
can kill ’em tomorrow, we’re not weak.” He, too, in other words,
had mixed up a private mental state—that is, his personal
consciousness of the potential of American power (very strong)—with
the way someone else was likely to perceive his failure to exercise
that power, that is, as an indication of weakness. He, too,
preferred to live in his fantasy world.
Doubtless it is very unfortunate that we live in such a wicked
world that people, particularly when they regard one another with
the kind of suspicion that attends the relationship of rival
powers, so often tend to regard kindness, gentleness, forbearance,
and self-criticism as indicative of weakness while violence, force,
vengefulness, and invincible self-confidence indicate strength, but
what are you going to do? Well, what both Presidents Barack and
Bill as well as Gideon Rachman are going to do—and are proud to
tell us they are going to do—is to pretend that it isn’t so. That,
too, is a sign of strength in their book. Nowadays, not only those
who can afford to live inside their own heads, but even political
and military leaders, people who have to deal with matters of life
and death in the real world, feel entitled to be the kind of
fantasists to whom Star Trek and half the movies made
today are designed to appeal.
Can it be, then, only coincidental that their flights of fancy
take place in the popular cultural context of a steady diet of
fantasy, fantasy, and more fantasy? Could the president’s
assurances that pouring trillions of dollars into federalized
health care will actually save us money, or that raising taxes on
domestic oil and gas production will help us toward “energy
independence,” or that, for that matter, “torture doesn’t work” and
therefore can never force us to a choice between our ideals and our
safety—could these and other fantasies have passed unnoticed and
uncriticized, as they mostly have in the media and other public
forums for political debate, if we lived in a culture inclined to
be at all critical of fantasy? I’m only asking.
