Star Trek: the skeeve

[aquaeri]

I still have too many posts and emails to write and the mammothfail thread to keep up with (I think I've given up on the latter). But I went to see Star Trek last night, and I've finally figured out in full proper words what I personally found skeevy about it, so I'm going to share it

Comments

[lilairen]

I have an interestingly different perspective on this, in part because I'm more familiar with the original material.

In ST:TOS, Uhura was ... well, she answered the phone. She flirted with Spock, apparently (I missed that, but I was young when I watched most of the TOS that I saw). She was, basically, token furniture. (Sulu and Chekov were also tokens, really, but they occasionally did something.) The actress at one point complained to Martin Luther King, Jr. about how her character was being treated as a glorified secretary and how she was planning to quit the show, and he convinced her to stay.

So comparing her role in Star Trek: Rebooted to Star Trek: TOS, I see a character who is actually portrayed as a full person, someone who knows what she wants, and is fully competent to get it; someone who actually has actions to take, information to convey which is more a part of the plot than "Hailing frequencies open, Captain"; someone who is also frustrated by the emotional unavailability of her romantic partner up until said

[aquaeri]

I can see all that, but I think that makes new!Spock different enough from old!Spock that it's almost a different show. Because your description of old!Spock does not sound like he'd set off my "just like the nerds who were attracted to me in high school" detectors.

It's all quite interesting.

Oh, and it might be worth noting that shortly before I went to see Star Trek, I'd watched this clip on youTube. And I could totally see those two having a relationship that wouldn't make me feel all skeevy. (Whether that would actually happen, I don't know. I guess that's what fanfiction is for.)

[lilairen]

I find new!Spock intensely consistent with old!Spock, just ... younger, which means he's less polished on the emotional armor front. (I know you know where my blog is, so you can see some of my thoughts on this; I posted about Vulcans earlier today.)

The reboot appears to me to be recognising that Spock was the romantic lead for TOS a lot of female Trekkies wanted, and running with it - and streamlining the Uhura-flirtation and Nurse-Chapel-frustrated-romance into interaction between bridge characters, as a friend of mine pointed out. Uhura is in that framework not merely a competent career woman - of the three originally-token characters, she got the most extensive development (Sulu got a martial arts quirk, and Chekov got conflated with Wesley Crusher, and that's about it) - but a potential identification-point for the female parts of the Star Trek audience

[aquaeri]

It occurs to me that part of the problem here might be that there's only one female character in new!Trek. I think we're each trying to squeeze all we can out of this one character, and it's not going to work because one character can't encompass the identification of all women (or even all Trek-movie-attending women who prefer to identify with female characters). And taking two inadequate token characters and merging them into one character just isn't acceptable, forty years later.

I feel we're being asked to be grateful for some fairly pathetic scraps, here. And it's part of the larger problem that in pretty much all movies like this there are only one or two female characters, so we're always having to fight about the scraps.

[lilairen]

Yeah. And this is a problem with the source material as much as anything else; it will be interesting to see how, if at all, they try to address this in subsequent projects.

[aquaeri]

I really think they could have tried a bit harder for the reboot. People are naming Number One, Nurse Chapel, Yeoman Rand - it's not like Uhura was the only female they could develop from the original series. And I would totally go for the Orion girl on the crew, except I don't think we found out what she was studying.

(I mean, yes, curvaceous woman covered in green paint and with a cultural reputation for sexual voraciousness is not the ideal female rolemodel - but as part of a reasonably gender-balanced crew I think she could work well, and would take pressure off eg Uhura to be the one who has to take her underwear off.)

[patgreene]

I realize its been a week since I saw the movie, but I can only remember seeing four women in the movie. (Kirk and Spock's mothers, Uhura, and the green-skinned woman). Intellectually, I know there must have been more, but it really seemed testosterone-heavy. Which is to be expected, I guess, but still...

[aquaeri]

I really, really hate that we have to sit around saying "well, it's about what I expected I guess". As far as I can tell, original Trek was if anything quite pacifist, and most of the testosterone was in a single character. Which seems an entirely reasonable state of affairs - I don't think testosterone-laden wish-fulfilment needs more than one character in a cast this size to identify with.

And yep, if you look at the IMDB page I linked, 11 men and 4 women (as per your identification) in the main page cast list. Additionally, while I don't have my python script set up handy, I'm pretty confident the lumping of three of those women at the bottom of the list is statistically non-random.