Oh who am I kidding, this is a rant. As I did with Interview with the Vampire I’m going to friend-lock this one, firstly because this reads as a lot more angry than I actually intended it to, and secondly because these issues rile people up quickly and I don’t particularly feel like any on-line arguments at this point.
Edit: It's been a while, so I'm taking this off friend-lock.
So I took Dad to see Star Trek for his belated birthday present considering he’s a big sci-fi/star trek fan. This was despite my foreknowledge of the whitewashing fiasco and the now-infamous underwear scene (but we’ll get to that).
I enjoyed it. I thought the storyline hung together reasonably well (despite a few narrative cheats and other illogical bits and pieces). It raised a few intriguing moral questions and juggled its extensive cast reasonably well - though some were more central than others. Action sequences were good, characterization was solid, and Abrams kept the light flares under control. If anything, it was a bit too long since I was ready to leave about the time Khan was defeated for the second time (but we still had the Enterprise’s crash landing and Khan’s last stand to get through) and a lot of it seemed to rely on foreknowledge of the original series.
But let’s get on to the controversies. Regarding the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch was playing Khan, a lot has already been said and with much more eloquence than I could ever manage.
This is my favourite article on the subject.
All I really have to say about it is two things:
Firstly, the casting of Cumberbatch isn’t just whitewashing, it’s also nonsensical. The excuse that this is a “rebooted universe” doesn’t cut it considering all the characters born prior to the beginning of the first film are still the SAME characters that began in the SAME place as the original series regardless of the timey wimey stuff that went down. Kirk is still a white guy. Uhura is still a black female. Spock is still half human/half Vulcan. They all still have the same parents, background and heritage. Care was taken to ensure that the new actors looked like the original ones.
But that a man called Khan Noonien Singh is now played by the world’s whitest guy is patently ridiculous.
Secondly, some people are saying that the portrayal of Khan was a no-win situation considering that if they had cast a POC they would have faced cries of racism considering he was essentially a terrorist. Well maybe. But you know what the logical solution to avoid this conundrum would have been? To NOT USE KHAN AT ALL. Seriously, would it have been so difficult to make up a brand new character, especially after going to all the trouble to establish a completely new timeline unfettered by the original canon in the first place?
And is anyone else intensely curious as to how much crossover there is between those who vehemently opposed the casting of Lucy Liu as Watson and those who are now passionately defending the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch? I suspect there's quite a few who did both, and those who have a problem with the former and not the latter really DO have a problem.
And now for the girls. I haven’t delved too deeply into the fandom, but what I’ve seen is unsurprising. A lot of passive-aggressive comments, a lot of dismissive attitudes and plenty of double-standards. According to the internet at large, Uhura is “just Spock’s girlfriend” and Carol was “the underwear shot.”
Okay, let’s tackle Uhura first. She’s in a relationship with Spock; a reciprocal, committed relationship. More importantly, she’s the linguist on board the ship who is chosen to travel with the rest of the crew to a highly dangerous and unknown planet where she alone steps out in order to communicate with the aliens they find there.
That? Was freaking awesome. Hands down my favourite part of the movie, not only because of the creepy atmosphere and the fact that Klingons were involved (Klingons!) but because of the intense level of physical and intellectual bravery it would have taken her to get out of that ship in the first place.
And yet of those two aspects to her character, it’s the first one that everyone keeps harping on, bringing out the usual complaint that she’s “just a love interest”. This ignores the importance of intersectionality when it comes to black women as love interests as well as the fact that everyone was vying for screen-time. Other characters were far more short-changed than Uhura, including Chekov, Sulu and even Bones to a certain extent. In short, I expected Uhura to have an important role to play in the plot, but was well-aware that she was part of an ensemble cast and was hardly going to be spot-lit. They delivered on that score.
Then there’s Carol Marcus. She smuggles herself onto the Enterprise in order to investigate a dodgy situation. Wow! She defuses a torpedo, saving Bones’s life in the process, and discovers the secret to the movie’s MacGuffin. Awesome! She then pleads with her father to stop his mass-murder of the Enterprise crew, bartering her own life in the process and claiming that she’s prepared to be destroyed with the others. Glorious!
Oh, and there’s half a second of her in her underwear. Guess which aspect of her role is getting all the attention.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the underwear scene is exactly what everyone is saying it is: gratuitous, pointless and stupid. But I do wonder why she’s getting so much flak for this scene when there’s comparatively been so little fuss about Kirk in a threesome with two alien cat-girls.
And based on the complaints I’ve seen, I do have to add my own take on what was going on. There have been a lot of people complaining that Kirk was being a pervert and abusing his power by looking at Carol when she expressly told him not to.
Now, he HAS done this before, in the first movie, when he spied on Uhura in her underwear without her knowledge. He should have been kicked out of the academy for that. But I don’t think that’s what happened here. I honestly got the impression that he didn’t know what was going on. When Carol tells him to turn around, he does it automatically without knowing why she’s asking. As she keeps talking he casually turns around and seems genuinely surprised that she’s undressed.
At this point we get the embarrassingly obvious shot, with the camera angled low so that we get a full view of her.
But I don’t think Kirk was doing anything untoward here, regardless of his womanizing persona.
Now, next time I see this film, I may well change my mind. I recently said in my Interview with the Vampire post that a scene I remembered very vividly when watching it several years ago was actually a product of my own imagination. People sometimes get it wrong. But at this point, I really don’t think this was a demonstration of Kirk being lecherous or taking advantage of a woman under his command. On a Watsonian level it was just a mistake which led to a Doylist excuse to see a girl in her underwear.
Basically, I think the movie did okay with its female characters. Not great, not even good - but okay. My real frustrations actually lie with the fandom, who are strangely insistent on diminishing the women to a love interest and a panty shot when it’s clear from the film itself they each had an important part to play in the story, a range of skills that were used organically, and a sense of autonomy and morality that guided their actions.
So can we please not reduce them to underwear model/Spock’s girlfriend when the movie itself makes it clear that there was SO MUCH MORE going on for both them?
***
Going back to Uhura for a bit in regards to her relationship with Spock, it is incredible how often the justifications for not liking her and her story match up to the excuses that were drummed up for all the Guinevere hate in the Merlin fandom. Seriously, it’s almost funny at how ridiculously predictable it all is. Some of my favourites include:
1. The faux feminist argument that states being in a relationship automatically strips a female of any innate worthiness as a character. BECAUSE BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP IS BAD FOR FEMINISM. WE MUST ALL BE SINGLE FOREVER IF WE WANT TO BE WORTHY OF WOMANHOOD (and hey, if this means that we don’t get in the way of the more profound and important bromances, then that’s just a happy side-effect and should not be considered the real basis behind this line of reasoning at all).
2. “I liked the black female character when she stood around in the background arranging flowers/pushing console buttons but find her annoying now that she’s become more assertive and central to the narrative.” Which by a TOTALLY UNRELATED COINCIDENCE coincides with her becoming a love interest to a male character. IT’S SO MYSTERIOUS.
3. This bizarre mentally that dictates there is only ONE type of worthwhile love in this world (romantic/erotic love) which can only ever be shared with ONE other person in the whole entire world over the course of an ENTIRE lifetime to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. It’s not enough that two people love each other, it’s that they have to love ONLY each other. It’s illustrated pretty well here:
This sentiment matches up scarily well to some posts I’ve seen that vehemently INSIST that Merlin never returned to Camelot to help Queen Guinevere during her reign because apparently they can’t bear the thought that Merlin might have other priorities in his life outside his Arthur obsession. Instead it’s all “Merlin ONLY EVER CARED ABOUT ARRRTHUURRR” and that it was totally beautiful that he spent the next thousand years as a hobo circling a lake instead of...you know, kinda weird and pathetic.
Seriously, when exactly did obsession and co-dependence become the new romantic? What’s with this weird jealousy-by-proxy reaction to the idea that a person can have more than one meaningful relationship during the course of a lifetime? Why do we have to constantly shove aside our female characters for committing the heinous crime of being loved and admired by a dude?
In the case of the above example it’s the final “this is why I love Uhura” tag that kills me. THIS IS WHY I LOVE UHURA/GUINEVERE. BECAUSE SHE UNDERSTANDS THAT SHE’S MEANINGLESS AND OBEDIENTLY GETS OUT OF THE WAY OF THE MORE IMPORTANT BOY LOVE.
Gimme a break.
And for the record, I want more gay representation on TV as much as I want more female characters who aren’t “just” love interests (not that I think this is the case for either Uhura or Guinevere, who clearly have much more going on in their lives than just Spock and Arthur if people actually bothered to notice that instead of constantly harping on the “she’s a love interest therefore she sucks!” excuse). But shitting all over the girls we already have is NOT the way to get either of these things. Apparently this is lost on some people, more’s the pity.
I mean seriously. I think it sucks that so many female characters are disliked because they get in the way of non-canon slash pairings, but at this point I’d rather people just ADMIT this instead of coming up with increasingly transparent reasons to justify girl-hate.