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

[aquaeri]

Hi! You didn't lurk all that lurkily as I saw you on my list :-). Yes, it felt to me like okay, she's not the jock's girl anymore, but she's still the girl. Rather than a human being who happens to be female.

[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.

[trulybloom]

I, too, had a problem with this new Uhura, but different from what you pointed out. I felt that the original Uhura was a confident, intelligent woman - a member of an elite crew, the best of the best were aboard the Enterprise, weren't they? The Enterprise was THE ship - the main flag ship of the Federation, at least that's how I remember it - so for her to be on the crew meant that she was worthy of being there.

Anyway, no matter what she had to do or didn't have to do, she still came across as intelligent and confident and good at her job. I think that's a pretty good role model for any young woman.

I felt this new Uhura was also intelligent and confident and good at her job - but that she had to be a bitch in order to be those things. She wasn't given assignment to The Enterprise, even though she was the best - she had to complain about it, had to bitch to her boyfriend and twist his balls to get him to assign her there, despite the fact that her test scores indicated she was better than anyone else for the job. It made me

[aquaeri]

That's a very good point. There seems to be a lot of social resistance to strong, assertive women and they do have to be "bitches" to get heard. But no-one* has to really take them seriously because they're being bitches, after all.

* no-one = no man

[zeborahnz]

I didn't see her as bitchy at all in that scene - assertive, yes; and no, she shouldn't have had to be: if Spock was so worried about the appearance of favouritism then not having a relationship with a student would be a far more logical solution than having a relationship and then shafting her like that. But when he was called on it he had the sense and grace to admit he'd been a jerk. --Y'know, implicitly

[lilairen]

Yeah, if Uhura was bitchy in someone's eyes, I so am not sticking around for their opinion of me. I'm probably a fucking sociopath.

[cakmpls]

ISTM that most people of any gender are looking, at least partly, for someone "who would desire them (possibly because they were somewhat convinced that wasn't possible), understand the pain and suffering they'd endured" and "reflect their own self-image back at them," that last referring to their self-image as they desperately want to be, not as they believe they are.

(You're on my f-list, so I suggest a peek at my current post "She doesn't think she's attractive.")

[aquaeri]

Well, it's a very minor part of my relationship search, and if feelings like that predominate in my life, I'm not really capable of looking for a relationship. And every time that's been the dominant aspect in someone's interest in me, I've run away as fast as I politely could.