Kirk Your Enthusiasm (16)

What do you think?

1. This is my favorite Star Trek time-travel adventure — with grownup and teen Kelly Jean teaming up to track how much these sci-fi parables are reality to us, while onscreen in the 23rd century a Kirk more at odds with himself than in any transporter-malfunctioned or mirror-universe physical split encounters uncertainty in the very fabric of the franchise he’s been living. This essay is also a prime directive for a dinner-party done right — opening with a joke (blue booze, har, just like the tributes are served on the way to slaughter in the Hunger Games flick), and sharply reading all at the table (the essence of Kirk’s mental acrobatics and verbal judo, even in a stationary scene, is brilliant, and “screw-patched” is both the badass close reading Chang was born for and the late-breaking lead entry for Adjective of 2012). Kelly Jean, you already share most of James Kirk’s initials, and captain my captain, this piece crosses the T.

2. Very well written. The Undiscovered Country a suitable name for the legions of fans who discovered the original Star Trek through there love for the Next Generation. This scene would be like the the Navy Seals having dinner with Al Qaeda. Hailing frequencies closed.

3. I think I may have to co-opt your motto. Also! This piece is excellent. Consider my enthusiasm Kirked.

4. “Nothing good comes from blue drinks.” Never a truer word spoken.

5. “The Undiscovered Country” is a terrific, evocative title for the film which was a satisfying conclusion to TOS which happened also to coincide with Roddenberry’s life (who died shortly before the film was released. I also liked the device of the tense, diplomatic soirée, where the belligerence is barely submerged beneath a competitive layer of verbal oneupmanship. If Kirk could be deft, he chaffed under the restraints and niceties. Although the references in Meyer’s “The Undiscovered Country” may have been more directly to the machinations around the fall of the Berlin Wall, to a fan of the entirety of TOS, it feels more like WWII-era gamesmanship between the US and USSR (George C. Scott toasting his Russian counterpart in “Patton” comes to mind). Roddenberry flew many bombing missions during WWII, so it isn’t really surprising that there are many references to WWII and to that era’s diplomacy throughout the series.

   It’s also gratifying to watch an actor of Plummer’s caliber unapologetically mixing it up with the rest of the cast, and their holding their own, in turn. And if you’re chewing up the scenery behind that much cool-looking make-up, why not the Bard?

6. Shakespeare tastes much better with the original Gak-sauce, Esoth :-). And yeah, guys like Roddenberry, and Jack Kirby, and my dad, were the surviving believers from a conflict that convinced them that the only point to having a fight is in the hope of ending fighting. They all saw final peace pushed indefinitely into the future — but some of them tried to show us how that future might look

7. Visualize galactic peace and picture a period at the end of that last sentence — cut-and-paste errors, however, will still be with us three centuries from now.

8. Kelly’s Proustian take (am bluffing, as have never read it, but I always figured the clue was in the title) is like warm toast on a snowy day.

   Perhaps we should explore the idea of writing autobiographies that describe who we were when seeing each Star Trek movie. They were real landmarks, and serve as useful past-synchronic grab bags. It’s like rembering the moment you heard John Lennon was shot, except it’s not tragic and there are seven consecutive Memory Parcels…

9. I love the idea of a geek tome of Star Trek “where were you when…” stories, Greg.

   Reading Esoth’s comment I had a visceral recall of the day I learned Gene Roddenberry had died. I had forgotten it was so close to Star Trek VI.

10. Greg, I too was awed to see this slice of Trek — always meant by its creators as a marker of its viewers’ world’s parallel history and as often turning out to be the mirror of our geeky personal obstacles and aspirations — turned into a life story by a memoirist extraordinaire (everybody click here: http://www.servinghousejournal.com/FitzsimmonsEye.aspx
    and here: http://www.liarsleaguenyc.com/blog/2012/07/hundreds-of-tiny-people-by-kelly-jean-fitzsimmons.html ).

    The only problem with where-was-I-when with Trek movies is that my mind was pretty much in Federation space (or on New Genesis, or at Avengers Mansion) all the time, while between movies and series my body moped around Mid-Atlantic suburbia like John Carter back at the mansion shuffling through his Dejah Thoris bubblegum cards. So no points in time come to mind, but alternate time*lines*, sure — plotting the quickest course out of the Reagan era in artschool while Roddenberry and Fontana returned with TNG to give me a “my” Star Trek; or marking time in deepest Nixon/Ford by measuring where my heroes had gotten to — Spock respected on Broadway in Equus, Kirk marooned in bad TV (Barbary Coast! Butter commercials!) — as we made our way through our shared, surely temporary exile on Earth…

11. I see what you did there, Adam. You’ve introduced vicious self-serving factionalism into the project, with your Subjective and
    Arbitrary Trek Chunk Rendering, rather than the Kelly Way, enforced by the Diachronic Discipline of the Movie Release Schedule.

    Stop messing with the concept, you Bourgeois Melkotian Desilusionist.

12. We don’t have nearly enough vicious personal attacks on Hilobrow, do we?

    Anyone who digress with me is a Gorn Demi-Waitress.

13. While this form of film-as-literature criticism is not a familiar genre to me, I do see Kelly Jean’s critical eye and commentary that goes far past the autobiographical element of this piece. I do not think one has to be a Star Trek fan to see the pop-cultural significance of James T. Kirk. He is more than just a manifestation of Roddenberry’s hope for humanity – though I am not the one to expound further. Kelly Jean is the proper voice for this one indeed.

14. Actually, Greg, when I ran it through my Universal Translator it wasn’t that bad. So yeah, sweeping movements vs. significant moments — can I help it if, between the two of us, only KJ had a life? :-)

15. If you call going to Star Trek conventions with my Dad having a life, then yes, that is the “Kelly J Way”

16. Also Greg, Gorn I may be, but towering over you in your disgrace at typing “disagrees” as “digress,” I’m not…going to correct you…TODAY! (And I know that line’s really from “A Taste of Armageddon,” not “Arena” — but I *do* digress, all the time, and will join you whenever you want…)

17. Ha KJ, how many of us really spend time with our dads? It occurs to me that dweebs like us probably had more quality bonding with the old man(s) than those who (gasp) went outside and threw a ball around. That tires ’em out quickly, but a weekend-long convention’s a commitment. Anyway Lisa, phenoms like Trek were the year zero of interactive media, with fans in a conversation with creators…so even more than most art, the show is completed in the reception of its viewers, and yeah KJ, your life story is part of The Real Series…

18. New topic: One thing that always disappointed me about Trek VI was that, once we see the head of Starfleet, the job seems to have gone to Commodore Some-White-Guy, when I always thought it would be cool for them to redeem Number One from the TOS pilot and show that *she* had become queen of the worlds (I took it okay when Gene Roddenberry died, but Majel Barrett I’m still adjusting to). But I just realized: at least the character can get a second chance in the do-over universe of the Abrams flicks! Let’s start a campaign!

19. I want to toast with forbidden blue ale! What a great series and what fabulous fans. Enthusiastically Kirked.

20. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” This is in the top ten best dinner party scenes ever. It also has one of my favorite lines in all of ST canon, in which you hear echoes of every change-averse person who has lived (uncomfortably) through a sociopolitical upheaval:

    “If there is to be a brave new world, our generation is going to have the hardest time living in it.” — Gorkon, to Kirk

21. Fa reals Delphi — just last Friday I was quoting that in an Israel/Palestine discussion over falafel. A civil discussion to begin with; two of us had grown up on Star Trek, and I can’t believe that’s a coincidence…

22. Thanks Delphi, that line really struck me too. It’s a lovely nod to both the Huxley and the Shakespearian sentiment behind the phrase.

    Adam, you win for eloquent falafel chatter.

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