Cinema Discourse

  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Classic Movies
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • Cookie Policy

John Lobell – John David Ebert

Movies as Theoretical Narratives


Cinema discourse looks at current and classic movies from a literary point of view. We also have top movie reviews, current movie reviews, film ratings, movie blogs and movie history.
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / On Star Trek

On Star Trek

May 23, 2009 By John Lobell 1 Comment

Star Trek: A Movie Review

By John Lobell 

The new Star Trek movie is so highly satisfying because it introduces a richness of back-story into a franchise we know so well, and because it adds a mythological depth. This depth does not approach that of Star Wars, but it is there. And since we now have time travel (the young Spock meets the old Spock, played by Leonard Nemoy), we may even get to see the development of a mythological relationship between James Kirk and his father.

Reconciliation with the father was the underlying theme of the six Star Wars movies. Of course this mythological depth, as I have said, does not approach that of Star Wars, for not only does Lucas understand the issue of the father, but he also understands the cycles of history. While the Star Trek movies have featured a series of encounters with angry nut cases (with the exception of the very prescient Borg), Star Wars unfolds against a cosmological backdrop that tracks the courses of empires and federations, rebels and defenders. Lucas not only knows his Campbell and his Spengler, but also Lo Kuan-Chung’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which begins: “The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.”

But there is something else going on in Star Trek, indeed in most American movies, that while surely noticed, is rarely discussed. If we date the emergence of modern humans at around 150,000 years ago, and settled agricultural communities around 12,000 years ago, then in rough terms we have spent 92% of our modern human existence as nomadic hunter-gathers, and 8% as settled agriculturalists. That is, we have been agriculturalists for twelve thousand years at most, while many humans have remained hunter-gatherers for much longer, and a few have survived even to this day. Agriculture, it is true, brought great benefits: reliable food supplies, comfortable residences, defensible communities. But this came at a great sacrifice: enslavement to the cycles of planting and harvest, and to watching over the land. No more moving over the landscape. Crops must be planted and harvested on schedule and watched in between. A cow must be milked every morning.

The courage of the Paleolithic hunter, able to track and kill large and dangerous animals alone or in tightly knit bands, was devalued in favor of the patience of the farmer. The shaman, who individually engaged in the shamanic journey to battle spirit enemies was replaced by the priest who did not act out of his own inner vision, but as an agent of an institution. So with agriculture, we have such vertically rooted orientations as organization, hierarchy, obedience, enslavement to the land and the seasons as well as to institutions. Industrial culture continued this model, substituting the factory floor for the field, and the office adopted it, too, as we read in The Organization Man.

But then in 1964, with his Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan announced the electronic age, and with it the reemergence of the hunter-gatherer with the remark that we are now hunters and gatherers of information. So the question now is how to build a culture that allows for the reemergence of individuality. For a while we did this in Silicon Valley.

But for the most part, we are now going in the opposite direction. Without arguing issues of social justice and the welfare state, let’s look for a moment at the control over the individual we are building: you must be born in a hospital, are encouraged to attend preschool, must attend school with a curriculum more and more federally mandated, are encouraged to attend a college that must be accredited under federal rules, graduate in debt that precludes a year of bumming around Europe before deciding what you want to do, pay taxes, report every stock trade you make to the government, drive a car that is mostly designed by government rules, have medical care which will soon give to the government records of every pill you take and everything you tell your shrink, and if you want to momentarily escape any of this, ingest only those mind altering substances approved by the government. And the extent of these controls is rapidly increasing. In other words, we are shifting from Foucault’s disciplinary society, which is disintegrating all around us, to one based upon the control of the individual through electronic tracking.

But while we may claim to be in communitarian agreement on this issue of growing control over our lives, who are our movie heroes? Almost without exception, those who rebel against such controls, those who live precisely as Paleolithic hunters, not as Neolithic farmers. There is no need to list these characters since they constitute just about every male (and now often female) lead in every action movie of the past half century.

So it is no surprise that when we meet the boy Kirk in the new Star Trek movie on the open plains of Iowa, we see him speeding in a vintage Corvette in defiance of a robot traffic cop. And we also take note that he is a rebel at the Star Fleet Academy.

What is so surprising is that our movies continue to present us with this model of the individual locked into fierce defiance of the institutions which govern and control our present civilization, which is, of course, tantamount to a celebration of the shamanic values over the priestly, an American faith in the inner voice so celebrated in books like Huckleberry Finn. This is going on at the same time that we are meanwhile plunging into greater and greater regulation of every aspect of every individual life in headlong pursuit of the total domestication of the once free, and now increasingly domesticated, surveyed and panoptically controlled individual, while such a dichotomy goes unnoticed and undiscussed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Comments

  1. Jacques de Beaufort says

    May 23, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    This might be one of the paradoxes of modernity…that even as the economies of scale created by mechanization enable ever larger institutional edifices, the machine is nevertheless held with great ambivalence. We are cognizant of the putative “benefits” of industrial society, yet still long for some sort of “authentic” experience; our heros are Romantics who turn their backs on civilization in search of inner truths not found in the profane world. Yet the Romantic movement needed the Rationalism of the Machine to cleave itself into existence. A rebel cannot exist without a cause.

    I suspect that as resource depletion (specifically liquid hydrocarbons) catalyzes the long slow descent of industrial civilization, the institution and the Priest will be held in less esteem. This happened at the beginning of the Renaissance after the Black Death and is evident in the humanist attitude expressed by Boccacio in the Decameron. So not having much of a foil for rebellion, our heros will assume a different mettle…perhaps crusaders not for some sort of hyper-individualist notion of “authenticity, but instead as survivors fighting the malevolent spirits that lay siege even to small tribal communities….famine, plague, etc.

    The Hero doesn’t really change, just the demons.

    also, if you care, you said “patients” instead of “patience of the farmer”

    Have you seen the Terminator movie ?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

 

CLICK-FOR-CULTURAL-DISCOURSE

 

CLICK-FOR-VISIONARY-CREATIVITY

 

Contribute

 

Giant-Humans-Tiny-Worlds book cover

 

Post-Classic-Cinema-book
clickforpromovideo

 

Catastrophe book cover

 

newMedia-book

 

CELEBS-ICONS-book

 

Ebert books

Recent Posts

  • Animated Cinematic Innovation Celebrated in the French Alps ~by Larry Ruppel
  • On Annihilation
  • On Blade Runner: 2049
  • On American Gods
  • On Twin Peaks: The Return

Archives

Site

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Resources

  • Articles
  • Books
  • Classic Movies
  • Contact
  • Cookie Policy
  • Data Access Request
  • Help Support John Ebert
  • John David Ebert Movie Review of Being John Malkovich
  • John David Ebert Movie Review of Inland Empire
  • John David Ebert Movie Review of Lost Highway
  • John Lobell on Myths and Movies
  • Privacy Policy

John David Ebert Videos

click for video

Heidegger's Being and Time

click for video

Jean Gebser's Ever-Present Origin

click for video

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

click for video

Fichte's Science of Knowledge

click for video

Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature

click for video

Karl Jaspers' Origin and Goal of History

click for video

Spengler's Decline of the West

click for video

Walter Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility

click for video

Derrida's Of Grammatology

click for video

Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment

click for video

Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus

click for video

Deleuze's Logic of Sense

click for video

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition

click for video

Vattimo's A Farewell to Truth

click for video

Alain Badiou's Ethics

click for video

The Works of Paul Virilio

click for video

Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres

click for video

John David Ebert on The Age of Catastrophe

click for video

John David Ebert on The New Media Invasion

click for video

John David Ebert on Elvis Presley

click for video

On Carroll Quigley and Historical Cycles

click for video

Heiner Muhlmann's Maximal Stress Cooperation Theory of Culture

click for video

On Borkenau's Cycle of the Dead

click for video

John David Ebert interviewed on Kubrick, Gilgamesh and the Dangers of Technology

click for video

John David Ebert Interviewed by the Artist Jacques de Beaufort

 

Click for John Lobell's Website

© 2014 John Lobell & John David Ebert | Webmaster jbQ Media Web & SEO

Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}