A TV critic for The Nation believes that the latest Star Trek series (Enterprise) is significantly more right wing than its predecessors. The analysis is a little shrill and over-wrought, but I think there is a germ of truth in there and I fear it may demonstrate a slide to the right in mainstream American thought over the last few years. As she points out:
The newest offering is a frank vehicle for white male suprematism and resentment.
Let’s start with white. The titles, set to a hymn that combines the first Christian references ever heard on Star Trek with some boasts about resisting alien domination, show drawings of the ships of fifteenth-century European colonial powers and European maps and globes from the same period.
On one is scripted “HMS Enterprise.” This jibes neatly with the plot, the first ever on Star Trek in which racism is applauded. The normal, virile, white spacemen of Earth are being held back by the ridiculous sensitivities of the Vulcans, pushy, geeky aliens who want them to respect the cultural differences of all the alien races.”
no – I wouldn’t say that Enterprise is significantly more right wing. There’s certainly a desire to make humans a little less sophisticated than their TNG-counterparts, but why should fear of other races be an exclusively right-wing reaction?
Anyway, this will be a major theme of the series, and it will revolve around the hick engineer. Ric Berman has already said as much.
God I’m such a trekkie 🙂
Comment by Nik Burton — 15 March 2002 @ 5:13 pm
I always liked Star Trek, but the new one turned me off completely. I didn’t take it to be right-wing– though the sentiments of the series certainly are, now that I consider it. Rather it seemed like an attempt to portray humanity at a younger, brash stage, before the PC-era of Picard. A backwards evolution. That, of course, is is silly, as we already know better. And I expect better from the Star Trek franchise. To be crass about it, there have been plenty of marauding “darkies” on this planet, why not celebrate them along with the white males?
Comment by Ali Hossaini — 20 March 2002 @ 10:33 pm
I cant find anything on the net suggesting that Enterprise is mirroring the events of the “terror war”, or being funded by republicans. But I cant believe i am the only person “imagining” the parallels between every plot and race and their roles. Come on, a terrorist attack on earth by a distant race with distinct tribes? The vulcans as a people demanding unilateral communication and trying to guide technological and social development from experience? The turn of all terrans from peaceful to bloodthirsty and fanatic? I can project a parallel from recent events on every episode. I have read comments that Enterprise started before 9/11, but the second, terrorist themed season did not. All the behavior of each character symbolizing different american attitudes one dimensionally, races symbolizing countries and their governments, manipulation of masses for economic gain, the list goes on. I just cant believe trek fans who are stereotyped as educated and intellectual are not posting more comments on this blatant parallel and inculcation into your “psychic living rooms” as it were. Did you somehow forget there is a propoganda war on? Or do you think SciFi franchises are so sacred that elitists could not get their monetary influence on them?
Comment by equilibrium3 — 14 May 2004 @ 3:06 pm