COUNTERING THE COUNTER CULTURE (THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK')

”The enemy from within – the enemy!”
- ’And the Children Shall Lead’ 

To Boldly Get Far Out

The voyages of the starship Enterprise began in 1966, the year John Savage has claimed youth culture exploded. And should anyone doubt it was a Sixties show in the way we think of them, and the hemlines alone weren’t convincing, show them the scene in ’Wink of an Eye’ where Kirk literally drinks the Kool-Aid.

Okay, officially it’s coffee. But the drink-me potion speeds him up to the point where he can see the aliens aboard the Enterprise, moving too fast to be visible to mere human perception. Who, most noticeably, don’t try to conquer him but convert him to their perspective.

Kirk’s view of slowed time is presented by Dutch angles, a visual conceit often employed to represent drugs or general derangement. And much of the episode’s appeal lies in seeing something once familiar rendered askew. (Beyond a brief intro, everything takes place on the familiar Enterprise sets.)

There’s a clear parallel between its time distortions and the contemporary fashion in psychedelic music for speeding up and slowing down sounds. Wikipedia cites as one of the main characteristic of the style as “Dechronicization” which “permits the drug user to move outside of conventional perceptions of time”, mimicking the effects of LSD (allegedly).

George Harrison said after first taking the stuff: “There was no way back after that. It showed you forwards and backwards and time stood still.” The aliens are even called the Scalosians, as if associated with musical scales. The episode itself becomes a little like dropping something in the coffee cup on the viewer’s armchair.

However unlike other adversaries (some of which we’ll move on to) the Scalosians themselves don’t represent the counter culture. In fact they’re a(nother) dying race who vampirically require humans. Accelerated time isn’t an enemy to be overcome so much as a setting for the story.

But then the Sixties themselves seemed an accelerated blur, something hard to take in at the time. (A point made by Darren in The M0vie Blog.) This wasn’t just the tempo of music or the rapid spread of the counter culture, though it included both those things. Rather than anything, it was everything. Art, politics, technology... the world seemed to be changing right under you.

Hindsight can have a flattening effect. The Futurists, the art movement operating before the First World War, boldly asserted in their manifesto “Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” But by the Sixties their time would have seemed sedate if not actually quaint. Much as the Sixties do to us today. But what matters how those eras felt from the inside. Objects which to us seem quaintly retro then felt almost impossibly futuristic.

And this has an extra resonance for ’Star Trek’, itself futurist in the techno-utopian sense of linear progress. But is all that progress now happening too fast, too soon? Characters here “burn out”, die from being accelerated.

As it turns out, the answer’s a reassuring no. It’s all happily resolved, with time turned back to its standard speed and cameras set back to their right angles. ’Wink of an Eye’ raises these concerns only to dispel them. In the future we’ll teleport places rather than catch the bus. But people will remain recognisably human, have comprehensible motivations, and coffee will just contain coffee.

At other points the show just temporarily tries on the counter culture, like a wage slave donning a hippy wig for the weekend. In ’I, Mudd’ the crew stage a happening to freak out the robotised squares holding them captive, who are soon crying out “Illogical! Illogical!” and overheating. (Actually not so soon. In the opposite to the Scalosians the scene transcends it’s literal length to become interminable.)

While ’Miri’ presents the generation gap as an infection. (One of many times when a negative social force is manifested as a disease.) In an era where youth protest was often dismissed as a simple failure to grow up, this literally infantilises those draft dodgers. Their ideology is irrationality, tantrum as political statement. The sloganising of demonstrators is reduced to taunting playground chants – literally “nyah, nyah, nyah”. They call adults ‘Grups’, short for ‘grown-ups’, midway between a childlike mispronunciation and a protest term like ‘pig’. Naturally they take against the Enterprise crew as more Grups and (in a somewhat symbolic move) steal their communicators, shouting “blah! blah! blah!” at Kirk as he tries to reason with them.

Yet it turns out even alien planets have outside agitators, and the children are revealed to be led by an older boy – Jahn. His resemblance to Scorpio in in the later ‘Dirty Harry’ (both below) is presumably coincidental, suggests they’re aiming at similar types.

Kirk insists “children have an instinctive need for adults; they want to be told right and wrong." And the episode is built, even titled, around a child who comes round to just that. We’re explicitly told both that Miri is barely pubescent and that she has a crush on Kirk, which is… well, let’s move on.

The adults are found to have caused the disease, with a resulting generational war fought on both sides. Yet it’s the children who are the antagonists. The adult characters appear early, offering portentous warnings which they underline by promptly dropping dead – like the harbinger in horror films. Perhaps significantly, the planet’s not an Earth nor a colony, yet looking exactly like the Earth even down to the shape of it’s continents. There is something cake-and-eat-it about this, that it’s our world yet simultaneously not. Yet it does hint the adults share at least some of the blame, a hint which is enlarged on in other episodes.

The infamous space hippies of ‘The Way To Eden’ are remarkably like the Planet People in ‘Quatermass’ (1979). They pursue a paradise planet which is almost certainly mythical. They reject rationalism like it’s a poison, when confronted with inconvenient facts they simply disregard them. “We recognise no authority, save that within ourselves” they insist. (In words strangely close to Crass’ dictum “there is no authority but yourself”.) Though professing to be free sprits they’re the duped disciples of their monomaniacal leader Severin, a clear Timothy Leary stand-in.

They hijack the Enterprise to take them to their Eden. Severin carries a disease (yes, another one), which this risks spreading to the natives. While their flight route also risks violates a fragile peace with the Romulans. When they get there the planet looks idyllic, but every living thing is full of acid (the other kind) and going barefoot in the grass does not end well. Severin would have poisoned a planet already poisonous, and almost triggers a space war to do so. Which feels a little like over-egging it, like one of those ‘Road Runner’ endings where the Coyote not only fails to catch his prey but falls off a cliff, gets hit by a rock and then run over by a train.

And yet at the very same time it’s busily lampooning those daft hippies with their silly costumes and daft slang it’s conceding they might have a point. Their music, while like a copy of ‘Hair’ except even worse than the original, allows them to extra-diegetically critique events, like the Ooma Loompas drawing moral through song in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ (1971). When Spock explains to Kirk the origin of their much-chanted insult, "Herbert was a minor official, notorious for his rigid and limited patterns of thought," he replies "Well, I shall try to be less rigid in my thinking."

As Josh Marsfelder comments “the Hippies were very much middle class in a way the previous and contemporary countercultural movements really never were: The major nerve centres of the Hippie movement were big Southern Californian universities… Now, look at who comprises our Space Hippies in ‘The Way to Eden’: "Starfleet Academy dropouts, the son of an ambassador, a disgraced physician and several scientific specialists.”

The hippies weren’t the black militants who could so easily be written off by resorting to racist stereotypes. They were our children, white as white, the educated youth who should be set to become the next generation of managers. And the episode itself seems unsure whether Kirk has a bemused sympathy with their youthful idealism or just has his hands tied by their social connections, dialogue veering between one and the other.

If one thing defined the hippie counter-culture it was a rejection of social conformity. Why should you spend your life doing what was expected of you? Why not live it like it was yours? They jeer “Herbert” at rule-makers and rule-takers alike. But that’s too broad to be a philosophy. They could be presented as anti-war, anti-consumerist or even anti wage labour. But the thing they go for is anti-technology. Not the environmentalism often parodied as anti-technology but the full monty.

True, hippies were latter-day Romantics, to whom science and technology represented a confining mindset. (Think of Blake’s quote: “For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”) And in a quite overtly techno-utopian series this being even quasi-sympathetic would seem the biggest digression of all.

(In fact, proving that every parody will find its literalisation if you wait long enough, the Primitivist ‘thinker’ John Zerzan has written: “What ’Star Trek’ has to convey about technology is probably its most insidious contribution to domination… Always at home in a sterile container in which they represent society, the crew could not be more cut off from the natural world. In fact, as the highest development in the mastery and manipulation of nature, ’Star Trek’ is really saying that nature no longer exists.”)

Scotty proves their chief critic, grumbling about the “barefooted what-do-you-call-‘ems.” Yet in a series ever-fond of personalised debates he never argues the point with the crewman most sympathetic to them. Which turns out, despite their supremely illogical behaviour, to be Spock. He comments “there are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created. It is almost a biological rebellion – a profound revulsion against the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres. They hunger for an Eden.”

So why should the biggest technophile of them all, a character ceaselessly likened to a walking computer, harbour such sympathies? This homes in on something. The hippies seemed to their elders to be rejecting not even what seemed worst in modern society but best. Having lived through the Depression and the deprivations of the war years, their parents revelled in the new-found and hard-won material abundance. Now their own children rejected it outright. The Ex’s ‘We’ve Got Everything We Never Wanted’ was a later punk song, but it captures this sentiment. It felt so at odds, yet coming from a source so close… was this so deranged it had to really be visionary?

But perhaps the real clue as to how this can be tied up, after the over-laboured ending, is the final exchange between Chekhov and the space hippy chick he’s had the inevitable crush on….

“Be incorrect, occasionally.”
“And you be correct.”
“Occasionally.”

We’ve got out of balance, see. Their yanking of the steering wheel might initially be disruptive and careering, but is necessary to keep us on the straight and narrow. Timothy Leary said “you’ve got to go out of your mind in order to use your head.” Luckily, here others are volunteering to do the out-of-mind part for us, so we can still use our heads only better aligned.

A similar expression of the same idea comes in (the really not very good at all) ‘Assignment Earth’ where Roberta says: “That’s why some of my generation are kind of crazy and rebels, you know. We wonder if we’re going to be alive when we’re thirty.”

And wondering if they’ll let you make it to that magic age, suddenly not trusting anyone over thirty doesn’t seem quite so crazy after all. Except rebel is precisely what she doesn’t. Her role is structured over the dilemma over which appropriate adult to obey. When Special Agent Gary Seven convinces her he’s CIA she immediately trusts him, despite their not being entirely down with the kids. When she susses he’s fibbing it turns out okay anyway, because he’s from an even higher authority. 

If the kids are playing up, the cause is obviously poor parenting skills and there’s no need to listen to what they’re actually saying. (All of which is remarkably similar to the way Marvel comics of the era treated youth revolt.)

And yet as a child, when that line was first transmitted to me, I was gobsmacked. It had never been suggested before that the peace-freaks and deviants you saw on the news, who asked for trouble then complained when cops hit them, might have a point. Was this the much trumpeted ‘Star Trek’ liberalism, challenging the official orthodoxy? Or radical groups pushing their ideas into the mainstream, past the point where they could be simply suppressed? They only answer is yes. There’s no real way to assign proportions to each.

Coming soon! Racism. No wait, that’s already here. Racism in ‘Star Trek’…