- Spock, ’Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’
One of the things ’Star Trek’ is known for, almost as much as the bold use of catchphrases, is its much-paraded multiculturalism. Non-white characters might seem to us to be assigned only subservient roles but, we’re quickly told, this was an advance for the time. And others have responded just as often that this is really a liberal inclusionism forced upon the dominant culture by the Civil Rights movement. Racial minorities bust their way in, don’t look like they’re leaving and so the only response left was to claim you welcomed them aboard. It was not a granting, it was a getting.
And there was a prior inclusionism to riff on. Though famously, and accurately, dubbed “Wagon Train’ in space”, the series was just as steeped in war movies. Two episodes, ’City On the Edge of Forever’ and ’Patterns Of Force’, involve the war era directly. And others, such as ’Balance Of Terror’, borrowed heavily from war films.
And war movies often involved a similar inclusionism. In ’Sahara’ (1943), for example, Humphrey Bogart ends up leading a rag-tag division including American, British, French and Sudenese soldiers. A Nazi scoffs at this motley array of a crew, insisting they should give up now. They reply this actually makes them stronger. Naturally enough, it's soon demonstrated that the Americans must lead, and the Sudanese guy essentially sacrifices himself for the others. In reality, all army divisions were racially segregated throughout the war. But it’s a handy shorthand to contrast ‘us’ against Nazism, while telling the home front this is a time to unite. And it’s precisely this which ’Star Trek’ borrows.
’Miri’, seen last time, takes place on an upside-down earth. Which has no impact on the story whatsoever, apart from the general suggestion we should be seeing this stuff allegorically. But the blatantly allegorical episode, the one where ostensible characters are actually walking symbols and get treated as such – that’s the anti-racist one, ’Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.’
So it doesn’t matter that the half-black and half-white faces of primary antagonists Bele and Lokai are absurd and blatantly theatrically made up, as they’re only there to provide a metaphor for racism. In fact, the absurdity of their look helpfully enhances the absurdity of their antagonism. “You half white!” one yells at the other as they struggle. Each ascribes every event to the other, like they’re the only two forces in the universe. (And as one is half-black and the other half-white they’re literal mirror images of one another.) There’s little to no attempt to sketch in their back story. We know a book’s worth about the Romulans by comparison.
Bele claims the chase has been going on for fifty thousand years, despite the fact they seem as mortal as us. (Lokai is near death before his rescue.) Which suggests their real existence is as metaphors and so they’ve been around as long as the stuff they’re metaphors for.
While there’s an unusual attempt to present the Enterprise as a workplace, with scenes of the crew going through duties and procedures. (Something they worked hard to convey at first, but had given up on even before the middle of the first season. Here, midway through the third, it’s back.) And the result is that they’re treated as metaphors, they're to provide a salutary life lesson, even within the story. They make mistakes so we don’t have to. Kirk does some imploring about reconciliation, but finally flies off leaving them to duke it out. They go wrong so we don’t have to.
In short, our photo-op multi-cultural crew encounter racism, presented as a thing from without. Their initial response is to not know what Lokai and Bele are on about. Only later do they come to feel recognition, and with it revulsion.
As both Bele and Lokai’s characters are literally written on their faces from the get-go there’s nowhere for them to go, which results in a very padded episode. And the threatened self-destruct sequence may well be so extended as part of that padding. But it’s effective nonetheless. And it’s purpose is clearly that the Enterprise crew, who can only action the sequence as a joint venture, would rather die together than be as divided as Lokai and Bele. Underlining the essential difference between them.
At one point Chekov comments “there was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class.” To which Sulu replies “Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today.”
And there are two ways to parse this. One is to emphasise the reference to the twentieth century, and accept that if our species is to find a future for itself we’ve got to smarten up a bit. Martin Luther King’s wise words finally got heard, we did get to that promised land. Our descendants have survived, where Lokai and Bele’s world hasn’t, precisely because of this. Their race through the Enterprise corridors, accompanied by a montage of war footage, we know this was introduced only to stretch the episode out to full length. But regardless, it’s a pretty good visual image of the futility of their war.
But there’s another reading. These are the characters we’ve watched week after week, and so we cannot help but identify with them. We look at that enlightened, multiracial crew and figure they are our characters, people we know , perhaps even stand-ins for us. It at the same time upholds and reverses the perspective on the trope Jack Graham dubbed “nice-but-then”. He used the term for inexplicably enlightened figures from the past, Iron Age feminists and the like. Whereas here they’re from the future. So we’re the nice-but-then; we’re civilised, proto-enlightened, upgrade-ready for this future to beam us aboard.
And yet despite Kirk constantly insisting “you’re two of a kind” Bele is a cop, with authority placed on his side, and Lokai is on the run from him. They may both be half-black but there’s no question who’s whitey. This is underlined by an exchange between them. Asked by Lokai “why should a slave show mercy to the enslaver?” Bele replies incredulously “Slaves? That was changed thousands of years ago. You were freed.” Yet he later boasts “We've got your kind penned in on Cheron into little districts.” So not, you know, that kind of freeing that actually leads to any freedom.
Pretty much anyone this side of Elon Musk can see the doublethink going on here. But it’s less often asked, why can't the episode itself? It openly weaves the rope to hang itself, then hands that rope over to us as if oblivious to what it’s doing. Yet this is a story, a work of fiction. The deck can be stacked any way the writer chooses. Why not make the characters as bad as each other, perhaps split Cheron into two warring hemispheres? Then have Kirk point at them at intervals and say “see, racism be bad. Just say no, kids.”
And if its not because they can’t, then it must be because they don’t want to. Because accepting what’s self-evident would have too many uncomfortable ramifications. You could not longer think of racism as a residue of “primitive thinking”, which will eventually go away all by itself. If racism is a structural problem, embedded in our society, to challenge it will require fundamental change. To expect people to see what’s not in their interests to see, perhaps that’s not logical Captain. Let that be the limits of liberalism.
But then, why do they get so close, then refuse the final hurdle? To get this we need some context. This episode was aired in January 1969, meaning it was developed during the tumultuous year of 1968. By then black Americans had repeatedly been tear-gassed, beaten, imprisoned and in many cases killed, often for rights they were officially due as a matter of course. They didn’t always react to this with serene calm, you may be surprised to hear.
And the ante was perpetually being upped. The mid to late Sixties had seen a shift from Civil Rights campaigns to Black Power movements, abruptly exacerbated in April 1968 by the assassination of Martin Luther King. The chief proponent of non-violence being murdered, somehow that seemed to push people into a more radical direction.
The immediate result was riots. They weren’t “race riots”, and in fact the Black Panthers (the most prominent Black Power group) criticised them as an ineffective substitute for political organisation. But they were portrayed that way by the popular press. And Cheron, it is implied, has been destroyed by extended race riots.
And what would white audiences think when they first heard Sulu’s line about “primitive thinking”? At school they’d have heard the ‘Lincoln freed the slaves’ line. Slavery was racist. So when that was over, naturally racism ended with it. So any blacks still complaining today are nothing but uppity troublemakers. Many conservatives even claimed that the riots had happened because blacks had been given too much freedom, that this was proof they had to be subjugated for their own good. In short, black activists were held responsible for their own oppression, because they’d resisted it.
Plus there’s another axis. Black Power was largely a youth-based movement, and Bele is clearly older than Lokai. Lokai is presented as self-righteous and disdainful to the point of petulant. (“My need gave me the right to use the ship… I'm extremely tired, made so by your vindictive cross examinations. I will answer no more questions.”) While Bele is more calculating and tactical. In a scene reminiscent of Khan in ’Space Seed’ he becomes a dinner guest with Kirk and the officers. While Spock spies Lokai on the lower decks, orating agitation to the lower ranks. (We don’t see him, just his rabble-rousing shadow playing over his attentive audience.)
And these circumstances enforce themselves on the script, characterise the antagonists more closely than an instalment of ’Spy Vs. Spy’. Black Power casts itself into the drama. By this point in the decade it cannot be held back. But alas it doesn’t seize control of the script. The episode affects colour blindness, as part of a genuine attempts to portray race as an absurd and counter-productive thing to fight over. But what it really suffers from is privilege blindness.
Nor was this all that unusual. The Mothers of Invention song ’Trouble Every Day’ was recorded in 1966, after the earlier Watts Riots. And as we might expect from a radical underground band, themselves mixed race at a time when that was still unusual, there’s more sympathy for the causes of the riots. (It includes the line “I’m not black but there’s whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white.”) But it still slips into the same both-sides equivalence of “race riots”, as if black and white gangs were at one another like the Sharks and Jets.
“And all that mass stupidity
“That seems to grow more every day
“Each time you hear some nitwit say
“He wants to go and do you in
“Cause the color of your skin
“Just don't appeal to him
“(No matter if it's black or white)
“Because he's out for blood tonight”
Then years later, in 1979, the radical anarcho-punk band Crass sang “Pogo on a nazi, spit upon a jew/Vicious mindless violence that offers nothing new.” As if Nazism and being Jewish were equivalent things. Racism runs deep because privilege blindness runs deeper.
A perpetual awkwardness in the original ’Star Trek’ is whether it portrays a techno-utopian future we should aspire to, or presents us with our ugly reflection in a distorting mirror. Which is both good and bad. The difference between it and ’Next Gen’ isn’t so much that the sequel show is more utopian, as that it’s so goddamned ordered. (At it’s worst, watching ’Next Gen’ feels like being inculcated into a cult.) ’Star Trek’ shows a more volatile Federation in a more volatile universe. And at times that tension becomes creative. Whereas at others… well, it turns out like this.
Also, there’s perhaps an inherent problem with the planet as parable trope... It can externalise what it wants to symbolise. The foreign planet is put in place to reflect aspects of us, including ones we might not want to look at. But if the resemblance gets too close we can always push the planet away – turn it back into just a story, set in a galaxy far away. And ’Battlefield’ highlights that, all but encouraging us to push away.
And it may be significant for that to come to a head in this episode. To this day racism is too often seen as “primitive thinking”, the opposite of having gone to college. But history tells us the opposite. The racial categories we now have were developed in the colonial era, and racism is perpetuated in order to have a sub-class who can have the worst work dumped on them. Its basis lies not in instinct but economics. Its best challenged by political struggle, not awaiting some mooted year of Enlightenment when all will change.
The other element of “primitive thinking” is that it assumes we choose to be or not to be racist, the way we choose to put out our recycling. The idea that racism might exist in structures of power is acknowledged, but then dismissed as unimportant. White folks such as myself might oppose racism, might even attend Black Lives Matter marches. But white privilege still sticks to us, whether we acknowledge it or not. We have been planted in Bele’s soil.
As we saw last time, white hippies can steal starships, endanger galactic peace treaties and nearly kill the entire crew. And Kirk will respond by saying “I used to get into a little trouble when I was that age, didn’t you?” But if you’re black, even if you’re black only down the one side, expect a less indulgent response from people with rank. Even in fiction. Even in liberal fiction.
Coming soon! Is it possible, do you think, that ’Star Trek’ was ever sexist? No, hear me out…
No comments:
Post a Comment