“NO, MR. BOND, I EXPECT YOU TO BUY” (THE ROLE OF SPECTRE IN THE SIXTIES BOND FILMS)

“We shall see a new power dominating the world”
-Blofeld

Watch the second Bond film, ’From Russia With Love’ (1963), and two things will not fail to strike you. The film’s tension is supplied by Spectre, and their playing Cold War antagonists against one other, causing events to fizzle and crackle unpredictably. Yet at the same time they shows every sign of having been inserted into an existing story.

Elementary research reveals yes, Fleming’s novel hadn’t originally involved them. They didn’t arrive until his ninth book, ‘Thunderball’, in 1960. And were then mentioned only passingly in the tenth, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. Whereas Spectre fill the films, being introduced from the first, ‘Dr. No’ in 1962. (Though admittedly seeded might be a better term, as the info plays little plot function.) Unlike the books the films never went for a purely Cold War plotline. Even the non-Spectre stories feature rogue capitalists, such as ‘Goldfinger’ (1964).

Interestingly, in ‘From Russia’ their existence is not revealed to Bond until near the end but spelt out to us viewers from the start. This may be for clarity, keeping us up to speed on some otherwise convoluted plot lines. But it also suggests impatience, an eagerness to get to them and their cat-stroking supremo as soon as possible.

And it worked! You always know when something’s truly cemented in the popular consciousness, because it’s what all the parodies swipe at. And so it is here, with Dr Evil in ‘Austin Powers’ and all the rest.

More elementary research suggests Fleming devised them precisely not to limit himself to the Cold War. But the Connery films don’t use them like that. Instead they stick to this introductory combination, the hidden third player in a seemingly two handed game. Blofeld’s infamous opening monologue is about the siamese fighting fish who waits until both his opponents are fought to a standstill, then strikes. They need that distraction as cover. So we have stories which require that setting to be told, yet which are not in themselves Cold War tales.

They next appear in ‘Thunderball’ (1965). In the by-now-standard set-up scene, Bond goes to see M in his office. Which is fairly plush, as offices go. But this time he’s told to instead attend the conference room. Which is still more grand, ornate and traditionalist, adorned with tapestries. The intra-story explanation is that thsi time Spectre’s plot is so big that all the double-O agents must be briefed at once, hence booking the bigger room.

But this is clearly more to do with creating a visual contrast with what we’ve just seen - Spectre set around a conference table in a sleekly modernist open-plan office. When an underling’s bumped off, like they always are, their chair sinks smoothly into the ground - efficient, mechanised murder.

Connery’s fourth outing, ‘You Only Live Twice’ (1967), essentially jettisoned the novel wholesale to reprise the plot of ‘Dr. No’ on steroids. Everything happens again, just on a grander scale; instead of just disrupting rockets Spectre are now snatching them, hence their need for a bigger base, and so on. Yet this scaling up is such that it makes a substantive difference. That famous opening scene of their rocket swallowing the American one up whole, it seems as much an iconic moment as Blofeld before his bank of buttons.

There were many unashamed Bond cash-ins, including Marvel’s ‘Nick Fury Agent of Shield’ comics (starting 1965). Where Hydra were such a clone of Spectre they unashamedly sported a near-identical skull octopus logo. (Meaning, of course, many limbs, one mastermind.) But they’re a riff on more regular phobias, a cobbling together of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, represented the familiar way as the evils of collectivism. (Their mantra is “Cut off a limb and two more shall take its place”.)

With the Cold War casting its shadow so deep over the Sixties, Hydra would seem the more logical direction to take. Yet it was Spectre. In ‘The Man From UNCLE’ (1964/8), for example, an American and a Russian agent teamed up against the menace of THRUSH.

But the real point of comparison might be the 1967 Avengers episode ‘The Fear Merchants’. Much like Blofeld, the Business Efficiency Bureau are initially faceless. With their minimalist-look, automated offices, with their gloved hands, their permanent sunglasses and clipped intonation they represent predatory capitalism, ruthlessly striking out the traditional, rather paternalistic corporations around them. They’re probably best read as the escaped shadow of businessman Mr. Raven who hires them, so to them terms like “eliminate the competition” are to be taken literally. Their efficiency fixation becomes a kind of dispassionate pathology.

Why should all this be? Why should spy-fi be the genre which looked beyond the day’s standard West/East antagonisms? In the best spy story tradition, there’s clues…

The introduction-to-Spectre scene takes place not in a fixed place, but aboard a yacht. Then in ‘Thunderball’, in a change to the book which reinforces this theme, their front group is the International Brotherhood of Stateless Persons. In ‘You Only Live Twice’, this becomes a corporation, Osato Chemicals. So the motif of Spectre lying quite literally behind transnational organisations, through hidden doors and so on, becomes established.

Because Spectre stand for the post-war growth of corporate power, the free market unconstrained. If Hydra represent too much conformity they’re an excess of individuality. Those modernist offices signify their ruthlessly non-rules-based competitivism, hire-and-fire politics taken to their limit. (“This organisation does not tolerate failure.”) That rapacious rocket, devouring those of nation-states, is a perfect visual metaphor for this.

Corporations, it is true, did not suddenly appear in the Sixties alongside mini skirts. But social and economic processes are normally remorselessly slow, changes which culture then tries to capture by transforming them into events. It becomes like trying to demonstrate climate change using the day’s weather map. And the Sixties were a point where their rise was starting to feel inexorable. Encyclopedia.com comments: 

“Despite prosperity, major shifts were occurring in American business and the workforce. Pre-existing corporations were merging and becoming larger, more powerful conglomerates. Consumers increasingly were doing their shopping at discount chain stores and their dining at inexpensive fast-food restaurants, leading to a decrease in the number of single-proprietor businesses.”

And if Britain was a step behind America in these shifts, that only meant they were felt more acutely. The 1965 spy film ‘The Ipcress File’ rather pointedly set a scene in the gleam of a then-very-modern supermarket, with one arch-Brit commenting distrustfully of “American shopping methods.”

And just like the British delegation in the opening of ‘You Only Live Twice’, literally placed between the Cold War enemies and consequently able to see outside their ideological blinkers, Britain’s economic model was more mixed. A much larger public sector covered most basic amenities. So corporations somehow seemed simultaneously inevitable, international and foreign. To this day British people tend to treat ‘American’ and ‘transnational’ as almost interchangeable terms.

Let’s try to focus on something that can be hidden by familiarity. Why the with-holding of Blofeld’s face? There’s never any suggestion this is a whodunnit question, where he’ll turn out to be some previously seen character. And arguably this anonymity of evil starts before he is even introduced. In ‘Dr. No’, Professor Dent goes to No’s island lair to warn him of Bond’s snooping. Yet despite his making this journey he only gets to hear his boss’s booming, disembodied voice, ‘Wizard of Oz’ style. Again there’s an intra-story reason for this. No’s displeased with him running to the island against instructions, and keen to spell this out. And of course this facelessness is mood-inducing, creating a sense of menace. But there’s more…

Corporations responded to public suspicions by investing heavily in public relations, with some even suggesting they invented the industry. Wikipedia states: “Public relations was founded, in part, to defend corporate interests against sensational and hyper-critical news articles. It was also influential in promoting consumerism after the emergence of mass production.” 

They not only lobbied be seen as people, in the legal concept of ‘corporate personhood’, but also to project likeable, trustworthy personalities for themselves. And, before such advertising-agency methods came to be used in electioneering, this seemed much more a corporate tool. The sinisterly shadow-hugging Blofeld is a counter to this project of open-facedness and service encounter smiles.

With the next entry, ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (1969) Blofeld kept enough accoutrements about him to be recognisable (a baldy with a white cat and so on) but was so re-written he was effectively a different character. He’d been a remote, controlling head of a criminal empire, who didn’t just despatch minions to fight Bond, but despatched minions in order to themselves despatch minions. Here, deprived of the formula role of the rough, touch henchman, he does the final-reel fisticuffs himself.

And his motives have become personalised, and with them humanised - he’s after a pardon and a hereditary title. All of which was underlined by his being played by Telly Savalis, quite a contrast to Donald Pleasence’s “maybe-too-calm” demeanour and understated menace. 

‘Diamonds Are Forever’ (1971) is generally seen as a return to formula after a one-off experiment. And indeed Blofeld’s plot is the now-familiar one of blackmailing the superpowers, using a genuine corporation as cover. The ante is again upped, this time they’re not a willing front. The Whyte Corporation suffers a rather literal hostile takeover, with Blofeld kidnapping and then impersonating its head. Whyte and Blofeld are never shown within the same frame, allowing for some id/ego comparisons.

But there’s no mention of Cold War antagonisms, and with them no mention of Spectre. Rather than a succession of underlings, Blofeld has an array of distracting doubles. And he’s more the attention-seeking megalomaniac of the last film, his motives virtually reducing to getting world leaders to return his calls. As he becomes Bond’s personal arch-enemy, with the pre-credit sequence devoted to 007’s attempts to hunt him down, he becomes personalised.

If the world didn’t hear from Spectre again until 2015, the immediate cause was rights issues. However, as by that point everything that had made them unique had dissipated, it felt a mercy killing. Were they such a creature of Sixties Cold War culture that even 1969 proved too late for them? Or had ‘Live Twice’ done it’s job too well, leaving Spectre with no more road to travel?

Alternately, it may be less to do with outside events and more with tactical errors. Blofeld shows his face in the finale to ‘Live Twice’ and it’s notable how quickly his sinister effectiveness dissipates from there. Perhaps, much like the initially unseen Corporation in the Alien films, it was a mistake which had no undo button. Perhaps the formula should have been more like ‘The Prisoner’, a successive array of No. 2s working to the bidding of some malign No. 1 teasingly kept forever off-stage.

So if corporations are the bad guys, does this make the Bond films anti-capitalist? Well, they were themselves distributed by a corporation, United Artists, and quickly became a byword for blatant product placement. (To the degree that the later instalment ‘Die Another Day’ was soon dubbed ‘Buy Another Day’.) So signs point to no. What, then, might be going on?

‘Diamonds’ might give us a clue. Willard Whyte runs his operations from a penthouse suite dubbed the Whyte House. And it’s explicitly stated that he’s more powerful than the President, that cops do his bidding and so on. Yet the film’s assumption is that this is only a problem when Blofeld’s usurped his commanding chair.

Perhaps the public weren’t opposed to corporations so much as conflicted about them. In the Encyclopedia quote above, the key word may be the very first - “despite”. Few in Britain, if any, wanted to go back to post-war austerity, with its ration book constraints. But this new abundance seemed to come at a social price, even as actual prices fell. We’ve seen society similarly conflicted over the power of the tech giants in recent years.

So the spectre of Spectre raises popular anxieties about corporations, in order to dispel them. It takes on their downside with none of the upsides, in order to separate the two. What couldn’t happen in reality could at least be brought about through reassuring symbolism. With each film Spectre initially seemed all-powerful, but their scheming was always scuppered by the end.

As corporations grew too big for the constraints of state power, Bond embodies the fantasy of state agents still somehow holding them in check. In this way the Bond films are themselves are part of the public relations industry, canvassing audiences then tailored its products to their dreams and desires, however contradictory.

And Bond himself is part of the old world, a Cambridge-educated toff who knows such social niceties as which wine to order. But he’s also shown as just Spectre enough to fight them at their own brute game. Rather than beset by this conflict, he’s shown as powered by his ability to straddle it. (Something which could also be said of Steed and Mrs. Peel.) The familiar image, from ‘Goldfinger’, of the smart white suit inside the frogman’s outfit exemplifies this double nature.

The 00 agents follow a number code, just Like Spectre. Bond’s relations with M are fractious, and he’s in perpetual conflict with Q, his rulebook-bound straight man who makes perpetual attempts to persuade him to take care of government property. While M’s office and Q’s lab are frequent locations we only see Bond’s own office once, in ‘Secret Service’, after he’s officially resigned. He’s in but not of the establishment.

Spectre use predators (tarantulas, sharks, piranhas and so on) as weapons but also as emblems. And Bond is clearly a predator set to catch predators. His actions are ruthlessly rogueish, rather than conventionally heroic. He’s gentleman and cad in one. (Audiences of the day may well have glossed over his frequent mistreating of women. But at one point he even kicks a cat!)

And, proving this was the way to go, Hydra did eventually catch up with the free enterprise model. The ‘Agents of SHIELD’ TV series included the episode ‘Making Friends and Influencing People’ (2014) where Agent Simmonds infiltrates Hydra. It opens with her as another chic metropolitan commuting to the office, coffee, bagels and log-ons, culminating with a pan to the Hydra logo on the wall. Those evil, scheming corporations. They’re not shadowy or otherly. They’re your day job.

PLANETARY UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS (THE ORIGINAL ‘STAR TREK’)

KIRK: “How long do you plan on keeping me here?”
VANNA: “Until we have help in the mines and our homes are in the clouds.”
KIRK: “That's quite a while.”
- ’The Cloud Minders’

By the late Sixties we’d seen youth revolt, black liberation, women’s liberation... even (by the June 1968 Stonewall riot, shortly after ‘Star Trek’ finished) gay liberation. And what’s missing from this picture? Unrest, great to see you. But you have no class.

In fact there‘d been a sharp increase in strikes throughout the Sixties, by the decade’s close hitting a peak only exceeded by the Forties/ early Fifties. Class issues may have been absent from media representation, but not life on the ground. And perhaps that’s not surprising. The one thing capitalism is most reliant upon is a class system, which is to say on a majority which does most of the work while getting the least of the benefits. Yet there’s one ’Trek’ episode which touches on this subject - ’The Cloud Minders’. And if one swallow does not a Summer make, maybe it could do us for a bit of a Spring.

Third season episodes such as this frequently suffered death by rewrite. Yet, interestingly, Josh Marsfelder claims that it was when David Gerrold’s original script was rewritten, by Oliver Crawford and Margaret Arman, that it transformed from a polemic on slavery into a more relevant account of wage labour. He calls it “unfiltered Marxism on primetime television”. And indeed, when accused of negotiating via force, rebel leader Vanna replies flatly that it’s “the only way we can obtain what is due us”. You know, a bit like how it works in real life.

Dating back to ’Gulliver’s Travels’ cloud cities are one of those recurrent SF concepts which are great eye candy while making no sense whatsoever. Why would anyone think of sticking a city on a cloud? Especially while there still seems no shortage of that rather firmer-looking ground stuff. But this story does at least find a symbolism in them...

Stratus is divided between the highminded cloud city dwellers and the mine-labouring Troglytes, as if only penthouse and basement. The mine contains a mind-numbing gas which all the Troglytes inevitably imbue. If that seems remarkably like a metaphor for false consciousness, check this exchange between Vanna and Kirk. When Vanna scoffs “It’s hard to believe something which is neither seen nor felt can do so much harm”, Kirk replies “but an idea can’t be seen or felt. That’s what’s kept the Troglytes in the mines all these centuries, a mistaken idea.”

And unlike the magic sign-revealing sunglasses of Carpenter’s ’They Live’ (1988), it’s closer to false consciousness as it actually works. The Trogyltes are neither seduced by cunningly crafted lies nor duped by subliminal commands. In fact the city dwellers are themselves unaware of the gas’s existence. It’s social conditions themselves which limit our consciousness. (It was some old bloke with a beard who first said that, I forget his name now.) 

This is admittedly applied in a crudely deterministic way. Trapped in their underground labours, unable to see the expanse of the sky, their horizons are quite literally limited. There’s even a literal fix, the gas-blocking filter masks Kirk wants everyone to wear which does stray back towards Carpenter’s cool-outsider sunglasses. But then again, making things clear-cut is pretty much the point of a metaphor. So far, things do seem pretty Marxist.

But then you might expect the gas, whose effects Kirk describes as “retardation and emotional difficulties”, to keep the Trogyltes passive and docile – in essence, as cattle. Instead it makes them surly and aggressive. In other words it accentuates the characteristics of being working class that we see in the popular stereotype - dim, monosyllabic, quarrelsome. There’s the reactionary but widespread association between the working class and alcoholism, which goes back at least to Hogarth’s prints and continues today in the popular bete noire of the mouthy chav clutching his tinny. And it seems scarcely a coincidence that the gas so closely duplicates the effects of alcohol. In short the Troglites are oiks, semi-rational brutes.

High Advisor Plasus insists that problems are down to the Disruptors, “a small group of Troglyte malcontents” yet “all the other Troglytes are completely dominated by them.” Which sounds an unsquareable circle, and by this stage we’ve already learnt not to trust him. Yet as the episode pans out, it turns out to be an understatement. As far as we see there’s really just one Disruptor, Vanna. An ex-servant she’s mostly lived in the city, away from the gas. And as their token representative of non-dumbness she naturally takes charge.

When Troglyte henchman Midro threatens to kill the captured Kirk she points out “a dead hostage is of no value.” Not the hardest to grasp of notions, but she only seems able to enforce this notion by pulling rank – “I will say what is to be done”. (What’s the word again for people who talk like that? I don’t think it’s Disruptor.) She refers to him disparagingly as “a child.” His desire to kill Kirk seems no more than a desire to gratify his immediate senses. He cannot do that thinking-ahead thing, he needs Vanna for that.

Then in a final fight between Kirk and Plasus, Vanna is left with a choice of going for Kirks’ phaser or communicator. Despite her clear earlier preference for the phaser as an effective negotiating tool she grabs the communicator - to ask the Enterprise for help. In the final scene she’s shown beginning to negotiate with Plasus.

To get this we need… you guessed… some context. In the Sixties, Trade Union membership was still high. But its mainstay was skilled, professionalised and in most cases white workers. Whereas the more recent rise in unrest had come from unskilled and casualised workers, those who had it worst. Often black themselves, they were influenced by the more radical methods of black liberation. (The overlap between civil rights campaigning and labour struggles was huge, and has since been almost entirely airbrushed out of the official narrative.)

Sometimes they formed their own groups outside of official unionism, such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. But mistrust of the mainstream unions was more general. During this time, increasing numbers of union-recommended offers were rejected by workers.

And so an inevitable feature of official unions came to the fore. As Sharon Smith has said “in many cases, management came to rely on union officials to ‘police’ the workforce - that is, to enforce productivity rates and shop floor discipline.” (Yes, that’s from the accursed and contemptible ‘Socialist Worker’, but the article itself is largely accurate.)

And it’s in this context that we should see Vanna’s choosing the communicator. In ‘Way To Eden’ Severin, the messianic leader, had to be written out so his more reasonable followers could be brought on board – Learyites without that troublesome Leary. When it’s workers it’s the opposite way up - the story which first flirts with the bog-standard rhetoric about outside agitators then flips back again.

There’s no reasoning with those sullen Troglytes, masks or not. But thankfully we have Vanna as our go-between. Where workers have legitimate grievances they should raise them the right way, through the proper channels. Vanna rejects Kirk’s filter mask only to become one; she turns into the voice of responsible unionism, forceful in negotiation but making only reasonable demands, keeping more disreputable elements in check. Class difference is fine, the problem only arises when those classes get too far apart. ’The Cloud Minders’ is neither filtered nor unfiltered Marxism, but a very necessary filter placed upon the face of Marxism in order to muffle it.

And there’s more… As with ‘Last Battlefield’, the problem with symbolising an issue by means of assigning a planet to it is that this can also externalise it. And as with ‘Last Battlefield’, this is played into. Racism, class prejudice – they’re things outside of me and you, done by people we watch without identifying with. And the look of Stratos is unmissably retro, it’s city in the clouds hearkening back to the days of pulp magazines. Think, for example, of the celebrated ‘Metropolis’ (1927). The upper city dwellers swan about in cloaks, admiring art, recalling the division in Ancient Greece between citizens and slaves.

In other words, Stratos is another degenerate European civilisation. This is the classic American cultural trope of pushing the issue of class back onto Europe. There was an absence of overt social deference, as there’d been in the old world. When the outer trappings of class went, the top hats and monocles replaced by jeans, surely class went too.

And, as so often with this trope, a very particular form of class is being used. Stratos, referring to a type of cloud, may seem a fitting name. But it is also associated with the term stratified. And effectively Stratos has no surface, at least not one anyone lives on. It is underground and sky, with no messing with Mr Inbetween – planetary upstairs downstairs. If Crawford and Arman did drag forward a script about slavery, they really only took it as far as a kind of serfdom.

In an echo of ’Metropolis’ even the younger generation have come to question, with Plasus’ daughter Droxine asking “Father, are we so sure of our methods that we never question what we do?” By the end she’s decided. “I shall go to the mines. I no longer wish to be limited to the clouds.”

But overall it becomes Kirk’s job becomes to bring this retro world up to the present. He and Spock first land on the planet’s uninhabited surface, like that’s where they naturally gravitate to. It’s nominally a member of the Federation, but because they’ve been kept unaware of how the Troglytes are being treated. Spock believes “all forms of violence have been eliminated”, as if this is all kept a guilty secret. A fundamental piece of ’Star Trek’ lore is thereby preserved, the solutions to the problems of the Old World all lie with the New.

THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK': JUST SILLY SEXIST SIXTIES HOKUM SET IN SPACE?

”Male and female are universal constants.”
- Kirk, 'Metamorphosis'

When Men Were Men (And Girls Green)

Is there anything left to say on Star Trek’s sexism? Certainly the show’s insistence on always presenting life, Jim, but very much as we know it has not gone un-noticed. Kirk’s line about this being what us earth creature call luuurve is one of show’s the best-known catchphrases. (Though the actual wording was “Love is the most important thing on Earth, especially to a man and a woman”.) While the green Orion slave girl is helpfully flagged up in the end credits on a weekly basis.

Its costume designer led to the term for women's clothing which is not just skimpy but almost entirely unsuited to the seemingly essential task of staying on the person wearing it. With Zap Brannigan, ’Futurama’s Kirk parody, the narcissistic girl-chasing became his central feature.

Alongside which there’s the repeat gag where Kirk has to awkwardly explain to some innocent the… ahem!… the, you know, the facts of… well… how it’s done to some youngster. And the combination of these two seems to define the thing.

Despite Scotty’s protestations, the laws of physics are broken on a weekly basis. The true universal constants are fixed gender identities and high hem lines. It seemed pretty much out of date by the time of Next Gen in the Eighties. Today it’s less notorious than risible, in the overlap between the cringy and the comic. Perhaps ’Futurama’ had it right. You don’t analyse this sort of thing, you take pot shots at it. Or can we manage more?

Take ’The Empath’ and ’Elaan of Troyus’. Okay, there was probably never a plan to broadcast them back to back. But both have women as effective children, not just in need of adult male guidance but basic socialisation. (Elaan even needs to be taught table manners.) However one is good, mute and… well, empathic, exhibiting the official feminine virtues. While the other is haughty, mouthy and downright tantrummy, but much happier once taken in line. And naturally only the second one – the one who needs taming - is sexualised. The thing’s almost schematic.

Perhaps it's better to take a slightly different question. Ideology is not about convincing people by arguments but shaping their unconscious assumptions. In short, its role is to insinuate itself as apparent common sense. As such entertainment is an ideal propagator; it’s precisely because it doesn't seem anything more than ephemeral than it slips below your perceptual radar. (Transmission is a term both for TV shows and diseases.) But then how much are their creators aware of any of this? Are they merely making their own unconscious assumptions ours by sharing them?

'Metamorphosis' is perhaps the show’s most gender essentialist moment of all. A female spirit (or, as they're described in SF, energy field) is keeping astronaut Zefram alive, long past his natural span. When Kirk asks hopelessly “How do you fight a thing like that?” McCoy shrewdly replies “Maybe you're a soldier so often that you forget you're also trained to be a diplomat. Why not try a carrot instead of a stick?” And they resolve the situation not by devising a weapon to hit the Companion with, but a translator so they might communicate with her.

Now the story’s main female character, Nancy, is a diplomat. So Kirk should be borrowing her carrots. Yet not only do we never see her perform any actual diplomacy, she’s repeatedly demonstrated to be sharp-tongued and unreasonable, blaming Kirk for every plot development. Perhaps unusual behaviour for someone of her profession.

The Starfleet directive as plot impediment, which tries to push them away from the adventure, is a recurrent device. (Like the chief in cop shows always bellowing “you’re off the case!”) And it can be enhanced by adding a Starfleet stuffed shirt they need to ferry, who can shout directly at Kirk rather than have Uhura relay orders. ‘Galileo Seven’ had Galactic High Commissioner Ferris, insisting he should be obeyed despite just being a guest on the show.

But making this permanently displeased bigwig into a woman brings up the subject of the career woman. And soon she’s saying “I've been good at my job, but I've never been loved. Never. What kind of life is that? Not to be loved, never to have shown love?”

It’s the perfect trade-off. A feminine spirit without a body runs into a woman after a career, so she clearly doesn’t want to be a woman in the first place. The natural order is restored by the closing credits.

It's commonly thought of as a love story. But that's to see the thing though it's resolution. For most of the time, the Companion behaves like a Mother. (Note how her name is contingent, in fact contingent on Zefram.) When he complains of feeling lonely, she goes and gets him a play date – nabbing Kirk and co, so setting off the story.

In the story's most interesting moment, finding the energy field is actually a female energy field, he initially recoils at the notion. Not at it's ludicrousness, but at the idea they've had some sort of affair. It's resolved through her taking female form, via the dying Nancy's body. The Freudian forbidden suddenly becomes possible, becomes the… and there’s no nicer way of saying it... Mum you can fuck.

And it’s Kirk who persuades her to cut the apron strings. He's soon off on the classic 'Star Trek' bugbear, railing against the static utopia. Zefram wasn't just any astronaut, but the inventor of the warp drive – another Historically Important Individual. Yet since then he's sat back with every need taken care of. “Our species can only survive if we have obstacles to overcome,” Kirk cries. “You take away all obstacles. Without them to strengthen us, we will weaken and die.”

When Spock prompts “ask it about its nature” deliberately or not he’s being tautological. For the Companion is strongly associated with nature. For reasons entirely unexplained within the story Zefram has to go outside to communicate with her, leading to the iconic scenes of her field descending over him. She can't leave the planet for any length of time without dying, suggesting she is in some way the Gaia-like spirit of the planet.

And in this way the romance story overlaps with the Romantic. The term 'Mother Nature' goes back to the Middle Ages, but Romanticism bestowed a feminine spirit upon Nature with renewed vigour. The more technologically advanced human society became, the more important the Romantics felt it was to stay in touch with the feminine. And Zefram communicating with the Companion “on a non-verbal level” does seem remarkably similar to the Romantic poet communing with nature. The techno-futurism of 'Star Trek' doesn't deny and even plays up all that, but makes of it something which must be put in the past. The Companion, in short, is not just the Mum but also the Earth you get to fuck.

Using the Assets You Have

But let’s get back to the bad girls. 'The Man Trap', the first episode to be broadcast, started things off the way they meant to go on. Like a cross between 'Species' and 'That Obscure Object of Desire', an alien impersonates desirable women to lure in its targets. Shapeshifting is a common weapon of villainy, inherently suggesting deception. But gendering the alien as a woman is significant.

Its hunger for salt (aka the human life force) is almost an inevitable result of being a woman in a man's world. Deprived of the means of her own survival unless granted by a man, she inevitably becomes a vampiric force. At one point, prompted by events, 'it' switches genders and immediately switches from male to female targets. Yet even this underlines what a she it really is, perpetually named after Nancy, her first victim. (Yep Nancy again, they were no better with naming women than charactersing them.)

One image strikingly sums this up. We never see Nancy attack her first victim, just her standing over his already-dead body like a tableau. It's a memorable moment, making more of an impact than if they'd gone for the more obvious action sequence. But its impact partly comes from suggesting at an inevitability to all of this. For if society is made up by men, then women will inevitably become something outside, something alien. To misquote the pop psychology book title, in SF Men are from Earth, Women aren't.

Yet amid all this reactionary sexual politics there's an ecological message. This is the last creature of its kind, explicitly compared to the buffalo. Sorry, the what? Given that we’re dealing with an intelligent creature, why isn’t the analogy the genocide of the American Indian? (Besides, one was contingent on the other. Buffalo were often slaughtered as a means to either starve Native Americans or drive them into reservations.)

Further, Darren at The M0vie Blog is almost certainly right to point out that, this all being a frontier analogy, the death of those who came before cannot help but be presented as regrettable - but a regrettable necessity. Progress determines that they need to be got out of our way, and anyway our pausing to get a bit rueful about it shows how good we really are. (Making Kirk a bit like that cop in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ who might shoot people but always agonises about it to his girlfriend afterwards.)

They talk of not wanting to kill her. At one point, she even gets to makes the case for her life. Except, in a somewhat delicious irony, at that point she's disguised as McCoy. In other words, literally given a man's voice. (It's never quite explained why they don't just up and give her some salt. Are they supposed to be short of the stuff? Would she have fared better asking for pepper? We get few clues.)

 

And these two themes do tie up. Through Nancy's 'true' appearance, an old and ancient thing. Her long straggly hair, her lined snout and what the production crew called “ashen skin”, the “old hag” of folklore, matches the dialogue where McCoy is blinded to her grey hair.

In Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) Blanche exclaims “I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” A notion Stanley rebels against: "It’s dark in here…. I don’t think I ever seen you in the light. That’s a fact!.. You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted much… What it means is I’ve never had a real good look at you."

And Nancy’s the Blanche Dubois of alien life forms, her devices to mask her age with appearance merely more sophisticated. But both plan to keep up her required level of desirability – the commodity which keeps her alive. Women are inherently about appearance and appearance is about deception.

And in fact we see a similar combination later, in 'Devil In the Dark'. The last of a kind is almost tragically wiped out through failure to communicate. Except one factor is reversed. Rather than impersonating humans, the Horta is one of the few non-humanoid aliens on the show. They could have talked to Nancy at any point, but only do so obliquely. 'Devil in the Dark' intentionally with-holds communication, only to devise a way to enable it. (The coining of the Vulcan mind meld.) And with it things come to a happy ending. So why can one live when the other has to die?

The real difference is of course that the woman in 'Devil in the Dark' is primarily a mother, acting only to defend her children. Unless you have a thing for duvets with varicose veins (and I concede there may well be an OnlyFans for that), she's not sexualised. Whereas Nancy’s sexualisation is associated with her predation. The only crew member resistant to her charms is Spock, and he survives her advances literally through not being a red-blooded male. Women don't have to die, at least not when fulfilling their biological roles. But female sexuality, inherently a threat, has to be killed off.

Yet ’Map Trap’ itself doesn't seem so convinced the two do tie up. Like 'The Doomsday Machine', it sets up two parallel themes then figures it needs to favour one of them. The episode is built around McCoy’s dilemma over his feelings for Nancy, with the last-of-it's-kind theme a late addition to the script. Yet that’s the one they play into. It's like the gendered stuff is so hard-wired into the story its own tellers look straight through it and instead focus on a more indirect analogy. It's tempting to argue that even on the level of metaphor it's disguised, one metaphor hidden beneath another.

And if we're taking on the show's sexism, why not go for the jugular? 'Mudd's Women' is the infamous episode which reassures the viewer that in the future prostitution will still be alive and well. It seems to have been part of Roddenberry's original pitch, suggesting it was integral to the show's world-view. (Or at least his.)

For plot beats, ’Mudd’s Women’ and ’The Way To Eden’ almost perfectly match. Both the women and Severin’s space hippies are unwillingly beamed aboard the Enterprise from a breaking-up ship, to stupefy the crew with their outrageous behaviour and scanty costumes. Both follow their leader’s instructions to seduce/befriend the crew to hijack the ship. Only when they reach their destination do their plans unravel. (Slightly bizarrely only one group uses drugs, and it’s not the hippies.) Yet they don’t feel similar.

Which may be because ‘Way To Eden’ is clearly about something. In its crass fashion it’s exhibiting an ideology in order to critique it, making it a fitting subject of critique itself. Whereas ’Mudd’s Women’ seems a relic of as time when women were goods (they’re specifically referred to as his “cargo”), better consigned to the past. Yet should we separate them that quickly?

Their ability to seduce and enchant the male crew into doing their bidding comes from the magic Venus pills they take. (Leading to McCoy’s classic line “are you wearing some unusual kind of perfume, or something radioactive?”) Much of the episode is like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons when the guy’s heart honks and eyes bulge uncontrollably out on stalks. While men feel sex, as a drive, women possess sexuality – like it’s a weapon at their disposal. But without a regular supply of pills, which they fall on like junkies, they fall back into plainness. In a fairly direct echo of 'Man Trap', women are associated with illusion and deception. Let’s remember glamour originally referred to a magical enchantment, a possessing spell.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence in the whole episode lasts only seconds. A scene of the women holding the Venus drug in their eager palms cuts to Spock with the lithium (not yet named dilithium) crystal needed to power the ship. For if the women in 'Mudd's Women' are to navigate a man's world, they need their power source as much as a starship does its. They’re simply striving to survive, using the limited options left to them. What else are they supposed to do? Study at the Academy for years and finally be allowed to answer the phone? Get to serve the Captain his coffee, hoping he notices your legs? And this segue admits as much.

One segue, of course, does not a redemptive reading make. We should remember that in selling themselves they require a pimp, who rations their drugs and whose ownership of them is telegraphed even in the episode title.

Let's note something about Mudd. He's built around the gag that his salesman's patter continually falls on impervious ears, making him an irresistible force continually bashing into an immovable object. This recurs so often you might wonder why he doesn't take one of his own pills, and stroke his beard alluringly at Kirk. He doesn't seem to have much to lose. But his inability to do what 'his' girls can is neither played up nor explained away, it's just accepted as a fact of life.

In 'Naked Time’, when the insane Riley usurps Kirk's place as Captain, he issues a decree that women shouldn't wear too much make-up. It’s a gag, but the moral of 'Mudd's Women' is oddly similar. Imagine it as a set of instructions for a young female viewer. Your chief asset is your looks, but you only have ‘em for so long so make sure you snag your man and settle down before they’re spent. And don’t overdo it even then. Powerful medicine.

Notably, the plot contrives to switch the women’s attention from the crew to a planet of well-off and available miners. And even then the deception fails when one of the girls won't go along with it. Which dodges something not just about plot resolution but ‘manhood’. To successfully resist them would suggest the crew were not 'real men' at all. While to succumb would mean they couldn’t be heroes. This dilemma surfaces elsewhere, and most consistently over Kirk.

Watching ’Star Trek’ all the way through, and in defiance of the cocksure Zap Brannigan stereotype, it’s notable how fallible a character Kirk is. He snaps at underlings when under pressure, makes small mistakes, very nearly makes big ones. But when this seems to happen over attraction to women it turns out to be a feint. He’s often shown seeming to do the wrong thing, abusing his command and even jeopardising missions by chasing skirt. Yet this always turns out to be part of some overall plan of his. See for example ’Conscience of the King’. 

(There’s precisely three genuine exceptions, where Kirk truly falls in love, in three series - ’City On the Edge of Forever’, ’The Paradise Syndrome’ and ’Requiem For Methusaleh’. Each of which is presented as something out of the ordinary.)

Jules Feiffer said “our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did – but rather the man who could if he wanted but still didn’t.” (‘The Great Comic Book Heroes’, 1965) Kirk can be shown getting his wicked way, with some off-screen shagging nudged and winked at (especially in ‘Wink of an Eye’). But mostly scripts repeatedly find mission-critical reasons why Kirk needs to seduce or counter-seduce the girl of the week. It’s victory, more than sexual gratification which drives him. “So that was your plan”, Kirk cries in ‘Mark of Gideon’ after another entrapment via seduction scenario. “That I would fall so under her spell that I’d give up my freedom and become a willing sacrifice”. And note that “spell”.

If women of the era only have power via sexual allure then, reassuringly, Kirk is shown as constantly able to out-allure them. Take ‘Elaan of Troyus’. Elaan’s plot is to get Kirk to fall in love with her, using evil juju, which jeapordises the Enterprise’s peace mission. But of course it’s her who falls in love with him, despite the absolute lack of magic affects on his part. Women endlessly launch themselves at his manly torso, but persistently miss and end up at his feet. About the only girl of the week he doesn’t seduce is Miranda in ’Is There In Truth No Beauty?’, and she turns out to be blind.

Harpies and Jezebels

Let’s look at a comparison, or at least what should be a comparison. ‘The Outer Limits’ ran from 1963 to 5, just before ‘Star Trek’, effectively passing the baton of TV SF. If there’s less temptresses in titillatory costumes, it was a different show, chasing a different market. One opens with a portentous all-knowing extra-diegetic narrator, the other with a triumphalist speech by it’s heroic lead.

But it was still a Sixties show with unsurprisingly Sixties attitudes. Women are “pretty nurses,” dutiful lab assistants, dutiful wives, or dutiful lab assistants doubling as wives. Admittedly, there’s exceptions. In fact Joanna Frank’s otherworldly performance as an elemental femme fatale in ’Zzzzz’ is more mesmerising to watch than all of Mudd’s Women put together. But exceptions is what they are. Women’s secondary nature is simply taken as an established fact. No need to hold them down there, it’s just where they are.

As much as they have a role, it’s as a necessary counterbalance to man’s rationality, with their handy ‘feminine’ virtues such as sensibility. See for example ’The Architects of Fear’, or ’The Borderland’ where a wife’s loving hand pulls her husband back from an experiment gone awry. The closing narration spells it out for us:

”There are worlds beyond and worlds within which the explorer must explore, but there is one power which seems to transcend space and time, life and death. It is a deeply human power which holds us safe and together when all other forces combine to tear us apart — we call it the power of love.”

Needless to say, such notions try to sell confines as virtues. But the bigging up of male virility and power… the “no we’re in charge, honest” is largely absent. It doesn’t feel like it’s insistently about sexism the way ’Star Trek’ does. What could have changed in those few years?

The short answer is that the early Sixties were not like the late. A rough and ready history of the rise of American feminism would be the publication of Betty Friedan’s ’The Feminine Mystique’ (1963), the formation of the National Organization for Women (1966) and the Miss America protests where the supposed “bra burning” took place (1968), which roughly equate to base camp, shoulder summit and highly visible peak.

’Star Trek’ also ran into Black Power and the counter culture head on, as much as it did the Romulans. You can almost see it happening in real time, from mildly indulgent inclusionism to identification of a perceived threat. But its relationship to feminism, while as heated, while more heated, is less distinct.

So ‘Star Trek’ fluctuates strangely in it sexism. ’Mudd’s Women’ is very much a pre-feminist story, about the role patriarchal society assigns to women, then in its paranoia panics over them having. But in ’Metamorphosis’, as seen, they had to deal with a woman diplomat who issued orders. Its sexism becomes a war on two fronts, against temptress jezebels and demanding harpies.

And there may even be a point where this switch happens. ’Requiem For Methusaleh’ is another story where Kirk goes off-mission and falls in love. (Though least credibly of all. The other stories at least allow some span of time where this might happen. Here, it’s during the ads.) He ends up scrapping over Rayna with his rival suitor, Flint. (Flint having built Rayna as an android companion for his life on a remote planet. You know, like you do.)

Horrified at their violence, seemingly on the spot she formulates the notion that maybe she could be the one making the decisions about her life. “Please stop. Stop! I choose where I want to go... what I want to do. I choose. I choose... Do not order me. No one can order me!” This might sound like a good starting point. In fact, out of shock of this strange new notion, she’s promptly struck dead.

While a later story, ‘Turnabout Intruder’, starts with a woman presuming she has that right to choose. Naturally she’s the villain...

Janice Lester plans a body swap with Kirk, as it’s her only chance to command a starship like the Enterprise. (Yes, the same series that dismisses racism as “primitive thinking” insists women can’t captain starships.) Now a feminist tale might involve the yeomen and telephonists getting together to agitate for more equal pay and less leering, something like what was starting to happen in the real world at the time. You know, collective action, based on shared identity, that sort of thing.

Whereas this goes straight for the single woman with a glass ceiling obsession. (Even her henchman’s a… well, he’s a man.) But it is a story which encounters feminism, is specifically anti-feminist. In a nice touch she gets to do the expository Captain’s log, as if threatening to take over the show.

Except of course her plan is deranged, and its execution merely reveals conflicts within herself. Her desire to be a starship Captain is casually conflated with her desire for a starship captain, she’s (yawn) another old flame of Kirk who feels spurned. And they’re not done yet...

Almost immediately on their being switched, she exults to Kirk “now you’ll know the indignity of being a woman…. Believe me, it's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman.” While the temporarily feminised Kirk refers to “her intense hatred of her own womanhood.” At a time when the call for equal rights was commonly parsed as “we don’t want to be women any more”. It’s as if even she can’t really imagine herself in the big chair, at least not as her self.

There are those who imagine all wrongs can be handwaved away by use of the phrase “of its time”. It’s more mantra than argument. Yet the irony is that this is a time the description fits, just in the opposite way to their imaginings. ‘Turnabout Intruder’ is typical of a story produced not in the absence of feminism, but precisely because of it’s presence. Feminism is raised, but only to be repudiated. This panic reaction is a hysterical reaction to something it tries to pass off as hysterical. The dread threat of a woman after a Captaincy powers the episode, as the very same time we’re supposed to find that idea a total absurdity.

Race-swapping stories, such as ’Black Like Me’ (1964) or ’Gentleman’s Agreement’ (1947), where Gregory Peck poses as Jewish, were films in the tradition of George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out In Paris and London’, undercover agents exposing the situation of poverty and discrimination. Can criticisms be made of them? Yes. But, particularly in their time, they were progressive. In both cases, the protagonist is a crusading journalist gone undercover.

Whereas gender-swapping stories are more traditionally played as comedies, such as ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959). They’re associated with Shakespearian tradition, where the drama lies in the world being turned upside down and the resolution of it being righted again as the men re-don their trousers. Yet here, when facing off feminism, Lester’s threat seems more real and the humour is dissipated. Except even then it can’t quite be expunged. Scotty calls Lester-as-Kirk “red-faced with hysteria”, and Shatner’s embracing of hissy fit drag cannot help but draw laughter. (It’s also tempting to suggest that with the preening, narcissistic Lester it’s the closest he ever came to playing himself.)

Formally, this is very similar to to good Kirk/ bad Kirk of ‘Enemy Within’, except noticeably the crew’s reaction becomes more foregrounded. Everyone, up to and including the regulars, notices the change and rejects the new Captain. In fact the script seems confused over whether resolution should come by the Shakespearian route of body-swap reversing (revealing it’s essential unnatural-ness) or the anti-feminism of Lester’s command being stymied by mutiny (revealing the absurdity of the situation). The two happen at about the same time, as if double booked.

So, in short, ’Star Trek’ didn’t insist so hard on strict gender roles and a boys-club Starfleet because this was all some innocent time before feminism, but precisely as a reaction to feminism. Yet the feminism it was reacting to was still emerging, perhaps even nascent. So there’s other times where it comes across as pre-feminist, with a quite different set of concerns. And by fighting both fronts it comes to feel obsessive on the subject, like sexism condensed.

It effectively launches with a Jezebel (‘The Man Trap’) and ends with a Harpie (‘Turnabout Intruder’). But we shouldn’t be seduced by that superficial neatness. In practise, the show switches arbitrarily between these two types, there’s no overall shifting from one to the other as feminism became more widespread. It seems more the case that feminism stirred up a more general anxiety, which stoked both simultaneously.

PS Should you wish to read more by a bloke about women’s rights (over which I’m supremely unqualified to comment) and SF (alarmingly over-qualified), with particular reference to the Amazon planet trope, go here.

Coming soon! And finally… about time we showed some class…