The future was calling…
The J. J. Abrams “Star Trek” (the movie) is due for release May 8th, but it’s already getting rave reviews.
It is hard to believe, but it is now 43 years since the first Star Trek, TV series was aired in US television.
The franchise has proven remarkably popular, and has had a steady, powerful and financially successful grip on not just the American, but the global public. There seems no end to the attraction of the concept, and there is even a school of thought that the technology first surfaced in Star Trek had enormous impact on real life designs.  Note the similarity between the Star Trek communicator, and Motorola’s design for the flip phone.
Of course, we have yet to see transporters, but I am sure Apple has them somewhere in the works as an ap for the iPhone.
Ironically, while the Star Trek franchise has held such a firm grip in the public’s imagination, real space travel has not.
Just three years after Captain Kirk and his crew left earth for a 43-year mission that seemingly has no end, real people landed on the real moon. Kirk and his progeny have explored vast galaxies and launched a tidal wave of movies, TV series, products and careers.
Since 1972, no one has gone back to the moon.
That is 37 years.
We went, we landed and we came home, never to return.
Why is that?
Why is it that what would appear to be, at least on the surface, one of the singularly greatest achievements in human history (right up there with standing erect for the first time), has been so quickly abandoned?
It’s not that we don’t have the technology. The technology to do this is as old as my father’s 1969 Buick Futura (literally).
And it’s not that we don’t have the money.
We spend as much every few months in Iraq as it cost to put a human on the moon.
What we lack here is the interest.
Which, I think, when examined in light of the Star Trek franchise, tells us (unfortunately) a great deal about where we are headed as a culture.
The average American today spends 8.5 hours a day staring at one kind of screen or another. 4.5 of those hours are spent watching TV, and as video migrates to the web, the number of hours and the percentage devoted to watching images is only going to increase.
Video screens bring us both information and entertainment, and as video use continues to grow, this trend is only going to continue.
Video also conditions us to a certain expectation – that is, entertainment value. Video must be compelling all the time to hold our attention, or we drift.
The problem with the moon landings was, that visually, they were boring.
Yes. As TV, landing on the moon is boring,
So is watching a few guys bumble around up there.
Conversely, the adventures of the Star Ship Enterprise, also a video-driven space adventure, is far more compelling.
The Apollo astronauts did not fire photon torpedoes, move at warp speed or content with Klingons. They drank orange juice crap from toothpaste squeezy things.
Not great TV.
So compared side by side, Star Trek is a ratings winner. Real moon landings are a bore.
Who wins?
In our culture, Star Trek.
The fact that Star Trek is fiction and the moon landings are real is, for all intents and purposes, immaterial.
They are both space adventures on the screen.
Now, this raises some interesting issues as our Screenworld culture takes a deeper and deeper hold on our society.
In Screenworld, does ‘reality’ matter any more?
As we become more and more of a video based/ image based culture, does the line between real and imaginary blur, or even begin to disappear. In the end, will we be able to tell, and more significantly, will we even care?
The seemingly endless War in Iraq or Afghanistan (take your pick) is a very real event. Very real for the men and women who are daily getting blown apart or maimed in pursuit of God-only-knows-what-at-this-point.
Yet if I were to ask you to ‘picture’ Iraq or Afghanistan, what do you see?
Brown, beige, desert, tanks, soldiers. A kind of muddled imagery with neither focus nor content. That would be about right, because that is the image that we have seen on our screens for more than 5 years.
For us, Iraq has become just a bad movie, a kind of Waterworld that simply has no plot (like the original) and no end (also like the original).
And like the moon landings, because it it bad television, no one any longer cares.
There is no passion for Iraq, one way or the other. It is simply something going on ‘out there’.
OK.
Let’s accept our fate in life. Let us accept the fact that we are creatures now of images. This is what defines our world.
Let us also accept the concept that perhaps we don’t in fact want to become a culture of mindless drones who do nothing but stare at screens ad infinitum.
What must we now do?
We must adapt the ‘rules’ of visual story-telling, but marry them to real life.
Engage people and make them care about things that are really happening, but use the tools of visual storytelling.
Take the space program.
What it needs are characters, an arc of story and a sense of adventure.
Ironically, it’s all there.
Science and real life can engage an audience. (Remember Jacques Cousteau?)
Make Americans care about the story line, and we will be back on the moon in no time.
(Mark Burnett, the rights are available. That should cover funding issues).
1 Comment
pencilgod April 22, 2009
When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. I had a plan. I’d work at school go into the airforce and hope to get into some sort of inter-country exchange scheme that got me on the astronaut training program.
It was a bit of a long shot but it was a plan.
Then at 13 my eyes let my down. No longer blessed with 20/20 vision what was only unlikely became impossible.
Then as a cameraman I have had the chance to fly in airforce jets, a glorious taste of that long lost dream, if the space program ever needs someone to shoot their story in space I’m so available!!!