SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/III)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
My mom popped her head in while I was watching “Star Trek” (an episode from the middle of the second season) and asked, “Are you watching ‘Star Trek?’” Well, that was unexpected. My mother isn’t familiar with, nor particularly fond of, science fiction. She usually doesn’t recognize anything I watch, unless it’s a Woody Allen movie or something like that from the 80s or 90s. But when I expressed my surprise, she said that yes, of course she knew about “Star Trek.” It constituted a considerable part of the TV schedule in her childhood, when said schedule ran for a total of three hours daily.
I finished watching “Star Trek” this summer. Over the past year, I had been watching TOS (the original series) intermittently. In a spurt of dedication, I managed to finish the first 10 episodes, which I hadn’t yet seen, in the last three months. Just so you know, it was mostly so that I could write this column more comprehensively. All for you guys. Also, I like science fiction. So I felt a commitment to the show, enough to sit through all of it. I even enjoyed it. However, there is something about it that bothers me: the acting.
It’s not just “Star Trek” or “Doctor Who”; every movie or television show shot before the 90s, roughly speaking, features a different quality of acting. For me, as someone who is used to what could be called “contemporary acting,” it can be quite off-putting, simply because it’s not very credible. It’s theatrical. It’s dramatic. It exaggerates dialogue and emotion. It aims for a different effect, due to two factors. First, back when movies were rare, you had theater actors getting the roles. Or maybe Hollywood stars who had “made it,” but with the theater guys to be compared to, they had to have some serious flair. Second, back when people invested time and money to go out and see a movie, I think they would probably have expected more than mere “reality.” They wanted “Casablanca.” They wanted the fairytale. This naturally demanded people who looked and acted like they belonged in a fairytale.
Today, movies can do so much more. They can introduce alternate realities, parallel universes and superheroes. The actors no longer have to have an out-of-this-world quality because the stories already do. Ironically, we now have to ground them to reality so that we can further explore the “strange new worlds…where no man has gone before.”
“Star Trek” was actually a big contributor to this development. It is widely credited as being the source of inspiration for many modern-day inventions. These include cell phones, automatic doors and retinal scanners. The first “Doctor Who” episodes (this is another 60s science fiction enterprise—an earlier British counterpart to “Star Trek”—that has survived to this day) feature a food dispenser whose “automatic” door is opened manually. Eighty episodes and 12 “Star Trek” movies later (2 of which were actually produced in this decade, so I’d seen them before), these surreal objects are available to everyone in our society.
We can’t really talk about inspiring science fiction without talking about its forefather, can we? Jules Verne, the French author of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Around the World in Eighty Days” inspired new technology way before people could even imagine it—the airplane wasn’t invented by the Wright brothers until Verne was 75 years old. I can’t dwell very specifically on his works because I was in elementary school when I read them. But thinking about them recently has rekindled my interest, and I’ve been considering rereading them. Except they’re children’s books, aren’t they?
Verne is one of the three most translated authors of all time, right between Agatha Christie and Shakespeare. Yet in the Anglophone world today, he’s perceived very differently than was the case originally. He wasn’t a writer of children’s books, as we’ve come to know him through the simplified novels that we read in our childhood. He was actually associated with the French literary avant-garde and the surrealists. So yeah. I’m going to read those books again (not that their being “children’s books” would’ve ever stopped me).
Verne’s work has been done and redone in movies and other books. It’s a classic. “Star Trek,” strangely, began to repeat itself instead of going back to an earlier source of inspiration. For example, in “The Wrath of Khan” (the second movie in the original franchise), they did the same thing as “Into Darkness,” except that the sentimental sacrifice at the end is reversed. This fits the whole idea of the new franchise being a parallel-world version of the original series and movies, so it’s not so bad. I must note, however, that in my opinion, the new franchise presents a much better Khan than in the earlier movie. In “The Wrath of Khan,” we see a man who is solely focused on destroying Captain Kirk, at the risk of destroying his own crew. In “Into Darkness,” the character develops a few more layers; now, his sole purpose is to find and protect his crew, which is all he has left in the universe.
Tastes change. What people expect changes. Take, for instance, the vaudeville tradition. Vaudeville is a form of entertainment that was popular in North America from the late 19th to the early 20th century. It’s basically a theatrical performance composed of unrelated acts, such as musical numbers, mimes and impersonations, that are brought together under one title. Nowadays, we seem to seek unity; everything has to have an underlying meaning. Of course it’s possible to tie this into a general life lesson about the changing times: back then everything was harder, so the audience preferred lighter entertainment. Now, though, with “cheapened” values and the “cavalier” lifestyles that go with them in real life, perhaps we search for deeper themes in fiction.