50 YEARS OF STAR TREK at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) from Saturday (September 24) to December 30. tiff.net/startrek.
Star Trek has been with us for half a century. Most of you reading this, it’s safe to say, have always known a world with Star Trek in it. And to celebrate the show’s premiere 50 years ago this month, TIFF is launching a salute to Gene Roddenberry’s transformative TV series and the franchise it inspired.
All the feature films will be shown there’ll be “Trek Talks” by astronauts, scientists and historians and there’ll be free marathon screenings of specially curated episodes of the original series this weekend. (Check tiff.net/startrek for details.)
This delights me, for I am an old-school Trekker. I have a pin from my visit to Toronto Star Trek 76 at the Royal York Hotel. My dad took me. I met Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Janice Rand. I was seven years old.
As cheesy as the sets looked and as awkward as some of the performances might have been, I loved it to death. Roddenberry’s vision, created in the days of the Cold War, was pure and optimistic: a future where humanity had escaped the petty pull of racism and sexism and ventured out into the universe to see what else was out there.
Yes, the politics have dated. As progressive as Roddenberry’s vision was, it’s still the vision of a white guy from the Mad Men era. James T. Kirk is a horndog who sleeps his way through the galaxy, women wear miniskirts and pine after unavailable men, there are no gay characters, and an Asian guy drives the ship (hardee-har-har).
But even if Sulu started out as the reversal of a cultural stereotype, the simple fact of an Asian man appearing in a position of power and responsibility on a network TV show in 1966, along with a Black woman, offered minority children a chance to imagine themselves in the show. The future wasn’t exclusively white or male.
The future was smart, too, and accommodated the atypical. The Big Bang Theory gets laughs whenever Jim Parsons’s quasi-autistic Sheldon holds up the emotionless, logical Spock as a role model, but that’s not actually a joke. For the nerds, the geeks, the readers, the socially awkward, Spock was their It Gets Better. There was a place in the future for those of us who were better at books than sports. The show gave us comfort, and in return we grew up to bring the show into the world.
Flip phones? That came from Kirk’s communicator. Minivan design from the late 80s onward? Earthbound shuttle craft.
We’re actually outpacing the show’s fictional future. It took a century in Trek terms for the Federation to stop using paper, and we’ve already got the iPad. Thanks, nerds.
So, yes, I will likely be at the Lightbox for various Trek events.
The presence of visual effects genius Douglas Trumbull at the screening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture will make that disappointing first movie worth revisiting, and I won’t miss the 70mm screening of The Wrath Of Khan, the sequel that finally turned the themes and characters of the show into genuine drama, in part by forcing William Shatner’s Kirk to confront his irresponsible actions as a space hero.
I might give in and catch the marathons, too. I’m 48 now, but the idea of watching Kirk wrestle the Gorn on the big screen? Come on.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
