TREKKIES review: celebrating geekiness

If you think Star Trek is ‘lame’ or ‘uncool’ then you are still manacled to the ball-and-chain of high-school mentality populararity contests, and should probably go back to listening to Green Day and reading Harry Potter and watching Avatar, you soulless humbug. Star Trek is a forty-year-old institution, a supporting pillar of modern pop culture, and beyond being a hideously outdated and camp piece of television, it actually attempts to tackle mature themes in an intellectual, thoughtful and ultimately optimistic manner, utilising its futuristic setting as a sort of distortion, allowing pertinent, modern issues of race, gender and sex, war and peace, science and technology to be discussed in a fun, intellectually-stimulating manner. The original Trek (the one with Spock and Captain Kirk) gave rise to a host of sequel shows: The Next Generation, with Shakespearean Picard; Deep Space 9 with quirky Sisko, the one on the space station; Voyager, the one with the female captain Janeway; and Enterprise, a show that you will never hear any Trek fan talk about with anything other than the utmost disdain. Trekkies is a documentary shot in the late 90s that deals with the rampant, runaway fanatacism involved with Trek over the years, and as such, it is just as entertaining and stimulating as the show that inspired its subject matter.

The show is presented by Denise Crosby, who Trek viewers will remember from Next Gen (she dies at the end of the first season, so casual viewers may, in fact, not remember her). Crosby brings a kind of insider’s perspective to the doco, which makes for some interesting interviews with fellow cast-members, and some hilarious interviews with visibly nervous fans at conventions and the like. The documentary is comprised of anectodes from the stars of Trek from the original 60s show through to the mid-90s trio of Next Gen, DS9 and Voyager, who discuss their brushes with crazed fanatics and gentle admirers alike. As a film Trekkies is eminenty watchable to a vast audience–everyone’s seen at least five minutes of at least one episode of at least one of the five discrete series of Star Trek, and as such have something to relate to in this documentary. It’s fun, fast, and a little short, but you never get bored and it never gets bogged down mocking its targets, which would have been a very easy trap to fall into.

A lot of the comedy you’re expecting from comes in the first half, when we meet some of the extreme fans and hear some of the more disturbing anectodes from stars and convention-organisers. For example, there’s a totally bananas little lady, not even five feet tall, who had the balls to wear her “Starfleet” uniform (sloppily tailored and clumsily festooned with poorly-rendered replicas of the show’s props) to jury duty. That’s nuts. What’s worse is that she actually believes she is setting a “good example” for “her crew” (she’s only a Lt Commander, for crying out loud — Riker outranks her in all his beardy glory) and that “her ship” needs to be run with the kind of discipline symbolised by the donning of nonexistent uniforms to important real-world events — it’s clear from her humourless interviews that she actually believes this stuff, believes that she’s paving the way for the Star Trek universe to become true by living her life by its tenets and philosophies. It’s absolutely clear that she’s stark raving mad.

Then again there are people who actually believe that Rapture is just around the corner, and that credit cards and nuclear war are prophesied in Revelations as signals of the End of Days. There are a lot of parallels between religion and Trek-worship, in fact: Trek-fans gather at big events at weekends to argue canon and sing songs and trade merchandise, as well as meet luminary figures of their universe; Trek-fans are inherently insular and unaccepting of outsiders; and Trek-fans have little time for non-believers, and a lot of time for their favourite hobby. It was about midway through Trekkies that I realised the documentary wasn’t about how silly Trek-fans are, it’s about how peculiar and funny every single person on the planet is, and that it’s okay to define ourselves and each other by our peculiarities, be they obsessive religious zealoutry, insane Star Trek nerdship, or a proclivity to stalk and worship celebrities.

I’m going to go off on a slight tangent here, but it’ll be worth your time, I think. Loving something like Star Trek (or Star Wars, or being heavily into desktop role-playing games, or obsessing over anime, or collecting stamps, or whatever) carries a lot of social stigma. Getting nitty-gritty with the trivia of fictitious universes is a fascinating and worthwhile activity to a lot of people. It makes them happy, it gives them some form of satisfaction, it keeps them busy, helps them to socialise, and that’s great; so what’s up with society’s violent failure to tolerate the harmless, cute geeks and their action figures and trading cards?

Turn the tables around, and it’s cool for a bloke to be into sports. It’s cool to know by heart the names of all the players on all the teams of your chosen competition; it’s awesome to know each player’s individual style, affiliation history, weaknesses, and, if you’re a really special person, you’ll even keep abreast of their off-field shenanigans. Local news coverage goes nuts whenever a sports star misbehaves; they make headlines for weeks; if it’s Beckham, he’ll make headlines all over the world for a few days. The daily news even has five minutes at the end dedicated solely to the competitive endeavours of local and international teams, like it matters that Arsenal lost 2 – 1 when racial genocide is being committed somewhere in Africa. Sports fans meet up every weekend to watch “the game.” They discuss tactics, question techniques, reminisce about past matches, and all of that kind of thing is totally acceptable in society. It’s considered healthy. Sure it’s a male-dominated pastime, but wives and girlfriends see “watching the game with mates” as a positive activity to be encouraged. In fact, women have their own hobbies to pursue: fashion and celebrity gossip consume many a young woman’s mind, and not knowing what Paris Hilton was wearing when she fell loudly out of a taxi last weekend is a serious faux pas.

How is being a sports-geek, or a fashion-nerd, any different from being a Star Trek fanatic? All groups go into the same level of detail about their chosen passion, but two of them are socially acceptable (“normal,” even) while one is perceived as being solely for basement-dwelling virgins who reek of body-odour and fantasise about Counsellor Troi making out with Doctor Crusher on a regular basis. This isn’t fair, now, is it? The fact that all the macho alpha-male bully-types gravitate towards the sports-option, and all the popular, pretty girls orbit the glamour-option, doesn’t help the repressed state of the humble Trek-fan, and the fat, obnoxious stereotype imposed on sci-fi geeks isn’t always inaccurate, but they’re still human beings with thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, etc., and their hobby satisfies them, so who are you to judge?

Another thing this movie made me think of goes even deeper. Twenty-thousand years ago, before we even dreamed of agriculture or taming the wolf or writing stuff down, did our humble cave-dwelling ancestors have hobbies? Brainless pastimes to occupy their every waking thought? Was there always that one especially hairy cave-man who sat in the corner meticulously drawing onto the cave-wall the silhouette of each and every leaf he picked up on his hunts? Or the one guy with an expansive collection of entirely useless rocks, about which he was obsessed? I don’t think cave-men had the time for geeky hobbies like that (what with all the hunting, gathering and primitive society-building to be getting on with), so with that in mind, our current state of consciousness evolved without the goal of geeky hobby-obsession in mind. It’s all just some freak offshoot of neuro-evolution that everyone has to manifest in some way or another — collecting stamps, knitting, ceaselessly organising photo albums, watching every match of “the game,” watching every episode of Star Trek (repeatedly), scouring the bible for clues to surviving the apocalypse — these are all completely and totally useless ventures that serve little to no practical use. But they are part of what make us human, and as long as your particular hobby isn’t rape or murder, I say hobbies should be wholeheartedly supported no matter what form they take.

It becomes clear through watching Trekkies that the majority of the fans at least agree on one issue, even if they can’t decide who the coolest captain is (Picard, natch): Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future is so inspirational in its optimism, and so relevant in its themes and symbolism, that anyone with an ounce of wonder for the cosmos or fascination with the future or connection to the present can and will fall in love with at least one episode (or season, or entire series) of the hundreds and hundreds produced over the decades. Not only that, the Trek future is an important beacon of hope to many people. One short example: Whoopi Goldberg was inspired to be an actress after she saw portrayed on the home television a black woman who wasn’t a maid. Uhura from the original series may have been a junior officer, but she was a black woman — black — woman — on the bridge in the 1960s; the studios wouldn’t have allowed it if the show weren’t set in the distant future, but there she was, representing the hopes and dreams of many fine young individuals who eventually grew up to become astronauts and computer scientists and engineers and so on. This is just one small aspect of Star Trek‘s cultural power, and it seems to be a power for good.

Listening to the Trekkies wax lyrical about their favourite hobby, it’s hard not to get swept up into the fantasy escapism that is the Star Trek universe. It has defined science fiction film and television since its inception, and it has given hope and faith in the future to countless people across several generations. The people who really, really dig it might be a little weird, a little wacky, but they’re good people inspired to be better by the show they love. Trekkies is an important historical document in that respect, and it’s also a fun, light but intellectually stimulating romp through some of the more amusing denizens of the socially unpopular underground.

Trekkies score

83/100