Star Trek: exploring strange, new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no one has gone before!

Deep Space Nine: Well, this is about as far as we want to go. There's a wormhole here with some pretty nasty mo-fo's on the other side. Why don't we build a station and just park it here for a while.

Star Trek: Voyager: How the hell did we get all the way out here in the Delta Quadrant! It's gonna take us years to get back to somewhere familiar! There's no place like home, there's no place like home....

I'm not dissing the shows, I just think the fundamental emotional resonances of their basic situations are interesting. I don't know if it was Nixon, Vietnam, Reagan, the persistence of racism or whatever, but something died in America after the 1960s. I guess that's Andrew's point.

What Star Trek always left out - quite wisely in my opinion - was any detailed account of how human society changed from the present into that sort of future. Better fans than I am can probably correct me here - there are hints about a war, and of course the crucial historical markers in Star Trek are not economic or political or social but technological: humanity's adulthood is marked by the discovery of warp drive technology, not its transcendence of the commodity form. But the burning question of the 1960s - political revolution or political reform? - on that the show didn't take sides.

One last thing. Whatever benefits for human beings that future may bring, it is catastrophic for their aesthetic taste. The plastic arts seem to be exhausted by building models of their space vehicles, while painting and literature have essentially died. Whenever they need to cite an artist, the crew is forced to quote someone from the "barbaric" 20th century or earlier. So it seems that for scientists and explorers and doctors and patients the Star Trek future is inviting and compelling. For artists, not so much.

In my opinion, the very fact that such utopian questions would be raised by a TV show indicates what a unique event Star Trek has been in American (nay, world) Culture.

Let's not forget Norm Coleman, former war protester and DFH:

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I'm thinking that the "left wing" in your post is a typo - there's nothing in your other posts to suggest a sympathy with right wing agitators. Anyway, until you confirm it, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Thanks for a very interesting interview, Andrew. The coyness you describe makes perfect sense to me, given Kathryn Bigelow's films. But I wonder whether it's just reticence about her personal life or something inherent to the way her films are meant to work. Whether Near Dark or Strange Days or Point Break or Blue Steel, they always operate on more than one level, as straightforward action films and self-reflective commentaries on the medium. But of course that meta-level has to remain implicit, because if it ever seems to be the point of the movie, the whole experience dissolves into pretentiousness. Her movies strike the balance perfectly. You see them, enjoy them for the technical brio and pacing and thrills, and then on thinking back you realize that they also raise questions about images and reality or gender and authority or what have you. It's consistent enough so that I doubt it's accidental, but I'm not surprised she doesn't want to talk about it. The whole point is to leave that level implicit, and lots of people are allergic to it, as if intellectual enjoyment was in competition with spontaneous thrills. I've never understood that, but there it is.

By the way, I didn't know there was anyone who *didn't* think Strange Days was an impressive movie!

Wow. If you had asked me which of those voices on the audio was the ombudsman and which was the defensive administration lackey, I would have gotten it wrong. In the real world there is no controversy about whether the US tortured, she admits, but in her own mind the controversy rages on. She doesn't know what an ombudsman is, she doesn't know what a journalist is, and in the end she can't even remember what a decent human being is. All so that she doesn't have to admit to us that she was wrong. Or worse, doesn't have to admit to herself that she lives in a country that tortures. That's just pathetic.

Thank you, Glenn, for following up on this. I'm also pleased that someone else at NPR showed a bit more character.