Kirk Drift

I read this years ago, but didn’t save a bookmark or anything, and never managed to turn it up again—until this weekend, when I stumbled across it while procrastinating as hard as I could from doing something else:

Strange Horizons - Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift By Erin Horáková:

There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination.

I’m going to walk through this because it’s important for ST:TOS’s reception, but more importantly because I believe people often rewatch the text or even watch it afresh and cannot see what they are watching through the haze of bullshit that is the received idea of what they’re seeing. You “know” Star Trek before you ever see Star Trek: a ‘naive’ encounter with such a culturally cathected text is almost impossible, and even if you manage it you probably also have strong ideas about that period of history, era of SF, style of television, etc to contend with. The text is always already interpolated by forces which would derange a genuine reading, dragging such an effort into an ideological cul de sac which neither the text itself nor the viewer necessarily have any vested interest in. These forces work on the memory, extracting unpaid labour without consent. They interpose themselves between the viewer and the material, and they hardly stop at Star Trek.

It’s excellent, and well worth your time.

(Off topic, I posted this to my then-work Slack, and this was the article that caused a coworker to wish that Slack’s link previews came with an estimated reading time. So, ah, get a fresh coffee and go to the bathroom before reading this.)

This is from 2017, and real life has been “yes, and”-ing it ever since. This provides a nice framework to help understand such other modern bafflements as “who are these people saying Star Trek is woke now” and “wait, do they not know that Section 31 are villains?”

And this is different from general cultural context drift, or “reimaginaings”, this is a cultural mis-remembering played back against the source material. And it’s… interesting which way the mis-remembering always goes.