Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

The Onion on Trekkie outrage over the new film

Unrepentant Trekkie though I am, I must concede that this is great stuff. That bit on the Vulcan dialogue was wickedly inspired.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

History Channel Star Wars documentary has moments but fails to deliver

Watched The History Channel's "Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed", a documentary purporting to unveil the artistic and cultural underpinnings of the Star Wars genre. Found it pretty disappointing. It shed a few intriguing insights, but was overall pretty light on information and devoid of the revelations promised by the title.

Hadn't given much thought to how multi-faceted the franchise's female heroines are, nor how the personalities of all its main characters (even villains) develop before one's eyes during the films. Nor had I noted the absence of women in the Empire, or how the Empire handily symbolizes the  creeping mechanization and homogenization of modern life (and in strong contrast to the diversity, individualism and smaller reliance on technology of the Rebellion forces).

I did get a kick out of one African-American film critic declaring Darth Vader the ultimate "pimp"  from Blacksploitation films. He's a got a point--Darth's dressed in black, is a bad-ass who towers over everybody around him, walks with a confident swagger, owns everything in sight, and is a snazzy dresser (including a flashy cape).  It never occured to me before, but he's straight out of "Superfly".

Nor had I thought about how intriguingly Christian the final battle scene in "Return of the Jedi" is. Luke rejects heroic convention and triumphs through nonviolence and self-sacrifice. His unexpected refusal to save himself redeems his father and results in a messianic triumph over evil (and one with a perhaps unintended trinitarian overtone due to the symoblic union of the son and father when they join forces in the final struggle with the Emperor, which is then followed by Vader's own sacrifice for the greater good).

Was a bit disappointed by the pedestrian interpretations offered of the mythos' most intriguing figures, the Jedi.

First of all, cowboy westerns are barely mentioned in the documentary even though the influence is self-evident at times (e.g., the gunglinger costumes, the visual demarcation between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys).  I think there is a sense of Jedis being akin to the solitary lawmen who maintain the peace out in the badlands of the Wild West.

Then there is how Eurocentric the discussion is despite the fact that you can't IMO make sense of the Jedi without considering non-Western literary genres. While these archetypes inevitably resonate for people from all cultures, I don't see how one can neglect to mention the constant parallels with various mystical religious traditions, especially Sufism. Their dress (consciously drawn from North African culture), style of speech ("May the Force be with you", constant references to the way of the "Force", use of deeply respectful titles like "Master"), the way of the Force's emphasis on self-abnegation and taming one's ego,  the paramount importance played by the master/disciple relationship in a Jedi's spiritual development, and constant discussion of unseen higher reality are tropes of Sufi tradition.

Of course, the Star Wars universe also lends itself well to an Asian religious reading. The Jedi master/disciple relationship is no less reminiscent of various "eastern" religious traditions, especially to my mind Buddhism. The emphasis on maintaining cosmic balance brings to mind the pan-Indian religious doctrine of Karma, not to mention the Daoist focus on harmony.

Both camps can make a credible claim to the Jedi. The call depends, I think, on which Jedi figure one takes as normative. Obi Won and Yoda seem to me to be Sufi and Buddhist archetypes, respectively. With its emphasis on paradox as a means of exposing the limitations of conventional binary categories of thought, I find Yoda's homiletic style especially Zen-like (though certainly not unfamiliar to one versed in Sufi discourse). Obi Won, by contrast, strikes me as a more conventional Sufi figure in his style, presence and more overtly moralistic orientation, though I imagine there's nothing particularly un-"eastern" about him, either.

In any case, I think to confine the discussion of the Jedi images of wizards and priests from Western literature and folklore leaves out the most interesting dimension to the film's Weltanschung.

Finally, it was quite irritating how the documentary completely left out the thing that educated fans most want to see: a rundown of Lucas' specific inspirations and borrowings throughout the films. For example, the comic relief characters of C-3PO and R2-D2 are unmistakably lifted right out of Akira Kurosawa's 1958 samurai classic "The Hidden Fortress" , but this film never bothers to point this out as it discusses the droids.

There's also a weird bait & switch, as the commercial tantalizingly promises fascinating disclosures--it shows a sequence from the Cloud City battle between Luke and Darth Vader alongside, in split screens, an identically choreographed sword fight in an unidentified  samurai film--but then inexplicably and maddeningly leaves this and all other specific references completely out of the documentary. 

This makes much of the documentary a bit of a dud. Hearing professors of literature pontificate on the relevance of the theories of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung to science fiction gets old after a while. Give us facts, not interminable commentary. And don't get us to tune in by showing things in the trailer that aren't in the final film.

Romulan technology on the way

Good news:  We're one step closer to warp drives and photon torpedos.

BBC NEWS |  'Cloaking device' idea proposed

The cloaking devices that are used to render spacecraft invisible in Star Trek might just work in reality, two mathematicians have claimed.

If I could have one imaginary technology from ST, it wouldn't be obvious ones.  Not the cloaking device.  It's not the transporter, either.  Not the warp drive. Not the tricorder.  Not even the phaser.

Give up?

Perhaps this shows what a hopeless nerd I am, but what I really fantasize about is getting my hands on one of those universal translators!

Continuity & Sci-Fi

Here's a entertaining and wide-ranging essay ("The Science of Consistency:
On fictional universes and the fans who rationalize them" by Todd Seavey) by a sci-fi buff about the challenge of maintaining continuity in science fiction and how inevitable such mistakes are in a fictional creation of any scale.

Shabana is periodically taken aback when I take great umbrage at some "minor" mistake on her part concerning the key narratives of sci-fi/fantasy--I'd share them, but they're too painful to recount--so I can relate to this quip:

The fictional universes depicted in movies like the Star Wars or Star Trek series tend to get very complex (for beginners: the former features Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the latter Captain Kirk, the Enterprise, and a loyal crew made up of people like engineer Scotty; if you get them mixed up, you are worthless).

I wouldn't go that far--I am a tolerant person, after all--but such mistakes clearly indicate that one has been out of touch for too long with the holy texts of the genre. 

The author also captures perfectly the different psychological import of continuity questions for the diehard fan and the average person:

That complexity means that—inevitably—the occasional “continuity error” occurs. In normal movie parlance, a continuity error means one of those embarrassing moments when, say, the bandage on an actor moves from the right hand to the left hand between scenes due to a mistake by the makeup department. For science fiction fans, though, continuity refers to the overall logical and historical coherence of our beloved fictional universes.

If Scotty witnesses Captain Kirk’s death at the beginning of Star Trek VII, it is extremely troubling to some of us—those who care, those who have intellectual integrity and the discipline of logic!—if Scotty is awakened from suspended animation approximately seventy years later in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and asks whether Captain Kirk is still alive. Scotty should know that Kirk isn’t! Something is wrong! It doesn’t add up—yet it must! It must!

There are many other gems of insight and deliciously nerdy examples of continuity objections, mostly concerning Star Wars and Star Trek.  Here's an unexpected example from a different genre:

The TV show Dallas famously erased an entire season by claiming it had all been a dream (though they neglected to make changes in the spin-off show Knot’s Landing, on which characters briefly mourned for a Dallas character killed off during the erased “dream season”).

And here's an interesting observation that explains the constant temptation in comics to trample on continuity:

there is a constant tension in comic books between the desire for the characters to accumulate interesting historical baggage and the desire to retell their basic, streamlined stories and this time get it right.

So it's worth a read if you're interested in such things. 

While we're talking about continuity, here's my own catch (and one that I haven't seen anybody else mention, perhaps because it's too trivial).

I think Star Trek Next Gen changed its approach to the reintroduction of the Romulans.

In a relatively early episode of STNG, Episode 26: "The Neutral Zone" (Boy, the web makes research easy sometimes.  All that took was a Google search under "'star trek next generation' romulans reintroduction" to dig up the episode in question.), the Federation re-encounters the Romulans again after the treat ending a long war centuries earlier.   Without getting into the plot  (which you can see at the link provided), the interesting thing was that the way that Romulan bird of prey was portrayed as utterly dwarfing the Enterprise in size.  When it decloaked dramatically, it must have been 10 times larger.  I think that and the ominomous tone of the exchange between Picard and the Romulan captain clearly implied that the Romulans had outstripped the Federation in terms of technological development and that, consequently, the Federation was in trouble.  In subsequent episodes, however, birds of prey were normal sized and Romulans were otherwise portrayed as being on the same footing technologically as the Federation.  I detect a change in the geopolitical backdrop.

I welcome comments from fellow believers.  In sci-fi, not Islam.  (What do Avari-Nameh and Von Aurum think, I wonder?)

The essay got me wondering about what comparable continuity slips exist in the great universes of fantasy literature, especially that of JRR Tolkien.  Between the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, there must be a mountain of logical and historical contradictions.   Two decades ago when I subscribed to a mimeographed Tolkien fan zine--yes, I was a nerdy teen--I remember reading some examples, but can't remember them now.  Anyone out there have any interesting examples of the Good Professor nodding?

R&B, Vulcan style

Speaking of intertexual experiments with pop culture icons (see my previous post on "The Superfriends and multiculturalism"), some genres just aren't meant to be mixed. 

While sci-fi purists might find Star Trek intellectually and artistically wanting--let's face it, with the exception of the occasional allegory about contemporary affairs (e.g., the episodes that criticized America's involvement in the Vietnam war), most of STOS's plots were if truth be told formulaic and devoid of the speculative spark that inspires real sci-fi; the gang would beam down to the latest new planet, a hapless redshirt would quickly die a horrible death, Kirk would kill some creature in hand-to-hand combat and celebrate by bedding some alien beauty, and the away team would return sans one member, etc.; not that this detracts from its appeal for me in any way)-- I think we can all agree that there's something sacrilegious about having Mr. Spock croon Bobby Brown's execrable "It's My Prerogative" while bogeying like a late 1980s b-boy.  (Boy, that song hasn't aged well.  The knowledge that I  bought that dreadful album as a confused, esthetically-challenged teen will haunt me till my dying day.)

Brace yourself, fellow Trekkies.  This little stop motion animation skit entitled "Star Trek Karaoke" would be funny if it weren't so painful to watch and just downright wrong.  Don't say I didn't warn you.  [HT: MyAsylum]  As myAsylum puts it, "Yes, the United Federation of Planets has not been spared by the scourge of karaoke."

As esthetically disquieting as that clip is, it does provide an intriguing glimpse of how realistic stop motion animation can be.  Those dolls are getting down like Soul Train dancers!  It's a far cry from the halting movements (think of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer) that I associate with this type of animation.

Still, I think I'm going to have to gouge my eyes out like Oedipus.  Doing that to Mr. Spock is just haram.  I did enjoy Lt. Uhura's rowdy encouragement, though (she yells out in inebriation, "Do it Vulcan style!")

Warning: Nostalgia overload!

How to transform the most sober 30-something American man into a wide-eyed, giggling little boy:
Lego® Star Wars™ The Video Game!

Star Wars crossed with Legos.  This is so intensely nostalgic, it's pornographic.  It's enough to labotomize you.

Watch the footage from the game.  Even as a Lego figurine, Darth Maul still rocks.

[Thanks for the tip, Jihad.]

Lego Lovers: Don't miss Brick Testament, either.

Star Trek New Voyages

Trekkies [*], rejoice! 

New TOS ("The Original Series", for the unitiated) episodes are being made by fans and are available for free download.  It's called "Star Trek: New Voyages" [this is a site hosted by Wired;  the real site loads painfully slowly, but it's worth the wait if you can do something else in the meantime], about which Wired says

The original Star Trek set out on a five-year mission that network execs cut short in 1969. Now a new confederation of amateur Kirk worshippers and studio renegades is repairing the space-time continuum and finishing the job.

One amusing tidbit:  A fanatical fan, one of the founders of the series spent years building a perfect replica of the bridge of the Enterprise in a barn!

I haven't downloaded the first episodes yet. 

It was interesting to look at the cast photos.  With the notable and lamentable exception of Lt. Uhura--who's played by a woman who looks barely "ethnic" (Is she Latina?), much less Black--they managed to do a good job in matching people.  The guy playing Kirk not only looks the part, but manages to ham it up even in the way he sits in the captain's chair.  The likeness in the case of Bones is really striking.

The photos of the actors playing extras and minor characters are also there.  A perusal of this long gallery of mug shots is entertaining. 

The first thing you notice is the dearth of non-white faces.  Unless I missed something, every single actor involved appears to be white.  Perhaps this is just another example of the funny things middle class white people do when they have too much free time on their hands--remember, this is a labor of love by diehard fans, not a commercial production--but those demographics remind me of how science fiction and fanstasy in general tends to be made for and by white men.  There are notable exceptions (e.g., Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, ...), but it remains a decidedly WASPy and testosterone-filled genre (e.g., the playful but very white & male  "Starship Troopers", which I really enjoyed as a white and a male), as far as I can tell.

Speaking of race, I see that they've returned to TOS system for Klingon appearances.  Anyone who's watched much Star Trek knows that Klingons on TOS looked very different from today's Klingons.  In the original series, these baddies were basically dark-haired, ruddish-hued white guys of normal build.  In TNG (Star Trek The Next Generation) and DSN (Star Trek Deep Space Nine), they decided to make them more "alien" and fierce-looking, adding all sorts of ugly facial ridges and wigs to their heads and casting large muscular (and usually black) actors.  [It would be interesting to know how many aspiring black actors got work due to this policy change by Paramount.]

It's also interesting to see all these red shirts (the infamously short-lived security officers in Star Trek wear red shirts).  I wonder if this new series maintains the old Aztec-style ritual of sacrificing the hapless and nameless red shirts to an angry god.  The book, All I really need to know I learned from watching Star Trek--whose premise I feel was stolen from me, as I've long said that all of life's lessons can be found in one episode or another of Star Trek--sums up the gory red shirt phenomenon quite wittily (unfortunately, I don't have the book, so I borrowed the quote from here):

Anyone with even a passing interest in Star Trek should know this rule: Never, ever, ever wear a red shirt--not under any circumstances. Don't do it.

Pick any episode. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, a series regular like Uhura, and some guy you've never seen before are standing on the transporter pad. If the guy is wearing a red shirt, he will not live past the first commercial. Somewhere on the planet below certain death awaits.

I've watched these guys in red shirts get shot, be blown up, be disintegrated, have all their blood drained, have every cell in their body explode and otherwise meet the most painful and horrible deaths imaginable.

The endings aren't even especially heroic. First a guy beams down, then he's dead. At least it's usually quick. Nine times out of ten, the poor fellow doesn't have a clue what hit him. Within seconds, Bones examines the fallen crewman with a tricorder, turns to the captain and says, "He's dead, Jim." By the next scene it's as if the guy never existed. There's no wake, no funeral and most of the time his name is never spoken again.

------------------------------------------------

* I note sadly that there are some skin-deep fans who sniff at the term "trekkie" and demand to be categorized instead as "trekkers".  As the old saying goes, it it looks, writhes, and leers like an Orion slave girl, it's an Orion slave girl! 

All these sissy fans who fear the mockery of the ignorant, non-sci fi-inclined masses.  Does a connoisseur of Impressionism care a whit whether some philistine who considers hologram posters art approves of her taste in paintings?  Get some backbone, Trekkies.  Say it and say it loud:  "I'm a Trekkie and proud."

In a world where Bill Gates is be the alpha male--That film "Revenge of the Nerds" was eerily prophetic!--we have nothing to be ashamed of.  Wear your pocket protectors with pride, guys.

Speaking of the infamous Orion slave girls, it just occured to me that they are basically a cross between the Incredible Hulk and the popular conception of the  houri.  I wonder what happens when they get mad.  Umm, nevermind.