Just a while ago I finished reading “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift”, an essay whose basic premise is that the womanizing callous “manly man” vision of Captain Kirk of Star Trek is an ahistorical toxic revisionist view.
“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.”
It’s a very good essay. What’s fascinating and horrifying too is the way in which this essay, written 10 years ago almost, has its finger on culture pulses that continue to echo today.
“ Heterosexuality has been through the fucking ringer in cultural productions in the last decades due to backlashes against feminism and queer visibility that have transformed portrayals and interpretations alike into dumbshows—crude pantomimes, as before the play. These frantic defenses have done more to render the proposition of men and women loving one another a piece of one-note unsustainable ridiculousness than women’s lib and LGBTQ rights ever could.”
There’s so much of this that I would love to clip and quote, but I’ll leave this final one here:
“If history is written by the winners, then people with power will always be the ones who control what is remembered, and marginal people’s truths and histories will be what is occluded. It is thus now. We cannot live without memory (and to do so would be to live without meaning). Given this, it becomes a question of what survives. If we do not strive for a strong and diverse collective memory, the collective memory that inexorably remains will be that of kyriarchy. Memory and accuracy also enable us to track and to contest changing definitions of masculinity.
[...]
Thus it becomes a matter of reclaiming texts via attentive reading. In the post-truth world, attention is a skill. Reading is a skill. We must vigilantly listen to the hum of the currents of power running through texts and their interpretations, to actions and their spin. We must insist upon reality in order to meaningfully and morally do the work of relativistic interpretation: there are four lights, for fuck’s sake. We do have to have stories, and so we need to be able to see them.”