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In
Commemoration of Star Trek's 40th Anniversary, our commentator takes us back to
where it all began. What is the passionate impulse that has captured viewers'
imaginations for decades?
STAR TREK AND MIND CONTROL, Part
1
Is there any greater fear than to have one's mind put under the control of an external force?
Is there any greater desire than to have mental control over people and
the environment, and to escape the confining limits of our own consciousness?
And what is commercial television but the most ubiquitous and freely accepted device for mass mind control today?
Put these ideas together and you have the fertile breeding ground from which Gene Roddenberry gave birth to the original Star Trek television
series. What science fiction writer could resist the opportunity to explore not just mind control but, by extension, explore and define the
nature of consciousness?
The two pilots created to launch this legendary television series explored the extremes of mind control, from the total powerlessness of
Captain Pike in "The Cage", to the unlimited mental power of Gary Mitchell in "Where No Man Has Gone Before."
In between mental vegetable and mental superman, are a variety of psychic-variant states, among them:
schizophrenia
kinetic powers
ESP
mind reading
artificial reality
vegetable or drugged states
female to male or adult to child consciousness transfer
artificial intelligence vs human intelligence
alien intelligence vs human intelligence
advanced intellectual powers
advanced predictive powers
repressed genius
unleashed madman
Star Trek probed all of these issues of intelligence earlier and more widely than any other filmed science fiction, and in so doing explored
the nature of consciousness from one end of the imagination to the other. The original Enterprise's voyage of imagination to stars and
planets was, as many already feel in their hearts, really a metaphor for psychic exploration.
Only within the frame of visually appealing outer space adventure could Star Trek, using commercial television as a medium, pursue it's
"subversive" mission of exploring consciousness in so many ways.
STAR TREK —
THE RESONATING PARADOX
At the root of the most popular television series ever created was a
contradiction. Contained within The Cage/The Menagerie's message was both attraction to the fictional characters....and repulsion to overuse
of the imagination.
The year was 1964. A super-secret "cerebral" television pilot for a new television series was being prepared at Desilu Studios in Culver City,
the first episode to be called "The Cage".
As a television writer, the creator of the series spent his days swimming in metaphors. So, in addition to
concerning himself with the top priority of attracting advertisers to his work (by implication here,
the "Talosians"), he made his science-fiction story a metaphor for the
television industry itself, indeed, a warning about the dangers of television.
So, despite the repressive and highly sponsor-controlled environment of commercial television, a vital few such as Roddenberry
and Serling managed to break through the mediocrity with creative material that actually asked questions about an existing social order. (But certainly
not OUR social order -- God forbid ;-).
Metaphors are, after all, ANY writer's stock in trade. The metaphor is the finding of parallels between things, seeing (or, indeed, hiding)
connections between things.
Even as the Beatles were exploring new states of consciousness in their music from 1966 to 1968, Gene Roddenberry's mission, and his underground
message, were much the same: a mind-expanding exploration of the extremes of inner space.
Much like the counter-culture message of the Beatles, Roddenberry's
"subversive" message in "The Cage" pilot was hidden. No network executive would approve a story warning about the dangers of television.
But if the focus was on outerspace rather than innerspace, if the warning was deeply couched in metaphor, it could pass the sponsor's test
and be seen by the general public.
Even though the original pilot was produced then rejected, the story originally called "The Cage" finally made it to broadcast air on
September 7, 1966, a "transmission" wrapped inside yet another story on the court martial
"view screen".
So while broadcast advertisers, with their coercive and repetitive messages, "pull the wool over our eyes" with seductive images, fine
print or semi-munchkinized disclaimers, distorted context, numbers games, and memory-penetrating
repetition, Roddenberry as creator of Star Trek was doing the reverse, pulling the wool over the eyes of the television network and the
advertisers —
as best he could.
The inhabitants of Talos IV (note the letters T-V enclosing the name of the planet) were withered and shriveled from watching too much
television. "Living and reliving other lives, left behind in the thought record", was how Vina put it
— a description of a video tape library.
And before Pike's trevails begin, Doctor Boyce warns: "A man either lives life as it happens to him...or he turns his back on it and starts
to wither away...", surely sound advice for America's couch potatoes.
The Cage was about the Captain of a space vessel, trapped, both mentally and physically. The aliens hardly needed to contain Captain Pike
physically, because they already controlled his mind with "manufactured illusions".
Vina tells Pike:
"You're better than the theater to them, they create an illusion for you, they watch you react, feel your emotions; they have a whole
collection of specimens..." This awkward dialogue, smoothly delivered by Susan Oliver, sounds suspiciously like a day of market research with
an audience in a screening room..
One slice of dialogue from Doctor Boyce is particularly revealing:
"Now, let's be sure we understand the danger of this. The inhabitants of this planet can read our minds, they can create illusions out of a
person's thoughts, memories, and experiences, even out of a person's own desires
(emphasis Boyce), illusions just as real and powerful as this tabletop and just as impossible to ignore."
Here Roddenberry puts the television set and the advertising industry right on the "tabletop" in front of us, and still we can't see it!
One can only wonder if the television metaphor seen in The Cage played any part in the pilot's original rejection by the NBC network.
But the obsession with mind control extends far beyond the first two television pilots of the original Star Trek series. With few exceptions
(Doomsday Machine, for example) this preoccupation with mental powers and psychically empowered or repressed states appears in episode after
episode.
end of part 1
(c) 2004 John C Graves
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