Guilty pleasures

At the urging of my friend Thomas, I'm starting up the blog again. Facebook put a real damper on my posting enthusiasm, but I think I can base my entries on status updates and see what happens.

Right now, we are in the middle of watching episodes from the original Star Trek series. A trip to the theater to see the J.J. Abrams reboot got me curious to revisit these blasts from my past. I vividly remember coming home from elementary school and turning on the tv, face pressed to the cool black naugahyde of our family couch, and hearing that familiar refrain: "Space, the final frontier..."

What's even more interesting is recognizing the quality of the scripts involved. Yes, the special effects are cheesy. One of the episodes had Kirk and Spock thrown against the wall of the ship, and the thing buckled like cheap foam board (which it was). For the most part, however, the stories are really good.

And then there's that special relationship between two of the main characters. There is real chemistry among the three main characters, but especially between Kirk and Spock. Curiously, the Kirk/Spock dichotomy led to the birth of slash fiction, and I've read through some of these creative attempts during the last week. Mostly, they are pitiful, with multiple points of view, lots of heavy breathing, and too many adverbs. But it's also hard to stop reading. It's kind of fun, actually.

Author Henry Jenkins explains why this kind of fan-created fiction is so popular, especially among heterosexual women:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series.

Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.”

As Spock might say, "Fascinating."