It’s hard for a guy in his sixties who often poohpoohs the kinds of movies that show up for the masses as latent garbage to admit it, but I sat in a theater surrounded by teenagers watching STAR TREK this weekend. My wife wasn’t interested and had work to do at school, so I went alone, which I rarely do.
And I got a kick out of it.
Driving home, I started thinking about the story that was originally developed by Gene Roddenberry when I was in my early twenties and going to Northwestern (where our theatre history studies started with the development of drama in Greek Mythology) and it has gone through many television and film iterations, each adding or filling out more story parts.
So, two hundred years from now when some theatre history student is perusing mythic drama that draws from the now religious repetition of the relationships of Spock and Kirk, Romulans and Klingons, Earth and the planets where no man has gone before, will that student remember that this was not lost reality which has become part of our culture by belief through repetition?
And will there be atheists who are challenged by the masses because they don’t believe that Spock actually ever existed?