SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER

In this essay I noted that I was currently re-reading Wagner and Lundeen's analysis of the STAR TREK franchise, DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. I also noted that I felt a little reluctant to blog further about it, though I only referred to the "chimera" of rebutting points made in a book published over twenty years ago. It's a little different when a critic breaks down an earlier work that still has a following, like Ursula Le Guin's THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I assailed in this essay and the two subsequent posts. Even if I had a larger following, would all that many fans, be it of STAR TREK specifically or of metaphenomenal criticism generally, even care about what Wagner and Lundeen said about "Star Trek in the American Mythos?"

However, one interesting aspect of the authors is their attempt to "serve two masters," as per the Matthew 6:24 quote. In HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PART 2 I attempted to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because they claimed that they were pursuing the course of pluralism, even if they do not do so in the same ways I do. But now that I'm about halfway through the book, I think that the authors' claim to appreciate different paths was just them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Wagner and Lundeen's claim to pluralism appears in the first chapter, following a generalized history of the many intellectual and academic interpretations of myth. In the concluding section, entitled "Plural Vision," Wagner and Lundeen write:

It is possible, when writing about myth, to be so driven toward a preconceived goal that one may select only the material that fits the chosen approach or stretch and whittle it until it does fit. Those who read myth in order to interrogate its hegemonic messages, are likely to write about such subjects as gender, race, ethnicity... [while] those inclined toward the veneration of myth are more likely to focus on heroism, self-transcendence, the achievement of inner wholeness and illumination...

Now that I've read more of the book, it's quite evident that there's a reason why Wagner and Lundeen first listed the critical, reductive analysis of "hegemonic messages," and gave short shrift to the view, expressed by such authorities as Jung and Frye, that myth has its own integral logic that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Though I intend to keep reading, in the first six chapters I've found nothing to justify the book's title. DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. The title sounds like a response to one of mythographer Mircea Eliade's more "transcendental" books on mythology, such as THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN or THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. But Eliade is only cited three times in the index, just like Carl Jung-- which indicates that the authors were just bullshitting about their supposed respect for the non-reductive views of myth.

Since this is just a blogpost, I'll confine myself to one example of the authors' reductive proclivities. Chapter 5, subtitled "Gender in the STAR TREK Cosmos," concludes with a section with the bumptious title "Tinfoil Bikinis and Political Correctness." The authors assert that in the fourth season of STAR TREK VOYAGER, the producers introduced the svelte character "Seven of Nine" to add sex appeal to the series, with the clear implication that for the show's past three seasons not that many fans. hetero or otherwise, were enthralled with the existing female cast-members. Wagner and Lundeen paraphrase a quote by Berman from a 1997 article in which he made some comment about the show having become too "politically correct." The bias of the authors toward the feminist agenda is clearly shown by their response:

If "political correctness" means a sensitivity to feminism and other left-liberal political views, it is probably too simplistic to blame it for the decline of the "sexy" STAR TREK female.

Wagner and Lundeen then veer off any actual estimation of the "correctness" accusation by accusing the Original Series-- the souce of the "tinfoil bikinis"-- of focusing on "women as the sole object of the sexual gaze, with men doing all the gazing." This is not sustainable, not least because Mister Spock managed to attract a sizeable female fandom-- but he did so as men usually do in the real world, through his actions rather than through the use of makeup and attire. One need not be a Jungian essentialist to notice that hetero men and women have different orientations with respect to the opposite sex, and one cannot glibly downgrade any of the TREKs if they reflect that basic experiential truth. In fact, the "sexual gazes" directed at Seven of Nine's smoking body in her skin-tight attire apparently included a number of lesbians, since during the run of VOAYGER, a petition was circulated to declare Seven as having a lesbian relationship with the ship's female captain, as reported in this Wikipedia article.

I've often made fun of overly politicized critics, such as Noah Berlatsky, who blathered about my myth-critical approach without the slightest understanding of the issues involved. But at least he only served one master, unlike the hypocritical authors of this not-so-deep analysis.

ADDENDUM 12-15-21: I considered devoting a separate post to  the remainder of this book now that I've finished it, but I found it such a mixed bag that I don't think it's worth it. There are some okay insights here and there, but in large point this is a "proto-woke" work, continuously complaining about the STAR TREK franchise's lack of proper intersectionality. Even after admitting that the shows are all television programs that must use human actors for the majority of their players, the authors STILL fault the shows for being too anthropocentric, and so they are guilty of a fundamental dishonesty, throwing out valid reasons for production procedures and then dismissing those reasons out of hand. 

Though there have been Far Left studies with inventive points of view, Wagner and Lundeen are largely derivative and unoriginal in their analyses. The only puzzling aspect of their work is that I don't know why they stuck the phrase "sacred time" in their title. They correctly attribute the phrase to Mircea Eliade, and even quote the context correctly. But given that the authors are mildly hostile toward the claims of any religious hegemonies-- as was, BTW, Gene Roddenberry-- it's clear that they aren't the least bit concerned with the philosophical aspects of Eliade's idea. Maybe in some fashion they viewed Eliade's concept of a originary time before time itself started as some sort of "modernism," which they incorrectly associate with cultural traditionalism. But if so, they failed to make that association clear, and so their whole project shortchanges their readers as well as their "two masters."