Also, "Kirk-drift" Is a Term I Need to Use Somewhere

[moon_custafer]

 Rewatching TOS a couple of months ago, I'd noticed that cannon!Kirk is almost completely different than the popular image of the character, but Erin Horakova in Strange Horizons goes into more detail (and semiotics theory, so, y'know, brace yourselves for that).

Especially good points --
1. Everyone knows Nimoy was Jewish, not so many people know Shatner is, and it's something to take into account as part of the subtext in stories like "The Conscience of the King."
2. A lot of Kirk's "conquests" in TOS are more like "Kirk plays along with the situation/distracts the guard."

Comments

[sovay]

Everyone knows Nimoy was Jewish, not so many people know Shatner is

I especially appreciated both of those sections and this conclusion:

"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."

Points also for dybbuks.

[moon_custafer]

What I think of as the tv-commercial portrayal of heterosexuality (the men are all knuckle-dragging ids who will do anything to avoid a conversation with their wives/girlfriends, which is kind of understandable because the women are all nagging harpies)....

[sovay]

(the men are all knuckle-dragging ids who will do anything to avoid a conversation with their wives/girlfriends, which is kind of understandable because the women are all nagging harpies)

*sets everything on fire forever*

[sovay]

(Weirdly, it had never occurred to me that people didn't know Shatner was Jewish. Discussion of the film The Intruder (1962) may also be relevant here.)

[moon_custafer]

I hadn't heard of that film -- always interesting to hear about someone's early roles. I've read some reviews from the early days of the Stratford Festival in which Shatner gets mentioned a fair bit for his supporting roles; but also Don Harron (who went on to have a long long Canadian career as a sketch and character comic, mainly as malaprop-speaking PEI farmer Charlie Farquharson) was apparently a really cold-blooded Octavius in "Julius Caesar." Future novelist and CanLit figure Timothy Findlay was a really handsome background extra, and Dan "Letter from Wingfield Farm" Needles was Petruchio, played against the script as a nervous Harold Lloyd type blustering his way through his courtship with Kate, unaware that she was doing the same thing.

[sovay]

I hadn't heard of that film -- always interesting to hear about someone's early roles.

It's black-and-white low-budget, much more obscure than most of Corman's B-pictures, and ridiculously good. Probably because it was made by white people in 1962, while the black characters are all clearly people with interiority and sympathy, they are not as dynamic in the plot as the white characters acting on different degrees of racism or anti-racism, but Shatner is great as white supremacist Adam Cramer, a kind of anti-Freedom Rider come from out of town—hence the name—to instigate a race riot in fictional Caxton, Missouri over the recent order to desegregate the schools, and the film's ending is much more realistic and equivocal than most race pictures of the time. I never wrote about it and maybe should, after all the other things I've promised to, argh.

and Dan "Letter from Wingfield Farm" Needles was Petruchio, played against the script as a nervous Harold Lloyd type blustering his way through his courtship with Kate, unaware that she was doing the same thing.

You know, it may not be possible to save any production of The Taming of the Shrew, but a production in which they are both awkwardly and semi-successfully going through what they believe to be the expected motions of heternormativity would be a lot more interesting to me than almost any other attempt I've heard of.

[moon_custafer]

BTW, have you ever seen Russ Meyer's film "Mudhoney" (1965) ? It's less like his other stuff (though there is nudity) and more like "Night of the Hunter." Black and white Southern Gothic about a Depression-era drifter who falls in love with the abused wife of the nephew of the farmer who hires him as a hand.

[sovay]

BTW, have you ever seen Russ Meyer's film "Mudhoney" (1965) ?

Never, but it sounds weird enough that I should.

[stardreamer]

I wish someone would do a setting of TotS played dead straight, so that the misogyny and abuse are impossible to ignore under bursts of laughter.

[sovay]

I wish someone would do a setting of TotS played dead straight, so that the misogyny and abuse are impossible to ignore under bursts of laughter.

The closest I've seen is the BBC Television Shakepeare production from 1980, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring John Cleese and Sarah Badel, which took the text as a serious expression of early modern concepts of love that are inextricable from hierarchy and obedience and as a result was a lot like watching a play from an alien planet that happened to be in English, containing a lot of words that sounded recognizable and meant things utterly different. It in no way defused the difficulty of the play for a modern audience, but also didn't attempt to disguise it. Theodora Goss wrote beautifully about it once, in a post that has since been lost to link rot, but the excerpt I preserved is: "Petruchio is to Katherine as a falconer is to a falcon, and the falconer loves the falcon precisely because it is a falcon. Which will not prevent him from trying to tame it."

As a sidebar:

[dewline]

You need to recode that link. I had to hand-edit to get to where you want us to go.

Re: As a sidebar:

[moon_custafer]

I think I managed to fix it.

Re: As a sidebar:

[dewline]

Yep!

Getting to "The Conscience of the King"

[dewline]

Whether "the King" is Kirk or Kodos...that whole business of that episode is far more horrific than I understood at first viewing.

Re: Getting to "The Conscience of the King"

[stardreamer]

I've seen two really good fanfics that incorporate the Kodos section of Kirk's life. One is a back-story fic in which Spock and Kirk meet for the first time on one of the rescue ships; the other is a New!Trek fic in which we learn that Kirk was left with a whole lot of weird food allergies stemming from his abuse and starvation on Kodos, and that's just background information, not the focus of the story.

[moon_custafer]

This is confusing but interesting (particularly the bit about Colombo and the bit about Hyacinthus, both of which I shall need to think about for a while), and the author seems to suffer a bit from Tiny Wittgenstein: http://tinyletter.com/Mallory_Ortberg/letters/captain-james-t-kirk-is-a-beautiful-lesbian-and-i-contend-daily-with-my-feelings

[sovay]

This is confusing but interesting (particularly the bit about Colombo and the bit about Hyacinthus, both of which I shall need to think about for a while), and the author seems to suffer a bit from Tiny Wittgenstein

So a lot of Mallory Ortberg's writing for The Toast did not work for me, but this succeeds immediately in making me want to watch the 1976 episode of Columbo, so I think its job is done.