Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past

1: Fantastic History

Fantastic History If you were a TV watcher in 1968, you might have seen an episode of the original Star Trek (NBC) series titled “Patterns of Force” in which Captain Kirk and his half-Vulcan first officer Mr. Spock visit the planet Ekos. There, they discover that a renegade Federation historian named John Gill has re-created a facsimile of Nazi Germany, with plans to deploy a “final solution” to annihilate the Zeons, a group of foreigners from a nearby planet inhabiting Ekos. The episode includes scenes of Kirk and Spock in Nazi uniforms and a struggle to derail the intended genocide while creatively interpreting the Federation’s “prime directive,” which prevents the Enterprise crew from any disruption of the planet’s cultural development. The climactic scene provides an opportunity for Kirk to decry the evils of the Nazi regime and to express incredulity at his former history teacher having taken it as a model for a utopian society. This episode achieved near-legendary status in the decades to follow, and various incarnations of the Star Trek franchise itself have often revisited the narrative premise of an alternate outcome of World War II, along with countless other alternate history novels, films, and games. The original Star Trek series was digitally remastered for the series’ forty-year anniversary, and when “Patterns of Force” reaired in May 2007, the episode prompted a flurry of responses among Star Trek fans, who circulated shot-by-shot comparisons of the original episode online. A great deal of attention was paid to improved digital effects in the remastered version; however, fans also engaged in lengthy discussions regarding the timeliness of the episode, encouraging viewers to think about “history” and its repetition in relation to the ongoing war in Iraq. While few would consider Star Trek’s return to Nazi Germany culturally significant—and indeed, some might decry the trivialization of this particular historical period—I will argue the opposite. As a series and through its fan activity , Star Trek demonstrates a strong cultural desire to grapple with the deficiencies of mainstream historiography, as do many other works in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. This may be seen in the show’s rampant, even obsessive, returns to key—if predictable—historical moments; in the frequent revisions of timelines to reimagine a different vision of our current world; and in a fascination with the “what-ifs” of history. Taken in aggregate, these returns and revisions constitute a culturally expressive 1 ] 18 · Technologies of History practice of historiography and, as such, deserve critical attention rather than derision or neglect. In short, meaningful historiographical discourse takes place in many more places and cultural forms that we habitually acknowledge. This historiographical discourse generally and the particular histories enabled by digital, recombinant media in particular suggest provocative ways of reconceiving and interacting with the past. In order to attain cultural and historiographical relevance, historical narratives need not aspire to factual accuracy or even plausibility. Instead , they may be “fantastic” (meaning that they may move well into the fictional realm, and even into fantasy), but in retaining a connection to history, they work to confuse the boundary between fact and fiction. In this sense, then, the term “fantastic” echoes the definition offered by Tsvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975), in which he argues that fantastic fiction provokes profound ambiguity between reality and fantasy within the narrative.1 While Todorov deals explicitly with the supernatural, and his project is concerned primarily with codifying a genre, his emphasis on the blurring of boundaries and the ensuing state of indeterminacy experienced by the reader is productive for my purposes, insofar as fantastic historiography may In Star Trek’s “Patterns of Force,” Kirk and Spock go undercover as SS officers to overthrow a Nazi-esque regime instituted by a Federation historian on the planet Ekos. (Paramount, 1968) Fantastic History · 19 similarly invite viewers to reconsider the ontological and epistemological categories—and supposed certainties—of traditional history. More significantly perhaps, fantastic histories serve as a vehicle for expressing present-day obsessions, social anxieties, and cultural aspirations . Often, in their most outlandish configurations—for example, as science fiction—this type of historiography provides a forum for articulating ideal relationships with both past and future. By considering historical constructions that make no recognizable claim to authenticity, desire and fantasy in the imagination of the past is thrown into relief—a...