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anghraineIncidentally, my best friend J happened across a copy of the famous novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and gave it to me for Christmas last year. We have been doing dramatic readings of the chapters to each other, complete with air quotes and loudly emphasizing the many, many, many unnecessarily quoted or italicized words/phrases/paragraphs. Although it was fun in its own unhinged way, it was also kind of shocking to realize just how terrible Roddenberry's... like, everything was without being able to lean on good writing/editorial staff like Sturgeon and Fontana, figures like Gene L. Coon to temper his worst impulses, the visual brilliance of people like Jerry Finnerman and William Ware Theiss, and the warmth and charisma brought to even much of the weaker writing by superb theatrical actors like Nichols, Shatner, and Nimoy. For all the novelization's extreme sleaziness, it is one of the coldest and most inhuman-feeling published novels I've ever encountered.
The attempts to salvage the footnote are largely nonsense, IMO—like, yes, it does accidentally imply that Kirk is just a bisexual who rather prefers women rather than a totally super manly straight guy, and his description of Spock and their super special eternal psychic bond does sound incredibly gay, but this is clearly because Roddenberry was constitutionally incapable of writing about any relationships in a non-horny way and loathed women. He was definitely going for desperately recuperating Kirk as the hypermasculine hyper-heterosexual seasoned middle-aged commanding captain figure with a weakness for women but also distaste for them that he'd always envisioned for his ideal of "the captain" (it's all over his writing of April and then Pike), and his resentment of what TOS Kirk actually became in the show is extremely visible (his Kirk dismisses TOS Kirk as a twee fictionalized version he actually hates and TOS in general as terrible and fake, unlike the real story in the novelization, etc). Like, it's 100% an attempt at no-homo and gender essentialism, he's just very bad at no-homo and also at writing people.
But the thing is, the footnote (and the other material straining to find a heterosexual explanation for TOS) may be - and is - homophobic, but this is actually the least of the novelization's problems. It is even more misogynistic, racist, incredibly petty, and so incredibly awkward that I was starting to think "justice for the OG Mary Sue writers, they were far better than this and honestly seem to have understood Star Trek itself rather better," given the weird 70s dystopia aspects he's got going.
In my opinion, TOS was never really going for the flat unchallenging utopianism of much of TNG that's often projected backwards onto it, but it was still quasi-utopian, a world vastly improved from the real one even if it inherited present-day problems in some form that would always have to be addressed, and which held out hope of a society that would iteratively improve upon itself. Episodes like "Arena" imply that our heroes, as aspirational as they are, are going to seem incredibly flawed to the Federation of the future, Zefram Cochrane-like figures who were instrumental in building the better world of their peoples' future but would seem backwards and embarrassing to those who live in it. But the novelization swings hard into cynicism that is not even in TMP itself, and while the film is extremely uneven and far from a particularly organic continuation of TOS (it very obviously functions more as a soft reboot to reset the characters to pop culture familiarity that is only more egregious in The Wrath of Khan, and has extremely rough-draft versions of characters like Riker and Troi that falter badly without the charm and presence of the more refined versions), it's not remotely answerable for the crimes of the novelization.
It's not really dystopian, and even the ways it's less hopeful than TOS are mostly just byproducts of being a weak sequel that needs to re-introduce the cast; the cultures are not dystopian at all, there's nothing like Roddenberry going on about senior members of Starfleet being outfitted with neural implants etc. But then again, Roddenberry doesn't seem to even understand the film, leaning on the most boring shit imaginable, time-jumping past scenes with real emotional stakes or cutting them sharply down or even altering the dialogue to have less emotion and personality. He openly denies that the characters' motives are what they appear to be (like Uhura being the only one who consistently has Kirk's back in TMP gets turned into a) she doesn't actually and b) the worst writing of a female character's interiority I've seen in a very long time, with her thinking about sex as men claiming women and being described as "the fine-featured Bantu," that Kirk jumping into space to rescue Spock is anything but captainly logic, etc). It works so hard to deny Decker's grating faults in the film, including denying that he shows bitterness at all and insisting his mistakes were actually just misunderstandings and blahblahblah, that we went from slight asides about "okay, it's obviously trying to launder Decker quite a bit from the movie" to just calling it the Decker laundromat (in the course of this, it manages to imply that Decker basically sexually assaulted V'ger through what is horrifyingly described as love play while repeatedly emphasizing that the Ilia probe didn't initially understand it, that Decker himself didn't know Ilia was "active" or that the probe could understand, and that V'ger thought it was being attacked).
Roddenberry also somehow manages to make a) heterosexual sex, b) women's breasts, and c) being a man with a sex drive sound like the most unappealing things imaginable.
So yeah, the Footnote really is that bad, but also, it's still one of the least bad things. Also, anyone who cites it as proof of heterosexuality or whatever has to ignore an entire mountain of everything else in it, including the novelization itself insisting it doesn't share continuity with TOS anyway, but also things like describing Ilia's breasts behaving like compass needles and continually referring to Sulu as "the Asian" with the occasional adjective ("the romantic Asian," "the all too scrutable Asian") and what J and I have taken to calling "the fuck deck" area of the Enterprise. Details only from the novelization being so absolutely inescapable in K/S fic, like Kirk's marriage to Lori Ciana (or Ciani; it doesn't care enough to be consistent about her name or personality, and she basically only exists to have a woman around to be misogynistic at before brutally killing her off once the cast includes Uhura, Chapel, and Ilia), are 100x more baffling now. Even the t'hy'la thing, while yes, high-impact shipping fodder, are pretty much completely unnecessary compared to what's already in TOS while the rest of it is just O_O.
(ngl, every time I get a "and as a bonus, William Shatner would hate it" comment on the f/f AU, I'm just thinking ... couldn't care less and in any case, I suspect 'Star Trek fans sometimes imagine your 30-something self as a hot curvy blonde who has lesbian sex, what's your opinion?' is not exactly among his top ten worst fandom experiences, but if there was a guy who I do think would genuinely hate everything I'm doing as well as me in general, it's Roddenberry, and I do get some enjoyment out of that.)
The attempts to salvage the footnote are largely nonsense, IMO—like, yes, it does accidentally imply that Kirk is just a bisexual who rather prefers women rather than a totally super manly straight guy, and his description of Spock and their super special eternal psychic bond does sound incredibly gay, but this is clearly because Roddenberry was constitutionally incapable of writing about any relationships in a non-horny way and loathed women. He was definitely going for desperately recuperating Kirk as the hypermasculine hyper-heterosexual seasoned middle-aged commanding captain figure with a weakness for women but also distaste for them that he'd always envisioned for his ideal of "the captain" (it's all over his writing of April and then Pike), and his resentment of what TOS Kirk actually became in the show is extremely visible (his Kirk dismisses TOS Kirk as a twee fictionalized version he actually hates and TOS in general as terrible and fake, unlike the real story in the novelization, etc). Like, it's 100% an attempt at no-homo and gender essentialism, he's just very bad at no-homo and also at writing people.
But the thing is, the footnote (and the other material straining to find a heterosexual explanation for TOS) may be - and is - homophobic, but this is actually the least of the novelization's problems. It is even more misogynistic, racist, incredibly petty, and so incredibly awkward that I was starting to think "justice for the OG Mary Sue writers, they were far better than this and honestly seem to have understood Star Trek itself rather better," given the weird 70s dystopia aspects he's got going.
In my opinion, TOS was never really going for the flat unchallenging utopianism of much of TNG that's often projected backwards onto it, but it was still quasi-utopian, a world vastly improved from the real one even if it inherited present-day problems in some form that would always have to be addressed, and which held out hope of a society that would iteratively improve upon itself. Episodes like "Arena" imply that our heroes, as aspirational as they are, are going to seem incredibly flawed to the Federation of the future, Zefram Cochrane-like figures who were instrumental in building the better world of their peoples' future but would seem backwards and embarrassing to those who live in it. But the novelization swings hard into cynicism that is not even in TMP itself, and while the film is extremely uneven and far from a particularly organic continuation of TOS (it very obviously functions more as a soft reboot to reset the characters to pop culture familiarity that is only more egregious in The Wrath of Khan, and has extremely rough-draft versions of characters like Riker and Troi that falter badly without the charm and presence of the more refined versions), it's not remotely answerable for the crimes of the novelization.
It's not really dystopian, and even the ways it's less hopeful than TOS are mostly just byproducts of being a weak sequel that needs to re-introduce the cast; the cultures are not dystopian at all, there's nothing like Roddenberry going on about senior members of Starfleet being outfitted with neural implants etc. But then again, Roddenberry doesn't seem to even understand the film, leaning on the most boring shit imaginable, time-jumping past scenes with real emotional stakes or cutting them sharply down or even altering the dialogue to have less emotion and personality. He openly denies that the characters' motives are what they appear to be (like Uhura being the only one who consistently has Kirk's back in TMP gets turned into a) she doesn't actually and b) the worst writing of a female character's interiority I've seen in a very long time, with her thinking about sex as men claiming women and being described as "the fine-featured Bantu," that Kirk jumping into space to rescue Spock is anything but captainly logic, etc). It works so hard to deny Decker's grating faults in the film, including denying that he shows bitterness at all and insisting his mistakes were actually just misunderstandings and blahblahblah, that we went from slight asides about "okay, it's obviously trying to launder Decker quite a bit from the movie" to just calling it the Decker laundromat (in the course of this, it manages to imply that Decker basically sexually assaulted V'ger through what is horrifyingly described as love play while repeatedly emphasizing that the Ilia probe didn't initially understand it, that Decker himself didn't know Ilia was "active" or that the probe could understand, and that V'ger thought it was being attacked).
Roddenberry also somehow manages to make a) heterosexual sex, b) women's breasts, and c) being a man with a sex drive sound like the most unappealing things imaginable.
So yeah, the Footnote really is that bad, but also, it's still one of the least bad things. Also, anyone who cites it as proof of heterosexuality or whatever has to ignore an entire mountain of everything else in it, including the novelization itself insisting it doesn't share continuity with TOS anyway, but also things like describing Ilia's breasts behaving like compass needles and continually referring to Sulu as "the Asian" with the occasional adjective ("the romantic Asian," "the all too scrutable Asian") and what J and I have taken to calling "the fuck deck" area of the Enterprise. Details only from the novelization being so absolutely inescapable in K/S fic, like Kirk's marriage to Lori Ciana (or Ciani; it doesn't care enough to be consistent about her name or personality, and she basically only exists to have a woman around to be misogynistic at before brutally killing her off once the cast includes Uhura, Chapel, and Ilia), are 100x more baffling now. Even the t'hy'la thing, while yes, high-impact shipping fodder, are pretty much completely unnecessary compared to what's already in TOS while the rest of it is just O_O.
(ngl, every time I get a "and as a bonus, William Shatner would hate it" comment on the f/f AU, I'm just thinking ... couldn't care less and in any case, I suspect 'Star Trek fans sometimes imagine your 30-something self as a hot curvy blonde who has lesbian sex, what's your opinion?' is not exactly among his top ten worst fandom experiences, but if there was a guy who I do think would genuinely hate everything I'm doing as well as me in general, it's Roddenberry, and I do get some enjoyment out of that.)
