Here’s a fun question: What is the most blatantly anti-capitalistic dialogue that you can think of in a mainstream movie?
Here’s my nominee, from a 1996 science-fiction film:
Character from the future: “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.”
Character from the 21st Century: “No money? You mean you don’t get paid?”
Character from the future: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
This exchange is from the movie Star Trek: First Contact, the seventh of an eventual 13 (so far) films stemming from the original vision of Gene Roddenberry, an atheistic World War II fighter pilot turned TV writer with a vivid vision of the future and who, it is safe to say, would most certainly have been “MeToo”d for his on-set behavior if he hadn’t died in some 25 years before the movement got started. Roddenberry’s idea of the future was not simply a thinly-veiled critique of his day’s social problems, nor merely a backdrop to action stories; instead, he wanted to depict a hopeful future, one in which most of today’s problems would be long past. Once, he was challenged by a reporter about the baldness of his character Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who spoke the radical lines quoted above. The reporter quipped, “Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness,” to which Roddenberry replied: “No, by the 24th century, no one will care.”
Roddenberry’s optimism went beyond bald-acceptance. Back in his 1966 pilot, The Cage, he cast his girlfriend, Majel Barrett, as the ship’s First Officer; when test audiences rejected a woman in such a high position, he still pushed for whatever diversity he could on the Enterprise bridge. The senior communications officer was a black woman, and by the second season two recurring characters were traditional American enemies: one Japanese, another Russian (and unapologetically so). As Roddenberry saw it, so many of our current identities would, by the future, be entirely quaint: the Cold War, race, religion — all of them complete non-issues in the world he imagined.
This vision of the future, however, certainly does not permeate the genre of science fiction. Notably, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is probably the best-remembered science fiction movie of the 60s and is also generally seen as optimistic, depicts a still-tense Cold War, with Russian and American astronauts/spies keeping secrets from one another. And, notably, this is one of the movie’s many anachronisms; by the actual year 2001, that particular chapter of history had been closed for a decade. In trying to imagine the future, Kubrick and Clarke had assumed that the same struggles that shaped their day’s society would continue, maybe in perpetuity. Similarly, Planet of the Apes, also from 1968, imagined (spoiler alert, but seriously the movie is 50+ years old) Earth’s future to be a wasteland managed by a bunch of theocratic apes, human civilization a crumbling warning not to go down the same cursed path.
But the turn of science fiction towards a “grittier” reality really began with Ridley Scott’s bleak 1979 movie, Alien. Unlike the exciting, fast-paced, wondrous technological beauty of 2001 or Star Trek or Star Wars, Scott’s spaceship was cold, ugly, and clunky. Other than the ability to travel to other planets, there was little advanced technology depicted. The characters were decidedly blue-collar, working begrudgingly in the service of “the Company,” completing a difficult and dangerous salvage operation so that they could earn some money, and from the looks of things, not a lot of money either. At the time, this grittiness alienated most reviewers, but it was in fact extremely influential. Scott followed up Alien with another gritty look at the future in his 1982 film Blade Runner, adapted from a dystopian 1968 novel. These films depicted a future awash in the same kind of corporate greed and unpleasant technocratic architecture that, as the computer age dawned, we began to increasingly recognize in our own world. It is hard to imagine our descendants giving up money to “work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” and far easier to see them serving aboard a creaky old ship in the service of some unnamed mega-corporation (who am I kidding, the mega-corporation in space is obviously SpaceX, right?).
In fairness, science fiction has long been a tool to address the problems of today by casting them in a slightly different light. For a particularly relevant example, H.G. Wells gave us, in The Time Machine, a future where the upper class and lower class had diverged into separate species, the former short and dumpy, living in ridiculous ease and stupidity above-ground, while the latter lived entirely underground in miserable conditions, running the horrific industrial machines that powered the lives of the surface-dwellers, only coming up to eat the fat upper-class dwarves whom they kept as more or less cattle. When contemporary sci-fi writers depict the future, they aren’t so much imagining humanity’s future as trying to describe to us, in exaggerated and slightly-altered terms, just what is so wrong with how we live now.
And thus, in the 21st Century, we’ve had an outpouring of particularly “gritty” and “realistic” science fiction, all of which depicts some element of the various challenges of our current era. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2004) gave us a caste-based society where the military and civilian leaders are constantly wrangling for power, and where collaborators helped turn us over to our enemy in exchange for preferential treatment; Interstellar (2014) showed us a world in which “The Blight” had rendered Earth effectively uninhabitable; The Expanse (2015) depicts three distinct races of humans, one of which is decidedly lower-class, worked to the bone and the subject of intense bigotry. We see repeated over and over again the themes of overconsumption, of racism and intolerance, of capitalistic excess and oppression, of the follies of man as we know them.
There is, of course, an entirely different conversation here about what happens when these parables touch on issues of race or gender and get accused by the mob of obnoxious right-leaning white-cis-male youtubers as “woke,” but that is fodder for another essay. The unfortunate backlash inherent in any social commentary aside, it is safe to say that most science fiction today leans towards a “gritty” depiction of a difficult future where technology has advanced but our culture of hatred and greed has not. Which brings me back to Star Trek.
In a media landscape increasingly defined by massive, interconnected “universes,” Star Trek’s contribution has been largely overlooked. Beginning with the 2017 premier of Star Trek: Discovery, there are now 5 concurrently-running television shows (and more in development), all of course on Paramount’s proprietary streaming platform, and all sharing an interconnected “canonical” universe. What’s more, they connect also to the established lore going back to 1966, and the 28 pre-existing seasons of Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise, not to mention the ten movies released over the span of 24 years. Altogether, long before the first modern Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Star Trek has been building its own imaginary timeline, with over 100 years of relatively-consistent internal “history,” starting before Kirk and ending long after Picard. They had an interconnected “universe,” you might say, long before it was cool.
Yet its recent spate of shows has, mostly, fit in better with the darker visions of the future depicted above than with Roddenberry’s idealistic vision. The first season of Discovery is set amidst a brutal war; even the two current lighthearted animated shows depict a flawed and conflict-heavy Federation; and the much-heralded (and, it must be said: exceedingly terrible) Star Trek: Picard entertains, in its second season, a trip to the year 2024, and a slew of not-even-thinly-veiled social commentary about how bad everything is now. Beyond the darker themes, though, the shows are visibly dark, and the mood is not reminiscent of the pastel-colored, happy-go-lucky Kirk era, or the majestic Picard era with one massive flagship jetting about the universe in peacetime, making moral decisions about diplomatic concerns and rarely facing the threat of extermination.
Thus it is with some surprise that the newest entry into this growing canon, entitled Strange New Worlds, is in many ways a throwback to the original Roddenberry sensibilities. Set aboard the starship Enterprise years before Kirk becomes Captain, it is bright — utilizing the same uniforms as the original 1960s show — and uplifting, and what’s more, it’s episodic. Unlike virtually all streaming television, each hourlong show has a separate story that is resolved within an hour, mostly by the wise and heroic actions of its captain, Christopher Pike. Rolling Stone echoes most reviews of the show in calling it “a welcome throwback to episodic adventures and a soothing parable for the grim realities of modern times.” It’s hard not to notice the stark contrast, in theme but also in visual and narrative style, between this new show and pretty much everything else out there right now in the world of science-fiction. It’s delightful, and it’s uplifting, and it’s hopeful.
In the first episode (some minor spoilers), we encounter a planet that — gasp! — has two viciously warring factions, and has developed weapons capable of destroying themselves. Despite the fact that we are not supposed to interfere in the “natural development” of alien worlds, Captain Pike decides to intervene (he defends this decision because it was actually his own actions that unwittingly gave this world the capacity to make such horrific weapons). He shows them images of Earth’s worst conflict, the mid-21st-century nuclear World War III (a long-established fact in Star Trek’s fictional timeline) and insists that the two factions negotiate with one another for peace. It is not a parable about the ultimate failure and hubris of intervention; it is instead a hopeful vision of how humans might be better, and how anyone involved in war might in fact rise above hatred and towards goodness.
Here you might ask: Okay, but if I’m not a Star Trek fan, why does any of this matter? Here is why: While I think there is tremendous value in using science-fiction to point out the absurdity of racism and greed and so on, I think that the “gritter” visions of the future do a bit of a disservice. When we look at our present issues, it’s easy to think that they are inevitable, that it’s somehow “human nature” for people to be this greedy, this selfish, this short-sighted, this hateful towards others. In treating these behaviors as inevitable, even normal, we in effect legitimize them; we accept them. I think that when science fiction shows us a future that looks just like our present, it further reinforces the idea that certain evils are not aberrant, but are in fact just part of being human — and as such, I think that this “grittiness” can inhibit actual change.
When Kubrick imagines that Russia and America will still be participating in spygames 50 years later, he misses a chance to denigrate the absurdity of the Cold War. No one, except someone opportunistically evil or criminally stupid, should ever have taken the Cold War seriously as a conflict of ideologies. Roughly 100% of normal American citizens and normal Russian citizens stood to gain nothing by the endless conflict that took the lives of tens of millions of people globally. But it was taken as a given, and instead of using an imaginary future as an opportunity to point out how backwards the Cold War was, this vision of the future unintentionally reifies the legitimacy of the conflict. [Star Trek note: I’m being fair, the Cold War mentality was even taken as a given by Roddenberry, who although he imagined Russians on the crew of the Enterprise, also swapped in the Klingons, a race with whom we had an ongoing “Cold War” throughout Kirk’s tenure as Captain. That being said, in many ways, this was directly subverted, including by the inclusion of a Klingon officer on the bridge of the new Enterprise in The Next Generation, and multiple plot developments leading to eventual peace].
When Scott imagines that the future will still involve mega-corporations exploiting underpaid workers for profit, yes he casts light on the darkness of our times, but it also subtly implies that this is just the way things are, the only way we can imagine an economy functioning. In its blisteringly “realistic” vision, The Expanse does the same: it makes it seem as though, no matter how well we colonize the solar system or advance technologically, all of the evils of capitalism, alongside the related evils of racism, are here to stay. These dark visions of the future imply that there is no way to have a future that isn’t subject to the same perversions that are heaped upon us now, and as such, that these aren’t perversions.
But they are, truly, perversions. Every time you’re tempted to think of Capitalism as “human nature”, you should remind yourself that humans have existed for 100,000 years, and Capitalism for only a few hundred. Capitalism may be many things, but it is decisively not the natural state for humanity. The idea, for instance, that land should be owned by a tiny caste and then rented out for profit to those who aren’t fortunate enough to have inherited it — this carryover from Feudalism to Capitalism is not a universal human ideal. It has not been present in the majority of human cultures going back through our entire history, and it does not need to be present in the future. Brutally exploitative labor, unfortunately, does have a far longer history, but it certainly isn’t necessary to a functioning economy to have the majority of workers underpaid and poorly-treated; many of us, since even before Marx, have imagined a world in which people are treated with dignity and labor is something shared by all, and not the unique burden of an underclass. In short, it should be possible for us to imagine a better future, and not simply to assert that the worst of Capitalism is permanent, inherent, and unavoidable.
Star Trek, as a whole, is the rare vision of the future that dares to suggest that people will look back on our present time and say “Holy shit, they did WHAT?! They lived HOW?!” And in so doing, it allows us to look at the perverse elements of our society with the correct amount of disdain and shock. In every series of Star Trek, including the “grittier” ones of late, there are sanctimonious, often awkwardly-written speeches about “Federation Values,” which are presumably preferring mercy and nonviolence over confrontation; respecting the independence of other cultures, even at the cost of one’s own life; pursuing curiosity and exploration rather than conquest and exploitation; and accepting diverse lifestyles and cultures without prejudice or judgment. The audacity of Star Trek, as reemphasized by its newest series, is to insist that humanity is capable of these values, and what’s more that someday they may triumph, if only we are awoken from our competitiveness and complacency, and freed from some of the burdens of scarcity and want.
I’m not an optimist out of naivete, and in fact, believing that humanity can be better just makes me all the more susceptible to anger when I observe humanity being worse than even I had thought they could be. But if we genuinely believe that greed, violence, exploitation, and hatred are permanent features of our genome, then why does it matter who wins the Presidency or which countries are bombed to smithereens or allowed to burn or drown in climate disasters? If humanity is so irredeemable that The Expanse really is our future, then what possible moral justification is there for preserving any of our species? I have to believe that the future could be brighter, that it is possible for us to live differently than we do now — more harmonious with each other and with our natural environment, more collectivist in both culture and economy, more noble and less fearful.
I hope that you, like Gene Roddenberry, can also imagine a future where humans are better. And when you see someone doing something like making a lot of money by exploiting others’ labor, or evicting people from a property so that they can raise the rent to market value, or testing the markets to see how much profit they can make from selling insulin to diabetics, and so on — do not write this behavior off as “well that’s just what you have to do today to get by,” or worse, as “human nature.” Greed is an illness and an aberration; we can, and arguably must, strive to be better — “to better ourselves and humanity.”
