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April Selley

SOURCE: "'I Have Been, and Ever Shall Be, Your Friend': Star Trek, The Deerslayer and the American Romance," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer, 1986, pp. 89-104.

[In the following essay, Selley focuses on the relationship between Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock in the television, film, and literary series Star Trek, identifying it in the tradition of mythic male friendship initiated in American literature by Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.]

D. H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler have noted that the most enduring and respected American "classics" revolve around the friendships of two males, usually of two different races—Natty and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim.¹ It is thus appropriate that the classic television series Star Trek and the three films it has spawned also focus upon the friendship between an American, white male, Captain Kirk, and the alien, green-blooded Mr. Spock. Their personalities and their adventures in the unknown form the backbone and backdrop of their friendship, which especially resembles that of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in The Deerslayer. In conjunction with the other Leatherstocking Tales, The Deerslayer provides the first significant portrayal of close male friendships in American literature. In both The Deerslayer and Star Trek, the male friendships do not constitute an escape from responsibility toward others, but rather an escape from time and its limitations—from the burdens of the past and ancestors and the complications of the future and descendants. Ultimately, both Star Trek and The Deerslayer are American romances as characterized by Joel Porte in The Romance in America and Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel.

In Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler describes the mythic friendship which is so familiar to Cooper's—and to Star Trek's—audiences

Two mythic figures have detached themselves from the text of Cooper's books and have entered the free domain of our dreams; Natty Bumppo, the hunter and enemy of cities; and Chingachgook, nature's nobleman and Vanishing American. But these two between them postulate a third myth, an archetypal relationship which also haunts the American psyche: two lonely men, one darkskinned, one white, bent together over a carefully guarded fire in the virgin heart of the American wilderness; they have forsaken all others for the sake of the austere, almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love which binds them to each other and to the world of nature which they have preferred to civilization.²

Although Kirk and Spock bend over their computer consoles aboard the starship Enterprise rather than over campfires, they too have forsaken the comfortable world of the safe and the civilized for (as the opening of each episode says) "space, the final frontier" in order "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." The Star Trek series presented an exploratory five-year space mission in which Captain Kirk, like Natty Bumppo, was the romantic hero, the scout in the wilderness preparing the way for those who would follow.

In the novel version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, series creator Gene Roddenberry "quotes" a Captain Kirk who bears a striking resemblance to Natty Bumppo in his independence and conservatism. In "Admiral Kirk's Preface" Kirk writes of himself and his fellow Starfleet captains:

We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us. We submit ourselves to starship discipline because we know it is made necessary by the realities of deep-space exploration. We are proud that each of us has accepted this discipline voluntarily—and doubly proud when neither temptation nor jeopardy is able to shake our obedience to the oath we have taken.³

"Temptation" (from the passions, usually incited by women) and "jeopardy" (from the unknown) present the greatest dangers to Kirk and Natty, and their self-discipline seems harsh when viewed by softer, more self-indulgent people in "civilization." Thus Kirk notes that some critics characterize the members of Starfleet as "primitives'." He readily admits that Starfleet's officers

resemble our forebears of a couple of centuries ago more than they resemble most people today. We are not part of those increasingly large numbers of humans who seem willing to submerge their own identities into the groups to which they belong.⁴

The latter breed of human being, according to Kirk, "makes a poor space traveler,"⁵ however.

And yet both Natty and Kirk are modest about their "gifts." Kirk protests that he has been "painted somewhat larger than life,"⁶ as Natty might protest to Cooper, especially about Natty's portrayal in the last two Leatherstocking novels which critics have noted as the most mythic. Natty and Kirk are modest not only because it is seemly for heroes to be so, but also because they both feel like outsiders and have a humble perception of their intellectual abilities. The "lack of intellectual agility"⁷ of which Kirk speaks and the "simplicity of mind"⁸ with which Cooper endows the illiterate Natty place them squarely in the American tradition of self-reliant heroes who are honest and forthright because excessive education has not made them artful and deceptive. Both Kirk and Natty are guided by experience and intuition on their respective frontiers, where they have acquired common sense and manly courage, but not the foolhardiness of a Hurry Harry. As Kirk says, "I have never happily invited injury; I have disliked in the extreme every duty circumstance which required me to risk my life."⁹ Yet, since both Natty and Kirk can more effectively prove their loyalty, integrity, strength, endurance, agility and stoicism in combat, both The Deerslayer and Star Trek are filled with violent action. Moreover, both Natty and Kirk must constantly confront death, the frontier beyond even the vast forest and limitless space. The possibility of death subtly reminds the heroes (and the reader) that something always remains mysterious and unconquerable. This awareness keeps the heroes' abilities in perspective—their constant cheating of death endows them with self-reliance and mythic stature, yet their ultimate susceptibility to death as human beings keeps them humble and emotionally sensitive to their own and their friends' transience.

But it is through their friendships—Kirk's with Mr. Spock and Natty's with Chingachgook—that the heroes most effectively demonstrate both their manly independence and emotional sensitivity. Kirk's and Spock's relationship parallels that which D. H. Lawrence describes between Natty and Chingachgook in The Deerslayer: "Each obeys the other when the moment arrives. And each is stark and dumb in the other's presence, starkly himself, without illusion created."¹⁰ Although Kirk is Spock's superior officer, Kirk relies upon Spock for the purely logical advice which Spock's Vulcan heritage makes possible. Kirk—like Natty, who praises "white man's reason" over instinct¹¹ admires Spock's stoic unemotionalism. This unemotionalism, if it doesn't allow for softness, also does not allow for the revenge and the other meannesses associated with violent emotion, meannesses which Kirk finds contemptible. Captain Kirk's code, like Natty's, "does not allow him to plunder, exploit, or kill in hate."¹² Kirk is humane, like the United Federation of Planets to which he owes allegiance. However, as Richard Chase points out about Natty Bumppo, "the ideal American image" is that "of a man who is a killer but nevertheless has natural piety."¹³

Thus Kirk and Bumppo must retain their passionate, killer instinct; it is all the more to their credit if they can control this instinct and utilize it constructively. In The Deerslayer Natty Bumppo demonstrates his killer instinct by wantonly shooting the eagle, which symbolically illustrates, as Joel Porte notes, Bumppo's "mastery over the American wilderness."¹⁴ But Natty is sorely repentant afterwards, not only because his natural piety tells him to respect all life, but because killing the eagle demonstrates loss of control over his lower instincts, such as pride.

Similarly, Star Trek calls attention to Kirk's ability to control his "killer" instincts. In "The Enemy Within" episode, Kirk is divided into his "good" and "evil" sides, and he discovers that his "animal" side gives him the power of command. Spock tells Kirk's "good" side, which is marginally and indecisively in command of the Enterprise, "Your negative energy was removed from you by that duplication process. Thus, the power of command has begun to fail you."¹⁵ In "Mirror, Mirror," several crewmembers from the Enterprise are accidentally exchanged with their brutal counterparts in a parallel universe. When the Enterprise crewmembers are finally returned, Spock tells Kirk that "It was much easier for you, as civilized men, to act as barbarians, than it was for them, as barbarians, to act as civilized men." Spock then looks at Kirk, as if to say he knows how much Kirk enjoyed the barbarian role. So there is still the barbarian in Kirk, which also allows him to subdue an alien commander in "Arena" in order to save the lives of his crew (although Kirk significantly spares the commander's life). Interestingly, Kirk's antagonist in "Arena" is a huge reptile, thus placing Kirk in the role of archangel slaying the dragon-devil.¹⁶ So Kirk is also involved in the cosmic struggle between good and evil; like Natty he is aware

that he can maintain his goodness in a fallen world only by means of a strict moral code, devilish cunning, and a deadly weapon. His is a goodness that takes evil tacitly into account, a militant goodness that protects its purity by being always on guard against the enemy.¹⁷

Kirk's self-defensive actions parallel Natty's when Natty must kill the two treacherous Hurons.

Kirk's and Natty's actions are of a distinctively American character. Chase points out that "The novelty in the conception of Natty Bumppo and his descendants is the irony of their double personality, and it is this that sets Cooper's hero apart from the softer, less ironic natural piety of a Rousseauistic or Wordsworthian man."¹⁸ The American Romantic hero has "The 'hard, isolate, stoic,' or 'Indian' quality" which "gives the image uniqueness." As Chase explains, "The romantic individual or solitary hero of nineteenth-century European literature had never been exposed to New England Puritanism or to frontier conditions, and this makes a difference."¹⁹

Natty admires Chingachgook for his stoic qualities and tries to emulate them as far as his "gifts allow," as Kirk tries to emulate Spock without imitating him. While the frontier, whether on earth or in space, tests men's stoic qualities, it also preserves those qualities by keeping the hero and his companion away from domestic entanglements which might separate them from each other. "Nature undefiled .. . is the inevitable setting of the Sacred Marriage of males."²⁰ Fiedler notes that this "Sacred Marriage" "blends with the myth of running away to sea, of running the great river down to the sea."²¹ And, of course, most of The Deerslayer takes place on the wide and long Glimmerglass. On Star Trek, "voyages" are made on a star ship and Captain Kirk identifies himself with ships' captains of old (on one episode, Kirk even quotes from John Masefield's poem "Sea Fever"). Moreover, most of the starships introduced on Star Trek—the Enterprise, the Vigilant, the Columbia, the Defiant—bear the names of America's Cup Defenders.

But the "ocean of space" is not merely parallel to oceans on earth; the two are intrinsically related, R.W.B. Lewis explains the metaphoric relationship between the two oceans when he speaks about the evolution of the American Adamic hero:

The evolution of the hero as Adam in the fiction of the New World—an evolution which coincides precisely, as I believe, with the evolution of the hero of American fiction generally—begins rightly with Natty Bumppo. I call such a figure the hero in space, in two senses of the word. First, the hero seems to take his start outside time, or on the very outer edges of it, so that his location is essentially in space alone; and, second, his initial habitat is space as spaciousness, as the unbounded, the area of total possibility. The Adamic hero is discovered, as an old stage direction might have it, "surrounded, detached in measureless oceans of space."²²

Gene Roddenberry placed his heroes in a third kind of space, outer space, and outer space has even more direct affinities with the ocean. Man evolved from creatures in the sea, but before that, earth was formed from the materials of space. Star Trek essentially affirms that space was the common mother of all. The Enterprise crew not only discover "humanoids" throughout the galaxy, but civilizations parallel to earth civilizations as well: to the Greeks' in "Plato's Stepchildren"; to the Romans' in "Bread and Circuses"; to the American Indians' in "The Paradise Syndrome." But the Enterprise crew also discovers that Eden does not exist on any planet.

The planet on Star Trek, like the shore for Cooper, Melville and Twain, represents civilization, corruption and stagnation. Even planets which appear to be paradisiacal turn out to be otherwise. In "This Way to Eden," a band of space "hippies" finally find an uninhabited, garden-like planet, only to discover that all of its vegetation is poisonous. In "The Apple," the people on Gamma Trianguli VI are cared for by the godlike Vaal. They never have to work and are completely innocent, but they are dull-witted and accomplish and produce nothing—neither the food they eat nor children. They are thus completely susceptible to Vaal's whims—and to any changes in the environment which Vaal proves unable to control.

But "This Side of Paradise" provides Star Trek's best illustration that paradise cannot be attained by settling on a planet. In this episode, plant spores produce a blissful high in the planet's colonists and in Kirk's mutinied crew, including Spock. The episode ends with Dr. McCoy (Star Trek's foil to Mr. Spock, since McCoy relies primarily on emotion when making judgments) commenting: "That's the second time that Man has been thrown out of Paradise." Kirk replies:

No—this time we walked out on our own. Maybe we don't belong in Paradise, Bones. Maybe we're meant to fight our way through. Struggle. Claw our way up, fighting every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of lutes, Bones—we must march to the sound of drums.²³

Of course Kirk and Spock, like Natty and Chingachgook, would eventually become bored in Paradise.

Kirk is cynical about the spores throughout the episode: "No wants or needs? We weren't meant for that, any of us. A man stagnates and goes sour if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is." Sandoval, the leader of the expedition, protests, "We have what we need," but Kirk merely reiterates his position more vehemently: "Except a challenge! You haven't made a bit of progress here. You're not creating or learning, Sandoval. You're backsliding—rotting away in your paradise."²⁴ Later, when released from the spores' influence, Sandoval laments, "We do nothing here," and after talking of the lost years, he tells Kirk, "I'd—we'd—like to get some work done." Man must struggle, produce, achieve. Similarly, Cooper's Chingachgook looks forward to hunting and fishing in Paradise after death.²⁵

In "This Side of Paradise," Sandoval's enthusiasm for release from the spores' influence is not shared by botanist Leila Kalomi, who represents another corrupting influence on planets and in civilization—women. Leila had fallen in love with Spock years before. Now, with the spores that she originally discovered, she has released Spock's human half, and, for the first time on the Star Trek series, has compelled him to fall in love. Spock is almost killed by the spores' initial aftereffects (thus demonstrating women's capacity for destruction, which will be handled in more detail later). But he is finally subdued, almost literally domesticated, and walks around the settlement like everyone else—contented but seemingly lobotomized.

Kirk is initially angered by Spock's abandonment of his duties, and later by the desertion of his crew; this anger allows him to resist the spores himself. The hard, stoic, killer American quality emerges in Kirk. In the words of James Blish's adaptation of the screenplay, "As peace and love and tranquility settled around him like a soggy blanket, he was blazing."²⁶ Kirk begins reclaiming his crew by provoking the killer instinct in Spock, and he succeeds admirably: "Spock was striking out with killer force, and with all the science of his once-warrior race."²⁷ Interestingly, when Spock's old self is restored, he has no desire to return to his euphoric state. Together, Kirk and Spock resourcefully build a subsonic transmitter to negate the spores' influence on everyone else. The episode ends, as nearly all Star Trek episodes end, with the Enterprise heading out into the freedom—and comparative security—of space.

Leila is just one of many aggressive females portrayed in Star Trek, all of whom come from outside the Enterprise's crew and disappear after one episode. The female crew members do not present the same threats as outsiders because they are part of the world of the "sea" rather than the "shore." Indeed, Gene Roddenberry originally wanted the Spock role to be played by a woman. However, NBC executives in the late 1960s claimed that a woman would not be accepted as commanding and unemotional. The only regular female characters retained on the bridge of the Enterprise were the businesslike and efficient, but feminine, communications officer, Lt. Uhura, and Capt. Kirk's secretary, the young blond with a very obvious crush on the captain, Yeoman Rand.²⁸

With their positions of responsibility, the women on board the Enterprise were way ahead of their time for prime-time television. But other women intruded into the Enterprise world only to entice Kirk, Spock and other crew members away from their work. Kirk and Spock are consistently rescuing each other from the romantic Dark Lady, so like Judith Hutter in The Deerslayer,²⁹ whose worldly experience has resulted in her becoming "cautious, rational and practiced in her handling of men. [She exemplifies] resourcefulness, . . . pragmatic intelligence, . . . and frank sexuality."³⁰ Judith offers Natty paradise when she asks him, after her father's death, to take possession of her heart, the ark, the castle and the lake. But Natty refuses, of course. And although much of The Deerslayer concerns Chingachgook's rescue of his beloved Hist, he, too, is solitary at the end of the book. Hist "slumbers beneath the pines of the Delawares,"³¹ apparently having lived only long enough to give Chingachgook a son who becomes the inseparable companion of Natty and Chingachgook, assuming the role of the child in their celibate "marriage."

Similarly, Kirk and Spock resist restrictive marriages with women in episodes which allow them to prove their loyalty to one another. In the first episode shown in Sfar Trek's second season, "Amok Time," Spock is compelled by primordial drives to return to the planet Vulcan or die, and to marry T'pring, to whom he has been betrothed since childhood. Kirk, disregarding Starfleet's orders to the contrary ("He [Spock] has saved my life a dozen times. Isn't that worth a career?"), takes Spock to Vulcan, where the treacherous T'pring, as is her right, compels Spock to battle for her hand. She selects Kirk as Spock's opponent. Kirk is willing to give his life for Spock, and when Spock believes that he has killed Kirk, his desire for T'pring (Spock later calls it "madness") is gone. When the distraught Spock bids farewell to a Vulcan elder and is told to "Live long and prosper," he declares, "I will do neither, for I have killed my captain, and my friend."³² Of course Kirk is alive, and star trekking continues.

In "The Paradise Syndrome" shown during Star Trek's third season, Spock saves Kirk. Kirk loses his memory on a planet whose inhabitants resemble American Indians. They assume that Kirk is a god, and he is told by Miramanee, the daughter of the chief, that custom decrees they should be married. When the Enterprise returns two months later, Miramanee is pregnant and Kirk is deliriously happy. In order to restore Kirk's memory, Spock uses the Vulcan mind meld, a telepathic fusion of minds which makes literally possible "the marriage of true minds," the fleshless, Sacred Marriage of which Fiedler speaks. Once his memory is restored, Kirk does not wish to return to his idyll, and Miramanee dies from internal injuries sustained when she and Kirk were stoned earlier. (Curiously, Miramanee's fate, for being the only woman to marry Kirk and to compromise the relationship between him and Spock, is to die by the ancient Hebrew method of punishing women taken in adultery.)

Miramanee's love for Kirk cannot save her, and her fate parallels that of another gentle, beautiful woman, Edith Keeler, in one of Star Trek's most popular episodes, "The City on the Edge of Forever." Kirk falls in love with Keeler, who runs a soup kitchen during the American Depression, where Kirk and Spock find themselves. Keeler is listed in the episode's credits as "Sister" Edith Keeler, probably to emphasize her pure, almost nunlike, quality. She resembles Hetty Hutter in The Deerslayer, whom Cooper characterizes as "one of those mysterious links between the material and immaterial world . . . [who] offer so beautiful an illustration of the truth, purity, and simplicity of another."³³ Kirk's admiration for Keeler's optimism and altruism reveals Kirk's own deep humanity, despite his job of making life and death decisions in harsh situations, as Natty's respect for Hetty demonstrates his own spiritual side. Although Kirk is romantically attracted to Keeler, his chivalrous affection is reminiscent of Deerslayer's for Hetty.

But, like Hetty, Edith cannot survive in a corrupt "civilization"—one headed for World War Two. And, like Hetty, Edith dies. She is hit by a car, the quintessential symbol, as Fitzgerald so eloquently portrays it in The Great Gatsby, of careless, corrupt power.³⁴ Coincidentally, it is Spock (in order to restore history to its original sequence and save millions of lives) who urges Kirk not to save Keeler when they see the car coming.

Thus the non-crew women on Star Trek are either angels, who must die like Stowe's little Eva and other romantic secular saints, or, what is more commonly the case, demons. Star Trek presented a plethora of these artful and intelligent seductresses; Elaan in "Elaan of Troyius," Lenore in "The Conscience of the King," and Sylvia in "Catspaw" even try to murder Kirk. But it is the last episode aired during Star Trek's third season, "Turnabout Intruder," which has remained an embarrassment to those associated with the series.³⁵ Based on a story by Gene Roddenberry, "Turnabout Intruder" is about Janice Lester, a woman scientist who was once in love with Kirk. Feeling that she never became a starship captain only because she was a woman (admittedly Star Trek never has presented a female starship captain), Lester engineers a machine to switch her mind into Kirk's body, and vice-versa. As Captain, she proves to be emotionally volatile to the point of irrationality, viciously ordering the executions of all who would mutiny against her. Thus, what Chase says about the portrayal of women in Cooper's novels is true of the characterization of non-crew women on Star Trek: women tend "to be seen obliquely and with a rather covert displeasure, or unhappy fascination, or secret vindictiveness."³⁶

It is women's intelligence which makes them dangerous, thus reflecting Natty's observation about Judith that "the Evil Spirit delights more to dwell in an artful body than in one that has no cunning to work upon." Commenting on this remark, Porte explains why intelligent women in American fiction are associated with evil;

Here Cooper not only institutes an association of sex with the head that was to become standard in the American romance, but also combines in Natty's reaction our national ambivalence toward sexuality and what many observers consider our native anti-intellectualism.³⁷

Yet the conniving woman serves an important purpose in both The Deerslayer and Star Trek. As the pure woman allows Natty and Kirk to see and to show the goodness within themselves, the dark lady forces the hero to face "his own duplex nature—the light and darkness within himself—and the duplex nature of experience generally."³⁸ If Kirk, like Natty, is to combine "prelapsarian virtue with postlapsarian knowledge,"³⁹ he must confront Janice Lesters as well as Edith Keelers, Judiths as well as Hettys.⁴⁰

But it is in the Star Trek films that Admiral Kirk and Capt. Spock come closest to losing all faults, attaining prelapsarian virtue and postlapsarian knowledge, and becoming most like Natty and Chingachgook. Neither Kirk nor Spock become romantically involved with anyone in the Star Trek films, nor does any woman attempt to seduce them. Their celibacy makes them purer and more mythic;⁴¹ "the real mythic action is the ritual reassertion of celibacy, the purification and escape from the taint of sex."⁴² Indeed, in the novel Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Roddenberry even takes pains to establish that Kirk and Spock are not homosexual lovers, ending with the reminder that Spock comes "into sexual heat only once every seven years."⁴³

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk's former lover, Dr. Carol Marcus, and their son, David, are introduced. However, there are no longer any sparks between Carol and Kirk; indeed, Kirk stands at a distance from Carol whenever they are together. Like Chingachgook at the end of The Deerslayer and Natty at the end of The Pathfinder, Kirk has apparently put romance behind him. Kirk's emotional responses are reserved for Spock. Spock "dies" in the film, giving his life to save Kirk, Carol, David and the Enterprise crew. Although the dying Spock states that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one," his last words are for Kirk alone: "I have been, and ever shall be, your friend." Shortly afterwards, David tells Kirk, with whom David has had an uneasy relationship throughout the film, that he is proud to be Kirk's son. But Kirk's response to David is nowhere near as emotional as Kirk's response to Spock's death, indicating that the most intense relationship in the film is not that between father and son but between friend and friend.

In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, David dies, giving his life for Spock and Lt. Saavik, a half Vulcan, half Romulan woman with whom David has been exploring the planet Genesis. David's fate is especially relevant to this essay. He is Kirk's only family. But American mythic heroes, like Kirk and Natty Bumppo, have no family ties and only vague origins. Lewis explains why this is so:

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.⁴⁴

Indeed, Star Trek shrouded Kirk's family in mystery. The only family members seen on the series, Kirk's brother and his wife and children, were introduced and died in "Operation—Annihilate."

David also parallels Chingachgook's son, Uncas. But of course Uncas dies in The Last of the Mohicans. When Chingachgook mourns that he has been left alone by the death of his son, Natty reassures him:

"No, no, no, Sagamore, not alone. The gifts of our colors may be different, but God hath so placed us as to journey in the same path. I have no kin, and I may also say, like you, no people. . . . The boy has left us for a time; but, Sagamore, you are not alone."⁴⁵

Similarly, Kirk is "not alone" at the end of The Search for Spock because his best friend has been restored to him. Both the opening and closing words of the film reiterate Spock's friendship with Kirk: "I have been, and ever shall be, your friend."

Of course, Spock does have a family. His father, Sarek, and his mother, Amanda, were introduced in "Journey to Babel." Yet Sarek's and Amanda's roles serve more to illustrate Spock's devotion to Kirk, and vice versa, than Spock's devotion to his parents, since Vulcan logic prevents any display of sentimental filial emotion. When Amanda tells Kirk that Sarek and Spock have not spoken for eighteen years, Kirk replies that Spock is his best friend. Thus the bond between Kirk and Spock appears even closer by contrast with the relationship between Spock and his father. Amanda is reassured by Kirk's and Spock's friendship as she goes on to establish Spock's position as the outsider (the Chingachgook-Jim-Queequeg figure): "I am glad he has such a friend. It hasn't been easy for Spock—neither Vulcan nor human; at home nowhere, except Starfleet"⁴⁶—and one might add, with Capt. Kirk. In "The Ultimate Computer," Spock tells Kirk why M-5, although "practical," is not a "desirable" starship captain: "A Starship, Captain, also runs on loyalty, loyalty to a man—one man. Nothing can replace it. Nor him."⁴⁷

Sarek appears again in The Search for Spock, and he tells Kirk that the cost of Spock's rescue has been Kirk's son and his ship. Kirk replies, "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul." When the resurrected Spock asks why Kirk went to such lengths to rescue him, Kirk replies that "the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." The individual, and his relationships, have highest priority. At the end of the film, Kirk and Spock are left together, surrounded by the bridge crew of the Enterprise, and Sarek is conspicuously excluded from the circle.

It is important that the heroes Kirk and Spock are not left alone immediately at the end of the film. The American myth does elevate male friendships—in the works of authors from Cooper to Melville and Twain to Fitzgerald to Hemingway. But the American myth is not one of perennial carefree boyhood, as some critics have suggested. The representative American hero is not the selfseeking and dangerous Tom Sawyer, as it is not Tom Hutter or Tom Buchanan. Rather, our representative hero is the moral, sad, conscientious Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, Nick Carroway and Capt. Kirk. If the American hero is plagued by anything, it is precisely the curse and blessing of prelapsarian virtue in a postlapsarian world in which the hero has attained postlapsarian knowledge. The hero's virtue combined with his knowledge produce the sensitive intelligence which alone makes compassion possible. This compassion compels the American hero to be the most responsible of men—the man who is his brother's keeper, but who must continually leave the world of the shore or planet because he finds it too painful to watch others' selfishness. At the end of The Search for Spock, the American, the Vulcan, the Scotsman, the Russian, the Oriental and the Black stand together in the harmony of mutual esteem, loyalty and responsibility, all second Adams, "American" Adams, who have shown their willingness to lay down their careers and their lives for their friends.

Thus The Search for Spock shows more than the closeness of Kirk's and Spock's friendship. It illustrates that the closest thing to paradise is man's harmony with his friends, achieved in a world where, as in Eden, time does not seem to exist since one has no parents or children whose aging reminds one of one's own mortality. As if to reiterate that Eden must be found in relationships, not in a place or time, The Search for Spock proves once again that paradise cannot exist on a planet. With his mother, Kirk's son David has "created" the planet Genesis from nonliving matter. At the end of The Wrath of Khan, Genesis looks like the wilderness celebrated in The Deerslayer. But the intrusion of "rational" beings leads to the corruption of both the Genesis and Glimmerglass wildernesses. David and Saavik, like Adam and Eve before the fall, explore Genesis, but there is a snake in the Garden. The Klingons, who resemble traditional portraits of Satan, want the secret of Genesis to use as an ultimate weapon.

The Klingons and their Romulan allies are Star Trek's version of the warlike Hurons. Both Klingons and Romulans share ancestors with the now-peaceful Vulcans as the Huron Indians do with the peaceful Delawares, to whose tribe Chingachgook belongs. Klingons do everything for the greater glory of their Empire. No individual loyalties take priority over the Empire's rules. Indeed, at the beginning of The Search for Spock, Kruge, a Klingon commander, illustrates that the "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one" by unhesitatingly destroying his lover's spaceship in order to maintain security. The conformist Klingons contrast in every way with the members of the Federation. David brought life from non-life (indeed, following in his father's footsteps, he even broke some rules to do so). But the Klingons, the greedy and exploitative Tom Hutters and Hurry Hurrys of space, bring non-life from life. They commit the first murder on Genesis by killing David/Adam. But the idyllic Genesis cannot last once it is corrupted. The planet begins to disintegrate as Kirk and Kruge fight until Kirk must kill Kruge in self-defense. At the point of the planet's dissolution, Spock, whose resurrected body has been growing from infancy as the planet aged, reaches maturity. He is a Christ figure (his burial clothes are left in his casket like the Shroud of Turin), the second Adam who comes to restore the lost Eden through friendship and caring. Like Christ's, his relationships after his resurrection are with his friends rather than with his family.

At the end of The Search for Spock, all vestiges of man's presence are absorbed into space with the disintegration of Genesis and of the Enterprise. Similarly, at the end of The Deerslayer Tom Hutter's ark and castle and other reminders of man's intrusion are being absorbed back into nature. Yet The Deerslayer, although it deals with the earliest period of Natty Bumppo's life as recorded in the Leatherstocking novels, was the last of the tales to be written. Thus not only Cooper, but his readers as well, knew that the wilderness around the Glimmerglass was already vanishing in reality.⁴⁸ Indeed, in order to find the true wilderness, Natty and Chingachgook must, in Huck Finn's words, "light out for the territory" at the end of The Deerslayer, as they do at the end of each of the Leatherstocking novels until Natty, in his old age, lights out for the final territory of death in The Prairie.

Cooper calls attention to the exploitation of the wilderness in the last sentence of The Deerslayer: "We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true." But he qualifies this melancholy thought by saying "though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities and mitigating if not excusing his crimes."⁴⁹ Cooper is not only referring to the "pure spirit" of the fragile and ephemeral Hetty Hutters, but to the resilient Nattys and Chingachgooks, Kirks and Spocks, whose friendships are harmonious with the wilderness. The Search for Spock ends with the words "The adventure continues." Like Christ, who ascended into heaven after 40 days, Kirk and Spock, we are to assume, return to space, for the last shot in the movie is of the sky above Vulcan. But wherever the adventure continues, Star Trek is a quintessential American romance, and that may well be the principal reason for its enormous appeal.

NOTES

¹ See further comments on the relationship between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in Leslie Fiedler, A Fiedler Reader (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), p. 6; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 47-63; and Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), pp. 162-214.

² Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 192.

³ Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), pp. 5-6.

⁴Ibid., p. 6.

⁵Ibid., p. 6.

⁶Ibid., p. 7.

⁷Ibid., p. 7.

⁸ James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 136.

⁹ Roddenberry, p. 8.

¹⁰ Lawrence, p. 44.

¹¹ Cooper, p. 136.

¹² Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p. 62.

¹³Ibid., p. 63.

¹⁴ Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 5. See pp. 3-5 for more on the significance of shooting the eagle.

¹⁵ James Blish, Star Trek 8 (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 47. After repeated viewings of every Star Trek episode and film, I can quote many lines from memory and will do so in the text. When I cannot remember a line verbatim, I will refer to James Blish's adaptations of the scripts, except when Blish's words differ radically from the scripts as I recall them.

¹⁶ The name "James Tiberius Kirk" itself has religious significance. There are a number of Jameses in the New Testament, including James, the "brother" of Jesus, who became the leader of the Christian Church in Jerusalem. Another James wrote the General Epistle of James, which declares that "faith without works is dead" (Jas. 2:17-26), a sentiment which would be shared by Capt. Kirk and Natty Bumppo. "Tiberius" was the Roman emperor who ruled in the lifetime of Christ. And "kirk" of course means "church." Although not a member of any established church, Capt. Kirk has a name which establishes his "natural piety." (Of course, Tiberius was a good, and then a ruthless, ruler.)

¹⁷ Porte, p. 27.

¹⁸ Chase, p. 63.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 63.

²⁰ Fiedler, "Come Back," p. 9.

²¹Ibid., p. 9.

²² R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 91.

²³ James Blish, Star Trek 5 (New York: Bantam, 1972), pp. 71-2.

²⁴Ibid., p. 68.

²⁵ Cooper, p. 423.

²⁶ Blish, Star Trek 5, p. 65.

²⁷ Blish, Star Trek 5, p. 70.

²⁸ The Yeoman Rand character was dropped after Star Trek's first season, probably because Kirk's character could not fall in love with her and retain his position of respect. On the other hand, if Rand lost her crush on Kirk, her character presented no plot possibilities.

²⁹ For an in-depth study of the romantic "dark lady" see Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. by Angus Davidson (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1951), Chapter 4. The seductive women in Star Trek are not always dark-haired. It is interesting that in James Blish's adaptation of "This Side of Paradise," Leila Kalomi is Eurasian, although Leila was played on the episode by $$' ond, blue-eyed Jill Ireland. Blish says in his "Preface" to Star Trek 12 that although he adapts theoretically shooting scripts, those scripts do not reflect last-minute changes made during filming.

On Star Trek, almost all women from outside the Enterprise crew are dark ladies, not necessarily in coloring, but certainly in their power over men. Even the most gentle one among them, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hilda in The Marble Faun, is capable of becoming what Porte calls "a worse and more subtle tyrant: not only the gentle guardian of religion and culture, but simultaneously an incitement to licence and desire—at once demanding respectful love and obedience and inspiring lust" (p. 101).

³⁰ David Brion Davis, "The Deerslayer, A Democratic Knight of the Wilderness: Cooper, 1841," in Twelve Original Essays on Great American novels, ed., Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1958), p. 7.

³¹ Cooper, p. 532.

³² According to Leonard Nimoy, who plays Spock, this line "defined the essence of that relationship [between Kirk and Spock] for me." See William Shatner, Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, Shatner: Where No Man (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1979), p. 190.

³³ Cooper, p. 521.

³⁴ Interestingly enough, Edith Keeler was played by actress Joan Collins, who before this role had, and since has, always portrayed a vamp.

³⁵ See Gene Roddenberry's and Leonard Nimoy's comments on "Turnabout Intruder" in Shatner, Marshak and Culbreath, p. 194.

³⁶ Chase, p. 64.

³⁷ Porte, p. 23.

³⁸Ibid., p. 10.

³⁹Ibid., p. 27.

⁴⁰ Cooper has a harsh attitude toward Judith Hutter, since he implies at the end of The Deerslayer that she becomes the mistress of the reprehensible Capt. Warley. However, the twentieth-century reader is more likely to regard Judith as Cooper's most interesting, complex and ultimately admirable heroine.

⁴¹ The Star Trek series, no doubt restricted by censors in 1966-69, usually was vague about the actual consummation of male-female relationships. In "Wink of an Eye," there is a brief scene in Kirk's quarters when he is pulling on his boots and Deela is brushing her hair, and in "Bread and Circuses," a beautiful woman is sent into Kirk's bedroom before he is scheduled to be put to death. Otherwise, Kirk's and Spock's relationships with women, to borrow from Oscar Wilde, appear to have been "passionately celibate."

⁴² Chase, p. 55.

⁴³ Roddenberry, p. 22.

⁴⁴ Lewis, p. 5.

⁴⁵ As quoted by Fiedler in Love and Death, pp. 211-12.

⁴⁶ James Blish, Star Trek 4 (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 48.

⁴⁷ James Blish, Star Trek 9 (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 44.

⁴⁸ For further reflections on the end of The Deerslayer see Donald Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 88.

⁴⁹ Cooper, p. 534.