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Kirk drift
The Future Is Like Pie #35
Lisa Maria Marquis
July 31, 2023
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
Many years ago, I started to read an essay that explained, in perfect and poignant detail, exactly why everything we know about Captain Kirk is wrong.
Even if you’re not a Star Trek fan, you know the cultural perception of Kirk: an arrogant womanizer, a swaggering cowboy who breaks both rules and hearts wherever he goes. But if you watch the original Star Trek, you won’t actually see those traits. Kirk, as written, was actually fiercely loyal, demonstrably monogamous, duty-bound to his crew, even a bit bookish. It’s almost the Mandela effect—“Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination,” Erin Horakova writes. So why is there such a gap—what she calls “Kirk Drift”—between the observable Kirk and the memorable one?
I dug up the essay again recently and realized that I’d never actually finished it the first time. Admittedly, it’s very long—but very worth the time to follow Horakova down every fascinating rabbit hole, connecting our perception of the captain's masculinity to miniskirts, Horatio Hornblower, modern fascism, collective memory, homophobia, colonialism, Dickens, the limitations of media critique, etc., etc., etc.
The long and short of it: Kirk Drift happens when we retcon our memory of a past cultural product to reflect current cultural tides, even when—maybe especially when—those tides are more harmful than those that shaped the source material:
I’m not saying there wasn’t anything dubious about gender relations in the 1960s in America. I am saying that we have, in some ways, become more wedded to forms of masculinity in entertainment that are violent, in opposition to cooperation and professionalism, and sexist. This is in part a way of enforcing a masculinity currently perceived as imperiled due to unstable and disempowering relations of capital, and as a backlash against the increasing visibility of women and queer people [and people of color].
I mean, hot damn. And it’s not just a risk to Star Trek, either:
All texts run the danger, even if they’ve worked hard to be progressive, or if they yield easily to positive interpretations, of being “rewritten” in the world and even in our minds. […] [All] work that comes from a place of, or offers any potential for, alterity is at risk of being “colonized” by conservative narrative reclamations operating via the mechanism of mismemory. It is not enough for a text to be progressive; its memory must also be defended against this decay.
Seriously—read this essay.
More on gender, media, and cultural critique: this Anne Helen Peterson essay—“Jennifer Lawrence and the History of Cool Girls”—is nearly a decade old, but still relevant, incisive, and excellent. It’s actually more about Clara Bow, Carole Lombard, and Jane Fonda than the title actress. Ow, my twenties:
Cool Girls don’t have the hang-ups of normal girls: They don’t get bogged down by the patriarchy, or worrying about their weight. They’re basically dudes masquerading in beautiful women’s bodies, reaping the privileges of both. But let’s be clear: It’s a performance. It might not be a conscious one, but it’s the way our society implicitly instructs young women on how to be awesome: Be chill and don’t be a downer, act like a dude but look like a supermodel. […] Famous Cool Girls are women who became stars during periods of societal anxiety over increasing freedoms for women, and as people quietly wondered whether women, once emancipated, would become homely, castrating bitches. Cool Girls have been proof positive that a woman could be liberated and progressive and yet pleasing to men, both in appearance and in action.
Because I will never stop losing it over Cat Valente’s writing, here’s a bit from one of her recent newsletters on that suddenly omnipresent picture of Mark Zuckerberg at the gym:
IT’S MARK ZUCKERBERG AND WE ALL SAT DOWN AND AGREED HE WAS A SOULLESS AUTOMATON POWERED BY ESSENTIAL OILS AND OUR GRANDPARENTS’ FEAR YEARS AGO. […] [So] why have I seen this aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-regular-totally-rad-guy-casually-hanging-with-my-totally-unpaid-bros influencer pic jovially posted everywhere like no one remembers this specific actual guy fucked us all. It’s like that whole fever-dream patch of years where half-naked Putin was nippling all over the internet wrestling bears and tigers and grinning nosferatu-ly into the camera like the 1%’s Joe Exotic and very organically and not at all suspiciously the kids loved it and fawned all over him pretending this was wholesome and awesome? WHY ARE WE DOING THIS SHIT AGAIN? NO. DO NOT TRUST THIS BIPED.
Get your (pre-ordering) hands on Ethan Marcotte's new book, You Deserve a Tech Union, which comes out next month. Do this especially if your job is Mostly Computers, and unions feel irrelevant to your professional experience—I assure you, they are not, and this book is the proof. Not only that, but it's incredibly well-researched and beautifully written and truly important. Do not sleep on this.
Oh, and quick reminder that you can buy my books, Everyday Information Architecture and You Should Write a Book, almost anywhere now—not just on the publisher’s website, but also from many online retailers, local bookstores, and libraries. (Don’t see it at yours? You can ask shops and libraries to carry it!)
If you’d like to support the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, here are two ways: Humanitas has set up a Groceries for Writers fund (scroll way down, or go directly to the PayPal donation page and select “Groceries for Writers” from the dropdown). The SAG-AFTRA Foundation has also set up a fund to support striking workers (select “Emergency Assistance” from the dropdown).
Stay safe, stay strong, good luck out there—
<3