Homoerotics, Heteroperformance, and the Gaze in Star Trek Into Darkness: Why the Abrams Defense Doesn’t Work

(NB: I've seen this movie once, though very recently, and the Conan sequence was edited for time in the version I saw. Any errors in my memory are entirely to be expected from my brain, and I apologise for them. I'm happy to be corrected if my facts are wrong.)

Introduction

In the wake of the recent controversy around a scene in the new Star Trek movie, Into Darkness, in which Science Officer Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) strips down to her underwear, writer Damon Lindelof took to Twitter to offer an apology to fans and moviegoers offended by what they saw as exploitative female bodily display. “I copped to the fact that we should have done a better job of not being gratuitous in our representation of a barely clothed actress,” he wrote on his Twitter feed (@DamonLindelof). “What I’m saying is I hear you, I take responsibility and will be more mindful in the future.” He did, however, qualify the apology thus: “We also had Kirk shirtless in underpants in both movies.” Likewise, director JJ Abrams, appearing on US talk-show Conan on May 22 2013, posited not only the Kirk scene - in which actor Chris Pine is seen shirtless in bed with two scantily clad alien women - as a balance to the Marcus scene, but also suggested that a further sequence, cut from the theatrical release, in which villain John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) showers as the camera pans in on his naked upper torso, effectively answered accusations of sexism.

I want to use this post to argue that these counter-scenes - what I’m referring to as the Abrams Defense - do not, in fact, redress issues of sexual objectification and female bodily display. In doing so, I want to bring in issues of power, dominance, and the Gaze, and to look at the disavowal mechanisms built into the Kirk scene that effectively allow him to reclaim his objectification in a manner denied to Marcus.

On Holidays and inspiration

So, I've been working pretty much non-stop for the past three months - and when I say non-stop, I mean evenings, weekends, lunch breaks, down time at work. It's been stressful, it's been unhealthy, and it's been utterly, bone-wearyingly exhausting, and, worst of all, it's become unproductive. An exhausted brain struggles to be creative; the concomitant reduction in output causes the pace of work to increase in order to compensate; and the whole thing becomes a vicious, ugly circle that leads to nothing good. But what's the alternative? The work needs to be done.

I had a holiday planned, and, as the date got closer and the project still wasn't finished (side note: one day, I will learn not to underestimate how long it will take me to complete any particular piece of writing. Because I'm never right. I could guess sixteen years and it'd end up taking thirty-two. I'm that bad at looking at a volume of work and trying to set a realistic completion date), I started to wonder if I'd have to take my laptop and work in the evenings. The whole idea of that just made me want to cry - and that's not me. Writing doesn't make me want to cry. It makes me want to tear my hair out and yell profanities at the heavens sometimes, but it never, ever causes that level of despair, that sense of "Dear God, just get me away from this because I cannot look at it any more."

So I thought, no. No work. Don't care. It's an arbitrary deadline, based on assumptions that will probably not play out, and if they do, I will deal with that. I am not working on this holiday.

So I took the laptop. But I used it twice: both times for checking Facebook.

As the holiday came to an end, and we were on a coach from Granada to the airport in Malaga, I was thinking that, for the first time in a long time, I felt ready to go, willingly, to my computer and drag a novel out of the depths of this MS that I have written.

And then, unexpectedly, this happened*:


Sc 1: INT - BUS

[RACH is absently scanning the passing hillside when suddenly a RANDOM IMAGE bursts unannounced into her cerebral cortex]

RANDOM IMAGE

Hi! I'm the first scene of your new novel!

RACH

You're my... Wait, what?

RANDOM

Your new novel! Hi!

RACH

Where did you come from?

RANDOM 

...Seriously? You've been writing for how long now?

RACH

Thirty-some years, why?

RANDOM

...And you still want to know where ideas come from? Don't you read Pratchett?

RACH

Good point. Okay, hi! It's been a while, I forget how this goes. 

RANDOM

Yeah, that's really it. Have fun!

RACH

Wait, wait, wait - I only have the first scene! What happens next?

RANDOM

Haha, seriously? 

RACH

...Right. Crap. I forgot. Any chance you could come into focus a little clearer at least?

[RANDOM IDEA fizzles a little, readjusts. Faint shadows become slightly more visible. A name appears.]

RANDOM

Cool?

RACH

Not so much. 

RANDOM

What do you want, a synopsis?

RACH

That'd be great, thanks.

RANDOM

Aren't you just the cutest. 

RACH

Okay, how about a hint?

RANDOM

You're in Spain?

RACH

Yes I am.

RANDOM

Yeah. That was the hint.

RACH

That was the hint? Something completely obvious that I already knew?

RANDOM

Godspeed. See you in a couple of years!

So. I have a new novel...




(*Dramatic reenactment; may not accurately represent events as they transpired)

NEC9X82CRFUQ

And So The Scary Begins...

Well, it is the Year of Living Recklessly. But now there's probably no going back.

What happened was this: I told my landlady that I'm going to have to move out. Why am I going to have to move out? Because I'm off to live in a garret and be a writer.

No, really: an actual garret. Quite a nice one, as it happens, with a very nice velux window and a contraption that's somewhere between a ladder and a staircase that leads down into a second room (bigger than my current sitting room), where I will have a sofa and all my books, and where I will, without question, pace the floor and freak out on the hour, every hour, for the foreseeable future.

Because the garret is in my mother's house. At the age of 34, I'm giving up my independence (and, I can't help thinking, any reasonable chance of ever having sex again) and moving back into the family home. Now, my mother is considerably more spectacular than the average cat ("Seriously, Rachael," she said, "if you're so unhappy with where you are, for God's sake: come and live with me and I'll support you while you go after this thing. Make the brave decision. Do it now." Whose mother actively bitch-slaps their child into giving up work and going after a dream? Mine, that's whose), but the simple fact of the matter is, I haven't got the first clue how to go about doing this. I guess it's going to be a sharp learning curve...

But, you see, I looked at my life and it wasn't the life I wanted, and all of a sudden I could see the walls closing in and I realised that I either do this now - fully commit to it with the kind of grand, romantic gesture that always works out in movies - or I'm going to blink and suddenly there'll be a mortgage and babies (fat chance of that, living in my mum's house...) and Responsibilities with a capital R. And the years will have gone by so fast - faster than they're flying by right now - and life will have happened without me.

It feels like that's started already, and that's the scariest thing of all.

Allow Me To Play You The Song of My People

The sirens are going nuts here. I hope it's just the snow...

Have just spent the better part of a week agonising over what amounts to three fucking paragraphs in this novel of mine. I wish I was exaggerating. I am now at the stage where I experience an actual shudder of revulsion at the thought of returning to it to edit, but return to it I must, because the damn thing needs the work. Reading over it, with my readers' comments, is like looking at it with new eyes (why on earth did I think that handkerchief scene would work? Am I, like, Jane Austen? Am I trying to write Jane Austen/sci-fi crossover fic...?

...Holy shit....

...That would be awesome...

DIBS.

But, no. The answer is no. For the purposes of this novel at least.

/stupid tangent)

but trying to find something to replace the handkerchief scene is remarkably bloody difficult. And then there's that... thing... I don't know if this is something other writers get or if it's just me, where you read back over something you've written, and there's nothing wrong with it, as such, but it's just... the rhythm is off, or something. It's not working, for reasons that I can't put my finger on. God, I feel like Smilla's Sense Of Snow here, but that's the best I can do.

Anyway, these three paragraphs refused, utterly refused, to hit their groove. I have literally just beaten them into submission, and now I'm fighting the rebellious urge to get shit-facedly, fall-over drunk (which I never do) because I'm just so damn ecstatic that I don't have to fight with these words anymore.

And for some reason, everyone on Scrabble right now seems to think it's okay to disappear without warning. Where did all the conscientious Scrabble players go?

(/second stupid tangent)

The Art of Procrastination

It's bad when I'm seriously considering housework over writing.

This is what editing does to me.

Don't get me wrong, I can do it. I'm disciplined enough these days that I can come home after a full day's paying-work, open the laptop, and, ignoring all objections, sit and bloody well hash out a few thousand words. And then I can take a day or so away from them, come back, read them over, and fix the bits that don't work. I can do this even when my inner 2-year-old is moaning and whining and stomping her feet because she doesn't wanna. But for some reason, editing to someone else's notes is just... terrifying.

Why this should be, I'm not entirely clear. The two readers I'm working with at the moment are fantastic: generous, intelligent, knowledgeable, and very clear, and they've given up hours of their life to do me what amounts to the biggest favour I've ever asked. They've actually reinforced my self-belief in a lot of ways, because they've been kind enough to be very positive about the book. Maybe it's because, in order to write, one has to believe that one's work is, essentially, transmitting itself fully-formed to its readership and suggestions for improvement knock that one right out of the water. It's not that I think my novel is perfect - far from it; I can't read over a sentence of the damn thing without wanting to pull it to pieces - it's more that the natural instinct of a writer is to secretly suspect that everything they create is crap, and a beta-read that's doing its job is going to gently encourage that part of the writerly psyche to throw a party.

Or maybe it's just me. I don't know, I'm blatantly procrastinating here so that I don't have to do my edits. Or my laundry.

www.rachaelkelly.com

One Does Not Simply Get An Article Pitch Accepted

So, I've been trying to pitch an article (no shit - that's what the title says!) to an online humour magazine, of which I am a regular and enthusiastic consumer. I'm pretty sure that no-one goes into something like this without secretly imagining that the editor will read their pitch and be dazzled into paroxysms of joy by the quality of this new, undiscovered gem of writing brilliance, but, delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, I didn't exactly expect that it would be easy. Plus, I know from experience that these things are always much harder the first time out than they are on the second or third. But, dear God, what a first time out it was. I think, by mid-week, I was already slightly deranged by sleep deprivation (full-time job, home, work on pitch, go to bed at 1am, and then, because the restless spirit of that goddamn paperclip that used to be the scourge of MS Word has apparently taken up residence inside my skull since being justifiably murdered by Microsoft, my brain would immediately flip into a two-hour cycle of, "It looks like you're trying to sleep! Would you like me to (a) endlessly recycle the past four hours on a three-second loop of crazy, or (b) Shut the fuck up and die? And option B is a lie.)

Then, Thursday evening, after a week of jumping through ever-shrinking hoops of fire, the pitch was unceremoniously rejected.

So, that was fun. My initial reaction, of course, was to throw an epic sulk and decide, ok, fine, that's fine, don't accept my pitch, I don't care I hate you I hate myself I hate EVERYTHING... and then I realised something important.

I am not three years old.

They rejected a pitch, not the being known as Rachael Kelly.

There was a suggestion within the rejection for how it could be made more acceptable.

So, I've spent the past day, which is considerably less time than a week (but I now understand the correct formatting and requirements, you see: second time around!) re-jigging the idea as per suggestions, and have just re-pitched. I await their response with baited breath, but if they don't go for it, what have I lost? Certainly not the right to redefine "Persistent Little Shit" as "Rachael Kelly: Seriously, You Might As Well Just Go With It, Because She's Not Going To Go Away Until You Do."

I think I might finally be ready for this, you know....