Hard wear
Peter Ackroyd
The Black Hole ('U', Odeon, Leicester Square) Star Trek: The Motion Picture ('U', Empire, Leicester Square) I'm sure that I saw wires, during The Black Hole, when some human being, or other piece of hardware, defied gravity and joined the legion of special effects. Of course I might have been mistaken, and the fantasists who boggle mindlessly at science-fiction films wouldn't, in any case, care to notice. This is a Walt Disney production, and manufactured for such people — Captain Nemo, like Peter Pan, still lives. The Nautilus may have changed into the starship Signus, but Disneyland's special touch remains the same.
The old morality play has been dusted down and wheeled on, glittering with star-dust: Maximilian Schell plays the authoritarian heavy, part .genius and part insane, who wields awesome technological powers in pursuit of 'the ultimate certainties'. Since his purpose is to travel through, and beyond, a black hole, the rest of the cast devote themselves to expressing awe and horror in equal proportions. I have always imagined that Walt Disney himself created the scenario, in indirect homage to himself and as a kind of replica of life in Disney Enterprises Inc. The Black Hole, in fact, represents some kind of posthumous tribute to his plastic skills. Everything is here: Gothic horror, spectacle, morality and whimsy.
In this instance, though, the company has failed to work the appropriate magic which binds the ingredients stickily together. The Black Hole has about as much tension as A Hundred And One Da'mations, as much grandeur as The Dog From Outer Space. It depends, in other words, upon its special effects — but cosmic engineering has become so familiar now that it has as much impact as a child's colouring book. But since Disney have relied upon the primitive awe in which such effects were once held, they have not devoted quite enough time (and money) to dialogue. This tends to be of the openmouthed sort, as the film moves immediately into cliché. The black hole itself unleashes a string of epithets which are not so much awkward as contradictory. It is 'straight out of Dante's inferno. . .about to devour the universe. . .a glorious pilgrimage straight into the mind of God. ..and that long, dark tunnel into nowhere'.
What are we to believe? The eyes should have it, and indeed most of the film is a lip-smacking advertisement for the ultimate journey into the 'hole'. When it arrives, though, it resembles a psychedelic, candyfloss version of Fantasia. The imagination has sickened and died; science fiction, on the screen, now seems to rely entirely upon special effects and, as a result, it has become over-blown and under-nourished.
The position of human beings, in films of this kind, is not a happy one; they become vehicles into which the fantasy is poured; they hasie to rival the special effects, or go under. William Shatner's face in Star Trek, for example, is a miracle of advanced technology — the make-up must be a foot thick, but the muscles move perceptibly when he talks; no laser could penetrate the mascara; his hair looks as if it has been woven out of tubular steel. He walks with some difficulty: could he be wearing a corset?
This is time-travel with a vengeance. Star Trek reassembles the entire cast of the television series: Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Chekhov and Captain (now Admiral) Kirk have been, according to the script, drafted on 'a reserve activation clause'. Their mission: to explore new contracts, to earn what no man has earned before. The danger was, of course, that they would simply carry on where they left off— they have, like the robots who have now become the focus of 'human interest' in science-fiction films, been 'programmed'. Bones, his greying hair now plastered down upon his skull, is as earthy and compassionate as ever: 'Why is something we don't know always called a thing?' he demands passionately, as an unknown, alien menace drifts toward the earth. Scotty, the engineer, still cheerfully announces doomsday every 15 seconds: 'I can't guarantee that the ship will hold up, Captain. The deflectors are pretty badly damaged'. Good old Scotty, we know he will do his best. Spock, now looking like some ancient Samurai warrior, is — as ever — cold and contemptuous, battling against the frissons of human emotion which cross his face like clouds of poison gas. And Uhura still looks worried, swivelling around in her 'plastic chair to announce that communications with Star Fleet have been, unpredictably, cut off. But none of them, to put it kindly, are in their prime: the future of the universe is in the hands of geriatrics.
But there is always William Shatner; age cannot wither him, nor custom stale. 'I wouldn't,' he puts it modestly, 'consider myself untried'. He almost cries with relief when he re-enters the Enterprise; the thought of aliens, exuding 'energy of a type never before encountered', brings only a moment of perplexity to his now solidified features: 'I had five years of dealing with unknowns like this'. He doesn't care any more; age has made him joky, whimsical, slightly petulant. He even uses physical gestures to portray emotion, a feat never accomplished on television.
But, despite everything, Star Trek has gone seriously wrong. The series on the small screen was interesting because it was so cheap: when would that rock move? How would Bones mispronounce that word? The director of Star Trek: The Motion Picture has performed a minor miracle: • he has expanded the original situation without making it any larger. But, with 40 million dollars spent on the cinematic sequel, nothing can be permitted to interfere with the special effects. Human beings become inevitable, but relatively inexpensive, extras; that amount of money can only be spent on the hardware. Most of the picture relies upon long, tracking shots of space-shuttles, alien devices, planets which swirl across the scene like metallic marshmallows. Star Trek, in fact, follows the new tradition of the American cinema: if human beings are to be allowed on screen at all, they have to be torn apart (Jaws), disgustingly possessed (Exorcist), or reduced to the role of carbon-units in multi-media extravaganzas (Apocalypse Now). The horror-film industry is now devoted to the proposition that the human body is grotesque; the sciencefiction industry to the contention that it doesn't matter much, anyway. A new barbarism is creeping across the screen; as Star Trek tells us, 'the human adventure is just beginning'.
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