Barbie has been a summer juggernaut as a cinematic feature despite outrage from the right in the United States. Dean Obeidallah argues that conservative boycotts and backlash only have traction in specific niches where their adherents are the majority of the market.
One wonders if Paramount will take note as they strategically rebrand their streaming offerings. Unfortunately, it seems they’ve been headed in the other direction.
While Discovery led the way in representation across many diverse groups, some of us have been concerned that Picard season three pulled back to more traditional gender roles and an emphasis on white cis-male heroes. SNW has a large female main cast, but the OG female command officer Number One doesn’t seem to be getting much opportunity to show heroic leadership.
Thought this conversation might be less fraught over here at Quark’s.
I don’t think any of the new Trek shows are progressive at all, and never have been. And neither is the Barbie movie. While they do regularly pay lip service to progressive liberal politics similarly to fan service “remember this guy/this issue/this political stance”, it never feels like more than a marketing campaign let alone something genuine.
Even worse, most of the actual politics have shifted to a US-centric “progressive imperialism” with the main characters basically encouraging CIA-ish regime change campaigns, showing no mercy to their enemies as long as is convenient to the plot, and for some reason constantly circling back to American issues, history and structures, even worse than old Trek that already struggled with that. (Why did Tilly go to something like a Junior High? Are you trying to tell me the American school system was the model for the Federation? Why is Jan 6th at fault for World War III? Why name-drop Elon Musk?) And instead of recognizing sexism, racism and all other forms of oppression as what they are - systemic products of a capitalist economy pitting different parts of the working class against each other - they are portrayed as conflicts between identities and experiences. Sexism means men are oppressors, racism means whites are oppressors, transphobia means cis people are oppressors. While of course they are in no way both equally victims of these systems of oppression, there is no doubt that all working people suffer from those lines of division and they did not pop out of nowhere: they developed out of objective, economic circumstances. Men are not categorically and intrinsically at fault for sexism, capitalism historically profits off of it. Old Trek kind of understood that every bigotry has a material, economic basis. New Trek doesn’t. This is a huge step back in progressiveness.
As someone who happens to be nonbinary and wear plenty of other minority labels, I feel much, much more at home in, say, DS9, than in Discovery, Picard or Strange New Worlds. The trans characters in the latter feel like upper class academic writing room representations of minorities right out of a Hollywood PSA, while people like Dax felt like genuine working class people I know while also being very cool representations of what I consider trans people. Of course, you can have overt and out trans people too, and you can be explicit in what you represent (a good actually gay character instead of constant queercoding like Garashir would have been cool), but it is so sanctimonious and misses the point completely in new Trek. I want a cool character who happens to be queer, not someone who is written explicitly to be that representation so the writers can advertise with how diverse their cast is.
Golden-age Star Trek has never ignored social issues; instead, it always projected the ills of our current-day society onto alien societies or specific groups, and contrasted it to the Federation as the shining example of what to do better. Ferengi showcased how sexism and greed were grotesque, Romulans were a critique of shadow governments and secret services, Cardassians were a critique of fascism and imperialism, and so on and so on. New Trek on the other hand seems hell-bent on making the Federation itself struggle with the exact same societal ills. We don’t have the “good guys” anymore who show us what humanity can be, but instead we have transphobia still being an issue, racism being an issue, sexism being an issue and so on, in this so-called utopia. Until, of course, they inevitably and confusingly praise how far they have come and how the future is without any ills although we clearly see the issues they still face.
What is the message of that? That humanity can never really improve or get away from its bigoted roots. The exact opposite of what I want from a progressive TV show.
One episode of DS9 that recently stood out as amazingly progressive was “Dr. Bashir, I Presume” where we get to meet Julian’s parents; the way they held conversations was incredibly realistic to how non-American, somewhat broken family dynamics work. Word for word, it was almost scary. In contrast, DSC/PIC/SNW dialogue feels painfully screenwritten in a way that is hard to describe; almost like they tried writing for an advertisement or a corporation image building movie. “We at Google believe in an inclusive, interconnected culture where people from all over the world can come together and celebrate diversity” writing style. Utterly devoid of humanity. When I watch new Trek, I feel like I am watching an advertisement for something. Everything’s glowy, glossy, right out of some Hollywood writer’s fantasy, nothing is authentic or anything I can relate to as a regular worker.