Not This Crude Matter

The Force as Something Else in Star Trek

I had initially titled this essay “On Watching Star Trek and feeling Star Wars,” but in writing this and in thinking about my experience of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with you, “watching” can hardly comprise the intimacy of its meaning now. Growing up as a Star Wars fan I have always known Star Trek as the rival franchise. In my brief attempt to watch The Original Series (1966-1969) alone as a teenager, I could not understand it. Star Wars was introduced to me first by my aunt and uncle, through a rented VHS copy of Return of the Jedi (1983)—this is a memory, created or not, that I cherish as a vision—and later by my middle school friends in the midst of the prequels craze (1999-2005). I never had a loved one introduce me to Star Trek—although I somehow have always been familiar with Spock as a cultural phenomenon present during my parents’ teenage years—until you did.

The two franchises are weirdly compared solely on the fact that the two are the biggest “Star” sci-fi series. While my first impression of The Next Generation was that of a space sitcom, far from Star Wars’ space opera, the two series eventually started connecting in my mind.

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In the episode Yesterday’s Enterprise (S3E15, 1990), of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), the Enterprise is thrown in another timeline in which the Federation has been at war with the Klingons for the past 22 years. The episode starts like any other, until a black-hole-like thing appears in space creating a “temporal rift” changing the present. No members of the crew have any awareness of this change, except for Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) who just “knows” it is wrong. Although the viewer knows the timeline has changed—this is initially represented by a ripple-like transition effect, and then through the absence of Worf (Michael Dorn) and the return of Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby)—the episode is carried by an unknowable force that hovers over everything, but that finds its representation in a war that is not supposed to be happening, the different uniforms and the vague knowledge Guinan has of the situation.

While in The Next Generation most invisible threats never remain invisible, the force in Star Wars— first described by Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope as “an energy field created by all living things” that “surrounds us and penetrates us” and “binds the galaxy together.”—is an invisibility that keeps the galaxy together. The force is manifested through kinetic powers, Jedi mind tricks and Darth Vader choking members of the rebellion (and the empire). The force is manifested through its contact with the real, or in the case of Emperor Palpatine, through lightning bolts shooting through one’s fingertips. Although the force is represented, we are made to understand that it is much more than Luke Skywalker levitating a bunch of stones or when Obi-Wan convinces the stormtroopers that these are not the droids they are looking for.

When Luke fails to bring the X-Wing out of the swamps of Dagobah, Yoda tells him that “Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.”—And in the brief months in which I tried to become a buddhist, I remember hearing the same thing, not from a little green fellow, but just a person like anyone else.—The force, although very visual in Star Wars, is an unknown that regiments everything in the galaxy. In its refusal and elusiveness towards a definition, the force is unlimited. In its invisibility, like that of thought, the force assumes a poetic language per Maurice Blanchot (in The Space of Literature), one that “frees us from the weight of things, the natural plenitude.” “Poetry, close to the idea.” He concludes.

Blanchot speaks of this unlimitedness as “what cannot cease speaking.” Wittgenstein, similarly, calls it a space without friction. Blanchot states that if one wants to make this unlimitedness, or murmurs, heard, one must silence it. Wittgenstein writes that “We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” Both writers make an allusion to a sort of space that limits the comprehension of the frictionless, invisible, the unlimited. All of Yoda’s verbal teachings, are then silenced when his little green hand finally lifts Luke’s X-Wing out of the swamp. His mental concentration, coupled with the physical lifting of a heavy object are closer to a definition of the force than he could ever describe in his weird reversed speech.

The invisible in Star Trek demands an answer. The answer is often unknown and the representation always unknowable, or rather it visually appears as knowingly abstract: humanoid energy beings, spatial blobs and talking heads floating in space. When it is known, such as the recurring character “Q” and its human form, it is known only because to assume a known form is the sensible thing to do. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that “But when a poet knows that a living thing in the world is in search of its soul, this means that he is in search of his own.” In order to boldly go where no one has gone before, to explore strange new worlds, the poet must represent the unknown, and in doing so represent themselves. The universe of Star Trek does not have an energy such as the force, which touches everything, but it is certainly not without a soul.

Although almost everything in Star Wars is new to the viewer, the characters rarely deal with it as unknown things. When Luke first sees Yoda in Dagobah he quickly accepts him, even though his species only had three appearances in the whole franchise: Yaddle in The Phantom Menace, Grogu in The Mandalorian and Yoda himself in almost every movie.

Star Trek offers a sense of astonishment with every new encounter. It relies on the new because the unknown finds its body in physical things, representations of energy beings, temporal rifts and black holes. There is not one single thing that binds the galaxy together. The force in Star Wars is not only a way in which the Jedi and the Sith can manifest their power, but it is also, and most importantly, an invisible network of connections that keeps the franchise together in the way it shoos away any need for explanation. While there is no force binding the galaxy together in Star Trek, its invisible connections are felt outside of the television: in the time spent watching and connecting with these characters, the time spent with the person sitting next to me on the couch through a series that is not simply new, but that is theirs. In the distance between person and television resides an invisible more unknowable, mysterious and powerful than any Jedi trick: love.

The astonishment in Star Wars is much more subdued. The amazement is not contained in the way Yoda looks or speaks, but in the way the force flows through him. This is where Blanchot’s “weight of things” comes back: when we remove the astonishment from the material we introduce a language that feels much closer to a beyond. Before Obi-Wan sacrifices himself to Darth Vader he cries “strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can ever imagine.” Obi-Wan’s invisibility lasts until the next episode of the saga, when he appears to a dying Luke Skywalker as a force ghost and tells him to seek Yoda in Dagobah. The astonishment in Star Wars resides on the abilities of the force, but also on how it visualizes and limits itself in its own language.

“The work draws whoever devotes himself to it toward the point where it withstands its impossibility.” (Blanchot in The Space of Literature)

The force in Star Wars is so all-encompassing that it seemingly necessitated a concrete explanation. Manifesting itself through blood cells called “midichlorians,” the force remained invisible after The Phantom Menace, but ceased to be unknown. The force in the prequels became an impossibility for George Lucas, and although the sudden scientific turn the force took has garnered intense criticism, this wanting to represent the unknown is understandable. Without the force, Star Trek takes on the weight of things proudly.

After the “midichlorians,” Star Wars hardly became a visible franchise. The films have always heavily relied on their soundtrack to express what cannot be seen, or what cannot be put into words. The strangeness of a new Star Wars planet is not felt through what it shows or the way its inhabitants act, but rather through the genius of John Williams’ soundtrack. When The Force Theme plays as Luke watches the binary sunset in the beginning of A New Hope, Obi-Wan’s words echo through my mind “… more powerful than you can ever imagine.” And while listening to Yoda’s Theme as I wrote this essay, I think not of the film, but just feel as if the force is flowing through me.

Star Wars and Star Trek, which are maybe only comparable because of their prefixes, are an invisible and visible franchises respectively. Star Wars asks us to understand that not everything can be understood, Star Trek tells us that we can try to understand everything, and if we can’t understand it, seeing it, hearing it, or feeling it might just mean believing.

“How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect.” (Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space)

While Star Wars may stand as an allegory to fatherhood, the unknown, aliens, monsters, androids and blobs in Star Trek have often stood as a frame for human issues: racism, homophobia, the AIDS epidemic, drug addiction, mental health, etc. Being a science fiction television show, the series never directly acknowledges what its episodes are about. Set in the future, Star Trek episodes exaggerate on what is happening in the present. This aspect is common to almost all science-fiction franchises, in which the problems of the present are blown out of proportion, or at least relayed to the future. Star Trek, although, is set “after the present.” In the time of the show, humanity has gone through every single contingency of the Cold War: nuclear fallouts, famines, wars, genocides. With racism, poverty and hunger eradicated from the Earth of the future but certainly still present in our Earth now, these issues are then relayed to other planets and species, but are no less a vessel than they would be in other science-fiction media.

“We also risk being bored by writing that is incapable of condensing the intimacy of the image.” (Bachelard in The Poetics of Space)

Coming to terms with Star Trek now, as a Star Wars fan, has been accepting that what Star Trek does is push the limits of what it means to condense the intimacy of the image. To explore not its strange new worlds, but to explore how to show them. Star Wars is all about the control the invisible has over everything, that the world is built in the distances between things.

Lying on the couch, in the distance between my hand and the television remote, lies a possibility that one day it will fly toward me like Luke’s lightsaber did when he reached out for it in the Wampa’s Lair. I choose to believe that in my inability to have the remote come to me, the force still exists, but I have simply not yet learned how to control it. In the midst of this possibility that the force will one day flow through me, I am content with the fact that Star Trek has shown me that there are other forces to be found. Bachelard, if he had spent time watching Star Trek with a loved one, would have also maybe considered the intimacy we put on the image.

For Sabrina,

May the force engage you.