Hollywood Utopia

160 Hollywood Utopia
idea that without community and citizenship 22 there is no liberation, only the most
vulnerable and temporal armistice between an individual and oppression. The
often apparent communion between human and alien culture is reminiscent of the
communitarian philosophy which affords a necessary bulwark to the selfish
individualism underscored by the mythic American dream that over-determines
hierarchical individualism at the expense of a form of symbiotic egalitarianism.
This dualistic model amounts to the demand to ‘be like me or disappear’ (Haber
1994: 126). This tension between individualism and community remains ever
present, if often buried and unresolved in the later series, especially through
narrative closure. But, as Honi Fern Haber persuasively affirms, ‘[C]ommunity
must not mean a shedding of our difference, nor the pathetic pretence that these
differences do not exist’ (ibid.: 113). This paradox becomes most pronounced and
often contradictory in encounters with ‘Body Snatcher type organisms’ called the
Borg.
More recent episodes and film spin-offs serve to dramatise a range of permutations
implicit within ecological strategies of self-determination, evolving from
individualist to totalitarian systems and which address in often diametrically
opposed ways the primary ecological directive of organic survival, played out within
a range of ‘exotic’ habitats. Like the ‘Body Snatchers’, the Borg also promise a
‘better quality of life’ but demand in return the sacrifice of individuality and
emotion, like any totalitarian regime. They promise ‘optimisation through effective
use of component parts, rather than perfection of individuals through an improved
understanding of the transcendent ideal of human nature’. The Borg finally
threatens the ‘annihilation of difference through assimilation’ (Harrison et al.
1996: 108) and embodies the antithesis of the Prime Directive, which is too big a
price to pay even for the most fundamentalist, deep ecologists.
Star Trek: The Next Generation prophesied an end to the Cold War by declaring
peace between Klingon and human cultures, and offered the cyborg organism, as
opposed to the ‘Body Snatchers’ prototype, as a more progressive model of human
subjectivity. While the original series also foregrounded non-humans like Spock,
nonetheless their otherness was framed as only an exaggerated aspect of human
psychology. Spock’s dominant (Vulcan) rationality and logicality had to be
tempered with human frailty to become fully acceptable and functional. This helps
to offset Bernardi’s reading of a racist agenda beneath the stereotyping, since what
the othered characters embody is often a powerful antidote to the apparently
hegemonic (white) consensus and agency.
The new Borg enemy reflects an even more advanced form of ecological organism,
which uses all life forms in its endless quest for continuous adaptability and
evolution. Unlike the libertarian notion of citizenship and individuality espoused in
earlier series, the Borg symbolically embodies a coherent macro system and its