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The Metonymy of Stat Trek.

Article Excerpt
The Metonymy of Stat Trek. Lincoln Geraghty, Ed. The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008. 244 pp. $35.00 pbk.

* Following Lincoln Geraghty's 2007 book, Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe, this fourth edited collection in the "Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy" series provides multiple critical voices on the place of Star Trek as a media franchise, a cultural text, and as a site for fan appropriation. Appropriate to the genre involved, it also offers some dystopian viewpoints that counterbalance the overarching theme of Utopia found in the earlier book. Geraghty establishes the four key areas this study will explore: the franchise, themes, film and television, and the fans. Since previous studies have tended to focus on The Original Series (TOS), he wants to expand his sample to include "all five series and ten feature films" which form "a gestalt entity greater than the sum of its parts" (3). Geraghty reminds the reader of his previous work on Trek's alignment with the American Jeremiad as a "moral guide" (4) and his continued appreciation for those ordinary fans that are largely overlooked in the field of fan/cultural studies because they don't show up at conventions in full Klingon battle dress. His contributors to The Influence of Star Trek come from specialties in cultural, film, and media studies, fandom, science fiction, Asian American studies, literature, education, and history. They provide, therefore, a diverse set of viewing positions that echo those found in Geraghty's Living with Star Trek and fans' individualized, multiple uses of the Trek canon.

The Franchise: Geraghty reprises his Trek philosophy that the show's notions of Utopia and community are its primary appeal for fans. That the franchise can stand in for words, ideas, and human experience is at the heart of this book. Geraghty applies textual analysis to the opening title sequence of Star Trek's original series and re-states his assessment (from Living with Star Trek) of the opening of enterprise (ENT), the final series in the franchise. This bookend approach helps make his point that, throughout its run and via multiple authorial/production voices, Trek consists of "a few core themes" (12) along with specific elements of story, storyteller, and audience. The opening narrations in TOS and ENT, he notes, establish that these stories of the future are being told--using linguistic strategies and visual cues--as histories. Then, in re-iterating the "overtly American version of history" (18) on the ENT opener (with its images of American aviation milestones), he sets up some of the later essays in this collection which explore the ways in...

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