And yet I am counting down the days to this premiere with a level of fannish excitement I haven’t felt in years. It’s a pleasant feeling, yes. But it’s a guilty pleasure, because it also triggers my fannish shame. You know what I mean: that little voice in your head that prevents you from mentioning your fandom hobby on job interviews or blind dates. Granted, culturally, this is less of a thing than it used to be. I’m old enough to remember the pre-Star Wars era, when the word Trekkie was never spoken affectionately by anyone who wasn’t one. When I reached high school, I made a conscious vow to myself never to mention Star Trek to anyone unless they brought it up first. That little shame-voice has been with me for a long, long time.
It’s the voice that’s telling me it’s dumb to squee about…
ARAMIS IN SPACE.
That’s right. Santiago Cabrera, who played Aramis in the BBC’s The Musketeers, of which I am rather a fan, is playing Chris Rios in the latest iteration of Star Trek, a franchise of which I am a huge dork of a fan. In my head, it’s not called Picard. It’s called ARAMIS IN SPACE. (Always rendered in all caps, because that’s how you have to say it. Like Don LaFontaine.)
So now seems like a good time to interrogate that little voice. What’s with the shame? Why does this feel extra exciting, but also extra dumb?
Because conflating a character with the actor who plays them feels so…childish. Who hasn’t felt fremdschämen (an excellent German word meaning the feeling of shame for someone else who has done something embarrassing) when a fan comes to the mic at a con and asks an actor, “In season 2, episode 13, why didn’t you just reverse the polarity?” When a kid does that, it’s cute, but when an adult does it, we cringe, as though the shame of this person’s weak grasp on reality is going to rub off on us. Juvenile behavior is a big embarrassment trigger for most people, I think. We spend a lot of time and effort building adult levels of self control, and shame is the biggest weapon in that arsenal. If it weren’t, we’d all be eating candy for breakfast and playing video games in our underwear all day.
As kids, we don’t have a strong understanding of how the world works, including how movies and TV are made. (For those of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era, all the more so. At my first Star Trek convention, age 12, mid-1970s, I learned that scenes are shot out of order, retakes are common, stunt doubles do fights, and the doors on the Enterprise set don’t open by themselves or make a “whoosh” sound.) To a kid, the face a character wears IS the character. The actor wears the same face; ergo, they are the same person. Simple. Twelve-year-old me would never have imagined that, decades later, I’d embrace anyone who is not Leonard Nimoy as Spock.
But here I am, a fan of both Zachary Quinto’s and Ethan Peck’s versions, evidence, I suppose, of a more mature understanding. As we grow up, we come to understand, intellectually, at least, that the characters we love are not entirely, or even mostly, the creations of actors, but of writers. The actor’s job is to embody someone else’s invention. We realize that good acting is vital to bringing the story to life, but that, while characterization is a collaborative effort, the essence of a character already exists on the page.
And yet…
At a con, or a red carpet, or anywhere popular entertainment is celebrated, it’s the actors who get the most exuberant reception, not the writers, directors, or even show runners. We respond viscerally to the faces of the characters we love (or love to hate). Deep down inside, each of us has a wide-eyed child who believes the person standing before us is a true hero, a foul traitor, a hilarious clown, a great lover, a tragic martyr – whatever. That’s why we whoop and holler for them, while the off-screen people who are, objectively, more responsible for the shape of our beloved stories get a more restrained reception.
Which explains why this impulse is a little embarrassing. We know these actors and their lives are nothing like the characters with whom we’re mildly obsessed. We know that the process of making the stories we love, of shooting a movie or a TV show, is nothing like living out the story. We know this person standing before us can’t fly, punch through walls, do magic, solve mysteries, destroy worlds, time travel, or for that matter, even pull off an exciting car chase. But inside each of us, there’s this little place of pure imagination where they absolutely can. It’s the place where the characters actually exist and the fiction has reality. Within that place, the real-world rule – that the one wearing a person’s face IS that person – applies. It’s not that we don’t see the boundary between reality and fantasy; it’s that we choose to immerse ourselves unreservedly in the fantasy. We allow ourselves to cross that boundary and experience the fantasy so viscerally that, when we cross back, it feels like an actual memory rather than a purely mental exercise.
Fan-shaming is largely about the perception that fandom is an indicator of arrested development – an immature understanding of, and even withdrawal from, the real world. (There are whole dissertations to be written about the gendering of that disdain, and its long history. Not for nothing were novels once seen as intellectually inferior literature that appealed mostly to women. But I digress.) Growing up is supposed to be about leaving childish things behind, right?
Except, not really. Sure, we do have to learn to compartmentalize a bit. But what would human beings be without the power to vividly imagine things they haven’t directly experienced? How would we communicate, invent, create, empathize? And what would imagination be if we didn’t allow it the full emotional impact of real, lived events?
The Gradgrinds of this world, people of a sterile, impoverished mentality, lacking imagination, or more likely, afraid of giving voice to whatever shriveled, hardened stump of imagination they have left after a lifetime of neglect, will always be with us.
But fuck it.
I can’t wait for ARAMIS IN SPACE.
(PS -- This wonderful Rolling Stone interview with Michael Chabon, in which he talks a bit about his own experience with fan-shaming, was published a couple of days after I wrote this. I feel so validated.)
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