Podcast #22: LapPOP!

(Thanks, American Rhetoric!)

Space:

The final frontier

These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise

Its 5 year mission

To explore strange new worlds

To seek out new life and new civilizations

To boldly go where no man has gone before

(The Star Trek Lyrics You Probably Never Knew Existed)
(You can sing along!)

"Beyond
The rim of the star-light
My love
Is wand'ring in star-flight
I know
He'll find in star-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never
His star trek
Will go on forever.
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me."

Captain's Log, Stardate April 15, 2006.
Welcome to a special episode of Metropoliticking in Seoul. For my regular listeners, I'm sorry I've been out of things for so long, but between my back going out, the Yellow Sandstorm from China that's been burning my eyes and nose, and trying to shake a cold that's been destroying my voice, it's been pretty tough to get a podcast down lately.

For my listeners at LapPOP, who are listening to this as part of a show with bloggers and other performers, I'd like to say thanks for coming out and listening to me, a true geek living and working in Seoul. This is a podcast I do on life and people in Seoul, and a place for me to vent and express while I work on my doctoral dissertation on Korean nationalism out of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. I'm also a photographer, and more recently, a blogger and podcaster. And the more I can try to put these things together, the happier I get – so being included in this show is a really cool chance for me to motivate, integrate, and presentate(?).

The Show Begins

So let the show begin! I thought this piece would be a good one to read and make an interesting audio segment out of; so I reworked it a bit and am "representating" it here; the piece is also old, so for those of you who've come into the blog recently and haven't dug back to all my early posts, I wanted to offer this up as one of my favorite little random pieces of Korea commentary. I don't often get a chance to talk about the various major forces in my life in one fell swoop: race, history, Korea, and Star Trek. So indulge me here. And please forgive me my geekiness.

Now, I love me some Star Trek and always have. I have always thought that people who claim not to like it either  have only a superficial impression of it or erroneously think that anyone who watches the show must automatically be the geeks rebuffed by William Shatner in that infamous Saturday Night Live skit: "Get a life."

And yes, there are geeky aspects to the Trek. The show takes place in outer space, there are aliens, blinking gadgets, and oodles of pseudo-tech-talk. But that's the flippin'-through-the-channels view of the show. If you look under the surface, you'll see some of the best writing on television (the various series have won more than their fair share of Emmy awards), extremely well-fleshed out characters, long-running, consistent, and soap operatic plot lines – elements that mesh together to make for a pretty darn good show.

You add on top of that some of the best elements of real science fiction – through futurist plotlines, technology, or other themes that allow a critique of society – and you get some really smart television that asks a lot of questions that are pertinent to us today.

Good science fiction is interesting, fun, and most importantly – challenging. Tellingly, it was the only television show Martin Luther King, Jr. would allow his children to watch. And when Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) was considering leaving the show, he made a personal request that she remain, as Star Trek was the only show that portrayed a vision of a true equality of the races. It may seem a bit outdated by our standards, but it was downright revolutionary at the time.

That's why the original Star Trek 1966-69 series was banned from most stations in the South, because they were too feminist, Communist, and suggestive of race-mixing for the time. I mean, there was a Russian deck officer, along with a Japanese navigator, a Black female main character who talked, and an ostensible Scotsman on the bridge. The 1960's viewer was reassured that the cocksure captain was a white man who didn't take shit off no aliens and always bagged the babes, but his first officer was a decidedly Asiatic-looking alien-human half-breed with devil ears. Here was the walking, talking embodiment of mixed-race – umm, scratch that – mixed-species lust, and he was a main character!

It should come as no surprise, for those of you not up on your Trek trivia, that Star Trek was the first show on television to show an interracial kiss, which got most Southern stations up in arms. Of course, science fiction was the only possible cover under which to get it through the censors even in the liberal, pinko North as well: the ostensible reason the kiss happened was because Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura had been under the control of an alien force using them for his own demented amusement.

Neither character is kissing each other by choice, so the possibility of an expressed desire for interracial humping is eliminated by this neat plot device. This all, despite the fact that Uhura was undeniably hot, and old Bill Shatner, back in the day was pretty mackin' himself.

At this point, dear reader, you must be asking the question – so what the hell does this have to do with Korea?

Well, the fact is, for some inexplicable reason, Koreans don't like Star Trek. And I mean DO NOT LIKE AT ALL. So what, ask you? But think about it. For a country that is so relatively culturally colonized by America, in which almost every major genre of any art form is reproduced here, and most anything that enjoys some degree of popularity in the US holds a proportionally similar degree of popularity here, Star Trek is noticably, glaringly absent from the pop culture scene. No DVD's of the TV series exist here, and the movies get almost no play. I saw a poster for Star Trek: Nemesis a few years ago in a subway staircase, and it got only a single night of play in a tiny theater in Kangnam, w well-to-do area of southern Seoul. The only other people there was a couple on the other side of the room, and the woman was obviously not there by choice. It was sad, very sad.

I am using one of my favorite shows as a foil to get right at the heart of what is an oft-overlooked cultural pattern in a progress-obssessed society that is so deeply and uncritically steeped in a balls-to-the-walls hyper-modernity, the cracks through which one might look to see the under-layer of a deeper, pre-modern web of thinking that lurks beneath everything in the layer above.

Wait - one more time? In other words, what I'm saying is that there just might be a reason that this very American cultural product doesn't translate well into the Korean market – because the show, its assumptions, concerns, and core concepts, for some reason, seem unable to mesh with anything within the Korean cultural framework of the familiar – no matter how much or how little Korea can arguably be called a cultural colony of America.

In fact, the reason shows such as Friends or Sex in the City are hits all over the world lies in those shows' universality, as opposed to the specific and peculiar fit of that foreign culture to the American one. The real reason shows such as Star Trek find such little popularity in certain countries (such as Korea) versus others (such as Germany) is because of the fit – or lack thereof – with the mode within which those countries operate.

If one were to take the standard cultural imperialism analysis, one would expect that the structural power of the core would simply replicate itself onto the culture of the periphery. In other words, the cultural colonialism of America would leave an impression on the foreign cultures it influenced with roughly the same proportion of popularity as in the home culture that manifest themselves in the culture on the recieving end – but that doesn't happen in the case of Star Trek..

Take the fact that the two most famous public figures of Korean descent in America – whom I call the two Chos (Margaret and John) – have never been able to make the rounds of Korean TV, because then they'd have to explain why they got famous in the first place (standup routines about gay sex and "warrrrshing" one's vagina, the concept of the "MILF," or getting high on a blunt before riding a cheetah to White Castle – these wouldn't fly on Korean Sunday night primetime).

I am willing to bet that if either John or Margaret Cho had gotten as famous as they are as bubble gum pop singers, serious authors, or Super Bowl MVP, they'd have made the rounds to Korea as Korean Long Lost Son or Daughter #1 a long time ago.

But beyond all that, there's the fact that every single Korean national with whom I have watched the show, of various backgrounds and levels of education, invariably have the same reaction to watching aliens and humans interacting on the screen: "Eewww. They're so gross." Or alternatively – "It's so unrealistic! How can something like that even talk?"

The comments are generally variations on this theme. What fazes the Korean viewers is the fact of the aliens' difference and the fact that they look so animalistic and...alien. Most Koreans can't seem to get past the "alien" part – that they look so "무서워" (scary) or "징그러워" (disgusting) – before we even get to the facts of the plot being in the far-flung future, or the existence of transporter beams, phasers, and the possibility of galavanting throughout space at "warp speed."

Although watching a bug-eyed "Hobbit" and his shriveled little friend climb a lava mountain with a magic Ring of Power that grants the wearer invisibility and an unnaturally long life, as he's chased by hybrid Elven-Orcs controlled by an evil wizard with a white beard – oh, that's believable. And Koreans loved them some 반지의 재왕 (Lord of the Rings). Wait – which is more unrealistic again? I'd bet on humankind coming across a slimy alien or inventing a faster-than-light drive before I'd ever bet on us seeing a 20-foot tall killer troll or a Magical Ring of Power.

So - am I being nitpicky, or is there something more under the surface here? When I consider that question, I think about the fact that Star Trek, judged as an American cultural product, is so very...American. It is steeped in the discourses of multiculturalism, collective Western guilt over colonialism, and in the larger progressive discourses of equality and democracy, as expressed in more obvious aspects of its backstory, which nurses a Utopian vision of equality between the races (and species), complete gender equality and the elimination of poverty, along with constant explorations of contemporary social issues (for example, the Bajoran "comfort women" or the unmistakably Israel-Palestine-oriented critique of the Cardassian "settlers" who encroach on Bajoran lands). Star Trek is unabashedly steeped in very "real" things – the stories, no matter the presence of starships and intergalactic federations and alliances, are still set up in ways we can easily recognize and understand in terms of the pressures and politics of actual human life in the present.

Star Trek is simply more "American" in regard to the way one might define this as a set of ideals that were the basis for every form of progressive "advance" in America – and around most of the world, actually. For better or for worse, whether one thinks of them having come too late or too early, the ideals of equal qualifications for citizenship, racial and gender equality, rights for gay or disabled people, and every other "movement" one might think of involving a group in a disadvantaged position in relation to the white, male, Protestant majority in power – owes its existence to particularly American founding ideals.

To the extent that the Star Trek world's "prime directive" of non-interference with developing civilizations expresses guilt over the West's many excesses (e.g. American westward expansion, the eugenics movement, or the resulting Holocaust), Korea is itself still very much caught up in this paradigm of "progress" and "development" that has already gotten the West in so much trouble. In a very fundamental way, Star Trek is a post-modern set of discourses, whereas Korea is still caught up in a mix between the pre- and presently modern.

That's one reason I think Star Trek might not gel in a Korea moving out of pre-modernity into a confident modernity that promises a new car for everyone, clean and luxurious housing, shiny appliances and gadgets, and more leisure time, all of which boost national pride while also partially explaining the nation's eventual triumph over evil Communism. To many Koreans, this is a dream come true; to Americans, that's all just so...50's.

But I digress; here's the important point here, I think: A postmodern, Star Trekkian hesitation about the direction of modernity seems to run up against a Korean modern urge to move forward, ahead Warp Factor 9, by any and all means necessary. Even if a Korean viewer might be able to identify with some of these post-modern messages, I think that it is hard for Korean viewers to ever get past a very pre-modern, pre-contact view of the outside world, a paranoid and suspicious view of Otherness. This simple fear of the "alien" – terrestrial or not – prevents any real (re)consideration of a modern multiculturalism or post-modern multiplicity.

Just take a look at Korea's blood-based notion of racial purity, history of discrimination against mixed-race people, as well as the fact that Korean folks, in the aggregate, just seem to not like Black people but seem to love them some white folks.

In this way, Korea's is a worldview unmarked by the West's trepidation to trek, in which the notion of inevitable and desirable progress is the lifeblood of this civilization's existence – note the lack of attention or even dismissal of ethical concern over the then-questionable triumph of having successfully cloned a human being.

I originally wrote this piece well before the Hwang Woo Seok scandal, and all my concerns about the possible ethical problems posed by human cloning were dismissed by many Koreans as "attacks" against Korea and were taken as signs of American "jealousy."

But, a thought experiment: if it had been a Western nation – say, for example France, the United States, or Germany – that had led the charge to duplicate human beings from scratch in a petri dish, surely there would have been more trepidation, if only because of the history of the grotesque acts committed in the name of "science" and "progress" in these very states. In Korea, you heard nary a peep of criticism about the claim of having cloned a human being; in fact, even well after it became clear that the research was faked, the original MBC producers who delivered the scoop on national television were still receiving death threats.

And don't even get me started about the many people who just don't get why having Hitler and Nazi-themed bars here in Korea is just so...1940's – people here know about the Nazis and the Holocaust, but I think that so many just don't get why and how those things were a real moment of shame to the West's project; it was "enlightenment" and modernity gone mad, and a shockingly horrid moment of failure for Western culture.

"Sieg, Heil!" in Shinchon

Dear reader Sungwon sends an old picture of his local Hitler place in Daejeon.

Springtime for Hitler – in Pusan, 2002. Thanks, Matty!

Hitler as a part of a bingo game for kids. If get bingo, call out "Sieg, Heil!"
(Thanks, "Hater Depot!")

And this is one of my points – why a Star Trek worldview might actually have a lot to offer to a consumption and commodity-obssessed Korean popular culture; Star Trek has asked myriad questions about what it means to be human, a clone, a slave, a sentient robot, and about the ethics of absolute power, the pitfalls of "progress," and the follies of ideology, racism, and nationalism.

But still, it would be ridiculous to say that Star Trek itself needs to be watched by all Koreans, or that doing so will magically make people on the peninsula more moral, further enlightened, or somehow better people. That's just plain arrogant.

But – to add to the words of a friend who once said that Koreans were, more than most other place in the world, in serious need of some good-ass weed, I'll say that sitting back and watching some Trek along with that might do wonders to mellow Korean folks out. Shit – it can't hurt – and surely it's better than importing The Jerry Springer Show or Freddy Vs. Jason.

And after the human cloning debacle, am I really so wrong to think this?

So, since I'm not holding my breath for the legalization of blunt in Korea, Star Trek DVD's with Korean subtitles it will have to be. So when we starting the petition to Paramount Korea?

THANKS FOR LISTENING!
I hope this show was cool with ya'll and that you have fun listening to the artists who will hopefully be far less boring and pedantic than me. I can be contacted michael@hanhakmoon.com as well as through the email link through my blog site, which is www.metropolitician.com. I hope to hear from some of you through my blog and podcasts, and I also sincerely hope that this reading worked for you. From Seoul, South Korea, this is Michael Hurt, signing off.

Thanks for listening!

Comments

[George Kelly]

Great podcast, man. It went over very well at Lap-POP 2.0.

[San Nakji]

I still completely disagree with your view that lack of Star Trek means anything to Korea. Will you be analysing all the other nations who could care less about it as well?

Here's a great quote from a British show called Extras... Don't know it? Hmm... this may require a whole post about America...

Patrick Stewart: I will "Make It So."
[blank look from Andy]
Patrick Stewart: You've seen "Star Trek: The Next Generation?"
Andy Millman: I haven't, no.
Patrick Stewart: Why? Your wife won't let you have it on?
Andy Millman: I'm not married.
Patrick Stewart: Oh, your girlfriend then?
Andy Millman: I haven't got a girlfriend either. I live alone.
Patrick Stewart: You're not married, you haven't got a girlfriend... and you've never watched "Star Trek?"
Andy Millman: No.
Patrick Stewart: Good Lord...

[The Metropolitician]

As I subtly implied in the actual post, as well as explicitly admitted in a comment, I am using the Star Trek thing as a foil to talk about these things. So although it's an interesting connection that I think has a lot of anecdotal weight, I am not placing a huge amount of stock in an argument that there is a direct relationship between Star Trek and Korean notions of race and identity. It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing – you do have a sense of humor, do you not, or perhaps you have a Vulcanian desire to take everything as seriously as if I were giving an academic presentation on the subject?

Yeah – I find it interesting that Koreans seem to have a near aversion to Star Trek; I find it interesting that given the TV shows, movies, and their later incarnations on DVD that are popular in the US, there is nearly a complete absence of real science fiction and things related to people of color, no matter HOW popular they get in the US; I also find it interesting that certain other equally-ridiculous and fantastic tales also get completely accepted.

Now, given that, I wrote an essay that kind of linked these things. I find all these various facts "interesting." I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece that drew these things together. But is this really the sort of thing that one can prove or disprove? Is there really any "evidence" that I could produce to make my point more acceptable. I think not.

Read it like a fun op-ed piece, or a bit of social commentary, or even as a blog entry of a guy just trying to exercise his brain on something that strikes him as perhaps descriptive of something much bigger, but using a peculiar angle to get at.

Whatever the case, I'd rather have fun and witty counter ideas or pet theories presented, or even a debate about how my interpretation is flawed and I didn't think about the this factor or that logical outlier. But whether or not it "applies" to the Korean case – OK, so you don't think so. I don't really have a "view" that there necessarily is a direct, causal, or explanative link between the phenonomon of Star Trek ITSELF and the greater Korean culture. Let me break it down:

All I'm saying is that if there are certain pre-existing pre-modern and postmodern attitudes towards race, difference, culture, and teleological notions of progress – all things that are part of a view that YES, has nothing to do with Star Trek but rather with history, economics, and ideology – I take the Star Trek as sort of a just-for-fun litmus test and excuse to talk about these things.

Yeah, I wax serious about serious issues, but do I think that a lack of that TV show has created these things? NO. Do I think that forcing the nation to watch Star Trek by legal decree will eradicate problematic patterns of thought and behavior? NO. Do I think that having a country-by-country comparison of the degree of Star Trek penetration in term of raw viewership and merchandising to UN markers of different kinds of social inequalties or economic indicators will yield anything worth saying? OF COURSE NOT.

I am/was having a bit of academic fun. Dude, why so serious about "proving" me "wrong" about the Star Trek bit? OK. I GET it. There is no real relationship between the Trek and Korean society. That show, like having watched The Island after hearing the news about a human being having been successfully cloned here, or noticing the absence of even America's #1 black television shows while everything with white folks in it gets played, even if they're shows that be slipping (Felicity?). Yeah – I'm not saying there's even a conspiracy to keep the brother man's shows out and the other man's shows in. I'm also not saying the Hwang Woo Seok was behind a secret plot to get The Island and Gattaca pulled form the shelves of South Korean DVD stores because they were threatening to interfere with the public's positive view of human cloning. Do you really think me that dumb?

I'm just making observations, dude, and then taking some admittedly broad liberties to point out what I think are some interesting connections between patterns of thought and behavior here.

I also partially wrote and have been sitting on a post about how much Korea in the 90's to now so reminds me of America from the 1950's to 1960's. I suppose if I ever do put it up, you'll say something like "You can't compare those two eras, from two completely different historical and cultural contexts!"

Yeah, dude, I know. I assume the same. But isn't it fun to point out things and in the process make some new neural connections? Like how in America in the 1950's, variety shows were popular, consumerism was the new thang, Commies were the enemy, men wore suits, and women wore heels in the kitchen on TV commercials. Hmm. Sounds like Korea in the 1990's.

Oh, no! So when is Korea gonna have its Martin Luther King or Civil Rights Movement? Wait?! Does that mean that I'm predicting a hippie and free love movement? How ridiculous is that arguement, Metropolitican? I got ya!

'Cept I don't make those kinds of arguements. None are predictive, none rely on positing some theoretical, explanative concept to place the thought experiment (e.g. Star Trek being watched in Korea) into some position as either a causal or contingent factor.

It's JUST FOR FUN and offered as a little food for thought. It's also an obvious ply for me to talk about something else I love – Star Trek, preferably in its old school incarnations. And the title itself derives its fun by the linking of these two actually unrelated things. Really. I'm not going to base my academic career on this as a pet theory of causality or anything possessing explanative power.

Seriously – lighten up just a tad.

[George Kelly]

Full disclosure: I have (and recommend) this book.

[dogbert]

Koreans in general do not seem to be big fans of either American or British science fiction.

[bumfromkorea]

I actually didn't like either the original star trek or the next generation, (and HATED Voyager) but I absolutely LOVED Deep Space Nine... I always thought that the whole Roddenberry's Utopia thing was a complete BS... mankind is waaay too f*cked up for something like that to happen. But in DS9, there were actual moral deviance and conflict displayed by the "good" side - and I thought one of the central theme of the show was challenging the inherent "goodness" of the Federation. And not to mention the whole "HOLY CRAP! Cardassians(bastards) and Romulans (assholes) are now on OUR SIDE?!?!?!"

Great, now I feel like a massive Trekkie... (I swear I'm not!)

Btw, have you ever had the chance of catching a rather short-lived show called Firefly? Love to get your opinion on that.

[Tony]

Big fan of your blog, and I especially love this entry since I'm a huge Trekkie. Any thoughts on the new J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek movie? The casting is quite interesting, with John Cho as Sulu... think that'll break any barriers in Korea and give Trek a chance to be seen? And what would be the perceived implications of a Korean playing a Japanese guy? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that! Oh, and ditto to buminkorea, DS9 is by far the greatest of the "modern" Treks.

[Alex]

When I first came here, I went to Yongsan looking for bootlegged Star Trek DVDs but could not find any. Should've bought it in Vietnam!!!

The Science TV channel (406) is showing Enterprise late Friday nights.

I love Mal in Firefly.