Well, it looks like some of our bloggy problems may be resolved—at the expense of all of your fantastic comments over the last several months. That’s as true over at Sasha’s blog as it is here, sadly. Today I was able to update the website normally through MobileMe (after restarting the computer and the DSL). I believe the problems were caused by our ISP rather than my software, but only time will tell. I expect that all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. But only time will tell.

In the meantime (well, recently), I’ve been seeing movies. Star Trek. Dans la brume électrique (In the Electric Mist). Blowup. Ponyo. Hancock. Ne le dit à personne (Tell No One). And television. House. Galactica. Caprica. Life on Mars. And so on. And I have to say, Jim’s comment way back when—which no longer exists, except in our collective recollection of it—seems more pertinent than ever.

Eternal recurrence. It’s what you add to your movie or TV show when you feel the need for metaphysical depth, but you have no actual thought or idea to provide it. “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” In just the last few days, I’ve seen too many examples of this to be simply coincidence. Okay, I expect to see it in science fiction, especially where time travel is concerned—so it was no surprise to me to see the past as a repetition of the present (although all presented as the “future”) in Galactica, or Star Trek. In Galactica what appears to be the distant future actually turns out to be the distant past, one that inevitably leads up to where we are now through a series of compulsive repetitions. Mankind, suffering from hubris, creates Frankenstein’s monster, the monster turns on us, we learn our lesson. And then forget it, leading to hubris, leading to… In Star Trek, the mixing of the future and the past is so thoroughgoing that even the characters in the movie are baffled. “What is the stardate?!” shrieks a Romulan baddie at Captain Pike. He’s confused, you see, for exactly the same reason the audience is: Captain Pike is no longer being played by Jeffrey Hunter, but by someone else! Confused as they may be, the characters in this time traveling scenario are still compelled to play their roles, re-enact the same scenarios.

Until Mr. Spock (always smarter than everyone else) realizes that, now that they have changed the past, even a little bit, they are free to do whatever they want. The future is now new, untrammeled, open for improvisation. This was clearly the goal of both the new Trek and the new Galactica—to say, “look, we know we’re changing everything about your beloved childhood TV shows (and they were our beloved shows, too), but we can have—and here’s my shout-out to Mr. Multidirectional Memory Guy—we can have multiple pasts at the same time, in addition to the multiple futures that we like to think we have. In fact, we do. That past, it’s a creative work of improvisation, filled with multiple genealogies. I don’t want that to sound all utopian, but science-fiction often presents it that way. We’ve been trapped in a cycle of endless repetition, but we will one day find our way out. Indeed, it is fated to be so! When the moment is right, history will end! Some readers may recognize in this the fundamental eschatology shared by, say, Marxism and Christianity: one day, this worrisome history that keeps happening and happening will finally stop, and the world that I dream of (an absence of socio-economic conflict; an absence of personal-ethical conflict) will arrive and stay forever. I have always distrusted this narrative for one simple reason—I’m too pessimistic to believe that the future will turn out just the way I want it, a problem especially acute with, well, precisely, Star Trek.

But—so Michael might keep reading—it’s not just science-fiction. We’ve seen two French films in the last week, Ne le dit à personne and Dans la brume électrique. La brume électrique is an English-language film (but a French production), shot in Louisiana, post-Katrina. It’s not bad, with Tommy Lee Jones. It’s a bit heavy-handed at times. The lesson it offers: the US has repeatedly cycled through a series of ill-advised conflicts—the Civil War, Vietnam, Bush—that were provoked by men who were “venal and greedy”; the consolation? Don’t worry, our soldiers and people were always honorable, brave and well-intentioned, even if the causes they fought for (slavery, the “domino theory,” or weapons of mass destruction) turned out to be not so great. But here, too, the past is merely a prelude toward a playing out of the same racism, the same violent conflict, the same exploitation and abuse, and the same honorable and well-intentioned people today! And guess what? This time, Tommy Lee Jones gets it right! I feel better already!

And in Ne le dit à personne, it’s the same story under a totally different guise (romantic). A couple, fated to be together from forever (the French give us three or four shots of handsomely lit nine year-olds open-mouthed kissing on the end of a pier—ah, the French!), happily married, is torn apart by a plot so ludicrously complicated that the time-travel paradoxes of Star Trek seem simplistic by comparison. So complicated that the entire last quarter of the movie is dedicated to a single person’s explaining. And explaining. Seriously, we’re talking twenty minutes + of pure exposition, much of it involving people so wealthy and powerful that they can arrange anything, including incredibly convoluted plots of French thrillers. But the awfully anticipated romantic reunion of our precocious protagonists is figured as the working out of destiny, a present day repetition of a cycle set up in the past. In this film, the present looks like an echo of the past, but I’m not sure that it makes much of a difference. The key is that every resolution is either a break from, or a return to, a repetitive cycle that echoes into the deep, atavistic past. My only question is how such a mediocre film got such raving reviews—other than it happened to be French, which still appears to be enough to persuade some people that something is important or deep.

The point, as Jim said, is that all this eternal recurrence creates an effect. It is, quite unlike Barthes’ effect of the real, the effect of depth. I am deep, and profound. My guess is that this is a response to the crushing de-historicization of the present epoch, and a typically postmodern one at that. Why postmodern? Because it’s not quite serious. My guess is that all this “eternal repetition” is a kind of mocking, ironic way of admitting that contemporary global culture has given up on history. We can only imagine or care about Civil War photos with Tommy Lee Jones Photoshopped into them.  See, it’s, like, relevant to the present and stuff!  So relevant that, like, we were practically there!

If you are Michael Rothberg, stop reading NOW.

For the record, Star Trek was better than expected, if not great (3 1/2 stars out of five). Chris Pine as Kirk may actually be the best part of the film, which is a little unusual. He’s Kirk, but not Shatner. Zachary Quinto is less great, because he’s not playing Spock—he’s playing Leonard Nimoy playing Spock (he actually looks too much like the young Nimoy for comfort). Many of the minor characters retain the dismissable, parodic quality (Uhura suffers especially, ending up with almost zero personality) they had in the original series. The writing is often clever (they have concocted a nice way of “re-booting” the original without angering fans), but very uneven. Some scenes are hard to take seriously, and the movie is not a coherent whole, but a series of more or less improbably linked episodes. That said, it avoids the self-referential, slapsticky, parodic character of the worst of the Trek movies. It appears to think that Star Trek is more than just a ridiculous product of the culture industry, and is in fact something worth taking at least semi-seriously, in spite of its many (and visible) faults. I happen to feel the same way.