Star Trek · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A streak of blue-white light rakes across the bridge of the Enterprise. No one fired it. A lamp sitting just off-camera has caught the lens and bled into the shot, and there it stays — a smear of energy with no business in the story. Abrams and his cinematographer Daniel Mindel put it there on purpose, sometimes physically holding lights near the glass during a take. Their stated reason is the key to the whole film: they wanted the sense of a world that exists beyond the camera's frame.

Deleuze has a name for what that flare reaches for. He calls it the Open — the feeling that the framed image is only a slice of a larger whole that keeps changing, that the set you can see opens onto an out-of-field you can't. Most films suggest the out-of-field by implication: a door, a glance, a sound from the next room. Abrams suggests it with raw photons. The flare is a photographic argument that the Enterprise is a working vessel flooded with light and traffic, too alive to be held inside one composition. It is a cheap trick and a real idea at once. Don't grant the lens flare the dignity of a theory and you miss why the bridge feels inhabited rather than decorated.

That instinct — keep everything moving, keep gesturing past the edge of the frame — runs the whole movie. This is the movement-image at full throttle: Deleuze's term for the cinema where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, where the cut serves a chain of cause and effect. Star Trek is almost a textbook of its grandest variety, the large-form action-image, in which a global situation builds until one decisive act can transform it. Nero's mining ship tears a hole in space and swallows Vulcan; the crew must act or the next planet is Earth. That threat is an encompasser — a milieu that presses on everyone and calls the action out of them. Pine's Kirk doesn't brood. He climbs, punches, improvises, throws himself at the situation until it gives. In an era Deleuze thought had largely abandoned the action-image — for characters who can only watch and endure — Abrams builds a gleaming machine that still believes a person changes the world by deciding to.

The engine inside that engine is a duel. Deleuze's action cinema runs on the binomial: force against force, and more subtly, two complementary forces whose split defines the whole. Kirk and Spock — fiery instinct against trained calm, the reckless Iowa farm boy against the Vulcan who has drilled his feelings into silence. The film inherits this shape directly. The Empire Strikes Back made the dialectical duo, Luke and Vader as two halves of one question, into space opera's spine; Star Trek rearranges that template into a friendship. Neither man is whole alone. The drama lives in the interval between them.

So far this is pure movement-image, and a superb one. But something stranger sits at its center, and it is why the film rewards a Deleuzian eye. Leonard Nimoy is in it. The original Spock, fifty years older, plays Spock Prime, and for a long stretch the young Spock stands beside the old one. Two ages of one being share a frame. Deleuze would reach first for the crystal-image: a moment where a present and its own double become impossible to tell apart, the actual and the virtual fused. Quinto's Spock is the living present; Nimoy's is the virtual — the memory the whole franchise carries, the standard against which the new performance is measured in real time, inside the same shot. A character meets his own image, and the film knows it.

But the crystal is only the surface of the deeper move. The mechanism is time travel, and it forks the timeline, so that everything we knew about these characters becomes one possibility running beside another. Deleuze's precise name for this is peaks-of-present — contradictory presents coexisting, a before and an after folded into a single becoming rather than a single line. The original universe is not erased. It persists, virtual, while a second present unspools next to it. And making two incompossible worlds both true is exactly what Deleuze meant by the powers of the false: not lying, but rendering truth and falsity productively undecidable so that mutually exclusive versions can both hold. Cinema's old contract was that the photographed image does not lie. Star Trek tears up a different one — the fan's faith that canon is fixed — and hands us a forger's gift instead. Abrams, a self-described outsider to Trek, treats fifty years of story as raw material rather than scripture. This happened, and also it didn't, and both are real. Nimoy's presence is the blessing that makes the forgery legitimate.

You feel the false in the texture. Mindel's camera rarely rests; even dialogue is handheld, and the cutting by Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey runs faster than the drama strictly needs. Critics later named this grammar post-continuity — momentum and immediate sensation valued over clean spatial logic. The flares, the velocity, the overexposed bridge: the film would rather you feel energy than map a room.

The lineage is specific. The anamorphic 35mm space-opera look descends from Star Wars, carried in through Mindel's lens-flare work with Tony Scott on Man on Fire. The reboot architecture — young cast, tonal reset, continuity wiped clean — is Batman Begins almost beat for beat. The way Pine and Quinto inhabit icons without imitating them is the Christopher Reeve method from Superman: play the essence, not the impression. And the compressed twelve-minute prologue, from Kirk's birth to his father's death aboard the Kelvin, inverts the self-sacrifice The Wrath of Khan built its heart around.

What did it do to film as an art? It proved a beloved property could be neither embalmed nor betrayed but re-forged, and that a wide audience would gladly follow a story that openly admitted it was rewriting itself. The blockbuster discovered the powers of the false and used them to be born again. The flare was the tell all along — a light leaking in from outside the frame, insisting the world is always bigger than the version you were handed.