So the long-awaited Star Trek trailer dropped, by all available evidence, sometime on Saturday and was exhaustively analyzed on the Internet by everyone capable of typing with an interest. As a franchise now over the forty-year mark, there's legions of the (overly-)invested just waiting to see what J.J. Abrams was going to do to Gene Roddenberry's long-straggling franchise. (Never mind that the Mission: Impossible had been kicking around for just as long when he got around to doing the third installment; presumably no one was that invested in the series' '88 iteration, whereas there's some desperate souls out there who still want to talk about how awesome Deep Space 9 was.)
And, of course, no one can agree on anything. But we can all agree on one thing: men who spend too much time on their hair aren't manly.
Yes, Abrams' Star Trek cast is full of pretty young things who'd be just as home on network TV making 13-year-old girls' hearts sw jasoon: Chris Pine, a TV journeyman, as Kirk, and Zachary Quinto (who apparently is on this show called "Heroes" that I really have never bothered to watch) as Spock. The smaller parts have been filled out with better but presumably less expensive supporting actors: Eric Bana, Simon Pegg, John Cho. (God bless the smart-ass who cast Winona Ryder as Spock's human mom; to suggest that her career has sunk so far that she had to find marriage on another planet is pretty hilarious.) No one, however, seems to be interested in their qualifications. Old-school Trek fans have recently been suggesting that the success of the original show rested upon its casting "real" actors with presence in the leads. This is obviously insane: Shatner was a journeyman actor going around doing bad things like trying to be one of The Brothers Karamazov, Leonard Nimoy was a guest-star on pretty much an TV series that would have him, etc. They lucked it in being a show that, whatever its campy excesses, had enough bold-faced Ideas to engage college students and create its own visual iconography — one that would subsequently be confused for a wonderful and brilliant vision, which it isn't. It's just part of the American pop-culture landscape.
Regardless: the big problem seems to be that everyone's haircut is too pretty. One "sott68" was one of the first, over at Ain't It Cool News, was the first to raise an important concern: "No Hetero kid actors available?" he wondered. "Kirk looks a bit womanish." The conservative commentators over at right-wingnut film site Dirty Harry's Place had similar concerns: "If I were a commander in a military-type body like Starfleet," explained one Jared, "any pretty-boy with the frosted hair that looks like it was commissioned in a beauty-salon instead of a barbershop would have to scrub the latrines with a brush made up of the hair we shaved off his head." One "whiskey" gets a little more explicit: "We are talking here [...] the kind of gay vibe that Hollywood insists on pushing. Guys don’t like it — they want leading men who are tough, not highly groomed, salon-friendly, sort of gay Russell Brand types."
Forget about the latent homophobia disguised as some kind of "respect" for the original; if a bunch of Star Trek nerds wants to have a nice day worrying about Kirk's masculinity (and pillory the buzzword "metrosexual" further to death), let 'em have it. What I'm really intrigued by is the idea that you can measure action-hero-viability via hair. One time I made a horrible mistake and went to the Atlas Barber School for a $4 hair-cut, only to find out that what I wanted wasn't possible; real men, it seems, get their haircuts with clippers; layering is for effeminates. Apparently this same kind of logic applies to action heroes.
But when you think about who's been cast lately as ass-kicking heroes, these commenters aren't that far off; they're merely responding to a casting stereotype that's been going on for years. Nothing against Jason Statham (no one's a bigger Transporter fan than me) or the growly-voiced likes of Vin Diesel, but if you look at the list of frequently-shaven-headed actors who've been trying to kill everything that moves on-screen in recent years, then yes: it does definitely look like J.J. Abrams isn't just taking his casting ideas from what kind of 20something inspires teen viewing on TV, but he's actively trying to queer things up, Kirk-Uhuru sex scene or no. At least Schwarzenneger and Stallone got to keep their hair, as ridiculous as it is. If Star Trek lets action stars get nice hair-cuts, then I'm all in favor of turning Star Trek into the Brokeback Mountain of sci-fi space action.
A high-quality trailer is here; far as I'm concerned, it's just fine.