Ritual and relativism: Star Trek as cult

Abstract

A TV series typically presents itself as a form of drama which offers a unique bond with its audience. TV itself is an intimate, ‘domestic’ medium’ which the viewer experiences as part of the routine of everyday life’, and the aim of the makers of a TV series is to win the ‘loyalty’ of viewers so that they will be persuaded to integrate its characters and situations into that routine. The experience of watching thus becomes ‘ritualised’ as part of a pattern of lifestyle. In the case of an action-adventure-based series such as Star Trek viewers must, in a weekly ‘ritual’ of suspension of disbelief, accept narrative conventions such as stylised fight scenes or last-minute dramatic escapes from danger. The regular viewer of a TV series, who becomes ‘privileged’ with more and more understanding of a show’s characters and situations, naturally learns to ‘read’ the ‘text’ of a TV series in a way that may elude more ‘highbrow’ critics. As Jane Feuer points out:

observers from the high culture who visit TV melodrama occasionally in order to issue their tedious reports about our cultural malaise are simply not seeing what the TV audience sees … They are especially blind to the complex allusiveness with which the TV medium uses its actors … (in Newcomb, 1994, p. 44).

As TV viewers we are usually innocent of our inevitable part in the struggle for meaning. As we put our feet up in front of the TV, our mood is more likely to be relaxed than combative … yet … our regular encounters with the kaleidoscope of words and images that flow into our living rooms form an inexorable part of our semiotic universe …

(Justin Lewis, 1991, p. 42)