Watching the Borg Part 3

Watching the Borg Part 3

In our last installment, I talked about the Borg episode Best of Both Worlds, and the accidental but perhaps fortuitous intrusion of the film Braveheart, blaring its speeches and slaughters from my son’s neighboring MacBook. I neglected to mention that Braveheart has another connection to my son; when my wife Margann was pregnant with him, she and I went to see Braveheart at the local big screen. I’m not sure we were completely clear how, well, how LOUD the film was gong to get. In each battle scene, I could feel the intensity and power and physical pull of medieval warfare, my body moving as if being pulled by strings as the swords and pikes clashed and men and horses collided. And as I found myself shifting my shoulders and clenching my fists and leaning forward, Margann turned to me to tell me that Bailey, in utero, was doing the same, moving around like nobody’s business.

When, as a toddler, he turned out to be one of those kids who make tons of sounds, I laid all the Foley-esque noises at the feet of Braveheart. And now that he is an antiauthoritarian skater Cali dude, I blame Braveheart for his absolute desire for freedom from anything that makes unreasonable (or reasonable for that matter) demands on him and his time.

But when I imagine a future for him, and imagine any war he might find himself forced to fight, all I can think of is Hurt Locker, or Jarhead, or Three Kings, or any number of post Vietnam films that combine bizarre connectivity and mobility with the unwarrior nature of modern occupation forces (which is a huge part of what the Iraq and Afghan “wars” meant).

And I think of torture.

Technology, torture, shock and awe

In Braveheart, William Wallace is betrayed twice by the intrigue of the Scottish lords. When he attempts to meet with Robert the Bruce in Edinburgh, he is caught by the English brought to London, and sentenced to be “purified by pain,” a series of brutal tortures publicly witnessed. He shows great personal courage and control in the face of a drawn out series of bodily mutilations, ending with his famous cry of Freedom as he dies. He is beheaded, drawn and quartered, and his head set on a pike on London Bridge (the common practice for those judged guilty of treason; Shakespeare would have seen such heads as he entered London for the first time). The torture and killing of Wallace are then “communicated” to the body and mind of Robert the Bruce, who in turn redeems his own betrayal of Wallace by refusing the easy English ratification of his rule of Scotland, and instead rallies the Scottish army to push back and defeat the English in the 1314 battle of Bannockburn.

In the film’s narrative, the torture is brutal, personal, and the last act of a bitter, vicious English king. And it is the sign of a final act of sacrifice and bravery of Wallace, and confirms his status as a martyr to a cause that ultimately succeeded because of him, his vision, his words. For it is his words that Robert the Bruce speaks to the troops in 1314, and his vision of a united Scotland that ends up defeating the more powerful English army.

In the Star Trek episode, Picard is captured by the Borg, and subjected not to torture per se, but to invasive medical procedures. Part of the horror genre is the penetration of the body by the alien Other, whether it be an insectoid Giger monster as in Alien, or some other transgression against the human body or mind’s autonomy. In the original script, when we re turn to the Borg ship to see the status of Picard’s capture, there is a brief scene that was omitted in the final edit:

Moving down a row... no activity... the Borg are in their regenerative state, in their compartments... finding Locutus in a compartment, 'asleep'... a shudder

crosses his face as though a nightmare has invaded his

mind... suddenly his eyes open in a panic...

12 MATTE SHOT - THE BORG SHIP INTERIOR (OPTICAL)

An agonizing human cry echoes through the chamber...

13 A BORG IN HIS COMPARTMENT

reacts to the commotion... methodically EXITS and moves to Locutus, who resists his efforts to restrain him...another Borg joins them... together they escort him out of his compartment...

This deleted scene would have supported what is implied later, that in some sense Picard is attempting to resist the Borg takeover of his body and mind. Several times crew members try to answer the question, is there anything left of Picard in Locutus? Again, a deleted scene with Counsellor Troi would have made this explicit (she can feel him, and his pain, inside Locutus). The deletions show the writers trying to set up a classic cyborg narrative: as the human body is altered with ever more potent and intimate prosthetics, when does the human stop being “the” human and cross over into some other kind of being?

Before the Braveheart connection, I read the Borg scene as a classic kind of horrific brain experiment, much like the scenes in Firefly, or the kind of CIA research on mind control done by the worst kinds of quasi-Nazi scientists (examples here). What we do get is the technological moment when Picard is helpless to resist the invasion of his mind and body. In the Borg operating room, a montage unfolds:

Small and no different than any other area of the ship except there is a medical table...Locutus is lying on his back, conscious as one Borg prepares to use a long, probing implant device to add a bio-chip... another Borg prepares a huge mechanical arm to attach... and as we slowly push in to Locutus' face... and into his eye... a single tear is in one corner... and as the operation commences, his eyes close and after a beat, slowly, the color in his human face begins to drain further and further away until he is ashen white.

But there are two other elements here besides “horrific brain surgery” sci fi: torture, and rape. Both are evident in the way the closeup of Picard/Locutus shows his eye, and his utter immobility as he is invaded and “augmented” by Borg technology. Later we find that his DNA is being rewritten in order to make him more connected to the Borg, and that the struggle between the Borg self and the remnants of the human self have been taking place all along.

At the end of the episode, Picard is restored to his previous human self: no hand prosthetics, no facial technology with strange probing red lights, no tubes eerily entering his neck. And yet at the very end of the show, Picard goes to the window of his quarters, and looks out, a solitary figure dwarfed by the immensity of the space outside him. That space holds the Borg, and the nightmares of his time forced to not only work “for” them assimilating and murdering thousands of his fellow humans, but to literally be one of them, in body and mind, against his will, making a mockery of will itself.

Picard is a survivor, and yet he must come to terms with what has been done to him. The following episode Family is one of the least known and best written of the Next Generation scripts, as Picard after twenty years goes home to France, and ends up coming to terms with his trauma through his conflict with his jealous older brother. Picard loses his famous self control, punches his brother, wrestles with him in the mud of the vineyard like some Biblical parable, and finally laughs himself into tears at the horror he’s been trying to live with: he was made to do unspeakable things, things against his will, and he was not good enough or strong enough to resist. It is the language of rape survivors, and of torture survivors; the self must literally be remade. It is this remaking of self and identity that the show wants us to contrast with the kinds of self that are made, or thrust on one, through technological connectivity and boundary-threatening cyborg prosthesis.

What is coming toward us, as the Borg, is both the stuff of horror films (Terminator writ large as a ship and an alien race), and a prescient uncanny look at the fears we have of coming technologies circa 1991. The new technologies threaten cultures based on old forms of authority, on ideals of freedom and self determination, on possessive individualism (as Katherine Hayles puts it) and the Enlightenment subject. The scenes of such technologies are multiple; weapon systems and power sources, of course in a sci fi movie, but also medical and communication technologies, and new, nonhierarchical and distributed forms of organization that seem utterly foreign and inhuman. Much like 1984, this dystopian look at a certain configuration of technology and humanoid bodies is both harrowing in its prediction (those who torture Winston in 1984 would recognize their kin in the black ops of the CIA kidnappers, the methods of Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo, the treatment of Bradley Manning) and one side of the coin. The other side is Brave New World, which shows a future in which people enthusiastically embrace the techniques of Big Brother. Imagine the Borg coming and assimilating us, not with scary white mind probes and invasive surgery, but with cheap cell phones and laptops, blue tooth rigs, and a rhetoric of assimilation and improvement augmented with a decent ad campaign? The strange hand prosthetic forced upon Picard, with its little whirring gizmo redolent of some Monty Python skit, is reshaped as a VR glove, or a Wii controller; the gizmo has morphed into a Playstation joystick, the strange lights and red ray now the multiple buttons on the wireless controllers for an Xbox.

The fear of being overwhelmed by an alien feeling technology in 1991 was not misplaced.