‘TREKKIES’ may be the “Roger & Me” of 1999; it is certainly one of the funniest movies so far this year. This is a considerable achievement for a feature-length documentary about people who live throughand for a 30-year-old TV program and its progeny.
It’s filled with laughs. But it’s also touching and sometimes verges on disturbing. In scrupulously non-judgmental fashion, “Trekkies,” which opens today in the New York area only on Long Island, introduces you not only to people who know the dialogue from every episode, attend “Star Trek” conventions or trade Spock dolls over the Internet, but also to those who have made “Star Trek” and its lore a lodestone of their everyday lives.
People like Whitewater juror “Commander” Barbara Adams, a print-shop worker who wears a uniform everywhere she goes and says without a trace of irony that she’s a Starfleet officer 24 hours a day.
These Trekkies aren’t fans so much as adherents to a spontaneously generated folk religion. Fortunately, it’s a sprawling, diverse and benevolent cult whose most negative manifestation seems to be dressing poodles in nylon space garb.
The film is hosted by actress Denise Crosby (who played Tasha Yar in the first season of “Star Trek – The Next Generation”). She goes to the conventions, interviews fans and follows folk dressed as Klingons into fast-food joints. She also talks to cast members from the various “Star Trek” series about the fans.
In awed tones, cast members tell stories of frenzied autograph signings. Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura in the original series) talks about a young black girl living in the projects who saw her on the show and excitedly called to her mother, “There’s a black lady on television who isn’t a maid!” The girl grew up to be Whoopi Goldberg.
Some of these hard-core fans reject the term “Trekkie,” preferring “Trekker” or “Trekan.” One otherwise normal and attractive young woman who moons over scrapbooks filled with photographs of Brent Spiner (who plays Data in “The Next Generation”) says that she and her fellow worshipers of the actor call themselves “Spiner-femmes.”
But whatever they call themselves, they come in an amazing variety of shapes, colors and sizes. There are transsexual Trekkies, German Trekkies, Trekkies in wheelchairs. There’s even a Florida dentist whose family and employees wear full Starfleet garb.
We also meet a middle-aged fellow who’s considering having his ears surgically transformed to resemble those of Mr. Spock. My favorite was Gabriel Korner, a brilliant, overenunciating 14-year-old semi-nerd straight out of “Spinal Tap,” who’s writing a screenplay for his own “Star Trek” movie.
Sure, some of this obsessive stuff seems pathetic, even crazy. You can understand someone making up a Klingon language for a lark; actually attending Klingon language camp crosses the sanity line.
Still, for the most part, these are eccentric but fundamentally decent folk who just happen to have taken a benign hobby to an extreme. Just about everyone interviewed by filmmaker Roger Nygard takes the humanitarian, progressive values of Gene Roddenberry’s original show very seriously indeed.
Their belief in the benevolent, inclusive, diverse future promised by “Star Trek” is inseparable from their need to belong, so it is not surprising they have in common a kind of open, uncynical sweetness.
Even the ones who dress up as Klingons.
—-
Trekkies
A documentary directed and edited by Roger Nygard. Hosted by Denise Crosby. With appearances by DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy. Running time: 83 minutes. Rated: PG. At the Broadway Multiplex in Hicksville, the Loews Raceway in Westbury and Brookhaven Multiplex in Medford.
