Violence, Art, and Star Trek: Picard (season 1)

Do not tell us violence is part of life. You can reflect violence without seeking to replicate it. To indulge in violence only reflects that the artist does not understand violence and how it intersects life. There is no common interest in gratuitous violence for the course of the matter and to do so is not art, but exploitation. Star Trek: Picard season one writer and producer, Michael Chabon, responded to critiques of violence in season one, stating, “And the reason that there has always been violence in Trek is that Trek is art, and there has always been violence—implicit and explicit—in art. It belongs there. It belongs in any narrative about human beings, even human beings of the future” (Trek Movie, 2020). This masking of violence though its cordial display is a cover up of the very intuition of violence. It is protecting violence as an institution. The altruistic remedy of discourse no longer glosses over finer texts of restitution and lives for the eternity of solace, but instead seeks to gratify quick-mire desire from a former glaze of concave prostitution of integrity and remorse.

Secular remunerations of violence are no longer deterred from a segregated sense of remorse for their motivation, but instead, instill their passive intrigue as a matter of determined logic. Casual violence causes determined latency of resurrected vines of dispersing motivations that are more casual than they are thoughtful. Yes, one must be thoughtful to the reality of violence and art that depicts life’s circumstances must certainly address the firm reality of violence, but this permissiveness of participation in a violence-society is not a reflection on it, but a reflection of it.

With violence in art, unnecessary violence masks true violence. It dislocates strategic empathy and a product of Old-World laxatives that are neither present for the enumeration of fallowed discourse nor the wasted periphery of violence as a digestive tool, which it should never be. That is the central error. It believes and perpetuates the false national notion that violence can be a digestive tool to analyze violence as a realistic entity, which reflects a lack of thoughtfulness on life as well as violence. Violence is not your brother or your reformed friend. It is the dearth of the wasted detours that de-evaluate the fragmented memory of your seized hands from the labors of your worthwhile love. What have you of love, you ask? That is not a question you would pose if violence were not so familiar to you. We must liberate our minds from the masks of violence and its attaining air. We must learn to see the day as a repositioning of reattained wealth of bread and breath of will.