To Boldly Go Where Others Have Gone Before: Music, Memory, and Nostalgia in Star Trek

Abstract

In adapting Star Trek to film, The Motion Picture (1979) and The Wrath of Khan (1982) represent two contrasting dimensions of nostalgia employed as acts of conjuration, aimed at recapturing—even if only for a moment, in our imagination—the fleeting experiences of Star Trek: The Original Series . Music offers a vital tool to navigate these nostalgic waters. This article centers the soundtracks of Star Trek ’s first two filmic adaptations to illustrate the franchise’s relationships with current events and the politics of memory, yearning, and loss that infuse them. Both films evoke the memory of a cancelled television series, but the two differ markedly in their narratives, visual styles, reception, and most especially, their soundtracks. Khan returns to the musical texts and scoring practices that The Motion Picture largely discards in favor of a quasi-Wagnerian Liebestod . As audiences continue to watch and rewatch these and Trek ’s subsequent remakes, re-imaginings, and reboots over multiple generations, these soundtracks have branched into multiple currents of nostalgia. Exploring the nostalgic residue of each film’s scoring practices allows us more fully to understand the franchise’s roots as well as unpack the complex webs of nostalgia that engulf one of the most iconic media franchises of our time. In so doing, we move beyond criticisms of nostalgia’s regressive possibilities and instead demonstrate how music in media franchises, one of the dominant landscapes of the present, enriches our understanding of nostalgia itself.