Bette Davis title card, Now, Voyager. 1942. Public Domain.
Now, Star Trek Voyager
It is a feature of our time that many of us now worry that the universe might actually be some sort of a giant simulation. We expect to hear astronomers report that entire star fields are repeating in faint quadrants of the night sky. Or that everything somehow “blinked” for a couple of seconds, and there are increments of time that cannot be accounted for anywhere, by anyone.
The reasons for why many of us find ourselves looking around for “the tell,” for some revelatory “glitch,” are not hard to find. For example, there is the sterility of our late capitalist culture, which abounds with simulacra. We’ve all seen the lazy re-packagings of dimly recalled “originals” employed to make “a fast buck” by trading on something that once resonated with more immediate cultural power. There is also our high-degree of perceptual saturation by digital media; for many of us, something isn’t real until it is validated by being uploaded to a cloud.
This all being said, I’m now going to make my own case to you that the universe must be such a simulation. It happened like this:
Last night, M and I were lying in bed, watching the TV on the wall, while the dogs snored and farted. I had the remote, and was flipping around, while M was reading boring texts by Chris Hayes on his phone. For a while, I watched “Star Trek Voyager.” The episode had something to do with Seven-of-Nine’s struggle to become a “real girl.” But I had seen it too many times, so I flipped the channel.
The next place I landed was an episode of the eighties sitcom, “Mama’s Family” starring Vicki Lawrence in the title role. In this episode, Mama is sitting with a distressed friend or relation, whose husband has left her. They are watching television, and we cannot see the screen. The friend says to Mama, “here comes the best part, the part where Paul Henreid lights Betty Davis’s cigarette.” Staring at the screen without looking at her companion, Mama says something like, “where are you going to find a man like that today?”
Without thinking much about it, I flip again. I land next on a showing of “Now, Voyager” on TCM. Paul Henreid is lighting Betty Davis’s cigarette.
Next to me, there is an intake of breath. M, roused from near slumber, says, “woah. What just happened. Did that just happen?”
For a millisecond, I don’t know what he’s talking about. But then it washes over me. How is this possible? Did something just happen? If so, what exactly was it?
Maybe we are suffering from some sort of hermeneutic syndrome, like an overactive thyroid? But that doesn’t make sense, because these shows were actually on TV at exactly the right time to send me these messages. But what messages? What is this telling me? Also, I didn’t just see it myself. M saw it too. Shared delusion? Or just too many months of COVID lockdown?
Do I need to see a doctor? Maybe I should go down to sickbay, and see the holographic doctor because that would be safer. But Voyager’s doctor is really rather abrasive. Anyway, this is psychological. I need someone more like Claude Rains’ doctor Jaquith. That’s it, a holographic doctor Jaquith.
