Friday, May 14, 2010

Am I Spock?

I had a chance this morning to watch the 2009 self-titled Star Trek movie, which was in my opinion one of the most unique reboots in recent movies. With that, I got to pondering on the very basic facets of Kirk and Spock, the primal essence that defines the character.

The title of this post actually has history for me, much more than the ramblings that I'm typing out right now. Back in 1995 I had a unique chance to go to the first ever Sci-Fi convention inside of the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney world. While this was not the first convention of this ilk that I had gone to, hosting it in the newly revamped "TomorrowLand" made it unique. I was able to listen to many famous actors and writers talk about their experiences, and the most unique of these was Leonard Nimoy.

He was there promoting his new book at the time: I am Spock. He talked about the parts of the character that were also parts of himself. After watching his performance alongside the new Spock and Kirk in the film, it begets a very interesting thought process for me: How much do my peers establish their personality based on the heroes written on screen during their youth? Kirk, Spock, Luke, Han, Indiana (even if it was the dog's name): These are the heroes of my youth, and the archetypes of the strong leader that I dreamed about at night.

Am I Spock? No, I would never characterize myself that way. In fact, I would state much more clearly that I would identify with Kirk as an archetype - Leap then Look, run with emotion, and settle the details later. It is not all of who I am, but reconciling my personality and how I view myself has to be a large part of determining who I am going to be.

Maybe one of these days I'm going to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up.