How the Vulcan got his ears

When the writer and director Nicholas Meyer was first approached about the possibility of working on the sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, his initial response was: “Star Trek? Is that the one with the guy with the pointy ears?” Meyer, who tells this story in his engaging memoir The View from the Bridge, went on to cleverly stage the opening scene of Wrath of Khan—which is probably the one movie, aside from Vertigo, that I’ve discussed more often on this blog than any other—so that those ears are literally the first thing we see, in a shot of a viewscreen taken from over Spock’s shoulder. Elsewhere, I’ve spoken at length about how Meyer’s detachment from the source material resulted in by far the best movie in the franchise, and one of the most entertaining movies I’ve ever seen: because he wasn’t beholden to the original series, he was free to stock it with things he liked, from the Horatio Hornblower novels to A Tale of Two Cities. But it’s revealing that he latched onto those ears first. As the reaction to Leonard Nimoy’s death last week amply proved, Spock was the keystone and entry point to that entire universe, and our love for him and what he represented had as much to do with his ears as with what was going on in the brain between them.

These days, Spock’s ears are so iconic that it can be hard to recognize how odd they once seemed. Spock was one of the few elements to survive from the original series pilot “The Cage,” and even at the time, the network was a little perturbed: it raised concerns over his allegedly satanic appearance, which executives feared “would scare the shit out of every kid in America.” (They would have cared even less for Gene Roddenberry’s earliest conceptions, in which Spock was described as having “a slightly reddish complexion.”) Accordingly, the first round of publicity photos for the show were airbrushed to give him normal ears and eyebrows. In any event, of course, Spock didn’t scare kids, or ordinary viewers—he fascinated them. And those ears were a large part of his appeal. As Meyer intuitively understood, they were a fantastic piece of narrative shorthand, a signal to anyone flipping through channels that something interesting was happening onscreen. Spock’s ears said as much about the show’s world and intentions as Kirk’s opening voiceover, and they did so without a word of dialogue.

Yet they wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if they hadn’t served as the visual introduction to a character who revealed greater depths the moment he began to speak. Spock was ostensibly a creature of pure logic, but he was much more, as Roger Ebert noted in his original review of Wrath of Khan:

The peculiar thing about Spock is that, being half human and half Vulcan and therefore possessing about half the usual quota of human emotions, he consistently, if dispassionately, behaves as if he possessed very heroic human emotions indeed. He makes a choice in Star Trek II that would be made only by a hero, a fool, or a Vulcan.

And while Robert Anton Wilson once claimed, with a straight face, that Spock was an archetypal reincarnation of the Aztec god Mescalito, whose pointed ears also appear on Peter Pan and the Irish leprechaun, his truest predecessor is as close as Victorian London. Meyer—whose breakthrough as a novelist was The Seven Per-Cent Solution—was the first to explicitly make the connection between Spock and Sherlock Holmes, whom Spock obliquely calls “an ancestor of mine” in The Undiscovered Country. Both were perfect reasoning machines, but they used logic to amplify, rather than undercut, their underlying qualities of humanity. “A great heart,” as Watson says, “as well as…a great brain.”

There’s a lesson here for storytellers of all kinds, and like most such examples, it’s easy to explain and all but impossible to replicate. Spock began as a visual conceit that could be grasped at once, deepened over time into a character whose basic qualities were immediately comprehensible and intriguing, and then became much more, aided in no small part by a magnificent performance by Nimoy. The autism advocate Temple Grandin has spoken of how much of herself she saw in Spock, a logical being trying to make his way in a world of more emotional creatures, and there’s no question that many Star Trek fans felt the same way. Spock, at least, carried his difference openly, and those who wear Starfleet pins on their lapels or don pointed ears at conventions are quietly allying themselves with that sense of otherness—which turns, paradoxically, into a sense of identity. “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human,” Kirk says at the end of Wrath of Khan, and what feels like a contradiction gets at something more profound. Humanity, whether in reality or in fiction, is something we have to earn with every choice we make. Spock’s journey as a character was so compelling that it arguably saved Star Trek three times over, and neither the franchise or science fiction as we know it would be the same if we hadn’t heard the story through his ears.