I have just come back from seeing J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek. It is a film of real brilliance that will become, I think, a minor classic of cinematic science fiction and establishes Abrams as a director to be taken seriously (I am unfamiliar with the Abrams' produced tv series Lost or Alien but did not appreciate Mission Impossible 3, so i can now chose to blame Tom Cruise for its failure).

I am still quite full of ideas that are perhaps not completely organized so the following remarks might not have the coherency i would wish them ti have, nevertheless i think they can be starting points for a conversation on this fascinating movie.

SPOILER ALERT - for those who haven't seen the movie I will be discussing some of its major events

The major question which occupies the film is that of inheritance. What is it that one inherits, what is the task facing the heir, and what particular light can the genre of science fiction throw on this question. The film is also of course very conscious of its own status as an heir to a cultural dynasty, consisting of multiple TV series and at least 10 films, a cultural heritage perhaps unique in the scope of its influence, having practically established a civilization inhabited by these patriotic citizens known as Trekkies.

The film opens indeed with a remarkable scene of the birth of an heir, where the father of the future captain Kirk - himself the freshly appointed (thus a very recent heir, a matter of minutes) to the position of a space ship's captain, (the previous captain having just sacrificed himself, bequeathing his position to Kirk's father) - commits a heroic act of self sacrifice which allows both the successful birth of his son (whom he will never see, but to whom he leaves his name) as well as the survival of a few hundred people. This is the opening (double) inheritance that will dominate a film that consists of multiple scenes of dying and bequeathing. The scenes of inheritance haunting the film come under two main aspects: 1)  the first is the inheritance of the position of CAPTAIN, where again and again a captain leaves or dies or resigns bequeathing his role to another. 2) the second major aspect of inheritance is that of people becoming the survivors of a culture or a world that has been completely destroyed, and in this sense they become the sole heirs and carriers of the memory of this lost world that exists nowhere but in their memory.

The question of being an heir then opens under the double aspect of inheriting a role of command, and becoming the memorial place holder of a world that is no more.  The heir is therefore, by implicaion, always double, an heir to a role or a function, to a position, as well as to a loss of which s/he is the only memory.This memory of loss, or memory as the place holder of loss, as the film shows, has two sides, the first in a way is the actual content of that which has been lost, say the customs and traditions and inventions etc of that culture that has been lost and which one now needs to preserve, and the second is a certain NOTHING, the simple fact of death, or that which is at the heart of any annihilation, a nothing that one becomes hunted by and a witness to, and the memory of which one also carries as an heir. this nothing in the science fictional terminology of the film is a black hole, a black hole haunting every act of inheritance. To be an heir is thus to inherit a role as well as becoming a double sided memory, of a positive content and of a black hole.

Let us consider a traditional scene of inheritance, a king dies and has left his son the kingdom. In the "ideal" case of this scenario, an ideal that to an extent has guided the classical thinking of inheritance, the inheritance goes completely smoothly, the kingdom remains as it were and the role of the king remains the same, only the one occupying it has changed. But in this sense, the change is not really essential, and thus death is not of real consequence, since the role and the kingdom have not changed. But what happens when together with the death of the king the kingdom has disappeared as well? what is it that the king's son has inherited? a role that is now empty, a world that is no more, and the awareness of the very fact of death as that which has interrupted the smooth inheritance of the kingdom. To an extent modernity, beginning with Shakespearean tragedy, is the era haunted by this problematization of inheritance, where the smooth transition inheritance is interrupted and where what is inherited becomes a memory that contains the fact of a death as an irreversible loss. What is the task of the heir to this loss? in the thinking of star trek the task is to become one of two things, a captain (or a senior member)of a space ship that constantly crosses black holes, or an evil villain who, having inherited the loss of a world, is completely haunted by the black hole aspect of this inheritance to such an extent that all he is consumed by is the desire to spread his black hole to everything. this heir, the villain of the film, is then the one whose inheritance consists in the call to spread the black hole of which he is the heir.
In the brilliant metaphorical device of the film, the evil villain then, the one haunted by the loss of his civilization of which he is one of the sole heirs, is in charge of a sophisticated scientific device that can turn any planet and any civilization into a black hole, a nothing,by which it is annihilated. in a visual idea of genius, this device in the film consists in the injection of a single red drop (clearly a drop of blood) into the heart of a civilization, an injection which destroys it. it is thus a single drop of blood, the trace of a loss and of a bodily death, that can become the carrier of the spreading of the black hole.

The captain on the other hand, the one who is supposed to navigate a space ship through black holes, meaning through time whose essence consists in annihilation, is the one who can carry an inheritance of loss, yet nevertheless not turn it into an instrument  of annihilation, but rather to the opening to the possibility of new cultures and new worlds, that come and go, each carrying at theur heart a black hole, which is on the one hand oblivion, on the other hand a memory and the possibility of a new world and civilization. Science fiction the genre haunted by time travel and black holes, becomes here a genre of inheritance and mourning, a genre haunted by the fact of a plurality of worlds, meaning by the facts that worlds are always already to an extent dead, having come into existence, and having disappeared, living a memory of which the ones navigating the science fictional universe are the carriers.