SOURCE: "'I Have Been, and Ever Shall Be, Your Friend': Star Trek, The Deerslayer and the American Romance," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer, 1986, pp. 89-104.

In the following essay, Selley focuses on the relationship between Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock in the television, film, and literary series Star Trek, identifying it in the tradition of mythic male friendship initiated in American literature by Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.

D. H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler have noted that the most enduring and respected American "classics" revolve around the friendships of two males, usually of two different races—Natty and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim.¹ It is thus appropriate that the classic television series Star Trek and the three films it has spawned also focus upon the friendship between an American, white male, Captain Kirk, and the alien, green-blooded Mr...