The House Next Door

By Ken Cancelosi


[A contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon.]

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan contains my favorite Star Trek moment and my favorite close-up of all time, when a seemingly shell-shocked Admiral Kirk listens to his nemesis, Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban), describe how much he will enjoy abandoning Kirk and his crew in the center of a dead planet, then screams “Khaaaan!” into his communicator.

The scene has annoyed me for years because it deceives the audience. Kirk and Spock have duped Khan (and us) into believing that the battle-damaged Enterprise is days away from functioning again, when in fact it will be space-worthy in a few hours. This false information leads Khan to believe he can finally bring his intense hatred of Kirk to a climax and conclusion. Kirk’s “pretend” reaction to Khan’s malice is so unrestrained, and so bereft of anything that might identify it as a ploy in retrospect, that we have to accept it as legitimate. At this crucial moment, Shatner's performance betrays not even the slightest hint to his “stranded” crew members or the audience that the whole thing is a ruse. The movie's director, Nicholas Meyer, guides his actors and cuts the scene in a way that turns the admiral's con job into a cinematic one. If you watch that scene closely and follow its internal logic, it seems almost unfair; even as I respect the creativity with which Kirk cheats death for the millionth time, it takes me out of the movie.

Still, there's no getting around the fact that it's the signature moment in Shatner's best performance as Kirk. The scream is so fearlessly intense that it stands apart from the rest of the movie. Elsewhere, Shatner is (by his standards) nuanced and moving. Star Trek II is a story of redemption and friendship that shows us a familiar character in an unfamiliar state: James T. Kirk, the intergalactic Horatio Hornblower, in emotional disrepair. Against all good advice, he has relinquished command of the starship Enterprise for a promotion to the admiralty. Starfleet has given him the 23rd century equivalent of a desk job, training Starfleet cadets. Shatner's performance conveys the sense that Kirk's mind is atrophying, that his boredom is killing him. “I must be getting senile,” he laments. His good friend Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForrest Kelley) arrives at his doorstep with a birthday gift -- a pair of granny glasses.

This Kirk is a melancholy man who feels older than he looks. “Gallavanting around the galaxy is a game for the young, Doctor,” he tells McCoy. His voice and gait confirm that his best days are behind him. En route to the Enterprise to conduct a training mission, he can hardly contain his disdain for his new job. “I hate inspections,“ he tells his helmsman. He steps aboard his old starship a shadow of his warrior self, a sad figurehead trapped in a small world of his own making. Redemption is coming, but it will cost him.

Shatner's turn in Khan would prove to be the second most significant performance of his career, eclipsed only by his initial appearance in Gene Roddenberry's science fiction drama. Trek, which ran on NBC from 1966-69, established the journeyman Canadian actor -- a veteran of televised theater, westerns and anthology shows (including The Twilight Zone's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet") -- as a leading man. His renown would only grow after the network canceled Roddenberry's low-rated series and turned it loose in syndication.

The character of Kirk received plenty of love from Star Trek fans during the 1970s, but Shatner was not the endearing figure during those lean years that he is today. He seemed torn between running away from Kirk and desperately exploiting his sci-fi connections. This is the man who embarrassed himself in front of the whole world with spoken word performances of pop songs (most infamously, a dramatic reading of Elton John’s "Rocket Man"). But for the most part, throughout the 1970s, he was just a working actor, showing up in episodes of Columbo, Mannix, Barnaby Jones and the like.

Then, over the next couple of decades, for better or for worse, an incredible thing happened: William Shatner, a man whose sour self-centeredness is well-documented in castmates' memoirs, became beloved. He's everywhere -- in ads for Priceline.com, on David E. Kelley's prime time drama Boston Legal, in feature films (Miss Congeniality), even in cartoons (Futurama). Who doesn’t enjoy Shatner these days? At 78, with a surgically stretched face, removable hair, a button nose and ample girth, the man resembles a character in a stop-motion Rankin-Bass holiday special. He has even acquired a catchy nickname: “The Shat.” We love to watch the Shat, and the Shat loves to be watched. Shatner's most prominent contemporaries from '60s and '70s TV -- Alan Alda, Bob Newhart, even Leonard Nimoy -- don't have nicknames. What happened?

The short answer: 1982. Looking back, this seems the pivotal year in Shatner's celebrity -- and not just because of his performance in Khan or the debut of his lame ABC cop series T.J. Hooker. Strange as it might sound, a far smaller role from 1982 might have had greater long-term impact: Shatner's supporting part in Airplane II.

In the comedy, a mostly forgettable sequel to Airplane!, Shatner plays a former war buddy of Robert Hays' alcoholic fighter jock hero, who's now a space shuttle pilot trying to land his damaged craft at a moon base. Shatner's knowingly Kirk-like performance suggested that he wasn't a self-serious ham, but a good sport who was in on the joke of his own fame. This film's most telling moment is also played in close-up. We see Shatner's face framed by what looks like one of the many viewscreens that were all over Star Trek. Then, Mel Brooks-style, he opens a door that you didn't realize was there and steps through it, revealing that the "viewscreen" was a window and the image you thought was a simulation was, in fact, the actual guy. It's the inaugural gesture in the next phase of Shatner's career.