A while ago I received a copy of William Shatner’s latest autobiography. My friends have a general sense that I have some sort of one-sided relationship to William Shatner that does not extend to wanting to know anything about his personal life, but that’s about as far as we usually get on the subject. I haven’t read the book yet. Odds are I won’t get around to it.
William Shatner, through no particular fault of his own, has always produced in me such a combination of powerful sentiments, such a furious mixture of longing and frustration and incoherence, that I can scarcely bear to think directly about him. By most accounts he is an unpleasant man and I think it unlikely that we would have much to say to each other, although that’s not exactly why I don’t want to know what he’s thinking or saying or working on these days. I have had to remind friends that I don’t want to hear about what fights William Shatner is getting into on Twitter, that I do not want ever to be put into a position where I might have to say hello to him, that for us to ever meet would result in great humiliation for me and moderate confusion for him. I have never sought to consummate any of my desires. I could never stand to be in a room with William Shatner. I would almost certainly burst into tears and quite possibly ask to suck his dick, and I can’t imagine he needs that kind of vibrantly upsetting energy in his life. I do not know exactly what I would require from him, and my guess is that he has spent probably enough of his life around people who overreact to his presence. The only thing I really want from him is to be left alone so I can contemplate him properly.
William Shatner guest-starred on two different episodes of Columbo, but I shall only require you to see the first, from 1976. Shatner’s second appearance, 1994’s “Butterflies in Shades of Grey,” is necessary only for the compulsive Shatner completist. Better to watch “Fade in to Murder.” Columbo, like the original run of Star Trek, regularly tried to imagine how to solve problems without immediately resorting to violence, and showcased a certain sort of competent, empathetic male peacefulness that makes me cry when I try to explain it to someone who’s never watched the show.
I have been trying very hard not to talk to you about Star Trek, but I’m afraid I’ll have to. No one really wants to hear how someone else got into Star Trek any more than they want to hear about your dream last night; those stories all sound the same and never quite tell the truth. I will confine myself to this: I had no real choice when it came to loving Star Wars. I saw it for the first time when I was six years old and was not yet grown enough to be able to decide where to bestow my adoration. I loved Star Wars helplessly, reflexively; I came to it before the age of accountability, which does not apply only to theological matters but those concerning the heart. For example, I was baptized at twelve, yet when it happened, I did not think of myself as too young for it at the time; it is the same way with Star Wars. For better or worse, I am a Star Wars person. I neither regret nor wish to change that part of myself, but I cannot take credit or responsibility for it. Star Trek, however, was something that belonged to me as soon as I saw it, and William Shatner belonged to me most of all. He was always being framed in gauzy close-ups, which was exactly how I wanted to look at the sort of man who compelled me—that is, handsome men of less-than-average height dressed in stretchy, breathable fabrics, with countless best friends committed to nonviolence, who had slightly feminine hips, who solved puzzles, and maintained erotically charged eye contact with other men and lady science officers: Yes, just like that, more of this, but don’t get any closer. Give me the outlines as sharp as you can, but stop zooming in.
At any rate, Bill Shatner is more than Star Trek—or at least I want to believe that he is more than Star Trek, which is why I am trying to put off talking about Star Trek for as long as possible. In “Fade in to Murder,” Bill plays Ward Fowler, an actor famous for playing the television detective “Lieutenant Lucerne.” He is also a murderer. He wears lifts in his shoes and a toupee and is following a joyless studio diet to keep his weight down, and spends the majority of the episode sheepishly acknowledging the truth about his body.
“I’d appreciate a certain amount of discretion in that matter, Lieutenant,” he tells Columbo after each confession/discovery. “Public image, you know.”
I never know how to refer to previous incarnations of myself in a way that honestly acknowledges the present without sacrificing the past. There is truth, sometimes, in saying that I used to be a woman of sorts, although I don’t think I’d much appreciate hearing someone else say this about me. Let us say that there was a time when I was a person who appreciated a certain amount of discretion in the matter of my public image, a time in which making decisions about my own life felt a bit like contemplating murder, a time when allowing any other person to see my body felt like inviting a detective to arrest me.
We know, of course, that William Shatner was well-known for wearing lifts, and a toupee, and following joyless studio diets to keep his weight down, and spent the majority of his post-sixties career acknowledging and apologizing for himself, at least on-screen if not in his memoirs. I’m not sure that it was ever strictly correct to call myself a closeted trans man. I think as soon as I knew I was one, or wanted to be one, or that one was pretty much the same thing as the other, I told somebody else about it. But a closeted trans man might experience a certain type of transmasculine resonance, watching that scene play out (your transmasculine resonance may vary; transmasculine resonance not guaranteed).
It should perhaps go without saying that unless you are Kevin Pollak, I do not want to hear your William Shatner impression, but I will say it nonetheless, in case you are ever tempted. You might practice your Shatner in the privacy of your own home until your speaking voice becomes indistinguishable from his and you baffle your own ears, and find strange new depths in your own throat. Call me then, but not before.
Most Columbo murderers fall into one of two categories. They’re either profoundly irritated at his quiet, relentless presence, or they are overwhelmed with relief when he turns up and they can stop trying to run for cover, and find excuses to spend more time with him. He is a rumpled little conscience in an overcoat who dogs their footsteps almost from the moment the murder is completed. There’s a moral lightness and an untroubled heart at the core of him, an innate goodness that resonates outward and either puts people immediately at ease or deeply unsettles them, according to the state of their own conscience. Columbo is perhaps the only fictional detective one can imagine sleeping soundly at night. William Shatner plays the second kind of murderer. The sight of Columbo is an enormous relief to him, a source of joy and freedom from something terrible, and he spends the majority of the second act smiling ruefully at Peter Falk as if to say, “Isn’t this all a little ridiculous? Aren’t I more than a little ridiculous? Do you want to have lunch with me anyway?” and breaking my heart in the meantime. William Shatner could put a promise into a smile like nobody’s business.
There is a website called Shatner’s Toupee that—surprisingly uncruelly, given its name—celebrates the quality of sheepishness that Shatner brings to Columbo. (Sheepishness [n.]: “Affected by or showing embarrassment caused by consciousness of a fault.”) Shatner on-screen is always affected, always conscious of the embarrassment he causes others, always conscious of his faults; sheepishness is the fastest way to convince me something or someone is worth loving. Hello, yes I’m very aware that I’m like this, I’m sorry.
It’s a very good episode, especially if you are interested, as I am, in watching the breakdown and failure of boyish charm. The last of Shatner’s boyishness had left him by about 1976, and “Fade in to Murder” pays it appropriate tribute. His last line to Falk, after a brief and gentle confrontation, is very endearing, and very boyish, and very sad: “Lieutenant,” he says, “you’d be doing me an enormous favor if you stopped calling me ‘Sir.’ ” There is no shit-eating in his grin then.
Please don’t mistake that ending, or Bill’s performance, for sadness. There is no possibility for true sadness in any performance of Bill Shatner’s. I don’t mean he is not capable of displaying sadness, merely that the gigantic reality of his underlying joy can never truly be compromised. Ward Fowler may go to prison, but Columbo has seen him first, and that is something no one can take away from him.
A while back I was at a conference in Tennessee with a bunch of medievalists trying to explain something about boyishness, and what it feels like to want to resist it and to drown in it at the same time. We were talking about Apollo and Hyacinthus (I am often, almost always, trying to talk about Apollo and Hyacinthus), and I was trying to figure out why exactly it felt so important to me, once again to explain the connection between the death of Hyacinthus and Ultimate Frisbee. Not because that was funny, but because it seemed very important to identify just what kind of beautiful boy he had been (Are you up? If so, do you want to play Frisbee and die for each other?). “There is a certain type of beautiful boy who plays Ultimate Frisbee and invites you to come watch his game,” I said, “not because he is vain and self-centered, although he maybe is, but because it is the only way he knows how to invite someone to share in his particular joy, and I think maybe the only thing I have ever wanted is to be a very beautiful, very dead, gentle boy that everyone gathers around and looks at.” William Shatner was, in his prime, a very beautiful, very gentle boy, although being dead had very little to do with his particular type of boyishness. It was a type of boyishness that drew scrutiny and criticism in a manner much like girlishness, and that seemed to require a constant public apology from him for aging.
I am also firmly of the belief that Captain James T. Kirk was, and is, at every age and in every incarnation, a beautiful lesbian; I fear that now I will be called upon to explain myself and that I will be unable to do so. I can only repeat myself with increasing fervor: James T. Kirk is a beautiful lesbian, do not ask me any follow-up questions. Like Goldwater, in your heart you know I’m right. There is plenty of stupid, surface-level evidence I could marshal forth in defense of my argument—people criticized Shatner for his weight, and women are often criticized for their weight; Shatner was beautiful in a way that women are generally beautiful; James T. Kirk lives with her longtime girlfriend (Spock) and her ex-girlfriend (Bones) in a benevolent feelings-and-sex-triad and generally observed the campsite rule when it came to bringing short-term partners around; James T. Kirk is vulnerable and anxious and riddled with sincerity and in love with her car; James T. Kirk wears motorcycle boots and seems to spend a lot of time on her hair, doesn’t want kids and rereads Dickens and doesn’t feel comfortable showing her feelings in front of anyone she’s known less than ten years but that doesn’t mean she won’t do it—but those things aren’t really what make James T. Kirk a beautiful lesbian, I don’t think. (It should perhaps go without saying that the contemporary interpreter of Kirk, Chris Pine, is also a beautiful lesbian, but that doesn’t have anything to do with my feelings for William Shatner, so we’re not going to address that any further here.)
I tried to explain to those same medievalists the strange reaction I have every time I read anything more than one hundred years old. “I feel a profound sense of triumph and superiority over the author,” I said, “because they are foolish enough to be dead, while I am young and gloriously alive. Not because I think their ideas are outdated or anything like that. It has nothing to do with how they think, or how we see the world differently. It is visceral, it is personal, it is gleeful, and it is triumphant. I have the good sense to still be living, while they have very foolishly died, and it always takes me at least ten minutes to stop crowing over my victory and pay attention to what I am reading.” No one else at the table, it turned out, felt quite the same way when reading something by a dead author, but that does not mean I am alone.
William Shatner would have made an excellent Maggie the Cat, because he is alive, no matter how many discuses you try to throw at him, no matter how easily the rest of us get distracted by his hairline or his age. He is beautiful, and alive, and not dead, and I don’t think I’ve done a very good job explaining anything today.