| Wednesday, February 4, 2004 |
01:41 - May the best Captain stand forth
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0204/020504.html
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Well, well. Looks like Patrick Stewart has at last had the meltdown that I suppose was all but inevitable-- I mean, c'mon. Even without ever hearing where he stands on this or that political issue, if you had to think of an actor who embodies the foremost values of the Hollywood Left, wouldn't it be ol' Pat? Aristocratic, theater-y, British even-- and best known for a role that's defined primarily by its opposition to his counterpart in the earlier series-- the European superseding the American. Picard, it's long been noted, is the embodiment of a UN in Space-- he's an ambassador, a negotiator, not a fighter. He's the aesthete with the tropical fish, the logician who put Spock to shame, the cold facilitator of dialogue who had more to learn about human emotion than Data did. Hell, even his name was French.
But Kirk, as we all know, was the cowboy-warrior, the lover, the military man, the guy who always went armed with the away teams because he liked to. And William Shatner has reinvented himself lately in ways I never really expected, but in ways that have really spiked my respect for him. Seen him in that recent Priceline commercial? Where his voice-over job gets taken away by Leonard Nimoy? It's all an extension of the character he's created ever since the fateful SNL appearance where he told Trek fans to "get a life". He's figured it out now. He knows all the Shatner jokes, and instead of getting pissed about them, he's playing into them. As a past-his-prime actor, he knows he has two choices: Either make himself still more of a laughingstock, or become a lighthearted parody of himself. He's chosen the latter, and he looks like he hasn't had so much fun before in his life.
I'd be quite surprised if I were to hear that Shatner counted himself into the same ideological ranks as Stewart evidently has.
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Brian Tiemann
