William Shatner: ‘Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu’
Cranked out to accommodate the recent boom in demand for fresh content to binge, too many celebrity-profile documentaries are defaulting to the formulaic sameness of assemblyline product: open with some candid talking-head soundbites, a walk down memory lane through their early years, deeper dives into the major bullet points of their career, and tie it up with a bit of summarizing introspection looking back on it all.
Conversely, Alexandre O Philippe’s new William Shatner portrait You Can Call Me Bill spends a goodly amount of time reflecting on its subject’s profound metaphysical bond with horses. The polymath showman also shares his musings on birds, dogs, space, Satan, classic westerns, the symbolic pregnancy of dreams, other people’s impressions of his distinctive voice, and occasionally, acting. He may have naturally wet eyes, but he appears to be on the verge of tears for the entirety of this feature-length philosophical inquisition into the Tao of Shatner.
“I could tell everyone again how I was born in Montreal, but at this point, who cares?” he laughs during a Zoom from his home overlooking the San Fernando Valley. (A 100-year-old former hunting lodge Shatner has rebuilt four times “in four different lives”, it’s an hour’s drive from the ranch where he goes horseback riding. In the background of his screen, his dog gnaws on an antique carpet. “Will this make him an antique dog?” Shatner wonders aloud.) His interests lie elsewhere, some place far beyond himself, in the ether of everyday life or perhaps in the deepest reaches of the cosmos. When he looks within, he does so in an expansive way, waxing rhapsodical on his place in a universe far vaster than Shatner. “And in the course of introspection,” he says, “you get a glimmer of the person.”
In the case of his time on Star Trek, for instance, an inevitable subject of discussion with the former Captain Kirk: “It was three years of my life, you know?” It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into “the category right below friend, I think”. He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. “Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu,” he says. “Great stories are great stories. You put human beings on a spaceship or a deserted planet, and we’ve got another way to see ourselves.”
A week out from his 93d birthday, he still carries that spirit of inquiry as he moves through a changing world. As for work, he shrugs that TV production has gone fundamentally unaltered in the seven decades he’s spent on set; “the cameras were animals, and I made friends with those animals,” he recalls, noting that the technology’s streamlining is his only way to clock the passage of time. But he’s taken a liking to his smartphone, a portal into Wikipedia wormholes that beckon him down “tunnels of knowledge with no end”. Amassing factoids can be its own self-evident reward, and he happily receives useless information as stimulation for the hungry mind. “You can spend hours on this,” he says. “And you ask yourself, especially if you’re 93, of what use is this learning? Why do I care that the Greeks used a phalanx or whatever it might be? And yet, it’s pleasing.”
Every man becomes a library as he ages, and Shatner’s unending pursuit of insight draws from a lifetime of accrued experience. A thespian of his stature can offhandedly mention days spent comparing notes with George C Scott on their diverging interpretations of a role, or how the workaday routine of a gig on Broadway can provide structure and stability. Yet for all his hardearned gravitas, he has the wisdom not to take himself too seriously; “A famous director once gave me the best piece of advice,” he says, then waits in silence for me to ask what it was before answering, “I was hoping you’d ask. It was ‘LOUDER!’” This combination of stolid earnestness in his work and humor about himself forms the foundation of his unlikely musical career, in which he speaks the lyrics of the standard songbook so that audiences may hear them through fresh ears. “You can think of it as comedy,” he explains. “‘O say, can you see,’ that’s our national anthem. But if I say it dramatically, the same words, it becomes something you’ve never heard before.”
The opportunity to dabble in everything remains one of Shatner’s most cherished perks in a long career, a restlessness that most recently brought the nonagenarian into sub-orbit. In 2021, he became the oldest man to undertake the extraordinary physical strain of a space flight courtesy of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin project. He takes on a tranquility as he recounts the extreme pressure bearing down on his chest as he rocketed through the atmosphere, and its instantaneous dissipation as they broke through into zero-gravity. Liberated by weightlessness, he found himself utterly transformed by the rush of perspective one can only assume miles above the Earth. “It’s very personal, what you see from up there, what you read into the stillness,” he says. “I saw the blankness of space as death, but an astronaut will see something else entirely. And when I looked back at the Earth, I saw life.”
The question of mortality hangs over Shatner, albeit not in a morbid way. He’s entranced by the paradox of death, that the absolute unknowability of what happens will be inevitably supplanted by the certainty of finding out. He appreciates the inscrutable quality to Timothy Leary’s final declaration “Of course!” as a brief transmission from the gateway to the beyond, and he seems unfazed as I point out that the same could be said of Colonel Kurtz’s “The horror, the horror!” in Apocalypse Now. Though that’s not to say Shatner harbors any romantic notions of the end, describing the process of getting out of bed as a “major enterprise” and concluding that he hopes only to live as long as his ability to get himself into and out of his underwear.
For a man accustomed to boldly going where no man has gone before, it’s all just the next phase of a single ongoing adventure. Every step on Shatner’s spiritual odyssey brings him closer to the enlightenment he chases throughout You Can Call Me Bill, though he’s also made peace with the limits of his comprehension. The universe charms him with its mysteries, the key to maintaining wonder through nearly a century of life. He likes the not-knowing: “I imagine that since the dawn of time, the little prehistoric guy with his club looked up at the stars and asked, ‘Is this all there is? Hunting, killing?’ We search for continuity, and faced with its lack – that when you die, you die, that’s the end, goodbye – we need an alternative. All throughout history, mankind has avoided thinking this dire thought. We devised wonderful stories, you get to meet back up with your mom and dad, you get to meet God. On the one hand, maybe it’s a fairytale. On the other, how can it be that this intricate being simply ceases to exist?”
You Can Call Me Bill is out in select US cinemas now with a UK date to be announced
I saw the blankness of space as death, but an astronaut will see something else entirely. And when I looked back at the Earth, I saw life
to Led Zeppelin. Her lyrics were so odd that some observers patronisingly suggested their author had a shaky grasp of English, but a quick scan of their Spanish-language equivalents revealed she was using exactly the same weird metaphors and imagery in her native tongue. It was all hugely entertaining, until the commercial underperformance of 2009’s She Wolf in the US seemed to rattle her: Shakira’s albums have been getting less idiosyncratic and more dreary ever since. Perhaps the hell-hath-no-fury mood here might inspire her to recover her sense of daring: after all, a woman who expresses her feelings about her ex’s mother by allegedly putting a lifesize model of a witch directly outside her home doesn’t seem minded to meekly curry favour.
Alas, anyone harbouring such expectations should dampen them. It’s certainly an album mired in her romantic travails, from sorrow at a failing relationship (Entre Paréntesis) to brutal enumeration of her ex’s failings (Te Felicito), to tentative steps back into dating, beset by doubts and fears which seem to have been assuaged by the conclusion of Nassau (“After doing it nonstop / We repeat it”). There are occasional flickers of the blue-sky-thinking Shakira of yore, in the lyrics of Puntería (which, if the translation provided by the record company is to be trusted, contains the intriguing command “give me your fire, squeeze my buttocks”) and in the moment when Cómo Dónde y Cuándo briefly threatens to transform itself from a We Will Rock You stomp into raging drum’n’bass. But these are scattered moments in an album primarily concerned with strolling through a selection of familiar modern pop styles: some Afrobeats, a big piano ballad (complete with guest vocals by Shakira’s children), a bit of mournful reggaeton on TQG and plenty of wan pop-house of both the EDMinspired and disco-influenced varieties. The melodies range from strong to irritatingly rinky-dink: none of them has a tune grabby enough to override the sense that you’ve heard a lot of this kind of thing already. There is a guest appearance from Cardi B – who briefly livens things up by comparing her vagina to an empanada – and there is the perennially depressing sound of a vocalist who patently doesn’t need to be Auto-Tuned submitting to it anyway because that’s the way things are done these days.
The best moments come when Shakira seeks out bands who deal in regional Mexican styles, a sound currently on the ascent in the Americas: Grupo Frontera on Entre Parentésis, and especially Fuerza Regida, who perform a frantic corrido on closer El Jefe. The latter jolts you not just because of its sweary lyrics – “I work harder than a whore but I fuck like a priest” – but because it feels unexpected. This is not music that Shakira has essayed before, which suggests the adventurous spirit that was once her USP isn’t entirely extinguished.
But if she’s still capable of making striking music, why doesn’t she do it more often? The majority of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran settles for gliding in one ear and out the other without leaving much impression, but without actively driving you up the wall either: the state of sublime mediocrity in which a lot of current pop chooses to operate. Perhaps that’s the point here. Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran sounds like the work of someone who has decided that sales are born of playing it safe and that success in itself is the best revenge.
This week Alexis listened to
Charlotte Day Wilson – I Don’t Love YouAn exquisite, graceful piano ballad with a plethora of twisted vocal samples lurking in its peripheral vision: fans of James Blake’s early experimentation are advised to investigate.