Captain's Blog, pt. 98: Leonard by William Shatner

"Some directors are Machiavellian manipulators; 

Leonard was a Mother Teresa manipulator."

- Steve Guttenberg 

Today is the one year anniversary of Leonard Nimoy's death. Seemed like an appropriate time to discuss William Shatner (with David Fisher)'s recently-published tribute:

It seemed pointless to analyze it the way I have other Trek memoirs. How do you really analyze a man's personal tribute to his dearly departed friend? I will say that if you wanted something like Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner, you'll be disappointed. It doesn't fill an essential gap in Trek lore and scholarship, but it would have been exceedingly surprising (and outside the scope of its intent) if it had. Shatner wanted to write a tribute to his friend's career that took the reader from Leonard's birth to death, in that he mostly succeeded.

Is it a good read? Sure. Leonard Nimoy was a fascinating guy, so anecdotes about his life and career will likewise be fascinating.Maybe there's less personal interaction between them mentioned than there should be. But a lot of that is just how Shatner is. He mentions James Spader, how they were attached at the hip and loved each other like brothers while working on Boston Legal all those years, but they've exchanged only a handful of texts or calls since. No love lost, just the way that it goes.

With Leonard, though, it was different. He and Shatner grew close not during the TOS era but from doing the conventions circuit and being continually in one another's lives as a result of Star Trek never fading away. He describes an eight-day cross-country motorcycle ride from Chicago to Los Angeles he took in 2015, the summer after Leonard died. He observed a set of brothers throughout the trip. 

"They rode side by side, each describing his brother as his best friend. They also had fights, one night they described choking each other, but the next morning, whatever caused that was gone. They loved each other and they are each others' best friend. That is something that is very rare, very enviable, and to me, something that must be cherished when achieved. And for a time, I had that with Leonard, and I lost it."  

We'll get back to that at the end of the post. The bulk of the book describes Nimoy's career and particularly his approach to his craft. Nimoy was an eloquent guy when it came to tradecraft and the purpose of art. When he did Equus on Broadway, he told Shatner afterward that it gave him"a feeling of awe at the power of the horse in the night mind of man." 

I love that. And it made me wonder what kind of book we'd have gotten had the situation been reversed and we were reading Nimoy's tribute to Shatner instead. That book probably would have been the equal of Hotchner's Papa Hemingway.

"In Search Of... was the perfect show for Leonard to host, because more than anyone I have ever known, Leonard spent his entire life in search of knowledge and creative expression."

Nimoy came from a first-generation Jewish immigrant family in Boston, three blocks from where the Boston Science Museum now stands (and where you can - or at least you could; I haven't been in many years - hear him say "Who put the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp" in the audio intro to all Omni IMAX presentations there). Much of the overview in Leonard of his early childhood comes from remarks I recall from Mind Meld, but there are some personal recollections mixed in, as well.

"My father warned me 'You'll be hanging around with gypsies and bums.' I understood that his vision of actors were the people who came into Iziaslav, in the villages and towns as a company, and did a performance in the town square and passed the hat - then maybe steal a loaf of bread, make love to the mayor's daughter, and leave in the morning. And then he offered me a piece of advice, 'Learn to play the accordion.' Because if I could play the accordion, I could always make a living working bar mitzvahs and weddings."

I would have liked to hear if Nimoy ever did learn to play the accordion. I don't think it's touched upon - here or anywhere else. Perhaps when he gets the definitive biography of the 600 page variety, we'll learn the answer.

He did pay tribute to his family's roots when he played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

While "unfortunately there was little demand for an actor who spoke Yiddish and could duel," Nimoy etched out a living for many years as a taxi driver in L.A., which freed him up for auditions during the day. He got parts regularly on a variety of shows of the era:

But of course it was Star Trek that put him over the top. Shatner spends an understandable amount of time on their Trek years, both the show and the movies, but this is all material that's been well-pored-over. One of the anecdotes - how he got Leonard to recreate his "Pain!" PAIN!" bit from "Devil in the Dark" as a set-up to say "Will someone get this guy an aspirin?" i.e. tell a dumb joke. - is described a bit differently here than it was in Shatner's TV Memories or in Nimoy's recollection. 

It was during the filming of The Motion Picture that Shatner began to appreciate how their natures complemented each other, not just as Kirk and Spock, but as Bill and Lenny. "(He) displayed little emotion; I was a walking mood ring." The filming of TMP was a well-known mess. One day they got to talking about how they could fix the script. They pitched their idea (which Shatner doesn't remember, or divulge; maybe he's saving it for a Clangers multi-parter) to director Robert Wise, who listened and said "Okay, that works. Sell Roddenberry on it, and I'll back you." Bolstered by this, they went in to tell Roddenberry, whose lack of enthused response took the wind from their sails and "it completely blew our pitch. (...) We laughed at that for the rest of our lives." 

Nimoy's other projects get plenty of attention, particularly the one-man play he wrote, Vincent, which (Nimoy once described to Shatner) was the perfect security for an actor, something he could take out on the road every few years and keep the wolves from the door. He kept the set in his garage, ready to be unpacked whenever the need arose. Though Trek (and Mission: Impossible) afforded him a steady paycheck for many years, it wasn't until Paramount settled Nimoy's lawsuit against the studio for licensing his likeness and not paying any residuals for Trek's near-constant syndication (which wasn't a standard of the trade back then) that he truly never had to worry about such things again. 

Leonard in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The book touches on Nimoy's alcoholism and how he tried to warn Shatner that the woman he married was an alcoholic and hiding it, something Shatner never truly realized until she fell into the swimming pool and drowned. Nimoy was there for him during this period, and this section was particularly touching. Any friendship that exists as long as Shatner's and Nimoy's did - and cut such a strange path through the cosmos - is going to encompass both loss and triumph, but it's how we deal with the former that defines the quality of the latter.

Nimoy was constantly re-inventing himself as an artist, whether through music:

poetry, photography:

Shatner devotes some considerable time to his friend's fine arts photography; I guess he was a big fan. Easy to see why - I actually had no idea how extensive this side of his life truly was.

or directing, most famously (perhaps) for 1986's Three Men and a Baby.

In later years, as Leonard's COPD accelerated - he was a two-pack-a-smoker for many decades - he retired from acting. But he left behind one more notable role as William Bell on Fringe, a show that ultimately disappointed me enough to tune out over the course of its third season but I do look forward to catching up with it one of these days. Nimoy started off his career playing mostly villains; there's a nice symmetry to his last role (outside of Spock of course in NuTrek) being a bad guy.

Shatner alludes to a falling out the two had over Leonard's not wanting to be in The Captains, or more specifically to Shatner's using convention footage of him in the movie anyway. Shatner seems genuinely bewildered by both Leonard's refusal and subsequent anger and figured - after a few rebuffed attempts to clear the air - it would blow over. They'd argued plenty of times, but like the brothers Shatner observed, they always got over it. Unfortunately, Nimoy died before they could make peace.

"I tried to find out what the issue was through our mutual friends, but I never found the reason. I was mystified. It was baffling to me (and) no one could give me an answer. It remains a mystery to me, and it is heartbreaking, heartbreaking. It is something I will wonder about, and regret, forever."

The last time he saw him was for this German Volkswagen commercial in 2014.

When he learned Nimoy was dying, he wrote him a letter (which he includes in the final pages) but is unsure if his friend got to read it before he died. Shatner was doing a charity event in Florida when he heard the news and couldn't make it back to Los Angeles in time for Leonard's funeral, something for which he was widely (and dickishly) chided for on social media. I remember signing into twitter the Sunday or Monday after Nimoy's death  and reading Shatner deflect tweet after tweet criticizing him for not being at the funeral.

"There are times when being a celebrity can be painful. The fact that rather than being able to mourn the death of my dear friend in my own way, I had to deal with this controversy was one of them."

To whom did the man owe an explanation? Star Trek fans? About the loss of his own best friend? People's self-delusion with celebrities - specifically those they claim to love - is amazing to me. Unless you're tweeting "Sorry for your loss", go watch Wrath of Khan and leave the man alone. I can only imagine the pain of not only losing a pivotal friend under a haze of unresolved drama but also having to offer one's self up "for the franchise" to some faceless jury of millions. 

To his credit, Shatner doesn't dwell on it and ends only with a fitting passage from Vincent and one final sentence:

  

"LLAP, my friend, 

my dear, dear friend."

Watchmen at Thirty, pt. 2: Absent Friends

"What's happened to the American dream?"

"It came true. You're looking at it."

"Moore and Gibbons' exposure of the antisocial, fascist, and psychologically diseased implications of superheroes was chilling, especially to adult readers still fascinated by superheroes but no longer quite comfortable with the fascination."

The quote above - from either Morrison's Supergods or Jones and Jacobs' The Comic Book Heroes, I didn't write down which - cuts to the quick of how and why Watchmen hit the way it did thirty years ago. Thirty years before its arrival, Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent claimed to expose the Freudian catacombs and corruptive dangers of comics as an art form. And failed completely. Wertham's staff was too long; he was digging in the wrong place. Watchmen's excavation was far more precise.

Within five years of its publication, though, exposing the fascist implications of superheroes was no longer all that chilling or uncomfortable - it was the new norm. Well, I could put that better. What actually became the post-Watchmen norm was watered-down-Watchmen: all the sex and violence with little of the withering insight.

THE PLOT

Chapter Two is broken into three sections, each anchored by Eddie Blake's funeral.

In the first part, Jon teleports Laurie across the country to visit with her mother Sally, the original Silk Spectre. They bicker - the usual mother/ daughter stuff:

Laurie is horrified at her mother's lack of reaction to the news that Edward Blake has died. Sally seems almost sympathetic to and about the man who raped her. Sally declines to clarify things. As she looks at a picture of the Minutemen, she flashes back to when the photo was taken.

Another fine visual segue, (aka "a Watchmen segue") there, with Sally's line about the past getting brighter cutting to the flashbulb in the past. The motion picture comic manages to one-up things with the magic of cut-away and voiceover.  

In the comic, above, Laurie's "extinguished" line does not bleed over to the next panel. Whereas in the m.p.c.:

Sally's "I've got spots in my eyes" line is suggestive, as well, since the photograph is the prelude to Blake's sexual assault while she's changing out of her costume. The costumes are all-important here, especially when Hooded Justice comes in to see what's taking Sally so long and discovers what's going on. He immediately begins to beat Blake, whereupon things get even creepier: 

Blake is sent home, and Hooded Justice tells Sally to cover herself up. 

It's a disturbing and multi-faceted scene, even thirty years on, but as discussed by Atom and Carr here, these themes (the fishnet-stocking-and-bustier-wearing heroine "asking for it," the sadist who gets off on beating people up, etc.) have been played around with in so many different ways in the years since that it's difficult to remember or imagine when this was utterly taboo terrain in comics. (Nevertheless, I imagine it would necessitate the creation of a safe space nearby to be discussed in a college classroom in 2016.) As much as similarly-themed material proliferated in its wake, though, Watchmen represents a high water mark in the deconstruction of "suits" as sexual perversion. 

In the second section, each of the Crimebusters at Blake's funeral remembers a different moment they shared with the Comedian. 

Ozymandias reflects on the time the Comedian sabotaged Captain Metropolis' attempt at establishing the Crimebusters. The parallel in the "real" comics world would be the creation of the Silver Age: the first "modern" Flash and the emergence of Marvel. In the Watchmen-verse, the Silver Age is aborted. (How you gonna keep em on the Silver Age farm once they seen Doc Manhattan's penis? Not to mention rapes at the team HQ.) That Moore and Gibbons achieve this with avatars of the caped crusaders from relatively deep in the closet (the old Charlton heroes acquired by DC, lest we forget) is an added bonus.

I also liked this:

Ozymandias is the killer mastermind behind the whole plot and the figure in whom Watchmen's many genres - police procedural, sci-fiction, noir murder mystery, etc. - coalesce. So of course we see him at the funeral of his victim - the mastermind/killer in these things always shows up at the funeral.  

Also: have another look at the panels above. How many flashback-explaining-present-scenario Lost season moments are modeled on this sort of transition? A lot of them. When Lost was huge, I remember a lot of talk on the forums on how Watchmen-inspired it was, and (at least in the first season) it totally was. Chapeau, Lindeloff and the gang.

Next up is Doctor Manhattan, who remembers (some time after the Ozymandias flashback) the last time he saw Eddie Blake "in country." Things went a little differently in the Watchmen-world's Vietnam, as Doc Manhattan was around to intervene on the American and South Vietnamese side. As a result of having a super-powered giant at his beckoned call, Nixon never left the Oval Office. 

This was a conceit Watchmen shared with that other subversive groundbreaker of 1986. In Dark Knight Returns, Superman's working for Uncle Sam meant Reagan was President forever.

A very drunk Eddie Blake ruminates on how much he hates Vietnam before a heavily-pregnant woman appears. The child she's carrying is Blake's, and she confronts him. He rejects her, rudely. She slashes his face with a broken bottle, and he shoots her dead in anger, as Doc Manhattan watches. 

"You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia, but you didn't lift a finger! You don't really give a damn about human beings. I've watched you. (...) Soon you won't care about Sally Jupiter's little girl."

Later we learn that Laurie is more than just Sally Jupiter's little girl, which gives an even more jagged edge to this scene.

Finally, Nite Owl remembers the time he and the Comedian were called upon to help quell the riots that preceded the passage of the Keane Act. 

Nite Owl, as we'll see more of in later issues, is the insider/outsider narrator common to so much American fiction. This flashback establishes him as a reluctant participant in the sadism, sexual perversion, and fascism of his fellow "masks," but a participant nonetheless.

The final section of Chapter II involves Rorschach, who watches the funeral from outside the gates in his civilian guise as homeless apocalyptic riff-raff. 

When he sees Moloch - the super-villain he and his fellow Crimebusters put away back in the day - attending the funeral, he breaks into his house and assaults him to find out why.

Turns out Blake paid a drunken visit to Moloch shortly before he died, babbling about an "Island" and having learned some secret that dismantled his worldview. But what he actually saw or learned Moloch doesn't know.

The 18 panels of Blake's anguish (from Moloch's flashback) are a tad overdone to my eyes now. It seems a stretch to me that the Comedian would be quite so shell-shocked as he appears by learning what is going on at the Island (and elsewhere).

The issue ends with Rorschach going to the grave to pay his own peculiar respects and to mull things over in True Detective genre fashion. He tells the famous joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says he's depressed, and the doctor says "You're in luck, go and see the great clown Pagliacci." The man breaks down and cries and says "But doctor, I am Pagliacci."

Just last weekend I heard Danny Clover tell the same joke on an episode of Broadway Is My Beat on audionoir. So I guess it's been around for awhile. What was interesting was how it was used on Broadway Is My Beat was exactly the way it was used in Watchmen #2: to emphasize an ambivalent mood over noiry-type music. Sure, you've got to imagine the music in Watchmen, but it's there. Anyway, it was a fun connection to make, standing in my kitchen.

And now it's time for:

At the last minute, Rorschach turns expectation on its head, though:

It's almost more jarring to see a positive (or at least non-negative) sentiment in the midst of Rorschach's otherwise-disturbed inner monologue.

~

"Absent Friends" deepens and darkens the journey begun in Chapter I. Thirty years on, it strikes me as not just just superhero deconstruction at its finest but Cold-War-nuclear-family-death-thrill-kill-cult deconstruction at its finest.