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 assembly-line 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 hard-earned 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?”
