Kirk Your Enthusiasm (3)

By: Nick Abadzis
August 1, 2012

Third in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single Captain Kirk scene from the Star Trek canon.

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“KHAAAAAN!” | Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan | June 1982

Captain Kirk is — as Spock observes, “a man of deep feelings,” an inspirational leader and breaker of rules if he feels the end justifies the means.

Kirk often wins fights by getting his shirt torn so that he can exude the charisma that overwhelms his opponents. But not in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Here, Kirk is aging gracelessly, experiencing a mid-life crisis now that his career has been reduced to babysitting some cadets on a training mission. The return of the genetically engineered superman Khan (from the TV episode “Space Seed”) assures us of a climactic showdown — which, in a sense, we never get because the two never meet in person. It’s not a flaw in the film’s structure, though; the payoff is more satisfying than if they’d clashed in hand-to-hand combat.

This is the crux of the story: how Kirk the lesser overcomes Khan the greater. Kirk sets Khan up, gambling that he can goad Khan into a confrontation, and he’s right – he succeeds in doing so, even after Khan has stolen the Genesis device, the MacGuffin that propels the movie. Kirk mocks Khan’s “superior intellect,” constantly baiting him: “Like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target!” That is, until Khan apparently traps Kirk in a cave deep inside a planetoid with no hope of escape.

“I’ve done far worse than kill you — I’ve hurt you,” breathes Khan, his face softening in an almost orgasmic release of tension. As he leaves Kirk, apparently buried alive, our hero responds with an expression of frustrated apoplexy that has become legendary — a moment so great it has transcended the boundaries of the fiction. “KHAAAAAN!” bellows Kirk into his communicator, his face puffing and reddening in glorious cinematic rage. His face inflates like a set of bellows and you’re afraid he’s going to stay that way. It is ludicrous and terrifying at once.

Then the camera cuts from Kirk to a shot that slowly ascends from the bleak, cratered surface of the planetoid beneath the surface of which he’s trapped and we hear that rage again, out here in the vacuum of space, emotion breaking through the diegetic boundaries of the reality of the movie itself. As James Horner’s score swells beneath it, Kirk’s anguished howl is so intense it can be heard even here, between worlds, beyond atmospheres. It’s a brilliant directorial flourish from director Nick Meyer, a moment of emotionally heated storytelling so assured it sells the idea that even if Khan may actually have triumphed over him, Kirk is still a force of nature and not to be underestimated.

It’s all part of a ruse, of course — Kirk changes the rules and cheats death one more time and overcomes his adversary in the kind of epic space battle we expect from him. But the moment of extreme, inflated rage persists and swells beyond the movie like some existential warp-propelled speech balloon. It is an instant in a character’s history that has passed into pop culture as a motif in its own right.

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What do you think?

Joshua Glenn says:

August 1, 2012 at 11:17 am

The “KHAAAAAN!” scene is one of the primary vectors of Star Trek- and Kirk-directed snark, so I figured it would be a good idea to tackle it early in the series. I’m very grateful to Nick for doing so in such a thoughtful, serious, and insightful way. I love the image of Kirk’s cry being so powerful that it not only breaks “the diegetic boundaries of the reality of the movie,” it breaks out of the movie and lodges itself in the pop culture unconscious.
Esoth says:

August 1, 2012 at 12:49 pm

Terrific series so far! The KHAAAAAN! moment is deliciously indulgent and, indeed, transcendent beyond the film’s diegesis, or that of the characters’ realities, as for a moment, the two demigods, trapped between pulp film and television*, take each other’s measure and revel in it. A sublimely guilty pleasure.

* “The Alternative Factor” from TOS season one.
Greg says:

August 1, 2012 at 12:58 pm

NIIIIIIICK!!!

Beautifully rendered, as Josh says. In one sense it’s the “Nooooo!!!” exclamatory, aimed at Heaven as the hero faces his apparent Third Reel nadir…. But, uniquely, Kirk’s words, as you point out, actually do reverberate across the heavens.
Greg says:

August 1, 2012 at 1:00 pm

Esoth: I reach your Alternative Factor reference, I really do.
Adam McGovern says:

August 1, 2012 at 1:39 pm

The word raised up past the air itself, crashing through the glass firmament to a smug god from a wrathful man — only a great cartoonist could paint a picture on so many planes! The “instant” that flashes long enough to change everything — let there be loud!
Nick Abadzis says:

August 1, 2012 at 2:02 pm

“Let there be loud!” – love that.
I nearly went with Where No Man Had Gone Before, where Kirk has to kill his former best friend Gary Mitchell. Or Star Trek V: The Final frontier. Kirk is the captain but equal parts Spock’s intellect and McCoy’s homespun wisdom – the head and the heart to Kirk’s spirit and instinct. Perhaps the ultimate spiritual moment for Kirk comes in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, when Sybok frees both his half-brother Spock and McCoy’s minds from their accumulated pain to allow them to better appreciate his mission to find God on a planet at the center of the galaxy. (I mean – Shatneresque in scope!) When it comes to Kirk’s turn, he protests.
“Pain and guilt can’t be taken away… Those are the things we carry with us; the things that make us who we are.”
It’s an important moment, one I quoted for many years when forgiving myself for watching that movie more than once.
“I don’t want my pain taken away,” insists Kirk. “I need my pain!”
Memories maketh the man.
PWC says:

August 1, 2012 at 2:19 pm

Wonderful.

One correction: Isn’t is spelled KHAAAAAN! ?
Adam McGovern says:

August 2, 2012 at 11:54 am

Nick, see the comments thread at the series’ originary post (https://www.hilobrow.com/2012/07/24/kirk-your-enthusiasm/) for an already bubbling controversy on the Trek leading men’s tri-cameral mind. I always did love that insight into Kirk’s psyche in Trek V, one of the most instructive and endearing looks inside a character who is deceptively uni-dimensional (in a position where he more or less has to be), and a true definition of the responsible leader who could be us (or at least sets an example of how to lead your own life). All the more admirable, perhaps, in the midst of the one movie Kirk’s real-life alter-ego took control of and otherwise crashed into an asteroid. But a reminder of how much more there can be to the character and the actor…
Peggy says:

August 7, 2012 at 12:27 pm

Kirk’s voice, as created/interpreted with sincerity and camp by William Shatner, is one of his defining features. Paradoxically, his impulse power is often shown through silence; those weird, staccato pauses in the middle of phrases, or sometimes even in the middle of words, being a measurement of the force of the id held in service to the superego ie the mission. Much like the engines of the Enterprise itself. But when that force is (infrequently, finally) coupled with sound, its power is measured in warp factors, as you so brilliantly showcase here.
Adam McGovern says:

August 13, 2012 at 9:47 pm

Late-breaking, semi-pertinent comment: What a great JJ Abrams Trek 2 it might be if (as often rumored) it was a re-redo of Khan, but in this continuum the planet didn’t blow up next to Khan’s exile world and he built a thriving society that benignly but sinisterly can compete with the Federation…speaking of which, Josh, I solved the riddle of how to have TOS be a phantom, “rerun only” series; the version that’s extremely influential but had no first run is a set of holo-pulps adapted from old-Spock’s recollections of a universe that now didn’t exist, in the Abrams timeline!
Michael says:

September 2, 2012 at 5:25 pm

What almost no one seems to remember about the [in]famous “Khaaaaan!!!” scene is that the entire *point* was that *Kirk* (not Shatner) was overacting. He was faking outrage and helplessness, so as to distract Khan and thus give Scotty and Spock time to get the Enterprise back into fighting shape.
Joshua Glenn says:

September 3, 2012 at 9:12 am

Good point, Michael — and I think that’s the point of this post, too.
Adam McGovern says:

September 4, 2012 at 11:47 am

The outsize emotion that’s Kirk’s artificial atmosphere around his core of calculation — maybe not a feint in the moment, but an expressive brushstroke on the way to painting himself out of the latest corner…

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Kirk Your Enthusiasm (3)

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