We’re Old Rivals

“He didn’t do what I did at all

Where I stood up to make a speech, he sat down. 

He did the opposite of •everything• I did. 

And I knew that son of a bitch was going to be a star.” 

Casting Christopher Plummer as Chang

Widely credited with resurrecting the fortunes of the franchise as director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and co-writer on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Meyer only ever had one man in mind for the role of the erudite Klingon general with the penchant for quoting William Shakespeare. 

“I had always been a fanatic Christopher Plummer fan,” Meyer told StarTrek.com. “I had acquired a CD of him performing excerpts from Henry V to the accompaniment of the musical score that William Walton wrote for the Olivier movie of Henry V. 

I used to just listen to it over and over and over again. And Chang came out of that recording.” 

An avid Shakespeare fan, Meyer had seen Plummer in several productions through the years. 

It was an experience that shaped much of what went into the script for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – right down to the film’s subtitle which is a direct quote from Hamlet. 

Meyer began writing his script with the idea of Plummer as Chang – and he was not about to accept any alternatives. 

“I said to Mary Jo Slater, who was our casting director, ‘You have to get him [Plummer] for this, because I can’t make the movie otherwise. There’s no other actor who can do this.’” 

Even so, Plummer took some convincing according to Leonard Nimoy. 

“I had to get on the phone with him several times… he had turned us down,” Nimoy revealed in an interview included on the Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Blu-ray release;  

“He was certainly a great choice… but we were turned down. There’s a certain kind of very good actor who’s concerned about taking on this makeup and this persona of a bad guy in a Star Trek movie…He wanted to find some way to say ‘OK, I think I can take this on,’ and make it worthwhile.” 

Despite being a fan of the original TV series, Plummer was hesitant to take the role of a Klingon on account of the heavy make-up effects he would be required to wear. 

“I didn’t want to look like every other Klingon,” Plummer later explained to William Shatner in the 2011 documentary The Captains. “We ran into great difficulty because … they said it was traditional to have all of this [the usual Klingon headpiece].” 

Plummer elaborated further in another interview for the film’s DVD release: “I found a lot of the headgear that some of them wore rather phoney. I could see where the stitches were, so I decided I’d be a little different” 

Eventually a compromise was reached. 

“Finally, Nicholas [Meyer], who wrote that very witty, tongue in cheek script, he stood up for me,” Plummer explained in The Captains. “The director stood up for me and I got my way — I didn’t have the long hair.” 

Donning an eyepatch that hinted at his eventful past as a great Klingon warrior, Plummer threw himself into the role of Chang with gusto, seeing it as a chance for the “upright, glamorous leading man to play a villain.”

 

It was much more than that though. 

The Shakespeare Influences

Shatner and Plummer had a friendly rivalry that dated all the way back to the 1950s, when Shatner was Plummer’s understudy during a production of Henry V at Stratford Shakespeare Festival. 

When illness prevented Plummer from appearing one night, Shatner took his place and found a way to upstage him. 

“He didn’t do what I did at all,” Plummer recalled during an interview on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. “Where I stood up to make a speech, he sat down. He did the opposite of everything I did. And I knew that son of a bitch was going to be a star.” 

The role of Chang offered a rare opportunity to share the screen with his friend and rival and it was one that Plummer relished, imbuing his performance with a sense of theatricality largely lacking in the Star Trek universe up until that point. 

It wasn’t a case of Plummer trying to upstage Shatner either; his grandiose performance elevated that of his co-star, bringing an extra dimension to the role of Kirk and his prejudice against the Klingon race. 

The film’s clever use of Shakespeare quotes – designed to highlight humanity’s gravitation towards conflict – might also have fallen flat were it not for Plummer’s delivery and ability to make them a believable part of his devious warmongering character’s persona. 

It’s not all about the famous bard though – one of Plummer’s most memorable scenes comes during Kirk and McCoy’s trial on the Klingon home planet of Qo’noS. 

Plummer delivers a devastating disdainful cross-examination of Kirk that ends with the memorable line: “Don’t wait for the translation, answer me now!” 

It’s an exchange that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the kind of courtroom dramas commonplace in the 1990s, with Plummer at his grandstanding, dramatic best. 

Even Chang’s final words in the film of “to be, or not to be” – the kind of line that might have sounded cliched coming from anyone else – were imbued with a sense of fatalistic gravitas that only enhanced Plummer’s performance and the character in Star Trek folklore. 

It also served to underline the importance of Plummer’s performance. While the concept developed by Meyer and Nimoy helped enliven the flagging franchise, Plummer undoubtedly elevated the material.  He delivered the franchise’s most compelling villain since Khan Noonien Singh. 

Audiences and critics evidently agreed, with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country garnering positive reviews and improved box office returns to help return the Enterprise to its former glories. It’s a further testament to Plummer’s performance that Chang lived on beyond the film in several Star Trek comic books and the game Star Trek: Klingon Academy – a game he happily reprised the role for. 

Plummer later reflected on the experience in his own inimitable fashion during his interview for The Captains.  

“I had the most marvelous time,” he said. “I was only jealous of David Warner (Chancellor Gorkon), who had the best line in the whole show, and I wished to hell General Chang could have said it, but it was David who said it.” 

The line in question?  “You don’t know Shakespeare until you’ve heard it in the original Klingon.”

You Fellas Have a Lotta The Same Power "E" Had.

You Fellas Have a Lotta The Same Power "E" Had.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Deception+Theatricality

Pseudologia Fantastica

JOSEPH SMITH AS PHYLLIS GREENACRE’S “IMPOSTOR"

Fawn Brodie, in her biography of the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, suggests that one important tool for understanding the psychology and the demagogic appeal of the founder of the Latter-day Saints can be found in the psychological disorder of pseudologia fantastica, whose victims or practitioners are often referred to as impostors.

Brodie preferred the notion of impostor to literary historian Bernard DeVoto’s classification of Joseph Smith as a “paranoid,” or Kimball Young’s labeling of the Prophet as a “parapath,” that is to say as someone unable to separate fantasy and reality.

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY ORDER

In the experience of the present author, the notions of the imposter and of pseudologia fantastica might well be expanded to include greater emphasis on the question of multiple personalities and multiple personality disorder. This insight derives from my own observation over a number of years of a charismatic political leader with strong tendencies toward the creation of a personality cult, somewhat on the model of Joseph Smith.

The individual in question is Lyndon H. LaRouche.

In the 1960s and 1970s, LaRouche was remarkable for his intelligence overview and programmatic orientation, which tended more and more to be overshadowed by a crude demand for adulation and unquestioning obedience, precisely along the lines of a personality cult. Over time, one got the impression that LaRouche had several distinct personalities –one perceptive and insightful, one raging, narcissistic, and vindictive, and yet another whimsical and nostalgic.


Needless to say, it was the insistent and vindictive personality which employed the other selves to recruit a following and then impose on them the yoke of his personality cult. In this process, he exhibited moments of charismatic rhetorical appeal, and other moments of the most primitive infantilism.


He also neglected the most elementary precautions. On the one hand, he launched campaigns of exposure and denunciation against Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Rockefeller, and other public figures of some power, while at the same time he refused to submit yearly federal income tax returns. 

It was this latter failing which helped to put him in jail for five years.

On at least one known occasion, LaRouche reportedly boasted of his multiple personalities, while claiming that he had the ability to shift at will from one personality to another, according to his own psychological needs. LaRouche called this his “multiple personality order.” The parallels of this syndrome to the case of Joseph Smith are evident.

In her discussion of the impostor, Phyllis Greenacre also cites the case of Titus Oates (1649-1705), who was the great protagonist of the fictitious “Popish Plot” during the reign of Charles II Stuart of England.

This plot was supposedly aiming at a Catholic takeover of England with the help of the Stuarts. Fictitious though this report turned out to be, its political effects were most welcome to the pro-Venetian Whig party of the English aristocracy.

Without intelligence networks interested in promoting Titus Oates’ story, he might have been relegated to total obscurity. 

Oates was a mythomaniac, recounting wild inventions he knew his listeners wanted to hear, all in a desperate bid to attract attention. But there were powerful political forces who found his hallucinations advantageous.

This reminds us once again, as in the case of Joseph Smith, to always look for the interaction between the individual impostor and the organized networks which constitute and assemble the audience which the impostor so urgently desires.

Some key excerpts from Greenacre:

“An impostor is not only a liar, but a very special type of liar who imposes on others fabrications of his attainments, position, or worldly possessions. This he may do through misrepresentations of his official (statistical) identity, by presenting himself with a fictitious name, history, and other items of personal identity, either borrowed from some other actual person or fabricated according to some imaginative conception of himself.

There are similar falsifications on that part of his identity belonging to his accomplishments, a plagiarizing on a grand scale, or making claims which are grossly implausible. Imposture appears to contain the hope of getting something material, or some other worldly advantage. 

DATA: 
Captain, why should a King wish to pass as a commoner? 
If he is The Leader, should he not be leading?

PICARD: 
Listen to what Shakespeare is telling you about The MAN, Data.

A King who had True feelings for his soldiers would wish to share their fears with them on the eve of battle. 

While the reverse certainly exists among the distinguished, wealthy, and competent persons who lose themselves in cloaks of obscurity and assumed mediocrity, these come less frequently into sharp focus in the public eye. 

One suspects, however, that some “hysterical” amnesia is, and dual or multiple personalities are conditions related to imposturous characters. The contrast between the original and the assumed identities may sometimes be not so great in the matter of worldly position, and consequently does not lend itself so readily to the superficial explanation that it has been achieved for direct and material gain. The investigation of even a few instances of imposture –if one has not become emotionally involved in the deception –is sufficient to show how crude though clever many impostors are, how very faulty any scheming is, and how often, in fact, the element of shrewdness is lacking. Rather a quality of showmanship is involved, with its reliance all on the response of an audience to illusions.

“In some of the most celebrated instances of imposture, it indeed appears that the fraud was successful only because many others as well as the perpetrator had a hunger to believe in the fraud, and that any success of such fraudulence depended in fact on strong social as well as individual factors and especial receptivity to the trickery.

To this extent those on whom the fraudulence is imposed are not only victims but unconscious conspirators. Its success too is partly a matter of timing. Such combinations of imposturous talent and a peculiar susceptibility of the times to believe in the swindler, who presents the deceptive means of salvation, may account for the great impostures of history. There are, however, instances of the repeated perpetration of frauds under circumstances which give evidence of a precise content that may seem independent of social factors….

“It is the extraordinary and continued pressure in the impostor to live out his fantasy that demands explanation, a living out which has the force of a delusion, (and in the psychotic may actually appear in that form), but it is ordinarily associated with the ‘formal’ awareness that the claims are false. The sense of reality is characterized by a peculiarly sharp, quick perceptiveness, extraordinarily immediate keenness and responsiveness, especially in the area of the imposture. The over-all utility of the sense of reality is, however, impaired. What is striking in many impostors is that, although they are quick to pick up details and nuances in the lives and activities of those whom they simulate and can sometimes utilize these with great adroitness, they are frequently so utterly obtuse to many ordinary considerations of fact that they give the impression of mere brazenness or stupidity in many aspects of their life peripheral to their impostures….

“The impostor has, then, a specially sharpened sensitivity within the area of his fraud, and identity toward the assumption of which he has a powerful unconscious pressure, beside which his conscious wish, although recognizable, is relatively slight. The unconscious drive heightens his perceptions in a focused area and permits him to ignore or deny other elements of reality which would ordinarily be considered matters of common sense. It is this discrepancy in abilities which makes some impostors such puzzling individuals. Skill and persuasiveness are combined with utter foolishness and stupidity.

“In well-structured impostures this may be described as a struggle between two dominant identities in the individual: the temporarily focused and strongly assertive imposturous one, and the frequently amazingly crude and poorly knit one from which the impostor has emerged. In some instances, however, it is also probable that the imposture cannot be sustained unless there is emotional support from someone who especially believes in and nourishes it. The need for self-betrayal may then he one part of the tendency to revert to a less demanding, more easily sustainable personality, particularly if support is withdrawn.


“The impostor seems to flourish on the success of his exhibitionism. Enjoyment of the limelight and inner triumph of ‘putting something over’ seems inherent, and bespeak the closeness of imposture to voyeurism. Both aspects are represented: pleasure in watching while the voyeur himself is invisible; exultation in being admired and observed as a spectacle. It seems as if the impostor becomes temporarily convinced of the rightness of his assumed character in proportion to the amount of attention he is able to gain from it.

“In the lives of impostors there are circumscribed areas of reaction which approach the delusional. These are clung to when the other elements of the imposture have been relinquished….

“Once an imposturous goal has been glimpsed, the individual seems to behave without need for consistency, but to strive rather for the supremacy of the gains from what can be acted out with sufficient immediate gratification to convince others. For the typical impostor, an audience is absolutely essential. It is from the confirming reaction of his audience that the impostor gets a ‘realistic’ sense of self, a value greater than anything he can otherwise achieve. It is the demand for an audience in which the (false) self is reflected that causes impostures often to become of social significance. Both reality and identity seem to the impostor to be strengthened rather than diminished by the success of the fraudulence of his claims….

“The impostor seems to be repeatedly seeking confirmation of his assumed identity to overcome his sense of helplessness or incompleteness. It is my impression that this is the secret of his appeal to others, and that often especially conscientious people are ‘taken in’ and other impostors as well attracted because of the longing to return to that happy state of omnipotence which adults have had to relinquish….

Vibrational Frequencies

Yes, and Yes.

Stupid is as Stupid does.

Anyone who has ever done DMT or had a Near-Death Experience (same thing), or reads DC Comics understands that 

All Matter is merely 

Energy compressed 

into a slow vibration.

One of the ways 

Vibrational Frequencies 

(or "consciousness") can be altered, increased of shifted downwards 

is by means of inducing 

sympathetic resonance.

If you are habituated in a saturation environment of AC/DC, your existence will be mediated in terms of Whiskey, screaming, dirty sex, fat hookers, leather and bad-assery.

If you are habituated in a saturation environment of Alice Cooper, there will be as much leather, but a lot more make-up, a certain level of black lace, and orientated far more around old horror movies and theatricality.

If you are habituated to a saturation environment of Morrissey, you grow up to be a cunt.

If you are habituated in a saturation environment of K*I*S*S, then I am sorry, but there is no hope for you.