Toupee?: "Not me!"

-"Suffer the death of thy neighbor, eh Spock? Now, you wouldn't wish that on us, would you?"

-"It might have rendered your history a bit less bloody."

The above quotes are from a conversation between Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock in the Star Trek episode "The Immunity Syndrome". The underlying gist of the exchange relates to a humanist concept of empathy - if we humans could really feel each other's pain and figuratively stand in each other's shoes, how different would our history have been? Would absolute empathy be desirable - it would make it almost impossible to do purposeful harm to others - or would it actually be too painful, too unbearable to experience the suffering of others?


Which brings us to a segment from a series of appearances that Bill Shatner made in the mid-seventies on a game show called Match Game. An episode of this show recently surfaced on YouTube and contains a moment related to Bill Shatner and toupees in which a painful, cringe-worthy, almost unbearable moment of absolute empathy from anyone watching it would seem to be the most obvious emotion.

Watch below:

Now, we don't know any potential behind-the-scenes personality clashes or resentments that might have made the question - "I've just invented an amazing new way to keep my toupee on forever. I'm going to blank it to my head" - a deliberate attempt to embarrass Bill Shatner (or to just have a little fun at his expense). So instead, we'll assume that it was just an unfortunate coincidence.


As soon as the question is asked, we the in-the-know audience, sense that poor Bill Shatner has become deeply uncomfortable - his body-language is a dead giveaway. When fellow panelist Anne Meara innocently says "You're wrong, Bill" again there is an instinctive discomfort visible in Bill Shatner, a fear that the toupee issue may be dwelled upon. Yet, no-one else on Match Game appears to be grinning, smirking or in any way feeling Bill Shatner's Tell-Tale Heart-like painful moment - they probably either don't know he's wearing a toup, or don't know that his toup-wearing is a secret. Indeed, at this time in Bill Shatner's career, the actor was in such a "Lost Years" lull that the spotlight was far away from both him and his toupees (the real toupee-related media attention would only come after the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979).


One of the ironies of the "I don't wear a hairpiece" line taken by Bill Shatner until the thawing of absolute denialism that has occurred in recent years, is that moments like the above produce an empathic response in us viewers that, if the official line is to be believed, is entirely in our own minds. In other words, if Bill Shatner's hair was and is real, our wincing at the above clip would actually be down to our own deluded mind-set and not the objective reality, in which there was no discomfort at all for Bill Shatner. Mind-boggling stuff.


Yet, in the exchange, Bill Shatner himself says "not me" - it is an entirely unprompted response to the toupee question. In a sense he is denying something that no-one is overtly accusing him of, and by so doing, actually implicating or drawing attention to himself. Or, conversely, is Bill Shatner letting us in on the joke - sensing that the question relates to him (and knowing that we know that he knows that we know), giving the audience a subtle nod about his own toupee?

There is, as many of our readers will perhaps agree with, a fascinating duality about Bill Shatner's overall personality (self-mockery versus severe vanity, relentless self-confidence versus acute sensitivity, Zen-like abandon versus constant self-consciousness to name but three examples). Exploring this duality is arguably why he was such a natural sympathetic villain in Columbo, or gave such a great performance as a person split in two in Star Trek's "The Enemy Within" - his is a complicated mind (name an icon whose isn't, right?) and perhaps at the center of this internal struggle, at least in visual terms, lies the toupee. "I Am not Spock" Leonard Nimoy once wrote - no, but perhaps Bill Shatner is.


The full (apparently "banned") episode of Match Game can be watched on YouTube, starting here. Thanks again to reader Margaret for the tip!

Big Bad Mama - a toupological analysis.

Big Bad Mama is a 1974 low-budget exploitation movie starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner and Tom Skerrit. It was produced by Roger Corman (who directed William Shatner in 1962's The Intruder) and is set in Depression-era America, telling the story of a mother and her two nubile daughters who reject a conventional life and instead hit the road, embarking on a huge and very brazen robbery spree.


Along the way, they pick up a bank robber (played by Skerrit) and the gambler William J. Baxter (played by Shatner).


Skerrit proceeds to bed all three of the girls.


While Bill Shatner only gets one - Wilma, played by Angie Dickinson. His description of filming his famous (or infamous) nude scene can be read in Up Till Now.


Though Bill Shatner's character certainly wishes for more...


The exploits of the gang of five become more and more audacious.

The name of the game is Fizzbin.

Ending with a bungled kidnapping and extortion attempt.


As with Bonnie and Clyde (with a slight twist of Easy Rider) it all ends with...


...a shootout.


What to make of a movie like this? The tone is that of a Benny Hill-esque parody all set to contemporary-era music.


Rottentomatoes.com is almost split 50-50 in terms of positive-negative reviews as are other review sites. The movie is perhaps best described as a silly romp, not to be taken seriously. Some may like it, others may think it an ultimately unrewarding experience.


Bill Shatner only appears in the second-half of the movie, and affects an interesting southern accent.


Now, to the hair...


Bill Shatner's hair here is very much of the 1973-74 curious piece variety, as seen in movies such as Impulse and Pray for the Wildcats.


It is probably the least flattering toupee-era of the actor's entire career (or was it the "T.J."?). Perhaps thankfully, the actor spends much of the movie in a hat, and generally resembles his mobster-persona in the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action".


Toupological moments center around various ruffling of the hair induced by Newtonian principles.

There are quite a large number of these in the movie.


Here's a clip with a couple more ruffle moments:

There are more of these during the character's death at the end.


Big Bad Mama is available on DVD - neither great, nor awful - somewhere inbetween.

The toupee as a cry for help.

A while back, we tried to make the case that the 1974 William Shatner movie Impulse, rather than being a piece of drek as is often suggested, was in fact a Shatner masterpiece - and that Shats' toupee had a lot to do with it. However, we will make no such claim for the TV movie Pray for the Wildcats (also made in 1974). This movie, we think, is really quite awful. And the toupee Bill Shatner wears in it is so poor it almost serves as cry for help - from the actor, to us, the audience.


We've previously examined the strong correlation between toupee quality and the quality of Shatner projects:


Well, in this case, both are at rock bottom. But let's start with the plot...

To quote the surprisingly detailed Wikipedia article on the movie: "The story centers on Sam Farragut (Andy Griffith), a sociopathic business executive in Southern California who forces a team of advertising agency employees (Shatner, Reed, Gortner) to embark on a dangerous motorcycle trip to Baja California [in Mexico] in order to compete for his business.


"Shatner stars as Warren Summerfield, a suicidal middle-aged ad executive who has been fired from the agency."


During the trip, Griffith's character brazenly causes the death of a young hippie couple. It seems that the local police are going to let him get away with it. Shatner's character faces the dilemma of having to persuade another member of the biker group to join him in reporting Griffith to the authorities - or will Shatner's character kill himself instead? Both problems are dealt with when the bad guy falls of a cliff while chasing Shatner. After that, Shatner decides that he doesn't want to kill himself anymore. That is pretty much it.

The dialogue in this movie is so appallingly written that you almost feel Bill Shatner squirming as he tries to deliver it with conviction. Here's an example:

We know that Shats is a guy that loves to dive into a project with the greatest of energy. However, in this movie, the actor's performance is strangely subdued. It is often observed that as Star Trek went downhill, Bill Shatner's performances became more bombastic, almost as if to compensate for the fall in quality (echoing a similar trick he had used to save the theatrical production of The World of Suzie Wong in the late fifties - see the book Up Till Now for the story). However, in Pray for the Wildcats that energy is almost entirely absent. Save the opportunity to ride around on a motorbike and get paid for it, Bill Shatner seems thoroughly uninterested in this project. It is perhaps ironic that he is playing a character so distraught that he is planning to kill himself.


To add to the indignity, during the biking trip, Bill Shatner wears a gold top that very closely resembles his Star Trek uniform. This only serves to accentuate the contrast between how he looked back then (thinner with a better toupee) compared with 1974, the nadir of the "Lost Years" period. Bill Shatner's toupee is far too dark and far too thick, greying at the sides - it is really a chaotic mess for most of the movie. Indeed, it is almost serving to sabotage the film: "Don't take this project seriously," it appears to be saying, "If Bill were really happy in this movie, would I be on his head making him look like this?". And it works, too. The toupee distracts the eyes; it is telling the viewer that Bill Shatner is feeling unreal, lost, dismayed, depressed. John Lennon sang "Help!" when life in The Beatles was all getting too much for him - well, the toupee in Pray For The Wildcats is Bill Shatner's equivalent of that.


We don't know if Bill Shatner kept his toupee on during the scenes in which he wore a helmet. That would have also made this production a deeply uncomfortable and sweaty one for him too. At the end of the movie, after a long motorbike chase (there are many, many long biking scenes in the movie - Easy Rider it ain't, though), Shatner takes off his helmet, allowing the toupee to flap freely in the breeze.


He then rides his motorbike into the sea and ditches it in the water, before splashing around joyously. Perhaps this was a prelude to Bill Shatner's underwater toupee tour de force in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; perhaps it was supposed to be the movie's Planet of the Apes moment (the final scene on the beach) or perhaps Bill Shatner was just glad that Pray For The Wildcats was almost over:

Matt Stone - the toupeed character.

In the past we've explored how Bill Shatner's toupee can determine both his age and the state of his career. But has there ever been an example where the toupee has transcended from covering up Bill Shatner's head behind-the-scenes to being an overt component of an on-screen character? Obviously Captain Kirk doesn't wear a toupee, neither does T.J. Hooker - but there is one example of a Bill Shatner character that might - the psychotic murderer Matt Stone from the 1974 flick Impulse.

The toupee in Impulse (1974) is telling us something isn't right.

In his book The Encyclopedia Shatnerica, Bob Schnakenberg called Bill Shatner's toupee in Impulse "one of his worst". Yet there is a case to be made that the character of Matt Stone (not just actor Bill Shatner) was a toupee wearer. Indeed, this is a rare example of a poor toupee actually helping to enhance the representation of the on-screen character. In other words, Matt Stone, being deranged and psychotic, might himself wear a very bad toupee and thus the bad toupee helps the audience to perceive the character's charming, seductive facade as a mere dangerous illusion. In the language of film semiotics, the toupee serves as a crucial concept signifier - it tells the audience that something isn't quite right with this character.

In the movie, Bill Shatner plays conman Matt Stone, who is traumatized by the fact that as a child, he killed his mother's lover rather than watch the strange man continue to violently humiliate her.


Years later, the experience has turned him into a Jekyll and Hyde figure. On the one hand, he is a charming, likeable man - on the other, a disturbing psychosis lies bottled up beneath the surface, ready to explode at the slightest reminder of his trauma. He kills his girlfriend in a fit of rage after she complains of his visiting a strip-club. Later, he runs over a dog while giving a ride to a little girl - then, by coincidence, ends up dating the same girl's mother. The girl (obsessed with constant mourning for her own dead father) is suspicious of this apparent "dog killer".


Later, Stone ends up killing loan-shark Odd Job from Goldfinger - in Stone's mind, all three of these killings were "accidents" that simply could not be avoided. The Odd Job killing is witnessed by the same little girl as before. She sets out to convince her mother that her new boyfriend "killed a man" but no-one seems to believe her. Stone, his world falling apart from these constant accusations, then threatens to kill the girl, before going completely insane at the end of the movie and killing the little girl's grandmother (correction: she isn't really her grandmother) and also trying to kill the other two generations of the family as well. But before he can complete the bloodbath, the little girl kills him instead. For a more detailed plot summary, visit The Agony Booth.


Firstly, there is a great deal about this rather disturbing and unsettling film (likely made in response to the horror popularity wave caused by 1973's The Exorcist) that is either tacky, makes no sense, or is poorly thought through, mainly to do with how the film was scripted. The acting performances of the little girl (Kim Nicholas) and Odd Job (Harold Sakata) are nothing short of dreadful.

Behind-the-scenes with Sakata (left) and Shatner (right) - image sourced here.

Yet, Impulse isn't entirely without merit. Firstly, it was made in the 1970s and you really can't go wrong with the stylish 70s aesthetic on your side. Secondly, and this may seem surprising, but Bill Shatner's performance is actually pretty darn good. Anyone who has seen the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within" will know that Shatner is particularly effective at portraying crazed insanity - the kind that mixes both the childlike longings of the disturbed adult mind (evil Kirk in tears: "I want to LIVE!") and the dangerous violence that this can bring about (evil Kirk to Yeoman Rand: "Let's stop pretending, Janice...").


Indeed, Matt Stone can be described as a fusion of both the good and evil Kirks from "The Enemy Within" (for those unfamiliar with this classic episode, it's the one where a transporter accident splits Kirk into two separate people - one Kirk's "good" side and the other his "evil" half). Except in the case of Impulse, the fusion is unbalanced. Rather than yielding a stable whole, the character is a mix of the negative traits of both: weak, tormented, violent and desperate. And if that wasn't enough, Impulse actually contains a direct nod to the infamous "rape scene" in "The Enemy Within". Watch our montage below:

But anyway, back to the toupee: what is interesting about Impulse is not just how the toupee serves as a warning shot with regards to the character of Matt Stone, but also how it changes its appearance depending on the state of the character's mind.

Stone the charmer is well groomed:


Stone the slightly ruffled is...slightly ruffled:


Stone the psychotic has an unnatural toupee style that reflects his unnatural state:


And Stone the crazed murderer has a toupee that, like the character, is falling to pieces:

Impulse can be placed in many categories, including the "so bad it's good" one. However, as a fusion of Bill Shatner's acting, which thoroughly holds and mesmerizes the viewer's attention, his general work ethic, which is always to give 100% of his energy to what he does, and his toupee, which gives nuance and subtlety to his portrayal of the lead character, we would suggest that Impulse (you can buy the film here) is nothing short of a William Shatner masterpiece.


Have you readers seen the movie? Let us know your thoughts.