I feel compelled to mark the passing of the actor Ricardo Montalban, who died on Wednesday in Los Angeles at the age of 88. You can read his New York Times obituary here.
Okay, you say, but what does Ricardo Montalban have to do with this website’s ostensible subject, the history of New York City’s literature and culture? Bear with me.
Some of you may remember Montalban from the series of ads that Chrysler ran during the mid-1970s for its Cordoba luxury sedan. Here’s the 1975 version:
Others may remember Fantasy Island, which starred Montalban as Mr. Roarke, the owner of an exotic island where guests would arrive in a small plane each week to go on adventures or play out fantasies that would change their lives. The show co-starred the late Hervé Villechaize as Montalban’s major domo, Tattoo, who would open each episode by ringing the island’s bell and exclaiming, “Da plane, da plane!” Here’s an opening from a 1978 episode:
(If watching this video brings on a wave of nostalgia that will require you to view complete episodes of the series, don’t worry: it’s now available on DVD.)
For me, however, Montalban will always be Khan Noonien Singh, one of the villains in the original Star Trek series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, a role that Montalban memorably reprised in the second Star Trek film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
We’ve established on this site that Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick is an important subject if you’re interested in the history of New York literature and culture. Over the years, I’ve been collecting allusions to the novel in later texts and in popular culture. And Star Trek II is chock full of them. Thus, the memorial to Ricardo Montalban here.
Montalban first appeared as Khan in “Space Seed,” an episode from the television show’s first season (1967), in which the Starship Enterprise discovers the Botany Bay, a derelict ship that contains cryogenically frozen super-beings exiled from Earth in the aftermath of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. (Don’t you love the way the 1960s imagined the 1990s and beyond? Question: are things better or worse than expected?) Khan is their leader, an imperious intellectual with a taste for Milton and Melville. When Kirk and his landing party board the ship, the super-beings are awakened and complications ensue.
After a failed attempt to take over the Enterprise, Khan’s group are exiled on a planet called Ceti Alpha V. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan opens when Pavel Chekov (played by Walter Koenig — and no that’s not a typo, that’s the way the series spelled the surname), the former navigator for the Enterprise, is surveying what is supposed to be an uninhabited waste land of a planet in the Ceti Alpha system. What Chekov and his captain (played by Paul Winfield) discover to their horror is that the planet is in fact Ceti Alpha V, laid waste when another planet in the system exploded, and that Khan and his mates have become very bitter indeed. Just before Khan reveals himself, Chekov surveys the ruined ship that he and his captain have discovered and sees a bookshelf that holds a copy of Moby-Dick .
Khan will spend the rest of the film chasing down his white whale — now-Admiral James T. Kirk — and quoting Ahab’s speeches from Melville’s novel. In the trailer below, you’ll hear the film’s adaptation of these lines from Ahab:
Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and
round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give
him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white
whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he
spouts black blood and rolls fin out.
The film’s plot involves the theft of a terraforming device called “Genesis,” which Khan realizes can also be used as a doomsday weapon. As the film draws to its close, Khan launches Genesis at Kirk and the Enterprise, and his final words are Ahab’s: “”To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Melvilleans may find it a nice, though I’m sure unintended, touch that the shock waves from the explosion of the Genesis device echo the vortex that Ishmael describes in his epilogue:
So. floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of
it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was
then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it,
it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever
contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that
slowly wheeling circle, like another ixion I did revolve. till gaining
that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by
reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising
with great force, the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea,
fell over, and floated by my side.
If you’d like to watch the whole film, it’s available in a 2-disc director’s cut edition on DVD.
Rest in peace, Ricardo!
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