How Rhodes Scholar-ish is Kirsten Dunst? I’ve always suspected she’s not that intellectually agile but I’ve never cared enough to get into it. I’ve never seen any indications of same. But now I have, courtesy of MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz. Unless, you know, Dunst was putting him on. But I doubt it.
Horowitz recently interviewed Dunst and her How to Lose Friends and Influence People costar Simon Pegg, and decided at one point to digress into a minor two-question Star Trek quiz. Pegg, an ostensibly nerdy type, blew his answer and then Horowitz turned to Dunst, who explained before answering that “I like nerds I’m still a girl at the end of the day.”
Horowitz (switch to present tense) says he understands that so he’s going to toss her an easier one. So he asks “who’s the captain of the Enterprise is, as played by William Shatner?” And Dunst quickly answers “Spock” and then realizes that may not be right. Then she laughs to cover up her inability to remember the correct answer. And then Pegg leans over and says “Kirk, Kirk” and she says “Kirk!”
You can be a “girl” all you want, but not knowing Captain Kirk is like not knowing who Jesus Christ, Barack Obama, Superman or Abraham Lincoln are. It’s not a nerd term — it’s a term known to tne entirety of Western Civilization. The name “Captain Kirk” is a primal, fundamental concept that anyone with a semblance of an education can identify. I’ll bet $50 bucks that even that idiotic drunken Kentucky woman in that YouTube video that I posted two days ago knows who Captain Kirk is.