The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Who knows: we may even locate a few correct answers. And don’t be so scared. The worst they can do is kill us.

  2: 11 OCTOBER 68

  Each new television season is marked by a trend which the general run-of-the-extrapolation critics choose to examine in terms of what is most prevalent: twenty-three new westerns or ten new private eye shticks or two series about gynecological gropers. (Mr. Amory, of TV Guide, did a brief turn on the abominable Joey Bishop bash a week or so ago, and he characterized this season as the Year of the Widow—citing Hope Lange in The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, Diahann Carroll in Julia and Doris Day in Doris Day. Tune in, Cleveland baby, and I’ll lay a few alternative titles on you.)

  What with idiot shows like Blondie and The Good Guys rearing their microcephalic heads, we could call it The Year of the Asshole. Or that disaster called The Ugliest Girl In Town might make this season eligible as The Year Of The Closet Queen. Or the unseemly spate of pro-John Law shows—Hawaii Five-O, Adam-12, Mod Squad, N.Y.P.D., The F.B.I., Dragnet 1969 and Ironside—might easily tag this The Year Of The Cuddly Cop.

  But those are merely staples in a diet guaranteed to cause scurvy of the mind. The two shows that really tell us where it’s at are The Outcasts and Mod Squad. These are the shows that dare to take the enormous risk of utilizing black folk as heroes. These are the shows that win the title hands-down for this being The Year Of The Shuck.

  The year the mickeymice inherited the public airwaves.

  The year they used Nat Turner as the mouthpiece of the honky. Stuff him and stand him up and pull his ringstring, and the do-it-yourself Mattel Nat Turner doll will gibber about equality.

  Oh, it is seamy stuff to watch.

  In the event you have been busy in the streets doing what it is these shows talk about, but don’t understand, let me hip you to what’s coming down on Channel 7, Monday nights at 9:00 and Tuesday nights at 7:30 in living black and white.

  On Monday, The Outcasts ride. Don Murray, who is so white he makes Ultra-Brite dull by comparison, and Otis Young, an Afro-American of uncommon surliness, are bounty hunters. One is an ex-Virginia Confederate soldier, the other is an escaped plantation slave. Through one of the great syntactical gymnastics in the history of plot-cramming, they wind up being trail buddies. They mooch around together, preying on their fellow man and snarling at one another for sixty minutes of self-conscious ethnic drama. There are half a dozen obligatory interchanges each show, in which Young calls Murray “boss” and Murray responds with a churlish “boy.” They do it over and over till you feel the urge to tell them to kiss and make up. (But the networks aren’t ready for interracial faggotry yet; that’s next year.)

  In the September 30th segment, viewers were treated to a scene in which Young and Murray—trail-weary after god knows how long—break jail and stop off after much eating of dust and pounding of ponies at a run-down way-

  station for express riders. The wife of the owner is a bit horny; and comes out in the moonlight to grab a little air, and anything else the boys have to offer. Now pay close attention: Murray and Young see this broad by the well, doing a lot of heavy breathing. They exchange a few bon mots about the state of their not-getting-any, and Murray sashays off to give the little lady a fiesta in the tackle and harness shed. Young watches.

  Now I’ll even grant the producers of The Outcasts the benefit of historical verisimilitude. In them days a black man knew better than to try cozening up to a white chick. The question does present itself, however, why didn’t Young drop a gentle hand on Murray’s shoulder and say something like, “Hey, hold up a minute, boss. Y’know, we both been on the trail eight weeks, and I seen the rushes of the next sixteen shows, and uh er, y’know not once in any of them sixteen shows do I get a piece, so why not let me go on out and further the plot a wee bit with that there fine little fox?” Granted, we couldn’t let Young do anything like that, I mean, actually get down with a white woman—but how much more like real men they would seem than the posturing prototypes they now play! Murray gets uptight when they won’t let Young sleep in the house—it’s the barn for the black boy, natcherly—but I wonder how tough he’d get if they refused Young service in a whore house? The point is, will Otis Young be given any more natural manifestation of manhood in this series than the wielding of phallic substitutes like horse and six-gun? Or will all the boy/girl jive be confined to the “acceptable” (i.e., white) Murray? Until separate but equal sack-time is established, this remains just another example of the shuck: the great American TV Boondoggle that seeing a black man make it sexually is too steamy and sordid for the fine-tuned sensitivities of the Great Unwashed.

  Which brings us, with gorge rising, to Mod Squad. It has to be seen and heard to be believed. Take last Tuesday’s offering, a script I have it on good authority was rewritten by the Executive Producer. Now get this, because we travel fast and tricky:

  These three overage Now Generation types, once free spirits but now straight-arrow types working as undercover narks for the L.A.P.D. (how they justify their gig is never really dealt with; one assumes that even the most militant Strip type would be converted to Reddin’s Folly were he only to be exposed to the logic of the billy club and mace can), return under aliases to high school, to break the back of a car-boosting syndicate. Through incredible stupidity and ineptitude, the three Mod Squadders get their one witness shot through the gut. After 56 minutes of idiot plot the case is cracked, and in the final scene one of the three undercover cops, Clarence Williams III, goes to try and explain to the girl friend of the slain boy why he’s sorry she lost her man. The chick is busy cleaning out her school locker. Despite being an “A” student, the chick is going to drop out and “get a gig somewhere.”

  Then follows one of the most incredible banalities ever concocted on network tv.

  Mr. Williams III first demeans the dead boy friend (who was trying to avenge his murdered teacher) by telling his bird that “Doc blew his chance.” (He sure did; he should have stayed clear of the fuzz as he had done all through the first half of the show; at least he was alive.) Then he tells her the school is where it’s at. It’s where it’s happening, baby. And then he starts to cry, for no damn reason save possibly to demonstrate an aptitude for Glycerine Bawling 102. And then he tosses her the clincher: he quotes from Ted Kennedy’s eulogy of RFK and says (approximately), “Some men look at the way things are, and ask why…I dream of things that could be and ask why not?” Then he asks the broken-up chick if she knows who said that. She, being no dud, knows this is a test that will count for 2/3 of her grade, and she replies, “A very great man.”

  With the two of them thus bound together in banality, the mod cop splits, leaving the chick—we can only presume—to the tender mercies of higher education.

  Did I mention that Mr. Williams and Judy Pace, the actress who played the girl friend, were black? I didn’t? Perhaps it was because they didn’t sound like any blacks I ever heard. They sounded like The System, and The System is white, so there must have been something wrong with my set’s color control.

  What does all of this say? It says that those series are bastardizations. They relegate the black community once again to proselytizing the party line. They are a shuck.

  They are ostensibly intended to show the black man and woman as normal, functioning members of the society, yet in actuality they are warped views of what’s going on by the aging mickeymice who put these shadow plays together. The producers in their Italian silk kerchiefs and wide belts need more than groovy gear from deVoss to get them into the heart of truth in the streets today. Or even the streets of Laredo, 1883.

  In one series the black man is allowed to vent his frustration and loneliness and hostility only through the use of the gun. We know what jingo propaganda that parallels. In the other series a black man speaks in such an uncool, unhip, untruthful manner that even the dumbest white chick would laugh in his face and call him a sellout.

  The mickeymice rule. They don’t know what the burning gut
of the problem is all about, and so they try to shuck us by taking a palm-feel of a high temperature.

  If this is integration on tv, it makes the days of Stepin Fetchit look almost cerebral by contrast.

  3: 18 OCTOBER 68

  Nothing pleases me more than that the major networks had a few of their newsmen dribbled around the streets of Chicago like basketballs. Nothing delights me more than that a few of those arrogant swine with their creepie-peepies got their heads and Arriflexes busted by Daley’s kulaks. The only thing that would have pleasured me more would have been Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley being beaten to guava jelly in full view of the cameras, in the gutter right outside the International Amphitheatre. There is a Yiddish word—quite untranslateable into English—kvell; it means, like, to feel as if the sun were glowing in your tummy; you rock back and forth with contained happiness. I would have kvelled to see “Good night, Chet,” and “Good night, David” said through puffy lips, around Band-Aid Sheer Strips.

  No deep-seated hostility prompts these blood-curdled pronouncements. Though I’m not what might be considered a nonviolent person, I have no animus for the gentlemen of the Video Fourth Estate. My feelings are prompted out of a gut-level desire for justice. The Universe is run in a sloppy manner, I’ll grant you, but overall it has a dandy check-and-balance system, and for justice to be meted out in full, what the newsvideo boys got was not nearly what they deserved. I’ll try to explain.

  In a roundabout way.

  I know a girl who was at the Century City free-for-all. She wasn’t in the area where I was tumbling, but she was there. She’s a third-grade teacher in a local grammar school. She went to the demonstration with a doctor of her acquaintance, and two attorneys. They were all dressed in acceptable Establishment garb: little white gloves and a pretty dress for her, suits and ties for the gentlemen. They dressed that way on purpose. They knew that a large segment of the demonstrating crowd would be in battle garb—sandals, hard hats, clothes that could stand sidewalk-scraping—and they wanted to show that all segments of the population were against WW2½. She told me, with a touching show of naïveté, that it seemed as though the television cameras, when panning across the throng, always avoided her little clot of squarely dressed dissenters, in favor of loving closeups on the scruffiest, most hirsute protesters. I smiled. Of course, baby.

  The news media invariably slant it. Whether it’s anything as flagrant as the prepared protest placards one of the local outlets took to a Valley men’s college for a debate, or as subtle as the proper defamatory word in a seven-minute radio newscast, the reportage is always corrupted so the dissenters look like fuzzy-minded commiesymp idiots (at best).

  There seems to be no question of ethic or morality in the minds of those who write the news, those who program the news, or those who deliver the news. Several friends of mine who work for CBS News here in Los Angeles have confided off-the-cuff that it appalls them, the manner in which the outrage of the minorities is presented. In private they’ll say it, but they haven’t the balls to actually do anything about it. They won’t make protestations to their superiors, they won’t make statements to the newspapers, they won’t back up their hideous parlor-liberalism with anything but muted whispers to activists they milk for inside information.

  So then the hypocrites get a little bloodied, and they shout “police brutality!” You could hear the outrage to the bottom of the Maracot Deep. Well, I’m afraid I can’t feel too upset about it.

  Where were they when the cops turned their bikes into the crowd outside the Century City Hotel? Where were they when fifteen-year-old girls were getting their heads busted on the Strip? Where were they at Columbia and University of Chicago and Berkeley? Where was their outrage then? Ask not for whom the bell tolls, brother reporters: it tolls for every one of you who sell out the people looking to you for truth. And when you reap a little of what you’ve helped sow, don’t come crying back and expect the field troops to feel sorry. It doesn’t work that way. You called the rules of the game, and now you’re uptight because the trolls with their mace and clubs decided it wasn’t how you played the game, it was whether or not you won.

  Which violent thought brings me to the topic of violence—or the lack of same—on prime-time tv. Everyone and his Doberman has had his say on this little topic, and having been a man who lost two grand when a segment of a show he wrote was canceled for re-run because it was too violent, I feel I’m as equipped as any dog to comment.

  It would be simple to make an artistic case for violence. All great art from Beowulf to Faulkner’s Intruder In The Dust has demonstrated that violence is often what results in moments of stress, when people under tension must seek release. Conrad, Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, John D. MacDonald, Arthur Miller—all of them bring their characters to the point of no return, and then follows violence. It is the way the machine works. (Note this: physiologically speaking, while Man’s forebrain, where he does his formulating, has grown larger as the eras passed, his medulla, where the emotions click, has remained the same size as his Neanderthal ancestors’. In effect what we have is a highly complex thinking machine, able to extrapolate and cogitate and parse, still ruled by the emotions of something little more godlike than a killer ape. Deny this, and you deny the facts. Ignore it, and what emerges artistically is a shuck.)

  A critic in Story Magazine recently ventured, in an article on the literary precedents for violence, that there is an “illiterate vocabulary of violence.” That when all reason fails, there is always the sock on the jaw. It says precisely what it means. There is no arguing with it. It makes a clearly defined dramatic point. And as the most valid argument for that theory the author cited Melville’s Billy Budd. When Billy, harried and chivvied by the detestable Claggart, finds himself literally unable to vocalize his frustration, or to deny the charges brought against him, the injustice being done to him in all its monstrousness, his futile attempt to speak finds voice in only one possible way—he lashes out and strikes the First Mate, killing him with one punch. Any other solution to the problem would have been illogical, untruthful, fraudulent.

  So then, if violence is necessary to the freedom of creating art, what is it about tv violence that has all the tippy-toe types running scared? What is it that has usually sane and responsible writers, producers and directors signing idiotic advertisements that they will never write violence again? (And thereby castrating themselves, and leaving the door wide-open for more and better network censorship; and proving what liars they are, for we all know if it comes down nitty-gritty to shooting that fight scene or writing that blood bath, who among them will walk away from the money?)

  What it is, of course, is what George Clayton Johnson, the videowriter, said it was, at a recent brouhaha thrown by the Writers Guild of America, West. He said it was “gratuitous” violence. Let me hit that again: gratuitous violence. And what is that, gentle readers? It is a death onscreen that no one cares about.

  If you’ve traveled through forty minutes of teleplay with a kindly old man who helps crippled children, and you see him shot to death on the steps of the altar where he is telling his beads, you care. You cry for that death. You feel you have lost someone.

  If, on the other hand, Little Joe Cartwright shoots down seventeen faceless hardcases trying to prevent him from snipping that bob’wire on the South Forty, you don’t give a shit. They were extras. They fell and they lay there and that’s that. (And the grossest debasement of the human condition of all, practiced regularly in tv series, is the scene in which someone has been murdered and lies there all through the shot while the remaining actors talk over what they’ll do next. Have you ever been in the same room with a corpse? No? Try it some time, and try carrying on polite conversation while the stiff’s blood and brains seep into the carpet.)

  It is the difference between our being stunned as though struck by a ball-peen hammer when we saw Bobby Kennedy get hit on-camera, or continuing to munch our potato chips through all those newsreel footages of m
assacres in the Congo. We knew him; whether we dug him or not, he was real, he mattered.

  So the blame, and the solution, lies in the hands of my fellow screenwriters. Most of them couldn’t write their way out of a pay toilet for openers, and they simply don’t have the craft or the heart to write what matters, what counts, what we can feel and care about. The solution to the question of violence stems from the insanity of the times, of course, but in interpretation it is filtered through the artfulness—or lack of it—of the writers. And then the producers. And then the directors.

  If the shackles of series format were removed from the writing hands of the creators, we would be many long steps toward solving the problem. Dispensing with violence on tv is tantamount to dropping a Bufferin and thinking it’ll cure your cancer.

  And if they decide that all violence must go, I suggest they start not with the innocuous banalities of combat demonstrated on half-wit series like The Outsider or Mannix but with the affectionate handling of freeway decapitations, sniper slayings, race riots and random brutalities delivered blow-by-blow in close close CLOSEUP by the ghouls on the Channel 7 news every night.

  Or doesn’t it disturb anyone to see a video newsman shoving his hand-mike down the gullet of a grieving widow on her knees before the burned body of her seven-year-old son?