Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  So they discover the monolith is sending out signals, and the receiver is somewhere out near Jupiter.

  So they send out the astronauts to dig what is shaking out there. The computer that runs the ship—aside from being faintly high-camp gay in its mannerisms—does a bang-up job keeping them on course, until one day, for no apparent reason it goes completely out of its gourd and kills everyone on board with the exception of Keir Dullea, who is just too smart to be put down by a mass of printed circuits and mumbly memory banks. But, the question asks itself, unbidden, why did the computer run amuck? The only answer that works within the framework of the film and logic, is that the aliens have somehow, by long distance, telekinesis or somesuchthing, sabotaged the thing. Reason: to capture the finest specimen of Terran life, the astronaut they know will be sent out to check that monolith near Jupiter. And they do. When he gets just abaft Jupiter, the formica tabletop comes for him, and then begins the section that will make this film a success . . . the astounding visual interpretation of a trip through hyperspace as the aliens cart Dullea back to wherever it is they actually live.

  (This section, by the way, has already gotten a deserved reputation in the underground, and when they can scrounge-up the hard-ticket prices to see it, the waiting lines at 2001 are mini-deep in heads waiting to get their minds blown a tot more than usual. It will be this underground rep that will spread out into the Establishment, and thereby assure the film of big box-office.)

  Now we come to the confusion.

  Oh really? Where've we been already? But . . . onward!

  Dullea wakes up (comes to? regains his senses? something.) in a Louis XVI bedroom, segues into a shot of himself a little older, segues again and he's wizened, segues again and he's lying in bed dying of old age. What is happening? Well, I see it this way (and being a science fiction writer naturally I am privy to all the secrets of the Universe, not to mention the mind of a director and the subtleties of a befuddled script):

  The aliens are trying to decide whether to go and join Man in his march through space to fulfill his destiny, or to let him destroy himself. They are pumping Dullea's mind.

  The periods of clarity for Dullea are those moments when the brain-draining ceases for a moment or two. Knowing that their environment is so alien to the mind of a human that he would crack, and be worthless for their purposes, the aliens have created a self-contained continuum for him to exist in, a dream if you will. It takes the familiar form of a white-on-white bedroom. It probably isn't really that. He may be in stasis in a gelatin tank, or hooked into a dream machine, or just floating free-ego in a never-never land of the aliens' design, depending on how alien and impossible-to-understand you care to make them.

  Finally, they get all they want out of Dullea, make up their minds to help Man on his way to Destiny, and utilizing the Time-Is-Circular theory, they send another formica tabletop to him, which changes him—devolves him? retrogresses him?—back to a baby with tarsier-huge eyes, and they send him back to Earth, ostensibly to make that second touch in the brain of Man that will give him an equivalent leap in intelligence that the first ape got from the monolith. Homo superior, the next evolutionary step, aided and abetted in the von Däniken idiom.

  That's one way to look at it.

  But then, is that really Dullea as a baby? It looked like an alien baby to me. It might even be an adult alien. Who says they all have to look like Raymond Massey with a fright-wig and a long beard? But even so, the story line holds.

  Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the story Kubrick and Clarke wrote. It may be a better one, who knows?

  In any case, there are still innumerable unanswered questions in the film, such as:

  If they found the monolith on the Moon, why didn't they find the one on Earth?

  Is it the same monolith, and it moves around?

  Why didn't the computer know Dullea would use the emergency exit to gain reentry into the ship?

  Why did Kubrick take endless time for the discovery of the monolith on the Moon, a sequence that would have been handled better in the teaser of the worst TV space opera?

  I could go on indefinitely.

  Which is not to say I didn't like the film. As I said to Norman Spinrad, the science fiction writer who was seated next to me at the screening, "the first half is boring . . . but not uninteresting." He stared at me. How can anything be boring and engrossing at one and the same time? Well, visit Kubrick's Folly and find out.

  The psychedelic segments are visually some of the most exciting stuff ever put on celluloid; in a way it's what cinema is all about, really. The ape sequences are brilliant, the special effects staggering, and my review brilliant. But I am compelled, once and finally, to say that this is a seriously flawed film. It fails in the first order of storytelling: to tell a story.

  So go get stoned on acid, pack your pockets with hash, go sit in the Cinerama cocoon, and let Kubrick fly you to the Moon. It ain't gossamer wings, but what the hell do you expect for $X.XX per ticket?

  Trumpet #9/1969

  JOE

  Joe is not merely an extraordinary film, it is a small artistic miracle. Only rarely in the turmoil of human events does a work of fiction speak so clearly, with such brutal directness to the core truths of the condition of life that no matter what one's beliefs, there is no denying its validity. Zola's "J'Accuse" was such a work, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was another. In film, in recent memory, Joe is approached for sheer impact and importance only by Z, Paths of Glory and the final scenes of Easy Rider. No one conceiving this film, a year ago, could have known how loudly it would speak today. It is a one-in-a-million success, a story so simple and so terrifyingly on-target for our times, that the luckiest Vegas bookies, with all the vigerish in the universe, would lose their shorts trying to predict odds on its happening again.

  Already the film is a legend. I saw it in New York (for the first time) early in July, the day after it opened at the Murray Hill on 3rd Avenue. By that time Judith Crist had come out strongly for it. Still, it was an unknown quantity to me, and though I was urged into seeing it by a film director friend of mine, I was reluctant: you can only see so many Strawberry Statements, so many Getting Straights, so many Revolutionarys without getting fed to the teeth by the exploitation of the dissent movement by the fat and cynical. But I allowed myself to be dragooned. (It is interesting to note that I had just come off a lecture tour through Middle America, two days prior to my trip to the Murray Hill. I had been through hardhat country.)

  I was not disposed to be impressed.

  I had had my guts twisted by Z and Easy Rider and I did not think they could do it to me again.

  At the end of the film, it took my director friend, Max Katz, and his lady, Karen, to help me up the aisle. I could not focus. I was trembling like a man with malaria. There was a large potted tree on the sidewalk outside the theater. I managed to get to it, and sat there, unable to communicate, for twenty minutes. I was no good for two days thereafter.

  Phone calls to the Cannon Group, the releasing corporation responsible for getting the film into circulation, brought me photo stills, production information and background on the story. I knew, even then, I would want to write some words about Joe.

  Seeing it again last night, here in Los Angeles, I was afraid my first impressions would be blunted by all the foofaraw the film has generated, by reevaluations, by seeing it in company with a less-hip crowd than the Manhattan audience.

  Though it became my turn to help someone up the aisle—my lady Cindy, who was (politely put) stunned—the film held as much significance and torment the second time around.

  The film buff inclined toward Cahiers du Cinema analyses of motion pictures may find this review somewhat wanting in phrases like mobility, color-sense, directorial thrust, cinematographic purity, characterization . . . the full sack of technical terminology that proves the critic knows whereof he speaks. The filmgoer whose exposure to cinema criticism rests on the high school book repo
rt level of getting a line-by-line retelling of the plot, may also be frustrated.

  I choose not to tell the story of Joe. Too many clowns have already spoiled the experience (on television and in newspapers) by categorizing it as a story about a hardhat who kills hippies, as a study of the generation gap, as a modern terror tale, as any number of other literary flummeries. And it is all of these, and none of these. What it is, fellow travelers, is a visceral experience on a par with going black-belting with Bruce Lee. Joe will kick the shit out of you. It will set the blood slamming against your cranial walls. It will make you as cold as Ultima Thule.

  So those who want informed and esoteric précis can look elsewhere. The sole and blatant purpose of this review is not only to get you to go see the film, but to buy a ticket for a needy hardhat.

  Because that is who should see this movie.

  I drove down Ventura Boulevard this morning. Just a few blocks past Sepulveda, they're building another of those filing cabinets for people—a massive office building. The thing rises eight or ten storeys already. They have one of those giant centerpost cranes on top, literally pulling the structure up by its bootstraps. And on the rigger's platform of the crane is a flagstaff, and flying proudly from that staff is Old Glory.

  Across the street from the construction is a men's shop I occasionally patronize. When I park in front of the construction and walk across to the men's shop, the hardhats come out on the railings up there and they start doing Joe. I'm thinking of buying a hundred tickets and passing them out to the fellahs. Let them go and see Joe Curran, the prototypical hardhat, the middle-class homeowner, the guy with the knotty pine rec room and the "well-balanced gun collection." Joe, the guy who refers to Bud as the King of Beers, the guy who hates welfare deadbeats and niggers and kids who've fucked up the music and shit on the flag. Let them go and see Joe, and then let them try and reconcile it in their baboon brains. If they can.

  Assaulted as you are, moment by moment, with urgings to read this and see that, to touch this and taste that, how do I summon the words that will impel you to the Four Star Theater, to see this film, now? How do I get you to do it, so you can get your parents and your friends and total strangers with short hair and a psychotic glaze over their eyes, to see it also? How do I do it . . . ?

  Perhaps I do it by analyzing the film in terms of the great cinematic moments. Perhaps by telling you the chilling and wholly logical story so you'll want to see how it all comes out. And perhaps I just do what I've done—advise you that the only person who could walk away from Joe without a new awareness of the treadmill to tragedy on which America is running is the kind of person who is Joe Curran.

  And maybe I just suggest, in a soft whisper, that the beast who is Joe lives in all of us, longhair or hardhat. And then, friends, we drop to our knees and pray.

  Los Angeles Free Press/September 25, 1970

  SILENT RUNNING

  Cogito ergo comparare. As a thinking animal, the species homo sap has this positively lemminglike urge toward myth and archetype. Every little kid lost on the grounds of Disneyland is a parallel to the Wandering Jew; every poor sonofabitch hoist on his own petard harkens back to Christ; every septuagenarian who slips out of Sun City for a stroll in the countryside is a Doppelgänger for Nietzsche's Old Man in the Woods; Henry Ford opened Pandora's box, Wilbur and Orville were Daedalus and Icarus, Howard Hughes is Croesus; every writer who writes lean and tough is obviously emulating Hemingway. Well, sheet!

  And every sf film released post–2001: A Space Odyssey will have to suffer with comparisons to Kubrick's jellyroll; most of the time, the contender's going to come away bloodied. Apparently, in the massmind, it isn't enough for the creator of whatever film comes into question to have had the dream and the skill to solidify that dream on film. It isn't enough, because homo sap seemingly can't handle all that fresh input each time, consequently has to gauge the new film by the old one, even when they bear only the most superficial similarities to each other.

  Well, hell, leave us cease beating around it. I'm talking about Silent Running, an outstanding film, albeit seriously flawed conceptually, and how much nonsensical balderdash it's going to have to put up with because it is the illegitimate son of 2001.

  Perhaps not all comparisons between the two are invidious, however. Special effects on 2001 were conceived and effected by a team of four, most prominent of whom was Douglas Trumbull: Silent Running was directed by Douglas Trumbull. 2001 depended heavily for its ambience of wonder on the hardware of space travel: Silent Running takes place entirely aboard the American Airlines space freighter Valley Forge. Heads dropped their tabs and went to freak behind the 2001 visual psychedelics of a jaunt through hyperspace: the most potent filmic technique surfacing in Silent Running is a violent, shuddering, kaleidoscopic ride through the maelstrom rapids of the rings of Saturn, using the same Trumbull-conceived cinematic vocabulary. Both are morality plays. Both anthropomorphize machines. Both deal with astronauts manqué. Both flaunt the minutiae of space travel and life aboardship inspace.

  Yet these are merely surface similarities. The two films are as dissimilar as Lolita and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, though both possess dirndl youth and femininity.

  The dissimilarities of 2001 and Silent Running are infinitely more striking than their lookalikes:

  2001 had no human characters with whom one could identify; Silent Running pivots on the character of Freeman Lowell, the last ecologist Earth ever produced. 2001 was heavily mystical; Silent Running is a myth anchored in materialism and realism, despite its fantascience trappings. 2001 was optimistic in the final analysis; Silent Running is a cautionary tale with a downbeat ending. 2001 was scientifically accurate (with only very minor errors) down to the last grommet and spanner; Silent Running makes no attempt to disguise its mythic qualities and the flaws in its physical sciences are numerous, consequently. Silent Running is essentially a romance, 2001 was not. There are more.

  But the most important difference between the two films, from the standpoint of criticism, is that 2001 so stunned with its metaphysical and cinematic overkill that virtually nothing but "Oh wow!" is available to its audience after they have seen it (a common denominator for Kubrick films, from Paths of Glory through Spartacus to Dr. Strangelove and up to A Clockwork Orange); Kubrick is clearly a genius, well ahead of the game; while the makers of Silent Running are merely extraordinarily talented men, and the film can be commented upon rationally because it isn't that rara avis, the fever-dream of a Polanski, a Fellini or a Kubrick. It is susceptible to comment and criticism, it is flawed, it is—at core—more human than 2001. And for that reason is more valuable to students of speculative fiction in films than 2001 because it bears the marks of human hands, it speaks to trends, it casts illumination on the directions sf can take in films: 2001 does not. It is a special vision and cannot be duplicated; it can tell us little beyond the rare qualities of a Kubrick.

  So, at last, fighting off the lemming-urge to comparison, we come to Silent Running which, like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead, is very very good when it's good, and when it's bad ought to go and sit on a cucumber.

  Blatantly—and to its disadvantage—it is a message film. It says: Don't kill off the forests. It says: We have to be more ecologically humane. It says: If we keep going the way we're going, we'll fulfill Joni Mitchell's warning, "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot." And the film says these now-all-too-familiar-yet-nonetheless-inescapably-true clichés just that nakedly. Making for some very difficult, pretentious speeches by the protagonist, played by Bruce Dern. It is a mark of Dern's acting expertise, and the exquisitely special quality he displays in the role of Lowell, that the speeches just manage to slide by without rasping the nerve-ends. But it's bad scripting.

  More on Dern, and more on the script, later.

  Shunting aside for the moment the plot-holes in which one could lose a cab rig and trailer, the story is an uncomplicated one. The last botanical s
pecimens from an Earth devoid of vegetation (and I won't even comment on that wonky concept at this point) have been enclosed in enormous domes, have been attached to space freighters, and have been orbited out near Saturn. Lowell and his three shipmates have been on the Valley Forge—one freighter in a large flotilla—for eight years, tending the forests and desert areas in each of the five geodesic domes. One day they receive the long-awaited message from the flagship that tells them the final dispensation of the botanical specimens. Not the recall Lowell was hoping for, the recall to return the vegetation to Earth where it would flower anew, but a message that delights the three jaded and bored shipmates: uncouple the domes, blow them out into space and vaporize them with atomic charges. Lowell's buddies love the message because it means they're going home. Lowell is appalled. He has come to love the forest, its denizens, its foods he grows with his own hands and eats (to the amusement of his shipmates living off dried and fortified synthetics from the robochef onboard).