Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Thus lighthearted, I jigged a little jog in my seat as the lights dimmed, and with growing horror became as one with the many film critics—from Time and Newsweek to Gahan Wilson in The Twilight Zone magazine—who have perceived Gremlins as a film utterly without restraint, exhibiting a streak of malign viciousness that I now suggest has been a part of Spielberg's oeuvre from the first . . . subverted and camouflaged heretofore, but now, with Spielberg's ascendancy to the throne of power and freedom in Hollywood, freed from its Pandora's Box and permitted free rein.

  Gremlins suffers from the dreaded Jerry Lewis Syndrome: it vacillates between a disingenuous homeliness and an egomaniacal nastiness. It is by turns so bewilderingly schizoid that one reels from the shifts, cloyingly cut and cuddly—so arch, so coy, so aspartameously endearing that Tonstant Viewer fwowed up—and monstrously evil in such a way that one spike speaks to all crucifixions; embodying in the gremlins the most loathsome traits of human beings without a compensatory balance of positive human values. It is all the specious arguments you've ever heard as to why the human race should be nuked till it glows, rolled into one vile paradigm and served up with an aw-shucks, toe-scuffling, ain't-we-cute anthropomorphism so contemptible one leaves the theater wanting to get one's soul Martinized.

  We have been convinced, through hundreds of interviews and analyses of Spielberg's motivations, that he makes the kind of films he wants to see, the kind he liked when he was a kid. Thus we are led to believe that what we're getting, expensively turned out, made with the highest level of cinematic expertise and most courant SFX state of the art, are films dreamt by an adult who sees with the eyes of a child. But if this is so, then there is surely a twisted adolescent intelligence at work in this picture. Because, as one of the stars of the film, Hoyt Axton, has said: "Gremlins is E.T. with teeth."

  Fangs is more accurate.

  And so, we trust Steven Spielberg. Unlike Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released at nearly the same time as Gremlins and bearing some sidebar attention (later in this essay) to the thesis at hand, which is obviously a film intended for the mentality of Huck Finn boys, no matter how old they may be, Gremlins has been aimed straight at little kids. The same wide-eyed tots who wept when E.T. gasped his last. A trusting, innocent audience that cannot discriminate between Lucas films and Spielberg films—so umbilically linked are these two old chums—and so, when it sees "Steven Spielberg presents Gremlins" it thinks Star Wars; it thinks E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial; it thinks Reese's Pieces (or M&Ms); it thinks Oh boy!

  But the mind of Steven Spielberg is not that of a child grown older but not grown-up. It is a mind, from the evidence passim this film, of an adult who has grown to maturity with a subliminal freightload of cynicism and meanspirited animus. Cloaked in the gee-whiz of hommages to B sci-fi flicks and simplistic Capra paeans to a small town America that truly existed only in the wish-fulfillment of Hollywood scenarists, Gremlins comes to that tot audience with comfy images of lovable aliens, sweetfaced urchins, incompetent parents and stories that come right in the end. All set? Now scare the hell out of those kids! Suck them in, con them with what went before, and then open that corroded Pandora's Box. Let the Worms of Evil eat their fill!

  An adult who sees with the eyes of a child? I think not. More probably an adult who retains the meanness of kids in the schoolyard, waiting to strike back for the inequities of getting teased, and being sent to bed without any supper, and having to do as one is told because. Let me not venture too deeply into cheap, vest-pocket psychoanalysis. I don't know what is in Steven Spielberg's mind; all I know is what I saw on the screen. And what I saw, apparently what many others also saw, was a grotesque breach of trust with that tot audience.

  I heard children scream and cry in Gremlins.

  I spoke to the manager of a theater in Columbus, Ohio who told me he has never before had so many instances of people demanding their money back. I have my own loathing to reconcile.

  One can rend this film on many levels, apart from the ethical. What are we to say about the remarkable similarity between the mogwai stage of gremlin development and artist Michael Whelan's conception of Piper's Little Fuzzys? (One tries to be even-handed when crediting the "influences" on Lucas and Spielberg. One credits a lot to hommage—until the moment comes with De Palma films, for instance, when one chokes on the phrase "homage to Hitchcock" and simply shouts, "Thief!" One tries to overlook memories of Edd Cartier's hokas when one sees ewoks. Yet one cannot indefinitely put from mind the many, many press items about plagiarism suits directed against this most successful of director-entrepreneurs. One remembers Richard Matheson's short story and Twilight Zone teleplay, "Little Girl Lost," and wonders why Matheson never raised a question about Poltergeist . . . until one remembers that Matheson—hardly a member of the Spielberg coterie—was hired to write Spielberg's subsequent production of Twilight Zone—The Movie. And one smiles to oneself at the possibility that this gentle, vastly talented writer may have escaped the toils of a decade-long legal imbroglio while yet preserving his integrity. Shadows darken the mythic Spielberg kingdom.)

  And what of those endlessly distracting hommages that tremble in the corners of every jam-packed frame? (For director Joe Dante has absorbed Spielberg's patented technique of packing every shot as if it were your Granny's bric-a-brac cabinet.) Polly Holliday stalks down the street and the background music, as well as her demeanor, reminds us of Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz; a poster half-seen on a wall is for Agar Pest Control, and we're supposed to chuckle at the reference to John Agar's co-starring role in the 1955 Tarantula; at a gadgeteer's convention we see the time machine from the 1960 George Pal adaptation of Wells's classic, we cut away, and when we cut back . . . it's vanished à la 1979's Time After Time; a legend on a door tells us this is the Office of Dr. Moreau; the marquee of a theater, seen fleetingly as the camera pans, announces Watch the Skies (the original title intended for Close Encounters and the last line of the original version of The Thing) and A Boy's Life (the working title for E.T The Extra-Terrestrial), and we are not supposed to snort at the filmmaker paying homage to himself, fer chrissakes; as Hoyt Axton makes a phone call a man in a hat stands behind him making notes, and the man is the film's composer, Jerry Goldsmith . . . we cut away . . . and when we cut back Goldsmith has been replaced by Robby the Robot, wearing Goldsmith's hat, speaking precisely the lines he spake in Forbidden Planet. But it goes on and on and on, world without end, amen. This is no longer the mild amusements, the inside jokes of those who love film and its history. It is intrusive. It keeps one's attention partially distracted from the emptiness of soul up there on the screen where the action is hysterical. Gremlins, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and as many other Lucas-Spielberg products as you care to recall, is a showoff's movie.

  Spielberg and Lucas and their proteges are scabby-kneed, snotty-nose neighborhood urchins scaring the crap out of their elders by walking a plank across a building excavation. They are so busy letting us know how clever they are, that they counterproductively shatter the best, first rule of film direction: don't make the direction obvious.

  As Frank Capra, who is hommaged to exhaustion in Gremlins, proved: the most artful direction is that which warms the audience into thinking the film was not directed at all, that it's just happening as they watch.

  Further, it is possible to savage Gremlins on the level of character and motivation. The boy and girl who play the leads are impossible! The boy is supposed to be one of those apple-cheeked virgins Capra used as icons, but he's old enough to work in a bank—though he lives in his parents' attic in a room filled with the toys of a ten-year-old—and his girlfriend is Ms. Phoebe Cates, who has managed to shed her clothes in every film I've seen in which she has a speaking part. (And though I'll be accused of something or other, I suppose we're expected to comment on Ms. Cates's firm flesh, otherwise why are we gifted with such regular peeks at it?) Ms. Cates is also supposed to be an apple-cheeked virgin, yet she is privileged to deliv
er the speech that is possibly the moment of worst taste in the film, a verbal recounting of that old Gahan Wilson cartoon about daddy dressed as Santa Claus and suffocating in the chimney on Christmas Eve. I submit that this iniquitous moment encapsulates the meanspiritedness of the film: taking the Capra Christmas motif and turning it into a toxic waste dump.

  No one seems very surprised at the existence of mogwai. Not the father, played by the intelligent Hoyt Axton, not the mother, not the high school science teacher, not the apple-cheeked hero and heroine. It seems to me that not even in the fantasy world of a film such as this should the introduction into everyday life of an impossible thing cause such little startlement.

  The instructions given to Axton on the three things one should never never never do to a mogwai on pain of terrible consequences—shine light in their eyes, let it get wet, and feed it after midnight—are never explored by Axton when he gets the creature. Even a schmuck asks for a book of instructions when he buys a microwave oven. And, of course, because it's an idiot plot, all three caveats are ignored so frivolously, so offhandedly, that we know from the moment we hear them that they have been entered merely to be transgressed.

  But since everyone else in the film acts like a bonehead, how naïve of us to pretend to amazement that the plot has been manipulated so crassly. For of fools there is no dearth in this film. Glynn Turman, as the high school science teacher who borrows one of the gremlin offspring to study, has just seen the wire cage containing the creature ripped open, has seen the creature grab a test tube and has heard the sound of the thing eating it, and yet he tracks it around the darkened schoolroom (he had been running a science film for his students and the lights were out) without having the common sense to turn on the lights. And though he knows the thing is ravenous enough to eat a test tube, fer chrissakes, he nonetheless acts like a fool and extends a candy bar, held in his naked hand, into the shadows under a desk. When we hear him scream, and later when we see him lying dead, just enough in shadow so we cannot tell how far up his body the evil gremlin ate, we are told by apologists for this film's systematic violence that "nothing is shown."

  Yet we must remember that film is a simulacrum of life. It is not a "cartoon" (a subject I'll cover next time). A cartoon is a cartoon. Live-action is one remove from the real thing. And in this film we see people being smashed by a snowplow that goes right through their house, we see a woman hurled at a prodigious speed through a second-storey window, we see Harry Carey, Jr. stick his hand into a mailbox and hear the sound of gnawing, we see a mother's face bloody with the raking of talons. And we are expected to laugh. We are told this ain't for real, it's a cartoon. But if you chew off someone's arm, they will bleed to death, slowly and horribly. If you run a snowplow through someone's home and smash them, you will grind them to pulp. If you throw someone from a second-storey window at a prodigious speed, her neck will be broken. And no amount of breakdancing and beer-swilling and emulation of human behavior by malevolent fanged creatures can remove the rotten core of violence that poisons this entire film. It is, truly, The Muppet Chain Saw Massacre.

  Inconsistency: "If these evil gremlins get to water, they'll multiply forever. We have to keep them from water." This film takes place at Christmastime. There is snow everywhere. Last time I checked, snow was mostly made of water.

  Rasa, tabula, one each.

  Or should we simply point out, and accept wearily, the reality that this film is nothing but a cynical marketing device for Gizmo and Stripe dolls, Gremlin lunch buckets, mogwai pajamas, premiums, doodads, million-buck marketables?

  It has been pointed out to me that I may not, at risk of bearing false witness, lay the onus of moral bankruptcy re Gremlins at Steven Spielberg's gate. This, I have been reminded, and scenarist Chris Columbus assured me in a recent telecon that it is so, is a film directed by Joe Dante, that Spielberg was off on location with Temple of Doom when Gremlins was in production. In all fairness, yes, this is Dante's work and is filled with the kind of violence Dante delivered in Hollywood Boulevard, Piranha, and The Howling. And it emanates from an original screenplay by Columbus (who wrote Reckless). But Columbus also told me that he went through several drafts of the script, over a period of months, with Spielberg himself, before he was given Dante as collaborator on another few passes.

  All this taken into consideration, true or false, each contributor's part in the action increased or softpedaled for whatever reasons of politics (perhaps in fear of a repeat of the Poltergeist fiasco, in which Spielberg was rumored to have done the direction while Tobe Hooper stood around the set with his thumb in his mouth, a rumor that time has proved to be utterly false and destructive to Hooper's reputation), it is Spielberg's bio that leads off the press kit furnished by Warner Bros. It is Spielberg's name above the title in the TV Guide two-page advertisement. It is Spielberg's name that sold this film to ten-year-olds and their parents.

  And in the same way that the mindless think Walt Disney wrote Bambi and Pinocchio, never having heard of Felix Salten or Carlo Collodi; in the same way that they think Rod Serling wrote every segment of The Twilight Zone; and in the same way that no amount of setting the record straight (with a knowing wink and an elbow nudge) will convince most people that Tobe Hooper, not Spielberg, directed Poltergeist; in that same way, and with equal responsibility, this is a Spielberg film bearing the freight of his cinematic vision and execution.

  Perhaps I do sin against the innocent when I suggest that this movie fits neatly into the Spielberg canon because it lies under the shadow of his Gray Eminence throughout . . . but it's a belief I cannot, try as I might, shake from my considerations when appraising Gremlins.

  And I suspect the free ride is over for Spielberg in terms of uncritical adoration. For Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom lets loose the Worms of Evil with its brutalization of children as a device to shock, and that's the first true glimpse of the darker side of the force that motivates the Lucas-Spielberg films—though it's there, subtly, in most of their movies, one way or another—and Gremlins fully opens that Pandora's Box: it combines, at last, the softest, most empty-headed, meretricious and dangerous elements of the entire Lucas-Spielberg genre.

  And whether you call it Bedford Falls or Kingston Falls, Gremlins savages to evil effect a world that need not have been trashed so callously.

  Steven Spielberg has more power, more freedom, more top of the mountain access to the best the industry has to offer, than anyone in the history of moviemaking. He has talent coming out of his ears. And I do not think the unquestioning adoration that has been visited on him is repaid by the sort of films he now seems inclined to make. It is presumptuous for me, or anyone, to tell an artist what to create; but it is the responsibility of the audience to alert a force as potent as Spielberg to the possibility that too much isolation, and too many yes-men, and too much money, and too much cynicism can turn the sweetest apple rotten to the core.

  We have all taken bites from that apple. And what is worse than finding a Worm of Evil in the apple is finding half a Worm.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / February 1985

  INSTALLMENT 7:

  In Which An Attempt Is Made To Have One's Cake And Eat It, Too

  By this time we will have come clean with each other. We will have ceased trying to flummox one another. You will reluctantly admit that these are not actually "reviews" of films, because The Noble Fermans assemble the goods three months before the magazine is published; and that means that even if I review 2010, Supergirl, The River, Dune, and Paris, Texas (all five of which I'll see next week, 12–18 November) immediately, those films will have opened and, in some cases, vanished before you get the dubious benefit of my appraisals. So insofar as being a theater guide to what you should lay out money to see, this column is academic. You'll have guessed well or badly on your own; you'll have been conned by advertising; or you'll have been warned off by word-of-mouth or by Roger Ebert. And for my part, I will admit that these are not "reviews" in the
way, say, Ayjay's book columns serve you, because the books are still out there three months after pub date; but the films may only be accessible in a second-run house.

  By reviewing what is coming out as far in advance of their national premieres as I can, I cut down the time-lag; and in some instances—Repo Man and Gremlins are the most recent examples—I can abet your own desires by talking up the former, which got a second pass at distribution, or by warning you off the latter, which hung around like a bad case of stomach flu for the entire summer, at least till they'd moved a million of those vile gremlin soft toys off the shelves.

  But what is truly being done in these columns is what I like to think of as essays in the realm of film criticism. The discussion of trends, subtexts, effects on the art form and on the commonweal, I suppose in an attempt to broaden your appreciation of film as worthy art. Thus, when I read Gahan Wilson's column in The Twilight Zone magazine, and Gahan quite properly wails in pain at the glut of films he has endeavored to see, in order to review, during the summer avalanche, and he professes to going blind and insensitive after seven days of two screenings a day, I sympathize without reservation. And finally, as it must to all men, overload comes to Charles Foster Ellison; and I simply admit that I cannot see everything available in this genre in your behalf; and also admit that it may not be a race worth the candle to attempt to see them all, if the best I can do is a mere squib relating basic storyline topped with a smartass one-punch evaluation.