Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  As for the morality of telling us a live-action feature is a "cartoon," I must enter in your behalf even greater disgust and rancorous feelings. A cartoon is a cartoon! And a cartoon is a simulacrum of live action. They may not, at risk of tar and feathers, wriggle with that back-formation. They cannot tell us that first came reality, then cinematic reflection of reality, then cartoon interpretation as simulacrum of reflected reality, and then live-action as parody of cartoon interpretation of reflected reality! They are simply lying. It has as much validity as George Wallace nattering on about "state's rights" when what he's really saying is, "Let's keep the niggers in chains."

  It is the most repugnant, vilest sort of dissembling; and that so many filmgoers and alleged movie buffs (like Bill Warren and Steve Boyett) go for that okeydoke, is disheartening. For shame, youse guys!

  Which leads me to the final consideration of this essay, which is why does this "cartoon" cop-out always seem to attach to the sort of films one finds reviewed in a science fiction or fantasy magazine?

  I think the answer contains the deepest sort of insult.

  Because sf and fantasy have always been considered trash by "serious" filmmakers, the sort of stories that a director chooses to film as a lark, not to be taken as seriously as his/her "important" work, it follows that dismissing a failure and the fools who went to see it as a cartoon intended for cartoon-lovers, is logical. No one ever heard the makers of, say, Gandhi, suggest to its critics that it wasn't intended as meaningful, that it was just a lark. Not even a Dirty Harry flick gets that kind of write-off. Oh, perhaps, it might extend to the last ten years' James Bond travesties, but I cannot think of too many other candidates for the life-as-cartoon award.

  But "sci-fi" and fantasy are clearly marketing fodder; visual aids to sell gremlin soft toys; loss-leaders intended to lure us to the popcorn and candy counter; elegant merde shot with state of the art SFX on the new ultrafast Kodak 5293 film. Only that which is conceived as intended for a less discriminating audience would dare to be palmed off as unworthy of complaint on the same level as that directed toward "real" movies, "serious" movies, "important" movies.

  The excuse that we weren't supposed to be bothered by mean-spiritedness in Gremlins, the brutality toward children in Temple of Doom, the violence and emptyheadedness blown on a breeze of rock'n'roll in Streets of Fire, the plot silliness of Cloak and Dagger because they are just "cartoons" intended for a malleable, substandard intelligence audience that will settle for zooming rocketships and flashing light-shows, is a reflection of the deepest-held views of those who run the film industry.

  And as long as they can make a buck or five or ten from such a gullible audience, we can stop asking Why doesn't Hollywood make good sf films?

  For my part, when I want a cartoon, I'll turn on Daffy Duck. Until that time, when I hear the apologia, I will respond as would the Tasmanian Devil.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / March 1985

  INSTALLMENT 8:

  In Which Some Shrift Is Given Shortly, Some Longly, And The Critic's Laundry Is Reluctantly Aired

  Uncle Ayjay (to whom I seem to make reference an inordinate number of times, though reports that we are "an item" are wholly unfounded; we are just friends, despite USA Today's front page revelation on December 13th that he gave me a 20-carat oval sapphire engagement ring) once, a long time ago, when he was trying to teach me how to write, said: "It is not acceptable in trying to create characterization to say, 'He looked exactly like Cary Grant, except the ears were larger.'" By extension, what Obergruppenfuehrer Budrys was telling me, is that describing something solely by reference to an existing icon ain't strictly kosher. I mention this as admission of malice aforethought when I write the words that follow:

  In 1983 20th Century Fox released a film titled Monsignor, starring Christopher Reeve. In merely one year it has levitated to the top of the list of Worst Movies Ever Made. Worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space; worse than A Countess from Hong Kong; worse than The Terror of Tiny Town; worse than The Oscar.

  Monsignor is the most astonishingly stupid, cataclysmically wrong-headed, awesomely embarrassing, universally inept stretch of celluloid ever thrown onto a movie screen. One views the film with one's mouth agape in stunned disbelief that so many alleged professionals could so totally have taken leave of their senses as to delude themselves that this cosmic stinkeroonie was worth making; or, having so deluded themselves that, once having screened it, the abomination was worth releasing save for cruel laughter. Monsignor is an Olympian exercise in imbecility.

  Describing something solely by reference to an existing icon ain't strictly kosher.

  Supergirl (Tri-Star Pictures) exists and functions on precisely and exactly the intellectual and artistic level of Monsignor.

  This has been a review.

  On the other hand, Tri-Star has given us a genuinely spiffy sf adventure written and directed by Michael Crichton; goes by the name Runaway. And it is what, in my view, a good sf movie ought to be: imaginative, logically consistent, entertaining, unpredictable, exciting and filled with stuff we've never seen. It's not dripping with memorable characterization, but apart from that one scant deficiency which is an acceptable trade-off for the goodies it proffers in abundance (and a last line I can live without), Runaway is the filmic equivalent of "a good read."

  Tom Selleck is engagingly cast as a police sergeant in charge of the Runaway Squad of a major metropolitan city's law enforcement department in the not-too-distant. Runaways are robots that have gone bonkers and are doing what they oughtn't. The first part of the film swiftly and neatly delineates a society almost identical to today's, with the addition of many kinds of household and industrial machines that perform the kind of scutwork labor white folks abhor and consign to peoples bearing green cards. And though prophesying what our world will be like twenty years hence, with robots to do our cooking and welding, is a mugg's game (and not even sf's vaunted claims of being able "to predict the future" hold up under close historical scrutiny), Crichton has been a model of rectitude injecting those little extrapolative touches we all slaver for. It all seems plausible, which is the most we should ever ask of this kind of woolgathering.

  When people start getting killed by otherwise innocuous mechanical helpmates, Selleck finds himself going mano-a-mano with the psychopathic high-tech killer, Dr. Luther, played with exquisite malevolence by rock star Gene Simmons, leader of Kiss. (Who walked up to me at the screening to say he was a fan of my work, and scared the shit out of me even without his concert makeup. Thank god he didn't stick out his tongue at me.)

  Additionally, as if a good original plot, endless action, terrific visuals and heartstopping danger were not enough, Runaway showcases the talents and beauty of three women for whom one might gladly burn the topless towers of Ilium: Cynthia Rhodes, Kirstie Alley and Anne-Marie Martin (regularly seen on the Days of Our Lives daytime serial). Now ordinarily, making a remark about the pulchritude of the actresses in a film would get both Vonda and Joanna tsk-tsking at me; but since the star of this movie is a sex object for women, I take obscene advantage of the opportunity to reprise that blissfully ignorant condition of chauvinism in which I existed for thirty years before Vonda and Joanna put me on the floor with their knees in my chest and pointed out logically where my thinking was screwed.

  As for that last line, it's goodness knows a tiny enough nit, but I mention it so Michael doesn't do it again. At the end of the film—and I'm giving nothing away by telling you this, trust me—Selleck and Rhodes have fallen in love. Both are cops, and both have performed athletically and competently throughout the story. But as they kiss, Selleck says to her, "Do you cook?" She answers, "Try me." Apart from the grating cliché of "try me" (which, if the universe is kind, I will never hear from a movie screen again as long as I live or even after, on a level of awful familiarity with someone saying "Just like that?" and reply being "Just like that"), and the recidivist resonance of times past when no matter how competent a woman m
ight be at non-housewifely occupations, she would only be fulfilled as a "real woman" if she could cook and clean and bear homunculi, the film prominently includes Lois, a cook/babysitter robot in Selleck's home. So Ms. Rhodes should have replied to Sgt. Ramsay's question with a line something like, "I don't have to; Lois can do it. I can fuck; Lois can't do that."

  But perhaps I ask too much of the universe. Then again, when I'm elected god this year . . .

  The ultimate variation of the cinematic convention commonly referred to as "Boy and Girl meet cute" (ref. Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli in Arthur) can be found in a sappy, nay, goofy, clinker called Starman (Columbia Pictures).

  Here in glamorous but Machiavellian Hollywood the Writers Guild has long fought the battle of the possessive credit. You know what I mean: Walt Disney's Pinocchio (written by Carlo Collodi); Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (written by John Briley); Brian De Palma's Scarface (written by Oliver Stone). Directors can continue to flummox the studios and the public only as long as they can continue to cloud our thinking with the auteur theory that puts them forward as "the creator" of a film. We are talking about power and money in the possessive credit. They get around it in a thousand ways, this bad feeling they stir in those of us who actually create the dream: A Brian De Palma Film / Brian De Palma's Film of / A Film of Brian De Palma . . . you get the idea. So the Writers Guild goes on fighting this one, against the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild, and not much progress is made, because we're talking about power and money.

  However, in the case of John Carpenter's Starman, I suspect not even bamboo slivers under the fingernails could get scenarists Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon to ask for the possessive credit. It's that dumb.

  (On the other hand, which I've been doing a lot in this installment, they are the guys who wrote this emgalla, so who's to say how deeply runs their brain damage.) (Emgalla: a South African wart hog.)

  Starman's plot is at least thirty-five years old. It is a first contact story that acts as if The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing (1951), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) had never been made. Out goes our space probe, it's found by an alien intelligence, the e.t. comes to Earth, the e.t. shape-changes to assume the persona of a woman's dead husband, they fall in love, he runs around a lot trying to evade people trying to capture him, he gives her a baby, and he leaves the planet. No explanation is ever given as to why he was here or why, if he went to the trouble to come here, he runs around madly trying to escape contact with the species he sought to contact in the first place.

  Again we have the stupidity of a spaceship whoooooshing noisily past in airless vacuum, again we have the inept and malevolent scientists and military schmucks who seek only to imprison or kill the visitor, again we have sophomoric definitions of "love" and "friendship" as explicated by subliterate characters.

  What we have here is a 1948 movie made in 1984.

  A waste of time.

  A contrived, simpleminded, sappy film. My patience is fast running out with John Carpenter, who is a talented man, yet who seems hellbent on cranking out one dreary clot after another. And they crucified Michael Cimino for Heaven's Gate.

  Just wait'll I'm elected.

  I'll save 2010 and Dune till next time, because it has become necessary to say something about The Terminator (Orion Pictures).

  Yes, folks, I'm more than painfully aware that The Terminator resembles my own Outer Limits script "Soldier" in ways so obvious and striking that you've been moved to call me, write letters, send me telegrams and pass the gardyloo along by word-of-mouth with my friends. You really must cease waking me in the wee hours to advise me I've been ripped off.

  As I write this, attorneys are talking.

  Despite the foregoing, permit me to recommend The Terminator. It is a superlative piece of work and deserves its success. Director and co-author James Cameron has made an auspicious debut. The film is taut, memorable, and clearly based on brilliant source material. More than that I am not at liberty to say.

  If for no other reason, I would celebrate this nifty movie on the grounds that someone has, at last, figured out a way to use Arnold Schwartzenegger effectively. I suppose I'm a bit tired of seeing that Friday the 13th horror ending in which the dead monster comes back to life again and again, but in context it plays like a baby doll this time.

  Now if you go to see this movie, I want you to put out of your minds all memory of "Soldier" or my other Outer Limits script "Demon with a Glass Hand" or my short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Also, do not think of a green cow.

  I would be less than responsible if I did not recommend a few non-sf films for your attention.

  Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy is a joy. It was directed by Marty Brest, who needs a hit, so go see it. And do take notice of the actor who plays the role of Taggart, a cop. His name is John Ashton, and he damned near steals the film from Murphy, if you can conceive of such a thing.

  Don't miss David Lean's first film in fourteen years, based on the exquisite novel by E. M. Forster, A Passage to India. You might even read the book first, couldn't hurt.

  The River is the best of the recent spate of country movies in which people lose the farm, and is the only one I've seen that made me give a damn if they did or didn't.

  The Cotton Club is Coppola, beyond which nothing need really be said; but for those of you who aren't as much in love with every foot of film Francis Ford has ever turned out, know that The Cotton Club is a wonder.

  Now I know I'm not supposed to be doing this kind of business, urging you to see stuff outside the genre, but my goodness, you'll need something to wash the taste of Supergirl and Starman out of your heads.

  Think of me as your mother. At least until I'm elected god, on the other hand.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / April 1985

  INSTALLMENT 9:

  In Which The Fortunate Reader Gets To Peek Inside The Fabled Black Tower

  If the Universal Studios Tower didn't exist, it would have to be invented. By some noted fabulist like Borges; or Satie or Arcimboldo; by Gaudi or the Brothers Grimm; more likely by Clifford Irving. (And within days Glen A. Larson—far-famed for his creation of such original television concepts as Alias Smith and Jones, BJ and the Bear and Battlestar Galactica—would have erected, out of cardboard and mucilage, an approximation of the Black Tower just a few miles farther along the Cahuenga Pass.)

  At no two consecutive points, one often feels, does what goes on in the Tower touch the rational universe.

  The Universal Tower rises from the North Hollywood flats like a Kubrick monolith farted off the Lunar surface. There are rumors Childe Roland is still a prisoner up there on the fifteenth floor. On moonless nights, when the ghosts of Universal executives who thought A Countess from Hong Kong, The Island and Streets of Fire would be smash hits drift silently around the back lot, ectoplasmic hands clapped over ectoplasmic ears in vain endeavor to block out the heavy metal caterwauling from the Universal Amphitheater, if one whizzes past the Tower on the Hollywood Freeway, one can still hear Rapunzel shrieking her guts out for someone to climb up her hair and release her from her starlet's contract.

  For five years, commencing on Thursday, September 18th, 1698, the Bertaudiere Tower in the Bastille of Paris held a nameless prisoner whose face was covered by a black velvet cloth that Dumas père transformed into "a visor of polished steel soldered to a helmet of the same nature."

  For seven weeks, commencing Monday, November 15th, 1971, the northwest corner of the 9th floor of the Universal Tower held a nameless writer whose mind was covered by a black smog ABC-TV transformed into "a lemminglike urge to hurl oneself through the ninth floor window to a messy fadeout."

  For seven weeks Dopplering toward, through, and past Christmas 1971, I sold my soul to Universal Studios, then-president Lew Wasserman, a producer named Stan Shpetner, a primetime tv series called The Sixth Sense, the American Broadcasting Company, and anybody else
who would make a reasonable bid on damaged goods, tacky remnants, floating ethics, and seriously flawed seconds; in short, I departed in a moment of greed and weakness from eleven years as a film and television writer to join the enemy on the other side of the desk. Yes, brethren and sistren, I became a story editor. Uck yichh choke!

  As the Christ child's natal day celebration neared in that watershed year of 1971, I found myself standing in the stairwell between the eighth and ninth floors of the Black Tower, rattling the walls with Primal Screams that brought secretaries running from all directions to help the poor soul who was obviously being disemboweled. Soon thereafter, mere minutes later, I leaped onto Stan Shpetner's desk, did a deranged adagio, terminated my employment, and fled television for a decade.

  (That I have, of late, returned to television is an odd story for yet another day.)

  Nor did I, during that decade, have much to do with the Studio of the Black Tower. Once having been touched by the lunacy of that self-contained vertical universe, I tried to live by the wisdom Voltaire demonstrated when, having attended an orgy and having comported himself (we are told) with heroic verve and expertise, refused a second invitation with the classic rejoinder, "Once: a philosopher; twice: a pervert!"