Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  In some ways it is more a manifestation of the Starfucker Syndrome in commercial circles, but auteurism is what it is in bold terms. Whichever comic artist is this week's Big Star, why he or she is the one given carte blanche to rewrite the canon of any pre-existing character. Not even that universal icon, Superman, is safe.

  DC Comics hired John Byrne away from Marvel by handing over the fifty-year-old legend of The Man of Steel for Mr. Byrne's tender attentions. With a hubris that would make even Paul Schrader or John Carpenter (but not Michael Cimino) blush, Byrne as auteur announced to anyone who would listen that everything that had gone before, from Siegel and Shuster's moment of creation through the decades of writers and artists who worked with the character, till this very instant, was null and void. He demanded, and got, DC to renumber Superman Comics—nearing issue #425 as I write this—from #1 with the pronunciamento that his was to be the only, the true, the preferred Superman.

  Jim Shooter, at Marvel Comics, wields the auteur theory for his personal aggrandizement by creating "a new Marvel universe" containing an entire line of new books featuring characters who will not have to be introduced with the line Stan Lee Presents. Now they will say Jim Shooter Presents; and since kids only have x number of bucks to spend on items that cost 10¢ when I was a tot, but now cost between 75¢ and $2.50 a pop, that means sales will be diverted from such as Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Thor—creations of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee—that have become staples of the American pop culture idiom, staples whose fame surely must rankle the overweening ego of Mr. Shooter.

  Back at DC, simply for bucks because he has confessed in interviews that he never cared a gram about the character, auteur Howard Chaykin has taken The Shadow and turned him, in a four-issue mini-series, into a sexist, calloused, clearly psychopathic obscenity. Rather than simply ignoring characters from the Shadow's past, Chaykin has murdered them in full view, blowing off their heads with shotguns through the peephole of apartment doors; strangling and stuffing them into water coolers; recasting them as winos and setting them on fire; impaling them (in defiance of the laws of gravity) through the neck with fireplace pokers and hanging them from balconies; and smashing in their skulls with hospital bedpans. And when Mr. Chaykin was asked why he had this penchant for drawing pictures of thugs jamming 45s into the mouths of terrified women, Mr. Chaykin responded that the only readers who might object to this bastardization of a much-beloved fictional character were "forty-year-old boys." These comics bear the legend FOR MATURE READERS.

  For MATURE read DERANGED.

  Here is hommage run amuck. Here is the delivering into the hands of artistic thugs the dreams and delights of those who were clever enough, and talented enough, to be prime creators. Not enough to suggest that they cobble up their own inventions as sturdy and long-lived as Superman or The Shadow. Not enough to suggest they retain some sense of their place in the creative world. Not enough to suggest they have a scintilla of respect for all the forty-year-old (and in this writer's case, fifty-two-year-old) boys who grew up on these wonders. Not enough.

  No, these are the depredations that invoke wrath, that blind us with fury at their temerity, their callous disregard for those who made their employment and elevation to Stardom possible, their dishonest assumption of control of the treasure that ends in debasement of that which succored us in our adolescence.

  The digression winds back on itself through funnybookland to the Spielberg-influenced Young Sherlock Holmes, written by Columbus, directed by Barry Levinson. And through the wandering, at last the explanation why writing a negative review of what is, at most, an exceedingly dumb movie produced such an unreasoning fulmination. The river runs swiftly, and it runs deep.

  Last time I apologized for the seemingly unceasing attacks on Steven Spielberg. Since writing that previous installment I have been apprised that Steven takes no offense at my diatribes, that even when I savage him he finds the locutions so fascinating he cannot get upset. Well, maybe; and I hope that's the case; but it don't beat the bulldog. Spielberg reached the pinnacle of a certain kind of personal filmmaking with E.T., and another summit with Raiders of the Lost Ark; pop masterpieces with their own voice and with a reverence for those genres and the best they had produced that endeared him to the cinemagoing world. But his olympian success has brought forth as predictable side-effect a Visigoth horde of lesser-talented imitators who eschew genuine creativity for the despicable auteurism they rationalize as hommage.

  Incapable of creating Superman or The Shadow or Sherlock Holmes, they steal the dream and turn it to their own ends, debasing it in the process.

  Young Sherlock Holmes is the prime example.

  Holmes, as a prep school boy, is made idiot foil to the extraneous special effects of Industrial Light & Magic truckling to the pinhead sophomorism of today's Cineplex audience needing its bread&circuses of cartoon ghoulies. Nowhere in the film do we see Holmes employ that aspect of his nature that has provided a niche in posterity for the Doyle-created detective—the use of observation, deductive logic, and ratiocination raised to a heroic level. The film is yet another dumb action-adventure featuring racist stereotypes, virgin sacrifices, running and jumping and hooting.

  Columbus and his compatriots have swallowed whole the Spielberg idiom and reduced Holmes to a jerk. He dashes about, mostly to ill effect, with a boobish Watson puffing along behind, landing in one imbecile situation after another. The puzzle is finally solved, in defiance of everything in the Holmesian canon, not by logic and deduction, but by brute Ramboism.

  Forget the infelicities of plot logic. Forget that one of the basic premises of this puppet-show is that Thuggees could build a gigantic wooden pyramid in the center of London without anyone noticing. Forget that even facts of weather are bent to a moron plot: a major sequence, for instance, demands that we believe the Thames froze over. According to my research, not in recorded memory has the Thames frozen over. Much of the river is, incidentally, tidal; show me such a river that freezes. Forget that everything we found dear in the stories is contravened.

  Forget all that. Even forget that the film is mostly boring. But don't forget that hommage such as this is simply the muddying of the waters, that it is dirty business.

  The fifty-two-year-old boy speaks. Why must the johnny-come-lately destroy the dream? To what end? Is this the act of the responsible artist; is it even the act of one who loves the original?

  Does Chaykin care that we derived our understanding of the simplistic but effective ethic that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit" from a pulp hero who came to us in magazines that flaked apart in our laps, across the ether through cathedral-shaped radios before which we lay with eyes wide?

  Does John Byrne consider for a moment between bouts with his own ego that some great section of the world looks on Superman as a paradigm for our own alienation and need to believe there is superness in each of us somewhere?

  We chew up and spit out our past.

  Honor lasts less long than Warhol's fabled fifteen minutes of notoriety. What remains for the dreamer capable of ushering out a Conan, a Sam Spade, a Tin Woodsman, a Wonder Woman, when any parvenu can misappropriate the vigorous conceit and cripple it by inexactitudes and ineptitude? If this can be done to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to Burroughs's Tarzan, to Pyle's Robin Hood or Johnston McCulley's Zorro or Bad Bill's Hamlet . . . what chance do the rest of us have?

  Is this too great a stretch of comprehension for you? Have you never slaved and sweated over something—as simple as a brick wall or as complex as a screenplay—and done it with all the grace and talent in you, only to see it taken over by some jamook who puffed himself up with arrogance like a banjo player who had a big breakfast?

  We are talking here about the primacy of interest of the creator. We are talking about what it is that steals the souls from filmwriters in Hollywood who are compelled to turn their creations over to effectuators who label themselves auteurs.

  Here is where the word hommage turns
to ashes. Once permitted the incursion into the sacred preserve under the terminological rationale hommage—as twisty a device as calling revolutionaries "freedom fighters"—anything is permitted. If it succeeds, we say nothing, because art has asserted itself, even if it is derivative art of a secondary importance, of a flesh with pastiche. If it fails, we cluck our tongues and forget it.

  This is a dismissal of the artist. It is the corruption in the bone marrow that destroys the purity of the dream. It is the leavening out, the "equality" of the untalented. It is in no way freedom, but a blanding that permits anything, without the nobility of the struggle for originality.

  And it seems, these days, to be the pry-bar of the young. That arrogance shrieking at us from billboards and television sets and midget-sized screens of coffin movie theaters—proclaiming (in the words of Ed Begley, senior not junior, in Wild in the Streets) that the young conceive of youth as the noblest state to which a human can aspire. Perhaps it is because this fifty-two-year-old boy spent those fifty-two years working toward some small proficiency in life and craft, that such fury is generated. Perhaps it is because movie studios, geared to the viewing tastes of an audience for whom nostalgia is remembering breakfast, refuse to give contracts to writers over the age of thirty. Perhaps it is because more than half the membership of the Writers Guild over the age of fifty is not just unemployed, but unemployable. I speak here not of old farts who can't cut it, but writers of both sexes who have won Oscars, who have written the films we call classics, and who merely want to write the best they can, but who have been denied access to the marketplace because every twenty-year-old fresh out of some cornball media communications class in the boonies is pushing another tits&ass coming-of-age flick bearing no greater worth than as perfect vehicle for Molly Ringwald or Tom Cruise. Vehicle they calls it; shitwagon, I calls it. Either way, it's spinach, and I don't give a damn.

  Spielberg hath wrought a generation of young punks for whom hard work and patience are anathema. And what we have to deal with at the local cinema, what I have to deal with in these columns, is transient as snot and only half as uplifting.

  Destruction of the past, whether as another De Laurentiis King Kong abomination, or as the leveling of an Art Deco building, is an American tradition. We eat yesterday and say it is of value only as sauce for our french fries.

  Age, in and of itself, means nothing. But where age has produced craft and invention of a high order, there youth must wait its turn. Trevanian said, in Shibumi, "Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty times."

  Contrariwise, do not think that brashness and the moment's limelight can supplant years spent making an artist. That is why Picasso remains a giant and Norman Rockwell can never be more than an enormously talented craftsman. Because Picasso could do what Rockwell did, but Rockwell was incapable of doing what Picasso did.

  That is to say, Chris Columbus can write from now till doomsday, he can do hommage to Charles Foster Kane or Harry Lime till he's blue in the face, but Orson Welles, were he still around, even fat as Iowa, could create him into the ground.

  Now that I've gotten that off my chest, maybe I can get some sleep.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1986

  INSTALLMENT 19:

  In Which We Long For The Stillness Of The Lake, The Smooth Swell Of The Lea

  At one of those college literary bashes where The Celebrated Visiting Author sits alone on the stage and academics with clipboards pelt him or her with "insightful" questions, I was recently hit with the poser, "What is your definition of maturity?"

  I thought about that for a moment before answering.

  And in that moment, here is the anecdote that flashed through my head, that I did not impart to the gathered sages:

  Most of you know by now that my friend Mike Hodel, host for more than fifteen years of the Hour 25 radio show on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, died of brain cancer on Tuesday, May 6th. Because he learned of his terminal state in February, and because the continuation of the program was a matter of concern to him, Mike came to visit and we talked about the darkness soon to come; and Mike asked me to host the show for him when he was gone. Because I loved him, and because his show has been so important to writers and readers of the genre for so long, I agreed to take over Hour 25.

  But the foreknowledge of Mike's imminent leavetaking, added to the weight of the deaths of so many close friends these last few months, sent me into a tailspin. My thoughts grew wearier and grimmer by the day. Until the anguish and the pressure began to produce a sharp pain behind my left eye.

  As I am one of those blessed individuals who almost never get headaches, this sharp needlepoint of agony behind my left eye came to obsess me. I knew very well, in my right mind, that I did not share Mike's illness; but every time the pain returned, I tumbled into the abyss of irrationality and thought, "I've got brain cancer. There's a gray pudding on the grow back there behind my eye." It was crazy; and when I saw Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters in the middle of March, and Woody went through exactly the same hypochondriacal situation, I laughed at myself. But I could not shake the terrible thought, and finally I made an appointment with John Romm, who has been my doctor for decades, and I went to find out if I was more irrational than usual.

  John examined me, put the light up to the eye and looked in, and reported back that there didn't seem to be anything in there pressing against the optic nerve. "Shouldn't I get a brain scan?" I said.

  "Well, if you're thinking about something like that, there's better state of the art than a CAT scan. It's called an MRI and it costs about a grand."

  "MRI?"

  "Magnetic Resonance Imaging. About a grand. But if you can't get this lunacy out of your mind, spend the money and put yourself at ease."

  "I'll think about it."

  So I thought about it. For several weeks. Went to see Mike in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, couldn't rid myself of the horror, and finally went in for the MRI. The next day, John called to report the findings on the images. "You're fine," he said. "No problems in there at all."

  I felt the edge of the desk I had been gripping for the first instant since I'd picked up his call, and realized how mad I'd been driven by Mike's situation. The pain behind my eye vanished instantly.

  Then I heard John chuckling. "What's so goddam funny?" I demanded, feeling more the fool than ever.

  "Well, it's just something the technician who sent these over said," John replied, trying to keep a straight tone.

  "Yeah? And what was that?"

  "Uh, well . . . he asked me, 'Are you sure this guy is almost fifty-two years old?' And I said, yes, I was certain; that I'd known you for years and that I knew you'd be fifty-two in May, and he said, 'This is remarkable for a guy his age. The actual brain matter looks like that of a six-year-old boy.'" And John broke up again. When he had it under control he said, "I always suspected you had the brain of a six-year-old."

  That was what I thought in the moment before answering the academics. Because it was the anecdote that informed what I've always considered to be a pretty workable definition of maturity. And I said to the questioner, "I take to mean, when you say maturity, that you're asking what I think an adult is. And my answer is that being grown-up means having achieved in adult terms what you dreamed of being as a child. In other words, you'd be mature, and an adult grown-up, if—say—when you were a kid you wanted to be a cowboy and now you owned a cattle ranch. Or if you wanted to fly like Superman when you were a kid, if you were now an airline pilot."

  And I added this quotation from Rimbaud: "Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."

  These thoughts, as random as most with which I open this column every time, tie in with observations about childish and adult visions of what to make as a motion picture in an era when the studios check the growth-rings of writers and directors before they commit to a project.

 
As rare as it has been in the history of motion picture writing for talent of a high order to emerge—Richard Brooks, James Goldman, Richard L. Breen, Paddy Chayefsky, Herman Mankiewicz, Ring Lardner, Jr. and the Epstein brothers come immediately to mind, though the list is a lot longer than you'd care to have me reproduce here and, sad sad sad, you wouldn't recognize the names of those who dreamed the dreams and put the words into the mouths of Bogart and Lancaster and Bergman and McQueen—as rare as it's been till now, the situation today is fuckin' bloody tragic. We operate in The Age of the Know-Nothing Tots.

  Kids raised not on literature, or even on films, but on television reruns, are being hired every minute to write and produce films that have the social import and artistic longevity of zweiback.

  (Here are some grim statistics. The current membership of the Writers Guild of America, west is 6181. Of that number only 51% is currently employed. That's 3152 men and women. But of that percentage, while 61% of WGAw members under forty years of age are working, only 43% over forty have a job. Don't ask what it's like for directors.)

  The deals being made at Cannon, at Fox, at Paramount and Universal, are deals for projects brought to executives by second-rate and derivative talents. Deals brought to men and women whose backgrounds are seldom in filmmaking, whose expertise and store of literary precedents is at best meager. (This is a series of generalizations. Of course not everyone who sells a script, or more usually a script idea, is a superannuated surfer. There are Larry Kasdans and Vickie Patiks and Tom Benedeks who have as much élan as Shelagh Delany or Harold Ramis or Horton Foote at the top of their form. But the generalization speaks unquaveringly to the reality of the industry practice today. The young and dumb sell to the only slightly less young and much dumber.)