Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  That I find myself saying all this, after more than twenty years, surprises me as much as you.

  Now if Koenig will just lighten up, perhaps I can concentrate on the creation of the universe, and other less knotty problems, such as when the hell will this damned jet land!?!

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / May 1987

  INSTALLMENT 24:

  In Which Flora And Fauna Come To A Last Minute Rescue, Thereby Preventing The Forlorn From Handing It All Over To The Cockroaches

  I was talking to Woody Allen the other afternoon, as we sat together in a bathyscaphe at the bottom of the Cayman Trench, trying to decide if marshmallow toppings on our hot fudge sundaes was Us or Non-Us, and he looked at me out of the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, and he asked me, "How come they've never given me a Hugo award? Whaddaya think, anti-Semitism?"

  Startled? Well, just you bet I was. It took me a while to recover, and while so doing I kinda fumfuh'd and assured him, "It's not because you're a Jew. They're forever giving Hugos to Jews. They gave one just a while ago to Orson Scott Card, and he's a Jew. They even gave me one last year, and I'm sure they know I'm Jewish. Of course, they keep nominating Silverberg and then give the award to anybody else in the category, so maybe it has something to do with sounding, as if you're Jewish. We could get Sam Moskowitz to do a paper on it."

  Then I shrugged and said, "What the hell do you expect from such schmucks? They gave a Hugo to that piece of drippy dreck, Back to the Future, and ignored Brazil. They didn't even put The Purple Rose of Cairo on the final ballot. Go figure."

  Woody looked forlorn. I was getting a tot forlorn myself. "But I've done so much fantasy and science fiction," he said. There was a lamentable Weltschmerz suffusing his words, a gray threnody undertoning his precise phraseology. "Sleeper was pure sf. So was Zelig. And what about that flying saucer at the end of Stardust Memories? Or the fantasy subtext of A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy; or the sperm fantasy segment in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Etcetera)? I bet if L. Ron Hubbard had written Purple Rose of Cairo they'd have given it a Hugo . . . I mean, it is sort of a hip, updated version of Typewriter in the Sky. Pass the marshmallow topping."

  Well, after we surfaced—a bit too rapidly and Woody got the bends and had to be admitted to Flower & Fifth Avenue Hospital—I decided to put some megawattage of thought into this apparent unfairness, prompted by Woody's last words to me as he was schlepped away on the gurney: "Do you think they'll even notice that my new film, Radio Days (Orion Pictures), is a loving tribute to the sense of wonder?"

  So I thunk about it some heavy. One doesn't like to think s/he is wasting his/her time on a species that watches wrestling on television—staged bogus "feuds" everyone knows are lousy choreography neither The Supremes nor The Temptations would tolerate, among grown men who, if they dressed that way in the city streets, would not only make Mr. Blackwell's Worst-Dressed List every year, but might be netted and taken in for psychiatric evaluation—voluntarily buys Barry Manilow, Prince and Beastie Boys albums; bans forty-five textbooks in Alabama because they contain humanistic values, on the bonkers theory that "humanism" is a religion; complains because it isn't permitted to fuck up other people's lungs with cigarette smoke on the Me-First grounds that their civil rights are being infringed; and gives Hugos to dopey flicks like Back to the Future while ignoring Brazil and The Purple Rose of Cairo.

  I mean, if you don't mind slapstick burping from alien critters, then I suppose Enemy Mine is a great film; but by the same judgment, so is Porky's.

  And I was ready to pack it in, throw up my hands as well as my lunch, and just say to hell with it, give the whole inhabited parking lot to the cockroaches!

  But suddenly I remembered this great quote from John Simon, a critic most of you can't stand because he's smarter than you and I and George Bush, en masse, en grande tenue, en casserole; and just because he had the honesty once to point out that Liza Minnelli has about as much talent as a rug-beater and looks a whole lot like a plucked chicken, you all get down on his case and think him a meanie. Well, I'm here to tell you he's no meaner than I. And so . . . he said this thing that gave me pause:

  "The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate."

  The thought of nobility, as manifested in the art and craft of Woody Allen, came to the rescue. In a week during which I sat through the entertaining but outstandingly mindless Lethal Weapon; Heat, the latest Burt Reynolds gawdawfuller, made even more unpalatable by having been lugubriously scripted by William Goldman from his dreary novel (a situation that distresses me more than I can say, for one of my all-time favorite writers has been Bill Goldman, whose fiction—with intermittent echoes of the books of grandeur—The Temple of Gold, The Thing of It Is, No Way to Treat a Lady, Soldier in the Rain, The Silent Gondoliers, and Marathon Man—for the past eleven years has seemed to me more and more slapdash, more and more written as way-station incarnation on the way to becoming screenplays); and Mannequin, a sophomoric "youth-oriented" ripoff of One Touch of Venus, Pygmalion and John Collier's "Evening Primrose," well, in such a week the thought of Woody Allen somehow keeps me from taking the gas pipe, saves the world from being consigned to the cucarachas.

  But I think of Woody lying there in the hospital, losing all fight to live as he becomes more forlorn in the contemplation that the fans who vote the Hugo awards will not understand that Radio Days is a wondrous paean to the joys of imagination. Is the cockroach creator equivalent of Woody waiting to be born out there in some damp sewer? Will the insects have more love for their special visionaries? On some day a mere dozen million years from now, will the Academy of Orthopterous Arts & Sciences convey to that splendid Periplaneta americana, all six legs' worth of him, the entomological equivalent of an Oscar, while insect fandom bestows the Jiminy on Larva Trek IV?

  My mind whirls.

  Can I be the only reader of fantastic literature to perceive that Woody Allen has been, and continues to be, one of our best filmic interpreters of that je ne sais quoi we call "the sense of wonder"? Surely not. Surely some other observer of the flickering screen image has stumbled on this obvious truth!

  But I search in vain through all the treatises on Woody, and I find no support for my theory. Nowhere outside the specialist semiotics of cinema lucubration (do I speak their langwidge or don't I!?) analyzing The Terminator till one could retch; nowhere in the totality of non-fantasy incunabula. They talk of his ambivalence between roots as a Brooklyn Jew and foliage as an adult who wants to make it with goyishe cheerleaders. They prate of his influences; from Wittgenstein to Ingmar Bergman. They totemize him as the germinal influence in raising the nerd to hunk status. But nowhere does anyone simply say, "This guy has a for-real science-fictional-fantasy outlook."

  So in the spirit of unalloyed nobility, I bring to the wandering attention of the genre audience that has poured millions into the pockets of Spielberg and Lucas, the advisement that Radio Days is a miraculous fantasy of imagination, drenched in the sense of wonder. A film about those of us who learned the universe is filled with magic through the medium of voices drifting to us in the night. The days of radio listening, the days before television turned us into wombats who will tolerate the cacophony of John Madden's voice, the empty Barbie-ism of Vanna White, the sleaze of telemogrified Judith Krantz potboilers; the days of adventure and suspense and drama that we conjured in our own minds, without recourse to the production budgets of businessmen in charge of an art-form; the days of The Green Hornet and Jack Armstrong and Buck Rogers and Sam Spade; the days when listening to the radio was an integral part of one's education, rather than an induced zombieism, an interruption of life, sitting goggle-eyed before that box that permits of no imaginative participation from the drowsing dreamer.r />
  Radio Days, a kind of cockeyed and utterly dear variation on the multiple-plot-thread structure Buñuel pioneered in The Phantom of Liberty (what Leonard Maltin calls "a dreamlike comedy of irony, composed of surreal, randomly connected anecdotes"); it is narrated by Woody, word-painting a portrait of life in America in the early Forties, when one's imagination could encompass a wealthy playboy whose alter ego could cloud men's minds so they could not see him, a temple of vampires through which a Jack, Doc and Reggie would wander in constant jeopardy, and a "Masked Avenger" whom we did not need to see in the flesh of Wallace Shawn to understand the nature of Good and Evil. In Radio Days—absolutely dripping with scenes that could make a paving stone roar with laughter—Woody Allen has created a fantasy structure of affection and memory that no one over the age of forty dare miss at peril of forgetting how wonderful was that time of youth, a film that no one under the age of forty dare miss at peril of being misled into accepting the squalor of television as the best of all possible mediums.

  I have told you nothing much of the plot. That's not my job. I wouldn't steal an instant of Radio Days from your joy of discovery. But in the name of unalloyed nobility I beg you to do yourself a favor . . . go see it. Don't wait for the cassette . . . go see it. See it today, this very evening, and then go see it next week, to prove to yourself that the rush you got was not an aberration.

  And send a get-well card to Woody. Tell him Harlan sent you.

  Woody, that brave little beast (as Moorcock once called your humble columnist), was the fauna (or is it faunum?) (what the hell is the singular of fauna?) (who the hell am I?) (it only hurts when I screw the electrodes too tightly, doctor) who saved all of us from the cockroaches, but to buttress my new faith in the human race you also have to thank the flora called Audrey. A bloodsucking, flesh-nibbling, badass-talking, monomaniacal plant that dominates the spectacularly enjoyable Little Shop of Horrors (Warner Brothers).

  I, like you, enjoyed the old Roger Gorman film of 1960; I, like you, applauded the 1982 off-Broadway musical version; but neither predisposition to be charmed provided one one-millionth of the pleasure I derived from this film. Ellen Greene, Rick Moranis, Vincent Gardenia and a Greek Chorus of (Supremes-) manqués simply wow the spats off you. And one may now add to the W. C. Fields list of those with whom a smart actor should never work—dogs and children—talking plants. Because as sublimely cavorting as the people are, Audrey damned near steals the film. Howard Ashman's screenplay adds an almost believable sf rationale to the absolutely believable fantasy of it all, and gives Audrey a raison d'être for fly trap behavior that was absent in the Gorman original; a conceit that enhances the story immeasurably.

  Flora and fauna. Came they hence to save y'all from paying property taxes to the termites, tithes to the cockroaches, dues to the potato bugs. And I'm feeling so up about a human race that includes Woody Allen and Howard Ashman, if the bugs try to claim dominion I'm prepared to introduce them to Audrey.

  ANCILLARY MATTERS: The follow-up essay on new technology of the Dr. Frankenstein style is in the works. Joe Dante is busy editing his new film, so we haven't had a chance yet to go do the Sam Spadework. Be patient. But until that time, let us stop referring to the depredations visited on The Maltese Falcon, et al., as "colorization." Colorization is the trademarked process and the name of the company that does the butchery. What it is, folks, is simply coloring. Apart from resisting the academese of what R. Mitchell calls "the educationists," we must not permit the coloring thugs to get us thinking their way at all. If we begin by using their heavy-breathing circumlocutions (like calling rebel insurgents "freedom fighters" and the napalming of villages as "Operation Sunshine"), then too soon we will not perceive that when Reagan's current mouthpiece says, "Yesterday's statements are inoperative," it is simply doublespeak for, "What he told you yesterday was a lie," and then, finally, they may be able to convince us that "colorization" is something nobler than parvenus with computer Crayolas. So eschew "colorization," good readers. Call it what it is, call it coloring. Call it merde.

  Also in work is the long study of David Cronenberg's films. I've been busy writing a pilot film for NBC and Roger Gorman, completing The Last Dangerous Visions, putting together a volume of film essays that include these columns, handing in The Harlan Ellison Hornbook to Jack Chalker, who's been waiting more than ten years for it, and in general trying to clear away all my debts to people like Stuart Schiff, who has been patient to the point of beatification. So please don't nuhdz me; when it gets written, it'll get written.

  And finally, I must bring to your attention volume two of a work already noted in these columns.

  Bill Warren, who knows more than any person in his or her right mind ought to know about American science fiction films of the fifties, gave us volume one of Keep Watching the Skies! in 1982. He has now lost complete control of the beast, and volume two, at 839 pages with a price tag of $39.95, has escaped to terrorize a placid world and . . . it's alive!

  If you missed volume one—a mere piddly 467 pages covering hundreds of films released between 1950 and 1957—a staggering compendium of wise, witty, weird essays on everything from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars to Zontar the Thing from Venus, then fer pete's sake don't let volume two slip past you.

  Yes, these books are pricey. (Of course, if you buy them separately they're $39.95 each, but if you buy the duo, it's only $65.00.) But, on my oath as a methane-breathing entity, this is a buck well spent. Warren doesn't merely give you the plot synopsis and the cast and the rest of the creative team, he doesn't merely put the film into historical and cinematic context, he doesn't merely describe the advertising and promotion and effect the film had on America as a whole or the sf world in part, he also lavishes each essay with bits of minutiae, arcane knowledge, bizarre connections and berserk influences, sidebar comments about the personal lives of the stars and writers and directors and producers. But on the plus side he does it with an absolutely charming affection for even the worst dog, the most inept pig, the lamest dromedary of a stinkeroo. Bill Warren really and truly loves this stuff, and his honest obsession cannot be resisted.

  Volume two covers 1958 through 1962, with appendixes that list full cast and credits, order of release of the films, announced (but not produced) titles, a bibliography, an addendum and an index to the more hundreds of movies that Bill has sat through from beginning to end so we don't have to.

  These are the sort of books one keeps to hand in the bathroom. As those of you who read understand, that is high compliment indeed. The potty is the last private place for a reader in the world. No one bothers you. Unless you live in large Italian family, which is another sociological can of worms entirely. But you can't be in there too long, or someone will think you're enjoying yourself in ways you're not supposed to, so you have to have reading material that can be enjoyed in medium-short bursts. Time is okay, and a book of Fredric Brown's short stories; comic books work well, and The National Review (because no one can read it for very long without throwing it across the toilet into the tub). Which is to say, Keep Watching the Skies is made up of delicious morsels that can be enjoyed over a long period of time. At peace, and with pleasure.

  If your bookstore has trouble ordering them, suggest they contact McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers; Box 611; Jefferson, North Carolina 28640. Pony up the sixty-five bucks for the pair. I do not think you will hate me too much for this recommendation.

  And tell 'em Woody sent you.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / July 1987

  INSTALLMENT 25:

  In Which The Specter At The Banquet Takes A Healthy Swig From The Flagon With The Dragon, Or Maybe The Chalice From The Palace

  Let us speak of guilty pleasures, and of outré nights at the cinema. Of windows nailed shut in the soul, and of dreadful dreams we would pay never to have again. Of winds that blow out of our skulls, carrying with them the sounds of sparrows singing in the eaves of madhouses. Of chocolate decadence, sleek limbs, cheap a
dventure novels, people we ought not to have anything to do with, and the reflection off the blade.

  When I rise at six every morning, and pad into the kitchen naked and still warm from the bed where my wife lies till a decent hour, to begin building my first great mug of Mexican Coatapec or Guatemala Antigua, the first thing I do is turn on the radio to KNX, L.A.'s CBS outlet. And as I spoon in the nutmeg and cardamon, the mortar-and-pestle-ground chocolate from El Popular in East Chicago, Indiana . . . I listen to the doings of my species. I listen to tales from the night before: a fourteen-year-old boy gunned down by vatos locos as he walked home from a basketball game; another dead black woman found in a dumpster, possibly the latest victim of the uncatchable South Side Killer; a disgruntled electrician who had been fired by a computer company, who returned with a pump shotgun and blew three night shift workers into pieces; a bomb thrown into a crowded bus station in Colombo, Sri Lanka, by Tamil separatists one week after a hundred men, women and children were machine-gunned to death on a rural bus: another 156 dead; another fourteen-year-old boy shoots a truck driver on a bet by a playmate; in Soweto township, South Africa, a grenade thrown into a group of police trainees on a parade ground, shredding the face of a young black man.

  These are not guilty pleasures of which we speak here.