Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  •The editing by Richard Francis-Bruce is marvelous. Very suspenseful. Particularly in the ways in which it is integrated with what may be the best film score by John Williams in a decade. The aural package melded to the visual freight is as good as anything you'll currently find on the big screen. It looks like a movie, not just another of those slambang tv eye-rippers tossed into the microwave and toughened up for theater release.

  •Note the intelligence of everyone in the film. People may act weirdly, but consistently. There are no dopes in this story. Which is a tribute to Cristofer and the canny players, because Updike gave us a fantasy trope, and the scenarist and actors have rendered it mimetically, sequentially, logically.

  •Catch the flies. Every time Nicholson comes onscreen, we get a not-obtrusive Lord of the flies echo. More would have been to pull a Spielberg ("Hey, looka me! See how well I know my subtext! See how cute I am!") and less would have been lost in the rush of the story.

  •Consider if it isn't time to send a letter to your regional movie maven, to suggest we may indeed have had enough vomiting scenes in films. The Exorcist did it as well as any of us cared to have it done, and if quality of puke were not sufficient, Terry Gilliam gave us Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life for sheer quantity. Beyond those seminal upchuck icons, all else is, well, simply parking the tiger. Calico carpet comment. What I mean, mate, you seen one spring-loaded tsunami of york, you've seen it all, in't it?

  •The tennis scene. See and delight. Then catch the resonance from the ultimate sequence in Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). Upper crust athletic activity as mystical ritual.

  •If costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers doesn't get an Oscar for Jack Nicholson's wardrobe (provided by Cerruti 1881 Paris), then we ought to call in Lt. Col. Oliver North to start collecting funds for the overthrow of Hollywood's Academy.

  •Rob Bottin's special makeup effects. Are you, as am I, getting weary of that same Bottin monster look? Would you kindly pay some attention to it in this film and ask your kids or the nearest SFX freak if it doesn't look boringly as if Bottin uses the same damned slavering, hunching critter every time, with a bit more or a bit less hair. Tell his mother. Bottin's, not the critter's.

  In conclusion: I'm not sure John Updike would like one of his serious novels thought of as simply great fun, but that's the way this film has turned out. And unless I'm off my feed, I think you'll look at this drollery and recognize it as a germinal piece of American cinema. One of those films people will use as reference for years to come. A very American movie, beautifully directed by an Australian, co-produced by a talented ex-hairdresser (we'll never let you get above your station, Jon), persuasively acted by three of the most seductive women in film today, and written with brio by a man who should be kept working at his craft by whips, if necessary.

  Even Fritz Leiber will enjoy this one.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1987

  INSTALLMENT 27:

  In Which The Fur Is Picked Clean of Nits, Gnats, Nuts, Naggers And Nuhdzes

  Because it might get nasty, I've been putting off having this little chat with you. But when I walked in this evening, your mother told me you'd been absolutely impossible all day—"just wait till your father gets home!"—so just ignore the fact that I've removed my belt and have it lying here waiting for you to cop an attitude; and let us discuss this stuff as calmly as possible.

  First, let's get this understood: unless I lose my mind entirely and make the error of savaging someone so scurrilously that it falls beyond the First Amendment's protection of opinion and criticism—which is simply not gonna happen as I have recently won a bogus, six-year-long slander suit brought against me and a magazine to which I gave an interview, and I am up to here in casebook law smarts about what berserk lengths one would have to go, to write something truly actionable—there is no way your cranky letters will convince The Editors Ferman to drop this column. That righteously ain't gonna happen, so save your breath.

  Let me tell you why that ain't gonna happen . . .

  Oh, wait a minute. Just so you don't think this entire column will be housekeeping, cleaning up ancillary hokey-pokey, here is a review for you.

  Robocop (Orion), despite its popularity, is as vicious a piece of wetwork* as anything I've encountered in recent memory. Devoid of even the faintest scintilla of compassion or commonsense, it is as low as the foreheads of those members of the screening audience who cheered and laughed at each escalated scene of violence. It is a film about, and intended for, no less than brutes. It is a film that struck me as being made by, and for, savages and ghouls. Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, and directed by the Dutchman Paul Verhoeven, this is a template for everything rabid and drooling in our culture. That it has been touted—after the fact—as being a "satirical" film, a "funny" film, is either ass-covering or a genuine representation of the filmmaker's ethically myopic view of what they've spawned. If the former, it's despicable hypocrisy; if the latter, that's just flat scary.

  *"Wetwork": the "intelligence community's" currently fashionable doublespeak for the dirtiest of dirty deeds, the act of assassination, termination with extreme unction, or whatever.

  It is also, clearly and shockingly, a ripoff of the Judge Dredd comic strip from the U.K. And if the creators and owners of that character fail to initiate a copyright infringement action against producer Jon Davison, Orion and the scenarists, they are missing what is, in my opinion, an opportunity to get rich by bringing what appear to be literary graverobbers to justice. Stay away from this one at all costs.

  Now, where were we? Right.

  Why it isn't in the cards that your outraged letters will convince the management of this publication that I am a blot on their table of contents.

  These essays are exceedingly popular.

  Despite the half dozen or so letters that have been passed on to me, complaining about . . . well, I'll tell you what they've been complaining about in a moment . . . there have been hundreds of letters commending the work. And even when one of you stomps his/her widdle foot and demands his/her subscription be terminated forthwith, it isn't even a piddle matched against the occasional readers who have subscribed just so they can be assured of getting the material. (It's also bone stupid, and severs nose from noggin just to spite itself, because this is a wonderful magazine, filled every month with the best writing being done in the genre, and maybe some of the best being done in America in any form; with Budrys and Asimov working at the peak of their form in their specialties; and just ripping out or flipping past that which offends thee, is far more rational.)

  Now we come to the bottom line, which is purely that ten times the number of you who fret over my essays tell the Fermans and me that the first thing they turn to is Watching. And that is just the letters received. Most readers are decent folks who either like what they're getting, or flip past/rip out what they're getting that they don't like. So unless a groundswell of vituperation is raised, and an economically-potent segment of the readership says it's had enough, we're going to be locked in this literary embrace for some time to come.

  I must make a clear distinction here, about the types of letters we get. There are times when I make mistakes, either out of ignorance or slipped memory, and those of you who bring me to task for such errors are dear and valuable to me. At such times, I make every effort to retrace my steps in a later column, to clean up the picnic grounds, as it were:

  (F'rinstance. Two issues ago, in reviewing Gothic, I opined that director Ken Russell was indulging his adolescent fantasies when he presented us with a scene in which the poet Shelley has a vision of Claire Clairmont's breasts with eyes that blink in place of nipples. Three or four readers—most notably Margaret L. Carter, Ph.D. and Teresa Nielsen Hayden—hurriedly [but politely, informedly] advised me that "every well-read devotee of Gothic horror knows that Shelley actually experienced such a vision . . . It's in writing . . . Shelley was inspired by a cryptic passage from Coleridg
e's 'Christabel,' describing the vampire-witch Geraldine: 'Behold! her bosom and half her side—a sight to dream of, not to tell!'"

  (I freely cop to not being as encyclopedic in my familiarity with Gothic literature as many of you, but, in fact, I was aware of the referent. Nor is there anything in what I actually wrote that indicates otherwise. Here is what I wrote:

  It is redolent with symbolism.

  Much of that symbolism is ludicrous: Miriam Cyr as Claire, in a laudanum-induced vision as perceived by Shelley, bares her breasts, and in place of nipples there are staring eyes . . . which blink at him. The audience roars with laughter. Russell had overindulged his adolescent fantasies.

  (What I was saying—and I think clearly—was that Russell had made an artistic choice in showing breast-eyes that blink. I then described the reaction of an audience to that choice. The question raised by readers familiar with the actual historic background, is moot. Whether the image as presented by Russell sprang from the director's imagination, or from Shelley's, is beside the point.

  (Frequently, in writers' workshops I've taught, someone will hand in a story in which something happens that is of great importance to the writer, but which does not work on the page. And when it is brought to the writer's attention that it isn't believable, the unvarying response is, "But this really happened to my cousin Ernie and his wife. I was there, I saw it happen." To which, the proper reply is precisely the same I offer to Dr. Carter and Teresa: it doesn't matter if it's true; it matters if we believe it's true. The question, thus, devolves not on authenticity, but verisimilitude. This is a lesson difficult to impart to novice writers, for whom craft and expertise come only with time and trial.

  (What I said in that snippet of the essay, was that Ken Russell, as the guiding intelligence behind the film, had chosen to show breasts with eyes . . . and then to make them blink. Now it is possible that merely the sight of the eyes would not have sent the audience into paroxysms of hilarity; but topping the grotesquerie by having those nipple-orbs blink was pure vaudeville; and the audience responded appropriately, thereby breaking the mood of bizarre fascination Russell was striving for. I was writing about a film, friends, not trying to demonstrate how arcane my wisdom might be.

  (The interesting thing here, it seems to me, is that not one of the persons who called me on this "omission," had seen the movie. I was being chided for apparently not knowing something, even though the knowing or not-knowing didn't mean a whistle in context. For the purpose of the critique, I gave every bit of information that was needed.

  (And as Einstein once observed, "Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler."

  (Get what I'm saying here? Gothic was not a film in which Shelley's fantasies, adolescent or otherwise, were being presented; it was a film in which Ken Russell's interpretation of those fantasies was being presented. The choice was not Shelley's, it was Russell's. And in my view—shared with a large audience—it was a ludicrous artistic choice.

  (And isn't that what film, or book, or dance, or art criticism is about? The correctness of choices. The coherent and effective vision that coalesces from a congeries of artistic selections.)

  With such letters, I have no problem. The careful reader has caught what mayor may not be a slip in the critic's mantle of authority. As we have nothing to go on with a critic but our agreement to trust him/her and his/her viewpoint based on past performance, it is absolutely proper—and appreciated—for the careful reader to suggest, "You seemed not to know such&such, and this puts your infallibility in shadow. Please comment."

  But there is another sort of letter. It is the splenic rodomontade that is intended to dismay the editors and pique my animosity. These are written by people who need attention. As one who needs attention, and who works out that need in a constructive manner by pursuing a career in which I write what I want to be noticed, I am on to these twits from line one, in which they say things almost always like this:

  "You think you're pretty cute, don't you, Mr. Allison. Well, my name is George S———-, and you've never heard of me, but I just wanted to tell you that you're rude and stupid and not nearly as sharp as you think you are . . . " (But then, George, who among us is?)

  These letters almost always go via the editors, and lament the leavetaking of the former film observer from these pages, suggesting that said person should be sought out with sled-dogs and sonar, and be brought back to that previous state of critical beatitude. On pain of having George's subscription canceled, should the suggested program not be adopted.

  Well, forget that, too. It ain't gonna happen.

  So if it isn't legitimate attempts to have errors corrected, to what complaints do I object?

  There are three, basically.

  1) Ellison doesn't do reviews. He does these long, weird essays that once in a while mention a movie.

  2) The first rule of being a columnist is that s/he will appear in each and every issue of the publication. Ellison keeps appearing irregularly. He'll do three or four in a row, then miss a month.

  3) Ellison usually talks about movies that have come and gone from the theaters. He doesn't give us reviews that we can use as a guide to what to see.

  There is also a lesser 4) which speaks to my not "reviewing everything," which usually means I've missed telling you about the latest autopsy movie in which a doorway to Hell opens in the basement of a boutique in a shopping mall built over an ancient graveyard that has been defiled by rutting yuppies, and a succubus takes possession of the mind and body of the busty jazzercise instructor, who slinks out whenever there's a Conelrad test on the Top 40 station, and eviscerates people in Ban-Lon pullovers by slovenly use of a cheese grater or apple corer.

  Let me respond once and only, for the record, to these cavils. Here's where it may get nasty.

  1) You're correct. I don't do reviews. I'm not much interested in doing reviews. There is a plethora of such reviewing already being done. In magazines published weekly, in newspapers published daily, on telecasts aired hourly; in specialty magazines used to huckster forthcoming films, that are endowed by the film companies themselves, available at every video shoppe and theater lobby in America; on the radio, in American Film and Starlog and Cinefantastique and Prevue. We are hip-deep in reviewers, ranging from Pauline Kael and Molly Haskell, who know what they're talking about, to Gary Franklin and David Sheehan, who have the intellectual insight of a speed bump. I won't even comment on the Siamese-critics whose syndicated review shows demonstrate even greater snippiness and discordancy than I visit on you.

  What I am interested in (and the vast majority of those who have commented on these columns seem to share that interest) is the concept of film as potential Art. Books are reviewed in these pages by Mr. Budrys in essay form, speaking to the intentions of the creators, the effectiveness of their vision, the value of the writing in the greater context of establishing artistic criteria by which we can make informed judgments as to what is, and what ain't, worth our valuable reading time. Why should films not be treated equally as seriously?

  These are essays on film. Not academic, stodgy Cahiers du Cinéma wearinesses, intended to demonstrate the cineaste's erudition, or his Trivial Pursuit noodling of the least line from an obscure offering by Arnold Fanck (German director, 1889–1974, known for his mountaineering films), but an attempt by one who both loves and works in film, to illuminate technique, intentions, historical context, ethical values . . . choices . . .

  The better to widen the aperture of a filmgoer's perceptions. The better to suggest a subtext for what may appear to be only momentary entertainment. The better, some might say, to educate and broaden horizons and afford more pleasure; as well as to suggest bases on which critical judgments can be made.

  If the essays seem inconsistent, well, I rush to the words of Bernard Berenson: "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."

  As for the way in which I write these essays, well, I write to please myself first. If the
y also please you, then that's swell. If they don't, sorry about that, kiddo, But if I were to write for a supposed audience, I would wind up as bland and shallow as most of the reviewers you channel-hop to avoid. I write what interests me, and that pretty well takes care of complaint 4) because I am utterly disinterested in most of the hack films slambanged at you in saturation tv advertisements. I have no axes to grind, I am on the secret payroll of no studio or filmmaker, and if you think I'm going to sit through Evil Dead 2 or The Barbarians just so your avaricious little heart doesn't feel it's missed something, then you'd better get out pad and pencil and dash off one of those letters to the Fermans, threatening them with loss of readership if they don't recall the previous tenant; because that is not what I'm about, and stop eyeing the belt, I haven't threatened you once, have I?

  2) is easily handled. I do the best I can. I appear as frequently as my often-otherwise-occupied schedule permits. I do have to make a living writing other things. And though suchlike as Charles Platt and Christopher Priest bend themselves into hyperbolic pretzels proving I'll never complete The Last Dangerous Visions, that and other matters of import command most of my attention most of the time. I enjoy writing these essays. I do them because they are things I want to write, not because I have a deadline that demands I write them. It is my naive belief that you would rather read something the author was compelled to write, rather than just space-filler because a presumed readership expected to see something in this space. Don't fret about it: when I'm not here, there'll be a nifty story in this space that has put food on the table of a deserving writer.