Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  Quite clearly, if one but looks around to assess the irrefutable evidence of reality, books strengthen the dreaming facility, and television numbs it. Atrophy soon follows.

  Shelley Torgeson, who is the director of the spoken word records I’ve cut for Alternate World Recordings, is also a mass media teacher at Harrison High School in Westchester. She tells me some things that buttress my position.

  1) A fifteen-year-old student summarily rejected the reading of books because it “wasn’t real.” Because it was your imagination, and your imagination isn’t real. So Shelley asked her what was “real” and the student responded instantly, “Television.” Because you could see it. Then, by pressing the conversation, Shelley discovered that though the student was in the tenth grade, when she read she didn’t understand the words and was making up words and their meanings all through the text—far beyond the usual practice, in which we all indulge, of gleaning an approximate meaning of an unfamiliar word from its context. With television, she had no such problems. They didn’t use words. It was real. Thus—and quite logically in a kind of Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole manner—the books weren’t real, because she was making them up as she went along, not actually reading them. If you know what I mean.

  2) An important school function was woefully underattended one night, and the next day Shelley (suspecting the reason) confirmed that the absence of so many students was due to their being at home watching part two of the TV movie based on the Manson murder spree, Helter Skelter. Well, that was a bit of a special event in itself, and a terrifying program; but the interesting aspect of their watching the show emerged when a student responded to Shelley’s comparison of watching something that “wasn’t real” with a living event that “was real.” The student contended it was real, he had seen it. No, Shelley insisted, it wasn’t real, it was just a show. Hell no, the kid kept saying, it was real: he had seen it. Reasoning slowly and steadily, it took Shelley fifteen or twenty minutes to convince him (if she actually managed) that he had not seen a real thing, because he had not been in Los Angeles in August of 1969 when the murders had happened. Though he was seventeen years old, the student was incapable of perceiving, unaided, the difference between a dramatization and real life.

  3) In each classroom of another school at which Shelley taught, there was a TV set, mostly unused save for an occasional administrative announcement; the sets had been originally installed in conjunction with a Ford Foundation grant to be used for visual training. Now they’re blank and silent. When Shelley had trouble controlling the class, getting them quiet, she would turn on the set and they would settle down. The screen contained nothing, just snow; but they grew as fascinated as cobras at a mongoose rally, and fell silent, watching nothing. Shelley says she could keep them that way for extended periods.

  Interestingly, as a footnote, when Shelley mentioned this device at lunch, a chemistry professor said he used something similar. When his students were unruly he would place a beaker of water on a Bunsen burner. When the water began to boil, the students grew silent and mesmerized, watching the water bubbling.

  And as a subfootnote, I’m reminded of a news story I read. A burglar broke into a suburban home in Detroit or some similar city (it’s been a while since I read the item and unimportant details have blurred in my mind) and proceeded to terrorize and rob the housewife alone there with her seven-year-old son. As the attacker stripped the clothes off the woman at knife point, the child wandered into the room. The burglar told the child to go in the bedroom and watch television till he was told to come out. The child watched the tube for six straight hours, never once returning to the room where his mother had been raped repeatedly, tied and bound to a chair with tape over her mouth, and beaten mercilessly. The burglar had had free access to the entire home, had stripped it of all valuables, and had left unimpeded. The tape, incidentally, had been added when the burglar/rapist was done enjoying himself. All through the assault the woman had been calling for help. But the child had been watching the set and didn’t come out to see what was happening. For six hours.

  Roy Torgeson, Shelley’s husband and producer of my records, reminded us of a classroom experiment reported by the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, in which a teacher was set to speaking at one side of the front of a classroom, and a television monitor was set up on the other side of the room, showing the teacher speaking. The students had unobstructed vision of both. They watched the monitor. They watched what was real.

  Tom Snyder, of the NBC “Tomorrow” show, was telling me that he receives letters from people apologizing for their having gone away on vacation or visiting with their grandchildren, or otherwise not having been at home so he could do his show—but now that they’re back, and the set is on, he can start doing his show again. Their delusion is a strange reversal of the ones I’ve noted previously. For them, Snyder (and by extension other newscasters and actors) aren’t there, aren’t happening, unless they are watching. They think the actors can see into their living rooms, and they dress as if for company, they always make sure the room is clean, and in one case there is a report of an elderly woman who dresses for luncheon with “her friends” and sets up the table and prepares luncheon and then, at one o’clock, turns on the set for a soap opera. Those are her friends: she thinks they can see into her house, and she is one with them in their problems.

  To those of us who conceive of ourselves as rational and grounded in reality (yes, friends, even though I write fantasy, I live in the real world, my feet sunk to the ankles in pragmatism), all of this may seem like isolated, delusionary behavior. I assure you it isn’t. A study group that rates high school populations recently advised one large school district that the “good behavior” of the kids in its classes was very likely something more than just normal quiet and good manners. They were too quiet, too tranquilized, and the study group called it “dangerous.” I submit that the endless watching of TV by kids produces this blank, dead, unimaginative manner.

  It is widespread, and cannot possibly be countered by the minimal level of reading that currently exists in this country. Young people have been systematically bastardized in their ability to seek out quality material—books, films, food, life-styles, life-goals, enriching relationships.

  Books cannot combat the spiderwebbing effect of television because kids simply cannot read. It is on a par with their inability to hear music that isn’t rock. Turn the car radio dial from one end to another when you’re riding with young people (up to the age of fifty) and you will perceive that they whip past classical music as if it were “white noise,” simply static to their ears. The same goes for books. The printed word has no value to them and carries no possibility of knowledge or message that relates to their real world.

  If one chooses to say, as one idiot I faced on the 90 Minutes Live talk show over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said, that people don’t need to read, that people don’t like books, that they want to be “entertained” (as if reading were something hideous, something other than also entertainment), then we come to an impasse. But if, like me, you believe that books preserve the past, illuminate the present, and point the way to the future…then you can understand why I seem to be upset at the ramifications of this epiphany I’ve had.

  Do not expect—as I once did because I saw Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin unmasked on television—that TV will reveal the culprits. Nixon lied without even the faintest sign of embarrassment or disingenuousness on TV, time after time, for years. He told lies, flat out and outrageously; monstrous lies that bore no relation to the truth. But well over half the population of this country, tuning him in, believed him. Not just that they wanted to believe him for political or personal reasons, or because it was easier than having waves made…they believed him because he stared right at them and spoke softly and they could tell he was telling the truth. TV did not unmask him. Television played no part in the revelations of Watergate. In point of fact, television prevented the unmasking, because Nixon used TV to keep
public opinon tremblingly on his side. It was only when the real world, the irrefutable facts, were slammed home again and again, that the hold was loosened on public sentiment.

  Nor did television show what a bumbler Gerald Ford was. He was as chummy and friendly and familiar as Andy Griffith or Captain Kangaroo when he came before us on the tube. Television does not show us the duplicitous smirk, the dull mentality, the self-serving truth behind the noncommittal statement of administration policy. It does not deal in reality, it does not proffer honesty, it only serves up nonjudgmental images and allows thugs like Nixon to make themselves as acceptable as Reverend Ike.

  And on the Johnny Carson show they have a seven-minute “author’s spot,” gouged out of ninety minutes festooned with Charo’s quivering buttocks, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s feeling about fiscal responsibility, John Davidson on recombinant DNA, and Don Rickles insulting Carson’s tie. Then, in the last ten minutes they invite on Carl Sagan or Buckminster Fuller or John Lilly to explain the Ethical Structure of the Universe. And they contend this is a rebirth of the art of conversation. Authors of books are seldom invited on the show unless they have a new diet, a new sex theory, or a nonfiction gimmick that will make an interesting demonstration in which Johnny can take part—like wrestling a puma, spinning a hula hoop, or baking lasagna with solar heat.

  All this programs the death of reading.

  And reading is the drinking of strange wine.

  Like water on a hot griddle, I have bounced around, but the unification of the thesis is at hand.

  Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.

  The dinosaurs had no strange wine.

  They had no imagination. They lived 130,000,000 years and vanished. Why? Because they had no imagination. Unlike human beings who have it and use it and build their future rather than merely passing through their lives as if they were spectators. Spectators watching television, one might say.

  The saurians had no strange wine, no imagination, and they became extinct. And you don’t look so terrific yourself.

  EPIPHANY

  Working in television—to appropriate the words of the late sports-writer Jimmy Cannon on boxing—“is a filthy enterprise and if you stay in it long enough your mind will become a concert hall where Chinese music never stops playing.”

  All unknowing, innocent as the heroine of a Barbara Cartland Regency romance (at least for the first fifteen pages before the initial bodice-ripping), I came to Hollywood in 1962 with a few published books to my credit and the ingenuous naivete that led me to believe that merely by being the best writer the medium had ever seen, I could raise the level of what went out across the coaxial cable.

  Nine years and two months later, on Wednesday, March 10th, 1971, ABC-TV aired the last script I was to write for ten years, an emasculated segment of the short-lived series “The Young Lawyers.” After nine years and two months, and several dozen teleplays; after having won the Writers Guild award for Most Outstanding Teleplay three times (the first writer ever to win three times and the only one till Christopher Knopf tied that record ten years later); after having the dream of elevating the medium revealed as the sophomoric delusion of one who simply does not recognize the juggernaut because it’s festooned with bright ribbons, I understood the application of Cannon’s words. And I perceived what the late Charles Beaumont—best known for his “Twilight Zone” scripts—meant when he told me, on my first night in Hollywood, as we shot pool in a joint in the San Fernando Valley, “Achieving success in television is like climbing an enormous mountain of cow flop so you can pluck one perfect rose from the top; and you find, after you’ve made that hideous ascent, that you’ve lost the sense of smell.”†

  On March 10th, 1971 I packed it in. I swore I would never again write for television. Life was too short, and the time allotted a writer too precious to waste on an industry whose loftiest ambitions were returning Bob Denver to Gilligan’s Island or tugging its forelock in an effort not to offend the intellectual paraplegics of The Moral Majority.

  When a writer embraces aloneness for as long as it takes to set down a book, or a story, or even an essay like this, what remains when he returns to the state of coagulated smoke from which Paracelsus contended it originated, is real. It can be held in the hands and reread, for better or worse, a thousand times, at leisure. The thoughts can run as deep as one might wish.

  When a television show has been aired, all that is left is air. Dead air. And the rapidly vanishing Doppler effect of what might have been a subtextual message under the transient action. For ten years I have inveighed against television and its dead certain effect on the intellect of not only America, but the world. I have expended hundreds of hours in printed interviews, on lecture platforms and (horribly, ironically) in that most potent of forums, the television talk-show, urging—as did the late Paddy Chayevsky’s Howard Beale—that we turn off the sets and go back to a non-alpha state wherein the reading of books might save the immortal soul and intellect.

  Invariably, I was pilloried for my holier-than-thou model of rectitude and unsullied ethic. In college audiences the blank stares of those who had been stunned into somnolence by the five thousandth rerun of “Star Trek” were justified by vocal antagonists who called me a cop-out for “deserting the battle” (their phrase). I told them it wasn’t my battle, I was not out there to sop up the bullets for them; I was not about to waste my abilities pursuing a holy grail that was little better than a Dixie cup full of Dr. Pepper. And in those audiences that were filled with men and women who would stand by as books were pulled off library shelves and burned by self-appointed guardians of public morality, without a shriek being uttered; who would be on the steps of City Hall with flambeaux and pitchforks were they to be denied their General Hospital or Family Feud; in those audiences I correctly saw ready candidates for the dance of the doomed species. And I was saddened.

  Now, ten years after renouncing the filthy practice, I have succumbed once more. I have written my first script in a decade. I have adapted one of my short stories for the new “Darkroom” series. It all comes full circle; the show is on ABC.

  One of my five or six best friends, who also writes for television, thinks I am a hypocrite. He does not pillory me for writing this script; he knows and loves me, and so assumes I have my reasons. He’s right. I do have my reasons. Even so, he feels my self-righteous stance all these years makes this a crime of monumental proportions. The fall from grace for one who aspired to purity is always more enlightening than just one more sellout by him or her who had no ethics to begin with.

  Yet if my reasons have driven me to write this wonderful script you will no doubt admire outrageously, the title of which is “Killing Bernstein,”† and if my fall from rectitude is so onerous, then the best I can hope for is that some of you will slip a tape into the VCR and capture that forty-eight minutes demonstrating my Feet of Clay when it is aired one of these Friday nights. At least it’ll be a semblance of preservation.

  Because if anything led me back into the evil of my former ways it was succumbing to the lure of videotaping; the ready access of moments when Bogart and old Walter Huston were told by Alfonso Bedoya that he didn’t have to show them no stinkin’ badges; when Donald O’Connor danced up a wall as Gene Kelly watched in awe; when Ronald Colman said it was a far better thing he did than he had ever done before; when Tyrone Power carved his first Z in an adobe wall; when Robert Armstrong sagely noted that it was beauty killed the beast.

  Like you, I am a sucker for technology, as I am a sucker for myths. Myths named Gary Cooper and Marta Toren and Jimmy Cagney and even Jack Webb as Pete Kelly. And myths like writing so well that you can drag the zombies back from their deadly dance of the doomed species.

  And that’s how Joan of Arc got an all-over hotfoot.

  ROLLING DAT OLE DEBBIL ELECTRONIC STONE

  What follows has been called by some—even those whose interests are ill-served by Harlan’s conclusions—the definitive statement on videogames
. It was written in 1982 on assignment for Video Review magazine and is followed by an epilog which accompanied its reprint in the October 1983 issue of The Comics Journal.

  Nothing in this world beyond the first sixteen seconds of a baby’s birth is innocent. Nothing is precisely what it seems to be. Anything can be a paradigm of life’s important lessons.

  Parker Brothers’s new Video Game Cartridge—“Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back”—seems, at first encounter, merely another of the seemingly endless permutations of the callus-producing rage that has swept an entire generation of Orphan Annie-eyed, overfinanced, leisuretime-surfeited teenagers into electronic game arcades from Tampa to Tacoma.