The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  on…not even me.”

  The sun in the background seems to flare more brightly. The nova of passion is approaching. Lord and chattel in the good land. I will go and eat out my heart for that creature of quicksilver movement and holy flesh.

  But she’s his. Always was, before either of them were born, until the last tick of eternity. His name is engraved in musk and platinum threads on the doe-soft inner thigh of her amazing right leg.

  It is wise to know when one cannot compete with gods.

  And…

  She comes striding out of the darkness. She is Bill Blass-accoutered in free-swinging elegance. Her stride is as the ibex—sure, graceful, drenched and imbued with strengths of femininity and purpose. I hear the voices: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  She steps into close-up and whirls off her Australian bush hat with the dia mond pin clasping up one side of the brim. She spins it away and tosses her leonine mass of hair in defiance. She is her own woman. She is the New Woman. She has empathy…but determination. She has gentleness…but cunning. She has love…but on her own terms. She is no man’s plaything; she is as far from a Hefnerism folded in three parts and with pubes airbrushed as Mies van der Rohe is from the architect of McDonald’s Golden Arches.

  She begins to unpeel her cigarettes and she stares at me with an early-warning system of carnality and sensual alertness that dares me to prove I am man enough to compete with her Visigoth lust. She is not to be tampered with. She is the slag bucket ready to catch the white-hot rivet. But only if my aim is precise and proper. She is totally liberated: clothes as she wants to wear them, for herself and her comfort and her freedom; makeup or no makeup, whichever suits her purposes; cigarettes slim and potent.

  If I think I can whip one of my 1940s male chauvinism numbers on her, I’m wrong. She will toy with me. She will outthink, outconjure, outmaneuver me. Then she will beat me at straight pool, fifty balls at a buck a pocket.

  I turn to boysenberry jelly.

  What hath god wrought? And where do I go to say thank you?

  This will be a study of sex on television. What’s that I hear you mumble? There is no sex on tv? Situation comedies are as sterile and aseptically asexual as Priapus’ birthday in a eunuchs’ dormitory? And who’d want to make it with Lucille Ball anyway? Oh, my friends, you have been seeing blindly; you have been led to the land of joy and have wandered witless at the periphery.

  For television today is the richest peephole for a voyeur ever conceived. It bubbles, it seethes, it overflows with goodies. Turn on your set, anytime, and but behold the joys. The most beautiful women history has ever known, filmed in phosphor-dot fantasy with scrims, with gauzes, with gels, with halations and solarizations, ranged and trotted out for the predilection and lust assuaging of the most seasoned connoisseur.

  Ignore the soap operas with their psychotic ladies and their endlessly destructive affairs. Ignore the dramatic shows with their surface-skimming attempts to delineate deep emotion and characterization in tissue-paper archetypes. Ignore the comedies that extend misshapen and hideous crones as the ne plus ultra of pulchritude.

  Flash on the commercials, you nits!

  And the late night talk shows!

  And for those of you who secretly lust after nubile young wenches, there are the rock dance programs. And for Humbert Humberts in our midst—in the past relegated to lurking in the basements of grade schools or surreptitiously peeking up tots’ skirts on subways—try Saturday mornings and the hordes of Mattel and Kenner commercials with their prepubescent Lolitas flaunting their softly rounded bodies beside endless Suzy Homemaker sets.

  One has only to open the cover of the current beaver magazine to see to what end all this permissiveness and sexual forthrightness has brought us: scruffy ladies with needle marks tracking their arms and thighs, lying out like slaughtered animals, knees opened and pudenda exposed. Sights of nauseousness more closely resembling massacre photos from My Lai than sexually arousing titillaters. A silken crossed leg is still more pulse-crippling than Gobi Deserts of pimple-studded flesh. We seek not the phony hypocrisies of Victorian prudery or cheap arousal, we merely seek to retain a touch of that mystery that lies between men and women, that indefinable come-on men have employed with after-shave lotions and rugged looks, that women have stated with subtle scents and a certain way of moving their hips when they walk.

  Blatancy is to be cast away. Subtlety ennobles.

  And what more subtle come-ons have we ever known than those currently on view tube-wise?

  Come with me, then, as we run barefoot through contemporary commercials like prep-school boys on a weekend in a harem.

  The conscious symbolism, the sexual allegories, the devious but stirring come-ons. For instance:

  The flower of Southern womanhood (an idealized image, I assure you, having spent considerable time below the Mason-Dixon line) in close-up. Curled locks silver and shining. A ripe mouth, petulant and little-girlish. A body lush and fruitful. Like the Life Savers she smiles into being.

  And she tells us about the fruit in the basket. The lemons…in which a hole appears. The limes…in which holes appear. The (oh, god!) cherry…in which a hole appears.

  And all through the arousing descriptions of ripe fruit and how they are the same tastes one receives from Life Savers…with holes in them…she plays coquette. She turns and smiles over her shoulder; she expands her chest and strains her bosom toward us; she seems gentle and kittenish and altogether available, if only we can grasp the subcutaneous implications of holes in fruit.

  Cancel those dates! Forget buying dinner and holding hands in the movie! Pass on picking up girls in rock joints! Get in front of the tv. Sit thyself down and pay attention to the lessons to be learned. Sexuality is rampant in the universe, can you but glean the key messages, can you but recognize the touchstones.

  Southern girls sell Life Savers…

  What does that say to you?

  The synonyms are obvious. The riches incalculable. The mind boggles. The gonads leap.

  Watch the screens a new way this week. We’ll pick it up from here in the next installment.

  58: 20 MARCH 70

  I’ll bet you thought this week would see part 2 of my exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of sex on tv, “Video Voyeurism,” didn’t you? Well, I’d planned it that way, but in the grand old tradition of my wandering mind and more loose ends than the Pentagon’s explanations about Laos, something else came up last week that I want to get set down before it becomes outdated, so just kinda stick Part 1 away in your mental pending file—along with that F-310 business, on which I’m still working—and I’ll hit it next week. I promise.

  Because this week I really have to do a destruct job on the diseased whore of the Fourth Estate, the pimp of the entertainment industry, the bought voice of Clown Town, that estimable rag of endless lies, gossip, and chicanery, the glossy-sided Hollywood Reporter. (Variety is hardly better, but at least occasionally it makes an attempt at honesty and impartiality.)

  What I’m about to say is not terribly new or startling. If there is anyone above the age of innocence who actually believes the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation the Reporter offers as its surrealistic impression of entertainment world news, surely it can only be those beach-bum actors and pudding-minded starlets who confuse shadow with reality. For the Reporter, by dint of its reliance on advertising from the very people it reviews, has been a captive sycophant for Hollywood since its inception. When horrendous, gargantuan bombs like Star! and Hello, Dolly! and Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Battle of the Bulge get rave reviews from the genuflecting Reporter and its staff of reviewers (all of whom seem to be lineal descendants of Uriah Heep)…all on the theory that big spectacular productions are good for Hollywood because they keep the featherbedding unions at work…ignoring the bald fact that the days of that kind of production are gone and such mammoths have helped kill at least three of the major studios…it becomes awkwardly obvious that the Reporter is about as relevant to
what is happening in the film world today as a McGuffey’s Reader.

  That the Reporter’s timorous little soul was bought long ago by its patrons—and the specific that forces my lance to tilt against it this week—demonstrates itself in a review by Tony Lawrence on page 16 of the Thursday, March 12, edition of the Reporter. It is a review of yet another in the endless string of moron-movies-for-tv made by Aaron Spelling Productions. A disaster of stupidity and ineptitude, a cataclysm of banality and sterility, a pustule of bad writing and little-theater acting titled The Love War. It was aired over ABC on March 10, from 8:30 to 10:00 and in a video universe singularly dedicated to retarding science fiction’s acceptance as a legitimate art form (such tools as Lost in Space, The Invaders, Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, My Favorite Martian, My Living Doll, and It’s About Time have dealt it crippling blows in the past) it was a karate chop of no mean strengths. Or weaknesses, depending on how you look at it.

  To clobber the Reporter properly, I must first describe The Love War in all its awfulness. Without comparison, the full dishonesty of the Reporter under a headline that reads “‘Love War’ Has Message, Performances, Good Effects” does not become apparent.

  Guerdon Trueblood and David Kidd are the first two culprits in the band of cutthroats who made this stinker.

  They wrote it.

  They took an idea that story editor Seeleg Lester of the long-dead Outer Limits would have rejected in a hot second, and they flaunted their cavalier lack of understanding of the science fiction idiom by turning it, one of the oldest clichés in the pulp bag of outdated sf shticks, into a predictable and insultingly illogical parody of everything valid in speculative fiction. (It always amazes me, the effrontery of writers ignorant of the most basic rules of sf writing, who have no conception of the almost fifty years of writing in the genre, whose temerity permits them to cobble up some pseudo-sf bullshit; they would never try to do a political teleplay without doing the research; they would never do a historical script without checking out the background; why the hell do they think they can attempt sf with the originality and verve of pachyderms trying to be terpsichoreans?)

  Two warring planets, Argon and Zinan, have sent battle squads to Earth. (Someone should have advised Messrs. Trueblood and Kidd that argon is not a made-up word intended to sound alien. It is a colorless, odorless, gaseous element found in the air and is used for filling electric light bulbs. Scientific “accuracy” of this sort keynotes my cavils in the paragraph above.)

  (Oh, yeah, one more bit of bullshit mumbo jumbo proving plowboys shouldn’t try to pull against fast guns: Kyle, an Argonite, played by Lloyd Bridges—about whose performance more in a moment—tries to explain to Angie Dickinson the cosmography of Earth/Argon/Zinan; he puts his hands side by side and says they represent the two alien planets. Then he says they “overlap Earth” and that both planets are trying to take it over. Now, I am by no means Fred Hoyle or even Camille Flammarion, but I am several steps beyond a Cro-Magnon [as I presume are Trueblood and Kidd], and I can look up into the night sky and see that there are not two planets “overlapping” the Earth. Now, had the scenarists read even one 1930s issue of Astounding Science Fiction, they might have come up with the dodgem explanation that Argon [!] and Zinan “overlapped the Earth in another plane of existence” or used subspace, or another dimension…any one of a hundred writer’s tricks sf authors have dreamed up over the years to take care of such problems. But they were rank amateurs playing potsy in a genre where they were illiterates, and so we have someone telling us openly from the screen that there are three planets sharing this Earth space.)

  Anyhow. To resolve who will “win” the planet Argon and Zinan have sent three guerrilla fighters each to Earth. Whoever knocks off the other gets to keep Earth. Argon wants to let us go our merry way and eventually let us into the League of Planets, or somesuch. Zinan wants to destroy all intelligent life on Earth and settle it themselves.

  If this sounds familiar to you, it is probably because it is a direct steal from such sources as Fredric Brown’s classic story “Arena,” from the Outer Limits segment starring Nick Adams that has been replayed umpteen times on Channel 11’s reruns of that series, and from the Star Trek segment based on the Brown story. If you get my meaning, I’m saying this was a cornball rehash of a standard idea done to death a thousand times before.

  But as if it wasn’t bad enough that Aaron Spelling and his production staff (not to mention the authors) didn’t know or didn’t care that they were using ninth-hand material done better by other people (and I suspect if Fred Brown wanted to sue for plagiarism he’d have a strong case), the stupidities of the plot were compounded with each passing scene.

  The aliens were so incredibly inept in their “guerrilla tactics” that they wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes with even a semi-competent Green Beret or Viet Cong. They chased each other around, moved from city to ghost town for no apparent reason, blundered constantly, and in the end the good guys lost because the Zinans had sent four instead of three. This ending, incidentally, is typical of literary chicanery of the worst sort—wherein the author withholds a salient fact so you can’t solve the puzzle—or changes the rules of the story. If they said there were three, there should have been three. You can’t with impunity write a fantasy and adopt as a rule of the game that no one can use his right hand, and then, at a crucial moment, have someone use his right hand to get him out of trouble, without the audience yelling foul.

  But that’s a minor carp compared to the other foulnesses of this ninety-minute stinker. The acting reeked of bathos: unmotivated, stilted, and illogical. Lloyd Bridges as the Argonite who has been without female companionship for 150 years (for reasons never explained) and his bête noire Angie Dickinson, who shows him what love can mean to a man, even if he’s an alien, act in a manner even high-school dramatics students would abominate. The only person worth watching in this farrago of senselessness was a girl named Judy Jordan who did a walk-on as a Union Station information desk clerk. When I say walk-on, that is precisely what I mean. Miss Jordan, who in a sexist phrase popular during my youth in Ohio eons ago, is what we used to call back in Ohio stacked like a brick shithouse, came out from behind her desk to show Mr. Bridges where he was going. I’m sure she was brought out from behind the desk to give us a clearer, more complete tallying of her charms, for which bit of intelligent direction (the only one, as far as I could tell) we must thank George McCowan, a director whose work, if we are to judge by this epic, will not soon be clamored for.

  When one has to descend to the troglodyte level of a Hefnerism to derive even the smallest scintilla of pleasure from a ninety-minute production, it can easily be ascertained a dereliction of artistry on the part of the producers and creators. Thus we commend The Love War and Mr. Spelling’s idea of trenchant drayma [sic] to the dustbin.

  Which leaves us with the Hollywood Reporter and its reaction to this patently flatulent excrescence.

  Why not let their own words hang them:

  “…solidly believable performances…an attempt at message and purpose with some interesting visual effects…direction maintained a fairly good balance between science fiction elements and a genuine relationship between two people…Miss Dickinson and Bridges found convincing aspects of their parts and played them out with complementary style…”

  Enough!

  This they have to say about a supposedly adult drama in which the future of the population of the Earth is at stake, a future decided by (get this) a High Noon walk-down and shoot-out in the dusty street of a ghost town. A scene of monumental stupidity and silliness.

  The Hollywood Reporter has for so long groveled at the trough of show-biz garbage that it can no longer even make a pretense of decent critical judgment.

  It is symptomatic of the schizoid nature of the entertainment industry in this town that, even though everyone knows the Reporter is filled with flack and puff most often existing only in the reality of a PR man’s mind, they continue to support
it and even believe their own puff. I’ve known agents who’ve dreamed up a sheer bit of flummery, sent it in (where everything is accepted without question, thereby pinholing the quality of reportage), and when it appeared two days later, looking at it as though it were real and acted on the humbug.

  Mr. Spelling is a mainstay of the Reporter. His name turns up in gossip columns therein with stultifying regularity, his every business move is reported with awe and Klaxons, his productions are plumped and ballyhooed as though they genuinely meant something sterling for the industry or the Condition of Art in Our Times. And when his offerings are reviewed, he is applauded. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  All this, despite the fact that Mr. Spelling is responsible for the longest unbroken string of rotten productions in the history of television. It is only when other, more tasteful and perceptive men take over the reins of his productions that anything has a chance of emerging with truth or originality.

  Yet the Reporter, the paid servant of the hypers and shuckers and hustlers of tv land, continues to perpetuate all the myths, all the lies, all the destructive hypocrisy that has brought the Hollywood Valhalla to a condition of sterility, aridity, and near death. And a few months ago—when the depression hit—the Reporter had the audacity to ask for more patronage, on the theory that when things are worst is when one should advertise most.

  Well, it may be a valid theory in some circles, but I suggest the condemned should not patronize the executioner. One may have to get one’s head lopped off, but one doesn’t have to aid and abet the axman.