Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison; Leonard Maltin

  And the terrible part of all this is that I know if the same circumstance were set up today, and my mother, or my best friend, or Susan, or Mother Teresa, or God his/her/its self brought me the wrong issue of Captain Marvel Adventures, I'd act exactly the same, indefensible, selfish way.

  Which brings me to Young Sherlock Holmes.

  Consider: how many times have good Samaritans "done you a favor" you didn't ask for? How many times have you wished they had kept their kindness to themselves, not put you in a position where you had to smile grimly and say, "That was very thoughtful of you," when what you wanted to do was knock them silly for putting you in a position where you had to clean up the mess engendered by "the thoughtful act of selflessness"?

  People are forever doing things for your own good. They are forever giving you gifts they want you to have which you don't, frequently, want any part of. They merely want to serve. They want to share. They want you to have a nice, expensive Christmas card with the word Hallmark on the back so you'll know they cared enough to send the very best.

  My wretched nature and guilt aside, I suggest this is self-serving on the part of the giver, with no damned concern for the attitude of the recipient.

  Everyone gets a fix from "good deeds." I applaud that. I far more trust those who will cop to the truth that they feel terrific when they perform a noble act, than those who try to get us to believe they were solely motivated by a desire to serve the Commonweal. Good Samaritans and philanthropists and those who roll bandages at the local hospital are not much different, at core, it seems to me, than those who attempt to legislate morality, to save us from the devil, or to convince us that we need to believe as they do to preserve the Union. It is a philosophical and ethical membrane that separates us from them.

  But I suppose it's part of human nature to give the gift that not coincidentally pushes the giver's viewpoint. Whether as bread-and-butter house gift or as guilt-assuaging invitation to dinner as reciprocation for all the dinners they've given you, the seemingly selfless act is, I submit, rooted as deeply in the need of the giver to get his or her fix, as it is to reward the recipient.

  The thorn in the paw when one accepts the gift, however, is that seldom are we asked if we want this attention.

  When it comes to filmic hommage—one of those gifts never sought and usually damaged in transit—the custom of primacy of interest by the creator is more honor'd in the breach than the observance.

  Did the Salkinds check with Siegel or Shuster as to their enthusiasm for having their creation Superman transmogrified into a clown at the hands of David and Leslie Newman? If we listen closely can we hear Edgar Rice Burroughs thrashing in his grave at what befell Tarzan under the tender ministrations of Bo and John Derek, Hugh Hudson, or the blissfully-forgotten hacks who churned out half a dozen Me-Retard-You-Maureen-O'Sullivan idiocies? Was any attempt made by concerned parties, to hire a spiritualist who might pierce the veil and get Val Lewton's reaction to writer-director Paul Schrader's quote in the May-June 1982 issue of Cinefantastique, just prior to release of Schrader's remake of the 1942 Lewton-produced Cat People, that "Val Lewton's Cat People isn't that brilliant. It's a very good B-movie with one or two brilliant sequences. I mean, we're not talking about a real classic"? With how much good grace do you think Ian Fleming would take the jaded, imbecile shenanigans of the James Bond we see in Octopussy or A View to a Kill?

  Even on suicide missions, at least lip service is paid to volunteerism. But Captain Nemo, Sheena, King Kong, Conan and Norman Bates keep getting sent out there to suck up them bullets—a kinder fate than having to suffer the critics' wrath—without any of the "gift-givers" bothering to ask if they mind having their literary personas savaged.

  Hommage is usually less a sincere form of flattery than an expensive Xmas card that blows up in your face. In the case of Brian De Palma, of course, hommage is merely a license to steal from Hitchcock.

  As the unsought gift is tendered, one has the urge to snarl, "Who asked for it, creep?" Nowhere do we find evidence that the recipient has been granted the option of saying, "Thanks but no thanks."

  Which brings us, yet again, to Young Sherlock Holmes, 109 minutes of just simply awful, lamebrained and inept crapola from the team that brought you Gremlins. One hundred and nine minutes of unsolicited hommage that utterly corrupts the nobility and artistic value of the original creation; proffered with disingenuous and actively embarrassed apologia front-and-back by young scrivener Chris Columbus and his mentor, an ever-more-millstonelike Steven Spielberg, who managed—one presumes with dangled carrots of fame and pelf and posterity—to suck in yet another excellent filmmaker, director Barry Levinson, whom we heretofore revered for Diner and the cinema adaptation of Bernard Malamud's The Natural.

  (An aside. No one is more aware of the seemingly incessant flow of aristarchian eloquence I've expended on Spielberg-influenced films, beginning with Gremlins, than I. From that first Chris Columbus-scripted abomination, through Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, to Goonies, Explorers, and Back to the Future, there has been no peace for Spielberg and those who have realized his personal view of movies by the warping of their own vision, from this corner of the critical universe. It has become such a threnody that even I grow weary of the dirge. Yet what is one to do? All I have to work with is what I see on the big screen. And Spielbergian product has so dominated the industry since E.T. in 1982—an industry that imitates what it takes to be success to the exclusion of alternate styles of filmmaking—that almost every other trend is as a trickling crick to the Mississippi. As verification of that assertion, if common sense and simple observation fail to convince, consider: taken as a whole, the five films nominated as best of the year for the Oscars earned $220 million in box-office revenues; Back to the Future, which was not among those five, earned $200 million. In the face of such success at a strictly commercial level, the level at which the drones and hacks of the industry place value worth emulating, a level of success that is awesome not only because of its height above the mass of financially-remunerative films, but because of the dismaying lack of quality and paucity of content they champion for those whose aspirations are already operating on a subterranean level, how can an observer trying to make sense of it all not dwell to almost pathological degree on what Spielberg hath wrought? It is the Spielberg sensibility that informs the writing of scenarists whose work prior to their association with him seems, in my view, stronger and truer and less marred by cutesy trivialism. It is the Spielberg sensibility that poisons the directorial attack of Robert Zemeckis and Kevin Reynolds and Joe Dante and now Barry Levinson. It is the juggernaut that flattens studio considerations of development of projects outside the narrow path of what Spielberg has shown will appeal to the adolescent—or at best sophomoric—demographic wedge that buys tickets. So what is one to do? Either to pretend that Out of Africa or Kiss of the Spider Woman are more than noble exceptions to a rule of picayune endeavor, or to continue dealing with that which dominates the industry in hopes that someone, somewhere, will take note and break loose from the Accepted Wisdom that the only surefire way to make a buck in movies is to ape the three or four styles of motion pictures that have been raking in the gelt: knife-kill flicks, Rambo/Rocky manipulations, high school epics of tits and food fights, or Spielbergian reductions of life and adventure to the importance of cartoons. I share your exhaustion at these fulminations . . . but what is one to do?)

  It is painful to attack a writer as young in years and in time spent working at his craft as Chris Columbus, yet what are we to make of someone whose credits to date include Reckless, Gremlins, Goonies and the quisquilian subject under examination here?

  Another Spielberg "discovery," Columbus seems sincere, dedicated, and hardworking. I spoke to him via telecon once, soon after Gremlins. My natural instinct was to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one; to assume (erroneously, it turns out) that the vileness of Gremlins emerged as corruptions of his original intent by Spielberg and/or director Joe
Dante.

  Turns out that both Dante and Columbus were swayed to the Spielberg view of filmmaking by the amentia of Amblin Entertainment; and we now have a quartet of Columbus screenplays to evaluate; and much as we might like to believe that Columbus is the new Lawrence Kasdan, even his staunchest supporters now admit in private what they will not say in public: Chris Columbus just ain't very good at this thing called screenwriting.

  And that wearying aspect of Spielberg-influenced films that masquerades under the encomium hommage, that endless truckling to injokes and references to best-forgotten minor films of a generation's childhood, takes center stage with Young Sherlock Holmes. Sorrowful headshaking ensues.

  There is nothing in this film fresh or innovative or even particularly well-executed beyond the delicious conceit of showing us what Holmes and Watson were like as students. A mind-tickler that has intrigued Sherlockians who can never get enough of the adventures of the World's First Consulting Detective contained in the sixty (or, as some savants insist, seventy-two) elements of the canon. Doyle forever possesses our admiration and affection not only because of what he let us know about Sherlock Holmes through the recountings of his escapades via Dr. John H. Watson, but because of what he didn't let us know. The tantalizing hints of cases not recorded—yes, lord, let us one day find hidden under a false bottom in that travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box kept safe in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Company, at Charing Cross, the full story of the horrible Giant Rat of Sumatra—and the clues to Holmes's background. We can surmise with some certainty that he was born in Surrey, and we know (because Holmes said it was so) that he was the descendant of country squires, but was Mycroft his only sibling? And why, exactly, had Holmes such suspicion of women?

  The gaps in our knowledge are almost as engaging as the vast amount we know, the adventures we read over and over from our first thrilling exposure to the canon till that final rereading of "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman" moments before we go to meet Sir Arthur in person on the other side.

  So the pull of what were Holmes and Watson like as prep school lads? is a kind of what-if I think no dealer in imagination could resist. I cannot find it in my heart to fault Columbus or Spielberg or Levinson for giving in to the temptation to fiddle with the conceit. It is the shallow and tawdry manner of their dealing with this material that hardens my heart. The word "entertainment" as it has come to be debased—as per Amblin "Entertainment"—falls far short of entertainment as we know it in its highest form, that is, as literature. Which is what the Doyle Sherlockian oeuvre has demonstrated itself to be.

  Columbus, et al., have treated Holmes as entertainment in this debased context, denying the material's value not only as Literature but, worse, more offensively, as Entertainment in the greater sense. But then, one suspects these people can do no better. Which, if true, is sad enough; yet one might wish that this batch of mediocre ribbon clerks could get past its awesome arrogance, its insular belief in the myth of its own omniscience, to display an uncharacteristic reticence when it comes to laying ham hands on the work of its betters. If the best they can conjure are the screenplay equivalents of fast foods and tv dinners, then swell. In the words of Thomas Carlyle, "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might." But let them, also in God's name, even if the name be Doyle (but not if the name be Spielberg), have the humility to know that their best is, at best, ephemeral fluff, examples of planned obsolescence, junk that insults the honorable term junk, creativity at the level of dispensability where one finds Kleenex and Saran-Wrap. Let them have the common sense to pull back from the posturing foolishness of a Schrader downgrading a Lewton in order to seem less a thief of art. Let them cease trying to fool us that their misappropriations are sincerely motivated hommage.

  I have more to say on this. It may be that some primal force other than my mere anger has been inflamed through the act of codifying reactions to what is, after all, only a dopey film. It may be that whistle-blowing time has arrived for this gang of pilferers of the literary treasurehouse. Michelangelo said, "Where I steal an idea, I leave my knife." Perhaps we have all been witnesses at the scene of the crime where we have failed to realize how important it was for us to identify the owner of the knife. As Socrates received the unsought gift of hemlock, so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he who created Sherlock Holmes and Watson and Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran, receives the unsought gift of hommage from Spielberg and Columbus and Company; and in leaping to the defense of one whose work probably needs no defense against the nibbling of minnows, perhaps we defend ourselves.

  I'll be back next time to complete the thought.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/July 1986

  INSTALLMENT 18:

  In Which Youth Goeth Before A Fall

  Completing the thoughts begun last time. Subject under scrutiny: Hommage, the unsought gift that blights the original creation. In specific: Young Sherlock Holmes (Paramount).

  It has been a month since I began this rumination, and the anger that seemed to build in me as I wrote the previous installment has abated somewhat. When I tried to analyze exactly what had sent me up into that spiral of rancor, no rational explanation presented itself. Like each of you, from time to time I find myself furious-beyond-proper-response; but whatever the stimulus—whether something I'd just read, or a snatch of radio news overheard while passing through a room, or a snippet of some television image—when the madness passes and I peel away the layers of emotion, I find that the snatch or snippet was only something that produced a resonance. The home videos of Imelda Marcos and her degenerate guests at Bonbon's birthday party in the Malacanang Palace, punked out and festooned with diamonds while 73% of the Filipino people were subsisting below the poverty level and scrounging for food in garbage heaps; rapists of a nation, cavorting and singing into Mr. Mikes; and the song they were singing was "We Are the World, We Are the Children." An item in the Birmingham, Alabama News about a woman clerk in an airport newsstand who had been arrested for selling Playboy, and had drawn two years in jail for disseminating pornography. A moment of infuriating disingenuousness during a radio broadcast the day after Tombstone Tex Reagan won one for the Gipper in his shootout with Qaddafi—wrong or right, agree with him or not—that set my teeth on edge: stickily referring to the two F-111 pilots who went down as "heroes of our hearts."

  Each produced a level of blinding animosity that spoke to something deeper than the events themselves. For, in truth, unpalatable as it is to admit, the starvation of thousands of little black babies in a faraway place does not affect us as deeply or lastingly or immediately as a stye on our eye, a particularly nasty cold sore on our lip, or our inability to have a good bowel movement. That we can be distracted at all from the petty yet vitally urgent imperatives of our petty yet vitally urgent personal existences is the miracle of the human race. That we can transcend the counterfeit emotions of the nanoseconds in which we lament the travail of those less fortunate than ourselves to feel genuine sorrow for others of our species, that transcendence that produces a Sojourner Truth, a Ralph Nader, or the man who passed the helicopter rescue ring to a drowning woman after the Washington, D.C. airliner crash, that creates Live Aid or the Red Cross, is the miracle that makes us the noblest experiment the universe has ever conjured up. Humbling and shaming as it may be to admit such weakness in ourselves, nonetheless it remains that what sends the burst of adrenaline through us at the snatch or snippet may only be the echo of an entirely personal, entirely human misery.

  Shaking my head to clear the fog of anger, I finally located the source of my animosity toward Steven Spielberg and scenarist Chris Columbus and those who made Young Sherlock Holmes; the source of my rage at the cavalier rationale called hommage that permits, even encourages, less-talented johnny-come-latelies to corrupt the creations of their betters.


  I fear another weird digression, by way of explanation, is necessary.

  Here, elsewhere, and on many other occasions, I have railed against the indiscriminate acceptance of the loathsome theory of cinematic creation called the "auteur theory," wherein all glory and condemnation falls to the director. The writer is merely a hired hand; merely the one who constructs from nothing the "plan" on which the Noble Director builds the edifice of a movie; the creator who dreams the dream, sets it down so the package can be financed by a studio, the one who merely . . .

  But listen to Francis Ford Coppola on this subject:

  "I like to think of myself as a writer who directs. When people go to see a movie, 80 percent of the effect it has on them was preconceived and precalculated by the writer. He's the one who imagines opening with a shot of a man walking up the stairs and cutting to another man walking down the stairs. A good script has pre-imagined exactly what the movie is going to do on a story level, on an emotional level, on all these various levels. To me, that's the primary act of creation."

  There. Just that and no more. And insert auteurism where the passion don't never shine.

  Of late, the auteur theory has crept into the world of comic books. (I said weird digression, but if you need an excuse not to screw up your face, consider that the comic book is more similar to a film than any other art-form, including the stage play; and thus, if you wanna duke it out, fit grist for this column.)