Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison; Leonard Maltin

  These are the manifestations of the amateur sporting events my species has enjoyed for at least the last million years. There is nothing secret about these pleasures. They are as openly trumpeted as home run statistics. They are the cold wind that blows from windows in the soul, whose nails have been prised loose, the sash thrown open wide.

  The guilty pleasure of violence that intrigues us. Draughts from the flagon with the dragon, filled with the opiate of the human race. The brew that is true.

  One is told that if one wishes to survive a rattlesnake's bite, one should imbibe incrementally larger doses of rattler venom, proceeding from soupçon to spoonfuls, to build up a tolerance that results in immunity when the snake strikes. If that is so, then why do we not grow inured to violence? Why must we always have more, and more imaginative, cinematic depictions of slaughter? Do I hear a demur from Canton, Illinois? From teenager John D. Payne, who wrote the editor of this magazine urging him to drop my little essays because I'm always bumrapping "his age-group (those between thirteen and nineteen)" which slavers after rip&rend flicks like turkey vultures after carrion? (That's the species that forks out the eyeballs of the carcass first.) I presume I'm getting these psychometric readings from Johnny D. because everyone in "his age-group" in Canton, Illinois puts in a minimum of forty hours a week doing community service, belongs to the 4-H Club, eschews Bud Light and Maui Wowie, and the police force in Canton, Illinois had to be reduced to one septuagenarian on a Schwinn because of lack of youthful indiscretions. Do I hear another wail of pain for a savaged segment of the species? Or is it possible that the age-group that includes Johnny D., the group for whom knife-kill flicks and Spring Break movies are made because that is the group that spends its newspaper route and chore money to see such films, is an age-group that does not consider films of excessive mad violence a guilty pleasure, but an openly-stated staple of its intellectual (?) diet?

  There is a critique of an important new film somewhere in this essay; but let me run one of my little digressions on you . . . as lead-in to that critique. By way of offering Johnny D. and all of his clean-scrubbed, god-fearing Skippy age-group in Canton, Illinois some data that may persuade them their Frank Capra-like town must be a singular, an anomalous Valhalla, free of the horrors that afflict the rest of the nation. And the digression is this:

  On Wednesday, March 27, 1985, at about four in the afternoon, I drove off the CBS Studio Center lot where we'd been filming The Twilight Zone—one sort of world in which I live from time to time—and entered the real twilight zone. I had been asked (as it turned out, I'd been conned) to speak to the inmates of Central Juvenile Hall. Anybody under eighteen who had committed a crime in Los Angeles serious enough to have drawn time inside, was to be my audience. About seven hundred boys, I'd been told by the "recreation director," name of Ford. It seemed weird to me . . . to be asked to come and lecture kids that age . . . for the most part hardcases convicted of everything from shoplifting to aggravated assault to manslaughter. It had been years since I'd worked with juvenile delinquents, and though I'd spoken at joints where the population had been adults pulling hard time, this was a situation that somehow didn't parse.

  Central Juvie, as they call it, is located at the ass-end of nowhere on Eastlake Avenue down in the center of the old city. It is like every other grand slam I've ever entered—big, square, squat and ominous—as much iron and concrete as you'd ever want to be inside—and though Ford was pleasant enough, I soon realized I'd been jobbed by one of the kids working as trusty for him. This kid, unlike all the others I encountered that evening, had been remanded for boosting thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment; a kid from an upper-class family in the posh Pacific Palisades section of L.A. He was a con man of the first order, and he had been reading my books, and had decided that meeting me would be a nice break in his otherwise boring routine. So he'd lied when he'd called me, telling me that he was an assistant recreation director; he'd lied when he'd told me that the staff had asked him to contact me as part of their "recreation" program; he'd lied when he'd told me the kids were big fans of my work and were anxious to hear what I might have to say about this'n'that.

  But I was in it before I figured out that I'd been hustled. (Remember: your brain never outgrows its need to have games run on it.)

  I had imagined it would be one session of talking to the few inmates who gave a damn that a live human being had come in to take up the slack of their empty hours, but I soon found out that it would be three separate encounters. The older kids were assembled at one time, the younger at another, and a third off-the-cuff presentation after I'd had dinner with them. Jail food is no better now than it was years ago when I'd been compelled to eat it.

  All went fairly well through the first two meetings. There were mostly trusties at the dinner thing. And the younger kids in the second get-together responded well enough to anecdotes about old gang days in Brooklyn and running away from home and staying smart enough to avoid people who'd skin you . . . the kind of bullshit a fifty-year-old man hopes won't bore a ten-year-old kid serving time for bludgeoning an eighty-year-old woman for her social security money and food stamps. I don't fool myself that I was of any value beyond distraction of the same sort that could be provided by watching a mouse work on a slice of Wonder Bread. All I wanted to accomplish—after I got hip to what was really happening—was to recount enough anecdotes not to bore the ass off them. It went fairly well.

  Then came the session for the older boys who had been fed on the second shift, who had been given the head 'em up, move 'em out treatment through the showers, and who had been ordered to attend the evening's festivities. Under the direction of guards with billy clubs—evident but not used—seventy or so teenaged boys were herded into a large day room with chairs set up around the perimeter. My chair was in the center of the ring.

  They looked at me as if I'd come from Mars. Or Beverly Hills. The latter no more alien than the former to street kids from Watts and the barrio. I confess to trepidation: only twice, in all the times I have been inside the joint as a visitor, have I felt fear. Once, on a journey to Death Row at San Quentin (about which I've written elsewhere) . . . and at Central Juvie that evening, surrounded by kids as cold and mean as any I've ever been around. These were children who had killed, raped, set fires that incinerated whole families; who had been in pachuco street gangs since they could walk, who had been heavy dopers since they could swallow, who had discovered just how crummy the world can be for those the city pretends don't exist. (Not knee-jerk Liberalism, only pragmatic observation.) Few of them could read anything beyond the level of comic books, all of them came with a freightload of anger and distrust that could be physically felt. They sat there, under the gaze of the guards, waiting and watching this Martian from Beverly Hills.

  I'd sent on ahead, earlier that week, a carton of paperbacks. Fifty mint copies of Memos from Purgatory, a book I'd written about gangs, and about being in jail. So now, seeing the veil that hung between me and my "audience," I asked one of the guards if the books had been given to the kids. (Hoping, I suppose, that the reality of holding a book in one's hands would lend some credibility to the person sitting in front of them.)

  All the boys looked at one of the guards, a man who seemed to be in charge. He looked chagrined for a moment, then muttered that the box had been kept in the office. I got the immediate message that those books had been picked over by the staff, and if the occasion presented itself to reward one of the inmates, a paperback book might be liberated from the cache.

  I said, "Well, I'll tell you what: let's haul that box out and we'll pass around some books so these guys know I'm at least what I say I am."

  There was a moment's hesitation. The guard was clearly not overjoyed with my suggestion. But there wasn't much he could do about it. Not in front of seventy pairs of eyes watching to see where the control was going to come to rest.

  He nodded to the guard nearest the door, and he left. In a few minutes the box had bee
n shlepped in, and set at my feet. It had been opened. Ten or fifteen copies were gone. I asked the boy nearest me to assist, and we handed out as many of the books as remained. I gave them a few minutes to examine the artifacts, and then the weirdness that prompts this digression began.

  "Hey, man," one of the kids said, turning the book over and over in his hands, "what is that?"

  I thought he was kidding. "It's a book. I wrote it."

  "No it ain't," he said.

  "Like hell,"' I said. "It's my book . . . I wrote it."

  "How do I know that?"

  "Because it's got my name on the front cover, bigger than the title."

  "The what?"

  "The title. The name of the book."

  "Where's that?"

  I realized at that point that he wasn't hosing me. He had no idea what a title was, and maybe couldn't even read it—or my name—if he did understand which was which.

  I got up and walked across the big circle to him. The others watched, still holding their copies as if they were plates of something wet and slippery they'd been ordered to eat. I leaned over the kid and pointed to my name. "See that. 'Harlan Ellison.' That's me."

  "How come?"

  "Because I wrote it."

  "What'cha mean, you wrote it? You wrote this?" And his ringer pointed to the letters that made up my name above the title. It took me a moment to understand that he thought I'd been saying I'd written those two words. "No," I said, very carefully, riffling the pages of the book he held, "I wrote all of this. Every word in here."

  "Get outta town!" he said, and I could see other boys in their chairs also riffling the pages, as if they'd never examined a book this close up in their lives. He didn't believe me.

  "I'm not kidding." I said. "This's what I do for a living. I write books and movies and tv."

  He looked at me with the look that says you got to open the sack before I'll believe there's a cat in there. "How do I know that's you?"

  I turned the book over. My picture was on the back cover. That should do it. "That's me," I said.

  He looked closely at me, hovering over him, then he looked at the photo again. "No, it ain't."

  Kafka had programmed the evening. "Sure it is," I said, "look at it . . . that's me . . . can't you see it?"

  "No it ain't," he said. "This guy ain't wearin' no glasses."

  Miguel De Unamuno once wrote: "In order to attain the impossible one must attempt the absurd."

  I took off my glasses. "They took that picture of me about five years ago," I said. "It's me. Look close." He looked, and looked back, and looked at the photo again; and reluctantly he decided I wasn't lying to make myself a big man. Then he riffled the pages again. "You wrote all this in here?"

  I nodded. "Can you read it?"

  He got cold and angry. "Yeah. I can, if I want to." I didn't push it.

  But when I returned to my chair, with most of them still holding the books as if they didn't know what to do with such alien objects, one of them yelled across the room, "You write movies?"

  "Yeah. And the stuff you see on teevee," I said, thankful for any point of entry.

  And here's where the digression ties in.

  Another kid yelled, "You write that Friday the Thirteen, Part Two?"

  "No," I said, smiling, not knowing what was about to transpire, "I don't like movies where people get stuck with icepicks. I don't even go to that kind of—"

  (What an asshole, Ellison! Don't just put in the time and make the best of a bum deal, don't just try to keep them distracted for an hour, be a hotshot: give 'em a moral! Jeezus, what a nitwit, Ellison! Go get your brain lubed.)

  I may still have been speaking, but they didn't hear it. They were now yelling back and forth to one another. They were, for the first time, animated, interested, excited. And here's what they were saying:

  "Oh, yeah, man, didju see that part where the woman gets the axe in her back?"

  "Yeah, that was cool. She wuz crawlin' 'cross the floor, an' the guy was cut-tin' on her!"

  "That was okay, but you see that one where the guy stuck that bitch through the mouth with the power drill an' the guy who's comin' to save her sees the drill come down through the ceiling upstairs?!!!"

  "Oooh, yeah! That was cool . . . but didju see . . . "

  How, I wondered insanely, could he remember which part movie of the Friday the 13th series it had been?

  I tried shouting into that maelstrom of voices. Almost every kid in the room was enthusiastically recounting his favorite slaughter scene to some kid sitting in the circle. And their voices rose and rose in the cage, and they got into it, warmed it in their mouths, relishing every nuance, recounting every cinematic trick that had been used to hook them—squirting eyeballs, faces ripped away in bloody strips, limbs torn off but still quivering, the stroke of the muscled arm as the razor came away festooned. And on, and on, and on . . .

  When I left Central Juvie, the recreation director Ford, having had an evening of recreation, took pleasure in my stunned condition. The nice white boy from showbiz looked as if he'd been gutted. He thanked me prettily for donating my valuable oh so valuable time to these deserving unfortunates; and he smiled straight and hard and with obvious amusement into my look of horror; and I stumbled out into the lightless, empty parking lot, got into my car, dropped my keys, fumbled in the darkness for them, and got out of there as if the demons of hell were after me.

  Not for the first time did I cast back in memory to the time Bob Heinlein described to me the horror he had felt when he'd learned that Charlie Manson adored Stranger in a Strange Land, thought of it as his bible, and had named his child Valentine Michael Smith. But for the first time I knew how Bob had felt. For the first time, in all the times I had had that intellectual discussion with myself and others about the responsibility of what a writer writes, was I frozen at the point of knowledge that yes, maybe, yes, what we write has a demonstrable effect on them.

  Don't ask me, please, to identify "them." I mean the them who go to see larger-than-life-size mayhem on the silver screen and think of those fantasies of gore as templates for reality.

  These films that teenagers go to see so avidly. These films that make box-office millions from ticket sales to teenagers. These films that John D. Payne of Canton, Illinois tells me "his age-group" does not condone, if I read the psychometric messages correctly.

  These secret icons. These guilty pleasures.

  No, I'm not talking about those guilty pleasures. At least, I don't think I am. What I'm talking about, is secretly loving the films of Ken Russell, the way you secretly love Baby Ruth bars and Gilligan's Island reruns, and won't cop to such love in open court. I think what I'm talking about is admiring and secretly loving the violence and ruthlessness in Ken Russell films, brought to these pages now on the release of Russell's latest film, Gothic (Virgin Vision and Vestron Pictures).

  Ken Russell. Where do I begin . . .

  Once I wrote that, in my view, there were only seven genius-level directors currently working in film. Just seven. That is, Directors. Unmistakable talents of the highest order of Art. I named them: Altman, Coppola, Fellini, Kurosawa, Resnais, Kubrick and (then alive) Buñuel. I hastened to add that this list was not intended to denigrate the work of other directors, merely that I saw all the others as craftspersons. As creative intellects of greater or lesser ability—from, say, Woody Allen and David Cronenberg and Ron Howard above, to Brian De Palma and Frank Perry post-1974 and Alan Rudolph (always) below. (Not to mention Richard Land, Mark L. Lester and Joe Zito, from whom all is dross and chaff.)

  I fudged the list. I was reluctant to endanger the credibility of that list of seven by including Ken Russell. But if my definition of directorial genius is the one by which my opinions stand or fall, then Russell makes that short-list, despite his lunacy and colossal pratfalls, his mind-boggling gaffes and infantile obsessions.

  (Definition: the genius director is one whose work bears little or no resonance of any predecessor; whose
work is so determinedly his that even if you walk in during the middle of the film, you can look up and say, "Fellini" or "Kurosawa"; whose work is never safe, never calm, never predictable; whose work never elicits the phrase, as one leaves the theater, "That was a nice film." Examples: Providence; Paths of Glory; Dersu Uzala; The Godfather, Part Two; La Strada; McCabe and Mrs. Miller; Los Olvidados.)

  There is no other Fellini, no other Kubrick, no other Kurosawa. Try to think of one, Try to fit any others into all the points of that compass. Some come close. Some may yet reach that Apennine headiness of individuality. Most will, at best, only get as staggeringly superlative as Capra or Ford or Von Stroheim or Wilder at their breathtaking best. That is not, as you can see, chopped liver.

  But there is a craziness, a disregard for approbation, a dismissal of posterity, a dangerous recklessness in those seven and in Ken Russell (and in Orson Welles), that sets them above and apart. In my view.

  Notwithstanding all of the preceding, no one will hit me with a brick if I name the seven and say they can't be touched; but let me add that guilty pleasure Ken Russell, and all of my well-ordered theorizing crumbles. Laughter begins. People will point their fingers and then make circular motions with that finger alongside their ear. They will stare and wonder how anyone who admires Kurosawa can even tolerate the blatancy, the gagging bad taste, the ridiculousness of Ken Russell! I mean, fer pete's sake, do you remember that idiotic scene in The Music Lovers where Russell accompanied the cannons in the "1812 Overture" with the heads being blown off mannequins bearing the visages of characters from Tchaikovsky's life? Come on! That was sophomoric . . . no, hell, it was downright dopey!