The aphorist Olin Miller has said, "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory."
For those who have read Stephen King's The Tommyknockers and continue to endure the frisson of déjà vu, I suggest you rent the videocassette of Five Million Years to Earth (1968). And when you compare them, understand that I do not in even the tiniest way suggest that Stephen King cops the work of other writers. Let me say that again, even stronger, so no one of even the most diminished capacity can read into my words the ugly intimation: Stephen King does not steal. He's too good to have to steal. But in the realm of sf/fantasy there are ideas that we rework and re-rework, recast and refashion, expand and transmogrify, that become common coin. James Blish was not the first writer to use the "enclosed universe" concept, but who would deny his reinterpretation of Bob Heinlein's "Universe" as the extraordinary "Surface Tension"? And if Heinlein was sparked to write The Puppet Masters after being enthralled by Wells's War of the Worlds, is there anyone idiot enough to suggest it was plagiarism?
No, literary crossover happens. And we are all enriched by it.
But "The Prize of Peril" is a richer way of telling the story at hand than The Running Man, especially as debased by Steven de Souza and Schwarzenegger. The lie we are fed, is the lie that The Running Man is a fresh, bold, new idea.
And if we look at The Hidden, from a screenplay by Robert Hunt, we can see the basic plot core of Hal Clement's famous novel of interplanetary cops-and-robbers, Needle. And we can see The Hidden ripped off for television as NBC's Something Is Out There, the pilot of which aired recently, with the promise that if there is a Fall Season, we'll be getting Hal Clement's Needle as a series written and produced by people who think Something Is Out There is only first-generation theft, when it all proceeds from Clement . . . who won't see a cent of the millions these arrivistes will rake in.
The lie we are told is that these watered-down, scientifically illiterate, mook-level ripoffs are the Real Thing. And that is why, in installment 30 ½ of this column, I urged the Science Fiction Writers of America to reinstate the Dramatic Writing category in the Nebula awards. If sf writers don't move to quash the lie, then who will? And if the readers and writers in the genre don't come to their senses and stop accepting this institutionalized theft, on which the lie floats blissfully, then those of you who praise dreck like The Running Man deserve no better than you get. Behind that dreadful door through which you, as innocent moviegoers, pass to nullify your reason with special effects and the idolatry of Schwarzeneggers and Stallones and Michael J. Foxes, lies the awful truth that the treasurehouse of ideas sf has filled since (at least) 1926, is being systematically looted by people who sneer at the concept of primacy of ownership of the creators.
As coda to this essay, and to satisfy Brian Siano of Philadelphia, and the others who requested it, let me make my feelings known about Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al.
Somewhere in the commercially ongoing practice of (how shall I put this delicately) "Idolizing Meat" there is a nubbin of rationale that has always escaped me.
Idolizing Meat may have been started in 1917 when the silent film actor Otto Elmo Linkenhelter was retitled Elmo Lincoln, and cast as the first incarnation of Burroughs's lord of the jungle in Tarzan of the Apes . . . but there are very likely a dozen even earlier isometric idols that cine-historians can point out.
But thereafter, fer shoor, the film industry mentality has gifted us with one muscle bound matinee idol after another, from Victor Mature and Steve Reeves to the current batch of melon-smugglers—a curl of Cro-Magnons, perhaps?—whose thespic abilities seem to me best subsumed in the quote from Dorothy Parker, or Alexander Wollcott, or somebody swell like that, who commented that a certain actress had flung her talent the full range from A to B.
I speak now of the cinematic lineal descendants of Johnny Weismuller, Buster Crabbe, and Gordon Scott: the vacuous Miles O'Keeffe, the anthracitelike Dolph Lundgren, the spectacularly untalented Sam J. Jones, to whom human speech does not appear to be a natural tongue, and those rara avae, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (were there ever two more perfect names for such as these?), who have transcended species, perhaps even phylum.
If one cannot fathom the mythic pull of the tongue-tied, lumbering beefcake as exemplified by Mature or Lundgren (and dontcha just know that in their heart of hearts they all want to assay the role of Hamlet), there is at least an inkling of what it is that draws us to the last of this parade of Idolized Meat.
Stallone first captured our respect and affection by turning his life into an American success story worthy of Horatio Alger, and then gave us a genuine sternum punch of an object-lesson in our own schizoid national character by JekyllHydeing into a Rocky/Rambo gaucherie of arrogance, insolence, brutality, and crippled expectations.
Schwarzenegger departs from the enigma of beefcake through the exeunt left of having demonstrated a cynical sense of humor about himself, about "the business," and about the archetypes he is supposed to represent. The superman, the unstoppable engine, the noble savage. Any man who can make a joke on himself about how much more gracefully the stop-motion robot in Terminator moves than he does, is a man whose career as an actor might well outdistance mere testosterone.
But as Michael Healy points out in the review I quoted earlier, the sneaky pleasure we derived from watching Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron and Terminator is absent from humorless, jaundiced slaughterfests like Commando, Raw Deal, Predator and, most particularly, The Running Man.
This film is the latest in a demonstration of how paucive intelligences will loot the treasurehouse. It knows nothing of the logic of science fiction. Nothing of the internal tensions that make sf work on the screen, à la Blade Runner. Nothing of extrapolation along sensible lines. This is one of those utterly unworkable "future societies" that makes no sense, save in the rathole rationalizations of know-nothings and studio heads. There is no characterization—which in a film that stars Schwarzenegger is a knife through the gut—not even for an actor as compelling as Yaphet Kotto. They are set-ups, to be gunned down for the predilection of thug audiences for whom the judgment scale of quality is measured in liters of blood and spilled entrails.
And so Schwarzenegger's Ben Richards becomes, in the clubby hands of Steven E, de Souza and director Paul Michael Glaser (who I can never remember which he was, Starsky or Hutch), nothing but a chunk of Idolized Meat with bad puns grafted on.
If this film has any claim to posterity, it will be due to the spectacular performance of Richard Dawson as Damon Killian, the tv game show host. It is a performance so dazzling that one can assume Dickie Dawson wasn't this year's Oscar winner for Best Male Supporting because of the redolent nature of the film itself.
And the crusher that denied Dawson his moment of international acclaim is the same crusher that flattens us, as aficionados of the literature of imagination. The crusher is the Little White Lie that steals from the treasurehouse and dulls the patina of the artifact, and substitutes Idolized Meat for the rapture of the sense of wonder. And gets you to pay for, and then praise indiscriminately, the devalued product.
Can it be that you have been reduced to the lowest idiot expectancy because of the untutored nature of the Illiterate Audience?
Well, let me leave you with the words of Stephen King, who has often said the best a writer can hope for, from Hollywood is when "they buy the rights, pay you half a million dollars, for some reason never make the movie—but you get to keep the half million without the embarrassment of some awful film coming out."
Which is a whole helluva lot sweeter than no one knowing Sheckley or Clement were there first, and ain't gonna see a kopeck for the error of cleverness and early arrival.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / September 1988
INSTALLMENT 32:
In Which The Switch Is Thrown
It often seems laughable to me how I, and other film critics, ceaselessly belabor the lack of verisimilitude in films. As a practitioner of
fiction—
the pure cobbling-up of lies that have the semblance of truth but which are, at splashdown, merely inventions abutting Reality only where necessary to sucker in the reader
—it does frequently seem to me to be a hypocritical carp that operates off a double standard, serving the critic in a not entirely respectable fashion.
Like demanding a greater nobility from oppressed peoples than that demonstrated by those who oppress them. South Africa, for instance. Botha's government can repress, brutalize, maim, lock-out, censor, incarcerate, and kill—and that's "maintaining order." But let a Homelands black pick up a rock and shag it at an Afrikander with a water cannon, and it's "terrorist activity."
Yet when we reach the target area of criticism, it is just such an unsettling absence of verisimilitude that looms largest in our judgments of a film's worth. Our trust can be lost in an instant. Just one flip we don't believe, and we're off the menu. Go figure.
I'm not talking about technical or factual errors that don't impede the flow of story. (The kind that apologists for films, as well as arrogant producers and studio flacks, sneer at, and say, "Who the hell will know the difference?" Thus allowing, even condoning, the perpetuation of intentional or just dumbheaded corruptions of fact for "story value.") I'm not talking about releasing a film titled Krakatoa: East of Java, when that volcanic island actually lies in the Sunda Strait, west of Java. I'm not talking about having the sun set in the east in the recent film Sunset, or having the sun rising in the west in The Green Berets. I'm not talking about having Metropolis (which is New York City) and the Great Wall of China simultaneously in daylight in Superman IV, though they're on opposite sides of the planet, Daily or otherwise. I'm not talking about ex-slaves in the crowd scenes of Spartacus wearing wristwatches.
That sort of thing is pooh-pooh'd by the same phylum of semi-literate plant life that excuses the soundtrack explosions in deep space and the whoooosh of spaceships as they dart around in imbecile imitation of Spads and Fokkers (a convention now so institutionalized that I've thrown up my hands and swear never to mention it again). No, I'm not talking about such thousand natural shocks to which the flesh is heir.
I'm talking about the visual shticks that make us groan. The moments we are expected to accept, in action films usually, that wrench from an audience the involuntary cry of, "Oh fer chrissakes, gimme a break!"
I suppose, for want of proper ThinkTank stats on this, that something like a Common Sense Switch cuts in, when we're asked to believe the foma of filmmakers. We seem to have no trouble accepting, say, the convention of Wile E. Coyote standing in midair, just beyond the lip of the cliff, looking around for the Road Runner, scratching his head, perfectly safe in defiance of the laws of the physical universe, just buoyed up by nothing, till he glances down and sees the abyss beneath his feet. We gladly accept that he has time to register a forlorn double-take, still standing in midair, until the epiphany of imminent gravity sinks in . . . and then he falls. But let the same sort of thing happen in live-action, and we deliver a raspberry at the screen that is as sincere as it is succulent. What I'm talking about is:
• James Bond hop-skipping across the backs of the alligators in Live and Let Die.
• Schwarzenegger in Commando, falling 350 feet from an L10-11, into a swamp, getting up without even shaking his head, and trotting blithely away at peak efficiency to do battle.
• "Bones" McCoy being such an inept physician that he injects himself by mistake in the rewritten version of "City on the Edge of Forever."
• The rubber life raft containing Indy, Short Round and Willie not flipping upside-down like buttered bread when it's dropped, as they go over the cliff in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; or the four-foot-tall Short Round karate-kicking into unconsciousness all those six-feet-tall trained thuggee assassins.
• "The best hired killers in the galaxy" using heat-seeking laser rifles that lock onto a target automatically, regularly missing their first shots, so they alert Sean Connery to each bushwhack in Outland.
• The hi-tech choppers in Blue Thunder strafing each other in the center of downtown high-rise Los Angeles, blowing up buildings that rain glass and concrete on crowds, and harming not one pedestrian, save when they are pelted by fried chickens.
• Robocop firing through the skirt of a woman hostage, missing her pudenda, and searing off the balls of the thug holding her up in front of him as a shield.
• Stallone, in Rambo: First Blood II apparently doing what cannot be done by a human being, when he literally flies up from a lake to the port of a chopper hovering twenty- five feet above the water. Apparently kicking off from the lake bottom and defying water pressure to break all world's championship high jumping records.
• And my all-time favorite: the assassins of Rame Tep, by the hundreds, come-and-go to-and-from a gigantic wooden pyramid built smack in the middle of Victoria's London, in Young Sherlock Holmes, and no one has ever noticed the tons of building materials schlepped into the area, nor heard the sound of sawing and hammering, nor paid any attention to the skinheaded hordes frequenting the vicinity.
What I'm talking about here is, "Oh, fer chrissakes, gimme a break!"
In that instant, the Common Sense Switch is thrown, and they've lost us. From that instant forward, they have to work very hard, very diligently, and with absolute purity of intent to win back our willing suspension of disbelief. (For all of us, that is, save those undiscriminating filmgoers who perceive of their lot in life as being one with the doorknob: to be turned and shoved and left covered with smudgy handprints. Those who expect to be lied to, and don't think they can do anything about it. Those who cannot summon up sufficient feelings of self-worth to believe they are due something truer and more inventive. Those who believe in boom! and whoooosh!)
It is the single cinematic common denominator that brooks no defense, that unites even navel-lint examiners like me with F/X-dulled adolescents like a very few of you. Such importunate demands on audience credibility can be seen, and the groans are pandemic; whether interpreted by a critic as "the film suffers from a herky-jerky rhythm" or by the casual filmgoer as "I didn't believe it . . . it was dumb." Dumb, as in dull-witted, stupid; not as in speechless.
That having been said, I submit (without the faintest ort of anger or outrage, truly more in sorrow than glee) that the instant throwing of the Common Sense Switch by whole theatersfull of movie nuts is the reason Willow (MGM/Lucasfilm) died a quick and awful death at the box office, while Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Touchstone) has made more than one hundred and fifty million dollars to the date I write this. And both deserve what they got: though the former is live-action, meticulously rendered with as much state of the art cleverness as a $35 million budget can buy in terms of the most accomplished technicians in the world; and the latter is utterly wacky, combining jaw-popping animation and live-action playars pantomiming and reacting against toons that were not there when they spoke their lines. The former, for all its heavy-breathing and sweaty struggles to make fantasy realms mimetic, is not for a moment believable. The latter, despite its clearly deranged juxtaposition of animated cartoons and live knockabout comedy, captures our trust from the first frames.
Apart from the awesome risk-taking of Roger Rabbit, from original conception to final cut, there is a surefootedness, an imperial arrogance at its brave beastliness, a confidence in its ability to cajole even Scrooge into adoration, that one cannot find in parallel unless one goes back to Alien, Fantasia, Pinocchio or the 1939 Thief of Bagdad.
(The film becomes a yardstick. You show me someone who has seen Roger Rabbit, whose face doesn't break into an idiot grin, who doesn't fall over him/herself to recollect a shot, a shtick, a boffo line that brought convulsions, who prefaces any remarks with "Well, I have problems with it and I'll show you a Grinch unfit to live with decent people. You show me someone who didn't like, who didn't love that film, and I'll show you someone whose opinion on anything should not be trusted. In a world ass-deep
in cupidity, ineptitude, meanspiritedness, fanaticism, random violence and anguish, how often are we given a treasure like Roger Rabbit, a dear soft fuzzy thing that asks only that we be happy and roll around in it like a puppy in a goose-down comforter? You show me a damfool who carps about anything in Roger Rabbit, and I'll show you . . . someone who likes eating lima beans.)
Deponent sayeth this: the fault lies not in its stars, but in its basic conception. Willow, that is. I'll get to the conception of Roger Rabbit anon. Because of its excellence, it requires less attention. We learn more from failures than from successes, because if a success is based on originality, then by deconstructing it, by trying to analyze it and codify it, we only find the replicable elements. And that's of value primarily if we're trying to emulate the success in an imitation. By the very nature of its originality, it ran risks that could not be gauged beforehand. It's akin to dissecting a butterfly to learn why it flies as it does, and in so doing, we destroy the beauty that was its essence. And since this column is foursquare against cheap imitations, we need not shred Roger Rabbit merely to discover that it was the first of its kind to go as far as it did. We know that. And we know that's why it wows. But Willow falls far and falls fast and falls flat: from which height we can learn the angle and severity of the trajectory of failure.
Harlan Ellison's Watching Page 54