Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  59: 27 MARCH 70

  VIDEO VOYEURISM: PART TWO

  The sexuality of television commercials has long been of the double-entendre variety. That’s nothing new. But (as my first two examples indicated, in Part 1 of this dissertation) two important polarizations have come to be the modus operandi of almost every sex-oriented commercial going out over the tube these days.

  The first posture, what might well be termed a right-wing reactionary stance, is grounded in the archaic concept of male supremacy. As typified by the “Love’s a Little Color” commercial (that opened Part 1 of this series), it tenders the image of the modern American woman as a vapid plaything of bright colors and fluffed plumage; a tapioca-brained bastardization of the few remaining feminine traits left to intelligent women who refuse to be typed as militant dyke Liberation haranguers (as corrupt a stereotype as we’ve had foisted on us recently) or Barbie dolls. It says that women serve their best function—according to these commercials that function is as man-trap—when they remain coy, confused, well-oiled, and transparently ridiculous. In this polarized vision of womanhood, Madison Avenue has marshaled them, ushering them on camera to dupe the little ladies out there in the Great American Heartland who serve as fifth columnists of their own freedom by a mama-instilled belief that they truly are no better than live-in maids with fucking privileges.

  At the opposite pole is what one might term the “new left” method of marketing sex in commercials. It plays openly to the liberated woman—the Virginia Slims commercial is the classic of the form—and tells her she can have sex whenever, wherever, and however she wants it, without guilt, without restraints, without even a scintilla of doubt as to retaining her individuality or preeminence over the males of her acquaintance. It very carefully shies away from the lesbian look (in a show of perceptivity that should only hip us more acutely to how into it admen really are). It flashes with color and a touch of sadomasochism, and I know of few men watching these items who don’t fall right in line with Woody Allen’s old secret dream—“I dreamed it was my birthday and they wheeled in a big cake and a gorgeous girl popped out of it with a whip and long black leather boots…and she dominated me.”

  Thus, operating from a pinnacle of understanding of these attitudes, we can categorize almost all of the sexually stimulating spots currently on view.

  Almost all. There are, of course, those few rare examples that display a shade of cunning, a Machiavellian insight of misdirection, a plethora of unconscious symbols such that our two major categories simply don’t hold them.

  Let me describe one.

  Bread is the staff of life. Remember that adage. The operative word is staff.

  Scene: Mother is in the kitchen, looking out through the back window into the rear yard. Out there, smiling and doing a buddy-up number are Dad and Sonny. They are attempting to rig up a tent for Sonny. They keep trying to get it raised, but it keeps falling down. They are trying to get it up, don’t you see? Trying to get an erection. They can’t get it up. They try and try, but they simply cannot get it up. The poles keep falling down.

  Mother smiles a knowing smile. She knows what to do. So she proceeds to make them sandwiches of Wonder Bread…the staff of life. Smug, in control of the situation that has stymied impotent, Bumsteadlike hubby and tied-to-apron-strings Sonny (whose masculinity, I’ll take bets, will be in serious question in the near future), she feeds them the necessary sex food, and in the next scene we see Mother standing beside them, beaming with sated satisfaction as Dad and Sonny get it up. The tent is erect, rigid.

  Let me describe another.

  There is a Dial Soap commercial in which a doll of a girl is leading a guided tour. As she walks in and out of rooms and buildings with her charges, we hear a tinklebell of sweetness, and suddenly we have subliminal flashes of this same cupcake in the shower. Nude, of course; commercials deal strictly with reality (and if you thought otherwise, disabuse yourself), and this girl is real if nothing else. She bathes bareass, unlike most of us who wear flight suits and scuba gear in our showers.

  She is succulent as hell, rubbing her smooth limbs, and as we shuttle back and forth between her bouncing, assured vivacity and her almost pathological attention to cleanliness, we understand that it is because she is so carnally devoted to keeping her epidermal layers down to the bare minimum that she is so self-possessed. She can be close to all those people for extended periods because she is a water baby. And, of course, all of that is bullshit. The implication is that if you swab yourself down with Dial nineteen times a day, bubie, you’ll look like that chick. And even that is bullshit, because the sole purpose of the hype is to show us a pretty girl in the buff.

  Sex! TV is lovely!

  And the loveliest thing about it is that, aside from the two polarizations discussed earlier, and their inherent hypocrisies, and the subliminal symbolism commercials, most of what we’re getting these days is just pure enjoyment of the isn’t-a-beautiful-woman-nice-to-look-at variety. All the panty hose ads. The feminine hygiene ads. The low-cal and diet drink ads. They all cut to sources. One panty hose advertisement doesn’t even bother with the most acceptable extraneousness…all it shows are the legs of a girl as she puts the things on. Now, for leg men in the audience that is Valhalla. For tit men it’s murder, but those of us who are leg men always felt tit men were weird anyhow. But that’s another story.

  I don’t want you to think, however, that such surfeits of joy should blind us to the evils of some of the sex commercials. The insidious ugliness of the Tiparillo ad, in which a very groovy, hippy-style chick, in attendance at a straight party, is hustled by a balding square through use of his phallic Tipa rillo. The Swift Butterball Ham commercial, in which the eighth-most-incredible-looking woman in the world moistens her lips and caresses her Butterball the way we might wish she caressed us: a sex substitute if ever I saw one. The ghastly Silva-Thins commercial that tries to tell us women are at their best when they’re slim and rich.

  These, and others of their sort, are corruptions of the pure sex message being delivered by television today. They are obviously the products of amorously constipated admen and their female counterparts. They are akin to the anti-female designers who feel uplifted only when they have most thoroughly destroyed any resemblance between their mannequins and human beings.

  Blessedly for all of us, they are in the minority. Most commercials use sex as it was intended to be used, as a corrupter of morality, as a polluter of our precious bodily fluids, as a leader-astray of the young, and as a balm to our weakened spirits.

  Yes, tv has finally come into its own. It has found a job it can do, and do well. It can purvey sex. And it can do it without recourse to any of the shabby trickery of history’s previous merchandisers. It never once has to show us the actual act. No offensive rutting and throbbing organs, no smutty language and bad taste.

  All it has to do is tease us.

  Thereby making sex more undercover and considerably dirtier, despite all the soap ads.

  And as I’ve said repeatedly, all this nonsense about sex being pure and sweet and uplifting is disastrous. If it’s clean and frank and open, anyone can do it, and that takes all the fun out of it.

  If sex ain’t dirty, I don’t want any part of it.

  So thanks to you, O tv tube, for bringing sex back where it belongs. Into our living rooms.

  There’s a breakdown in logic there, somewhere, but I’m too horny to think about it right now.

  60: 3 APRIL 70

  I want to clear up some loose ends this week, and then talk a little about the shows that have been axed…and the new ones coming on to replace them. But, as I say, there are a few straggly ends that need to be tied off.

  The first is the F-310 matter. While this is by no means the final word, I wanted you to know the mail has been inundating me, from all over the state, and by way of a progress report, let me say that I think I was, in fact, duped by my own naïveté and my need to believe in The Good Fairy. Enough of you have pa
tted me on the head, however, for me to stop pulling this mea culpa shit; and as you have suggested in many communiqués, anybody can be had once. It has taught me a much-needed lesson, and in a completely unexpected manner it has shown me that I’m not nearly as cynical a bastard as I’d thought. More to the point, I was hoping it was true, and nothing speaks more appropriately to the attitude than a quote from Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936): “In order to attain the impossible one must attempt the absurd.”

  Expecting Standard Oil to do something for the commonweal—without their megalomaniacal need for usurious profits—was frankly absurd.

  Even so, I still have hopes that the worst part of the whole shuck is that the gasoline is no worse than any of the others. It doesn’t look that way at the moment, just from preliminary information; it looks as though F-310 does as much harm as good. When I know for certain, I’ll either write a straight-news piece for the Freep, quite apart from this column (where the space allocated to F-310 is getting to be an oppressive drag), or I’ll sum it up as briefly as possible and put it to rest. Till then, my advice is to distrust everything you see in tv commercials, including that saintly little old man with the English accent who wants to sell you books of picture stories from the Bible. And don’t use your cars at all. Just sit at home and take shallow breaths.

  Next on the loose-end agenda is the matter of answering mail. When I started this column, I only received a handful of personal messages, and I religiously answered each one, at least briefly if I was pressed for time. But I suppose it’s a mark of the popularity of the column these days (and that cheers me, to be sure) that I get quite a bundle of missives. Where an answer is really required, I still try to answer as many as possible. Where it’s just a friendly note telling me to keep doing what I’ve been doing, I consider the appearance of subsequent columns to be response enough. And when it’s paranoid horseshit, such as that engendered by Louise Lucks, who is a righteous coo-coo, I dump them and forget them.

  But in the main the problem mail is from people with the best of intentions and the warmest of feelings toward this columnist, who require answers to problems I can’t (or won’t) handle, who want to know where to send scripts, who want me to find agents for them, who want me to critique their scripts or stories or poetry, or who get offended if I advise them I just don’t have the time off from my own work to become a pen pal.

  So this is by way of explanation and appeal. I genuinely dig hearing from you, particularly—as with the F-310 thing—if I need information and you respond as richly as you have in the past. But I’m up to my ass in nine thousand projects, most of which keep me at this devil typewriter eighteen hours a day as it is, and when I get caught up (as I haven’t since 1964), I like just to fall down and relax. Sitting down to answer chatty letters, even from nice people, is a busman’s holiday of the ugliest sort. And relax time comes seldom to me. So, with very little time for extracurricular correspondence, I have to appeal to those of you who write…don’t get pissed off or feel slighted if I don’t respond personally. If what you’ve written is something more than a good luck or well done, if it’s a bitch or a subject you want me to cover, keep watching the columns. I’ll probably get around to you.

  Otherwise I’d never have time to write the stories and screenplays that earn me my living. And as for people like Ms. Luck…save your postage.

  Now, if the nice typesetter has left a one-line space between the last paragraph and this one—to indicate I’m changing the subject—we’ll go on to a preliminary look at the terminal cases in primetime, and their replacements for next season.

  ABC, apart from alphabetically, deserves to be considered first because—as usual—its death rate is five times higher than either NBC or CBS. Among those slated for the guillotine are The Flying Nun, Here Come the Brides, It Takes a Thief, and Land of the Giants, all of which had a healthy run for their money and whose loss won’t cause much breast-beating among the masses. In the case of Land of the Giants, though several of its stars are friends and acquaintances, it is to make happy. The stupidity, vapidity, and eczema-producing banality of this most recent Irwin Allen monstrosity has, for the last two years, brought a wince to the phizzes of anyone even remotely familiar with science fiction. And further joy is ours in the knowledge that Mr. Allen, the Ralph Williams of Television Adventure Series, has no product slated for the new season. But, accepting the theory that bad money drives out good (or that VD can’t be stamped out as long as you have one plague carrier running loose), we can expect him to be back in the dismal future.

  Somewhat more sad-making is the death of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which was a nice show when it started, but which, this season, slipped considerably. I personally attribute this slippage to the caliber of scenarists hired to write the segments. When Joe Banaducci moved on, the quality dropped appreciably. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

  Vanishing, and with no moans of sadness, for they passed through our culture and prime-time slicker than snot on a doorknob (or doo-doo through a colander, depending how vomitous you’ll allow me to get), are such dandies as Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters Hour, The Engelbert Humperdinck Show, Pat Paulsen’s Half a Comedy Hour, and Paris 7000. Of this last, the most recent starring vehicle for George Hamilton, the best that can be said is that Mr. Hamilton should have been under it, rather than in it.

  ABC is bringing in a gaggle of gropers, of course, led off by The Young Lawyers, starring Lee J. Cobb and a young actor of uncommon brilliance named Zalman King. It deals with Boston law students who staff a legal aid society, and is based on the excellent mini-movie by Mike Zagor. I suspect this will be the show to watch next season. Cobb (replacing Jason Evers, who name-fronted the pilot mini-movie) is always a joy to watch work, and Zal King is the first likely possibility for superstar since Steve McQueen hung up his hawg leg for a Bullitt.

  Also arriving come September is The Young Rebels. (Do you think ABC has finally gotten hip to the fact that young people aren’t watching tv? Do you think the word young in two of their most important series indicates they’re on to something? Does a chicken have lips? Does a wild bear shit in the woods? Is Ellsworth Bunker a liar?)

  Set in 1777, The Young Rebels is about three members of a Yankee guerrilla band aiding General Washington in his struggle against the stamp tax. It will, of course, parallel contemporary problems. And fighting off the British is pretty safe these days. God forbid Cornwallis had a Chinese cook. (I wonder if they’ll show the first American to fall in the Revolution…a black dude named Crispus Attucks?)

  Vince Edwards lumbers back on camera with Dial Hot Line, based on that gawdawful ABC movie of a few weeks back. In the series Edwards heads up a telephone answering service that “deals with troubled teens who have nowhere else to turn.” I don’t know about you, friends, but if our troubled teens have nowhere else to turn than to Vince Edwards, we are in worse shape than I thought. But…I grow snotty. Onward.

  There are a trio of new sitcoms: The Partridge Family, about a group of rock singers whose mommy heads up the unit; extrapolating cunningly, I parse this to be a vehicle for The Cowsills. Whoopee! The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman doing the Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau roles from the Neil Simon film. Barefoot in the Park, starring Nipsey Russell and Scoey Mitchell, converts the Doc Simon Broadway hit and film from white to black, which is a rather surprising switch, but which gives us pause to observe that what we may be getting here is more white middle-class bullshit done in black drag. After all, Diahann Carroll is still Doris Day with a suntan, if you know what I mean. I’m waiting for a touching, heartwarming situation comedy about a ghetto dweller, his delinquent kids, his wife who slaves as a housemaid, his amusing trips to the unemployment line, his cute encounters with cockroaches and Rattus norvegicus, and his sidesplitting attempts to regain his masculinity in a white world where his only outlet for aggression is kicking the legs off his borax furniture.

  Danny Thomas will be back. After his las
t appearance, on the DANNY THOMAS MELODRAMA CENTURY (or so each hour segment seemed to be), the best we can make thanks for is that it’ll only be a half-hour sitcom. They never know when to go to Sun City, do they, troops?

  I’ll talk more about the sf series, The Immortal, after I’ve seen the new pilot. And the same for Zig Zag, which sounds as though it ought to be about a crash pad full of heads but is actually concerned with a trio of master criminologists. (I like my version better.) And the same for something called The Silent Force, whatever that is. (You don’t suppose it’s tales of Agnew’s Majority, do you…?)

  61: 24 APRIL 70

  By the time you read this, I’ll be back, but as I write it, I’m on the road again. Lectures in Lawrence, Kansas, at the University of Kansas, and at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The other night was the Oscar-cast, Hollywood’s annual spasm of chicanery, and I want to get into that, but I’ll save it for next week…. Something else is on my mind right now.

  And again, dammit, it touches tv only peripherally—in a way I’ll describe later. But by this time, those of you who’ve gritted your teeth and borne it as my mental wanderings (not to mention my corporeal ones) have taken me far afield from the teat will understand that television is frequently only a hook to get to some of the more burning issues of the day…and this week…having encountered something genuinely unsettling during my lecture tour…I frankly state that tv only glancingly involved itself here…and hope you’ll forgive me the transgression.

  Onward.

  (Preamble. My credentials as a vocal foe of repression and conservatism need not be explicated here. I’ve been doing it, not merely writing about it, for quite some time now. I mention these credentials here, at this time, of course, because of what is to follow, and to assure my readers that my allegiances have not changed.)