The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  With the two of them thus bound together in banality, the mod cop splits, leaving the chick—we can only presume—to the tender mercies of higher education.

  Did I mention that Mr. Williams and Judy Pace, the actress who played the girl friend, were black? I didn’t? Perhaps it was because they didn’t sound like any blacks I ever heard. They sounded like The System, and The System is white, so there must have been something wrong with my set’s color control.

  What does all of this say? It says that those series are bastardizations. They relegate the black community once again to proselytizing the party line. They are a shuck.

  They are ostensibly intended to show the black man and woman as normal, functioning members of the society, yet in actuality they are warped views of what’s going on by the aging mickeymice who put these shadow plays together. The producers in their Italian silk kerchiefs and wide belts need more than groovy gear from deVoss to get them into the heart of truth in the streets today. Or even the streets of Laredo, 1883.

  In one series the black man is allowed to vent his frustration and loneliness and hostility only through the use of the gun. We know what jingo propaganda that parallels. In the other series a black man speaks in such an uncool, unhip, untruthful manner that even the dumbest white chick would laugh in his face and call him a sellout.

  The mickeymice rule. They don’t know what the burning gut of the problem is all about, and so they try to shuck us by taking a palm-feel of a high temperature.

  If this is integration on TV, it makes the days of Steppin Fetchit look almost cerebral by contrast.

  * * * *

  3: 18 OCTOBER 68

  Nothing pleases me more than that the major networks had a few of their newsmen dribbled around the streets of Chicago like basketballs. Nothing delights me more than that a few of those arrogant swine with their creepie-peepies got their heads and Arriflexes busted by Daley’s kulaks. The only thing that would have pleasured me more would have been Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley being beaten to guava jelly in full view of the cameras, in the gutter right outside the International Amphitheatre. There is a Yiddish word— quite untranslateable into English—kvell; it means, like, to feel as if the sun were glowing in your tummy; you rock back and forth with contained happiness. I would have kvelled to see “Good night, Chet,” and “Good night, David” said through puffy lips, around Band-Aid Sheer Strips.

  No deep-seated hostility prompts these blood-curdled pronouncements. Though I’m not what might be considered a nonviolent person, I have no animus for the gentlemen of the Video Fourth Estate. My feelings are prompted out of a gut-level desire for justice. The Universe is run in a sloppy manner, I’ll grant you, but overall it has a dandy check-and-balance system, and for justice to be meted out in full, what the newsvideo boys got was not nearly what they deserved. I’ll try to explain.

  In a roundabout way.

  I know a girl who was at the Century City free-for-all. She wasn’t in the area where I was tumbling, but she was there. She’s a third grade teacher in a local grammar school. She went to the demonstration with a doctor of her acquaintance, and two attorneys. They were all dressed in acceptable Establishment garb: little white gloves and a pretty dress for her, suits and ties for the gentlemen. They dressed that way on purpose. They knew that a large segment of the demonstrating crowd would be in battle garb—sandals, hard hats, clothes that could stand sidewalk-scraping—and they wanted to show that all segments of the population were against WW2½. She told me, with a touching show of naïveté, that it seemed as though the television cameras, when panning across the throng, always avoided her little clot of squarely-dressed dissenters, in favor of loving closeups on the scruffiest, most hirsute protesters. I smiled. Of course, baby.

  The news media invariably slant it. Whether it’s anything as flagrant as the prepared protest placards one of the local outlets took to a Valley men’s college for a debate, or as subtle as the proper defamatory word in a seven-minute radio newscast, the reportage is always corrupted so the dissenters look like fuzzy-minded commiesymp idiots (at best).

  There seems to be no question of ethic or morality in the minds of those who write the news, those who program the news, or those who deliver the news. Several friends of mine who work for CBS News here in Los Angeles have confided off-the-cuff that it appalls them, the manner in which the outrage of the minorities is presented. In private they’ll say it, but they haven’t the balls to actually do anything about it. They won’t make protestations to their superiors, they won’t make statements to the newspapers, they won’t back up their hideous parlor-liberalism with anything but muted whispers to activists they milk for inside information.

  So then the hypocrites get a little bloodied, and they shout “police brutality!” You could hear the outrage to the bottom of the Maracot Deep. Well, I’m afraid I can’t feel too upset about it.

  Where were they when the cops turned their bikes into the crowd outside the Century City Hotel? Where were they when fifteen-year-old girls were getting their heads busted on the Strip? Where were they at Columbia and University of Chicago and Berkeley? Where was their outrage then? Ask not for whom the bell tolls, brother reporters: it tolls for every one of you who sell out the people looking to you for truth. And when you reap a little of what you’ve helped sow, don’t come crying back and expect the field troops to feel sorry. It doesn’t work that way. You called the rules of the game, and now you’re uptight because the trolls with their mace and clubs decided it wasn’t how you played the game, it was whether or not you won.

  Which violent thought brings me to the topic of violence—or the lack of same—on prime time TV. Everyone and his Doberman has had his say on this little topic, and having been a man who lost two grand when a segment of a show he wrote was canceled for re-run because it was too violent, I feel I’m as equipped as any dog to comment.

  It would be simple to make an artistic case for violence. All great art from Beowulf to Faulkner’s Intruder In The Dust has demonstrated that violence is often what results in moments of stress, when people under tension must seek release. Conrad, Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, John D. MacDonald, Arthur Miller—all of them bring their characters to the point of no return, and then follows violence. It is the way the machine works. (Note this: physiologically-speaking, while Man’s forebrain, where he does his formulating, has grown larger as the eras passed, his medulla, where the emotions click, has remained the same size as his Neanderthal ancestors’. In effect what we have is a highly-complex thinking machine, able to extrapolate and cogitate and parse, still ruled by the emotions of something little more godlike than a killer ape. Deny this, and you deny the facts. Ignore it, and what emerges artistically is a shuck.)

  A critic in Story Magazine recently ventured, in an article on the literary precedents for violence, that there is an “illiterate vocabulary of violence.” That when all reason fails, there is always the sock on the jaw. It says precisely what it means. There is no arguing with it. It makes a clearly-defined dramatic point. And as the most valid argument for that theory the author cited Melville’s Billy Budd. When Billy, harried and chivvied by the detestable Claggart, finds himself literally unable to vocalize his frustration, or to deny the charges brought against him, the injustice being done to him in all its monstrousness, his futile attempt to speak finds voice in only one possible way—he lashes out and strikes the First Mate, killing him with one punch. Any other solution to the problem would have been illogical, untruthful, fraudulent.

  So then, if violence is necessary to the freedom of creating art, what is it about TV violence that has all the tippy-toe types running scared? What is it that has usually sane and responsible writers, producers and directors signing idiotic advertisements that they will never write violence again? (And thereby castrating themselves, and leaving the door wide-open for more and better network censorship; and proving what liars they are, for we all know if it comes down nitty-gritty to shooting that fight scene
or writing that blood bath, who among them will walk away from the money?)

  What it is, of course, is what George Clayton Johnson, the videowriter, said it was, at a recent brouhaha thrown by the Writers Guild of America, West. He said it was “gratuitous” violence. Let me hit that again: gratuitous violence. And what is that, gentle readers? It is a death onscreen that no one cares about.

  If you’ve traveled through forty minutes of teleplay with a kindly old man who helps crippled children, and you see him shot to death on the steps of the altar where he is telling his beads, you care. You cry for that death. You feel you have lost someone.

  If, on the other hand, Little Joe Cartwright shoots down seventeen faceless hardcases trying to prevent him from snipping that bob’wire on the South Forty, you don’t give a shit. They were extras. They fell and they lay there and that’s that. (And the grossest debasement of the human condition of all, practiced regularly in TV series, is the scene in which someone has been murdered and lies there all through the shot while the remaining actors talk over what they’ll do next. Have you ever been in the same room with a corpse? No? Try it some time, and try carrying on polite conversation while the stiff’s blood and brains seep into the carpet.)

  It is the difference between our being stunned as though struck by a ball-peen hammer when we saw Bobby Kennedy get hit on-camera, or continuing to munch our potato chips through all those newsreel footages of massacres in the Congo. We knew him; whether we dug him or not, he was real, he mattered.

  So the blame, and the solution, lies in the hands of my fellow screenwriters. Most of them couldn’t write their way out of a pay-toilet for openers, and they simply don’t have the craft or the heart to write what matters, what counts, what we can feel and care about. The solution to the question of violence stems from the insanity of the times, of course, but in interpretation it is filtered through the artfulness—or lack of it—of the writers. And then the producers. And then the directors.

  If the shackles of series format were removed from the writing hands of the creators, we would be many long steps toward solving the problem. Dispensing with violence on TV is tantamount to dropping a Bufferin and thinking it’ll cure your cancer.

  And if they decide that all violence must go, I suggest they start not with the innocuous banalities of combat demonstrated on half-wit series like The Outsider or Mannix but with the affectionate handling of freeway decapitations, sniper slayings, race riots and random brutalities delivered blow-by-blow in close close CLOSEUP by the ghouls on the Channel 7 news every night

  Or doesn’t it disturb anyone to see a video newsman shoving his hand-mike down the gullet of a grieving widow on her knees before the burned body of her seven-year-old son?

  * * * *

  4: 25 OCTOBER 68

  Several things perplexed me this last week. The first was the Mitzi Gaynor special on Channel 4, Monday night the 14th. The second was the CBS Playhouse special, J.P. Miller’s 90-minute drama The People Next Door, on Channel 2, Tuesday the 15th. The third was a segment of the Channel 11 Donald O’Connor variety show—Thursday’s offering, the 17th, specifically. They befuddled me, unsettled me, and defied analysis ... until something crummy happened later Thursday night, something that really zapped me and dropped everything into place.

  May I tell you about it? Thank you.

  The Daisy is quiet these nights, since all the lemmings followed the spoor to the Factory and Arthur and the Candy Store. So it’s a good place to go late at night for a cup of coffee and a few dances. After the O’Connor show had been on a while, and my mind had been extruded out through my nostrils, a young lady and I motored down. It was quiet, nice.

  We sat and talked for a while, and then a small podium was set up, and two young men who call themselves “The New Wave” came out. They each carried an unamplified guitar, their hair was stylishly long, they were nice-looking guys, and they mounted the stools on the podium, and they prepared to play.

  At that moment, into the small but polite audience came a table-load of stretch-black knee socks/dark lint-free suits/midnight beard-stippled/powdered and cologned/cigar cellophane crinkling/pure Hollywood types. With their ladies of the evening. They were noisy. That is the most polite way to put it. They were noisy.

  They took a table at the edge of the dance floor, within arms’-length of The New Wave. As the two boys started playing—with great skill and beauty—the egg-suckers began gibbering. Talking, laughing, doing all the square old shticks that old squares pull in the presence of the terror generated in them by youth. (And I finally learned what a tramp is, incidentally. Their chicks were in their twenties—naturally: old impotent squares need fresh meat to reassure them the world isn’t entirely against them, that they aren’t completely turning to ashes in their husks—and the chicks laughed right along at such brilliant bon mots as “Is that a girl or a boy with all that hair?” A tramp is a chick who will laugh at a swine’s gaucheries because she wants something from him, even if it’s only another stinger.)

  The New Wave played eight or nine songs of genuine beauty, most of which they’d written themselves, many of which said something fresh and searching about life in our times, the struggles of the young for identity, in general a fine and lovely set, concerned with what is coming down these days. The old farts could have learned something if they’d listened. But they wouldn’t. As those sweet guitars worked, the crustaceans of the Alcholic Generation screamed louder, made more impolite remarks, jeered, goosed their whores and went to decay and garbage before the eyes of The New Wave—who were beautifully cool and ignored them without dropping a measure—and everyone else in the room.

  I left the Daisy confused by what I’d seen, and deeply troubled. Oh sure, I’d seen this kind of ridiculous behavior before, many times, in many night clubs, at many concerts, in movies. But why, I asked myself, couldn’t they have at least taken a table at the rear of the room if they wanted to talk, if they didn’t want to hear a live performance? Why did they sit right in front; and sitting right in front, why couldn’t they open their gourds and maybe learn what these kids had to say.

  These were the kind of swine, I thought, who groove on those hincty, square, bible-belt-style Las Vegas lounge acts, all screamhorn and sweaty thighs. Trini Lopez and Shirley Bassey and Sam Butera and Robert Goulet and a big sequined finale where everybody exudes phony enthusiasm marching around singing When The Saints Go Marching In. The Judy Garland lovers. The ones who dig ... and it all dropped into place...Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O’Connor and what The People Next Door were putting out.

  The linkage was there, plainly. And though I shied away from the cliché, it was dear God help us, the Generation Gap. Those were the most gapped people I’d ever seen. And I knew why those three TV shows had unsettled me.

  The Mitzi Gaynor special was old. It was cornball. It was all that papier-mâché elegance, all the highkicking chorusboy shit that goes big in Vegas, and goes down smooth as honey in redneck territory, because it feeds the unrealistic images all those rustics have of glamour and showbiz. It was the essence of the-show-must-go-on-ism. (And let’s put a hole in that one right now: what the hell would it matter if the show didn’t go on? Is the arrogance of the showbiz type so monumental that he thinks the course of Western Civilization would somewhichway be slowed if the Osmond Bros, didn’t make the midnight show on New Year’s Eve at the Sahara?)

  The same holds true for the O’Connor show. Night after weeknight we are treated to a dull, dreary hegira of Vegas lounge acts, slouching like some rough beasts toward a Bethlehem that looks like nothing so much as the interior of the Stage Deli. It is outdated entertainment. It is an atavistic throwback to the cornball of the Thirties and Forties, without the saving grace of being nostalgic or even camp. They take it seriously. Henny Youngman still works as though he were a fresh, apple-cheeked act. The days of belting, busty chanteuses and vaguely off-color comics with cuffs that shoot automatically is past. They are on the other side of the Gap. T
hey are as far from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In as Little Orphan Annie is from the Mona Lisa.

  Sure the septuagenarians should have equal time in the networks’ programming. Sure they should. But when will the powers-that-do realize that being au courant, achieving that across-the-board viewership they revere more than the blood of Christ or their mother’s gefilte fish, means more than adding Harper’s Bizarre to an Ed Sullivan bill featuring Kate Smith, the Sons of the Pioneers and Betty Hutton doing her roadshow rendition of Hello Dolly?

  Time is passing them by, and they obstinately remain gapped.

  Even as J.P. Miller, author of The People Next Door, is gapped. Demonstrably obvious from his 90 minutes of hysterical reaction-formation to his own son’s dropping out and becoming a hippie, The People Next Door was as dishonest and stacked-deck as a drama could be.

  I won’t go into the plot. If you missed it, you didn’t miss much but an object lesson. It was an exercise in hypocrisy. It started with cliché characters and espoused a view of the generation of revolution as imperfect and disembodied as the uninformed opinions of the most militant and frightened Orange County Bircher.