An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  The Religious New Right raised over $150 million last year alone.

  They’re spending millions not on preaching, but on politics—just one group reports spending $3 million on its political efforts this year, which is why so many liberal and humanistic senators and congress persons were defeated, to be replaced by the clones of Jesse Helms and James Watt.

  In state after state they have taken over state and local political party organizations.

  They have organized powerful lobbies in Washington, in State Capitols and City Halls.

  They’ve distributed “moral report cards” telling their followers which politicians are “good” Christians and which are not.

  In order to be a “good Christian” and a “good American” you must not differ with their opinions. (Even as conservative a politician as Barry Goldwater has said that they’re terrific if they’re on your side, but if you cross them…look out!) You must believe in increased military spending; must support Taiwan; must be against the Panama Canal Treaties, the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, teacher’s unions, the Department of Education, and the SALT II treaty.

  So if you feel frightened, and you want to do something, the address for People For The American Way is 1015 18th Street, NW; Suite 310; Washington, DC 20036.

  Write them for literature and let them know of encroachments on your personal freedom in your area; like the kid from Bridgman, Michigan, Richard Hernandez, who wrote me that his short story in the Bridgman High School’s newspaper, The Beeline, was banned because he used the words “God” and “damn” in juxtaposition. He didn’t write God damn, or goddam, he only wrote “Oh, God—and damn!” And when he objected to this petty censorship in his capacity as editor of the paper, in a special editorial…the editorial was banned.

  It’s not just the principal of Bridgman High, it’s the frightened, running-scared, Spanish Inquisition tenor of the times. And maybe People For The American Way is the first line of defense for all of us who are not joiners, who feel acutely that we must do something, but don’t know where to go to do it.

  And trust me that you can do something. You are not as helpless, as much a pawn, as they would have you believe. Each of us can effect change. (Remind me sometime to tell you how Leonard Nimoy and Carl Sagan and naturalist Arnold Newman and some dedicated men and women and even I saved an entire ridge of paleontological goodies just last week here in Los Angeles.)

  You can move the world. You can be Zorro.

  And for the three—out of several hundred—readers of this column who wrote me suggesting that this protracted outtake on the Moral Majority had no place in a magazine called Future Life, I tag off with merely these two bits: If it’s inappropriate to discuss that which affects the future life of all of us, then perhaps you agree with James Watt that there may not be many more generations before the coming of the Lord.

  And ultimately, this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  “The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.”

  Take that, Creationists!

  SHORT BITS: I promise next issue to go into a discussion of knife-kill movies, the one I promised for this time.

  I promise to go into detail on the subject of “mind-dribble fantasy,” issue after next.

  Get hold of a copy of A FIELD GUIDE TO THE ATMOSPHERE (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95) and check out the color photos. One in particular shows a cumulus cloud formation that, so help me, is a dead ringer for the flying saucer from Forbidden Planet. Show it to those who assure you they saw a saucer. But hide the explanation of what it is under the photo. Let them run amuck at this “proof” of the existence of UFOs…and then whip it on ’em. Heh heh.

  Rebecca Ann Brothers writes to alert us to the existence of a new cult. The “Galacticans.” Not just fans of that tv show-that-shall-go-unnamed, but people who have constructed a quasi-religious cult based on concepts presented in the show. She assures me she’s not making this up, that a close friend of hers has been swallowed up in the cult. Terrific. Jonestown claimed the lives of over 900 innocents, duped and led to slaughter by a failed evangelist. Scientology became a church based on the snake-oil psychology of an ex-pulp magazine writer. Half the world burned and died because of the cultish blandishments of an unsuccessful paper-hanger. And now the idiotic ripoff of Star Wars, foisted on the tv viewing audience by quick buck entrepreneurs, becomes the basis for yet another cult. Glen Larson as the Holy Ghost? Gimme a break, willya!

  If you haven’t yet caught George Romero’s new film, Knightriders, I commend it to your attention. It has its flaws, as what among us doesn’t, but it is a sensitive, intelligent film filled with beautiful images, memorable characters, a fresh and original sensibility, and a determination to treat the audience with respect. Ed Harris, Tom Savini and my friend Cynthia Adler (outstanding in a cast that is, itself, outstanding as ensemble) will remain in your memory for many rich moments of recall. And, blissfully, the film is almost totally free of the violence that has come to be the hallmark of American films.

  About the birthday presents you’ve been sending. Look: it’s strictly swell of you, but knock it off, okay? I’ve got just about everything in the world I could want, and the money to buy the few things that arrive on the scene late. There’s no room in the house for most of the things you think I’d like (that I really don’t like), so they wind up going to the Salvation Army. Save your money. It’s nice of you to think of me, but in the future, don’t bother. If you really want to send me a birthday greeting, do it in the form of a small donation to the National Coalition to Ban Handguns in Washington, or to People For The American Way, or to the Klanwatch project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, or to the campaign to stop the so-called Human Life Amendments, c/o National Organization for Women in Washington. You’ll pay me all the compliments I could ever want, and all the respect I’ll ever deserve, by committing just a tiny share of your awareness and wherewithal to these important programs.

  (But if someone out there happens to have a hardcover copy of Robert Nye’s novel FALSTAFF in good condition, I’d take it as a helluva birthday gift if they’d allow me to purchase it.)

  It will have happened several months ago as you read this, but as I write it James Doohan of Star Trek has had a massive coronary. He seems to be out of danger now, having been taken off the pacer yesterday; and Leonard Nimoy was over to see him and says he looks pretty good; and when he was finally taken out of the intensive care unit and put into a room with a phone he started calling back those of us who had been keeping vigil. First Walter Koenig called to say Jimmy was okay, and about ten minutes later Jimmy himself called. He said they may do a heart bypass, but nothing was certain at the moment. So by the time you read this “Scotty” will no doubt be well on his way to full recovery. He appreciates letters from his fans. So instead of writing a letter to me this month, telling me what a thug I am, drop a note to James Doohan care of the office of Gene Roddenberry at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

  END OF SHORT BITS. Except to say: apology accepted, Allison Bell.

  A few random remarks about the film Outland; not particularly because I was asked for my opinion (though several there have been who did precisely that), but simply because I saw it and the film manages to encapsulate some thoughts I’ve been wanting to share with you about sf films since I began this series of columns. Thoughts that may explain why I seem to be down on the majority of big-budget special effects movies. All in the spirit of better communication between us, if you get my drift.

  On sum, all things given, at base…I rather enjoyed the movie. But only as long as I was watching it. Like sex, even if it’s bad sex, you seem to enjoy it while it’s happening.

  But as soon as it was over (the film, not the sex, dummy), I began realizing what a stupid piece of shit it was.

  I think that’s the intellectual crucible in which all films of this sort should be tested. How do you feel about it when you’re walking away from the theat
er and discussing it with other intelligent people? Not the kind of fans who applauded during the scenes in which someone’s body exploded, not the sort of nonjudicial adolescents (of every age) who can slaver over matte effects and miniature models and bright lights while turning off their critical faculties; but people who genuinely love and enjoy good movies (and if you haven’t figured out that I’m one of those by this time, well, we simply aren’t getting through to each other). People, in short, who resent it when the script does something incredibly, gratuitously stupid that invalidates an otherwise acceptable story and makes you distrust everything the makers throw up on the screen thereafter.

  Look: One of the basic tenets of good science fiction has always been that it has an intellectual content that sets it apart from and above the usual sprint of merely-entertainment diversions. While we’ll suspend our disbelief to allow James Bond or Burt Reynolds to jump a car in a way that we know defies gravity and the laws of impact or whiplash, we balk at permitting that kind of mickeymouse stunt in a sf film. Because we know that science fiction deals with the laws of the universe and its accepted physics.

  So when the error, the lapse in logic, is a simple one that could have been avoided without slowing or crippling the plot, that need not have set the snail on the blossom of our enjoyment, need not have darkened our feeling that we are safe in the hands of a creator who will reward us for our attention and the price of a ticket, we react more sternly than were it just another Blues Brothers or The Hand, which are brainless loutish films but from which we expect nothing better.

  Reiteration: If you cast back over the reasons why certain sf films disappointed you, chances are a good many of them will be this sort; silly, sophomoric, kindergarten-level scientific illiteracies that defy what even the dullest people know about science and pragmatic reality.

  I speak of the kinds of errors—and I’ll offer a flagrant one in a moment—that are made by directors (and in this case a director who deludes himself that he can write) who are too arrogant to hire and listen to a knowledgeable consultant. They wouldn’t have the gall, the nerve, the temerity, the chutzpah to make a film about the Civil War without engaging the services of a savant like Bruce Catton to authenticate detail and history; or a film about quenching an offshore oil-rig fire without getting Red Adair to validate the technique; or a film about Cortez’s depredations in Mexico without constant reference to Bernal Diaz del Castillo. But they are such self-important spoilers that they blunder into the arena of science fiction with some half-baked derivative idea and they sell it to an even less literate studio executive and proceed to make the film without even a passing nod to the possibility that they are cramming their cinematic feet in their cinematic mouths.

  The writer and director of Outland, one Peter Hyams, is the man responsible for an earlier exercise in stupidity, Capricorn One. When I consider Hyams’s abilities as a plotter of sf-oriented ideas, I am put in mind of the rhetorical question, “If you nail a duck’s foot down, does he walk in circles?”

  Lemme give you a f’rinstance that brooks no argument, not even from the most slavishly adoring fan of this film.

  There is a scene in Outland where Space Marshal O’Niel, played as well as can be expected in a drone scenario like this by Sean Connery (who looks as if he wished he were back making a worthwhile flick like The Hill), draws blood from a corpse to ascertain if narcotics are present in the dead man’s system. For the moment we’ll ignore the implausibility that they have maintained the corpse in a plastic bag rather than simply cremating it in one of the mining colony’s furnaces, which would be de rigueur in an enclosed life system such as that portrayed on Io. Since space on shuttles would be at a premium, logic dictates that a clause would have been inserted in every laborer’s contract with the mining corporation, Con-Am, that should death occur while on the job, the body could not be shipped back to Earth for burial. So they’d simply blow it out into space or burn it. But I’ll even go along with the unexplained (to my satisfaction) plot-device that the body is conveniently left in transit storage for Connery to examine. (Which wouldn’t happen, also, because the baddies wouldn’t want an autopsy done that would show their dope had been instrumental in killing the guy. See what I mean? The more you examine the story, the more easily it falls apart.)

  To get to the point, Connery sticks a needle into the tracheal cavity, ostensibly into the carotid artery, and up bubbles about a quarter of a pint of bright red sloshy blood into the barrel of the hypodermic.

  The only trouble with that, as any dolt who has ever watched Quincy on tv can tell you, is that it ignores the reality of forensic medicine and the reality of lividity. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, lividity is what draws the blood to the lowest part of the body in a corpse. (Don’t try to fudge it by saying, “Yes, well, that’s how it is if there’s gravity,” because even on Io, innermost moon of Jupiter, gravity is on the order of one-twelfth to one-fifteenth Earth g, which would make lividity work the same way, especially after the unstated number of days the body had been in that plastic bag. And even trying to rationalize the gravity question doesn’t work, because we can see that the mining colony has artificial gravity. Take that, Saracen dog!)

  So if Connery stuck that needle into the neck hollow, all he’d bring up would be air, because all the blood left in the corpse would have long since drained into the ass! And any first year high school biology student knows that. But not Pete Hyams, who fancies himself a writer of sci-fi movies.

  And as if that ain’t moronic enough, there is also the reality of coagulation. Days after death, you stick a needle into the body anywhere and nothing bubbles up like Old Faithful. What you get is clotted brown glop.

  Look. I’m getting angrier and angrier, the more I think about this. My editor is waiting for this column, he swears he’ll have me defenestrated if I don’t get it into the overnight post office express shipment, and this is the second time I’ve mailed the sucker out. But my summation of the final five hundred idiocies of Outland was capsulized; and I really want to lay this monstrosity out at length. So I’m retyping these last two pages and laying over the remaining sections of this analysis till next time, when I’ll finish Outland and tie it in somehow—Falwell willing—with my essay on knife-kill movies.

  This is called a cliffhanger. It is intended to bring you back, panting for more, next issue.

  And I leave you with this final warning:

  You know what you should do if an Irishman throws a pin at you?

  Run like hell. He has a grenade in his mouth.

  INSTALLMENT 11: 18 JUNE 81

  PUBLISHED 1 SEPTEMBER 81 FUTURE LIFE #30 COVER-DATED NOVEMBER

  Look: since this is something like a couple of months beyond my first anniversary at this job, already a year down here in the trenches with you, it occurs to me that maybe there’s a thing you ought to know about me. No big deal revelation, just a setting forth of a credential that’s slipped through the interstices. It is tendered before I get down to the second part of the bloody disembowelment of that hircine chunk of celluloid called Outland, begun last issue. And it is this:

  I don’t just like movies; I love them.

  Your humble columnist sees something like two hundred films a year. What I don’t catch at studio and Writers Guild screenings or first-run in theaters, I see on the cable movie channel or on airplanes or in hotel rooms when I’m on the road. Additionally, I have a Beta cassette library of over two hundred films that I run over and over to study techniques of film writing, or to analyze scenes that stick in my mind. I am, after all, in the business of writing motion pictures; and I take the craft seriously.

  What I’m getting at here is that you’re not dealing with just another pretty face. I am hardly a nouvelle vague journalist sway backed ’neath a freightload of academic terminology—I am still bored to tears by L’Avventura; Claude Lelouch’s films seem to me as empty as Phyllis Schlafly’s head or Reagan’s rhetoric to the NAACP Convention; and I don’
t give a damn if Spielberg didn’t explain how Indiana Jones could hang onto that Nazi sub’s conning tower for 2000 submerged international nautical miles, because I love everything about Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like you, I go to movies to be dazzled, enriched, entertained and uplifted; and to give myself over with the trust and innocence of a ten-year-old.

  Thus it pains me to have to swat away the foul ball canards of those very few dullwitted among you who contend that merely because I don’t accept each slovenly wet brain of a “sci-fi flick” as the greatest thing since Crime and Punishment, that I am an effete snob unfit to sample the wizardly wares of Holly and Wood. So as credential for my overbackwards even-handedness about films, I offer here a short list of movies I’ve seen in the past four or five months, grouped simply enough as to those I liked (to a greater and lesser degree without minor carps) and those I thought gummed the big one.

  AYES:…And the Band Played On; Tess; My Bodyguard; Tell Me a Riddle; The Man with Bogart’s Face; Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane; Brother, Can You Spare a Dime; The Hunter; Tom Horn; 6th and Main; The Last Metro; Fort Apache, The Bronx; Kagemusha, the Shadow Warrior; La Cage Aux Folles II; Knightriders; Thief; Nighthawks; Altered States; The Four Seasons; Raiders of the Lost Ark; Escape from New York; The Great Muppet Caper and For Your Eyes Only.

  NAYS: Nine to Five; Falling in Love Again; The Howling; Seems Like Old Times; The Mirror Crack’d; Tribute; The Hard Way; Cruising; Bad Timing; The Earthling; Back Roads; Where the Buffalo Roam; Starcrash; The Hand; Outland; Bustin’ Loose and Superman II.

  I’ve tried to discern a pattern; but apart from utterly subjective gut-reactions that I carried away from these films, either positive or negative, the only codifiable statistic is that of the forty films noted above I liked twenty-three and disliked seventeen. I’m not sure that tells us much; except that I go to a film predisposed to enjoy; and only what they throw up on the screen changes my mind.