An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  How many knife-kills have you sat through?

  More important: ask yourself why you went to some of these films, when you knew in advance how twisted, how anti-human, how sexist, how degenerate they promised to be?

  Are you a great soft average American boy or girl? Did you come when the sharp stick gouged out the eyes? Did you applaud when the heads were sawed off? Did you gasp with pleasure at the special effects when the straight razor sliced and the blood spattered the camera lens?

  Are you still deluding yourself that you’re sane?

  Interim memo

  By the time I’d broken the twelfth column for Future Life into my first two columns for the rejuvenated appearance of these peripatetic observations in the Weekly (as explained in the previous Interim Memo), a number of incidents had occurred and new psychological data had surfaced. In this second half of the original column, expanded for its new readership, I made reference to some data published as an editorial in the 15-21 January edition of the Weekly. What it said was: “Findings by Neil M. Malamuth, 1981 Visiting Professor at UCLA, and James V. P. Check, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, indicate that movies do indeed significantly increase male acceptance of violence against women. They took 272 men and women and divided them into three groups. One group viewed Swept Away and The Getaway, both of which show violence against women as having justification, while the other two groups—a designated control group and a group of ad hoc volunteers—saw A Man and a Woman and Hooper, which were chosen because they exclude all forms of sexual violence. To prevent predetermination of attitude, the subjects were led to believe they were taking part in a rating system test. After viewing the films, the subjects then had to fill out identical questionnaires that used basic psychological attitude testing methods to determine (1) each subject’s general acceptance of interpersonal violence, (2) how much each accepted myths about rape, and (3) each subject’s beliefs about the adversarial nature of male-female sexuality. The men who viewed the two violence-prone movies demonstrated a “significantly” greater acceptance of violence and rape and higher tendency toward adversarial sexual relations than the men who viewed the two non-violent movies. Not surprisingly, they also showed a far greater acceptance of violence than the women with whom they had seen Swept Away and The Getaway. (Interestingly, all the women scored approximately the same, demonstrating non-acceptance of violence no matter which movies they saw.)

  INSTALLMENT 13: 2 JULY 81

  PUBLISHED 20 OCTOBER 81 FUTURE LIFE #31 COVER-DATED DECEMBER

  REPUBLISHED IN EXPANDED FORM 22–28 JANUARY 82, L.A. WEEKLY

  As I was saying. Knife-kill flicks. The subject of a new book titled SPLATTER MOVIES. You like that a lot? Splatter movies. Cute.

  Though there are exceptions the apologists will always cite, the bulk of the violence—total, psychopathic, sudden and seemingly the only reason for making these films—is directed against women.

  Oh sure, there are a few men who get whacked in these films; the merest wetwork; but their deaths are usually sort of pro forma; almost as if they were reluctantly added to the script against the advent of just such criticisms as these; so the righteous director (who is usually egomaniacally, but inaccurately, logged on as co-scripter) and the producer can justify slaughter by saying, “Well, hell, didn’t you see the guys who got snuffed? How can you say we hate women?”

  But that’s misdirection. Afterthought. It’s like George Wallace talking about state’s rights when what he really means is let’s keep the niggers in chains. It’s on the moral and ethical level of those who excuse Nixon’s criminal acts by saying, “Hell, everybody does it!”

  No, what we’re dealing with in nifty little films like Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Blow Out is a concerted attack on females.

  Females burned alive, hacked to ribbons, staked out and suffocated slowly, their limbs taken off with axes, chainsaws, guillotines, threshing machines, the parts nailed up for display. The deification of the madness Jack the Ripper visited on pathetic tarts in Spitalfields in 1888.

  As a man who hit a woman once, early in his life, and swore never to do it again, I reel back from these films where hatred and brutalization of women is the uncontrolled engine, the governing force of plot. I’ll admit it, I cannot watch these films. I get physically ill.

  But they must be drawing an audience. More and more get made each season. Saturation advertising on television pulls you to them. They make money. And money begets money; and the begetting sends even greater numbers of minimally talented filmmakers to the form. They proliferate. And the sickness spreads.

  You wonder why the Moral Majority has some coin with otherwise rational Americans? It is because they fasten on festering sores like the spate of knife-kill films and they argue from the solitary to the general: moral decay, rampant violence, rotting social values. Joining with these latter-day Puritans on a single issue, though one may despise what they’re really trying to do, is the downfall of all liberals.

  Even so, their revulsion at these films (which they patronize like crazy) is the healthiest thing about such movies. Everything else, from motivation for making them to artistic values, drips with perversion.

  I have a theory, of course. Don’t I always.

  These are not, to me, films of terror or suspense in the time-honored sense of such genre definitions. The Thirty-Nine Steps, North by Northwest and Gaslight are classics of suspense. Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and Alien are classics of terror. The lists are copious. Rosemary’s Baby, Knife in the Water, Repulsion, The Haunting, The Innocents (from Henry James’s TURN OF THE SCREW), Psycho, The Birds, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dead of Night. Add your own. You know which ones they were that scared you, held you helpless in the thrall of fear, gave you memories that chilled not sickened you. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Parallax View and Carrie.

  It was always the scenes leading up to the violence that you remember. You needn’t watch the death…you had been wrung dry before it ever happened.

  What do I consider a terrifying scene? Here, try this: *

  * And, no, you’re not going crazy: yes, it actually is an excerpt from my essay “The 3 Faces of Fear” to be found in OVER THE EDGE. When I wrote this column originally, the pieces in OVER THE EDGE were out of print, including that essay. And so, because it was the perfect example I needed to make the point, I excerpted this bit from the longer study. When EDGEWORKS I came out, nobody caught the repetition; but now, as we go to press with the trade paperback edition of El, I felt it behooved me to point out the repetition, just so you didn’t think you were losing it, or that I had only one metaphor in my bag. We calls it punctiliousness.

  Chill beneath a cadaverously-gray autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else:

  A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.

  Chill beneath a crawling terror of spotted death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.

  A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the bakery, get flour for father’s dinner bread. The child shows a moment of fear…the animal they haven’t found yet…

  The mother insists, it’s only a half block to the bakery. Put on a shawl and go get that flour, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the sack of flour held close to her, the street empty and filling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.

  The child’s eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rushing.

 
To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rushing toward her on the wind.

  Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!

  The mother’s face assumes the ages-old expression of harassed parenthood. Hands on hips she turns to the door, you’re always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will—

  Mommy! Open the door!

  You’ll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!

  Mommy! Mom—

  Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and a mist of flour explodes through the cracks, sifts into the room. The mother’s eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door.

  Madness crawls up behind our eyes, the mother’s eyes, and we sink into a pit of blind emptiness…

  …from which we emerge to examine the nature of terror in the motion picture. Fear as the masters of the film form have showed it to us, and fear as the screen has recently depicted it, with explicit vomitous detail, with perverted murder escalated from awfulness to awfulness. Having seen the deaths of dozens, one is spiraled upward to accept the closeup deaths of hundreds. Knives are not enough, they’re old hat. Razors are not enough, that’s been done. To death. Meathooks are not enough, that’s a cliché. Has anyone squeezed that bag of blood called the human body in a car crusher? Yeah, well, we can’t use that. How about a paper pulping machine, a blast furnace, a rubber stamper, a meatgrinder, a Cuisinart? What’s more ghastly than the last piece of shit? Acid? Rat poison? If we use acid or rat poison we have to show the victim writhing, vomiting, tearing her own throat out, the burns, the drool. Hey, is there something that’ll explode the eyeballs right out of their sockets? Then we can show the raw red pulpy brain behind the empty holes. Now that’s fresh, new, inventive, state of the art. Maybe we can call it Scanners. Or Outland.

  The scene just described, a scene shot for the small theater screen, in black and white, with a minimum of production values, with unknown actors, shot with misdirection (in the sense of that word as magicians use it) and subtlety is from a little-remembered 1943 RKO Radio Picture, The Leopard Man, based on a brilliant Cornell Woolrich thriller, BLACK ALIBI (1942). I offer it as a fine example of cinema terror in its most natural, unsullied incarnation, from the oeuvre of Val Lewton. To students of terror in films, the name Val Lewton will be familiar. Had I wanted to be less precise but more chic, I’d have cited the early Dassin or Hitchcock.

  But as a more reliable barometer of the centigrades to which artful horror can chill a filmgoer, I find no equal to what Lewton produced in merely eight films between 1942 and 1946, with budgets so ludicrous, achievements so startling, and studio intentions so base, that they stand as some sort of landmark for anyone venturing into the genre, whether a John Carpenter or a Brian De Palma.

  Using the foregoing as yardstick, and comparing the knife-kill flicks against them, I submit that what we’re getting these days are not films of terror or suspense or even horror. They are (and here’s my theory) blatant reactionary responses to the feminist movement in America.

  Surely there are no great truths being propounded in these films, no subtext that enriches us with apocryphal insight, no subtle characterizations that illuminate the dark night of the soul, no messages for our times…unless the message is that every other person you pass is a deranged killer waiting for you to turn your back so he or she can cut your throat.

  No, I’ve convinced myself, even if you might have trouble with the theory, that this seemingly endless spate of films in which women are slaughtered en masse, in the most disgusting, wrenching ways a diseased mind can conceive, is a pandering to the fear in most men that women are “out to get them.”

  In a nation where John Wayne remains the symbol of what a man is, the idea of strong women having intellectual and sexual lives more vigorous than men’s is anathema. I submit that the men who go to see these films enjoy the idea of women being eviscerated and dismembered in this way. They get off on it. In their nasty little secret heart-of-hearts they’re saying, “That’ll serve the bitch right!”

  The audiences that go to these films, that queue up to wait an hour for their dollop of deadly mayhem, are sociopaths who don’t know it. Beyond that, and I have no way to prove it, I think these films serve no purgative, cathartic end. They merely boil the blood in the potential rapist, the potential stomper, the potential knife-killer.

  Last week’s editorial in these pages proffering clinical substantiation of the theory that splatter movies, knife-kill flicks, raise the tolerance level of men for violence against women merely adds to the already existing body of such evidence that self-interested film makers and tunnel-visioned kneejerk liberals like me have refused to acknowledge.

  They are the twisted dreams from the darkest pit in each of us, the stuff against which we fight to maintain ourselves as decent human beings.

  I leave it at that. For the moment.

  But next week I want to relate what happened when a few responsible people tried to do something about these films. It was an adventure among airheads. Knees jerked, hot air filled the land, writers who’ve spent their whole lives fighting against censorship were pilloried as being self-appointed censors…oh, it was spiffy.

  And it encapsulates more than we wish to know about the nature of self-blinding fear that produces a moral vacuum, masquerading as courage. Next week I stop being polite.

  Interim memo

  You know, I’m not sure for a moment that anyone reading this book for amusement, intellectual stimulation, arousal of ire or as a short course in becoming a curmudgeon, gives a damn when the columns were published, and what the cover-date of the magazine might be. One tries to pre-guess the complaints a book might draw, before it’s published: did it have an index, have the typos been expunged, is the design ducky? But the beefs are always unexpected. So for those who found the listings on the previous thirteen columns, as to origin of publication, a fast pain in the fundament, unlax. From this point forward it was only a matter of three or four days—maximum—between the writing of the columns and their appearance. When An Edge In My Voice was being done for a magazine that published eight issues a year, rather than for a weekly, it meant a lag-time between inspiration and execution and publication of 2½-3 months. So everything was a trifle chilled by the time it was in the hands of the mob, and it was another three months before their enraged responses saw publication. Imagine how pissed they were, heh heh. So what we have from this point forward (apart from a “fail-yure to comm-uni-cate”) is almost-instant ignition and conflagration. It made for heavy-breathing immediacy, not to mention threats of fire-bombings and disembowelment, some of which were even made by the readers, rather than I.

  INSTALLMENT 14: 25 JANUARY 82

  The German poet Günter Eich (1907–72) wrote, “Be uncomfortable; be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world.”

  I won’t say that’s the only beat to which I march, but as readers of this column may have already perceived, it is well out front among the ethical commands that motivate me. I do not even attempt to ennoble my troublemaking by assuming the mantle of gadfly. That is too safe an appellation. Like jazz, that came up the river from the whorehouses of New Orleans to find respectability in Kansas City and Chicago and the white-tie legitimacy of big bands like Paul Whiteman’s, thereby getting itself almost respectabilized out of existence, I get the feeling that when a commentator on the passing scene begins to be almost endearingly called a “gadfly,” he has become acceptable. He has traded his effectiveness as sand in the machinery for the safe status of a loveable curmudgeon.

  Thus, I prefer to remain your basic, garden-variety pain in the ass. I do not write what I write, what I observe, to shock. It is done to startle. There is a difference; I’m sure you’ll gr
asp that difference.

  Nonetheless, in the words of an ancient Japanese aphorism, “The nail that stands too high will be hammered down.” That is to say, there are dangers attendant on startling the machine that make life less than a rippling rhythm. For instance, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times recently in which I tried to point out the dangers of worshipping the Common Man (and Woman): you wouldn’t believe the nasty letters I got from the most common of men and women about that essay. One can be a Communist, a molester of children, a white-collar organizational embezzler, a reactionary dolt spreading racism and militaristic paranoia, a former butler or housemaid for a movie star selling cheap gossip for bestseller notoriety…one can be almost any species of unsavory immoralist and be excused the practice by those who conceive of themselves as common clay. But don’t ever make a case for Elitism; they’ll getcha! You can be as flawed as you wish, gentle readers, as long as you don’t make out yo’ ass is in any way better or nobler than the groundlings.

  This attitude of disingenuous humility on the part of many of our in-print critics—thus permitting them to enjoy the approbation of monkeys—makes it scratchy as hell for those who aspire to higher standards in ethics or Art. Let John Simon point out that Liza Minnelli has based a career in large part on a ghoulish echoing of her mother’s tragic life, or that she has a singing voice that could stun a police dog, and he is pilloried for his bestial behavior. That Simon hews to standards of critical appraisal too lofty for the bunion-brains who think of “public embarrassments” (as Richard Schickel termed him in Time) like the other Simon, Neil, as America’s premier comic playwright, escapes them. Schickel is another example. He is not the first to point out that the emperor has no clothes; that Neil Simon is to dramaturgy as Genghis Khan was to good table manners; but he did it in the open, in flat-out terms; and the common clay that cannot handle Pinter or Stoppard, whose meals of Neil Simon go through them like beets through a baby’s backside, tsk-tsk in horror that such an American Institution should be so unceremoniously castigated.