Harlan Ellison's Watching (13 page)

Fellini is too good for that. And to quote Lautrec: "A man may play the fool once, and be excused the role; but if he play it more than once, it must be assumed he enjoys the part."

Cinema
/ July 1966

Ten thousand times I have said if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and goes steady with ducks, chances are it's a duck. Recently, I was wrong. I saw something that looked like a duck, but it's really a turkey.

Fully aware that I am a hostile minority in the country of the blind, I refer to
You're a Big Boy Now!
which will undoubtedly make twenty-two billion grupniks at the box office and garner for writer-director Francis Ford Coppola all manner of future assignments. I believe the operable phrase is "bright young man." Wrong. A genuine no-no.

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE, 1988: The motorist who has been driving erratically and at excessive speeds for years, flouting the law and endangering others, who finally gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol and is ticketed, complains at the injustice because
this
time s/he really
didn't
do anything wrong. There is, however, a kind of cosmic justice at work. The insensate universe struggling toward some kind of balance. It is, how shall we view it . . . fair. In a cockeyed way. Publication, at last, of this piece I wrote in 1966 is similarly . . . fair. It is a genuinely dopey review. Apart from the sterling ineptitude I demonstrated here, by managing not to review the film at all—can
you
figure out what the movie is about?—I was dense enough not to perceive any value whatever in the early efforts of Coppola. Somewhere in the latter section of this book, I go off my chump completely and say something like, "I have loved every foot of film Coppola has ever shot." Never having had this earlier piece published, I was able to get away with the panegyric. Unlike politicians running for office, whose sophomoric plagiarisms in college are dredged up to throw mud on their character twenty years later, I got away with it. I can no longer live with the guilt! I was shortsighted and seven kinds of a dolt. Which is not to say that
You're a Big Boy Now!
is much better a film than I said it was (time has not been kind to it, as verified by a recent Late Show tv viewing). I blow the whistle on myself (the slaphappy tone of all this being merely a surface candy-coating) as part of an ongoing need to keep my "credentials" credible. I've written elsewhere about the imperatives of an essayist having no guilty secrets. No matter how small. The urgency of confessional writing. It is the pathological dedication to being non-blackmail able. Especially by oneself. The parallel most applicable, in my experience, is this: once upon a time not that long ago, I was a guest on a national tv talk show. The host is a man whose name is common coin in households where Kafka, Conrad, Paul Muni and Sojourner Truth are unknown. In the course of his oncamera "conversation" with me, I became aware of an animus toward me and what I was saying that perplexed me and seemed unmotivated by what we were actually talking about. I won't be more specific than that, but when next you and I get together, I'll play the videocassette of the show, and you'll see what I mean. It was easily the most awful of the hundreds of such talk show encounters I've had in the last twenty years. And it perplexed me, the more intensely each time I re-ran that tape to attempt some penetration of the mystery. It was not until a friend of the host—whom I met some time later, and with whom I discussed this matter—let me in on the Secret Agenda. Which was that the host is both a seriously practicing Catholic and a practicing homosexual intent on staying in the closet. Understand: neither of these aspects of the man's life, in my view, is a topic for discussion or the judgment of others. Neither as an Atheist nor as a heterosexual do I think being Catholic or gay is something to hide. But in the public spotlight, it is obvious why he feels the need to protect his privacy. And as a result of the ongoing cultural prejudices against either or both of these life-choices, can you imagine the hell in which he dwells every day? He has to pretend to be straight, lest he suffer the hellfire of his religion; and he has to conceal both from a viewing audience that might well become less enamored of him. And because of this need to keep his secrets, his on-camera attitudes toward many guests and many philosophical positions become tortured, even warped in their logic. He is, sadly, innocently and tormentedly, a man who self-censors because he is blackmailable. In protecting his "guilty secrets," which in a sane world would produce neither guilt nor opprobrium, he produces "work," i.e., conversation, that is dishonest. For a writer, such guilty secrets can be crippling. The more one has to conceal about oneself, the more often one shies away from writing the burning truth about those dangerous areas, either consciously or unconsciously. The only way to insure that the writer goes as close to the fire as s/he can, is to hold nothing back, to tell it all, to reveal one's pimply ass to the world. This is considered suspect in many literary circles, and at least an act of gauche tastelessness. In England, for instance, when my short story collections are published, the UK. editors insist that the introductions and sometimes the foreword be dropped. On the well-founded belief that such revelations of personal involvement with the fiction will offend critics and even readers. I've ceased arguing with them, having indeed suffered scathing negative reviews from English critics who spent the bulk of their copy on what an impertinent self-server I am, without spending much copy actually addressing the quality of the stories. Nonetheless, I believe to my shoe-tops that it is imperative for my "credentials" that I try to conceal nothing that will compel me to slide past a difficult subject. I am as weak and as strong in this respect as you, and I know how easily our species twists reality to make ourselves look good. As Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." (Miller also said, "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators," but that's quite another matter.) So I try not to give myself the opportunity of concealing even the few personal flaws that are not enormous enough for the most casual reader to perceive without a road map. This rambling footnote—size 20 triple-E by this time—thus goes directly to that auctorial policy. You might never remember, by the time you get to my praise of Coppola later in these pages, that at age thirty-two, more than twenty-two years ago, I wrote such a dippy analysis of one of the great film directors. But you might; and if you didn't, I would. This is why murderers who've gotten away with it for a lifetime suddenly rush into a police station to confess.

Mr. Coppola's comedy of awakening sexuality and the loss of innocence in Big City U.S.A. is straight
Catcher in the Rye
derivative, by way of a castrated Tom Sawyer. The words precious, artsy-craftsy, overblown and juicy come to mind. The color is overwhelming.

There is little fresh or innervating in either the screenplay or the attack of this film. It covers ground so heavily tilled the best that can be harvested is corn. Yet audiences leap and bubble for it. I think the phenomenon is a sad one. Films such as
10:30 PM Summer
and
Mickey One
and even in an alarming number of instances
Blow-Up
are regarded by an American cinemagoing audience with suspicion, hostility and outright confusion, while such films as this,
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
and
The Fortune Cookie
touch the proper nerve-endings and are rewarded with accolades. They are the common denominator films. They are the idiot comedies, in which no one demonstrates a modicum of intelligence, perspicacity or style. They demand nothing of the viewer. They are merely palatable.

That
You're a Big Boy Now!
is so popular is strident testimony to the accusation that we have become a movie-viewing nation of systematically corrupted taste.

To this echoing tune, Coppola has added his own personal contrapuntal variation. I will not belabor the point nor enumerate the tedious twirls of the plot that compel me to this conclusion, save in remarking that any film that casts Julie Harris as a character named "Miss Thing" is so obviously slanted for the cute and cuddly that it cannot be considered seriously.

Since the film is entirely the work of Coppola, all blame must be laid at his talent. I have heard Mr. Coppola speak on several occasions, stating his thesis of filmwriting, and he makes no secret of the fact that he will write hack in an effort to produce "quality" films of his own design. Mr. Coppola "hacked" on such monumental atrocities as
Is Paris Burning?
and
This Property Is Condemned
and so by action/reaction we should expect a "quality" film of his own vision to be as spectacularly good as the hacks were bad. But we get more of the same, except on a slightly smaller scale.

Rip Torn and Geraldine Page are hideously miscast, and their posturings in parts of little more than imbecile caricature are painful to witness. Elizabeth Hartman doesn't really have the kind of legs needed to wear miniskirts. Michael Dunn is wearing awfully thin indeed, not to mention grating. And poor Peter Kastner, who has some stuff going for him, is weltered down in a quagmire of nonsense and random murmurings that make him appear to be little more than a bifocaled epileptic. Tony Bill . . . well, the less said the better.

And all of that pseudo-Resnais walking through the streets of Manhattan, culminating in a 1930s off-into-the-sunset being dragged by a slobbering nitwit of a dog, was more treacle than my doctors will allow me to consume.

The only saving grace of the film is the brilliant and youthful score by John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful. The songs are memorable, they capture the mood that Coppola may have intended but thoroughly failed to inject into his film, and they are well worth going to hear. But as I said in a recent record review of the soundtrack album, the Spoonful's music is so good it shucks one into believing the film has merit, when in truth it is roughly akin to having a Rolls Royce grill braised onto the front of an Edsel.

Written 1966, previously unpublished

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE, 1988:
The motorist who has been driving erratically and at excessive speeds for years, flouting the law and endangering others, who finally gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol and is ticketed, complains at the injustice because
this
time s/he really
didn't
do anything wrong. There is, however, a kind of cosmic justice at work. The insensate universe struggling toward some kind of balance. It is, how shall we view it . . . fair. In a cockeyed way. Publication, at last, of this piece I wrote in 1966 is similarly . . . fair. It is a genuinely dopey review. Apart from the sterling ineptitude I demonstrated here, by managing not to review the film at all—can
you
figure out what the movie is about?—I was dense enough not to perceive any value whatever in the early efforts of Coppola. Somewhere in the latter section of this book, I go off my chump completely and say something like, "I have loved every foot of film Coppola has ever shot." Never having had this earlier piece published, I was able to get away with the panegyric. Unlike politicians running for office, whose sophomoric plagiarisms in college are dredged up to throw mud on their character twenty years later, I got away with it. I can no longer live with the guilt! I was shortsighted and seven kinds of a dolt. Which is not to say that
You're a Big Boy Now!
is much better a film than I said it was (time has not been kind to it, as verified by a recent Late Show tv viewing). I blow the whistle on myself (the slaphappy tone of all this being merely a surface candy-coating) as part of an ongoing need to keep my "credentials" credible. I've written elsewhere about the imperatives of an essayist having no guilty secrets. No matter how small. The urgency of confessional writing. It is the pathological dedication to being non-blackmail able. Especially by oneself. The parallel most applicable, in my experience, is this: once upon a time not that long ago, I was a guest on a national tv talk show. The host is a man whose name is common coin in households where Kafka, Conrad, Paul Muni and Sojourner Truth are unknown. In the course of his oncamera "conversation" with me, I became aware of an animus toward me and what I was saying that perplexed me and seemed unmotivated by what we were actually talking about. I won't be more specific than that, but when next you and I get together, I'll play the videocassette of the show, and you'll see what I mean. It was easily the most awful of the hundreds of such talk show encounters I've had in the last twenty years. And it perplexed me, the more intensely each time I re-ran that tape to attempt some penetration of the mystery. It was not until a friend of the host—whom I met some time later, and with whom I discussed this matter—let me in on the Secret Agenda. Which was that the host is both a seriously practicing Catholic and a practicing homosexual intent on staying in the closet. Understand: neither of these aspects of the man's life, in my view, is a topic for discussion or the judgment of others. Neither as an Atheist nor as a heterosexual do I think being Catholic or gay is something to hide. But in the public spotlight, it is obvious why he feels the need to protect his privacy. And as a result of the ongoing cultural prejudices against either or both of these life-choices, can you imagine the hell in which he dwells every day? He has to pretend to be straight, lest he suffer the hellfire of his religion; and he has to conceal both from a viewing audience that might well become less enamored of him. And because of this need to keep his secrets, his on-camera attitudes toward many guests and many philosophical positions become tortured, even warped in their logic. He is, sadly, innocently and tormentedly, a man who self-censors because he is blackmailable. In protecting his "guilty secrets," which in a sane world would produce neither guilt nor opprobrium, he produces "work," i.e., conversation, that is dishonest. For a writer, such guilty secrets can be crippling. The more one has to conceal about oneself, the more often one shies away from writing the burning truth about those dangerous areas, either consciously or unconsciously. The only way to insure that the writer goes as close to the fire as s/he can, is to hold nothing back, to tell it all, to reveal one's pimply ass to the world. This is considered suspect in many literary circles, and at least an act of gauche tastelessness. In England, for instance, when my short story collections are published, the UK. editors insist that the introductions and sometimes the foreword be dropped. On the well-founded belief that such revelations of personal involvement with the fiction will offend critics and even readers. I've ceased arguing with them, having indeed suffered scathing negative reviews from English critics who spent the bulk of their copy on what an impertinent self-server I am, without spending much copy actually addressing the quality of the stories. Nonetheless, I believe to my shoe-tops that it is imperative for my "credentials" that I try to conceal nothing that will compel me to slide past a difficult subject. I am as weak and as strong in this respect as you, and I know how easily our species twists reality to make ourselves look good. As Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." (Miller also said, "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators," but that's quite another matter.) So I try not to give myself the opportunity of concealing even the few personal flaws that are not enormous enough for the most casual reader to perceive without a road map. This rambling footnote—size 20 triple-E by this time—thus goes directly to that auctorial policy. You might never remember, by the time you get to my praise of Coppola later in these pages, that at age thirty-two, more than twenty-two years ago, I wrote such a dippy analysis of one of the great film directors. But you might; and if you didn't, I would.
This is why murderers who've gotten away with it for a lifetime suddenly rush into a police station to confess.