Harlan Ellison's Watching (17 page)

But let's pretend Kubrick
didn't
do that. Let's just say the story runs sequentially from the Dawn of Man and the apes through the discovery of that black formica tabletop on the Moon, and Keir Dullea chasing Gary Lockwood around 'n' around the centrifuge, to the surrealism of the ending and
Thus Spake Zarathustra
running as Muzak for the journey back to Earth by that homunculus in the bubble. Let's pretend such was the case. (For those of you who haven't yet seen the film, naturally this will make very little sense, but don't let it bother you; if you are one-half of the crowd-followers I think you are, you will be dashing to queue up for the film soon anyhow, and you can clip this guide, put it in your wallet, and read it during the half-time intermission so when you emerge, your girlfriend or husband will think you are the most intellectual item since Nabokov, a rare combination of beauty and brains.)

Now. Had you read the short story, "The Sentinel," written by Arthur C. Clarke (well-known science fact/science fiction writer and co-author of the screenplay of
2001
), upon which the film was loosely based, you would know that the black formica tabletop was a kind of radio signal left on Earth by aliens; left behind on their passage through our galaxy to somewhere else.

So. The first monolith, the one the apes find, is the one that gives the slope-brows the gift of reason (we know this because when one of them touches it, we hear
Thus Spake Zarathustra
and we are uplifted). And if you still had any doubts, the scene that follows shows the ape discovering the first utensil. The linkage is inescapable.
Res ipsa loquitur
.

So now we go from the ape hurling the bone-weapon into the air, to the space-shuttle spinning down through the void to dock (at unbearable length) at the space station.

Now we mulch on forward. They take half the two hours and x-minutes (it was forty when I saw it, but I understand they've cut seventeen minutes of boredom since then) of the film to let you in on the big deal surprise of another monolith being discovered on the Lunar surface . . . or strictly speaking, just below the surface, which is where the plot lies, as well. In Clarke's original story, the aliens had left the signal device—the monolith in the film, a pyramid in the story—on the Moon, because they wanted to get in touch with whatever life form developed on Earth only at a point when it was advanced enough to
get
to the Moon. (You knew, of course, that the ape-stuff took place on Earth, didn't you? Rob Reiner didn't.)

So they discover the monolith is sending out signals, and the receiver is somewhere out near Jupiter.

So they send out the astronauts to dig what is shaking out there. The computer that runs the ship—aside from being faintly high-camp gay in its mannerisms—does a bang-up job keeping them on course, until one day, for no apparent reason it goes completely out of its gourd and kills everyone on board with the exception of Keir Dullea, who is just too smart to be put down by a mass of printed circuits and mumbly memory banks. But, the question asks itself, unbidden, why did the computer run amuck? The only answer that works within the framework of the film and logic, is that the aliens have somehow, by long distance, telekinesis or somesuchthing, sabotaged the thing. Reason: to capture the finest specimen of Terran life, the astronaut they know will be sent out to check that monolith near Jupiter. And they do. When he gets just abaft Jupiter, the formica tabletop comes for him, and then begins the section that will make this film a success . . . the astounding visual interpretation of a trip through hyperspace as the aliens cart Dullea back to wherever it is they actually live.

(This section, by the way, has already gotten a deserved reputation in the underground, and when they can scrounge-up the hard-ticket prices to see it, the waiting lines at
2001
are mini-deep in heads waiting to get their minds blown a tot more than usual. It will be this underground rep that will spread out into the Establishment, and thereby assure the film of big box-office.)

Now we come to the confusion.

Oh really? Where've we been already? But . . . onward!

Dullea wakes up (comes to? regains his senses? something.) in a Louis XVI bedroom, segues into a shot of himself a little older, segues again and he's wizened, segues again and he's lying in bed dying of old age. What is happening? Well, I see it this way (and being a science fiction writer naturally I am privy to all the secrets of the Universe, not to mention the mind of a director and the subtleties of a befuddled script):

The aliens are trying to decide whether to go and join Man in his march through space to fulfill his destiny, or to let him destroy himself. They are pumping Dullea's mind.

The periods of clarity for Dullea are those moments when the brain-draining ceases for a moment or two. Knowing that their environment is so alien to the mind of a human that he would crack, and be worthless for their purposes, the aliens have created a self-contained continuum for him to exist in, a dream if you will. It takes the familiar form of a white-on-white bedroom. It probably isn't
really
that. He may be in stasis in a gelatin tank, or hooked into a dream machine, or just floating free-ego in a never-never land of the aliens' design, depending on how alien and impossible-to-understand you care to make them.

Finally, they get all they want out of Dullea, make up their minds to help Man on his way to Destiny, and utilizing the Time-Is-Circular theory, they send another formica tabletop to him, which changes him—devolves him? retrogresses him?—back to a baby with tarsier-huge eyes, and they send him back to Earth, ostensibly to make that second touch in the brain of Man that will give him an equivalent leap in intelligence that the first ape got from the monolith. Homo superior, the next evolutionary step, aided and abetted in the von Däniken idiom.

That's one way to look at it.

But then, is that really Dullea as a baby? It looked like an alien baby to me. It might even be an
adult
alien. Who says they all have to look like Raymond Massey with a fright-wig and a long beard? But even so, the story line holds.

Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the story Kubrick and Clarke wrote. It may be a better one, who knows?

In any case, there are still innumerable unanswered questions in the film, such as:

If they found the monolith on the Moon, why didn't they find the one on Earth?

Is it the same monolith, and it moves around?

Why didn't the computer know Dullea would use the emergency exit to gain reentry into the ship?

Why did Kubrick take endless time for the discovery of the monolith on the Moon, a sequence that would have been handled better in the teaser of the worst TV space opera?

I could go on indefinitely.

Which is not to say I didn't like the film. As I said to Norman Spinrad, the science fiction writer who was seated next to me at the screening, "the first half is boring . . . but not uninteresting." He stared at me. How can anything be boring and engrossing at one and the same time? Well, visit Kubrick's Folly and find out.

The psychedelic segments are visually some of the most exciting stuff ever put on celluloid; in a way it's what cinema is all about, really. The ape sequences are brilliant, the special effects staggering, and my review brilliant. But I am compelled, once and finally, to say that this is a seriously flawed film. It fails in the first order of storytelling: to tell a story.

So go get stoned on acid, pack your pockets with hash, go sit in the Cinerama cocoon, and let Kubrick fly you to the Moon. It ain't gossamer wings, but what the hell do you expect for $X.XX per ticket?

Trumpet
#9/1969

Joe
is not merely an extraordinary film, it is a small artistic miracle. Only rarely in the turmoil of human events does a work of fiction speak so clearly, with such brutal directness to the core truths of the condition of life that no matter what one's beliefs, there is no denying its validity. Zola's "J'Accuse" was such a work, Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was another. In film, in recent memory,
Joe
is approached for sheer impact and importance only by Z,
Paths of Glory
and the final scenes of
Easy Rider
. No one conceiving this film, a year ago, could have known how loudly it would speak today. It is a one-in-a-million success, a story so simple and so terrifyingly on-target for our times, that the luckiest Vegas bookies, with all the
vigerish
in the universe, would lose their shorts trying to predict odds on its happening again.

Already the film is a legend. I saw it in New York (for the first time) early in July, the day after it opened at the Murray Hill on 3rd Avenue. By that time Judith Crist had come out strongly for it. Still, it was an unknown quantity to me, and though I was urged into seeing it by a film director friend of mine, I was reluctant: you can only see so many
Strawberry Statements
, so many
Getting Straights
, so many
Revolutionarys
without getting fed to the teeth by the exploitation of the dissent movement by the fat and cynical. But I allowed myself to be dragooned. (It is interesting to note that I had just come off a lecture tour through Middle America, two days prior to my trip to the Murray Hill. I had
been
through hardhat country.)

I was not disposed to be impressed.

I had had my guts twisted by
Z
and
Easy Rider
and I did not think they could do it to me again.

At the end of the film, it took my director friend, Max Katz, and his lady, Karen, to help me up the aisle. I could not focus. I was trembling like a man with malaria. There was a large potted tree on the sidewalk outside the theater. I managed to get to it, and sat there, unable to communicate, for twenty minutes. I was no good for two days thereafter.

Phone calls to the Cannon Group, the releasing corporation responsible for getting the film into circulation, brought me photo stills, production information and background on the story. I knew, even then, I would want to write some words about
Joe
.

Seeing it again last night, here in Los Angeles, I was afraid my first impressions would be blunted by all the foofaraw the film has generated, by reevaluations, by seeing it in company with a less-hip crowd than the Manhattan audience.

Though it became
my
turn to help someone up the aisle—my lady Cindy, who was (politely put) stunned—the film held as much significance and torment the second time around.

The film buff inclined toward
Cahiers du Cinema
analyses of motion pictures may find this review somewhat wanting in phrases like mobility, color-sense, directorial thrust, cinematographic purity, characterization . . . the full sack of technical terminology that proves the critic knows whereof he speaks. The filmgoer whose exposure to cinema criticism rests on the high school book report level of getting a line-by-line retelling of the plot, may also be frustrated.

I choose not to tell the story of
Joe
. Too many clowns have already spoiled the experience (on television and in newspapers) by categorizing it as a story about a hardhat who kills hippies, as a study of the generation gap, as a modern terror tale, as any number of other literary flummeries. And it is all of these, and none of these. What it is, fellow travelers, is a visceral experience on a par with going black-belting with Bruce Lee.
Joe
will kick the shit out of you. It will set the blood slamming against your cranial walls. It will make you as cold as Ultima Thule.

So those who want informed and esoteric
précis
can look elsewhere. The sole and blatant purpose of
this
review is not only to get
you
to go see the film, but to buy a ticket for a needy hardhat.

Because
that
is who should see this movie.

I drove down Ventura Boulevard this morning. Just a few blocks past Sepulveda, they're building another of those filing cabinets for people—a massive office building. The thing rises eight or ten storeys already. They have one of those giant centerpost cranes on top, literally pulling the structure up by its bootstraps. And on the rigger's platform of the crane is a flagstaff, and flying proudly from that staff is Old Glory.

Across the street from the construction is a men's shop I occasionally patronize. When I park in front of the construction and walk across to the men's shop, the hardhats come out on the railings up there and they start doing Joe. I'm thinking of buying a hundred tickets and passing them out to the fellahs. Let them go and see Joe Curran, the prototypical hardhat, the middle-class homeowner, the guy with the knotty pine rec room and the "well-balanced gun collection." Joe, the guy who refers to Bud as the King of Beers, the guy who hates welfare deadbeats and niggers and kids who've fucked up the music and shit on the flag. Let them go and see
Joe
, and then let them try and reconcile it in their baboon brains. If they can.

Assaulted as you are, moment by moment, with urgings to read this and see that, to touch this and taste that, how do I summon the words that will impel you to the Four Star Theater, to
see
this film, now? How do I get you to do it, so you can get your parents and your friends and total strangers with short hair and a psychotic glaze over their eyes, to see it also? How do I do it . . . ?