Harlan Ellison's Watching (33 page)

We have in this use of revivified language a sort of superimposed verbal continuum at once alien to our ear and hypnotically inviting. To say more, is to say less. It
does
work.

But if we use the special written language of Bradbury and Hemingway as examples, we see that such "special speaking" does
not
travel well. It bruises too easily.

Perhaps it is because of the reverence lavished on the material by the scenarists, who are made achingly aware of the fact that they are dealing with
literature
, that blinds them as they build in the flaws we perceive when the film is thrown up on the screen. Perhaps it is because real people in the real world don't usually speak in a kind of poetic scansion. Perhaps it is because we love the primary materials so much that
no
amount of adherence to source can satisfy us. But I don't think any of those hypotheses, singly or as a group, pink the core reason why neither Bradbury's nor Hemingway's arresting fictions ever became memorable films. When Rock Hudson or Rod Steiger or Oskar Werner mouth Bradburyisms such as:

"Cora. Wouldn't it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress swishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don't drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan's Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it? . . . If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-lined country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you
do
it?"

or Gregory Peck or Ava Gardner carry on this sort of conversation from Hemingway:

"Where did we stay in Paris?"

"At the Crillon. You know that."

"Why do I know that?"

"That's where we always stayed."

"No. Not always."

"There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there."

"Love is a dunghill. And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow."

"If you have to go away, is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?

I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armor?"

what we get is the auditory equivalent of spinach. The actors invariably convey a sense of embarrassment, the dialogue marches from their mouths like Prussian dragoons following Feldmarschall von Blücher's charge at Ligny, and we as audience either wince or giggle at the pomposity of what sounds like posturing.

This "special speaking" is one of the richest elements in Bradbury and Hemingway. It reads as inspired transliteration of the commonplace. But when spoken aloud, by performers whose chief aim is to convey a sense of verisimilitude, it becomes parody. (And that Bradbury and Hemingway have been parodied endlessly, by both high and low talents, only adds to their preeminence. They are
sui generis
for all the gibes.)

The links between King and Bradbury and Hemingway in this respect seem to me to be the explanation why their work does not for good films make. That which links them is this:

Like Harold Pinter and Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King are profoundly allegorical writers.

The four of them
seem
to be mimetic writers, but they aren't! They
seem
to be writing simply, uncomplicatedly, but they aren't! As with the dancing of Fred Astaire—which seems so loose and effortless and easy that even the most lumpfooted of us ought to be able to duplicate the moves—until we try it and fall on our faces—what these writers do is make the creation of High Art seem replicable.

The bare bones of their plots . . .

A sinister manservant manipulates the life of his employer to the point where their roles are reversed.

An ex-prizefighter is tracked down and killed by hired guns for an offense which is never codified.

A "fireman," whose job it is to burn books because they are seditious, becomes secretly enamored of the joys of reading.

A young girl with the latent telekinetic ability to start fires comes to maturity and lets loose her power vengefully.

 . . . bare bones that have underlain a hundred different stories that differ from these only in the most minimally variant ways. The plots count for little. The stories are not wildly inventive. The sequence of events is not skull-cracking. It is the
style
in which they are written that gives them wing. They are memorable not because of the thin storylines, but because the manner in which they have been written is so compelling that we are drawn into the fictional universe and once there we are bound subjects of the master creator.

Each of these examples draws deeply from the well of myth and archetype. The collective unconscious calls to us and we go willingly where Hemingway and Bradbury and Pinter . . . and King . . . beckon us to follow.

Stephen King's books work as well as they do because he is writing more of shadow than of substance. He drills into the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid with the dialectical function of a modern American mythos, dealing with archetypal images from the pre-conscious or conscious that presage crises in our culture even as they become realities.

Like George Lucas, Stephen King has read Campbell's
The Masks of God
, and he knows the power of myth. He knows what makes us tremble. He knows about moonlight reflecting off the fangs. It isn't his plots that press against our chest, it is the impact of his allegory.

But those who bought for film translation
'Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine
, "Children of the Corn" and
Firestarter
cannot read. For them, the "special speaking" of King's nightmares, the element that sets King's work so far above the general run of chiller fiction, is merely white noise. It is the first thing dropped when work begins on the script, when the scenarist "takes a meeting" to discuss what the producer or the studio wants delivered. What is left is the bare bones plot, the least part of what King has to offer. (Apart from the name
Stephen King
, which is what draws us to the theater.)

And when the script is in work, the scenarist discovers that there isn't enough at hand to make either a coherent or an artful motion picture. So blood is added. Knives are added. Fangs are added. Special effects grotesqueries are added. But the characters have been dumbed-up, the tone has been lost; the mythic undercurrents have been dammed and the dialectical function has been rendered inoperative. What is left for us is bare bones, blood and cliché.

It is difficult to get Steve King to comment on such artsy-fartsy considerations. Like many other extraordinarily successful artists, he is consciously fearful of the spite and envy his preeminence engenders in critics, other writers, a fickle audience that just sits knitting with Mme. Defarge, waiting for the artist to show the tiniest edge of hubris. Suggest, as I did, to Steve King that
Cujo
is a gawdawful lump of indigestible grue, and he will respond, "I like it. It's just a movie that stands there and keeps punching."

How is the critic, angry at the crippling of each new King novel when it crutches onto the screen, to combat such remarks? By protecting himself in this way—and it is not for the critic to say whether King truly believes these things he says in defense of the butchers who serve up the bloody remnants that were once creditable novels—he unmans all rushes to his defense. Yet without such mounting of the barricades in his support, how can the situation be altered?

Take for instance
Children of the Corn
(New World Pictures). Here is a minor fable of frightfulness, a mere thirty pages in King's 1978 collection
Night Shift
; a one-punch short story whose weight rests on that most difficult of all themes to handle, little kids in mortal jeopardy. Barely enough there for a short film, much less a feature-length attempt.

How good is this recent adaptation of a King story?
Los Angeles
magazine began its review of
Firestarter
like so: "This latest in a seemingly endless chain of films made from Stephen King novels isn't the worst of the bunch, '
Children of the Corn
' wins that title hands down." That's how bad it is.

Within the first 3½ minutes (by stopwatch) we see four people agonizingly die from poison, one man get his throat cut with a butcher knife, one man get his hand taken off with a meat slicer, a death by pruning hook, a death by sickle, a death by tanning knife . . . at least nine oncamera slaughters, maybe eleven (the intercuts are fastfastfast), and one woman murdered over the telephone, which we don't see, but hear. Stomach go whooops.

Utterly humorless, as ineptly directed as a film school freshman's class project, acted with all the panache of a grope in the backseat of a VW,
Children of the Corn
features the same kind of "dream sequences" proffered as shtick by Landis in
An American Werewolf in London
, De Palma in
Carrie
and
Dressed to Kill
, and by even less talented of the directorial coterie aptly labeled (by Alain Resnais) "the wise guy smart alecks." These and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-had-all-been-a-bad-dream inserts, which in no way advance the plot of the film, are a new dodge by which Fritz Kiersch,
Corn's
director, and his contemporaries—bloodletters with viewfinders—slip in gratuitous scenes of horror and explicit SFX-enhanced carnage. This has become a trope when adapting King's novels to the screen, a filmic device abhorrent in the extreme not only because it is an abattoir substitute for the artful use of terror, but because it panders to the lowest, vilest tastes of an already debased audience.

It is a bit of cinematic shorthand developed by De Palma specifically for
Carrie
that now occurs with stultifying regularity in virtually
all
of the later movies made from King's books.

I submit this bogus technique is further evidence that, flensed of characterization and allegory, what the makers of these morbid exploitation films are left with does not suffice to create anything resembling the parent novel, however fudged for visual translation. And so fangs are added, eviscerations are added, sprayed blood is added; subtlety is excised, respect for the audience is excised, all restraint vanishes in an hysterical rush to make the empty and boring seem scintillant.

Children of the Corn
is merely the latest validation of the theory; or as
Cinefantastique
said in its September 1984 issue: "King's mass-market fiction has inspired some momentous cinematic dreck, but
Children of the Corn
is a new low even by schlock standards."

Of the nine films that originated with Stephen King's writings, only three (in my view, of course, but now almost uniformly buttressed by audience and media attention) have any resemblance in quality or content—not necessarily both in the same film—to the parent:
Carrie, The Shining
and
The Dead Zone
.

The first, because De Palma had not yet run totally amuck and the allegorical undertones were somewhat preserved by outstanding performances by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie.

The second, because it is the vision of Kubrick, always an intriguing way of seeing, even though it is no more King's
The Shining
than Orson Welles's
The Trial
was Kafka's dream.

(The sort of people who call Kubrick's version of King's
The Shining
"self-indulgent" are the same kind of people who think secular humanism is a religion, or that there is some arcane merit in astrology. If I hear "self-indulgent" used once more as a pejorative, violence will follow. Listen very carefully: what else is Art
but
self-indulgence?

(Only the blamming of rivets into Chrysler door panels escapes the denotation "self-indulgent." The Sistine Chapel ceiling is the artistic self-indulgence of Michelangelo;
Moby-Dick
was Melville's self-indulgence; sculptor Gutzon Borglum indulged himself by creating Mount Rushmore National Memorial; and bombing Pearl Harbor was the self-indulgence of Japan's prime minister, Hideki Tojo. The former trio of artistic "self-indulgences" brought their creators fame and approbation; the latter "work of art," World War II, got its architect hanged as a war criminal. There is a lesson here.

(It seems somehow beyond the intellectual grasp of those who widely disseminate their opinions on cinema, that King's
The Shining
is not Kubrick's
The Shining
, any more than Kafka's
The Trial
is Orson Welles's
The Trial;
but all four of these creations of a superior, individual intellect bear the stamp of High Art. Kubrick is one of only seven
real
directors in the world. By that I mean superior beyond comparison. All the rest are craftspersons of greater or lesser merit, but simply not touched by the divine madness suffusing every frame of work by these seven. That to which Kubrick turns his hand becomes, despite your affection for the original, something different, something equally as great as the original. In some cases, greater: Capra's
Lost Horizon
beats out James Hilton's famous novel of the same name by a dozen light-years.