Harlan Ellison's Watching (35 page)

Gremlins, like Kilroy, were the creation of a modern world needing modern mythology. I didn't understand (nor had I, in fact, ever heard of) the dialectical function, Joseph Campbell's cosmological symbolism, Jungian archetypal images or the universal psychic structure called The Trickster. But I knowed gremlins was real neat. Me loved they puckish pranks. Not just as Disney fifinellas and widgets, but as a character on a radio program I listened to every Saturday morning:
Smilin' Ed McConnell's Buster Brown Gang
, featuring Froggy the Gremlin.

No one who remembers the famous phrase, "Plunk your magic Twanger, Froggy!" could suspect this reviewer of anything but an overwhelmingly positive attitude as I sat there in the pre-release screening of
Gremlins
.

Further: while I am of a mixed mind about the Spielberg canon, having known him since his days on the Universal TV payroll, I would have to say that I'm solidly in his camp. (For the record—and you'll understand in a moment why I go into such minutiae—I admire the following Spielberg films:
Duel, Sugarland Express, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark
, and
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
. I'm not even as great a critic of
1941
as the rest of the world seems to be; it had its whacky moments and I think Steve need not be too bothered that it didn't turn out as he'd intended. My favorite film from the Spielberg factory is, oddly enough, an associational item, as is
Gremlins:
the vastly underrated and strangely unsung
Poltergeist
, which I view as a Tobe Hooper film, influenced by Spielberg. On the other side of the ledger I confess to a dislike of much of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
Twilight Zone—The Movie
.)

Thus, my remarks here about
Gremlins
should not be construed as part of a pattern of denigrating what it is Steven Spielberg turns out. I offer the foregoing as credential in aid of establishing biases.

Thus lighthearted, I jigged a little jog in my seat as the lights dimmed, and with growing horror became as one with the many film critics—from
Time
and
Newsweek
to Gahan Wilson in
The Twilight Zone
magazine—who have perceived
Gremlins
as a film utterly without restraint, exhibiting a streak of malign viciousness that I now suggest has been a part of Spielberg's
oeuvre
from the first . . . subverted and camouflaged heretofore, but now, with Spielberg's ascendancy to the throne of power and freedom in Hollywood, freed from its Pandora's Box and permitted free rein.

Gremlins
suffers from the dreaded Jerry Lewis Syndrome: it vacillates between a disingenuous homeliness and an egomaniacal nastiness. It is by turns so bewilderingly schizoid that one reels from the shifts, cloyingly cut and cuddly—so arch, so coy, so aspartameously endearing that Tonstant Viewer fwowed up—and monstrously evil in such a way that one spike speaks to all crucifixions; embodying in the gremlins the most loathsome traits of human beings without a compensatory balance of positive human values. It is all the specious arguments you've ever heard as to why the human race should be nuked till it glows, rolled into one vile paradigm and served up with an aw-shucks, toe-scuffling, ain't-we-cute anthropomorphism so contemptible one leaves the theater wanting to get one's soul Martinized.

We have been convinced, through hundreds of interviews and analyses of Spielberg's motivations, that he makes the kind of films he wants to see, the kind he liked when he was a kid. Thus we are led to believe that what we're getting, expensively turned out, made with the highest level of cinematic expertise and most
courant
SFX state of the art, are films dreamt by an adult who sees with the eyes of a child. But if this is so, then there is surely a twisted adolescent intelligence at work in this picture. Because, as one of the stars of the film, Hoyt Axton, has said: "
Gremlins
is
E.T.
with teeth."

Fangs
is more accurate.

And so, we trust Steven Spielberg. Unlike
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, released at nearly the same time as
Gremlins
and bearing some sidebar attention (later in this essay) to the thesis at hand, which is obviously a film intended for the mentality of Huck Finn boys, no matter how old they may be,
Gremlins
has been aimed straight at little kids. The same wide-eyed tots who wept when E.T. gasped his last. A trusting, innocent audience that cannot discriminate between Lucas films and Spielberg films—so umbilically linked are these two old chums—and so, when it sees "Steven Spielberg presents
Gremlins
" it thinks
Star Wars
; it thinks
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
; it thinks Reese's Pieces (or M&Ms); it thinks Oh boy!

But the mind of Steven Spielberg is not that of a child grown older but not grown-up. It is a mind, from the evidence passim this film, of an adult who has grown to maturity with a subliminal freightload of cynicism and meanspirited animus. Cloaked in the gee-whiz of
hommages
to B sci-fi flicks and simplistic Capra paeans to a small town America that truly existed only in the wish-fulfillment of Hollywood scenarists,
Gremlins
comes to that tot audience with comfy images of lovable aliens, sweetfaced urchins, incompetent parents and stories that come right in the end. All set? Now scare the hell out of those kids! Suck them in, con them with what went before, and then open that corroded Pandora's Box. Let the Worms of Evil eat their fill!

An adult who sees with the eyes of a child? I think not. More probably an adult who retains the meanness of kids in the schoolyard, waiting to strike back for the inequities of getting teased, and being sent to bed without any supper, and having to do as one is told
because
. Let me not venture too deeply into cheap, vest-pocket psychoanalysis. I don't know what is in Steven Spielberg's mind; all I know is what I saw on the screen. And what I saw, apparently what many others also saw, was a grotesque breach of trust with that tot audience.

I heard children scream and cry in
Gremlins
.

I spoke to the manager of a theater in Columbus, Ohio who told me he has never before had so many instances of people demanding their money back. I have my own loathing to reconcile.

One can rend this film on many levels, apart from the ethical. What are we to say about the remarkable similarity between the
mogwai
stage of gremlin development and artist Michael Whelan's conception of Piper's Little Fuzzys? (One tries to be even-handed when crediting the "influences" on Lucas and Spielberg. One credits a lot to
hommage—
until the moment comes with De Palma films, for instance, when one chokes on the phrase "homage to Hitchcock" and simply shouts, "Thief!" One tries to overlook memories of Edd Cartier's hokas when one sees ewoks. Yet one cannot indefinitely put from mind the many, many press items about plagiarism suits directed against this most successful of director-entrepreneurs. One remembers Richard Matheson's short story and
Twilight Zone
teleplay, "Little Girl Lost," and wonders why Matheson never raised a question about
Poltergeist . . .
until one remembers that Matheson—hardly a member of the Spielberg coterie—was hired to write Spielberg's subsequent production of
Twilight Zone—The Movie
. And one smiles to oneself at the possibility that this gentle, vastly talented writer may have escaped the toils of a decade-long legal imbroglio while yet preserving his integrity. Shadows darken the mythic Spielberg kingdom.)

And what of those endlessly distracting
hommages
that tremble in the corners of every jam-packed frame? (For director Joe Dante has absorbed Spielberg's patented technique of packing every shot as if it were your Granny's bric-a-brac cabinet.) Polly Holliday stalks down the street and the background music, as well as her demeanor, reminds us of Margaret Hamilton in
The Wizard of Oz
; a poster half-seen on a wall is for Agar Pest Control, and we're supposed to chuckle at the reference to John Agar's co-starring role in the 1955
Tarantula
; at a gadgeteer's convention we see the time machine from the 1960 George Pal adaptation of Wells's classic, we cut away, and when we cut back . . . it's vanished
à la
1979's
Time After Time
; a legend on a door tells us this is the Office of Dr. Moreau; the marquee of a theater, seen fleetingly as the camera pans, announces
Watch the Skies
(the original title intended for
Close Encounters
and the last line of the original version of
The Thing
) and
A Boy's Life
(the working title for
E.T The Extra-Terrestrial
), and we are not supposed to snort at the filmmaker paying homage to
himself
, fer chrissakes; as Hoyt Axton makes a phone call a man in a hat stands behind him making notes, and the man is the film's composer, Jerry Goldsmith . . . we cut away . . . and when we cut back Goldsmith has been replaced by Robby the Robot, wearing Goldsmith's hat, speaking precisely the lines he spake in
Forbidden Planet
. But it goes on and on and on, world without end, amen. This is no longer the mild amusements, the inside jokes of those who love film and its history. It is intrusive. It keeps one's attention partially distracted from the emptiness of soul up there on the screen where the action is hysterical.
Gremlins
, like
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, and as many other Lucas-Spielberg products as you care to recall, is a showoff's movie.

Spielberg and Lucas and their proteges are scabby-kneed, snotty-nose neighborhood urchins scaring the crap out of their elders by walking a plank across a building excavation. They are so busy letting us know how clever they are, that they counterproductively shatter the best, first rule of film direction: don't make the direction obvious.

As Frank Capra, who is
hommaged
to exhaustion in
Gremlins
, proved: the most artful direction is that which warms the audience into thinking the film was not directed at all, that it's just happening as they watch.

Further, it is possible to savage
Gremlins
on the level of character and motivation. The boy and girl who play the leads are impossible! The boy is supposed to be one of those apple-cheeked virgins Capra used as icons, but he's old enough to work in a bank—though he lives in his parents' attic in a room filled with the toys of a ten-year-old—and his girlfriend is Ms. Phoebe Cates, who has managed to shed her clothes in every film I've seen in which she has a speaking part. (And though I'll be accused of something or other, I suppose we're expected to comment on Ms. Cates's firm flesh, otherwise why are we gifted with such regular peeks at it?) Ms. Cates is also supposed to be an apple-cheeked virgin, yet she is privileged to deliver the speech that is possibly the moment of worst taste in the film, a verbal recounting of that old Gahan Wilson cartoon about daddy dressed as Santa Claus and suffocating in the chimney on Christmas Eve. I submit that this iniquitous moment encapsulates the meanspiritedness of the film: taking the Capra Christmas motif and turning it into a toxic waste dump.

No one seems very surprised at the existence of
mogwai
. Not the father, played by the intelligent Hoyt Axton, not the mother, not the high school science teacher, not the apple-cheeked hero and heroine. It seems to me that not even in the fantasy world of a film such as this should the introduction into everyday life of an impossible thing cause such little startlement.

The instructions given to Axton on the three things one should never never
never
do to a
mogwai
on pain of terrible consequences—shine light in their eyes, let it get wet, and feed it after midnight—are never explored by Axton when he gets the creature. Even a schmuck asks for a book of instructions when he buys a microwave oven. And, of course, because it's an idiot plot, all three caveats are ignored so frivolously, so offhandedly, that we know from the moment we hear them that they have been entered merely to be transgressed.

But since everyone else in the film acts like a bonehead, how naïve of us to pretend to amazement that the plot has been manipulated so crassly. For of fools there is no dearth in this film. Glynn Turman, as the high school science teacher who borrows one of the gremlin offspring to study, has just seen the wire cage containing the creature ripped open, has seen the creature grab a test tube and has heard the sound of the thing eating it, and yet he tracks it around the darkened schoolroom (he had been running a science film for his students and the lights were out) without having the common sense to
turn on the lights
. And though he knows the thing is ravenous enough to eat a
test tube
, fer chrissakes, he nonetheless acts like a fool and extends a candy bar, held in his naked hand, into the shadows under a desk. When we hear him scream, and later when we see him lying dead, just enough in shadow so we cannot tell how far up his body the evil gremlin ate, we are told by apologists for this film's systematic violence that "nothing is shown."

Yet we must remember that film is a simulacrum of life. It is not a "cartoon" (a subject I'll cover next time). A
cartoon
is a cartoon. Live-action is one remove from the real thing. And in this film we see people being smashed by a snowplow that goes right through their house, we see a woman hurled at a prodigious speed through a second-storey window, we see Harry Carey, Jr. stick his hand into a mailbox and hear the sound of gnawing, we see a mother's face bloody with the raking of talons. And we are expected to laugh. We are told this ain't for real, it's a cartoon. But if you chew off someone's arm, they will bleed to death, slowly and horribly. If you run a snowplow through someone's home and smash them, you will grind them to pulp. If you throw someone from a second-storey window at a prodigious speed, her neck will be broken. And no amount of breakdancing and beer-swilling and emulation of human behavior by malevolent fanged creatures can remove the rotten core of violence that poisons this entire film. It is, truly,
The Muppet Chain Saw Massacre
.