Harlan Ellison's Watching (47 page)

I think I've reached the core of my thesis.

If we date the age of modern science fiction from Wells, rather than from Verne or Mary Shelley or Lucian of Samosata or the nameless author of the Gilgamesh Epic, we have a second artform whose age is less than a century. (I'll let adherents of the Verne-versus-Wells school hammer out the rationales for my picking Herbert George over Jules. I don't mean to be either capricious or arbitrary; I merely feel that
modern
sf as we know it, for purposes of this discussion, is better defined as proceeding from Wells's more thoughtful dystopian view of technology's effects on people than from Verne's less-critical utopian fascination with things mechanical.)

Proceeding thus: speculative fiction as a coherent genre is a medium as old as cinema, and the two have been inextricably linked from the outset. Hell, the first movie of them all, according to many experts, was a science fantasy: Georges Méliès's
Le Voyage Dans La Lune
, 1902. But in less than a hundred years, sf in the print medium has come from the naïveté of Verne, the didacticism of Chesney, and the technocracy of Hugo Gernsback to a sophistication that produces writers as various as Lafferty (our answer to Thurber), Gene Wolfe (as one with Bierce), Kate Wilhelm (Dostoevskian), Benford (Faulknerian), Le Guin (equal to C. S. Lewis), Silverberg (Dickensian), Ballard (Joycean), John Crowley (whose resonances are with Colette) and Moorcock (in the tradition of Fielding) . . . while filmed sf gives us vapid and grotesque, unnecessary remakes of
Invaders from Mars, The Thing, Cat People
and
King Kong
. Even as the newer writers—Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Shepard, Bishop, Connie Willis, Tem, Curval, Bryant and Simmons—assimilate all that was the best of "the New Wave" of the Sixties/Seventies, melding it with elements of traditional sf, to develop ever subtler and more innovative ways of dealing with
what-if
, the cutting edge of sf in film is
Explorers, Cocoon, Baby, Weird Science
and
Back to the Future
.

Even extolling the virtues of
Cocoon
and
Weird Science
, the reality with which we must deal is that sf cinema has come, in a few years (comparatively speaking, as regards the life span of an art-form), to a weary recycling of the same tired themes with mere fillips of variation, cosmetic repaintings of last year's models. In any other art-form, such a manifestation of aridity of invention, such an obvious stasis, would signal the end of development. In just this way did the epic poem give way to the novel form.

A moment's pause. How is that written sf, for all its wrong turns, faddish detours and periodic recidivism, has continued to show constant growth and revitalization, while film—with its mushrooming population growth of new, young talents and astonishing technical expertise—has turned more and more in on itself, cannibalizing the core subject matter and paying false homage to its most trendy newcomers, even as it ignores the experimental work of men and women whose vision opened new paths fifty years ago? Gil Lamont suggests, and I agree, that sf in the print medium continues to show vitality, in defiance of the natural order of such things, precisely because it
is
a ghetto. Since we need not please the masses, the Great Wad, as do television and big-budget films, we continue to produce that which interests
us
. And the
us
that is pleased is one raised on The Word. Not an
us
, like those who come to work in tv and movies, raised on thirty-five years of repetitive sitcoms and episodic series.

Only mass-market sf—"sci-fi"—gives us repackagings of the same old themes: space opera, heroic fantasy, things with fangs, haunted houses. Here in this ghetto, for all its death of soul for writers who aspire to the larger playing fields of general literature, there is a welcoming of the daring and experimental. So the best we have to offer, even thirty years old, is ignored by the motion picture mentality in favor of hackneyed treatments of hoary clichés.
Starman, Ice Pirates, The Last Starfighter
and
Back to the Future
are prime, current examples.

It is clear: those who pass themselves off as creative intellects—Joe Dante, Spielberg, Lucas, Landis, Carpenter, among many whose names fall from the lips unbidden—are truncated things, capable of limited imagination. Oh, their technical flourishes are beyond cavil. They know every new camera lens and stop-action technique. But what they choose to put up on the screen is empty. It is either devoid of intellectual content or so sunk in adolescence that it can appeal to none but the most easily dazzled. Now we get an
hommage, en passant
, in
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
to a line from
Buckaroo Banzai; Explorers
tips its dunce cap to
Gremlins;
and Steven Spielberg is on record as having said of
Back to the Future
, "It's the greatest
Leave It to Beaver
episode ever produced."

Isn't that a daring project for the most powerful and artistically unfettered talent in film today!

You'll notice I'm not even attacking these films on their lack of internal logic or extrapolative rationality. This note of the death-knell strikes simply in terms of which stories have been chosen for the telling.

Which brings me to
The Bride
(Columbia),
Teen Wolf
(Atlantic Distributing) and
Fright Night
(Columbia).

All three have been popular.
Teen Wolf
, a quickie, has a mass appeal based, apparently, solely on the current hot actor status of TV's Michael J. Fox. The other two did well at the box office, it seems, because of subject matter. And what
is
the subject matter? Is it something fresh and new in the canon of fantasy? Is the subject matter sophisticated and newly-slanted as was the case with
Liquid Sky, Repo Man
and
Night of the Comet
, three innovative films that died at the box office, and have become cult favorites precisely because they
are
purely ghetto films that eschew all the Amblin-like appurtenances of moron media hype? Are they even as fresh as, say, 1940s sf films?

No, they are minuscule variations on
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
.

All in the same month, rechewings of the three classic film fantasy archetypes.

Teen Wolf
is easy to dismiss. Badly directed, sloppily written, riddled with holes in the storyline logic, all this exploitation hackwork has to recommend it is the kid, Michael J. Fox; and as best I can tell he's got a one-note style of acting developed for NBC's
Family Ties
that is pleasant enough at first encounter, but is already wearing thin in these eyes.

Fright Night
is also easy to dispense with. The vampire is charming, the vampire lives next door, the vampire dies in the latest hi-tech manner. That's it. Vivid violence, some sophomoric humor, teenaged protagonists and Roddy McDowell doing his prissy imitation of Vincent Price as a ghoul-show host. That's it. Chris Sarandon—whom you may remember as Al Pacino's gay lover in
Dog Day Afternoon—
plays the bloodsucker in the currently hip Frank Langella/David Bowie/David Niven/George Hamilton charm-the-knickers-off-them manner, intended (one presumes) to set labia lubricating. The specter of Lugosi need have no fears. Sarandon's vampire isn't worthy of whisking the dandruff from Bela's cape. There is more of reminiscence of the young Robert Stack bounding into frame with a grin and a "Tennis, anyone?" than of Carpathian Creepiness.

Tom Holland, who wrote and directed
Fright Night
, is remembered fondly for
Cloak and Dagger, Psycho II
and
The Beast Within
, a trio of humdingers. Stop gnashing your teeth, it's not polite!

The Bride
is a little harder to slough off. Principally because it was obviously made with serious intent, considerable intelligence insofar as design is concerned, and a performance by David Rappaport (the leader of the
Time Bandits
dwarves, Randall) that is no less than stunning. The conceit that motivated this film's production was the
what-if?
that follows a created female by Dr. Von Frankenstein that did
not
perish immediately. Not a bad idea. Room for a whole lot of development there. And for the first half hour one is so taken with the look and pace of the film, that it only slowly dawns—through the numbness in your butt—that there isn't much going on up there. At final resolve, the film turns out to be an elegant, handsomely-mounted bore. And Jennifer Beals, essaying the role created by Elsa Lanchester, is simply embarrassing. One expects her to fling free the coils that suspend her in the web of lightning, and flashdance her way into Sting and Quentin Crisp's hearts.

As pretty to look at as
Barry Lyndon
or
Tess
, but no more enriching than
Teen Wolf
or
Back to the Future
or
Fright Night, The Bride
forms the fourth wall of the box into which cinematic sf/fantasy has chivvied itself.

Once one has seen the original Tod Browning—directed version of
Dracula
(1931) with Lugosi unparalleled for interpretation of the dreaded Count, and once one has seen the 1979
Love at First Bite
with George Hamilton, Arte Johnson, Susan St. James, Richard Benjamin and Dick Shawn flailing away at every possible hilarious parody variation on the original canon . . . what is there of significance left to do with the vampire idea?

Once one has seen James Whale's
Frankenstein
(1931) and
The Bride of Frankenstein
(1935), with Karloff unparalleled for interpretation of the Monster, and once one has seen Mel Brooks's 1974
Young Frankenstein
doing for that classic what
Love at First Bite
did for
Dracula . . .
why do we need yet another remastication of the original meal?

As for
Teen Wolf or An American Werewolf in London
or
The Howling
(not to mention Michael Jackson's
Thriller
), if you can't live up to the tragedy and pathos of Lawrence Talbot being clubbed to death by Claude Rains, if you can't get Madame Maria Ouspenskaya to play the gypsy woman Maleva, and if you can't express the horror of lycanthropy without the special effects folks laying in barrels of gore, then why not think of something new? I mean, hell, John Carpenter thought of a new monster creation for
The Thing
remake: killer Italian food.

These four films, the cutting edge of what is being done
today
in sf/fantasy on the screen, say more about the sere and dusty condition of imaginations brought to bear on the genre. This, sadly, is the best they can do.

It's not that there isn't room for better. Go see
Kiss of the Spider Woman
(Island Alive productions), an astonishing fantasy based on Manuel Puig's extraordinary novel, starring William Hurt, Raul Julia and Sonia Braga. Very likely one of the most important films of the past decade. And see what the
real
talent has to offer these days. Do not go gentle into that good night of movie attendance believing that
Explorers
or
The Goonies
or
Back to the Future
proffer anything more meaningful than background to chew your Jujubes by.

Here are four moneymaking films, top of the rank, best by far, lauded and applauded by the Wad. And they ask for nothing finer, nothing richer. And it's not that the
auteurs
set out to make empty, useless films:
this is the best they can do!

With greater freedom, superlative technology, exchequer-breaking budgets, neither Spielberg nor Lucas, nor any of the clone-children they have taken under their wings, from Arkush to Zemeckis, can match by one-millionth the achievements of Willis O'Brien, Val Lewton, James Whale or Fritz Lang. They preen and posture and talk about technique in the short takes one sees on the cable movie channels, but in truth they are the whistling pallbearers of the corpse of cinematic fantasy.

The art-form has reached its untimely end. All is ashes and
Porky's
from this time forward.

How tragic that many of you will have attended the wake and never know that the eyes staring back at you are those of the living dead.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/January 1986

In the November 1985 issue of a magazine called
Starlog
there appears the first half of an interview with your humble essayist, given to a very nice young man named Lee Goldberg. Mostly, it concerns my work for the past year on
The Twilight Zone
.

Mr. Goldberg began his introductory notes about me with the following sentence: "No one will ever accuse Harlan Ellison of keeping his mouth shut."

There is a widespread belief that columnists such as myself or Budrys or Erma Bombeck or John Simon or Robert Evans always have a ready opinion on anything that occurs anywhere in the world at any time, past, present or future.

That is because we have deadlines.