Harlan Ellison's Watching (50 page)

ANCILLARY MATTERS: By now you've no doubt learned that Terry Gilliam's wonderful sensational terrific glorious awesome
Brazil
is in release, in its acceptable length. No doubt many of you are taking pleasure in my having said nyaah nyaah I saw it and you never will, and
badoom!
there it is for you to see. So go ahead and have your nasty little laugh. I am content: because of articles such as mine, Universal knuckled under to Art; and I don't mind looking the fool once again.
I
know I'm a saint, so there!

One more thing. While I understand that puns are, for the most part, the highest level of wit available to a lot of sf fans and readers (a singularly humorless lot I often think), nonetheless it behooves me to point out to the reader who wrote in accusing me of stealing the Monty Python dead parrot routine which I integrated into my column several installments ago, because I didn't belabor it by pointing out that it was a Python shtick (which you knew anyway), that this was something known as
parody
. Or parroty. Or something.

And to the reader who accepted at face value my statement that sf was dead as a filmic genre (only to take it back two issues later), this was a literary technique called
engrossment
. Sometimes referred to as
satire
. The art of the
jongleur
.

Some of you act as if you are miraculously free of the ravages of intelligence, and I'm going to tell you kids this just once more, and then to hell with you, you'll just have to wait till your father gets home at which time you're going to get one helluva licking: some of this crap is supposed to be taken with a smile.

You know how to smile, don't you? Just attach fish hooks to each side of your flaccid lips and give a yank straight up!

And that's what we call brotherhood.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ May 1986

One of my pet hates is Christmas cards. No need to go into the convoluted thinking behind my hatred of the damned things; I'm a month or so shy of age fifty-two, and I'm permitted a few eccentricities. Suffice to say that every year, despite many and widely-disseminated appeals to save their money and send what they'd spend on a card to some noble charity, readers and even long-time friends who should know better, fill my already spavined mailbox with gold lame, embossed, outsized, Oriental silk-screened wishes for a joyous Christmas, Channukah, New Year, Twelfth-night, Hsin Nien, Festival of Tet, Druidmass and End of Days (the last accompanied by a pair of ducats on the 50-yard line for the battle between Gog and Magog).

Most of these are returned to the sender on the same day they are received, with the message I HATE XMAS CARDS AND CATS printed with a large, thick-line green marker, right there on the envelope. I've been doing this for years. But as we know, there are always those who Don't Get The Message. So every year I curse and fume and send back hundreds of Yuletide missives.

You cannot know the enmity this act generates.

Even those faithful who stick with me during my most indefensible, unconscionable periods of social vileness and irrational gaucherie, sprout fangs and fire back letters (in ordinary envelopes, not those square Xmas card wrappings) in which such umbrage, such animosity, such a tone of affront is manifested, that one might think I had used the family budgie for genetic experiments. The thrust of their anger is that I have committed a felony. Let me opine that Heinlein's latest novel isn't up to his best, or that Reagan is so locked into Cold War thinking that he would sacrifice us all to his paranoia, or that
Peanuts
is a dumb comic strip, and they'll all smile protectively and make excuses for me . . . he's such a sweet man, perhaps he was just having a rotten day.

But let them receive the card they sent, all in good faith and sincerity and camaraderie, scrawled upon in green marker, and they howl for a return of the ducking stool. Defenestration is too good for me, they shriek! Scaphism is too kind a fate, they bellow!

How
dare
I not only turn away this kindly-intended, innocent gesture of goodwill, but let them know I never asked for it in the first place? This is an act of antisocial intercourse guaranteed to sour even the sweetest friendship.

And in what obscure fashion does any of this have to do with
Young Sherlock Holmes
(Paramount)?

Well, let me put it this way:

It had to've been late in 1942. I was eight years old. I was laid up with the flu. We're talking Painesville, Ohio. And my mother was going downtown to do some shopping, and I was miserably bundled in my bed with more books than I could've read if I'd been down with something serious like rinderpest or beriberi or Dutch Elm blight, and my radio so I could listen to
Jack Armstrong
and
Superman
and
Terry and the Pirates
, and of course my comic books; but I still lacked the one thing short of chicken soup with farfel that could save me from death. And that, simply put, was issue #18 of
Captain Marvel Adventures
, a 10¢ panacea issued every four weeks by the world-famous faith healers, Fawcett Comics.

With great care I explained to my mother that issue #18 had been among the publications received just that very day at the magazine-and-smoke-shop right next to the Utopia Theater (at which venue, I hoped she would notice, I was
not
enjoying the Saturday ritual of seeing Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder or Sunset Carson as Sunset Carson mopping up bad guys, to the accompaniment of the crunching of popcorn and the smell of gunsmoke, which personal tragedy surely entitled me to
some
consideration) (if not the Croix de Guerre). I described in detail how the magazines came in all bundled together with wire that had to be snipped by the nice man with the smelly panatella who ran the shop, and that if she had
any
faint shadow of affection for one soon to pass through the veil, she would make sure that the copy of issue #18 of
Captain Marvel Adventures
she selected from the racks was not one that had been scored by the dreaded bundle wire.

I went over the instructions several times. You know how parents can be. And I made absolutely certain she knew it was issue #18, the brand-new one available today for just a few minutes before other children (lesser children who were not on their deathbeds) savaged the supply. Eighteen, I said again. One eight. I have all the issues up to number eighteen, I said, to her retreating form. Eighteen, I shouted from my bedroom window as she got into the car. Eighteen, I gasped, falling back amid the sodden sheets.

Don't you know I waited
all damned day
for that comic!

Now this part is painful. Not just because of what comes next in the story, but because of my behavior. I have never forgotten what comes next, and if I'd had the courage to say it to her before she died about ten years ago, I'd have told my mother that I spent the next thirty-odd years of my life being ashamed of my behavior. But I was so ashamed that even at age forty-something, I couldn't dredge up that awful moment and ask for absolution.

Because what happened was that my mother came home all laden down with groceries, having spent a difficult day helping my dad in the store and having rushed back to make dinner, and when she answered my endless screams from upstairs, demanding my
Captain Marvel Adventures
, and she handed me the paper bag with the comic in it, the comic she had gone out of her way to buy for me, and I pulled it out of the bag and saw that it was issue number seventeen (#17 for crine out loud, not #18 which I had waited for all day with my tongue hanging out, only the thought of that comic keeping the Man With the Scythe from my person, but sevenbloodyteen!!!), the one with Captain Marvel battling Jap Zeros on the cover, I screamed at my mother and threw the damned comic across the room.

I'm certain that when I really do lie on my deathbed, the look on my mother's face at that moment will sneak back to strangle my spirit. The real crimes we commit cannot, somehow, ever be expunged. We pay and pay, right up to the last moment. There simply isn't enough in the exchequer to settle the debt.

And the terrible part of all this is that I
know
if the same circumstance were set up today, and my mother, or my best friend, or Susan, or Mother Teresa, or God his/her/its self brought me the wrong issue of
Captain Marvel Adventures
, I'd act exactly the same, indefensible, selfish way.

Which brings me to
Young Sherlock Holmes
.

Consider: how many times have good Samaritans "done you a favor" you didn't ask for? How many times have you wished they had kept their kindness to themselves, not put you in a position where you had to smile grimly and say, "That was very thoughtful of you," when what you wanted to do was knock them silly for putting you in a position where you had to clean up the mess engendered by "the thoughtful act of selflessness"?

People are forever doing things for your own good. They are forever giving you gifts
they
want you to have which you don't, frequently, want any part of. They merely want to serve. They want to share. They want you to have a nice, expensive Christmas card with the word Hallmark on the back so you'll know they cared enough to send the very best.

My wretched nature and guilt aside, I suggest this is self-serving on the part of the giver, with no damned concern for the attitude of the recipient.

Everyone gets a fix from "good deeds." I applaud that. I far more trust those who will cop to the truth that they feel terrific when they perform a noble act, than those who try to get us to believe they were solely motivated by a desire to serve the Commonweal. Good Samaritans and philanthropists and those who roll bandages at the local hospital are not much different, at core, it seems to me, than those who attempt to legislate morality, to save us from the devil, or to convince us that we need to believe as they do to preserve the Union. It is a philosophical and ethical membrane that separates us from them.

But I suppose it's part of human nature to give the gift that not coincidentally pushes the giver's viewpoint. Whether as bread-and-butter house gift or as guilt-assuaging invitation to dinner as reciprocation for all the dinners they've given
you
, the seemingly selfless act is, I submit, rooted as deeply in the need of the giver to get his or her fix, as it is to reward the recipient.

The thorn in the paw when one accepts the gift, however, is that seldom are we asked if we want this attention.

When it comes to filmic
hommage—
one of those gifts never sought and usually damaged in transit—the custom of primacy of interest by the creator is more honor'd in the breach than the observance.

Did the Salkinds check with Siegel or Shuster as to their enthusiasm for having their creation Superman transmogrified into a clown at the hands of David and Leslie Newman? If we listen closely can we hear Edgar Rice Burroughs thrashing in his grave at what befell Tarzan under the tender ministrations of Bo and John Derek, Hugh Hudson, or the blissfully-forgotten hacks who churned out half a dozen Me-Retard-You-Maureen-O'Sullivan idiocies? Was any attempt made by concerned parties, to hire a spiritualist who might pierce the veil and get Val Lewton's reaction to writer-director Paul Schrader's quote in the May-June 1982 issue of
Cinefantastique
, just prior to release of Schrader's remake of the 1942 Lewton-produced
Cat People
, that "Val Lewton's
Cat People
isn't that brilliant. It's a very good B-movie with one or two brilliant sequences. I mean, we're not talking about a real classic"? With how much good grace do you think Ian Fleming would take the jaded, imbecile shenanigans of the James Bond we see in
Octopussy
or
A View to a Kill?

Even on suicide missions, at least lip service is paid to volunteerism. But Captain Nemo, Sheena, King Kong, Conan and Norman Bates keep getting sent out there to suck up them bullets—a kinder fate than having to suffer the critics' wrath—without any of the "gift-givers" bothering to ask if they mind having their literary personas savaged.

Hommage
is usually less a sincere form of flattery than an expensive Xmas card that blows up in your face. In the case of Brian De Palma, of course,
hommage
is merely a license to steal from Hitchcock.

As the unsought gift is tendered, one has the urge to snarl, "Who asked for it, creep?" Nowhere do we find evidence that the recipient has been granted the option of saying, "Thanks but no thanks."

Which brings us, yet again, to
Young Sherlock Holmes
, 109 minutes of just simply awful, lamebrained and inept crapola from the team that brought you
Gremlins
. One hundred and nine minutes of unsolicited
hommage
that utterly corrupts the nobility and artistic value of the original creation; proffered with disingenuous and actively embarrassed apologia front-and-back by young scrivener Chris Columbus and his mentor, an ever-more-millstonelike Steven Spielberg, who managed—one presumes with dangled carrots of fame and pelf and posterity—to suck in yet another excellent filmmaker, director Barry Levinson, whom we heretofore revered for
Diner
and the cinema adaptation of Bernard Malamud's
The Natural
.