Harlan Ellison's Watching (55 page)

But because I started some serious discussion of films made by adults with the sensibilities of adolescents; of films that are childish but not childlike; of films that pander to an erroneous conception of what even
kids
want to see; of films that are so commercially slanted for the MTV mentality that they disenfranchise most of the rest of us to the extent that a recent study commissioned by Columbia Pictures tells us that in a nation where for half a century going out to the movies was as formalized a part of the week's activities as saying grace at the dinner table, three out of four Americans now
never
go to a movie; of films that have so cheapened and trivialized what was well on its way to becoming a genuine art-form that the Hollywood movie has become irrelevant, not to mention laughable, in the eyes of the rest of the filmgoing world; because I started that train of thought on its journey last time, I must deny myself the luxury of divertissements. So no time wasted, I will get into a resumption of last time's discussion.

And I trust in the future you'll grant me my little auctorial ways. I really do pay attention to your carping, as you can see from how assiduously I bowed to your wishes this time.

Let us look at two recent films whose similarities of plot and theme and production are far greater than their differences in these areas; whose similarities of quality and intelligence and purpose are almost minuscule and whose end-results up there on the screen could not be more glaringly opposed. The beautiful failure is
Legend
(Universal). The charming success is
Labyrinth
(Tri-Star Pictures).

Ridley Scott is, in my estimation, one of the most exciting talents ever to turn his hand to the genres of film fantasy and science fiction. I'm sure that somewhere back in the early days of this column I related the incident in which Mr. Scott came to my home and sounded me out on my interest in doing the screenplay for
Dune
, which at that time he was contracted to direct. It was a marvelous afternoon of conversation, in which his grace and intelligence proclaimed themselves sans the affectations I've come to associate with directors of germinal films . . . men and women who, for all their pretenses to literacy and omniscience, are buffoons not fit to be mentioned in the same occupation as Fellini or Hawks or Kurosawa. As the afternoon wore on toward dusk, Mr. Scott said something to me that I took to be anything but self-serving. He said: "The time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films to emerge. And I'm determined to be that director."

When he said it—and this was after
Alien—
it struck me with the force of unadulterated True Writ. Yes, of course, I thought. Who else fits the bill? Kubrick had had his shot and had made his mark with 2001 and
A Clockwork Orange
(and thereafter with the quirky but laudable
The Shining
), but there was something, for all his undeniable genius, that was distancing, cool and too contemplative; something so individual that the films remain almost like views of the human race as seen through the eyes of an alien. No, I thought, as devoutly as I worship the work of Kubrick, he isn't The One. Spielberg, perhaps?
E.T.
remains a great film, as important in its way as
The Wizard Of Oz
or
Lost Horizon
, and whatever his part in the making of
Poltergeist
, his hand can be seen in the final production. But (as I sensed then, and have gone on at length about in these pages for more than a year) there is something sadly hollow at the core in Spielberg's
oeuvre
. Something otiose and ultimately trivial. No, not Spielberg. Then how about George Lucas? Had I been ravished by the wonders others had found in
Star Wars
, I might have considered the man who was, at that moment, the biggest moneymaker in the history of cinema, The One. But even then, as now, I thought
American Graffiti
a far superior film, and more likely to stand the test of time than the space operas. And nothing much since that time has happened to alter my opinion. Perhaps one day soon, but not then, and not now. Beyond those three prominent directors, who was there: Nicholas Roeg? Louis Malle? Brian De Palma? John Boorman? I think not. The concerns are too great for the long haul with each of them.

Yes, I thought at that moment, Ridley Scott is The One. If anyone can bring to the sf/fantasy film the same level of High Art and High Craft that Ford brought to the Western, it is this man. I dreamed of the elegance and respect for original source that Scott had shown with
The Duellists
in 1978. I extrapolated from the sheer virtuosity and Cedric Gibbons-like love of setting and background that had gone so far to making
Alien
a masterpiece of clutching terror. (And if I were not committed to eschewing digressions, I'd suggest a linked viewing of Scott's film and the James Cameron sequel which, as decent a piece of work as it is, cannot even hope to rival the original foray for transcendence of trivial subject matter.)

Since that afternoon that wore on toward evening, I have come to believe that Scott is, indeed, The One. Even
Blade Runner
, which did not collapse me as it did so many of you, has come to look to me, after repeated re-viewings, as a significant achievement, deeper in human values than I'd supposed, far more than a glitzy melodrama of sci-fi machinery and thespic posturing. Over time, my respect and admiration for Scott's vision has grown substantially.

But
Legend
, years in the making and the sort of production nightmare that all but the Michael Ciminos of the world would shun like putting on the feed-bag with Falwell, is a tragic enterprise. It is a long, self-conscious Jungian dream filled with awkward symbolism and an adolescent sensibility that I find bewildering in the light of Scott's frequently-manifested maturity and insight. What we received here in America was a chopped-up 89-minute version of the full 129-minute film released in the U.K., so there is no telling if the tale told at greater length worked better.

Legend
has a surreal quality, almost Dali-esque; or perhaps reminiscent of the paintings of that school known as the Orientalists—Gerome and Regnault and Debat-Ponsan. If wonder is the creation of a world in which one would love to live—Oz, Lawrence's Arabia, the streets of
Blade Runner—
then this film conveys wonder. The things that come before one's eyes in this motion picture are quite remarkable. Things we have never before seen. The camera roams as wide-eyed and innocent as Charlie Chaplin through
Modern Times
, and I defy anyone to name another director whose eye for the
outré
is keener.

But after eighty-nine minutes of rushing and flinging and breakneck visuals that leave one gasping, begging, desperate for a moment of peace and leisure—the stillness of the lake, the smooth swell of the lea—all is emptiness. This elaborate fairy tale of Good and Evil, of barechested Tom Cruise playing Bomba the Jungle Boy as if he were Mother Teresa, of unicorns and demons and dryads, is ridiculous. Like Boorman's
Zardoz
and Dante's
Explorers
and Boorman's
Excalibur
, it is the attempt to lift to adult level what is essentially the plaything of children.

As children we found in such fables—Aesop, Howard Pyle, Uncle Wiggily, Grimm and Andersen—touchstones for ethical behavior in the real world. They were tropes, intended to impart broad and simplistic versions of charity and honor, loyalty and gumption. But as adults we learned to our shock and often dismay that the real world was more complex than the fairy tales led us to believe. And we always felt cheated; we always found ourselves thinking, "They lied to us. They didn't tell us life would be this big a pain in the ass!"

Legend
is a film made by an astute adult who, when turned loose, when given the power to create any film he desired, fled into a throwaway universe of childish irrelevance.
Legend
is, at final resolve, a husk. A lovely, eye-popping vacuum from which a sad breeze blows. Because it finally gives nothing. It steals our breath, captures our eyes, dazzles and sparkles and, like a 4th of July sparkler, comes to nothing but gray ash at the end.

Unlike
Labyrinth
, which is a film made by adults that renews and revitalizes the perception of the world we held as children, yet operates on many other levels—as does
all
High Art—and invigorates the adult in us.
Labyrinth
, were it the first film to which you'd ever been taken, would be as memorable to you as
Snow White
or
The Wizard of Oz
. And it is as important a film as those; and it is as original as those; and it is as rich in multiple meanings as those.

And I will conclude these thoughts about films made by adults that are childish, and those that are
childlike
, next time. Because I seem to have run out of space.

I don't know why that might be.

God knows I've hewn to my stated purpose. I mean, I might have rambled on about all the other films I've seen of late, films I think you might want to know something about, but I didn't. I just hung right in there.

Hoping you are the same . . .

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ December 1986

If this afternoon you are walking down the street and some geek in a window three storeys above you decides to be cute, and s/he dumps a paper bag full of turds into the abyss, and as you pass beneath you get slimed from head to toe with ka-ka, and you look up and scream at the sonofabitch, and s/he gives you the finger, I'd be willing to make book that you'd register about 9.6 on the Pissed-Off Scale.

If you picked up today's paper and read where Reagan and his cronies had managed to push through a hundred and fifteen million to aid the Contras, but were trying to reduce the aid to retarded children from 9% (which is what it is, though it was supposed to have been 14% and then go as high as 30%, but they never quite got around to doing it) to 7 ½%, and they tried to con you by telling you we had to do it because of the Domino Effect in Latin America that would permit the Communist Menace to gain a toehold in this hemisphere, I'd put good money on your responding with outrage and a verbal explosion of naughty words.

If you go out to dinner tonight and a car full of no-neck spuds pulls up alongside you at a traffic light, and the feeps inside look across at the one you love, sitting beside you, and yell, "Hey, that is the ugliest piece of crap I've ever seen, I hacked up something prettier than that when I got drunk on Friday, it looks like something I fished outta the sink disposal this morning!" I'd bet my paycheck for this column that your first instinct would be to deck it as you leave the light and centerpunch those dirtballs into a better life.

Yet by the time you read these words many of you (and many of your friends) (and a large group of total strangers all across these great Yewnited States) will have shelled out as much as six bucks a head to sit through
Flight of the Navigator
(Walt Disney Pictures), and I'll take odds not one of you took sufficient offense at having had your intelligence insulted, at having been flipped the bird by Disney's head of production, Michael Eisner, by director Randal Kleiser (the man who gave you
Grease, The Blue Lagoon, Summer Lovers
and
Grandview, U.S.A.
, four of the dreariest films of the past eight years, despite having made indecent amounts of money, thereby guaranteeing Mr. Kleiser unlimited shots at your insipience threshold), and by a trio of writers named Baker, Burton and MacManus whose first names ought to be Larry, Shemp and Moe, that you rose up in wrath and demanded your money back. Go ahead, tell me that you felt so damned affronted by
Flight of the Navigator
that you nailed the poor theater manager's head to the candy counter. Tell me you felt as used as you did after seeing
The Secret of Al Capone's Vaults
; that you knew to the core of your being that once and for all you weren't going to have the Hollywood Crap Mill stick it to you and break it off inside. Go to it; tell me: I'll believe anything; hell, I'm just a critic, not one of the Great Wad that goes to these abominations and doesn't understand that it's had its pockets picked. And then I'll tell you that pigs can fly, and we'll start even.

What I'm trying to say is that
Flight of the Navigator
is just awful. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it. From a plot that has approximately half as much logic as a Creationist tract to a nauseating passion for anthropomorphizing every machine that they can flog across the screen, this no-brainer is an insult to anything crawling across our planet with the vaguest scintilla of a claim to sentience.

Navigator
combines the worst elements of
Explorers, Short Circuit, Goonies
and
The Last Starfighter
, with treacly homages to those early Disney True-Life Adventures in which all manner of flora and fauna were imbued with human characteristics.

No.

I've had it.

I can bear no more. This time I was going to inveigh once again about the juvenilizing of our beloved cinematic art-form, lamenting the horrors visited upon Ridley Scott's
Legend
and comparing it to
Labyrinth
(which, like
Return to Oz
, was never given a fair shake by the press or the critical
apparatchiks
); I was going to conclude with stunning summation the theses advanced in the last two or three columns, using as ghastly examples
The Manhattan Project, Ladyhawke, Sword of the Valiant
(aka
Gawain and the Green Knight
),
Space-Camp, D.A.R.Y.L
. and all the limping, lurching, broken-backed, blind in one eye illogicalities I've savaged here these past months, from
Gremlins to Young Sherlock Holmes . . .
but I'm simply not up to it. I've been receiving letters from many of you, pleading for respite. Agreeing, with sobs and defeated expressions, that this has been a period of assault on our tolerance for the imperfect unparalleled in moviemaking history; an assault that makes the dreadful indulgences of Pee-Wee Herman (whose voice, you will learn here for the first time, was used as that of Max, the sentient spaceship, in
Navigator
) seem by comparison to be of a stature with the thespic joys of Sirs Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson. Pleading for a brief break from the shrieks of anguish I let out every time one of these spikes is driven into my critic's perception. And at last, finally, I agree. I can say no more for a while. There is apparently no bottoming-out of this trend toward imbecile filmmaking. Every week brings new and more loathsome product; and at last even I am unhorsed.