Harlan Ellison's Watching (51 page)

(An aside. No one is more aware of the seemingly incessant flow of aristarchian eloquence I've expended on Spielberg-influenced films, beginning with
Gremlins
, than I. From that first Chris Columbus-scripted abomination, through
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, to
Goonies, Explorers
, and
Back to the Future
, there has been no peace for Spielberg and those who have realized his personal view of movies by the warping of their own vision, from this corner of the critical universe. It has become such a threnody that even I grow weary of the dirge. Yet what is one to do? All I have to work with is what I see on the big screen. And Spielbergian product has so dominated the industry since
E.T.
in 1982—an industry that imitates what it takes to be success to the exclusion of alternate styles of filmmaking—that almost every other trend is as a trickling crick to the Mississippi. As verification of that assertion, if common sense and simple observation fail to convince, consider: taken as a whole, the five films nominated as best of the year for the Oscars earned $220 million in box-office revenues;
Back to the Future
, which was not among those five, earned $200 million. In the face of such success at a strictly commercial level, the level at which the drones and hacks of the industry place value worth emulating, a level of success that is awesome not only because of its height above the mass of financially-remunerative films, but because of the dismaying lack of quality and paucity of content they champion for those whose aspirations are already operating on a subterranean level, how can an observer trying to make sense of it all
not
dwell to almost pathological degree on what Spielberg hath wrought? It is the Spielberg sensibility that informs the writing of scenarists whose work prior to their association with him seems, in my view, stronger and truer and less marred by cutesy trivialism. It is the Spielberg sensibility that poisons the directorial attack of Robert Zemeckis and Kevin Reynolds and Joe Dante and now Barry Levinson. It is the juggernaut that flattens studio considerations of development of projects outside the narrow path of what Spielberg has shown will appeal to the adolescent—or at best sophomoric—demographic wedge that buys tickets. So what is one to do? Either to pretend that
Out of Africa
or
Kiss of the Spider Woman
are more than noble exceptions to a rule of picayune endeavor, or to continue dealing with that which dominates the industry in hopes that someone, somewhere, will take note and break loose from the Accepted Wisdom that the only surefire way to make a buck in movies is to ape the three or four styles of motion pictures that have been raking in the gelt: knife-kill flicks,
Rambo/Rocky
manipulations, high school epics of tits and food fights, or Spielbergian reductions of life and adventure to the importance of cartoons. I share your exhaustion at these fulminations . . . but what is one to do?)

It is painful to attack a writer as young in years and in time spent working at his craft as Chris Columbus, yet what are we to make of someone whose credits to date include
Reckless, Gremlins, Goonies
and the quisquilian subject under examination here?

Another Spielberg "discovery," Columbus seems sincere, dedicated, and hardworking. I spoke to him via telecon once, soon after
Gremlins
. My natural instinct was to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one; to assume (erroneously, it turns out) that the vileness of
Gremlins
emerged as corruptions of his original intent by Spielberg and/or director Joe Dante.

Turns out that both Dante and Columbus were swayed to the Spielberg view of filmmaking by the amentia of Amblin Entertainment; and we now have a quartet of Columbus screenplays to evaluate; and much as we might like to believe that Columbus is the new Lawrence Kasdan, even his staunchest supporters now admit in private what they will not say in public: Chris Columbus just ain't very good at this thing called screenwriting.

And that wearying aspect of Spielberg-influenced films that masquerades under the encomium
hommage
, that endless truckling to injokes and references to best-forgotten minor films of a generation's childhood, takes center stage with
Young Sherlock Holmes
. Sorrowful headshaking ensues.

There is nothing in this film fresh or innovative or even particularly well-executed beyond the delicious conceit of showing us what Holmes and Watson were like as students. A mind-tickler that has intrigued Sherlockians who can never get enough of the adventures of the World's First Consulting Detective contained in the sixty (or, as some savants insist, seventy-two) elements of the canon. Doyle forever possesses our admiration and affection not only because of what he let us know about Sherlock Holmes through the recountings of his escapades via Dr. John H. Watson, but because of what he
didn't
let us know. The tantalizing hints of cases not recorded—yes, lord, let us one day find hidden under a false bottom in that travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box kept safe in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Company, at Charing Cross, the full story of the horrible Giant Rat of Sumatra—and the clues to Holmes's background. We can surmise with some certainty that he was born in Surrey, and we know (because Holmes said it was so) that he was the descendant of country squires, but was Mycroft his only sibling? And why, exactly, had Holmes such suspicion of women?

The gaps in our knowledge are almost as engaging as the vast amount we know, the adventures we read over and over from our first thrilling exposure to the canon till that final rereading of "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman" moments before we go to meet Sir Arthur in person on the other side.

So the pull of
what were Holmes and Watson like as prep school lads?
is a kind of what-if I think no dealer in imagination could resist. I cannot find it in my heart to fault Columbus or Spielberg or Levinson for giving in to the temptation to fiddle with the conceit. It is the shallow and tawdry manner of their dealing with this material that hardens my heart. The word "entertainment" as it has come to be debased—as per Amblin "Entertainment"—falls far short of entertainment as we know it in its highest form, that is, as literature. Which is what the Doyle Sherlockian
oeuvre
has demonstrated itself to be.

Columbus,
et al
., have treated Holmes as entertainment in this debased context, denying the material's value not only as Literature but, worse, more offensively, as Entertainment in the greater sense. But then, one suspects these people can do no better. Which, if true, is sad enough; yet one might wish that this batch of mediocre ribbon clerks could get past its awesome arrogance, its insular belief in the myth of its own omniscience, to display an uncharacteristic reticence when it comes to laying ham hands on the work of its betters. If the best they can conjure are the screenplay equivalents of fast foods and tv dinners, then swell. In the words of Thomas Carlyle, "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might." But let them, also in God's name, even if the name be Doyle (but not if the name be Spielberg), have the humility to know that their best is, at best, ephemeral fluff, examples of planned obsolescence, junk that insults the honorable term
junk
, creativity at the level of dispensability where one finds Kleenex and Saran-Wrap. Let them have the common sense to pull back from the posturing foolishness of a Schrader downgrading a Lewton in order to seem less a thief of art. Let them cease trying to fool us that their misappropriations are sincerely motivated
hommage
.

I have more to say on this. It may be that some primal force other than my mere anger has been inflamed through the act of codifying reactions to what is, after all, only a dopey film. It may be that whistle-blowing time has arrived for this gang of pilferers of the literary treasurehouse. Michelangelo said, "Where I steal an idea, I leave my knife." Perhaps we have all been witnesses at the scene of the crime where we have failed to realize how important it was for us to identify the owner of the knife. As Socrates received the unsought gift of hemlock, so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he who created Sherlock Holmes and Watson and Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran, receives the unsought gift of
hommage
from Spielberg and Columbus and Company; and in leaping to the defense of one whose work probably needs no defense against the nibbling of minnows, perhaps we defend ourselves.

I'll be back next time to complete the thought.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/July 1986

Completing the thoughts begun last time. Subject under scrutiny:
Hommage
, the unsought gift that blights the original creation. In specific:
Young Sherlock Holmes
(Paramount).

It has been a month since I began this rumination, and the anger that seemed to build in me as I wrote the previous installment has abated somewhat. When I tried to analyze exactly what had sent me up into that spiral of rancor, no rational explanation presented itself. Like each of you, from time to time I find myself furious-beyond-proper-response; but whatever the stimulus—whether something I'd just read, or a snatch of radio news overheard while passing through a room, or a snippet of some television image—when the madness passes and I peel away the layers of emotion, I find that the snatch or snippet was only something that produced a resonance. The home videos of Imelda Marcos and her degenerate guests at Bonbon's birthday party in the Malacanang Palace, punked out and festooned with diamonds while 73% of the Filipino people were subsisting below the poverty level and scrounging for food in garbage heaps; rapists of a nation, cavorting and singing into Mr. Mikes; and the song they were singing was "We Are the World, We Are the Children." An item in the Birmingham, Alabama
News
about a woman clerk in an airport newsstand who had been arrested for selling
Playboy
, and had drawn two years in jail for disseminating pornography. A moment of infuriating disingenuousness during a radio broadcast the day after Tombstone Tex Reagan won one for the Gipper in his shootout with Qaddafi—wrong or right, agree with him or not—that set my teeth on edge: stickily referring to the two F-111 pilots who went down as "heroes of our hearts."

Each produced a level of blinding animosity that spoke to something deeper than the events themselves. For, in truth, unpalatable as it is to admit, the starvation of thousands of little black babies in a faraway place does not affect us as deeply or lastingly or immediately as a stye on our eye, a particularly nasty cold sore on our lip, or our inability to have a good bowel movement. That we can be distracted at all from the petty yet vitally urgent imperatives of our petty yet vitally urgent personal existences is the miracle of the human race. That we can transcend the counterfeit emotions of the nanoseconds in which we lament the travail of those less fortunate than ourselves to feel genuine sorrow for others of our species, that transcendence that produces a Sojourner Truth, a Ralph Nader, or the man who passed the helicopter rescue ring to a drowning woman after the Washington, D.C. airliner crash, that creates Live Aid or the Red Cross, is the miracle that makes us the noblest experiment the universe has ever conjured up. Humbling and shaming as it may be to admit such weakness in ourselves, nonetheless it remains that what sends the burst of adrenaline through us at the snatch or snippet may only be the echo of an entirely personal, entirely human misery.

Shaking my head to clear the fog of anger, I finally located the source of my animosity toward Steven Spielberg and scenarist Chris Columbus and those who made
Young Sherlock Holmes;
the source of my rage at the cavalier rationale called
hommage
that permits, even encourages, less-talented johnny-come-latelies to corrupt the creations of their betters.

I fear another weird digression, by way of explanation, is necessary.

Here, elsewhere, and on many other occasions, I have railed against the indiscriminate acceptance of the loathsome theory of cinematic creation called the "
auteur
theory," wherein all glory and condemnation falls to the director. The writer is merely a hired hand; merely the one who constructs from nothing the "plan" on which the Noble Director builds the edifice of a movie; the creator who dreams the dream, sets it down so the package can be financed by a studio, the one who merely . . .

But listen to Francis Ford Coppola on this subject:

"I like to think of myself as a writer who directs. When people go to see a movie, 80 percent of the effect it has on them was preconceived and precalculated by the writer. He's the one who imagines opening with a shot of a man walking up the stairs and cutting to another man walking down the stairs. A good script has pre-imagined exactly what the movie is going to do on a story level, on an emotional level, on all these various levels. To me, that's the primary act of creation."

There. Just that and no more. And insert
auteurism
where the passion don't never shine.

Of late, the
auteur
theory has crept into the world of comic books. (I said weird digression, but if you need an excuse not to screw up your face, consider that the comic book is more similar to a film than any other art-form, including the stage play; and thus, if you wanna duke it out, fit grist for this column.)