Harlan Ellison's Watching (53 page)

As I am one of those blessed individuals who almost
never
get headaches, this sharp needlepoint of agony behind my left eye came to obsess me. I knew very well, in my right mind, that I did not share Mike's illness; but every time the pain returned, I tumbled into the abyss of irrationality and thought, "I've got brain cancer. There's a gray pudding on the grow back there behind my eye." It was crazy; and when I saw Woody Allen's
Hannah and Her Sisters
in the middle of March, and Woody went through
exactly
the same hypochondriacal situation, I laughed at myself. But I could not shake the terrible thought, and finally I made an appointment with John Romm, who has been my doctor for decades, and I went to find out if I was more irrational than usual.

John examined me, put the light up to the eye and looked in, and reported back that there didn't seem to be anything in there pressing against the optic nerve. "Shouldn't I get a brain scan?" I said.

"Well, if you're thinking about something like that, there's better state of the art than a CAT scan. It's called an MRI and it costs about a grand."

"MRI?"

"Magnetic Resonance Imaging. About a grand. But if you can't get this lunacy out of your mind, spend the money and put yourself at ease."

"I'll think about it."

So I thought about it. For several weeks. Went to see Mike in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, couldn't rid myself of the horror, and finally went in for the MRI. The next day, John called to report the findings on the images. "You're fine," he said. "No problems in there at all."

I felt the edge of the desk I had been gripping for the first instant since I'd picked up his call, and realized how mad I'd been driven by Mike's situation. The pain behind my eye vanished instantly.

Then I heard John chuckling. "What's so goddam funny?" I demanded, feeling more the fool than ever.

"Well, it's just something the technician who sent these over said," John replied, trying to keep a straight tone.

"Yeah? And what was that?"

"Uh, well . . . he asked me, 'Are you
sure
this guy is almost fifty-two years old?' And I said, yes, I was certain; that I'd known you for years and that I knew you'd be fifty-two in May, and he said, 'This is remarkable for a guy his age. The actual brain matter looks like that of a six-year-old boy.'" And John broke up again. When he had it under control he said, "I always suspected you had the brain of a six-year-old."

That was what I thought in the moment before answering the academics. Because it was the anecdote that informed what I've always considered to be a pretty workable definition of maturity. And I said to the questioner, "I take to mean, when you say
maturity
, that you're asking what I think an adult is. And my answer is that being grown-up means having achieved in adult terms what you dreamed of being as a child. In other words, you'd be mature, and an adult grown-up, if—say—when you were a kid you wanted to be a cowboy and now you owned a cattle ranch. Or if you wanted to fly like Superman when you were a kid, if you were now an airline pilot."

And I added this quotation from Rimbaud: "Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."

These thoughts, as random as most with which I open this column every time, tie in with observations about childish and adult visions of what to make as a motion picture in an era when the studios check the growth-rings of writers and directors before they commit to a project.

As rare as it has been in the history of motion picture writing for talent of a high order to emerge—Richard Brooks, James Goldman, Richard L. Breen, Paddy Chayefsky, Herman Mankiewicz, Ring Lardner, Jr. and the Epstein brothers come immediately to mind, though the list is a lot longer than you'd care to have me reproduce here and, sad sad sad, you wouldn't recognize the names of those who dreamed the dreams and put the words into the mouths of Bogart and Lancaster and Bergman and McQueen—as rare as it's been till now, the situation today is fuckin' bloody tragic. We operate in The Age of the Know-Nothing Tots.

Kids raised not on literature, or even on films, but on television reruns, are being hired every minute to write and produce films that have the social import and artistic longevity of zweiback.

(Here are some grim statistics. The current membership of the Writers Guild of America, west is 6181. Of that number only 51% is currently employed. That's 3152 men and women. But of
that
percentage, while 61% of WGAw members under forty years of age are working, only 43%
over
forty have a job. Don't ask what it's like for directors.)

The deals being made at Cannon, at Fox, at Paramount and Universal, are deals for projects brought to executives by second-rate and derivative talents. Deals brought to men and women whose backgrounds are seldom in filmmaking, whose expertise and store of literary precedents is at best meager. (This is a series of generalizations. Of
course
not everyone who sells a script, or more usually a script
idea
, is a superannuated surfer. There are Larry Kasdans and Vickie Patiks and Tom Benedeks who have as much
élan
as Shelagh Delany or Harold Ramis or Horton Foote at the top of their form. But the generalization speaks unquaveringly to the reality of the industry practice today. The young and dumb sell to the only slightly less young and much dumber.)

These deals being made, and the films often made as a result of the deals, are films that cannot be viewed or critiqued by standards that have always obtained for literature, movies or even television segments.

Consider: we learn from the trade papers that filmgoing dropped another 15% last year. We learn that more and more of the audience that used to go out to, say, a movie a week, now stays home and watches videocassettes. The weekly opening of movies convinces us that overwhelmingly the theater-viewing audience is made up of teenagers. In the week that I write this column, here is what dominates the screens of Los Angeles, not much different from the screens where you live:

Molly Ringwald in
Pretty in Pink;
Judd Nelson in
Blue City;
Sean Penn in
At Close Range; Band of the Hand;
Nicolas Cage in
The Boy in Blue;
Ally Sheedy in
Short Circuit; Dangerously Close; Fire with Fire; Echo Park; Free Ride; Girls Just Want to Have Fun; Lucas
and
Top Gun
with Tom Cruise.

These are all films either
about
teenagers, or
starring
teenagers (though most of them are now in their twenties . . . the Brat Pack begins to creak and suffer morning arthritis). Most of them belabor the rite of passage, the dawn of sexuality, the pair-bonding of prep school twits, or the confusion of mid-life crisis occurring at age eighteen.

And one realizes, with a shock, that the tradition basics for reviewing films is inapplicable these days. One cannot, at peril of being hincty and irrelevant, evaluate a film on the merits of screen writing, editing, direction or even design. None of these staples seem to matter to the merchandisers of modern films. Apart from splashy special effects (which is a criterion that has begun to pall for even the most unjudgmental Kallikak), the sole criterion of a movie's worth—looney! lunatic! loopy!—is if the soundtrack can be melded to two-second snippets of the action sequences to form a music video for MTV, producing, of course, a gold album.

It doesn't matter if the film is a medieval fantasy (
Ladyhawke
), a contemporary aerobatics adventure (
Top Gun
), a western (
Silverado
), an Eddie Murphyclone cop rampage (
Running Scared
), or retold fairy tales (
Legend, Company of Wolves
). All that counts is that a
sound
is produced that can function in the secondary markets for appeal only to those who cannot listen to music in anything under 200 decibels. That the music doesn't fit, that the music jars, that the music distracts and blunts the mood of scene after scene, seems not to enter into consideration by those responsible for the film's artistic gestalt.

It is adolescent adults playing three-card monte with the captive kiddie audience, or actual tots saying fuck you to the rest of the world, both younger and older.

This cynical pandering to the sophomoric, unformed and utterly undiscriminating hungers of a juvenile audience disenfranchises the rest of us, both younger and older than the demographic wedge that buys rock music . . . or worse, that even smaller wedge that doesn't buy but merely derives its calorie-poor musical diet from
watching television!

Take
Short Circuit
(Tri-Star) and
Legend
(Universal) as specimens under the microscope.

Short Circuit
is nothing more than a sappy replay of
E.T.
with a cuddly, anthropomorphized runaway robot replacing a cuddly etcetera etcetera alien. It is last year's
D.A.R.Y.L.
Martinized and reworn. (Only difference is that Barrett Oliver as the robot in
D.A.R.Y.L.
had his gears and cogs and chips camouflaged, while No. 5 in
Short Circuit
has metal in view.) Both films paint authority as not merely inept and evil-with-a-Three-Stooges-silliness, but as implacably stupid and brutish.

Granted,
Short Circuit
posits the philosophical position that violence and killing are not nice things to do, which is a salutary message in this era of
Cobra
and
Rambo
; nonetheless it is a film that panders to the youth audience by giving them two of the three staples of
all
these teen-slanted films.

What are the three?

1) Bare tits. (Absent from this movie, presumably because Ally Sheedy, the omnipresent Ally Sheedy, is such a box-office draw that she doesn't have to bare her bosom.)

2) Disdain for authority.

3) Casual destruction of personal and public property.

No. 5 is just a kid, after all. It may be a kid with molybdenum paws, that runs on trunnions instead of sneakers, but it's just a kid. And, like James Dean, it is having a hard time learning who it is. It suffers existential angst in trying to reconcile the creative abilities of humans with the species' need to slaughter. It is the same, tired rebel without a cause yarn. It invests the young with a nobility that is unpossessed, presumably, by anyone over the age of twenty-one.

Short Circuit
did big ticket business, but no amount of giving-the-benefit for its anti-killing aspect can disguise the fact that this plate of spinach is a manipulative, sappy truckling to teen hungers and fantasies. And having Steve Guttenberg standing around like something carved from Silly Putty don't help beat the bulldog, if you catch my drift.

Yet
Short Circuit
soared. I suggest this phenomenal turn of events can be linked to the promotion of the film via music videos and its totemization of adolescent rebellion fantasies. It sure as hell couldn't have been on the basis of freshness of material or superlative acting.

It is a kiddie film, made by adults pretending to have the souls of the pure and innocent. Porky, duded up like Peter Pan.

A sidebar thought, probably deeper than we have space here to explore: Is film rendering our impression of the mutable world meaningless?

For more than sixty years we have received a good proportion of our understanding of the world around us from movies. Film was seldom at the cutting edge of the culture in portraying trends, but as soon as a trend became clear, movies were in there, commenting on it, well or badly.
On the Waterfront
may have come to the subject of labor corruption late in the game, but when it came, it made its position known. America took notice.
Saturday Night Fever
may look cornball today, only nine years later, with its stacked-heel disco boots and its Nik-Nik shirts, but it drove America into a spin when the Bee Gees and Travolta made their statement about the social set that lived and foamed in disco palaces. (And it was only about five years into the trend before it got the wind up; pretty good for an essentially conservative industry.)

But is this ability to mirror the world still operating in the mainstream of motion pictures?

I think not. The numbers are skewed, the facts distorted, the picture out of focus. One of those Polaroid shots in which everything comes out roast beef red. Such films as
Short Circuit—
the sf version of a typical teen rebellion flick—send us a view of the world that resembles
Lord of the Flies
more than it does reality. Kids run everything in these movies. Either kids grown a little older, like Guttenberg and Sheedy and Cage and Estevez and Moore, or kids in their native habitat, like Nelson and Macchio.

It was bad enough when movies beat us about the blades to accept obscurantism and illogic like Amityville as the secret formula to understanding Life, but the current flood of discarded immaturity that pretends to be How It Is
looks
real, no matter how twisted and bent. And this, I submit, is hardly the meal we need to enrich us.

They are films that reject maturity, even in the loose terms I suggested at the outset of this essay.