Harlan Ellison's Watching (68 page)

But because that is so, in my view, it explains why sf fans and readers have championed one of the worst films in recent memory,
Spaceballs
(Brooksfilms/MGM) co-written, produced and directed by Mel Brooks.

See how it all ties together, however long it took me?

Spaceballs
rivals
L'Avventura
as the single most obstinately boring film of all time. An invincibly tasteless farrago of lame jokes, obvious parodies, telegraphed punchlines, wretched acting and idiot plot so sad that its funniest bit is a rip-off of Chuck Jones's "One Froggy Evening."

Mel Brooks. Since
The Producers
we have watched a Brobdingnagian wit shrink in on itself as if suffering from some hideous malaise, with only one period of remission
—Blazing Saddles
and Yowng
Frankenstein
(1973–74)—until it has become dwarfish. And if "dwarfish," the sensibility that has given us
Spaceballs
goes by the name Dopey. And its confreres are certainly Sleazy, Party, Mockie, Shallow, Sleepy and Tyro. Party makes all the scatological and potty-training remarks; Tyro is in charge of the "home movies" look and sound of the film; Shallow selects the subjects to be satirized; Sleepy is in charge of keeping the boredom quotient high; Sleazy makes all the sophomoric sex comments and the sexist asides as if he had just discovered his wee-wee; and Mockie makes sure there is an abundance of self-hating Jewish references. But Dopey is the governing intelligence, selected by secret ballot on which None of the Above is the lone candidate.

An incredibly self-conscious movie. One grows weary of the
Moonlighting
shtick (totemized as "breaking the fourth wall between players and audience") in which characters turn and speak to the camera: "Nice dissolve." And when the head and arm of the Statue of Liberty come spiraling down out of space to the planet, only those who batten on puns can fail to perceive that they are about to see an
hommage to Planet of the Apes
, and only they laugh when the icons hit the sand and two people in monkey masks ride up. (When I saw this film in the company of a selected fan audience, and they did indeed react as described, it gave me a firm conviction that Brooks had reached precisely the audience he wanted: adolescents, and those who suffer from arrested adolescence.)

What sort of dribblebrain chooses to parody the
Star Wars
films (themselves parodies of the first of the trilogy and the totality a parody of the parodic form called "space opera") ten years too late?
Hardware Wars
, a twelve-minute live-action short written, produced and directed by Ernie Fosselius in 1978 did it all funnier, faster, and with infinitely greater panache.

The writing is so much succotash that one has to have one's leash jerked to remember that this howling, blithering runamuck was actually directed by something approximating a human intelligence, not just slopped together in a tureen in some biochemistry lab, plugged into a Voss electrostatic generator and shot up with ten million volts of idiocy, at which point it leaped through a casement window and ran off shrieking into the countryside, with a deranged Mel Brooks tearing his hair, rending his flesh, ripping his raiment, and shouting, "It's
alive!
It's
alive!
"

Brooks's direction is an infirm, broken-backed, whimpering creature, shot through the brain and the heart, and left to thrash out its tormented death in the bush. Direction that does not even have the sense to be passively bad, but is Brooks's usual bombastic, farting,
geshry
ingly aggressive one-man Grand Guignol . . . written, directed and acted by Brooks with the same maturity and insight one encounters at lunchtime in a grade school, when one of your playmates turns his eyelids inside-out just as you're biting into your peanutbutter&jelly sandwich.

Brooks continues to be more interested in—perhaps obsessed with—his own obnoxious comic persona than anything else, to the sacrifice of pacing, content, idea development or even honest humor above the level of the
tuchis
or bellybutton. He is a greedy talent, unwilling to give up a single ort from the groaning board of his films to other performers, sequential storytelling, or the ultimate primacy of loyalty to the work as a whole. It is a stark demonstration of disrespect for the audience, a loathing that says, "Open your mouth, I wanna pee in it again." He will cut the throat of logic, put out the eyes of artistic ambition, and disembowel integration of gag with story for the sake of one more booger or fart.

The moral of this film is: don't trust the coming attractions. (Your physician would refer to them technically as "trailers.") The trailers for
Spaceballs
were hilarious. Kids, don't try this at home.

And though
Spaceballs
made $28 million after 26 days, it is considered a critical and financial basket case. But it has been halloo'ed and praised by flotillas of sf fans and readers. (It is only interesting, I suppose, that Ebert—an ex-fanzine publisher and one-time fan—loved it while Siskel—with whom I seem to agree only when a two-headed calf is born—found it a dreary effort about as momentarily filling as a toxic waste burrito, my words not his.)

It is a film fans seem to love, following my thesis, because True Wit is wasted on them. They respond to the pun, to the trumpeting bleat of dumb humor . . . like the call of the wild as like seeks like.

There have been witty films.
The Princess Bride
is an exemplar.
Splash. Dr. Strangelove
. And outside the genre, a plethora, most evident at the moment being
In the Mood
.

But
Spaceballs
is a fan's movie.

It is one sustained pun groan from opening credits to fadeout. One throws up one's hands in sorrow and frustration, and wonders why we bother.

Why the liver and not the heart.

Why the carrion calf and not the eagle.

Why Catherine the Great never had a date with King Kong.

And why it should be that the literature we love should be dominated by readers and fans who are capable of laughing at this film . . . the same sort of people who laugh at paraplegics and old men falling downstairs.

The great French director Alain Resnais (and I've quoted this before) calls Brooks and his ilk, "The smart-aleck directors." Those who crave such inordinate portions of self-attention that they abandon all hope or desire for anything like Art or even a good story. And fandom clasps
Spaceballs
to its Kiss-A-Wookiee T-shirt. Lepetomane lives! The pun rides triumphant!

Now don't be angry because I revealed the Forbidden Truth. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you folks
are
as clever as you think you are. Maybe I'm not as clever as I think
I
am. Maybe pigs'll fly.

Just remember: who loves ya, baby?

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ February 1988

Among the many readers' letters to the Noble Fermans who edit this magazine, responding to my column before last, in which I asked those who enjoyed these outings to drop a note vouchsafing same as palliative to the incessant bitching of those who don't like the cut of my jib (to reassure my employers that
Watching
isn't Ferman's Folly), was a lovely note from a woman in Hilton, Pennsylvania, containing a question no one had asked me before. A question that I had to think about for several days before I understood how important it is in setting the cut of my jib. I've waited to answer her here, because I wanted the thoughts and response to be absolutely fresh, since I'm setting down this personal revelation for the first time.

She asked: "You always seem so angry. Perhaps it is your bellicose manner that puts off the readers who write such nasty letters. How is it that you can get so upset about what is, after all, only a movie? Sometimes you seem so filled with rage that I feel the heat through the paper. Wouldn't your comments be just as effective with a little less of the flamethrower?"

Hmmm. And several days more of hmmm. Till I'd thought it out, working diligently to strip my response of self-serving rationalizations. And after much self-examination, this is what I get:

I am no different from any of you in this major attitude: I don't like being lied to.

Like you, I get crazy when someone tells me untruths that serve their ends and in the bargain warp the perception of reality. It is why I despise Edwin Meese, our soon-to-be-dumped Attorney General. He lies about the way we, as a nation, look at erotic material, the family unit, personal ethics, and the role of the government in handling lawlessness. It's why I can abide Billy Graham and lust for an Uzi to silence Falwell and Swaggart and Robertson. The former has a deep and abiding faith in something I may consider arrant superstition, but he seems genuine in his belief and willing to let others carry on their lives without ramming his book down their throats. The latter are self-serving demagogues; tyranny and elitism of the worst sort in their hearts; playing on the fears and prejudices of the gullible who seek succor in a world seemingly deteriorating around them. They lie endlessly, in aid of nothing nobler than divisiveness, with a Salem witch trial methodology that only serves to send their constituency into a tighter downward spiral of hatred, alienation and dependency on the irrational. They lie about the way the world works, and their obfuscations serve not the commonweal, but the demagogues' need for power, and their exchequers.

When we are lied to by a used car dealer or respond to tv advertising and buy a product that is not as represented, the least rancorous of us flails against the walls within our head, and cries for redress. We are lied to by governments, by our elected officials with secret agendas set down by lobbyists, by relatives and friends who think they are doing it "for our own good," but who are, in fact, trying to keep the lake calm for their own journey, and by a business community that deals in floating ethics for the benefit of the bottom line.

We are lied to constantly, in a thousand small ways every day; and the less actively we call them on it, the greater and more easily institutionalized are the lies that follow.

Lying, as a matter of policy, has always been one of the staples of the hype attendant on promotion of films. Some of it is fairly harmless, and even amusing: the bogus biographies of stars, cobbled up in the pr departments of the studios back to the twenties; William Castle's publicity tricks and hyperbole that assured the filmgoer s/he would have a heart attack if s/he sat through the latest Castle offering, and so a nurse and pulmotor squad was in attendance at every screening; the hokey-pokey about 10 YEARS IN THE MAKING! that served to legitimatize ghastly extravaganzas, failing to mention that it had taken ten years to unleash the dog because the financing kept falling through.

But other movies have been sold to us, have been judged of note, on the basis of outright whoppers intended to add a patina of social value to otherwise tawdry efforts. These are not the little white lies that we wink at, because they're silly and do no harm—the belief that a western actor actually punched cattle, when in truth the closest he had ever come to beeves was in their T-bone persona, slathered with ketchup—but the actively dishonest representations that coerce us into plonking down our money to see something special because of its origins.

Take, for instance,
The Emerald Forest
, a 1985 film written by Rospo Pallenberg and directed by John Boorman. This was a movie trumpeted in advance of its release as "based on a true story." Its advertising and most of the reviews about the film stressed the following claim:

"He was seven years old when he disappeared from the Amazon damsite where his father . . . was at work . . . For ten years, the father spent every spare moment searching for his son. But when they met again, the boy knew only one father, the chief of the primitive Indian tribe called the 'Invisible People' . . . "

In the film, the father is played by Powers Boothe and the son is portrayed by Boorman's curly-blond-headed son Charley. They are Americans. In the postscript to the excellent Robert Holdstock novelization of the film (New York Zoetrope, 1985), we are told that the father was actually "a Peruvian whose son, Ezequiel, was kidnapped by Indians who attacked the family campsite along Peru's Javari Mirim River." Already we begin to see a fudging of "the true story." And, reluctant to dismiss this sensational story, we accept the dishonesty by saying, "Well, the producers did it because they needed a box-office name for the general audience, and using a great Peruvian actor might be more authentic, but we wouldn't enjoy the movie as much as if we can identify with an American, Powers Boothe or whomever."

But, as it turns out, converting the protagonists from Peruvian to Yanks is nowhere near the core of duplicity used to con us into validating this film as "based on a true story."

SCAN (which stands for Southern California Answer Network) is a reference program network set up to field inquiries from area librarians unable to locate answers to reference questions through the usual sources. They publish a splendid newsletter, filled with the responses to arcane queries initiated by librarians and other seekers after enlightenment.