Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  So you get no thoughts from me on The Last Starfighter, Sheena, Mutant, Red Dawn, Dreamscape, Conan the Destroyer, The Philadelphia Experiment, Night of the Comet and The NeverEnding Story. By the time those films got to the screening windows, I couldn't see the forest for the trees. (Understand: I am a movie freak, and in order that I don't overload on sf/fantasy films, I see a great many mainstream films, as well. And I must confess that in a world where I can enjoy Garbo Talks, Amadeus, A Soldier's Story, The River and Beverly Hills Cop, I choose not to pollute my precious bodily fluids with Sheena and Conan and films notable only by the number of teenage female breasts available for leering at by microcephalic schoolboys.)

  Eschewing semiotics and structuralism, techniques better left to the functionaries who rapturously give us shot-by-shot analyses with a meticulous examination of the firing of cinematic codes operative within a given segment, rife in journals such as Camera Obscura and Wide Angle, I try to look not only at the primary entertainment, storytelling qualities of films, but attempt to consider them as reflections of cultural phenomena.

  Movies have always been slow to pick up on new trends and societal predispositions—breakdancing flicks tumbled onto the cineplex screens two years after the fad was hot—but by the time they hit your neighborhood they resonate to attitudes already concretized among the general population. Years after the effects of feminism had manifested themselves in a widespread confusion by men as to how they should now react, publicly and privately, movies reflected their quandary with films of deliberately cultivated sadism and violence toward females. Foreshadowing the unexpected support of Reagan by voters in the heretofore liberal 18-to-35-year-old demographic, such films as the despicable Risky Business come late to an observation that this target audience doesn't give much of a damn about the starving children of Ethiopia . . . they want a sinecure at Dow Chemical, complete with a comprehensive retirement plan. After-the-bomb movies are big right now; and only thirty or so years after the initial fears of nuclear holocaust began to dampen our national spirit.

  No film is ever made in a vacuum. It is a murky shadow in the cultural mirror. And thus I am glad we no longer lie to each other that what you want is a rating system for what you'll see this weekend, something slight and dopey; that what I'm offering here is an exhaustive series of comments on trivial cinematic exploitation exercises.

  Yet synchronistically, my concern this outing is in precisely that quarter: the excuse currently proffered by many filmmakers that we should not judge their product too harshly because it is trivial. Don't take it seriously, we are told, it's only a movie. Excuse as explanation: they want their cake, and they want to eat it, too.

  As the subjects of this month's sermon, I selected Streets of Fire and Cloak and Dagger (Universal) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Paramount). All share a less-than-salutary press, and all share a common apologia. Which is: "This isn't real-life, folks, it's just a cartoon. So you can't legitimately lynch us for Sins Against Art that serious films may commit."

  First example: Indiana Jones and the Etcetera of Ditto. There will no doubt be those benighted few who will find fault with this film because it seems to be nothing more than a show-off congeries of tricks, stunts and gags we have learned were, for the most part, left over from Raiders of the Lost Ark. These same viewers with disdain will also, no doubt, chastise Steven Spielberg for a certain, how shall we put it delicately, McMartin Pre-School attitude toward children.

  They will say that the character of Willie Scott (played by Kate Capshaw), the Shanghai songstress unwillingly dragged into Dr. Jones's latest bloodletting escapade, is demeaning to women because through most of the film she runs around in ever-decreasing circles screaming in terror. They will say that the laws of rationality, not to mention those of gravity and physics, are defied by a three-foot-high Chinese kid dropkicking fanatical, highly-trained, six-foot-four thuggees, and by a mineshaft tram as it leaps its tracks, soars through empty space and lands nicely on rails beyond the abyss. They will say that the depiction of Third World peoples is racist because they spend most of their time quaking in fear or slavering with deranged evil. They will say there is too much gore because people are shot in the forehead, run through with sabers and the occasional kris, ground under rock-pulverizing wheels, burned alive, have their hearts torn still beating from their bodies, are gnawed to shreds by crocodiles, get smashed against rock walls, blow up in car crashes and otherwise meet their demise through means both mundane and innovative, as with one Wily Oriental Gentleman who gets skewered with a rack of shish-kebob.

  Those who object on these grounds, well, let's just say their bread ain't completely toasted.

  They have lost touch with reality.

  Which is not to say that Indiana Jones and the Thingie of Whatsit has so much as an elephant's fart to do with reality.

  Now I happen to like this film, but then I also like liver and onions and abominate sushi, so what does that say about me? I accept with a childlike willingness the suspension of my disbelief, in order that I may more perfectly resonate in contiguity with the intelligence that conceived this adventure: the mind of a thirteen-year-old boy commando, tipsy with dreams conjured by Sir Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, Richard Halliburton, Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Edmond Hamilton and Frank Buck. Lest you doubt my sincerity in this giving-over of myself to this metempirical state, let me reassure you by asserting that I do understand why it is that a piece of buttered bread always falls to the floor buttered-side-down. By the same token, and using the same rudimentary knowledge of gravity, I understand that when Indy, Short Round and Willie fall out of that tri-motor in a rubber life raft, they should by all rights turn upside down. (Which would have added a dimension to the fall that would have made the stunt even more exciting, because the raft would have served as a kind of parachute, and they would have been hanging from the life raft's perimeter rope as they dropped toward the Mayapore foothills.) But that's an exercise in logic, the introduction of reality; clearly an inadvisable undertaking, as it would jangle against the impossible view of the received universe that informs such films.)

  So I do not sit by the carpfire with those who pick nits. I swallow the adventure whole; and if I find it far less of an exhilarating experience than its predecessor, Raiders, it is nonetheless a nifty boy commando imago.

  But cake-eating/cake-having disingenuously rears its head when the reviews start coming in. Perhaps it was because of an independent realization on the part of many critics that a certain meanspiritedness was subcutaneously present passim the Spielberg-Lucas ouevre and that it was beginning to surface. Released but a few weeks before Gremlins, this film drew only foreshadowings of concern that spiraled up into hysterical gardyloos when Gremlins made its debut. (The phrase that best synthesizes critical alarm is the one I quoted last time, from David Denby's review of Gremlins in the June 18, 1984 issue of New York magazine: "I'm tired of being worked over by these people . . . the master's head-slamming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; now this creature bash, which flows with the same black blood as the Thuggee rites in Indiana Jones.") But it was a trend, and when groups dedicated to protecting children from Bad Influences began pillorying Spielberg for the child-labor scenes in Temple, Spielberg and allied apologists riposted with the disclaimer, "It's all in fun. It's not supposed to be real. It's a cartoon."

  Bear that line in mind.

  Second example: Streets of Fire.

  Oft-used phrases no longer available to me: "Director Walter Hill can do no wrong." Remember Hard Times (which he also co-wrote) in 1975; The Driver (that shamefully undervalued homage to the Parker crime novels of Donald Westlake writing as "Richard Stark") in 1978; the extraordinary production of The Warriors in 1979; Alien, which he co-produced in the same year; The Long Riders in 1980; the absolutely paralyzing terror of Southern Comfort in 1981; and 48 Hours in 1982, providing the perfect debut vehicle for Eddie Murphy; remember those films? Films of originality, incredible movement and p
ower; artistically conceived with a core understanding that they must entertain first and convey philosophical subtext second; filled with fresh insights, and joyously overflowing with images that continue to smolder long after you've left the theater.

  Of all the directors I ever wanted to work with, Walter Hill has been for me, as a scenarist, the Impossible Dream.

  I'm such a goggle-eyed fan of Walter Hill's work that I had trouble, for at least the first half hour, accepting that Streets of Fire is as dreadfully emptyheaded as it appeared to be. But as we say in the world of periodonture, Streets of Fire masticates the massive one. My gut aches when I say this, but it is pure crap from start to stop. I simply cannot understand how WalterferchrissakesHill! could have done a film this vapid. The Warriors was an astonishing exercise in surrealism masquerading as a gang rumble flick; so far ahead of its time that it caused riots when it opened: an augury of urban malignity that made popcorn sociology like The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause recede into the realm of show biz melodrama where they belong. It was a tough, yet poetic, stylized yet mimetic, fantastic yet naturalistic warping of perceived reality that remains as fresh today as the day it was shot.

  And for some goddam dumb reason Walter Hill chose to take his success with the flawed 48 Hours (ironically, the weakest of his works) and invest it in a production so sophomoric and purely lamebrained that reason founders. He has, in effect, remade The Warriors badly. Reportedly given carte blanche by Universal to make any film that piqued his fancy, within twenty-four hours after 48 Hours broke box-office records, Hill signed the deal for Streets of Fire. He is one of the few truly intelligent American directors unhampered by delusions of auteurism. His comments about what he was trying to do with Streets, in prerelease interviews (notably in an interview he gave to Kay Anderson in the September 1984 issue of Cinefantastique), were astonishing:

  "I've always been struck by the morality fables of the Middle Ages, which take place in a framework that looks very real, but in which the events could be outside of reality. Our fantasies, however, tend to be extrapolated into another type of technology, usually futuristic. But if you tell people the film is 'on an interior landscape,' they look at you with question marks. In an unfamiliar setting, people pay attention to the background, trying to orient themselves, instead of just glancing over the familiarity of a here-and-now backdrop."

  In those few phrases Hill codifies the esthetic for fantastic film, a series of concepts that the Peter Hyamses and John Carpenters of the world never seem fully to comprehend.

  Yet even with his head on straight, and his sensibilities well-ordered, Hill has turned out an expensive exercise in babble. With bubblegum heavymetal new-wave trash music mixed so badly that everything comes up succotash; with cinematography and production design that are the equivalent of purple prose, much of it in a ghastly roast beef red; with mindless violence and a plot that had audiences across the country roaring with unintended laughter; with performances by drone children who must think Stanislavski is a triple-decker sandwich one might order at Nate'n'Al's or the Stage Deli; with nothing going for it save Diane Lane's jailbait sensuality (and on the evidence of her first dozen films, apparently that's where her thespic abilities end) and newcomer Amy Madigan's gritty interpretation of the asskicking reiver McCoy (a part originally written for a guy), Streets of Fire was the big Holiday Bomb for Universal. They had the highest expectations, outdid themselves with the kind of hype advertising that should have resulted in queues as long as the Children's Crusade, the videos were omnipresent on MTV, they block-booked it for saturation play . . . and it went into the dumper so fast it produced a Doppler that could shatter cardboard.

  Now we're not talking duds like De Palma or Arthur Hiller (whose batting average is three good films in a thirty-year career, currently onscreen with Teachers, which ain't one of the three). This is Walter Hill I'm talking about!

  Yet even with his keen understanding of what it takes to create that special interior landscape of magic realism, Hill's conception is superficial and spavined.

  And the apologia was entered even before the judgment of critics and audience came in. On the jacket of the album of music from the film's soundtrack, Hill has a note dated May, 1984, that reads as follows:

  "Streets of Fire is, by design, comic book in orientation, mock-epic in structure, movie heroic in acting style, operatic in visual style and cowboy-cliche in dialogue. In short: a rock'n'roll fable where the Leader of the Pack steals the Queen of the Hop and Soldier Boy comes home to do something about it." And he tops off the justification with a quote from Borges: "'A quite different sort of order rules them, one based not on reason but on association and suggestion—the ancient light of magic.'"

  Walter Hill, heretofore a filmmaker on the highest reach of innovation and intellect, has made a film about which the most salient he can say is, "It's a comic book, a parody."

  Bear that line in mind.

  Third example: Cloak and Dagger.

  Remember what I said earlier about motion pictures—which should be on the cutting edge of cultural phenomena—coming in late as an octogenarian struggling uphill in terms of fad subjects like breakdancing, CB radio talk, punk clothing, etcetera? Well, Cloak and Dagger hopped onto the scene all brighteyed and bushytailed with videogames as a major element, as if it were five years ago and we hadn't seen Atari, et al., gasping for survival, with videogame arcades manifesting the business equivalent of cardiac infarction. Fresh concept, very fresh.

  A remake of the 1947 suspense film The Window starring the late Bobby Driscoll (for which he won an Oscar as best child actor), based originally on a Cornell Woolrich short story, Cloak and Dagger is a contemporary updating of the "imaginary playmate" trope. The current Bobby Driscoll, E.T.'s Henry Thomas, is one of those mythic whiz kids we see on the cover of Time and Business Week: imbued with a natural facility for computerstuff that is supposed to shame those of us who still use a manual typewriter into feeling as though we're Cromerian. He is pals with a Bondian father-figure spy named Jack Flack, protagonist of the eponymous fantasy role-playing game Cloak and Dagger. The kid's dream life overlaps the real world on the occasion of his witnessing the murder of an FBI man; and the spies come after him. Jack Flack appears onscreen in the flesh (a dual role for the always interesting Dabney Coleman as the double-ought adventurer and as the kid's father) and advises him how to escape danger.

  There isn't much more to it than that, and taken on its own terms it's a frothy confection no better or worse than many another such matinee offering. It's the kind of flick that would have been a cute B feature back in the Forties. Not that a budget in the multimillions should recommend for greater attention a film this slight, but when a movie costs this much, was touted this heavily, and had such solid studio support, and it doesn't draw an audience and is quickly pulled, out come the rationalizations. Which wouldn't hold our interest any longer than alibis usually do, save that once again the apologists countered critical attacks with the now-familiar threnody, "It's not supposed to be realistic; it's just sci-fi fantasy, you know. A cartoon."

  And at last, having set this up with examples, we come to the core of the contestation. Are these cartoons? Should they be judged on less exacting grounds than "real" movies? Why is it almost always a film of fantasy or sf that gets dismissed in this way? Does the audience swallow such disclaimers?

  Let me first establish—on your behalf—feelings of animosity and disgust at the mendacity inherent in this concept of "cartoon." Whenever someone hits you with a conversational shot that is crude or is intended to hurt, and you bristle, the shooter quickly throws up his/her hands and tries to get you to believe, "I was only kidding. It was all in fun. Boy, are you overreacting. You musn't take it seriously, it was just a joke." Well, we know it wasn't any such thing. It was a snippet of truth slipping past the cultural safeguards that keep us dealing with one another with civility. It was for real. Similarly, when such films as Streets of Fire and Gremlins an
d Temple of Doom are made, we are expected to take them seriously enough to plonk down five bucks for a ticket. When they fail to deliver what they've promised in all those tv clips, and we express our anger at having been fleeced, the shooters tell us we're overreacting and we should feel a lot better about losing our five or ten or whatever amount they got out of us, because it was all a gag.

  I wonder how well they'd take the gag if we paid for the tickets with counterfeit bills. Or pried open the firedoor at the theater and sneaked in with the entire Duke University Marching Band. "It was all a joke, fellahs; don't take it so seriously; gawd, are you overreacting!"

  No, they cannot have that cake and eat it, too. If we are expected to look with solemnity on all the superhype that works as support system for even the least of these films—short films on The Making of Cloak and Dagger, or a dozen others; clips on Entertainment Tonight that take us behind the scenes; items the pr people have cleverly slipped into the NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news programs with some pseudo-"event" cachet; trailers in movie houses; four="color" lithography on those doublespreads in every publication from TV Guide to American Film; all the primetime crashbang commercials; the billboards; the endlessly imaginative apparat of publicity that whelms us—then they cannot, dare not, must not, had damned well better not, come at us with cop-out cries of "We was only foolin', folks!"