Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  But as the ultimate literary device for a story of what-if?, time travel abounds in the genre of speculative fiction, notable in such works as Robert Heinlein's classic "By His Bootstraps," in which a man goes through a time portal again and again, meeting himself over and over (a story to be dramatized for the first time this year on the upcoming revival of The Twilight Zone); the late Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, in which Nazi Germany won WWII; Pavane by Keith Roberts, in which Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated and the Protestant Reformation was crushed, Mary Queen of Scots ascended the throne and the world became wholly Catholicized; and the late Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, in which the South won the Civil War.

  For shrugging off the toils of the here-and-now, for allowing human curiosity to fly unfettered, the what-if? theme cannot be bettered.

  It is thus little wonder that the motion picture screen has returned to this plot-device with regularity, if not much depth of intellect.

  There immediately spring to mind the most obvious films that have employed the time machine: Somewhere in Time (1980), based on a marvelous Richard Matheson novel called Bid Time Return, in which Christopher Reeve, using something like a Tantric trance, thinks himself into the past so he can woo and win Jane Seymour; Time After Time (1979) in which Malcolm McDowell as the young H. G. Wells pursues David Warner as Jack the Ripper from c. 1892 to San Francisco in the present day; the George Pal version of Wells's The Time Machine (1960) with Rod Taylor as the temporal traveler, finally linking up with Yvette Mimieux in the far future (as good a reason for going to the far future as one might wish); Planet of the Apes (1968) in which a contemporary space probe goes through some kind of timewarp in the outer reaches and returns to a far-future Earth now ruled by simians; Time Bandits (1981), in which a little boy abets a group of time-traveling dwarves as they rampage from era to era plundering and screwing up The Natural Order of things; Slaughterhouse Five (1972) in which Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time"; and 1984's The Terminator (some say based on writings we will not name here), in which an android assassin from the future is chased back through time to our day by a soldier determined to keep him from slaying a woman whose death would detrimentally affect the world of tomorrow.

  But that's only the first calibration on the cinematic chronodial. How many filmgoers realized they were seeing a time-travel fantasy when they watched Bing Crosby as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949)? (Actually, Rhonda Fleming ain't a bad reason to travel back to yore, either.) How about Brigadoon (1954) or Berkeley Square (1933) with Leslie Howard? It Happened Tomorrow (1944) in which the device is the next day's newspaper that falls into Dick Powell's hands; the classic Portrait of Jennie (1948) from the famous Robert Nathan novel; and even A Christmas Carol, in its many incarnations, has strong time travel elements when Scrooge is taken by the ghosts to see his past and future; all are examples of the ineluctable hold the concept has on the creative intellect and on the curiosity of typical filmgoers.

  Why should this be so? Well, consider the following:

  If time is like a river that flows endlessly through the universe, then might it not be possible that by going into the past and altering some pivotal moment in history, the river's course could be changed? By damming the past at some seminal nexus, could we not alter our world today?

  Say, for instance, you stepped into your time machine today and stepped out in 1963, in the Texas Book Depository, behind Lee Harvey Oswald as he was drawing a bead on JFK, and you yelled, "Hey, you asshole!" might it not startle him for that precious moment during which Kennedy would get out of the target area, and history be forever altered?

  What if you were on-site during one of the nexus moments of ancient history; during those months in 218 B.C. in which Hannibal crossed the Italian Alps with his elephants to attack Imperial Rome? And what if you set loose on the mountain a rabbit that dislodged a pebble, that hit a stone, that rolled into a larger stone, that broke loose a rock, that hit a boulder, that started an avalanche, that closed the mountain pass? The flow of Western Civilization would have been utterly diverted.

  With such Wells of invention inherent in even the shallowest of time travel stories, with such fecundity of imagination born into the basic concept, it would seem impossible for a filmmaker ladling up riches from that genre to produce a movie anything less than fascinating. Not even forty-five years should run it dry, right? If one thinks so, one has not seen Back to the Future (Universal), a celluloid thing as trivial as a Twinkie and, like much of the recent Steven Spielberg-presented product, equally as saccharine.

  Directed by Robert Zemeckis, currently a "hot talent" by dint of having trivialized both romance and high adventure with last year's Romancing the Stone, this flapdoodle from Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment uses a plutonium-powered DeLorean to send seventeen-year-old Michael J. Fox back to 1955 so he can set up the meeting between his mother and father (as high schoolers), thus securing his own future birth. Naturally, his mother gets the hots for him, and the lofty time paradox possibilities are reduced to the imbecile level of sitcom.

  With the arrogance of what the great French director Alain Resnais has called "the wise guy auteurs," Zemeckis and co-producer Bob Gale have had the effrontery to write a time travel screenplay with seemingly no knowledge of the vast body of such literature. And the story is by turns cheaply theatric, coincidental, obvious and moronic. Not to mention that Robert A. Heinlein and his attorneys are rumored to be murmuring the word plagiarism because of the film's freightload of similarities to Time Enough for Love, the master's 1973 time travel novel, as well as the famous Heinlein short story "'All You Zombies—'."

  Yet even with such embarrassing trivializations of a concept that seems dolt-proof, if—as Bogdanovich suggests—movies are merely pieces of time*, then surely this idiom as a source for fresh and imaginative films has barely been tapped.

  *Actually a phrase from Jimmy Stewart.

  At least one would think so.

  Yet here it is, less than sixty years since filmmakers denied the wonders of modern technology, computer graphics, robotics and even the freedom of using models made of plastic or hydrocal, not to mention color or sound, drawing merely from the treasurehouse of imagination, were able to create Metropolis; and their artistic descendants can offer us nothing more meaningful or inventive than Back to the Future.

  If we date the "beginning" of cinematography from Edison's Kinetoscope in 1891—rather than from Roget's Theory of the Persistence of Vision in 1824, or Rudge's 1875 magic lantern projector, or from Muybridge, or from Jules Etienne Marey—then we are talking about a self-proclaimed "art-form" whose age is less than a hundred years. Yet if we are to judge by the trite product that the most advanced crafts and talents offer us—the endless sequels, endless remakes, endless "hommages" that are little better than inept plagiarism—this is an "art-form" that has already gone stagnant, if not wholly, then damned certainly insofar as sf/fantasy is concerned.

  I think I've reached the core of my thesis.

  If we date the age of modern science fiction from Wells, rather than from Verne or Mary Shelley or Lucian of Samosata or the nameless author of the Gilgamesh Epic, we have a second artform whose age is less than a century. (I'll let adherents of the Verne-versus-Wells school hammer out the rationales for my picking Herbert George over Jules. I don't mean to be either capricious or arbitrary; I merely feel that modern sf as we know it, for purposes of this discussion, is better defined as proceeding from Wells's more thoughtful dystopian view of technology's effects on people than from Verne's less-critical utopian fascination with things mechanical.)

  Proceeding thus: speculative fiction as a coherent genre is a medium as old as cinema, and the two have been inextricably linked from the outset. Hell, the first movie of them all, according to many experts, was a science fantasy: Georges Méliès's Le Voyage Dans La Lune, 1902. But in less than a hundred years, sf in the print medium has come from the naïveté of Verne, the didacticism of Chesne
y, and the technocracy of Hugo Gernsback to a sophistication that produces writers as various as Lafferty (our answer to Thurber), Gene Wolfe (as one with Bierce), Kate Wilhelm (Dostoevskian), Benford (Faulknerian), Le Guin (equal to C. S. Lewis), Silverberg (Dickensian), Ballard (Joycean), John Crowley (whose resonances are with Colette) and Moorcock (in the tradition of Fielding) . . . while filmed sf gives us vapid and grotesque, unnecessary remakes of Invaders from Mars, The Thing, Cat People and King Kong. Even as the newer writers—Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Shepard, Bishop, Connie Willis, Tem, Curval, Bryant and Simmons—assimilate all that was the best of "the New Wave" of the Sixties/Seventies, melding it with elements of traditional sf, to develop ever subtler and more innovative ways of dealing with what-if, the cutting edge of sf in film is Explorers, Cocoon, Baby, Weird Science and Back to the Future.

  Even extolling the virtues of Cocoon and Weird Science, the reality with which we must deal is that sf cinema has come, in a few years (comparatively speaking, as regards the life span of an art-form), to a weary recycling of the same tired themes with mere fillips of variation, cosmetic repaintings of last year's models. In any other art-form, such a manifestation of aridity of invention, such an obvious stasis, would signal the end of development. In just this way did the epic poem give way to the novel form.

  A moment's pause. How is that written sf, for all its wrong turns, faddish detours and periodic recidivism, has continued to show constant growth and revitalization, while film—with its mushrooming population growth of new, young talents and astonishing technical expertise—has turned more and more in on itself, cannibalizing the core subject matter and paying false homage to its most trendy newcomers, even as it ignores the experimental work of men and women whose vision opened new paths fifty years ago? Gil Lamont suggests, and I agree, that sf in the print medium continues to show vitality, in defiance of the natural order of such things, precisely because it is a ghetto. Since we need not please the masses, the Great Wad, as do television and big-budget films, we continue to produce that which interests us. And the us that is pleased is one raised on The Word. Not an us, like those who come to work in tv and movies, raised on thirty-five years of repetitive sitcoms and episodic series.

  Only mass-market sf—"sci-fi"—gives us repackagings of the same old themes: space opera, heroic fantasy, things with fangs, haunted houses. Here in this ghetto, for all its death of soul for writers who aspire to the larger playing fields of general literature, there is a welcoming of the daring and experimental. So the best we have to offer, even thirty years old, is ignored by the motion picture mentality in favor of hackneyed treatments of hoary clichés. Starman, Ice Pirates, The Last Starfighter and Back to the Future are prime, current examples.

  It is clear: those who pass themselves off as creative intellects—Joe Dante, Spielberg, Lucas, Landis, Carpenter, among many whose names fall from the lips unbidden—are truncated things, capable of limited imagination. Oh, their technical flourishes are beyond cavil. They know every new camera lens and stop-action technique. But what they choose to put up on the screen is empty. It is either devoid of intellectual content or so sunk in adolescence that it can appeal to none but the most easily dazzled. Now we get an hommage, en passant, in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome to a line from Buckaroo Banzai; Explorers tips its dunce cap to Gremlins; and Steven Spielberg is on record as having said of Back to the Future, "It's the greatest Leave It to Beaver episode ever produced."

  Isn't that a daring project for the most powerful and artistically unfettered talent in film today!

  You'll notice I'm not even attacking these films on their lack of internal logic or extrapolative rationality. This note of the death-knell strikes simply in terms of which stories have been chosen for the telling.

  Which brings me to The Bride (Columbia), Teen Wolf (Atlantic Distributing) and Fright Night (Columbia).

  All three have been popular. Teen Wolf, a quickie, has a mass appeal based, apparently, solely on the current hot actor status of TV's Michael J. Fox. The other two did well at the box office, it seems, because of subject matter. And what is the subject matter? Is it something fresh and new in the canon of fantasy? Is the subject matter sophisticated and newly-slanted as was the case with Liquid Sky, Repo Man and Night of the Comet, three innovative films that died at the box office, and have become cult favorites precisely because they are purely ghetto films that eschew all the Amblin-like appurtenances of moron media hype? Are they even as fresh as, say, 1940s sf films?

  No, they are minuscule variations on Dracula and Frankenstein.

  All in the same month, rechewings of the three classic film fantasy archetypes.

  Teen Wolf is easy to dismiss. Badly directed, sloppily written, riddled with holes in the storyline logic, all this exploitation hackwork has to recommend it is the kid, Michael J. Fox; and as best I can tell he's got a one-note style of acting developed for NBC's Family Ties that is pleasant enough at first encounter, but is already wearing thin in these eyes.

  Fright Night is also easy to dispense with. The vampire is charming, the vampire lives next door, the vampire dies in the latest hi-tech manner. That's it. Vivid violence, some sophomoric humor, teenaged protagonists and Roddy McDowell doing his prissy imitation of Vincent Price as a ghoul-show host. That's it. Chris Sarandon—whom you may remember as Al Pacino's gay lover in Dog Day Afternoon—plays the bloodsucker in the currently hip Frank Langella/David Bowie/David Niven/George Hamilton charm-the-knickers-off-them manner, intended (one presumes) to set labia lubricating. The specter of Lugosi need have no fears. Sarandon's vampire isn't worthy of whisking the dandruff from Bela's cape. There is more of reminiscence of the young Robert Stack bounding into frame with a grin and a "Tennis, anyone?" than of Carpathian Creepiness.

  Tom Holland, who wrote and directed Fright Night, is remembered fondly for Cloak and Dagger, Psycho II and The Beast Within, a trio of humdingers. Stop gnashing your teeth, it's not polite!

  The Bride is a little harder to slough off. Principally because it was obviously made with serious intent, considerable intelligence insofar as design is concerned, and a performance by David Rappaport (the leader of the Time Bandits dwarves, Randall) that is no less than stunning. The conceit that motivated this film's production was the what-if? that follows a created female by Dr. Von Frankenstein that did not perish immediately. Not a bad idea. Room for a whole lot of development there. And for the first half hour one is so taken with the look and pace of the film, that it only slowly dawns—through the numbness in your butt—that there isn't much going on up there. At final resolve, the film turns out to be an elegant, handsomely-mounted bore. And Jennifer Beals, essaying the role created by Elsa Lanchester, is simply embarrassing. One expects her to fling free the coils that suspend her in the web of lightning, and flashdance her way into Sting and Quentin Crisp's hearts.

  As pretty to look at as Barry Lyndon or Tess, but no more enriching than Teen Wolf or Back to the Future or Fright Night, The Bride forms the fourth wall of the box into which cinematic sf/fantasy has chivvied itself.

  Once one has seen the original Tod Browning—directed version of Dracula (1931) with Lugosi unparalleled for interpretation of the dreaded Count, and once one has seen the 1979 Love at First Bite with George Hamilton, Arte Johnson, Susan St. James, Richard Benjamin and Dick Shawn flailing away at every possible hilarious parody variation on the original canon . . . what is there of significance left to do with the vampire idea?

  Once one has seen James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), with Karloff unparalleled for interpretation of the Monster, and once one has seen Mel Brooks's 1974 Young Frankenstein doing for that classic what Love at First Bite did for Dracula . . . why do we need yet another remastication of the original meal?

  As for Teen Wolf or An American Werewolf in London or The Howling (not to mention Michael Jackson's Thriller), if you can't live up to the tragedy and pathos of Lawrence Talbot being clubbed to death by Claude Rains, if you
can't get Madame Maria Ouspenskaya to play the gypsy woman Maleva, and if you can't express the horror of lycanthropy without the special effects folks laying in barrels of gore, then why not think of something new? I mean, hell, John Carpenter thought of a new monster creation for The Thing remake: killer Italian food.

  These four films, the cutting edge of what is being done today in sf/fantasy on the screen, say more about the sere and dusty condition of imaginations brought to bear on the genre. This, sadly, is the best they can do.

  It's not that there isn't room for better. Go see Kiss of the Spider Woman (Island Alive productions), an astonishing fantasy based on Manuel Puig's extraordinary novel, starring William Hurt, Raul Julia and Sonia Braga. Very likely one of the most important films of the past decade. And see what the real talent has to offer these days. Do not go gentle into that good night of movie attendance believing that Explorers or The Goonies or Back to the Future proffer anything more meaningful than background to chew your Jujubes by.