Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Hold the brick.

  Yes, that was downright dopey. And in every Ken Russell film there is dopiness; pure Howdy Doody time. And there is excess. And there is bad taste. And there is imaginary gone bugfuck. And there are performances by actors who seem to have dined alfresco on jimson weed.

  But in that same film, The Music Lovers, Ken Russell put on celluloid the single most frightening cinematic image I can remember in nearly fifty years of moviegoing. (Because the morbidly curious will demand I specify, I will recount it here for you. If you are easily shocked, or even if you are hard to shock, I urge you to skip to the paragraph below beginning with the big bullet: • I am not being facetious. There is no coy duplicity in my warning. I am not trying to titillate you with a "guilty pleasure." What I will describe rocked me even when I saw it; the theater audience with whom I shared the raw experience was moved in large numbers to depart the screening. You have been alerted. Read on if you wish, but don't send one of those outraged letters to the Noble Ferman Editors; if you remained, it was free choice.)

  In The Music Lovers, a bizarre film biography of Pê'tr Ilich Tchaikovsky that distorts historical fact and the flow of the composer's real life to Russell's nefarious ends, we are presented with an encounter in the open yard of a madhouse between Tchaikovsky's nymphomaniac wife, Antonina Milyukova, and her mother. Nina (who actually only lived with Tchaikovsky for a few weeks) has been consigned to bedlam by the mother who, in the film, is portrayed as a monster who has pimped her daughter to well-heeled gentlemen in Moscow. Nina is so far gone into lunacy that the mother presents these callers (who have been told they can fuck "Tchaikovsky's wife" for a few rubles) as "Rimsky-Korsakov," "Mussorgsky," "Borodin." Nina has already slipped so far into suicidal psychosis that she accepts the duplicitous fantasy, and becomes a merchandised sex object for her mother's gain. She contracts syphilis, goes completely out of her head, and is sent to the institution. (In fact, this happened three years after Tchaikovsky's death, but Russell uses it to his own purposes as having happened while Tchaikovsky was still a youngish man.)

  The mother, decked out in rare plumage, silks and a haughty manner, comes to see her daughter. Nina, played by Glenda Jackson, joins her in the exercise yard. All around we see barred windows and grates set into the ground, and from these cell openings we see hands and scabrous arms reaching, reaching, imploring. Jammed into every cell in this awful place are those the nineteenth century chose to lock away rather than attempt to understand and cure. The screams. The wails of the damned. It is as flamboyant and sickeningly sensual as Russell has ever been. Nina is covered with running sores, her eyes red-rimmed and lit with the fire of lunacy. She wears a gray rough-cloth shift that billows around her feet.

  They have a conversation that only faintly touches on reality. And at the end of the chat, Nina wanders coquettishly toward one of those grates in the cobblestones, from which hands reach, from which fingers writhe like fat white worms, against which faces of demented men are pressed, their rheumy eyes shining out like those of rats in a sewer.

  And with the grace of a royal courtesan, Nina begins to lower herself onto the grating, thighs wide, bending at the knees, settling down like an ashy flower, shift spread wide around her to cover the grate. She settles down till she is pressed to the grate, naked beneath her garment; and as the mother (and we) watch in disbelief, we hear the slurping, sucking sounds of those diseased madmen working at the secret places of Tchaikovsky's mad wife.

  • To those rejoining us, relax: you're safe now. For those who traveled through the preceding four paragraphs with me, I cannot apologize for having demonstrated my eloquent gueule—which translates from the French, roughly, as "bad mouth." As George Orwell once pointed out, "There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a madman." Real Art has the capacity to make us nervous. In my view, that scene is Real Art. Twisted, depraved, wildly disturbing Art, but Real Art nonetheless. It is the essence of Russell's raw power to capture something infinitely darker in the human psyche than Lovecraft at his most beguiling. I cannot apologize for exposing you to Art, no matter how deeply it distresses either of us. It is important, if you are to understand why I perceive Russell as a Great Director, that specifics be tendered.

  For all of his shenanigans and his belly-whoppers, Ken Russell uses film to look at things we not only don't care to see, but to look at things we don't even imagine exist!

  Does that not lie near to the burning center of what we seek in fantasy literature? The unknowable. The inexplicable. The monstrous that abides in sweet humanity. Is it not what we see corrupted and ineptly proffered by the slasher-film directors? Does it not tear at our perceptions in ways that treacly abominations like Short Circuit and Gremlins cannot?

  So here we have Russell's vision of that single night—June 16, 1816—in the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland; a night on the shores of Lac Leman in which the opium addicted poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the company of his lover, Mary Godwin, her wild half-sister Claire, Dr. Polidori, and their cruelly jesting host Lord Byron, experience the debauchery and reckless mindgames that will one day produce Polidori's The Vampyre (from which, authorities argue, Dracula and the genre of horror fiction as we know it, proceeds) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

  In fact, the session went on among these five for an entire summer; but Russell gives us a night of storm and drugs and sex and terror and frenetic submission to the moist and gagging secret fears that encapsulates for dramatic effect, all that transpired during that legendary encounter.

  The film has the surrealistic feel of such classics as Arrabal's 1970 Viva la Muerte (Hurrah for Death), Buñuel and Dali's 1928 Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau's 1950 Orphée. Mark my caution: this is nowhere near being in a class with such great films, but it has the same sensibility. Images flash and burn and flee almost before we have had the moment to set them correctly into the jigsaw. An attack by a suit of armor culminates in the helmet's visor being thrown up to reveal a face of raw meat writhing with leeches. A painting on a wall, representative of the work of Henry Fuseli, showing a troggish demon astride the naked body of an houri, comes to life and Mary sees herself as the violated victim. It is an Odilon Redon nightmare come to the tender membrane of sanity and clawing its way into the real world. It is redolent with symbolism.

  Much of that symbolism is ludicrous: Miriam Cyr as Claire, in a laudanum-induced vision as perceived by Shelley, bares her breasts, and in place of nipples there are staring eyes . . . which blink at him. The audience roars with laughter. Russell had overindulged his adolescent fantasies.

  And this excess, ultimately, undermines the film. What was there to be discovered, is revealed at last to be the silliness and self-indulgence of people we find foolish and vain and empty. As Mary Godwin and Lord Byron and Polidori and Shelley were not. Like a child trying too hard to get the attention of adults, finally pissing on the living room carpet, Russell's conceit shreds itself with its strumpet-painted nails. It is too diffuse, too bizarre, too distorted to be taken seriously.

  By presenting the accumulated phantasms of a summer in one night's grisly carrying-on, Russell has reduced the premier idea of a horror film to the level of Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?—a running, jumping and standing still charade; the shipboard stateroom scene from the Marx Bros.' A Night at the Opera. Distorted closeups like parodies of shots from Sergio Leone westerns. Icons of slime, rats, ichor, cobwebs, dirt, meat, blood, water. Gothic? No, more precisely, rococo; grotesquerie piled on grotesquerie without pause, without release, without a moment for reflection. Formless, over the top, obsessively goofy . . . such screaming and running around and eye-rolling that we perceive the film as one cacophonous shriek. While at the same time it takes itself so seriously we feel we must laugh behind our hand. And all of this played out to Thomas Dolby's molar-grinding electronic score. Whatever happened to real symphony orchestras, playing scores by Waxman and Newman and Rosza, as background for "big" pictures such as
this?

  No one in his or her right mind could truly be said to "like" this film, for in this film no one is in his or her right mind; and so we have no place to moor our sympathy.

  At final consideration, Gothic is loopy and fatally flawed and an aberration.

  Yet I treasure this film. So may you. If you, as am I, are out of your head . . . you will cleave to this tortured bit of cinematic epilepsy because it is alive. It is yet another crime of passion committed by Ken Russell, and his sort of berserk creativity has fallen on such hard times in this age of Reagan and yuppie sensibility, that simply to be exposed to the ravings of an inspired madman is cathartic.

  I came away from Gothic with my soul on fire. It drove me to this essay, all 5000 + words of it.

  Back to the Future had no such effect on me. Nor have any of the hundred or so films I've seen in the last six months had anything remotely like that effect. We live in a time of "safe" art that is no way art, but merely artifice. Gothic frightens, after the fact, because it is dangerously conceived, impudently mounted, uncaring of its footing, determined to crawl the wall or tumble into the abyss, all in the name of disgorging the absurd demon in the thought.

  I cannot in conscience recommend Gothic to anyone. You would no doubt lynch me. But I tell you this: for every teenager in Canton, Illinois who would have us believe his "age-group" is free of potential slashers, there are a hundred slashers-in-waiting within the bedlam cells of our natures to populate a Lovecraftian duchy; for every insipid film that rakes in millions by offering 1980s visions of floating ethics and looking out for # 1, there are greedyguts viewers who see such films as a license to indulge moral turpitude; and for every nutcase like your faithful columnist, who tells you to embrace a wonky failure like Gothic because a pulse beats in it, a pulse that signifies life means more than what one finds confined to the screen of a tv set, there will be legions who tell you disorder is chaos, riot is recklessness, art is quantifiable.

  The final assertion of critical judgment on Gothic is not whether or not it is good, or whether one likes it or not. The undeniable truth of Gothic, as in all the work of Ken Russell (an artist who is either so mad or so foolhardy as not to care if he wins or loses), is that it is palpably alive. It is riot and ruin and pandemonium. But it will have you by the nerve-ends.

  And isn't that what Real Art is supposed to do? Even in Canton, Illinois?

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / September 1987

  INSTALLMENT 26:

  In Which A Good Time Was Had By All And An Irrelevant Name-Dropping Of Fritz Leiber Occurs For No Better Reason Than To Remind Him How Much We Love And Admire Him

  Though her name be not Calliope, Euterpe, Thalia or any of the other six, a Muse of my East Coast acquaintance also happens to be on a first-name basis with John Updike, and she happened to mention a month or two ago that Updike had said the new Warner Bros, film adaptation of his 1984 fantasy The Witches of Eastwick only superficially resembled the novel, but it sure as hell captured the feeling of the book.

  Now, this was not Updike's first picnic in the enchanted forest of our mythic genre. Back in 1963, he did a sorta kinda symbolic fantasy called The Centaur. It is my least favorite of all the fifteen or sixteen Updike books I've read. No, let me be more specific: surgeons have it easier; they are blessed and cursed with the ability to bury their mistakes; novelists have to live with the walking dead of their failed efforts. The Centaur made my hide itch. I ground away valuable layers of tooth enamel during the reading.

  So it was with considerable pleasure that I found Updike's second sojourn down our way considerably more successful. (Like all of us who have access to the range and spiced variety of fantasy literature that includes writers The New York Review of Books has never even heard of, I often find myself subscribing to the Accepted Wisdom that visitors from The Mainstream more often than not make asses of themselves when they decide to try their hand at what we do. I am ashamed when I catch myself thinking that way; and for every Doris Lessing, Herman Wouk, Jacqueline Susann, Taylor Caldwell or Andrew Greeley who makes us rend our flesh and spit up our breakfast, there is an appositely wonderful Peter Straub, Naomi Mitchison, John Hersey, Peter Carey or Russell Hoban who teaches us old dogs some new tricks. So it is surely unfair to me, of us, to go to our graves bearing that ignoble misconception. So I was happy that Updike pulled it off, rather than wallowing in smug pleasure at his earlier misstep.)

  While it is impossible to read any novel in which suburban witches appear in a contemporary setting without taking out the prayer rug and intoning the hallowed names of Fritz Leiber and Conjure Wife, Updike's literary conceit is a good read, an honest reexamination of the basic fantasy construct, and is filled with some of his liveliest writing.

  What would be made of the book by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer, the brilliant Mad Max director George Miller, and the "hot" but frequently tasteless producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters (we're talking here Flashdance, A Star Is Born, The Deep and The Color Purple, among others), was anybody's guess. But the odds weren't terribly terrific. Updike ain't that easy to translate onto celluloid, and the stats of previous attempts look like readouts on the value of the Mexican peso.

  But I am here to tell you that The Witches of Eastwick is great fun. Get it out of your head that it's Updike's book, scene for scene, or line for line, or even character for character. But no matter how you saw Darryl Van Home (they've dropped one of the "r"s from his first name in the film), Alexandra, Jane and Sukie in the novel, you would have to possess the soul of a pigeon-kicker to object to the interpretations of those characters by Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer. Veronica Cartwright and Richard Jenkins are also not too dusty as Felicia and Clyde Alden.

  Updike's Eastwick, Rhode Island (found and filmed in Cohasset, Massachusetts) is the safe, settled Late George Apleyesque cubbyhole of life in which Alex, Jane and Sukie mark off the days of their lives as victims of "the dreaded three D's": death, desertion and divorce. Alex's husband is dead, Jane's husband has divorced, and Sukie's old man has deserted, leaving her with six daughters.

  The women possess "the source," the secret power of witchcraft that all men—naively or cynically—believe lies in the female. (Van Home delivers a brief but impassioned codification of this cliche near the beginning of the film and, near the end, does it again with the kid gloves off, inquiring whether God has made women as a mistake or as some sort of ghastly punishment for men. I take no side in this matter. I merely report what is on the screen.) This power manifests itself fully only with the arrival in Eastwick—perhaps by wish-fulfillment of the women's group fantasy—of "a prince traveling under a dark curse . . . very handsome . . . with a cock neither too large nor too small, but right in the middle": Daryl (one "r") Van Home.

  Well, Jack Nicholson may be many things, but "handsome" ain't one of them. There is too much pasta in that face. Yet in a few minutes, like the exquisite three women, we are conned into accepting Nicholson and Van Home as just such a "dark prince." And he proceeds, without too much butter, to seduce all three of them. To tell you more would steal from you that which you deserve: the pleasure of getting coshed over the noggin by a satanically charming romp courtesy of all concerned.

  And even if Fritz Leiber did most of this to perfection in 1943, preceded only by Rene Clair, Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway and Robert Benchley (from a screenplay by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly) in 1942's I Married A Witch, you would have to be the kind of person who enjoys pissing on the snowy egret to carp about this delicious film.

  As Stan Lee would put it, 'nuff said!

  But:

  Unceasing in my efforts to broaden your filmgoing experience (and by way of thanking all of you for saving Woody Allen's life by retroactively awarding him a Hugo for Sleeper in 1974, which fannish largesse was imparted to him on the operating table, thereby giving him the will to live), I have preserved my notes from the Warner B
ros, screening, and I offer them here in brief, to give you things to watch for.

  •The Writers Guild fought long and hard for proper credit onscreen for the scenarist(s). But notice, when you go to see The Witches of Eastwick, how cunningly the Directors Guild has circumvented the rules. All but two of the opening credits are committed, concluding with the writer, before there is an intrusion of a complete scene. Then, after that space, we return to more bucolic camerawork (by the inspired Vilmos Zsigmond, who could make rice pudding as breathtaking as Walden Pond) and in the artistic respite that follows, the downtime, as it were, they flash the producers' and director's credits. It isn't exactly a degrading-to-writers cheat, but in terms of cinematic vocabulary, of what the eye sees and registers, it is a now-commonplace dodge that establishes who is below the salt and who ain't. Watch for it. Notice it.