Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison; Leonard Maltin

  And all of it is spinach.

  With a universal constituency for film, everyone feels arrogantly competent . . . no, not even competent . . . divinely inspired . . . to pass judgments down to the most minute facets of the film. At a kaffee klatsch, that's just fine. Just peachykeen. In scholarly journals, and in allegedly critical reviews, it is unacceptable.

  So the problem, as I see it, that most presses us when we talk about "film scholarship" is setting minimal standards of cinematic knowledge. And I don't mean those used to hand out such horseshit awards as Golden Globes or Oscars every year.

  I'm not suggesting that before someone can speak with wisdom about movies that s/he must be able to quote verbatim from Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Rotha or Terry Ramsaye (though it wouldn't hurt to have such a rich background). What I am suggesting is that the least we must demand of anyone who sets him/herself up as a critic of film, is that said Oracle strive to operate on the level of, say, Agee, Arthur Knight (of The Liveliest Art), Stanley Kauffmann, Molly Haskell, or just Pauline Kael.

  This means, also, that the scholar should love film. Should adore just going to the movies, the way a kid adores going to the movies. Bearing with, a large measure of innocence; a large measure of I'll sit here, you just do it to me. Just purely love it, to the degree that s/he is willing to savage that which is inept, dishonest, historically corrupt, pretentious or simply meanspirited. That which demeans the art form. That which lies to the trusting audience. That which rusts our innocence for no greater purpose than to con us out of our ticket money and get us ready to be manipulated into laying-out for the mendacious sequels.

  By this standard, I discount such critics as John Simon. As brilliant and as uncompromising as Simon's dance and legitimate stage reviews are, as correct as I think he is most of the time, as deeply as I admire his erudition and his insights and his vivid writing, to the same degree do I find his film reviews unacceptable. He clearly thinks of film as a second-class art form, and it shows in every line he writes about cinema.

  (He is not alone in this dichotomous, ambivalent attitude; and more on that in a moment.)

  He does not love film as he loves the theater or ballet, and his Elitism seems thus, to me, corrupt. It does not escape my sense of the self-serving or ridiculous that as an Elitist I'm saying my brand of nobler-than-thou is more peachykeen than thine or Simon's. I got that. Nonetheless, I speak of these matters and make comparisons not to contemn John Simon—whose work I find constantly thought-provoking, which is precisely what a critic is supposed to do, in my view—but to make sure the reader knows I have no secret agendas. I think it is above-all-else urgent that the reader of film criticism be able to trust that the critic is right out there, holding nothing back, being absolutely candid.

  It means, also, that the kind of overintellectualized barbarism of critics-manqué who see deep, redemptive significance in Night of the Living Dead films, though they "have problems" with Brazil or Apocalypse Now, cannot be considered apropos. We must remember that Philistinism makes lucid copy for dolts, and we must resist crediting that kind of thing, lest all standards be downgraded and eventually become flummery.

  I would add that most temporal concerns when judging film are also suspect. Deconstruction, a trendy way of examining films these days, coupled with Marxist Feminist Dystopic Reified Orthodontist criticism (or whatever the goony-birds are currently using to feather their vitae) is ultimately hateful and false.

  So the problem, in my view, is bringing into being a cadre of film critics and film scholars whose pronouncements are based not on academic need, cynical disrespect for the art form, or hayseed arrogant ignorance, but on background, knowledge, sophistication and—most of all—affection.

  It is in such spirit that Hoppity has written what you find in this book.

  PART THREE:

  In Which The Critic Attempts To Escape The Gas Chamber By Explaining His Motives, Not Raising His Voice In Anger Though Insulting Everyone In Sight, And By Explaining How He Came To This Occupation

  The inescapable, core problem with writing critical comment about films is that the commentator is really given no option.

  If the review is positive, if the film is something special that one wishes to inveigle the reader into actually going to see, literally conning the potential filmgoer into spending money through the seduction of words, one is limited. The word-pictures can only do so much. The restrictions are many and truly fearsome. The critic dare not give away the great scenes, dare not reveal the punch of the surprise ending or expose the killer; the critic may not hint at, or paraphrase, the memorable lines that everyone talks about interminably, at risk of robbing the movie-lover of the frisson of joyful discovery. It's as mean an act as telling the reader of a murder mystery who the culprit is, ten pages before s/he finishes the book.

  The critic can only go huzzah and huzzah so many times before it becomes white noise. The critic is limited in vocabulary, because beyond a certain point it becomes dangerous and boring, and then dangerously counterproductive. Dangerous, because nothing can live up to such panegyrics; boring, because what can one say after one says don't miss it?

  So the options are removed. And what one is left with is the negative, or killer, review. One can be infinitely more entertaining when savaging the unworthy, the cupidic, the inept, the dishonest. Like Spaceballs.

  One can unleash the stream of liquid fire and chew a path of invective through the failed art with a candycane marker of didactic dirge at every gravesite. Make the stake of licorice, and one can drive it into an endless number of vampire hearts with relative impunity.

  But even that choice is no choice; for very soon, the short memory of the reader comes to expect savagery and fulmination. Forgotten are all the palliating equivocations, all the positive comments, all the rave reviews. Only the violence retains the color of passion in a reader's memory. And no matter how deserved the evisceration of the unworthy movie, it becomes suspect. The critic is perceived as just meanspirited; bitterness for the sake of cleverness.

  It's not that it's easier to write bad reviews, it's simply that there is so much more bad stuff than good with which the commentator must deal. That wearying truth notwithstanding, the critic is perforce manacled by the rigors of the game, as well as by the insatiable appetites of the readership.

  Most people only read film reviews to see if they agree with the commentator, anyhow. And how does one win that pot?

  There are smart critics and dopey critics. Pauline Kael and Molly Haskell and most of the time David Denby, in my view, are the models one tries to approach for quality and common sense, for important insights and the placing of a film in its historical context. I suppose Siskel and Ebert are the best of the populist reviewers, though I think the ceaseless demands of cobbling up artificial rancor between them for the delectation of a tv viewership that can be roused from torpor only by brouhaha, has made their duologues cranky and tiring. George Kirgo on CBS was dedicated and wise, but he rapidly grew so disenchanted with what he had to pass judgment on, that when contract renewal time presented itself, he opted out.

  Intelligence is not necessarily a condition of employment for being hired as a movie reviewer on the tube. On-camera charisma seems the greater imperative. And what the bosses will accept as "charisma" is often bewildering. Case in point: Carol Buckland, the movie maven on CNN.

  So the field is abandoned to fools or hypesters who, if they aren't in the secret pay of studios, sure as hell ought to be. Even hookers resent amateurs giving away the goods without recompense. The Entertainment Tonight mentality is omnipresent: David Sheehan, Gary Franklin, Rex Reed, Michael Medved, Jeffrey Lyons*, Bill Harris (several

  of whom I know personally and can attest are mensches) proffer a kind of comment on films that frequently ranges from uselessly bitchy to flat-out wrong. At best, it seems to me, it's plebeian and parataxic. One of the above-named, in fact, sat beside me at a studio sneak preview a couple of years ago, fell snoringly aslee
p two-thirds of the way through the film—a smarter way to go than those of us who kept slapping ourselves awake for its duration—and appeared on the 11:00 News an hour later . . . and reviewed what he had not seen!

  * Jeffrey Lyons—who is not only the talented son of the legendary Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons, but is one of the few guys I know privy to the knowledge that, contrary to popular belief, Heinie Manush and Goose Goslin never played ball together, not to mention that he has a better collection of baseball bubble gum cards than I (I lust for his Carl Yastrzemski rookie year card)—is the perfect amalgam of treasures and torments that codify a television personality film reviewer. On the plus side is the inescapable thorn in the paw of reviewers in print mediums: Jeffrey reaches more millions with every review on the tube than does the most widely-read, most widely-syndicated newspaper or magazine critic. (And did you know, as a nasty attempt to alleviate the pain in the paw, that the New York Film Critics Circle denies membership to tv critics?) On the minus side are the parameters of the tv format that truly honk off guys like Lyons: everything must be boiled down to three-minute jingoism and sound-bites; and very little of it can refer to the in-depth erudition or historicity that the good critic needs to buttress an opinion.

  Jeffrey Lyons is a man of intelligence, wit, originality of opinion and meticulous honesty. This soundness of credential manages to reveal itself, despite the rigors of the medium in which he presents his views. I envy him his baseball card collection, but not the arena in which he plies his trade.

  But even if every film critic hired to do the job knew, with encyclopedic accuracy, all of the commentary of Agee, Kevin Brownlow, Rotha and Kracauer, we would nonetheless be left with the conundrum of dealing with ignorance on the part of the audience, as well as the almost insurmountable problem of trying to get past the general audience's bastardized taste for the tasteless and bastardized. Neither a small problem.

  I mean no offense here. But one deals pragmatically with what one is given. And any concern that this is again a manifestation of my meretriciously Elitist attitude can be evaporated simply by considering the sorts of films doing huge box-office business: Someone to Watch Over Me, Predator, Beverly Hills Cop2, Soul Man, Like Father Like Son. Like the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin. Or, as Benjamin Franklin said, "An empty bag cannot stand upright."

  How, then, does the critic who loves movies convince a readership/viewership sated with Robocop, The Living Daylights and Spaceballs that worthier recipients of its adoration, if given the chance, might be In the Mood and The Princess Bride?

  Certainly not by pushing bloated, self-important and phoney "art films" like A Room with a View, no matter how cunningly manipulated commercially to win an Oscar for its scenarist. Such films only give Art a bad name, and further distance the general audience from movies of serious intent that are, for all their struggles to uplift and inform, cracking good stories.

  Simple reviews, therefore, seem to me to serve no worthwhile purpose. Without the essay in depth that illuminates the special treasures a specific film proffers, it becomes a niggardly business of popularity contests and hucksterism, intended at its noblest to demonstrate the critic's skill at being coy and arch, while separating the gullible from their hard-earned shekels.

  As with most endeavors, those who assay the job at the least demanding level, are the ones who draw down the least calumny, the ones who make the smallest waves, and who go on year after year exacerbating the problem by refusing to challenge their audience. They subscribe to the cheapest rationale given by schlockmeisters for the perpetuation of worn-out templates, the callous disregard for historical or scientific accuracy, the purely mercenary proliferation of haggard sequels, and a widespread anti-intellectual subtext: "We're only giving the audience what it wants."

  Well, since this is transparently bullshit—because how can an audience know it wants something not yet created?—even if it were truth as deep and solid as Gene Hackman's talent, as a critic I've tried to say in my essays that just because an audience wants something, it may not necessarily be good for them, and one is not impelled to give it to them if it ain't good for them.

  (Don't start that crap of asking, "Well, who the hell are you to judge what's good for people?" We're dealing with common sense here, not the kind of obfuscation the Administration uses to keep Ollie North out of prison. That sort of ad hominem arguing is what keeps us paralyzed. Guns are bad things and ought to be eliminated entirely. Rock cocaine will fuck you up and to hell with how seriously we interfere with the economy of Latin American countries whose ability to repay American bank loans is dependent on the drug crop. Abortion is a matter of individual conscience and piss on those who deflect the arguments with ancient and creaking religious obsession.)

  These are reviewers and critics who suck along recommending and tolerating films that are illegible, destructive artistically, transient, manipulative, ubiquitous, and praised by people of confused or no criteria.

  Is it not endlessly fascinating how often in this life that plain, unadorned cowardice is deified by the words "prudent behavior"?

  Let me give you (in the words of David Denby in New York magazine, 5 October 1987) "an all-too-explicit example of the way giving in to the audience can make a movie worthless:"

  ALEX FORREST (GLENN CLOSE), THE neurotic New York single woman in Fatal Attraction dresses entirely in white, like Lana Turner's murderous Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Alex works in publishing, and when she meets Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), a vaguely bored married man who's doing some legal work for her company, she goes after him. They have a drink together, and she's so attentive, she seems to be devouring him whole.

  The movie takes her measure cruelly. She has a recognizable kind of New York willfulness, fueled by lonely blues. Her loft, in the meat-packing district, is too bare and white; she pushes too hard, exercises too much. Her initial sweetness—all attention and sympathy—dissolves when Dan returns to his wife at the end of the weekend. The rage she feels has an edge of emotional blackmail to it. She tries to shame him into remaining her lover.

  British director Adrian Lyne and screenwriter James Dearden, who spend a fair amount of time setting up Alex as a credible, three-dimensional person, should have continued to take her seriously—they've made her worth it. Her isolated situation is painfully familiar (everyone in professional, upper-middle-class New York knows a stranded Alex). She has a characteristic way of pressing on what Dan says to her, violently holding him to what he's only mentioned in passing. She can't relax, and Glenn Close, who in the past has shown a tendency to darlingness, is scarily effective—sympathetic and dislikable at the same time.

  Why does Gallagher get involved with Alex? There's nothing wrong with his marriage. The filmmakers seem to be saying that any married man, given the opportunity, will fool around if he thinks he can get away with it. When Dan tries to disappear after the weekend, Dearden gives Alex something of a case against him. She may have done the pursuing, but, as she says, their power positions aren't the same. She's single, getting older, and what's a weekend diversion for him is a major event for her. Dearden uses feminist perceptions and arguments as a way of creating Alex—and then he gives way to male paranoia and betrays her altogether. She tries to kill herself, and then becomes a vicious, knife-wielding gorgon, stalking Gallagher's wife and daughter. The movie falls to pieces. The last third is despicable—ghoulish horror with blood thrills for the jaded.

  I can see the difficulty of working with a character who's never more than partly sympathetic. Where can the story go? The filmmakers' way out is to withdraw all sympathy from the character, which means trashing their own work. The awful thing is that in box-office terms, they aren't wrong. When I saw the picture (on opening day at the Loews Paramount), the audience, cheering on any sign of crazed possessiveness, was obviously longing for Alex to go nuts.

  Coming up with a real dramatic resolution might have required more imaginative sympath
y, art, and courage than anyone connected with this movie has.

  Using that much of another writer's work analyzing just one film, as opposed to a pithy sound-bite of my own, all flash and no insight, is excusable only in the context of John Simon's remark, "There is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said."

  Denby's example is so perfect, and the observations so smart and so simply stated, that though I thought long and hard of a better exemplar, again and again I returned to what Denby had said. Finally, I decided to hell with it; there are certainly critics sharper than I; and Denby is very likely one of those.

  And what he's saying, apart from the obvious that just because an audience wants something doesn't mean you have to give it to them if it corrupts the work and panders to human weakness, cheapness of spirit, and, well, brutishness . . . what he's saying, is that if filmmakers who bask in the glory of the Seriousness of the Cinematic Art wish to continue enjoying the good press they get from the dubs and semiotic simpletons who see grandeur and subcutaneous significance in even the groundling-slanted swill they fob off on us every season, they're going to have to demonstrate a greater sense of responsibility. They can't keep on having it both ways, no matter how glitzily they mount each year's Oscar telecast. What Denby points out so sharply is one of the main themes of this collection of essays, stated a hundred different ways: the accountants and attorneys and fast-shuffle merchants of the film industry have had a free ride for more than half a century. But in putting the buck before the honesty of telling a story truthfully, they have created an illiterate audience whose taste has been systematically corrupted. And at last, as we've seen over the decade of the Eighties, it is a venality that has come back to suck the blood of Hollywood like an AIDS-carrying vampire bat.