Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison; Leonard Maltin

  Badmouthing Star Wars these days is considered a felony; on a level with spitting on the American flag, denigrating Motherhood, admitting you hate Apple Pie, or trying to dope Seattle Slew.

  In the hysterical wake of all-stops-out media hype, uncritically slavish reviews, effulgent word-of-mouth praise and the chance of being trampled to death by ex—Star Trek groupies, who've had their epiphany-conversion, as they queue up to see the film for the sixth or eighth time . . . anyone daring to suggest that Star Wars is less monumental than the discovery of the fulcrum and lever, runs the risk of being disemboweled by terminal acne cases.

  This lemminglike hegira to worship at the shrine of director George Lucas and "the return of entertainment!" has been so carefully orchestrated that otherwise sane and rational filmgoers whose desiccated sophistication has led them to find flaws in even such damn-near-perfect movies as The Conversation; Taxi Driver; Oh, God! and Nashville, roll their eyes and clap their hands in childish delight. And I think childish is the operative word in this lunatic situation.

  And though I find the role of Specter at the Banquet somewhat less than salutary for my social life, as a practicing writer of fantasy (into which genre science fiction and space opera of the Star Wars variety plonk comfortably) I'm afraid I must reluctantly piss on the parade.

  Hollywood has never understood the difference between making science fiction films and making westerns, spy thrillers, Dr. Kildare flicks, historical adventures and contemporary dramas.

  In an industry where nothing succeeds as consistently as repeated failure, the ex-CPAs, ex-mail room boys, ex-haidressers and ex-agents who become Producers conceive of imaginative fiction as just another shoot-'em-up with laser rifles. They have a plethora of hype but a dearth of inventiveness. And they think of films in terms of making the deal, not of presenting the logical story. For most of these yahoos, a "film" is something, anything, they can get Streisand and McQueen and Pacino to star in. The script can come later. What the hell does it matter if it's good, bad or imbecilic . . . just as long as the names of the stars can be featured above the title.

  But science fiction is a very special genre. It is the game of "what if." What if we were forced to abandon the land and adapt physically to life in the seas? What if everyone was telepathic and could read everyone else's mind, how could you commit a murder and not be discovered when your thoughts gave you away? What if the male contraceptive pill became as common as the one women use? What if.

  And playing that game is the core of the story. But it must be internally consistent. It must have a much more rigorous logic than an ordinary, mimetic story, because you are asking the audience to suspend its disbelief, to go with you into a completely new, never-before-existed landscape. If what goes on in the story is irrational and diffuse, then it all comes up looking like spinach.

  But Hollywood doesn't understand that. They make films—like Star Wars—that are nothing but The Prisoner of Zenda or some halfwit wild west adventure in outer space.

  Good science fiction films have been few and far between. I suggest as a quality level toward which to strive, the following films:

  Charly

  1984

  The Shape of Things to Come

  Wild in the Streets

  The Conversation

  A Boy and His Dog

  And there are a few others. But they grow harder and harder to name. Because all the films that we thought were great, like 2001, become, in retrospect, merely exercises in special effects. There are damned few "people" stories that deal with what science fiction at its best and most valuable handles better than any other kind of story: the effects on human beings of technology, unusual happenings and the future. Discount films that make us tingle, like The Thing or Dr. Cyclops, because they are really only horror stories told with a pseudo-scientific flair. I'm talking here about stories where we care about the people, films that cast some new light on the human condition.

  Also notice, the films I select as the best are films you probably never even considered sf. Charly and The Conversation are classic examples. They weren't marketed or reviewed as sf, because they were free of overpowering special effects. They didn't look like orgies of bizarre technique, and they did very well at the box office, even with people who hate science fiction. Because they were "people" stories. They couldn't have happened without the scientific bases, but they took those technological advances—raising the I.Q. of an idiot by chemical means in one case, and electronic surveillance in the other—and dealt with them in terms of human angst.

  This important measure of worth is missing entirely from Star Wars.

  But before I enumerate the dangers of this classic simpleminded shootout movie, let me give you a few horror stories.

  Incident:

  During the third weekend in June, for three thousand dollars—the only thing short of bamboo shoots under the fingernails that could get me to do it—I spoke at something called Space-Con IV, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In the neighborhood of ten thousand people attended this combined Star Trek/space science/tv addict media melange: a hyperventilated whacko-freako-devo two-day blast that served as cheap thrill fix for a tidal wave of incipient jelly-brains who would rather sit in front of the tube having their minds turned to puree-of-bat-guano than have to deal with the Real World in any lovely way.

  Traditionally, the dealers' rooms, wherein one can buy (at usurious rates) Spock ears, Federation starship gold braid and frogging, German versions of Star Trek comics and hairballs called tribbles, has been a place where Star Trek reigned supreme. A wad of Kleenex, authenticated as being the very item William Shatner honked into during the legendary phlegm epidemic of the second year of the series, could bring a price that would permit the dealer to return to his native island a rich grandee.

  In June, however, Star Wars had been open for nearly three weeks; and those who formerly festooned themselves with buttons that said LIVE LONG AND PROSPER or TAKE A KLINGON TO LUNCH now paraded around wearing buttons that proclaimed LET THE WOOKIEE WIN and JEDI KNIGHT and the catch-phrase that has replaced the splay-fingered Vulcan greeting of Star Trek, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.

  Dealers loaded down with Star Trek memorabilia had their annuities flash before their eyes in a brief two-day nightmare as Star Wars posters, light sabers, Darth Vader masks and Ballantine Books paperback novelizations vanished as if they'd been warped into hyperspace.

  Even panels of erudite writers and NASA space shuttle engineers were overwhelmed with trivial badinage about Star Wars and the effects it would have on the course of Western Civilization.

  And the only adverse criticism of any kind I heard, from anyone, was a comment from the science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster, who had just handed in the manuscript of the novelized sequel to Ballantine; a comment that removed, finally, any vestige of ambivalence I'd had about badrapping Star Wars. That comment, in a moment, but first, another:

  Incident:

  I called Tony, to ask him if he and Gail wanted to go to dinner. Gail sounded terrible. "What's the matter?" I asked, thinking maybe Tony had gone back to the bottle. "I haven't seen him in a week," she wailed, actually crying over the phone. "Where the hell is he?" I asked, thinking maybe I'd have to go pry him out of an X-rated motel down on Ventura Boulevard. "He's seeing Star Wars," she said, sobbing. "I think he's seen it fifteen or sixteen, maybe more, times. He won't come out of the theater, except to come home and shower and then go find another place where it's playing. What am I gonna do!?!"

  Incident:

  I stopped off at A-1 Record Finders, to pick up the new Jaco Pastorius side, and the dude behind the counter asked me if I'd seen it. No name, just IT, like the Second or Third Coming. So I ran a few negatives, and then I noticed these two teenaged kids lounging against one of the record bins, giving me sidelong glances one usually reserves for butchers who have a thumb on the scales.

  I had to go out to my car, parked right in front of the shop, and they watched me. Whe
n I returned to the shop and resumed the conversation, the two young gentlemen walked out, got their bicycles from the wall, and crossed the street right beside my car.

  The neatly-furrowed gash that runs from my left front fender all the way to the left rear tire-well, handsomely engraved with a house-key held tightly in a teenaged fist, is charming testimony to the religious fervor Star Wars junkies manifest. Fortunately, I drive a very old, very funky car, and the gash doesn't distress me overmuch; but if I ever need crazed True Believers to help me Kill for the Love of Kali, liberate The Holy Grail, or Save Ammurrica from The Red Menace, I will begin my recruiting activities at the Avco Cinema Center on Wilshire.

  These three incidents are only grassroots reflections of the blind fanaticism Star Wars has generated in such pro- and anti-Establishment journals as New Times, New York, New West, American Film and Time magazine . . . good old Time magazine that set off the main charge with its six-page, four-color, May 30th story and banner-headlined cover (INSIDE: THE YEAR'S BEST MOVIE) (that's what I hate about Time: they're so wishy-washy).

  Time was so determined to looooove that film, they even told an outright lie. On page 57 of the May 30th article, the following excerpt appears:

  "Star Wars is the costume epic of the future," says Ben Bova, editor of Analog, one of the leading science fiction magazines. "It's a galactic Gone with the Wind. It's perfect summer escapist fare."

  Now Ben is one of my closest friends, and I simply could not believe he had bubbled along that way. He's too smart for such an okeydoke. So I called him and asked him if he'd said what Time said he's said. After the bellowing ceased, he made it clear that Time's reporters simply were not going to hear anything negative about that flick, no matter what was actually said. Two issues of Time later, the following item appeared on page 6, in the Letters column:

  Your quotation of my comments about George Lucas's film Star Wars makes it appear that I liked the film. I most emphatically did not. Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-'em-ups when we go to a science fiction film. We have been disappointed many times, but I had expected more of Lucas. Somebody Up There likes the film, it seems, and no dissenting views are allowed. Too bad.

  Ben Bova, Editor Analog New York City

  And that's what has been going down with New Times with its June 24th cover story likening the comic-strip characters of Star Wars to such American myth heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Joe DiMaggio and The Lone Ranger. Hurray for the robots, R2D2 and C3PO! New Times' Jesse Kornbluth sees in the film reassurance that machines are not taking over, that NASA isn't involved in a sinister conspiracy to keep us from knowing there is intelligent life on Mars, and that The Ole Debbil Technology will not savage us further. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.

  People raves. Starlog gushes. Rona Barrett vociferates. The world loves Star Wars! And the studios and the television networks and the fastbuck blue sky independents and the mass media have once again discovered science fiction. Except they think it's hip to call it by that hideous neologism "sci-fi" and nowhere can be heard a discouraging word. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.

  And that is precisely where my cavils with Star Wars begin.

  As I write this, only the much-damned critic John Simon of New York magazine has had the courage to say the emperor is buck naked. While those who seem oblivious to the occasionally honorable and more-frequently trashy history of fantastic films that stretch back to Georges Méliès whoop and simper about how enriching Star Wars is, Simon puts his finger dead on the plague-bearing nature of this film and the way it's being received. In the June 20th issue of New York he said, in part:

  I don't read science fiction, of which this may, for all know, be a prime example; some light years ago I did read Flash Gordon, of which Star Wars is in most respects the equal. But is equaling sci-fi and comic strips, or even outstripping them, worthy of the talented director of American Graffiti, and worth spending all that time and money on?

  I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don't: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its high-falutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality . . . trite characters and paltry verbiage . . .

  Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be childish or unlucky enough never to have grown up.

  Were it not for Simon's sobriety—for which he must be commended in the face of such overwhelming mass hysteria—I would think I was the only one marching to the beat of that other drummer. Because, when I emerged from the 20th Century Fox advance screening, as far as I could tell, I was the only turkey evil enough to have ambivalent feelings and a beetled brow. It took me several days to codify my unease.

  I pilloried myself. What's the matter with you, Ellison? The damned film is a wonder . . . filled with sight and sound and flash and filigree. It soars, it sings, it thunders through a wholly-realized universe of Lucas's imagination! Why do you feel as if you've been had? You're always bleating about the lack of magic and simple wonder in contemporary film, the kind of swell dazzlement you knew in Saturday afternoon dream-days of your youth . . . serials, B westerns, Val Lewton suspense films, great fantasies! Why does this hommage to Flash Gordon distress you? Have you lost the ability to see as a child sees?

  And then I realized that was the problem. When I was a child, I learned from movies. I learned that you never screw a friend, never snooker him or her behind the eight ball; I learned that systems and governments intended to serve human needs frequently spend their time maintaining themselves in power to the anguish of the people; I learned that Hemingway had a workable definition when he said guts was grace under pressure; I learned about what was in store for me when I became an adult. All of these I learned without realizing I was being taught, because even those sappy, illogical schlock flicks of the Forties and Fifties had people in them.

  Star Wars has no people.

  Which instantly brought to mind a rule-of-thumb for films of this sort: any motion picture—such as 2001: A Space Odyssey; Demon Seed; Silent Running or Forbidden Planet—or Star Wars—in which the most identifiable, likeable characters are robots, is a film without people. And that is a film that's shallow, that cannot uplift or enrich in any genuine sense, because it is a film without soul, without a core. It is merely a diversion, a cheap entertainment, a quick fix with sugar-water, intended to distract, divert and keep an audience from coming to grips with itself.

  And in these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy, future shock, belief in coocoo conspiracies and Bermuda Triangle/UFO/reincarnation/Atlantis/est stupidities, information overload, urban terror and television stereotype, anything that keeps people stupid is a felony. "Entertainment is back!" the reviewers trumpeted, as if it had ever vanished. Nabokov is entertainment; Shakespeare is entertainment; Katherine Anne Porter is entertainment. Must "entertainment" be synonymous with "mindless" or "without content"? How foolish of us to have thought Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was entertaining, or Poe, or Pinter, or Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Troubling, yes; forcing us to think, yes; but entertainment nonetheless.

  But not Star Wars. For all of its length, for all of its astonishing technical expertise, its headlong plunge and its stunning effects, at no time can one discern the passage of a thought. It is all bread and circuses. The human heart is never touched, the lives are unexamined, the characters are comic strip stereotypes.

  But that's the point! is the single defense I get when I alienate myself at dinner parties by my negativity. It's supposed to be mindless, I'm told. And then those professorial types who are safe in loving Star Wars where they might be attacked for reading the latest Robert Silverberg or Thomas Disch sf novel, explain to me as carefully and quietly as one would a retarded child, that Star Wars is a return to the worship of the Ete
rnal Verities: honor, truth, fighting Evil. All black and white.

  Try black and white in a world of credit cards, punk rock, mastectomies, Watergate, the rise of homegrown Nazism, Anita Bryant, and the terrifying fact that more than half of all serious crimes in the United States are committed by people between the ages of ten and seventeen—and that includes rape, murder, robbery, aggravated assault and burglary.

  In the Real World, anything that keeps people stupid is hardly a chuckleable item. And for several weeks I resisted putting Star Wars in that category. It was fun, I told myself. It was good for people to see a simple film in which the Good Guys were extraspecial good and the Bad Guy wore not merely a black hat, but black body-armor and a black death-mask, I told myself. Nor could I bring myself to fault Lucas, who had clearly set out to make an hommage to the Saturday afternoon serial and had done it with what Flaubert called "clean hands and composure." Then I heard the comment I mysteriously referred to earlier, from Alan Dean Foster; and I felt no qualms about pinning the butterfly to the board.

  Not to keep you in suspense a moment longer. There we were—Alan, myself, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Catalano—all of us properly or erroneously tagged "science fiction writers"—sitting on a panel at Space-Con IV, fielding questions about Star Wars. And I began the raving you've witnessed here. And I said the movie keeps people stupid. But I didn't have chapter and verse. All I had was a vague feeling. I said Lucas had done what he wanted to do, and all honor to him for that; he hadn't compromised. But then I remarked that one of the things in the film that was indicative of keeping people stupid was the constant boom one heard when something blew up in outer space throughout the film. And, as everyone should know, but most people don't know, since there is no air in deep space, since it is for all intents and purposes total vacuum, there can be no transmittal of shock waves, no displacement of molecules of air, and thus . . . no sound. And I said this was another example of giving people what they want to hear, literally, though it contravenes the laws of the physical universe. And in a time when we're so abysmally uneducated about technology, which rules our lives more each day, that was a criminal act of artistic prostitution.