Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison; Leonard Maltin

  These are important things I wish I had done, but the chances of getting around to them now seem slim, particularly if I'm going to get around to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, which I swear I will do, just stop shoving. Similarly, I have never gotten around to reading Barry B. Longyear's novella "Enemy Mine."

  I should, I know I should; but, well, I put it off, and I put it off, and I put it off, and then it won the triple crown in 1979—Hugo, Locus poll and Nebula awards—and Barry got the Campbell award as Best Writer that same year, and I had to start lying when people talked about the yarn. "Oh, sure," I'd say, "some helluva piece of work. Just brilliant." But then I'd quickly switch the conversation to Celine or W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, which I had read, god forbid anyone would think I was inadequately prepared for social congress.

  But now that I've set myself the chore of discussing Enemy Mine (20th Century Fox), I can't use flummery to cover my sin of omission. It is certainly going to enrage my critics that my unceasing dumb luck triumphs once again, because by not having read the story it redounds to my (and your) benefit in my capacity as film critic for this august journal. Dump me in cow flop and I'll come up with the Hope Diamond.

  I've been wanting for some time to review a film in this genre that is based on a well-known published story, the original version of which I had never read. Purity of vision, is what I was hoping for. A total freedom from the mist and shadow of the original work. Couldn't do that with Dune or Blade Runner or 2010 or a host of others, because I was already "tainted" by a familiarity with the sourcework. So here it falls right in my lap, this secret shame I've borne since 1979, and (damn that Ellison, doesn't he ever fall on his face?!) badoom! it's a court-martial that turns into the Distinguished Service Cross.

  So I went to my screening of Enemy Mine, looking forward to a movie that I'd enjoy—which is the way I go to all of them—and I came away thinking it hadn't been such a terrific film at all. Not a thorough stinker, not a Damnation Alley or Outland or Gremlins, but simply a flick that seemed to have had a chance to be 108 minutes and 4 seconds of pretty entertaining adventure. It left me, how shall I put this, unfulfilled. Like a long meal of cotton candy and readings from Kahlil Gibran.

  I'll recap the story for you, in the event you've also been lying about having read the published version, and haven't caught the film. Won't take long.

  Well, Robinson Crusoe, this human being, crashes on a sort of volcanic island called Fyrine IV, and he finds he's not alone there. This other castaway, Friday, also lives there. And at first they don't like each other, and then they do like each other because they've got to work together to survive, making a hut out of palm fronds or creature carapaces or like that. And in the end we understand that it doesn't matter that Friday is a black man with a funny way of talking and Robinson Crusoe is a kind of thick-headed whitey, because under the scales and cranial crests, we're all the same, and we call that brotherhood.

  Wait a minute. I think I'm getting my movies mixed. Lemme try again.

  Okay. So this white convict named Tony Curtis is handcuffed to this black convict named Sidney Poitier, and they manage to escape from this state work farm, called Fyrine IV, and at first they don't like each other, and then they do like each other because they've got to work together to survive the posse out to find them, and in the end we understand that it doesn't matter that this white guy is actually a Jew named Bernard Schwarz or that this black guy is actually an ex-basketball player named Lew Alcindor, because beneath the spacesuits and overacting we're all handcuffed together in the big prison break of Life, and we call that brotherhood.

  Uh. I think I've mixed things up again. Let me go for it just once more.

  Okay. So there's this U.S. Marine on a South Pacific island called Fyrine IV where he's forced to work with this alien creature called a nun, which is a female kind of person who dresses all in funny kinda clothes, and who is played by Deborah Kerr, who's really swell at playing this kind of alien creature, and at first they don't like each other, and then they do like each other because they're trying to stay out of the way of the entire Imperial Japanese Navy and because they're both pretty horny, and the Marine, whose name is Mr. Allison, suggests that it doesn't matter that she's this alien kinda creature, they should take off their clothes and their bad habits and sorta have social congress because they're all alone on Fyrine IV and who's to know, and the nun alien tells him, "Heaven knows, Mr. Allison." And from this we understand that it doesn't matter how weird you dress or whether you're a 20-year career man in the Marines, nuns ain't gonna let you screw them unless you're extremely glib, and we call that brotherhood.

  Er. Wrong again? Well, then, how about Hell in the Pacific (1968) with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, which was all about this Japanese space pilot and this American space pilot who get stuck on another South Pacific island also called Fyrine IV (a Melanesian name that means deja vu) and at first they don't like each other, and then they do like each other because they both agree that if Robert Mitchum, for crine out loud, can't get laid, then what chance do we have, particularly with Deborah Kerr who should have been easy, considering how she rolled around in the surf with Burt Lancaster. And we understand that we should call this brotherhood. Or the birth of the blues.

  All right, I'll get serious. I wasn't even disappointed in Enemy Mine, because for all its overproduced affect—you should see the weapons and ships and the suits and the communications gear: none of it form-follows-function but shiny and futuristic and must have cost a fortune—the movie has all the staying power of a Dalkon Shield. But the other day a famous sf film producer stopped by to chat—and I'm purposely not dropping his name—and he called Enemy Mine "megadumb." Which impressed me, because I hadn't thought it was that bad, and I'm curious to know if you readers thought it was "megadumb" also, and if so, why. Which comments I'll boil down and run in a forthcoming installment, depending on how vitriolic and original and clever you are with your denigrations. See preceding for format.

  But just so you don't go for the obvious missteps the film makes, I thought I'd list a few of the more glaring, thereby throwing you back on native cunning and that dormant sense of filmic discrimination I know lies deep in each of you.

  First, they begin the outer space stuff without sound. Nice, I thought. They went the Kubrick route instead of the George Lucas route. Then, of a sudden, they scramble the starfighters and we are treated once again to the Star Wars space dogfight à la Industrial Light and Magic, which firm continues to be hired by all and sundry to produce space battles in a vacuum that doesn't seem to hinder spaceships from acting like Spads and Fokkers, and they all go whooooosh and blow up with big bangs slightly smaller than the Big Bang.

  Second, though we never see much of Fyrine IV except these fumaroles they shot down in the Canary Islands, and all this petrified wood or whatever, both the human and the alien can breathe without artificial assistance, and I just wonder how that can be on a planet without any greenery to produce oxygen, but I suppose Poul Anderson or Hal Clement could explain how it might be possible, which doesn't detract from the quibble because if it is possible, they should have given us at least a small indication, don't you think? I sure do.

  Third, the mood of seriousness that hangs like a gray day over this entire production is gratuitously, and ridiculously, ripped apart by one of the silliest missteps I've ever seen made in a film put together by supposedly professional moviemakers. There is a sequence early on, in which a scuttling creature with a Chelonic carapace is trapped and sucked down into a sand pit by some thing like an ant lion with nasty complexion and one helluva glandular condition, and it gets sucked down screaming horribly, so we know either the human or the alien will soon be confronting the same problem, and we're scared for a moment until . . . the carapace is flung back up out of the hole and we hear . . . a burp. A low-comedy burp. And everyone laughs. And the mood is broken.

  Fourth, that speech near the end where the big bully miner is fighting with the human spa
ce pilot, and he does one of those Jimmy Cagney routines about, "I'm gonna kill ya, cuz you killed me brudder Joey." And everyone laughs. And the mood is broken.

  Well, that's just a sample. You can't use those when you write in. And don't complain that the human space pilot is carrying a bullet-firing pistol instead of some sort of laser gun, because it's logical that projectile weapons would still be in use as a personal defense a hundred years from now, because the engineering it would take to devise a way of mirror-stacking to make a laser small and portable, is way beyond the abilities of a society as dumb as the one presented in Enemy Mine. Also, drop a laser gun, smash one mirror, and you're up the Swanee without a scull. So that one's okay. But only because we were clever enough to figure out why, no thanks to the producers of the film.

  So here's your chance to dabble in film criticism. Unleash those Visigoth tendencies! Defame multimillion dollar epics! Voice your paralogical opinions! Savage the great and the near-great! See what fun it is, and you'll understand why I wouldn't trade the writing of this column for anything in the world. Except maybe a date with Sally Field, things being the way they are between Deborah Kerr and me.

  ANCILLARY MATTERS: By now you've no doubt learned that Terry Gilliam's wonderful sensational terrific glorious awesome Brazil is in release, in its acceptable length. No doubt many of you are taking pleasure in my having said nyaah nyaah I saw it and you never will, and badoom! there it is for you to see. So go ahead and have your nasty little laugh. I am content: because of articles such as mine, Universal knuckled under to Art; and I don't mind looking the fool once again. I know I'm a saint, so there!

  One more thing. While I understand that puns are, for the most part, the highest level of wit available to a lot of sf fans and readers (a singularly humorless lot I often think), nonetheless it behooves me to point out to the reader who wrote in accusing me of stealing the Monty Python dead parrot routine which I integrated into my column several installments ago, because I didn't belabor it by pointing out that it was a Python shtick (which you knew anyway), that this was something known as parody. Or parroty. Or something.

  And to the reader who accepted at face value my statement that sf was dead as a filmic genre (only to take it back two issues later), this was a literary technique called engrossment. Sometimes referred to as satire. The art of the jongleur.

  Some of you act as if you are miraculously free of the ravages of intelligence, and I'm going to tell you kids this just once more, and then to hell with you, you'll just have to wait till your father gets home at which time you're going to get one helluva licking: some of this crap is supposed to be taken with a smile.

  You know how to smile, don't you? Just attach fish hooks to each side of your flaccid lips and give a yank straight up!

  And that's what we call brotherhood.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / May 1986

  INSTALLMENT 17:

  In Which We Unflinchingly Look A Gift Horse In The Choppers

  One of my pet hates is Christmas cards. No need to go into the convoluted thinking behind my hatred of the damned things; I'm a month or so shy of age fifty-two, and I'm permitted a few eccentricities. Suffice to say that every year, despite many and widely-disseminated appeals to save their money and send what they'd spend on a card to some noble charity, readers and even long-time friends who should know better, fill my already spavined mailbox with gold lame, embossed, outsized, Oriental silk-screened wishes for a joyous Christmas, Channukah, New Year, Twelfth-night, Hsin Nien, Festival of Tet, Druidmass and End of Days (the last accompanied by a pair of ducats on the 50-yard line for the battle between Gog and Magog).

  Most of these are returned to the sender on the same day they are received, with the message I HATE XMAS CARDS AND CATS printed with a large, thick-line green marker, right there on the envelope. I've been doing this for years. But as we know, there are always those who Don't Get The Message. So every year I curse and fume and send back hundreds of Yuletide missives.

  You cannot know the enmity this act generates.

  Even those faithful who stick with me during my most indefensible, unconscionable periods of social vileness and irrational gaucherie, sprout fangs and fire back letters (in ordinary envelopes, not those square Xmas card wrappings) in which such umbrage, such animosity, such a tone of affront is manifested, that one might think I had used the family budgie for genetic experiments. The thrust of their anger is that I have committed a felony. Let me opine that Heinlein's latest novel isn't up to his best, or that Reagan is so locked into Cold War thinking that he would sacrifice us all to his paranoia, or that Peanuts is a dumb comic strip, and they'll all smile protectively and make excuses for me . . . he's such a sweet man, perhaps he was just having a rotten day.

  But let them receive the card they sent, all in good faith and sincerity and camaraderie, scrawled upon in green marker, and they howl for a return of the ducking stool. Defenestration is too good for me, they shriek! Scaphism is too kind a fate, they bellow!

  How dare I not only turn away this kindly-intended, innocent gesture of goodwill, but let them know I never asked for it in the first place? This is an act of antisocial intercourse guaranteed to sour even the sweetest friendship.

  And in what obscure fashion does any of this have to do with Young Sherlock Holmes (Paramount)?

  Well, let me put it this way:

  It had to've been late in 1942. I was eight years old. I was laid up with the flu. We're talking Painesville, Ohio. And my mother was going downtown to do some shopping, and I was miserably bundled in my bed with more books than I could've read if I'd been down with something serious like rinderpest or beriberi or Dutch Elm blight, and my radio so I could listen to Jack Armstrong and Superman and Terry and the Pirates, and of course my comic books; but I still lacked the one thing short of chicken soup with farfel that could save me from death. And that, simply put, was issue #18 of Captain Marvel Adventures, a 10¢ panacea issued every four weeks by the world-famous faith healers, Fawcett Comics.

  With great care I explained to my mother that issue #18 had been among the publications received just that very day at the magazine-and-smoke-shop right next to the Utopia Theater (at which venue, I hoped she would notice, I was not enjoying the Saturday ritual of seeing Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder or Sunset Carson as Sunset Carson mopping up bad guys, to the accompaniment of the crunching of popcorn and the smell of gunsmoke, which personal tragedy surely entitled me to some consideration) (if not the Croix de Guerre). I described in detail how the magazines came in all bundled together with wire that had to be snipped by the nice man with the smelly panatella who ran the shop, and that if she had any faint shadow of affection for one soon to pass through the veil, she would make sure that the copy of issue #18 of Captain Marvel Adventures she selected from the racks was not one that had been scored by the dreaded bundle wire.

  I went over the instructions several times. You know how parents can be. And I made absolutely certain she knew it was issue #18, the brand-new one available today for just a few minutes before other children (lesser children who were not on their deathbeds) savaged the supply. Eighteen, I said again. One eight. I have all the issues up to number eighteen, I said, to her retreating form. Eighteen, I shouted from my bedroom window as she got into the car. Eighteen, I gasped, falling back amid the sodden sheets.

  Don't you know I waited all damned day for that comic!

  Now this part is painful. Not just because of what comes next in the story, but because of my behavior. I have never forgotten what comes next, and if I'd had the courage to say it to her before she died about ten years ago, I'd have told my mother that I spent the next thirty-odd years of my life being ashamed of my behavior. But I was so ashamed that even at age forty-something, I couldn't dredge up that awful moment and ask for absolution.

  Because what happened was that my mother came home all laden down with groceries, having spent a difficult day helping my dad in the store and having rushed back
to make dinner, and when she answered my endless screams from upstairs, demanding my Captain Marvel Adventures, and she handed me the paper bag with the comic in it, the comic she had gone out of her way to buy for me, and I pulled it out of the bag and saw that it was issue number seventeen (#17 for crine out loud, not #18 which I had waited for all day with my tongue hanging out, only the thought of that comic keeping the Man With the Scythe from my person, but sevenbloodyteen!!!), the one with Captain Marvel battling Jap Zeros on the cover, I screamed at my mother and threw the damned comic across the room.

  I'm certain that when I really do lie on my deathbed, the look on my mother's face at that moment will sneak back to strangle my spirit. The real crimes we commit cannot, somehow, ever be expunged. We pay and pay, right up to the last moment. There simply isn't enough in the exchequer to settle the debt.