An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  The foregoing: presented as testament to the innocence and intent-to-enjoy of the critic. Presented: to avoid the non-salutary prejudgment that the critic wants to eviscerate moron films such as Outland. I don’t. But I must. For all of us.

  And I think going to see a film as pluperfectly dazzling as Raiders of the Lost Ark makes the point so manifestly, all words of further argument can be dispensed with. Sitting there during Raiders I kept hearing that voice in my head that all-too-often makes snide remarks about what I’m watching. But this time it kept saying, “Yes! Dammit, yes! This is what all the others should have done for me.”

  Raiders is so sensible, so magical, so dear a film, that one cannot keep from being dissatisfied with all the others—including Star Wars—that promised to take us out of ourselves completely. The film has the power of chronokinetics: it moves a human being through time. I became ten years old again, even as I retained my adult faculties of discrimination and erudition, but my childlike sense of wonder, my perception of place and age were whirled backward. I was a kid again, enjoying a film not just in the prefrontal lobe, but in every micromillimeter of exposed skin and nerve-ending. It was total; and becomes the cinematic trope for the word “entertainment.”

  If you can recapture what Raiders does to a filmgoer, and apply that elevated standard of visceral manipulation to all the other films in this genre, then I need never again go to these lengths in gutting such a drooling idiot of a film as Outland.

  To recap my last column. One cannot help but resent and distrust a film that makes so many gratuitous errors, that fails to demonstrate even a first year high school student’s basic understanding of science or medicine or logic; that manipulates plot and characters in such a patently cheapjack manner to the service of a ripoff comic book plot; that denies everything we know about human nature; that is, simply put, so clearly a derivative shuck.

  The core of contempt this film congeals in me lies with the basic concept. By admission of the writer / director Peter Hyams in many interviews, he approached the producing entities Warner Bros. and the Ladd Company with a single sentence précis: “It’s High Noon in outer space.” And they cut a deal on the spot.

  Let me sidetrack for just a moment.

  Likely it won’t surprise you—what with my ill-deserved rep as a cranky esthete—that I admire critic John Simon with very few reservations. The veneration, in this instance, extends itself to presenting a recent quote from Simon that subsumes as epigram the point this sidetrack makes.

  He wrote: “I remember one of my freshman English students at the University of Washington asking with genuine concern, ‘But I don’t understand, Mr. Simon. What is wrong with being average?’ There is nothing much wrong with being average, but there is considerably less wrong with being above average, and still less with being outstanding.”

  To put it another way, this time in the words of John D. MacDonald, “In a half-ass world the real achiever is king.”

  And if you are a motion picture and only average—or as I submit way below average where it counts—is there much point in spending fourteen million dollars, sixteen weeks’ production time of uncounted talented artists and technicians who might better spend their time on something outstanding, not to mention the scarce theater booking space and attention of hundreds of thousands of filmgoers who spend millions of dollars for baby sitters, parking, travel costs and the high price of admission, if you are at best only average?

  When a manufacturer in this country wants to run a market test on a new product, the city most often selected for the proper demographic sampling, the city considered the most average, is Columbus, Ohio. The residents of Columbus don’t seem to understand how deeply they are being insulted by this “honor.” They don’t seem to realize that in the name of having the latest Arby’s sandwich or sanitary napkin or fruit juice combo tested on them, they are categorized as average. And in these days of trying to please the lowest possible common denominator, average becomes synonymous with mediocre. Unexcelling. Middle. Undistinguished. Non-idiosyncratic. Predictable. Malleable. Columbus and all its inhabitants become merely marketing tools, fit for nothing better than consuming useless products. This is not the deification of taste, it is the standardization of no taste whatever.

  Now to link average with Hyams’s one-liner to the heads of the Ladd Company and Warner Bros. Sidetrack now concluding.

  On a specific date now lost to historians, in 1966, long after I’d given up hope that Star Trek would be the realized dream I’d been gulled into believing it would be, but before my own segment had been aired, a writer who had just sold the series a teleplay encountered me at a Writers Guild meeting. My own script for “City on the Edge of Forever” had been circulated to a number of first-time or potential writers shooting for berths on the series, so he knew I was considered to have “a beat” on what they wanted. He desired to let me know he’d sold the show, and in some small way, I suppose, sought my approbation.

  He said to me, “I just sold them a script. Guess what it is?” I smiled and said I had no idea, why didn’t he tell me. And with absolute innocence he said, “I just took the plot of Flight of the Phoenix and rewrote it with Spock instead of Jimmy Stewart.”

  Though personally I have affection for this man, I was unable to keep myself from turning away from him in disgust. I remember the instant with clarity and pain. My lips skinned back over my teeth like a wolf’s. I didn’t have the reason or the heart to express my loathing of what he had done. He had taken that which had been done better, earlier, as a feature film, and cribbed from his fellow writer. He had debased the craft and his own talent, high or low, and sold derivative material. For a buck, no more than that, he had performed that cliché act best typified by the back cover ad Galaxy Magazine ran in its earliest days: he had converted a non-sf story into a kind of witless space opera by changing the equivalent of cayuses to spaceships.

  It perfectly captured for me, in that awful instant, how writers in Hollywood willingly debase and rupture their abilities in the headlong rush to pander to the illiteracy of producers.

  I’ve never mentioned how I felt to that writer, and we are friends. But I will never have respect for him as an artist.

  Peter Hyams stood in front of the deal-makers at the Ladd Company and said, “Outland is High Noon in outer space,” and the wee, limited, horizonless mentalities of those whose purses he wished to wallow in, twitched their noses and once again conceived of the audience as average and cut him a contract. They subsidized mediocrity.

  But Outland is not High Noon.

  The latter is a film of passion and courage, with a clear subtext that speaks to the fog of fear and cowardice that covered Hollywood during the Fifties due to the House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunts that blacklisted, among others, the scenarist of High Noon, Carl Foreman. It is the story of a dedicated man doing his job and not being swayed by the self-serving timidity of his community.

  The former is a crippled and dishonest mockery of that noble 1952 effort. And the core of corruption that is Outland’s most notable feature is redolent of that slavish mockery. More, it is a screenplay that demonstrates Peter Hyams has the plotting sensitivity of a kamikaze pilot with eighteen missions to his credit.

  Wedded to the bone-stupid idée fixe of transposing High Noon one for one, without expanding or restructuring the plot to account for alien conditions and a different societal mesh, Hyams made this film an exercise in repeated inconsistencies, illogicalities and contrivances sufficient to give a coprolite a tic.

  Let me enumerate.

  In High Noon we have a prairie community setting with a population of maybe two hundred people, most of whom are farmers and small businessmen and ranchers. They are not gunslingers, they are middle-class burghers and common laborers. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gary Cooper’s Marshal would find almost no one to help him. They were people who had relied entirely on the Marshal for peacekeeping, of which there had been no serio
us necessity in some time as the film begins. It was a slow, slumbering town without danger.

  Contrast that with the mining colony of Io, where the toughest, burliest laborers in the Solar System have come to brave incredible adversity to burn titanium out of a hundred-meter deep crater in airless, high-pressure circumstances. Over twenty-one hundred men, the equivalent of oil riggers and high steel workers and gandydancers. Not cowards, but grizzled roughnecks who work hard, drink hard, and whose lives of confinement would produce not—as Hyams contends—passivity, but a tendency to brawl, to seek hardy entertainments, to get involved in the politics and work-problems of their enclosed society.

  In High Noon the character of the town is so clearly laid out that we have no difficulty in believing the timid mouselike citizens hide behind their shuttered windows. But in the Con-Amalgamated refinery 27 it is impossible to believe that Marshal O’Niel could not find enough mean, sympathetic, tough hands to make up a cadre of deputies. For God’s sake, look at yourself! Are you a coward? I’m not, I’d join the cause. And so would you. And so would all those lineal descendants of long-haul truckers, anthracite miners and merchant marine deckhands. It is simply impossible to accept that men recruited and signed to time contracts for their burliness and ability to suffer life under such extreme conditions would all be sniveling, head-in-the-sand cowards.

  But to maintain with obstinate idiocy that improperly-deployed trope of High Noon, Hyams defies what we all understand to be the logic-within-illogic of human nature.

  Further. Con-Am is government regulated. All through the film O’Niel says they’re afraid of losing their franchise, that’s why the Earth government has placed Marshals on hand. If the police of any city found they had a serious situation for which they needed more men, they would simply go out and deputize. Conscription. And there are always men who sign up for such posse comitatus. But not at Con-Am 27 where the moron plot demands that to maintain the High Noon parallel, Sean Connery has to go it alone. That is manipulation of reality in deference to the belief that an audience is too stupid to perceive the corruption of real life.

  Further. O’Niel acts stupid throughout. Not just stupidly, but card-carrying ultra-maroon. If he intercepts the phone conversation between Sheppard—the Peter Boyle villain—and the shadowy criminal cartel from whom Boyle’s been buying his narcotics, all he has to do is tape the call and then go arrest Sheppard, lock him up till the next shuttle, and send him back for prosecution. But he doesn’t tape the conversation, which is solid evidence.

  Further. He finds the drugs stashed in the meat locker. What does he do with this valuable evidence that will be needed for a trial? He flushes it down a toilet. Very smart. Show me even the stupidest country hick deputy who, after finding the dope he needed for a bust, would then flush the evidence. I scream. I shriek. I rend my flesh!

  Further. O’Niel knows two gunmen are coming in on the shuttle. Instead of calling the space station and having authorities there check the luggage of all passengers for weapons, thus stopping them at the start, he allows them to board. I foam. I fulminate. Gimme a gun!

  Or maybe I’m being too picayune. So then, if he isn’t a complete doddering, pestilent, certifiably brain-dead asshole, let him stand with his deputies (even the traitor deputy) at the egress port of the shuttle when it arrives. Let him speak to the onboard personnel and have them send out passengers one at a time, have them drop their pants while their baggage is searched, and catch the two “best professional killers in the Solar System” (as the voice on the space-phone called them) before they gain access to a huge refinery complex where they can set up an ambush. And if your deputies say, “We don’t want to get involved,” then if you are the topkick of the peacekeeping force you simply say, “Your ass is fired, collect your gear.” Try and convince me that all these space cops, career men, obviously, will risk loss of pay and being drummed out of the service, because they’re afraid to help O’Niel…which is their job!

  Further. If O’Niel has such certain knowledge that Sheppard is the power behind this scam, and if you don’t want to acknowledge that all O’Niel has to do is take the fucker into custody till help arrives, then have him simply go to Sheppard’s office—as he does on several occasions—tie the clown up and sit there with his laser rifle trained on the port. Have him wait for these two skillful assassins and when they come to check in with the boss, to find out why they can’t find O’Niel, let the Marshal blow them out of their socks.

  But that’s too logical. Too simple. Too direct. It would deny us the joys of that imbecilic chase through the refinery. A chase that defies its own internal consistency, not to mention the simple precepts of logic. Let me point out a few to you.

  “These guys are the best,” said the mysterious criminal voice on the space-phone, when Sheppard called for help. (And do you perceive another lamebrain manipulation of reality in that Sheppard can call for help whenever he needs it, but O’Niel can’t? Or won’t. Simply put: he doesn’t, thereby making him seem even more a dolt, rather than the superior cop we’re asked to believe he is.) These heavy duty killers come fully equipped with laser rifles that sport heat-seeking telescopic sights. We are treated to shot after shot of these infrared heat-seeking devices tracking back and forth. But each time they get O’Niel in their sights, with him unaware of the danger, they miss the first shot! Every single time. Thereby giving O’Niel a chance to escape, fire back, to pull a diversionary maneuver. What science, what technology, what skilled trackers! What horse cookies!

  If these are the two best assassins the crime syndicate and Sheppard can come up with, I’ll throw any two of the punchiest button-men in Brooklyn against them and relax.

  And for a big finale, for the towering moment of absolute idiocy, Hyams asks us to believe that these killers who are “the best,” who apparently have been out in space a long time, who understand the laws of physics (which is more than can be said for Hyams), are simple-minded and / or distracted enough to fire a laser blast at a greenhouse window, thus exploding them out into the vacuum.

  The night I saw the film, the audience booed and hissed at this ridiculous climax. I was pleased to see that not even an audience slavering to enjoy one of these “sci-fi flicks” for special effects was prepared to let themselves be so intellectually insulted. I wish Mr. Hyams had been there. And I wish I had the spoiled fruit concession.

  I’ve spent about five thousand words in two columns stripping this gawdawfulness to the rotten core, and I could go on for another five thousand. The phony scare technique of having a cat jump out at Frances Sternhagen. The avoidance of common sense in O’Niel’s being able to tap Sheppard’s line, but his not putting a recorder on the wire so he could find out who the traitor in his midst might be. And the big moral shuck of not having O’Niel simply walk into that dining bay and say, “Okay, you hundred working stiffs, you’re all deputized, let’s go get the Bad Guys!”

  Further. Where is the labor union for these workers? Don’t tell me that the United Mine Workers or the Teamsters or the futuristic equivalent of an AFL-CIO wouldn’t have shop stewards there protecting the rights of the men. Don’t tell me that in that vast body of over two thousand men there wasn’t one like Victor Riesel, the columnist who had acid thrown in his face for trying to expose union corruption. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t one union man who would see his fellows were being killed by contraband junk proffered by a company man, who wouldn’t spread the word and organize other workers. And what kind of schmucks are these 2,000+ workers supposed to be, that they can see others of their number running amuck and dying from some nasty substance, who don’t blow the whistle? Even in wholly owned company towns the miners and factory workers stand up for their rights. To ignore that entire aspect of the situation denies the realities of the Labor Movement for the past hundred years. Only in the incomplete, manipulate-as-you-will duplicity of a bad writer can such factors be eschewed.

  High Noon was about something special. Like Arthur Miller
’s “The Crucible,” it was about being a “good German,” about letting the powers of repression and censorship and evil do their dirty work unhampered. It might be shown today as a warning against the New Puritanism of the Moral Majority.

  Outland is about nothing. It is simply a cheap filmic device to give the makers of little plastic models a chance to convince you your sense of wonder has atrophied. It is an untalented man’s career getting another boost from your innocent desire to see a good science fiction film. It is the bastardization of someone else’s original idea, ineptly translated to a genre where it does not work.

  In an issue of Starlog just about the time the film was released, Frances Sternhagen said in her interview, “This isn’t really science fiction. It is set in a science fiction ambiance, but it is more like an old Western. It just happens to be an old Western on a satellite of Jupiter.”

  And that is the most corrupt thing about Outland.

  Thirty years after Galaxy Magazine conceived the perfect example of what sf would look like if it were put in the hands of dabblers, fools and perverters…the template becomes a nasty reality. It is called Outland.

  Ms. Sternhagen, an intelligent actress who, in this case, has made an incredibly dumb statement, does not seem to perceive the invidiousness of her comparison. I won’t comment on how Ms. Sternhagen—most recently on Broadway in Strindberg’s “The Father”—would look on such a transposition of the classics. “Oh, it’s just ‘Miss Julie’ rewritten as a superhero comic.” “Oh, it’s just ‘Richard III’ as a roller disco comedy.” “Oh, it’s just ‘An Enemy of the People’ as an underwater ballet for Esther Williams.”

  But the inept and inappropriate warping of High Noon into a genre where it doesn’t work bothers her not in the least.

  Such tenebrous thinking from a respected artist only serves to validate for the jimooks who made Outland their arrogant stupidity in cobbling up such a piece of duplicity.