An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Why do I tell you all this?

  Because every time you spend your money to swell the box office coffers for monkey-puke like this movie, you encourage the know nothings at outfits like Warner Bros, and the Ladd Company to listen to babble like “This is High Noon in outer space,” and to foist off on you again and again the most slovenly, childish, unsatisfying imitations of thoughtful sf they can get away with.

  But then, I suppose if you enjoy playing the boob, you’ll fight with me over nits in this analysis…and queue up for the next dreg a halfwit has sold to other halfwits.

  In which case, as Jefferson said in another context, you’ll be getting exactly what you deserve.

  Interim memo

  I had nothing to do with it, officer. I have a brass-bound alibi. I was elsewhere when Future Life magazine gasped its last. All I know for certain is that the kids who buy the companion magazine, Starlog, were more interested in reading silly ass articles about how Star Trek phasers make that funny noise than they were about advances in science or how to prevent pollution or what life might be like on the planets circling Proxima Centauri. And so the excellent staff of Future Life—Bob Woods, Barbara Krasnoff, Laura O’Brien and a host of others during the year I wrote these first twelve columns—were informed by the publisher that, sadly, uplifting the mentalities of kids drunk on SFX and Hollywood hype was a chore no longer in favor with the rabble. And Future Life vanished. The column lay dormant for five months, and then I was solicited to continue it in the L.A. Weekly (all of this, in greater detail, in the afterword to this book). For my first column in the Weekly, because events subsequent to its having been written the previous July had provided me with additional, contemplative material, I recycled the final Future Life column, my twelfth, as two installments, which became 12 and 13. This makes for some small confusion among archivists; but if they didn’t like being befuddled they’d have become shoe salesmen or poets. So this is the transitional column.

  INSTALLMENT 12: 2 JULY 81

  PUBLISHED 20 OCTOBER 81 FUTURE LIFE #31 COVER-DATED DECEMBER

  REPUBLISHED IN EXPANDED FORM 15–21 JANUARY 82, L.A. WEEKLY

  Once upon a time not too long ago I was married to a young woman whose every waking moment was underlain by a preoccupation with thanatopsis.

  Perhaps it was only Weltschmerz; but I ruminate about her occasionally, and I’m more and more inclined to believe it was genuine thanatopsis.

  I won’t make you go to the dictionary. Weltschmerz is one of those words that sums up in German what would take paragraphs to illustrate in English. It means sorrow which one feels and accepts as his / her necessary portion in life; sentimental pessimism; literally, world-pain. Thanatopsis comes from the Greek personification of death, Thanatos. Like thanatophobia, it is a view or contemplation of death that transcends mere mortal awareness that we all come to an end in darkness.

  I lived with her for a year, and was married to her for somewhat less than another year; and on November 20th, 1976 I sent her away and divorced her when I finally realized, for reasons I will not go into here, that I could not trust her. It was a culmination of a chain of events that I number among the most debilitating in my variegated life.

  One month earlier, on October 8th, 1976, my mother died, after a long and dehumanizing illness. She had spent too long on the machines that kept her alive in the biological sense, but which could not bring her back from the condition of vegetable thing she had become.

  She lay in the hospital bed, having become a cyborg.

  Half-human, half-machine…extruding tubes…one with the ohm and the kilowatt…without tears or smiles…having no need to brush her teeth in the morning or a magazine to help her sleep at night. I touched her face and she did not know it. I put one of my tears on her cheek and it did not move.

  And so finally it came to the end of the story, came to final moments when someone had to make the decision to kick out the plug. Someone made that decision.

  Those ashen months of 1976, for these and other reasons, were a terrible time for me. Yet as barren of sunlight and joy as those days were, I never shared the world-pain or the absorption with thanatopsis my ex-wife had known. She would often say to me, “Why bother? What does it all mean? What’s the point of living?” I would wither a little inside, because no argument suffices if the skin and bones don’t understand that the answer is: we live to say “No!” to death.

  Through all the days and limitlessly longer nights, I never felt my soul in the grip of the fist, never lost the humanism that keeps me warring with the rest of my species. We are one of the universe’s noblest experiments; we have a right to be here, I’ve heard; and if we struggle long enough against the forces of ignorance and mischievousness that bedevil us, we will be worthy of that place in the universe. I believed that, continue to believe it, and only once during that monstrous period was my faith in the nobility of the human race shaken.

  A month after my marriage became a portion for foxes, two months after my mother finally found the trail opened for her reunion with my father, I experienced the lowest moment I’ve ever known in my consideration of those with whom I share common heritage. On December 22nd, 1976—for the first and I sincerely hope only time—I was dashed to despair in the sure and certain knowledge that we are an ignoble, utterly vile form of life, unfit to steal space from weeds and slugs and the plankton in the sea.

  That moment came in a motion picture theater, and I, who fear almost nothing, was frightened. Not at what was on the screen; at the audience around me. Fellow human beings, a stray and unspecific wad of eyes and open sensory equipment, common flesh and ordinary intellects, so petrified me with horror that I had to hold myself back from screaming and fleeing. I wanted to hide. I can’t get over it, even now: I wanted to hide. I was more scared than I’d ever been, before or since.

  Pause. Deep breath. Quell the memory. Force back the abreaction. Stop the shiver as it climbs.

  On that Wednesday night, I was escaping my life. I got in the old dirty Camaro and drove into the San Fernando Valley just over the hill from my house. Down there in the Valley is not Hollywood, it is not Brentwood or Westwood, it is barely Los Angeles. In many ways it is a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. As writer Louise Farr has said, it is the edge of the American Dream that bindlestiffs and bus-riders have come to seek where the sidewalks are made of gold. Or at least partially inlaid with bronze stars. But it is Country, in the way Fort Worth will always be Country, no matter how urbane and cosmopolitan Dallas becomes. It is tract homes and fast food and the Common Man keeping barefoot and pregnant the Common Woman.

  Oh, there are fine shops and big homes—in Woodland Hills and the newer 850-to-million-five estates—there are nonpareil French restaurants like Aux Delices and Mon Grenier; there are pseudo-hip boites like Yellowfingers and L’Express, but every once in a while they get the French syntax wrong and wind up with names like Le Hot Club. Nonetheless, it ain’t all no-necks and polyester crotches. It is just, like where you live, The Valley. As close to the American Dream as Common and average may ever hope to get.

  I drove out, drove around, could not escape myself. And decided to take in a movie. Any movie. Didn’t give a damn what or which.

  In Tarzana, out along Ventura Boulevard, near the big tree under which I am told Edgar Rice Burroughs lies buried, in the bedroom community named after his greatest creation, there is a multiple cinema like the thousands thrown up in every American city these past decades. Cinema I—Cinema II—Cinema III—Cinema IV they call themselves, these windowless, airless cubicles. They are not theaters. Theaters had spacious lobbies and balconies; they had cut glass chandeliers and ushers with flashlights; they had an authoritarian manager in an impeccable tuxedo to whom you could complain when the noisy schmucks behind you wouldn’t shut up; they had a candy counter with freshly popped popcorn that got real butter slathered over it, not some artificial crankcase drainage that had never seen the inside of a cow. They were theaters, not these little boxes,
which, if they had handles, would be coffins. In Tarzana they have caused to be thrown up a six-box edifice called Theeeeee Movies of Tarzana.

  I didn’t care what I saw, just as long as I hadn’t seen it before. Every screening room had a double feature. I picked the one that had two films I hadn’t heard much about. I don’t remember what the A film was, but the second movie, the B, was one that had been around for a few months, that I’d missed.

  It was called The Omen. You may know the film.

  It was crowded for a Wednesday night and the lights were up as I wandered down the single aisle to find a seat. The Omen would start in a few minutes.

  I gauged the audience. I’ve come to hate seeing films in ordinary theaters since the advent of television. People talk. Not at the screen, an occasional bon mot as response to something silly in the plot or a flawed performance, but to each other. Not sotto voce, not whispered, not subdued, with the understanding that there is something going on here, but at the top of their lungs, as if they were yelling to someone in the kitchen to fetch them a fresh Coors. They are unable to separate reality in a theater from fantasy in their tv-saturated home. They babble continuously, they ask moronic questions of each other, they make it impossible to enjoy a motion picture. It is the great dolt audience, wrenched from the succoring flicker of the glass teat, forced out into this Halfway House between television stupor and the real world: not yet fully awake, merely perambulated into another setting where the alpha state can be reinduced. I looked around at my fellow filmgoers. Not much different from the crowd you last shared a Saturday Night at the Movies with.

  I do not think I malign them too much by characterizing them as eminently average. From their behavior, from the mounds of filth and empty junk food containers I had to kick aside to get to my seat, from the stickiness of my shoes from the spilled sugar-water, from the beetled brows and piglike eyes, the feet up on the backs of seats in front of them, from the oceanic sound of chewing gum, I do not think I demean them much by perceiving them as creeps, meatheads, clods, fruitcakes, nincompoops, amoeba-brains, yoyos, yipyops, kadodies and clodhoppers. But then, the garbage dump smell of bad breath, redolent armpits, decaying skin bacteria and farts mixed with bad grass always gives me a headache and puts me in one of my foulest Elitist humors.

  Nonetheless, I was there, the film was to start in a few minutes, and I was trying to escape (in the worst possible situs) the world. So I took a seat next to a young man and his date, a young woman. I gave them the benefit of the doubt: a young man and a young woman. I was shortly to learn that I had misjudged them. Actually: were-things passing for human.

  I will describe them physically.

  The young woman was vibrating against the membrane of her twenties. Gum moving in the mouth. Shortish. Ordinary in every esthetic consideration. Just a female person, holding the right hand of the young man who sat to my right. What distinguishes her most in memory is that she was with him.

  Ah. Him.

  There is a sort of young man, never older than twenty-five, that I occasionally encounter at college lectures. The somatotype is one that you’ll recognize. Large, soft, no straight lines, very rounded. A lover of carbohydrates. Pale. An overgrown Pillsbury doughboy. Weak mouth. Alert. Very sensitive. And I usually have to confront this type when I’ve done a number on Barbra Streisand, with whom I’ve had a number of path-crossings in my life, and whom I do not like a lot.

  So when I’ve mentioned Ms. Streisand, and have expressed my opinion of her, one of these great soft things leaps up in the audience and, usually with tears in his eyes, reads me the riot act. “Barbra is glorious! Barbra is a star! What do you know about anything? You’re just jealous of her!” Followed by exeunt trembling.

  (God knows how much I envy her. She can wear a cloche and wedgies so much better than I. Don’t shoot the shwans.)

  Beside me sat one of those. He looked like Lenny in Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN. Probably not all there; several bricks short of a load; only 1.6 oars in the water. Big, soft, holding her hand.

  Enough. Let me get directly to the moment.

  This film, The Omen, is a textbook example of what we mean when we speak of gratuitous violence. That is, violence escalated visually beyond any value to plot advancement or simple good taste. That which makes your stomach lift and your eyes look away. Not the simple ballet of death one accepts in Straw Dogs or The Wild Bunch or Alien or Bonnie and Clyde: I’ve seen death close up a few times. Those films are okay. No, The Omen is another can of worms. And the moment came like this:

  There is a scene in which David Warner gets his head cut off by a sheet of plate glass. Ah, the joys of decapitation, as opposed to willy-nilly defenestration. We have been set up for this scene in a number of ways, so that we will feel trepidation and mounting tension. Warner has evinced that sweaty, doomed attitude we have come to know through years of movie going as endemic to those the plot demands get wasted. The whining passengers of the Poseidon; the downy-faced aviator on his first recon flight with Gable or Robert Taylor; the PFC who stands up in the Bataan jungle to yell to his rifle squad, “Hey, it’s all clear, no more snipers!” Pee-ing! Bullet through the brain. We know poor David Warner is about to get shitcanned in some earsplitting way.

  As the group of which Warner is a member rushes through the street of some Algerian-style city (it’s been over five years since I saw the film and detailed specifics of plot are blurred), we get artful intercuts by director Dickie Donner of Warner’s sweaty, crazed face…a truck or wagon or somesuch with a large sheet of plate glass lying flat on the bed, protruding off the rear of the vehicle…Warner rushing…the truck trundling…the glass looking ominously ready…an impediment in the way of the truck…Warner…glass…ohmiGod! we know what’s going to happen because the intercuts are harder, closer together, the music begins to crescendo…the impediment stops the truck…the wheels of the truck smash into it…the truck stops short…the glass wrenches loose and zips off the rear of the truck…Warner seeing the glass coming toward him…

  Now we know he’s going to get hit by the glass.

  And because we’re trained to drive instantly to the most morbid escalation of the death-equation, we suspect he’ll be decapitated. And that’s the point to which violence is at least tolerable, acceptable, required by the plot.

  But.

  Little Dickie Donner, famed far and wide as the director of the television kiddie show The Banana Splits and a movie about a super-hero, charming Richard Donner directs the scene like this (remember, you’re sitting in a theater all unaware of what’s coming at you):

  Intercuts. The glass slicing through the air. David Warner’s face registering terror as he sees it coming. His eyes starting from his head. His mouth open in an animal scream of horror. The faces of the other actors distorted in ghastly expectation of the impact. Glass! Warner! Screams! Closeup on the glass slicing into Warner’s neck. Blood spurts across the glass. The head rolls onto the glass. Glass and body carried backward to smash against a wall. Glass splintering.

  Okay, we think, horrible. That’s it, though. It’s over.

  Wrong, and wrong.

  Now the head rolls down the glass, draining blood from dangling cords and emptying carotid artery. Blood smears on glass in long slimy streaks.

  Enough!

  The head bounces off the glass, hits the cobblestones, rolls.

  Enough!

  Camera follows the head bouncing down the street.

  Enough! Enough already!

  The head rolls into a corner.

  Enough! God, cut me a break here!

  The head comes to a stop as the camera comes in on the final spurting of blood, the face contorted in horror, the eyelids still flickering…

  And here is the ultimate ghastliness of that moment, close to Christmas of 1976. Not on the screen. In the theater.

  The audience was applauding wildly.

  They were, God help them, laughing!

  And beside me, that great sof
t average American boy and girl, fingers twined tightly, were pounding their fists on his knee. From him: moaning bursts of sound, as if he were coming. From her: sharp little expletives of pleasure, as if she were coming.

  Rooted, unmoving, my hair tingling at the base of my scalp, memorable fear overwhelming me, I sat there in disbelief and dismay. What kind of lives could these people live? What awful hatred for the rest of the human race did they harbor? What black pools of emotion had been tapped to draw such a response? The character David Warner played was not a villain, so they couldn’t be excused or understood on the basis of catharsis…that no-less-bestial but at least explicable release of applause and whistling when the Arch-Fiend or the Renegade White Man or the Psychopathic Terrorist gets blown away. No, this was a high from the violence, from the protracted, adoring closeups of blood and horror.

  This was America experiencing “entertainment.”

  I can’t remember the rest of the film. I’m not sure I actually stayed to the end. I know I didn’t see the feature film I’d come to see. I may have stumbled up the aisle and into the night, decaying inside from the death of my mother, the breakup of my marriage, loneliness, sorrow…and the evil rite I had just sat through. But now, five years later, I recall that moment as the absolutely lowest point I’ve ever reached in loathing of my species. I could not even fantasize wiping them off the face of the Earth. That would have been to join with them in their unholy appreciation of the senselessly violent. I just wanted to be away!

  Now, five years later, I see the twisted path stretching from that night of monstrous perception to an omnipresent mode in current movies.

  In the phrase credited to writer-interviewer Mick Garris, knife-kill movies.

  How many have you seen?

  Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Prom Night, He Knows You’re Alone, Don’t Answer the Phone, Dressed to Kill, When a Stranger Calls, Motel Hell, Silent Scream, Blood Beach, My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13th, The Omen II, Mother’s Day, Zombie, Eyes of a Stranger, The Boogey Man, New Year’s Evil, Maniac, Terror Train, Humanoids From the Deep and, yes, I’m sorry to include this for those of you who adored it, The Howling.