An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  One cannot lumber Schrader too much for bringing forth bad films like American Gigolo or Hardcore. They are, at least, his own original visions. But for this parvenu, lumped in with the other Wise Guy Directors, to presume to retell the films of his betters is an act of consummate gall that deserves nothing better than a forehead lightly carved with Michelangelo’s words.

  The same goes for Carpenter, who showed some stuff with Halloween and then did a swan-dive into the potty with The Fog, Escape from New York and now the remake of the Hawks-Nyby The Thing…which depredation he attempts to validate by saying he wanted to pull out of the original John W. Campbell story those treasures undiscovered by the original creators.

  The Thing, if you have not caught it (and how I envy you if you exist in that numinous state), is a picture about which this must be said: one should not eat before seeing it…and one cannot eat after having seen it.

  If the treasures Carpenter sought to unearth are contained in the special effects lunacy of mannequins made to look like men, splitting open to disgorge sentient lasagna that slaughters for no conceivable reason, then John Carpenter is a raider of the lost ark of Art who ought to be sentenced to a lifetime of watching Neil Simon plays and films.

  The Thing did not need to be remade, if the best this fearfully limited director could bring forth was a ripoff of Alien in the frozen tundra, this pointless, dehumanized freeway smashup of grisly special effects dreck, flensed of all characterization, philosophy, subtext or rationality.

  Of De Laurentiis and his aborted remake of King Kong, we need not even wait for the judgment of history. Like The Thing and Cat People, it is deservedly a box office disaster.

  But flushing these pustules is not enough.

  They were made. The sensibility behind their creation is the canker on the rose, the worm in the apple. It is the same debasement that will bring us a television remake of Casablanca with poor David Soul in the Bogart role. (I say “poor” David Soul because I know and I admire and I like David Soul. He is a talented man. More talented than he has had the opportunity to demonstrate. I came to this knowledge slowly but with dead certainty.) And now poor David Soul will be pilloried for demonstrating the same sort of towering hubris that drenched Schrader and Carpenter and De Laurentiis: the delusion that he could do better than what has already been done properly best.

  I wish I’d been able to say this to him before he accepted the role of Rick. I hope he survives the firestorm that will fall.

  I hope others reading this column will have the sense, when they are presented with the opportunity to remake Gone With the Wind or Hud or Viva Zapata, to say to the hypocritical conceptualizers devoid of originality but ass-deep in megabucks, “This is a stupid idea. Get out of my face before I puke on your shoes.”

  Or, I suppose, they could get rude about it.

  Interim memo

  “Jon Douglas West” stirred considerable controversy. Several dozen letters defending good ole Harlan came into the Weekly in the backwash of his attack. There was something about his manner that was easily as offensive as my own; and those who had now, after approximately twenty-six weeks of reading these little forays into rumination, developed a taste for them—I like to think of myself as the steak tartare or sushi of Letters, it takes a while to acquire the ability to keep me down once I’ve been swallowed—went after “West.” You’ll read one of the letters at the end of this installment. But it had been two weeks since I’d started trying to locate Mr. West; and as far as I could tell, exhausting every tool of tracing the skip-tracers use…Jon Douglas West did not exist. He had no bank account, no telephone, no automobile (unthinkable in Southern California), paid no taxes, owned no property, had no military or police record, possessed no charge accounts, did not vote, and had never been married. I can usually track down almost anyone I want to find, anywhere in the States, and on several occasions have done so, merely to board a plane and visit said individuals who had thought they could give me a bad time anonymously. But “Jon Douglas West” had stymied me. So I hired a private detective I’d once used to locate “Terry Dixon.” The plot thickens, fans.

  Letter reprinted with permission from the L.A. Weekly

  INSTALLMENT 35: 19 JULY 82

  Insofar as these weekly outings are concerned, I am one with Voltaire, who said, “My trade is to say what I think.”

  This is a commitment that brings me both praise and hate mail. Neither, really, is deserved. Voicing one’s informed opinion is a responsibility gladly shouldered by any concerned citizen. The operative word, of course, is informed.

  The old saw that “everyone is entitled to his / her opinion” is, in my informed view, horse puckey. These days, information is easy enough to come by, if one merely seeks it out. Thus, no one is entitled to a stupid, uninformed or irrational opinion.

  Oh, surely enough, they can hold such opinions…no one ever said each of us wasn’t entitled to be as dippy as we wish to be…and they can even express those dippy opinions…no one ever said we weren’t entitled to look like a schmuck…but as for being entitled to a wrongheaded, uninformed opinion…well, I say nay. We’re entitled to being as intelligent and clever and up-on-things as we can make ourselves. That’s why book-banning is something we must resist with all our might. Access to the source material cannot be protected too forcefully. In the words of Dr. Johnson, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information.”

  (Yes, Virginia, it would be a much duller world in which everyone knew what s/he was talking about; but then, compensatorially, it would also be a less violent world.)

  I am forever dismayed at the sort of pedestrians collared by radio stations like KHJ and KNX when they do their respective “Street Beat” and “Voice of the People” features. It seems almost a pathological compulsion on the part of the interviewer to select and air the opinions of the most uninformed passersby. I suppose it’s a desire to select “average” people, to get the general free-floating consensus on a contemporaneous question, that promotes such parameters of selection. Yet I question the unstated bias of that “average,” if by average we believe the general mass to be insensitive, illiterate, filled with misinformation or no information, and so tunnel-visioned as to be arrogantly self-serving.

  Accepting the mythology that the Common Man / Common Woman is a dolt, and airing oafish opinions on these programs only serves to deify the numbskull. Yet one seldom hears a thoughtful, considered, closely-reasoned position when the walker in the street is buttonholed. It is as if the reporters select, from among the (one presumes) multifarious statements made out there at curbside, only those as simplistic as possible. Are there truly no intellectual thinkers emerging from Fedco or bustling along in front of the County Courthouse? One would get that impression by clocking the voices heard day in and day out on KNX or KHJ.

  The stricture against voicing uninformed opinions goes for me as well as for the rest of you. It may sometimes seem I take a lofty position in that respect, but I assure you such is not the case. I do as I say, when I do as I do. Permit me to prove it to you, drawing on two recent responses to this column.

  The first is a note from a regular reader, Joanne Gutreimen, who wrote on July 8th, “Also you haven’t said a word about Israel / Lebanon. Not like you to stay off a hot issue. Why?”

  Well, the reason is not that I’m a Jew and am appalled at what’s going on in the Mid-East. The reason is simply that I don’t know enough about it to make a particularly original or informed statement on the subject. I have chosen to keep my mouth shut on this “hot issue.” Similarly, I haven’t said anything about the efficacy of the insanity plea, the flat rate income tax proposal, the Prop. 8 “victim’s bill of rights,” or the Constitutional Amendment for a balanced Federal budget.

  This reticence should be greeted with huzzahs of approval from the correspondents to this column who seem to have no special animus toward my weekly pronunciamentos, save that I make them. One such—
and this is the second mailbag item—was an open-letter-of-sorts addressed to me by one Jon Douglas West of Burbank, and published in the 9–15 July issue of this very newspaper.

  Mr. West, whose letter verged on the imponderable with phrases like “You can turn out the closet lights now…,” “And Hugh Beaumont is gone forever,” and “I’m in the phone book if you would like to come to Burbank and kick my ass,” seemed to think these Joycean stream-of-consciousness lines had meaning for others than himself. I don’t know about the rest of you, but they were bibble-bibble to me.

  What was not bibble-bibble in Mr. West’s letter, and jumped out at me (which may explain the peculiarity of the Weekly’s letter section editor even running such a pointless communiqué) was the following extract:

  If you really need a channel for your energies, both you and Ed [Asner] could get an effort going for the very victimized Lebanese and Palestinians. (Civilian dead now over 10,000?) Of course, you and Ed and I know who signs the checks.

  Unless I misread wonkily, Mr. West is a closet anti-Semite with the closed door very much ajar. No, Mr. West, I don’t know who signs the checks, which is why I keep my mouth shut on the subject; but I gather you are making yet another in the unending series of references to The Great International Zionist Jewish Communist Money Conspiracy that secretly runs the world.

  (Which, if it actually exists, annoys the hell out of me. Somewhere out there is a kike with twice his / her allotment, because I sure as shit ain’t got mine yet. I work much too hard to make ends meet, like the rest of you, and if the Great IZJCM Conspiracy do, in fact, exist, I’d appreciate the Comptroller getting in touch with me so we can straighten out this egregious oversight.)

  Mr. West, unless I misjudge his secret heart of hearts, is a laid-back bigot who understands that spicks, kikes, wops, niggers, gooks and Papists are an ever present menace, but who is also hip to the reality that use of such words does not get one invited back for dinner. There is no less racism or bigotry in America today than in years past; the only difference is that it’s gauche to voice such opinions openly. I take this as a positive thing. If it isn’t heard abroad, then the kids don’t pick it up as easily, and over a few generations it recedes in the general social atmosphere. One can only hope that with the final passing of those who think they know who signs the checks, these irrational and idiotic prejudices will also vanish down the hole, the bad interred with their bones.

  Mr. West cloaks his unsavory opinion, and I don’t voice mine at all. Were I to say something about the imbroglio in Lebanon, I would say that Begin is a thug, and always has been. He is not displaying his true colors for the first time. For those who remember history, Mr. Begin was a member of the ultramilitarist Irgun, a terrorist offshoot of the Haganah. He was a bomb-thrower and a merciless advocate of violence no saner and no more compassionate than Meyer Kahane and his Jewish Defense League, whom I despise with as much fervor as I do the assassins of the PLO.

  Begin and Sharon are to be condemned for what they are doing in Lebanon. Yet one understands the madness that drives them to such horrors. The PLO has been at it for far too long. Like all True Believers they will not cease until they have been slaughtered to the last infant in its crib…or have converted the last unwilling adversary to their belief. Neither extreme demonstrates rationality or humanity. What am I expected to say of a Holy War being fought in 1982? That it is laudable in any way? That it is nobler by any measure than the other Holy Wars being irrationally waged by Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, by Turks and Armenians over a massacre that happened in 1915, by Cambodians and Vietnamese in search of redress for nastiness a thousand years old?

  The situation in the Mid-East goes back before the dawn of recorded history, one presumes. It is at least as old and as raw a wound as the Balfour Declaration and the British White Paper of 1939. Yes, I’m conversant with all that Palestinian history, but it still doesn’t unravel the skein. Were I to voice an opinion, it would be too flippant for all those in the PLO and the JDL who will no doubt take these words as inflammatory: I would say that the Jews and Arabs should join forces. With the Israeli genius for warfare, fanning, economics and art, with the Arab genius for mathematics, tenacity, devotion and oil manipulation, the dumb fuckers could rule the world in fifteen minutes.

  But they won’t. They’ll continue to slaughter one another. This time it’s for a homeland for the Palestinian refugees. But no one seems to suggest that if the Arabs are so damned concerned about these homeless peoples getting situated, why don’t they just give them a chunk of their vast lands. They are, after all, as they continue to tell us, all brothers.

  If we’re talking about solving the problem, of finding a home for innocent people, and not just keeping alive ancient antagonisms, why do the PLO’s Arab brothers turn their backs on these doomed few and continue to goad them into trying to cop land that the Jews saved from the desert and turned into a garden? There’s enough land out there for everyone, but not even Lebanon chose to allow the PLO to annex a chunk for its national homeland. They chose instead to permit a warrior cadre to exist in their backyard, permitted that cadre to make forays against the Israelis until even the dullest-witted could see that a monster like Begin would one day say, “Enough!” and would move against the harboring nation.

  Though I am a Jew, I find it impossible to side with the Israelis in this terrible conflict. It has gone too far. Even if one accepts that Israel was driven to this madness by the PLO depredations, it is an unconscionable escalation of genocide by a people who were decimated within memory by just such an organized program of slaughter.

  Ms. Gutreimen asks why I’ve been silent on this matter. Silent, because I don’t know enough. Silent, because I see both sides. Silent, because I despise both sides. Silent, because as an American Jew I am ashamed, and proud, and rent with dismay at the lunacy of the human race. I can understand why Jews, who have been chivvied and driven for thousands of years, by naked swords and veiled remarks such as Mr. West’s, have at last gone completely mad in what they perceive to be defense of their survival. I can understand it, but I cannot condone it. I am sickened by it, as are all decent human beings.

  But I have no answer, save a flippant one. And that won’t do. It won’t do for Arafat, nor for Begin, nor for some misguided supporters of one side or the other who will read this column and, in a paroxysm of the same insanity that has leveled Beirut, seek vengeance against this columnist.

  With the Jon Douglas Wests of the world still making themselves known, is it any wonder that paranoia leading to slaughter continues to be the order of the day? And if some of us choose to keep silent on these “hot issues,” Ms. Gutreimen, it is only because we know that nothing we can say can put cool water on the brow of a feverish Holy War.

  Like Voltaire, it is my trade to say what I think; but even for a run-on like me, there are times and topics that must, in the name of rationality, go uncommented-upon.

  The check is in the mail, Mr. West.

  —————LETTERS—————

  Fight The Right

  Dear Editor:

  I have just finished reading Jon Douglas West’s “Open Letter to Harlan Ellison” [July 9-15]. Actually, I’ve read it twice so far, having found it impossible to believe—on the basis of one reading—that anyone could, in all good conscience, put pen to paper and draft such a letter. Such naiveté is soul-numbing, paralyzing in the extreme.

  “Come on…relax, lay out for a few months,” he advises. “The bogey-man of the ‘far right’ will still be there when you feel better.” He then goes on to condone the actions of Kimberly-Clark, Walter Annenberg and the rest of the neo-fascist lot by invoking the First Amendment in an attitude of Hey, like, they’ve got a right to their opinion, too, y’know.

  Perhaps it’s time that someone straightened Mr. West out as to exactly what free speech is. Free speech is when I and The Other Guy take to our soapboxes and air our views. It’s not free speech when I walk over and
stuff a sock in The Other Guy’s mouth so he’ll stop contradicting me, or when I put my views on television or in a magazine before millions of people, while not only denying The Other Guy access to the same exposure, but stealing his soapbox to boot.

  And that is precisely what the New Right is attempting to do. When Ed Asner is stifled, when Walter Annenberg’s TV Guide praises the mindless sitcoms that divert us while attacking the news programs that call into question The Established Order of Things, when the President of the United States decides for himself what the people who elected him need to know about the way he runs our government, when books are burned and public school teachers are forced to teach mythology disguised as pseudo-science, then free speech has been nailed bleeding to a wall.

  There is a difference, Mr. West, between free speech and propaganda. If you control the flow of information, you control the nation. Every power-crazed public official and dictator has understood this. The Torquemadas, the McCarthys, the Hitlers—especially the Hitlers—have long recognized this law. The placarded mandate of the late ’30s is now becoming the very real threat of the ’80s, although the names have been changed to protect the far-from-innocent: “Henceforward it shall be deemed a crime against the state, punishable by law, to make any criticisms whatever of Reichschancellor Hitler.”

  You say that because of the First Amendment, we should all “lay out” and forget about things, ’cause it’s a drag. But it’s precisely for that reason that we can’t “lay out.” There is a very definite threat to free speech in the works today. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” implies a coordinated action toward a definite goal. Rather, I think we have a concerted action, in which different groups, working more or less separately, are all pursuing the same goal at the same time. Individually, they would not amount to much. But collectively, they wield a great potential for suppression. To ignore them is to invite grief. Maybe writers are more sensitive to the situation because they’re confronted by it more often. Maybe that’s the way it should be.