Harlan Ellison's Watching Read online

  I was enthralled by the animated efforts of the insectile tenants in that weedy patch of earth "just 45 inches from Broadway" as they struggled to escape the skyscraper-erecting encroachments of Man, when the flashlight beam hit me in the face.

  At first it was only an annoyance, a faint distraction to my right. But it persisted, and I glanced toward the aisle and got the flash right in the face. "That's him," I heard my Grandmother say; and then a younger female voice, an authentic Ajax Usherette Training School voice, whispery so as not to disturb the other patrons, yet husky and compelling, said, "Come out here, little boy."

  Blinded by the light, paralyzed by the voice of authority, and not yet completely the scofflaw I was to become through this escapade, I began to tremble. "Come out here this instant, little boy!" The usherette was not to be trifled with. This young woman would no doubt grow up to be the head nurse in a maximum security nuthouse dedicated to straightening out guys like Jack Nicholson. "Harlan," my Grandmother said helpfully. "His name is Harlan Ellison."

  (Yes, Officer, my dear old sweet Granny would say to the Secret Police when they came for me, he's the one you want. And the evidence is buried under all his dirty socks and underwear at the back of the clothes closet. Swell old lady.)

  "Herman; you come out here, Herman Nelson."

  Gramma: "Harlan."

  Usherette: "What?"

  Gramma: "Harlan, not Herman. Harlan Ellison, not Herman Nelson."

  Patron: "Shhhh!"

  Usherette: "Harmon, I don't want to have to come in there to get you!"

  Gramma: "It's not Harmon, it's Harlan."

  Usherette: "Whatever! Get out here, little boy!"

  I got out there . . . before my darling Grandmother began handing out Wanted leaflets to the audience.

  By the ear, like something from an Our Gang comedy, I was dragged up the aisle. What an ignominious reverse-path from my entrance to the Heights Theater.

  I had run like a mad thing through the streets of Coventry-Mayfield, reaching the theater ten minutes before Mr. Bug was to begin. I'd given my name to the ethereal vision in the ticket booth, and she had looked it up and, smiling wonderfully, had told me to go right in, as she handed me a "birthday pass" that entitled me to free popcorn.

  The young woman at the door had waved me in with another of those smiles that made the spine deliquescent, I'd bought a Tootsie Roll and accepted my free popcorn, and had allowed the charming usherette to show me to my seat, right in the middle of the third row. The theater had been pretty well filled, but even under such exacting circumstances the theater's staff had treated me properly as visiting royalty. It was, after all, as I told each person in my row as I shoved my way to my seat, my birthday!

  And now, to be usherhandled up the aisle, my ear pincered excruciatingly, my dear sweet Granny kvetching along behind, intoning half-Yiddish gardyloos about my certain future as either a demented hunchbacked bell-ringer, or a Cossack love-slave . . . how ignominious!

  I was, of course, dragged the three blocks back to the House of Pain, my wrist caught in a lobster-grip so maliciously tight that it would have drawn clucks of admiration from SWAT teams and Argentinian death squads. I was thrust through the front door into the presence of Grampa Harry, who was reading the Jewish Daily Forward, probably "A Bintel Brief," as he reminisced about the happy-go-lucky past in Russia filled with kasha and the grinding of the faces of the poor under the boots of the Tsar's kulaks. He looked up only long enough to spit the word oysvorf! And went back to the newspaper.

  Brandishing a Swingline Stapler with which she threatened to attach me permanently to the mattress, I was once again divested of my clothing, and condemned to a state of supine anguish with threats of a "k-nok in the kopf"if I so much as hyperventilated too loudly.

  I waited all of three minutes. Then I crept to the bedroom door, cracked it a sliver and listened. They were in the living room, and had just tuned in to Fibber McGee and Molly. I could hear Harlow Wilcox extolling the virtues of Johnson's Wax.

  I located the contraband skeleton key where I'd hidden it a year or more earlier, under the rug beneath the bed, and unlocked the closet where my Grandmother (on whom Dickens had modeled his character Madame Defarge) had thrown my clothes in a heap on the floor. I dressed quickly, made it out through the window again, and raced back to the Heights Theater.

  How I explained to the woman at the door that I was supposed to be there, I cannot remember. But I was adapting swiftly, metamorphosing in just one evening into a creature as sly and tricksy as a television network executive; and I conned my way inside. I got past the usherette somehow, hid out in a different area of the seats than the one previously discovered by the posse, and settled down with my thumb in my mouth to see how the evil C. Bagley Beetle and his two thugs, Smack the Mosquito and Swat the Fly, conspired to mulct Mr. Bumble, the proprietor of the Honey Shop (and the father of Honey Bee, Hoppity's girlfriend), out of his property.

  This time I got to watch about twenty-five minutes of the film before I saw the flashlight beam bobbing down the aisle. I ducked. They went down the right-hand aisle, across the front of the audience, and up the left-hand aisle. I was on the floor. They missed me. I stuck my head up and watched the movie from the floor. Other patrons began hissing at me. I sat in my seat. I watched, mesmerized, despite the breaks in continuity occasioned by my frequent absences and nosedives.

  They snuck up on me from behind, and snatched me out of my seat. This time it was my mother, in the company of the Assistant Manager. Gramma had called her to come back from the restaurant. She was not all that free with approbation for my ingenuity and tenacity. She held me aloft by my hair like a small beast chivvied from its lair by runny-nosed hound dogs. At the entrance to the Heights, the Assistant Manager waggled a finger at my mother and enunciated the evils of Interdicting Honest Merchants in Their Attempts to Recover from the Great Depression, culminating with remarks best summed as, "Keep your loathsome brat to home, lady!"

  I was jammed into the glove compartment of the family Plymouth, was freighted back to durance vile, was stripped to the skin, was dressed for bed in a monstrously oversized pair of Grampa Harry's pajamas, and was stapled by Swingline into the bed.

  My mother never hit me, but the voodoo curses and vivid word-pictures of my imminent demise should I budge from the bed served to cow me. My mother left, I heard the front door slam as she rushed away back to the restaurant, and I lay there for a full five minutes before I crept to the bedroom door, cracked it and heard Bob Hope introducing Frances Langford on the radio. And in pajamas fitted by Omar the Tentmaker, I made good my Great Escape for the third time. Barefoot. Crazed with determination. Now completely a creature who would ever-after have a helluva time dealing with rules and authority.

  Knowing they'd be watching for me at the front door, I circled the theater in my pajamas until I found the exit doors. One of them was ajar. I slipped inside, and went to ground in the very first row, my head tilted up at a ninety-degree angle in hopes of making some vague sense of the plight of Hoppity and the inhabitants of the bug village, now displaced by the high-steel construction, in constant danger and seeking a place to draw a safe breath. As you might well imagine, there was a shitload of identification with the bugs.

  Of course, they nabbed me again.

  My memory at this point becomes blurred, possibly with the recalled pain of thumbscrews and vats of boiling pitch. The night passed with all the charm of Tom Brown's School Days, and I cannot tell you how many times more I broke out, or if I did get away a fourth time. When I dream of this incident, it does seem to go on for eternities.

  I never did get to see the complete Mr. Bug Goes to Town until something like the mid-Sixties when it became available on videocassette. Today I have it in my private collection, and every once in a while, far more often than the quality of the film commends, I take it down and watch it. My wife has emerged from sleep in the wee hours to find me sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watc
hing insects.

  But had it not been for the Fleischer Brothers, I might easily have remained a sweet, obedient human being who never uttered a cross word, never saw the flaws in the commands and dicta of Authority Figures, never became so obsessed with animated cartoons and other cinematic marvels that he became a film critic . . . and might today be a registered Republican.

  Had it not been for Hoppity, I might well have remained untwisted, uncorrupted, placid and pliant. I would not have been arrested as many times as I have; I would not have had as difficult a time in the Army as I had; I would not punch out television and film producers when they mess up my screenplays; and the world would have been a quieter place.

  I was a helpless pawn, caught in the grip of animation evil. You can call me Hoppity.

  PART TWO:

  In Which The Critic Turns His Forepaw To Semiotic NeoMarxist Post-Feminist Post-Structuralist Lacanian Kristévan Uninvested Postmodern Deconstructionist Cine-Fabulist Scholarship Thingee Stuff

  You go to a movie. You turn on the set and watch a tv show. You don't think about it. You just see it. When you rise, leave the theater or punch the remote to kill the set, if you are thinking at all, your thought is usually something no more complex than I liked that or I didn't like that. (Actually, the latter impression is more likely to be What a waste of time. I call that the Geraldo-Rivera-Opens-Al-Capone's-Vault response.)

  For an appreciably smaller number of exposures to film or television, the gray matter has not been stunned, and you very likely think about what you've seen. Then I liked and I didn't like become What a terrific movie! or Gawd, I hated that, I'd like to slug the Producer, knock him down, go through his pockets, and get back the ticket money, the parking lot fee, the cost of the babysitter, and a few bucks for punitive damages!

  Filmgoers and television-viewers (and their mind-sets, which are completely different) justifiably judge a work in these visual mediums by what it is, not by the intentions of those who created it. They assume that what comes to them across the screen large or small is exactly what its makers wanted it to be. They have no idea—however knowledgeable they may be in the abstract—of the disruptions, the compromises, the disappointments and artistic roadblocks that come with the territory. Nor do they care. (I'm not sure anyone should care, on one everyday level. It is surely enough that the audience has trusted the creators sufficiently, in advance, to give over their time and their money.)

  But, in truth, the average member of the viewing audience would rather cobble up his/her uninformed opinion that goes beyond merely I liked or I didn't like, and visit it on anyone who'll listen, with the force of an Obiter Dictum, rather than learn what really transpired in that minefield between initial conception and final presentation, why some movie succeeded or failed, sans conspiracy paranoia or, worse, the naive rural-hayseed folderol of Those Who Never Get the Message.

  Because what is being indulged is a desire to comment, to voice an opinion, in short . . . to criticize.

  Considering the question from both sides of the plow—as both scenarist and critic-insider and just-like-you moviegoer—I discover, to my surprise and pleasure, that the single most important problem of film criticism, whether scholarly or casual, is easy to pin. It is the same problem from either side.

  Because movies (and by extension, television) are so damned accessible—they are the "common denominator" art forms of the masses, as pulp magazines and radio dramas were before them—they lie naked to the attentions of both the wise and the foolish. Where criticism of work in the print mediums requires having to read and (one hopes) a heightened degree of insight, if not good old simple common sense, as well as (again, one can only hope) some background in the form being discussed, anyone who plonks down the price of a ticket feels equipped to pontificate on a film.

  That's just fine, absolutely peachy keen, if one is making judgments about a movie while standing in the waiting line, or tossing it around at dinner or après-cinema; we all enjoy putting in our 2¢ on any topic we feel even remotely within our purview. But—and having voiced these opinions in print more than a fistful of times I'm aware of the inevitable charge of Elitism, to which charge I plead guilty, on grounds of common sense driven by pragmatism—it is a lot less salutary than "just fine, absolutely peachy keen" when those uninformed opinions are concretized as Film Criticism.

  For decades it was de rigueur on most small town (and many big city) newspapers to fob off the book reviews on anyone who would do the filthy job. A stringer who handled mostly box scores of the local high school baseball teams, would pick through a stack of review copies that had found their way to a newspaper, and select something that looked like it might be worth reading. They usually weren't even paid for the "review." That became the process for film reviewing, too. A local lady who assembled the village bulletin board listings, or who held Great Books sessions at her home, would be assigned to report on whatever the town's lone moviehouse was playing this week. Or canned material, usually based on studio handouts, would be picked up from the AP, UP or INS wires. Larger papers had a "Hollywood Correspondent" who filed interviews with stars and dealt regularly in gossip.

  Over time, serious film criticism began to emerge. Slowly, haltingly, and often to the bewilderment of city editors who used the material as fillers. Eventually, when a certain kind of academic began to perceive that there was Thesis Material in film criticism, a frequently infelicitous attention came to be focused on Hollywood's product. I refer here not to the serious, thoughtful, informed writings of such as James Agee, Graham Greene, Louis Delluc or Roland Barthes, but to the opportunistic scratchings of backwater Educationists (as R. Mitchell calls them) whose passion was not for the film individually or the form in toto, but merely to jump on what they cynically considered a popular culture publish-or-perish target of availability.

  And they passed along their parvenu perceptions to students who, because they had plonked down the price of a ticket, also felt entitled to pontificate, unfortunately employing the arcane jingoisms and semiotically-convoluted rationales they'd picked up from bloodless instructors unconsciously determined to leach every last morsel of pleasure from the act of filmgoing.

  Thus, justification for dumb remarks was institutionalized in American society. Not for the first time. Religion, politics, morality, literature . . . each in its turn has vibrated to the disturbances of air justified by the expression "I'm entitled to my opinion." As I point out in one of my essays, the important word informed is always missing from that bleat. In my ugly, Elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions; we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions. As Anatole France once wrote, "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

  People who wouldn't have the chutzpah to venture a Solomonic medical diagnosis, or even proffer an opinion about why your car's engine is missing, have no compunctions or modesty when it comes to raving about, or trashing, a motion picture.

  Without having read all the drafts of the screenplay before it ever got into the hands of the production personnel, the line producer, or the director, without having been present on the set to experience the million contretemps that lobby for or against the written word's transmogrification, without understanding the skills and problems that go into the sound portrait, the color corrections, the editing, the looping and dubbing, or any of the other hundred-plus elements that meld to make a movie, self-appointed mavens—judging only what they receive as they sit in the theater—do the Critical Judgment Thing. They decide this actor was lame, that director can't handle action sequences, this noble scenarist's brilliant vision has been martyred, that producer is a venal swine who has sold out Art for Commerce.