Harlan Ellison's Watching (48 page)

We are expected to find a new crusade every time we put pen to paper. We are expected to plumb the depths of every isolated incident, and we are expected to track the path of every emerging trend. And for our sins of regularity in print (or in my case, semi-regularity) we are rewarded with the encomiums Big Mouth, Know-It-All and Vicious Critic.

If one of us raves about a film, say for instance
Dune
, not only is it instantly forgotten that we praised something, but we are pilloried for not following the party line that
Dune
was awful.

(This is much like my situation as regards fiction. Because I once wrote a story in which—for good and sufficient plot reasons—a young woman is killed and eaten by a dog, I am stereotyped by casual readers of my work as one who writes nothing but stories of violence and cannibalism. When I wrote three pages of an X-Men "jam" comic book, proceeds of which went to feed starving children in Ethiopia, a reviewer in
Amazing Heroes
wrote, "Harlan Ellison who, perhaps surprisingly, wrote the most upbeat and positive of the Entity-induced nightmares." Not surprising, perhaps, to those who have read, say, "Jeffty Is Five" or "Paladin of the Lost Hour" or "With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole," or any of the hundreds of other stories I've written in which friendship, courage, kindness and true love are the themes. But you get what I'm trying to say, don't you?)

And if we rationally and painstakingly savage a film we think is ka-ka, like f'rinstance
Back to the Future
, we get letters such as this one from Forrest J Ackerman:

"Do you suppose you're the only person on Earth who didn't like/love
Back to the Future?
Or can you name me five others? Or don't you give a damn how many cinemicrocephalons there are in the world?"

To which I replied: "Forry, with affection for you personally, I will let Anatole France respond to your question. 'If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.'"

And so the general feeling is that we are Big Mouth, Know-It-All and Vicious Critic. Because we are required to meet the deadlines by which the magazines in which we appear live and die. When you turn to our columns, there we are, opening our big mouths. Because that is what we're being paid to do. And so the Lee Goldbergs of the world say, "No one will ever accuse Harlan Ellison of keeping his mouth shut."

But, in weary truth, there are times when some of us
don't
have anything to say. Times when we haven't seen any films that require analysis. Times when we start an essay on why it is that most sf writers cannot write television scripts, or on why after ten years of publicly denouncing tv I went to work for
The Twilight Zone
, or . . . well, whatever. But we have those deadlines, so we do it.

And all those who cannot wait to pounce on the latest essay as yet another example of the Big Mouth Know-It-All Vicious Critic shooting off his bazoo nod sagely and say, "Doesn't he ever shut his mouth?"

For all of those kindly folks, and for those of you who know what it is not to have any particular opinion burning in you from time to time, I offer this installment, for which I am asking the editors of this magazine to pay me only one dollar:

I haven't anything to say this time. Maybe next time. Maybe not.

Mr. Goldberg: the millennium is at hand.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ February 1986

I have no idea who "A. Kindsvater" is, but s/he was represented by a quote at the top of a page of a 1982 memo book sent to me four years ago around Christmastime by a roofing repair company I'd engaged to locate a leak under the Robert Silverberg Memorial Cactus and Succulent Roof Garden here at Ellison Wonderland; oh I guess that'd be back around 1979; and they keep sending me these nifty genuine imitation-leather plastic-cover memo & date reminder booklets, little pocket-size jobbies, with birthstones and which-wedding-anniversary-is-the-13th (traditionally lace, but more contemporaneously, textiles and furs are looked on as appropriate), and a place to write in all the appointments you'd have gotten to on time if you'd thought far enough ahead to carry the little genuine imitation-leather plastic-cover memo & date reminder booklet with you, but you didn't think that far ahead and so the booklet lay in a drawer, unused for four years, until a few weeks ago when I tossed it out, along with the reminder booklets from 1983, 1984 and 1985; but not before I went through them and pulled out a few of those obscure quotations that serve as running heads every week. And that's where I discovered this quote by the dreaded "A. Kindsvater" whomever. Which quote was as follows:

"The probability of someone watching you is proportionate to the stupidity of your action."

Kindsvater—about whom I know absolutely nothing, yet whom I choose to capture in my imagination as having devised that truism at the moment s/he was caught by the
Man on the Street
's minicam as s/he was having perverted sex with a Rocky Mountain oyster in the show window of Bloomingdale's—certainly knew whereof s/he spoke, because no sooner do I write a column in which I explain in detail why there will never again be a worthwhile sf movie, than I see what is not only the greatest sf film ever made but is, in my infallible view, easily one of the ten greatest films of all time.

(This list of 10, which I change in a shamelessly duplicitous fashion to suit the occasion, variously includes
La Strada, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, M, Viva La Muerte, Providence
and
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
and
Paths of Glory
and about thirty others; but you get the idea.)

Kindsvater had it absolutely pegged because I know all of you read that column, only two months ago, and have been sharpening your yellow fangs waiting for me to poke my little head up out of the molehill of opinion wherein I reside; waiting with blowguns to lips for me to register any sort of ameliorative revisionism; waiting to make me eat my words, force-fed through the medium of your ever-vigilant, ever-contentious, ever-maliciously nitpicking letters to the Noble Fermans who edit and publish this magazine.

Well, if I have to masticate my manuscripture, I'll do it in as flamboyantly gourmandising a manner as was my original pronouncement. I herewith eat my words. The belief that sf is dead as a serviceable genre for motion pictures—stated baldly and without equivocation in my January installment—was a precise and correct view of the universe except for one thing; I hadn't seen
Brazil
(20th Century Fox/Universal). I eat my words, but the maître d' is Terry Gilliam. And okay I made an ass of myself in print for the very first time in my life, but I can live with it because, though I may look like a dip, I'm still better off than you, because I've seen what is surely the greatest sf film of all time (and one of the ten greatest films ever made), and you never will. Nyaah nyaah!

But enough levity. It is enough that your faithful essayist has learned humility through adversity. Let it suffice that unbridled arrogance has been brought to its knees by contradicting evidence so inescapably overwhelming that all that remains to me is the act of contrition in which I drive to this tattoo artist's place I know in Venice (California, not Italy), and have the guy inscribe on my tongue the following, from Montaigne:

"To be cured of ignorance one must first confess it."

Brazil
was the talk of London when I was there last summer. The reviews had been strange. Mixed reviews, if truth be told. Reviews that ranged from querulously timid admissions by lesser reviewers that they hadn't understood one frame of this singularly disturbing film, to sheer panegyrics by usually flint-hearted critics in which the word "masterpiece" appeared so often it became suspect.

Moorcock went wild over it. Lisa Tuttle couldn't stop raving about it. One after another English or Scottish fan, upon first meeting, almost before saying, "Glad to meet you," radiated messianic fervor and asked, "Have you seen
Brazil
yet?" Well, no, I hadn't; because it had come and gone so fast in the U.K.

Distributed internationally by 20th (and in the U.S. and Canada by Universal), the film had been shown in England in its original 2-hour 22-minute version, and however well or badly it did at the box office, it left in its wake the kind of awed comment usually reserved for books that turn out to be, fifty years later, contenders for literary immortality.

I was curious, naturally, but took it all the way we usually do when we hear how sensational some upcoming film is supposed to be. Like you, I've been burned too many times in the past few years. So I didn't go too far out of my way to find a suburban theater where
Brazil
might still be viewed.

I knew that
Brazil
was the latest directorial effort of the lone American member of the Monty Python troupe, Terry Gilliam. Having seen Gilliam's three previous films
—Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(1974),
Jabberwocky
(1977), and
Time Bandits
(1981)—I hadn't been wildly impressed with his abilities as regards the first two, but had gone absolutely bugfuck over
Time Bandits
, which remains one of my all-time favorite movies (though not one of the 10 greatest films of all time, like
Lawrence of Arabia, The Thief of Bagdad
[1939],
All About Eve, Metropolis, Throne of Blood, Viva Zapata
or
Singin' in the Rain
). I was anxious to see if the talent and inventiveness directorially displayed in
Time Bandits
had progressed to
Brazil
in as startling a quantum leap as it had shown between
Jabberwocky
and
Time Bandits
. And when I learned that Gilliam and Charles McKeown had been joined in the writing of the original screenplay by no less a master of wordplay than dramatist Tom Stoppard, my interest was truly piqued.

The cast sounded wonderful, too. Jonathan Pryce and Robert De Niro and Ian Holm and Bob Hoskins and Michael Palin, among many recognizable American and British names. But of the plot there was little said. No one could really explain to me what
Brazil
was about.

Was it about Brazil?

Well, no, Brazil doesn't enter into it at all.

Then where does the title come from?

Uh, well, you remember that song from the Thirties, "Brazil, where hearts were entertained in June / We stood beneath an amber moon / And softly murmured, 'Some day soon.'" And etcetera. Remember that song?

Yeah, sure, I remember it very well. It was one of my favorites. I remember a terrific version done by Hazel Scott on the organ in some dimly-recalled film or other. So what's that got to do with this movie?

Uh, well, it sort of plays over and under, throughout the film.

Then this is a romance.

Uh. Yes and no.

Well, what the hell
is
it?

It's, well, it's sort of a
1984
-like story, that may make you think of
Blade Runner
, except it isn't anything like either one of them, although it has some resonances with Lindsay Anderson's
O! Lucky Man
and
A Clockwork Orange
, but uh er it isn't very much like either of those, either, and there's elements of a lot of the screwball comedies of the Thirties, with the tough-talking dames in them, and all sorts of non-intrusive
hommages
to films like
Potemkin
, and all this big-screen adventure on a par with
Dune
, but nothing like
Dune
at all, and then there's all this dream sequence stuff and, uh . . . er . . . oh dear . . .

Stop! Stop! What you're trying to tell me is that this film is unclassifiable. It's
sui generis
. It's the kind of film you demean if you try to identify it by saying it's like this or that movie, only more pink. Right?

That is correct.

Brazil
is heart-stopping. It is brilliant beyond the meaning of the word. I guarantee you have never seen anything even remotely like this film.

And now here is the bad news.

Universal's Sid Sheinberg wants the film cut. And cut again. And "re-thinked" to give it a happy ending. As "happy" endings were tacked onto the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
. Or he won't release it in the United States.

Not because he's an evil man, but because he
likes
the film, and he wants to see millions of people go to see it. Sheinberg has said, of this piece of genuine cinematic art, breathtaking in every way, "If we had this other ending and I could show you that it would do 100% more business, you'd be a fool not to agree, wouldn't you?"

Yes, we'd be fools not to agree, if the yardstick were how well a piece of art appealed to the Great Wad, rather than being true to its own creative vision and reaching only those who would weep at its gloriousness. We would be fools were we to suggest that
La Gioconda
might not be a greater work of art if she had a wordballoon coming out of her mouth, and thereby might reach a wider audience.