Harlan Ellison's Watching (6 page)

I mean no offense here. But one deals pragmatically with what one is given. And any concern that this is again a manifestation of my meretriciously Elitist attitude can be evaporated simply by considering the sorts of films doing huge box-office business:
Someone to Watch Over Me, Predator, Beverly Hills Cop2, Soul Man, Like Father Like Son
. Like the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin. Or, as Benjamin Franklin said, "An empty bag cannot stand upright."

How, then, does the critic who loves movies convince a readership/viewership sated with
Robocop, The Living Daylights
and
Spaceballs
that worthier recipients of its adoration, if given the chance, might be
In the Mood
and
The Princess Bride?

Certainly not by pushing bloated, self-important and phoney "art films" like
A Room with a View
, no matter how cunningly manipulated commercially to win an Oscar for its scenarist. Such films only give Art a bad name, and further distance the general audience from movies of serious intent that are, for all their struggles to uplift and inform, cracking good stories.

Simple reviews, therefore, seem to me to serve no worthwhile purpose. Without the essay in depth that illuminates the special treasures a specific film proffers, it becomes a niggardly business of popularity contests and hucksterism, intended at its noblest to demonstrate the critic's skill at being coy and arch, while separating the gullible from their hard-earned shekels.

As with most endeavors, those who assay the job at the least demanding level, are the ones who draw down the least calumny, the ones who make the smallest waves, and who go on year after year exacerbating the problem by refusing to challenge their audience. They subscribe to the cheapest rationale given by schlockmeisters for the perpetuation of worn-out templates, the callous disregard for historical or scientific accuracy, the purely mercenary proliferation of haggard sequels, and a widespread anti-intellectual subtext: "We're only giving the audience what it wants."

Well, since this is transparently bullshit—because how can an audience know it wants something not yet created?—even if it were truth as deep and solid as Gene Hackman's talent, as a critic I've tried to say in my essays that just because an audience wants something, it may not necessarily be good for them, and one is not impelled to give it to them if it ain't good for them.

(Don't start that crap of asking, "Well, who the hell are you to judge what's good for people?" We're dealing with common sense here, not the kind of obfuscation the Administration uses to keep Ollie North out of prison. That sort of
ad hominem
arguing is what keeps us paralyzed. Guns are bad things and ought to be eliminated entirely. Rock cocaine will fuck you up and to hell with how seriously we interfere with the economy of Latin American countries whose ability to repay American bank loans is dependent on the drug crop. Abortion is a matter of individual conscience and piss on those who deflect the arguments with ancient and creaking religious obsession.)

These are reviewers and critics who suck along recommending and tolerating films that are illegible, destructive artistically, transient, manipulative, ubiquitous, and praised by people of confused or no criteria.

Is it not endlessly fascinating how often in this life that plain, unadorned cowardice is deified by the words "prudent behavior"?

Let me give you (in the words of David Denby in
New York
magazine, 5 October 1987) "an all-too-explicit example of the way giving in to the audience can make a movie worthless:"

ALEX FORREST (GLENN CLOSE), THE neurotic New York single woman in
Fatal Attraction
dresses entirely in white, like Lana Turner's murderous Cora in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. Alex works in publishing, and when she meets Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), a vaguely bored married man who's doing some legal work for her company, she goes after him. They have a drink together, and she's so attentive, she seems to be devouring him whole.

The movie takes her measure cruelly. She has a recognizable kind of New York willfulness, fueled by lonely blues. Her loft, in the meat-packing district, is too bare and white; she pushes too hard, exercises too much. Her initial sweetness—all attention and sympathy—dissolves when Dan returns to his wife at the end of the weekend. The rage she feels has an edge of emotional blackmail to it. She tries to shame him into remaining her lover.

British director Adrian Lyne and screenwriter James Dearden, who spend a fair amount of time setting up Alex as a credible, three-dimensional person, should have continued to take her seriously—they've made her worth it. Her isolated situation is painfully familiar (everyone in professional, upper-middle-class New York knows a stranded Alex). She has a characteristic way of pressing on what Dan says to her, violently holding him to what he's only mentioned in passing. She can't relax, and Glenn Close, who in the past has shown a tendency to darlingness, is scarily effective—sympathetic and dislikable at the same time.

Why does Gallagher get involved with Alex? There's nothing wrong with his marriage. The filmmakers seem to be saying that any married man, given the opportunity, will fool around if he thinks he can get away with it. When Dan tries to disappear after the weekend, Dearden gives Alex something of a case against him. She may have done the pursuing, but, as she says, their power positions aren't the same. She's single, getting older, and what's a weekend diversion for him is a major event for her. Dearden uses feminist perceptions and arguments as a way of creating Alex—and then he gives way to male paranoia and betrays her altogether. She tries to kill herself, and then becomes a vicious, knife-wielding gorgon, stalking Gallagher's wife and daughter. The movie falls to pieces. The last third is despicable—ghoulish horror with blood thrills for the jaded.

I can see the difficulty of working with a character who's never more than partly sympathetic. Where can the story go? The filmmakers' way out is to withdraw all sympathy from the character, which means trashing their own work. The awful thing is that in box-office terms, they aren't wrong. When I saw the picture (on opening day at the Loews Paramount), the audience, cheering on any sign of crazed possessiveness, was obviously longing for Alex to go nuts.

Coming up with a real dramatic resolution might have required more imaginative sympathy, art, and courage than anyone connected with this movie has.

Using that much of another writer's work analyzing just one film, as opposed to a pithy sound-bite of my own, all flash and no insight, is excusable only in the context of John Simon's remark, "There is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said."

Denby's example is
so
perfect, and the observations so smart and so simply stated, that though I thought long and hard of a better exemplar, again and again I returned to what Denby had said. Finally, I decided to hell with it; there are certainly critics sharper than I; and Denby is very likely one of those.

And what he's saying, apart from the obvious that just because an audience
wants
something doesn't mean you have to give it to them if it corrupts the work and panders to human weakness, cheapness of spirit, and, well, brutishness . . . what he's saying, is that if filmmakers who bask in the glory of the Seriousness of the Cinematic Art wish to continue enjoying the good press they get from the dubs and semiotic simpletons who see grandeur and subcutaneous significance in even the groundling-slanted swill they fob off on us every season, they're going to have to demonstrate a greater sense of responsibility. They can't keep on having it both ways, no matter how glitzily they mount each year's Oscar telecast. What Denby points out so sharply is one of the main themes of this collection of essays, stated a hundred different ways: the accountants and attorneys and fast-shuffle merchants of the film industry have had a free ride for more than half a century. But in putting the buck before the honesty of telling a story truthfully, they have created an illiterate audience whose taste has been systematically corrupted. And at last, as we've seen over the decade of the Eighties, it is a venality that has come back to suck the blood of Hollywood like an AIDS-carrying vampire bat.

The audience is larger than ever, but it's also dumber than ever. Attendance at movie theaters continues to grow by lemming-horde increments: up 7% in 1987 over 1986; according to the U.S. Bureau of Census, as of 1 January 1989, we are more than 250 million strong, and there's a VCR in more than 55% of American homes; theatrical business accounted for 42% of the movie industry's total revenues in 1987, but with 40,000 titles available on videocassette, with more than five hundred new and vintage titles issued monthly, the 39% of the industry's total revenues that is represented by six billion dollars in total video stores' volume tells us the teeter-totter is about to tip, if it hasn't already. And the obvious conclusion we can draw from these statistics plus the evidence of our own experiences?

The audience is getting more illiterate.

(What's that? How does he come to figure such a thing?)

The focus groups and demographic studies all seem to agree: the audience for more difficult films, for subtler and more specialized films, is still extant. But it isn't going to theaters to satisfy its movie hungers. It's staying home, renting the films for enjoyment in convenience, safety and retention of pocket money.

The older filmgoer, the aficionado of foreign and experimental productions, is getting a full menu of movies on cable and through the good offices of the household VCRs. If one wishes to see either the original 1973 French charmer
La Bonne Année
, starring Lino Ventura and directed by Claude Lelouch, or its equally charming 1987 American remake
Happy New Year
(with Peter Falk in his finest performance since his 1960 role as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles in
Murder, Inc
. and the 1962
Dick Powell Theater
presentation of Richard Alan Simmons's "The Price of Tomatoes," for which Falk won his first Emmy), one need only visit a well-stocked video outlet or wait a few days for both to appear on HBO. One does not go to the nearest multiplex.

A "little" film like
Happy New Year
, starring an actor best known to the immature film audience as Columbo—five-finger thespic exercises ever-available in tv syndication or in current blah ABC Mystery Movies—never had a chance in theaters. It sat on the shelf for a year before release, played the big screens for less than a week, and went straight to cable and cassette.

Movie lovers looking for that kind of pleasant, but not box-office-busting, experience stay at home.

So what part of our 250 million made up that 7% increase in theater attendance?

Teenagers, tv zombies brainwashed by thunderbolt commercials saturating primetime, MTV drones who can't get enough Madonna or Prince on the small screen, knife-kill flick devotees, and baby-boom yuppies who have such a total ignorance of even recent history that they do not see how corrupt
Mississippi Burning
is.

An audience that is, in large measure, cinematically ignorant. That does not resent bad and unnecessary remakes of
D.O.A., The Razor's Edge, The Big Clock
or
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
because for a constituency that renews its cultural amnesia upon awakening every morning, nothing existed
before
this morning. An audience that, more and more, reads less and less; and thus is insensitive to plot development, the logics of story, complex characterization, or thematic subtext; an audience that judges a film's worth on how spectacular were the special effects.

We don't need stats to bolster the above-stated ugly and Elitist position. Common sense and the evidence of our own observations when we venture out bravely to see a movie more than suffice. (In this collection of essays you will come across more than one recounting of Journeys Among the Trogs and Gargoyles. Compare them to your own experiences, and the case is made, no matter how egalitarian one wishes to be.)

With an audience that has been chivvied and prodded and dulled to a point where the product need never rise above the level of merely competent, however ethically debased, there is no need to overachieve. If you can make millions, fer shur, with another Rambo or Rocky installment, if you can do the dance of the rolling gross by throwing away comedic talents like Whoopi Goldberg, John Candy, Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy in fluff that is as forgettable as a zit, if you can cobble up some clinker based on the current teen rage . . . why bother to risk those millions with a film like
Happy New Year
or
Brazil?

With handmaidens of hype like
Entertainment Tonight
or
People
magazine, abetted by Oprah, Geraldo, Letterman, Carson, Arsenio Hall and all the other "talk show" venues that push the devalued product, why buy into the delusions of Art and Creative Responsibility that are based on chance and danger and the likelihood of smearing the bottom line?

Or, to quote another knowledgeable source: "It is not difficult to win the approval of a wide audience when one laughs at the same things, when one is sensitive to the same aspects of life, and moved by the same dramas. This complicity between certain creators and their audience has resulted in successful careers." Francois Truffaut, in the 1984 revised edition of his excellent study,
Hitchcock
.