In Which We Long For The Stillness Of The Lake, The Smooth Swell Of The Lea
At one of those college literary bashes where The Celebrated Visiting Author sits alone on the stage and academics with clipboards pelt him or her with "insightful" questions, I was recently hit with the poser, "What is your definition of maturity?"
I thought about that for a moment before answering.
And in that moment, here is the anecdote that flashed through my head, that I did not impart to the gathered sages: Most of you know by now that my friend Mike Hodel, host for more than fifteen years of the Hour 25 radio show on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, died of brain cancer on Tuesday, May 6th. Because he learned of his terminal state in February, and because the continuation of the program was a matter of concern to him, Mike came to visit and we talked about the darkness soon to come; and Mike asked me to host the show for him when he was gone. Because I loved him, and because his show has been so important to writers and readers of the genre for so long, I agreed to take over Hour 25.
But the foreknowledge of Mike"s imminent leavetaking, added to the weight of the deaths of so many close friends these last few months, sent me into a tailspin. My thoughts grew wearier and grimmer by the day. Until the anguish and the pressure began to produce a sharp pain behind my left eye.
As I am one of those blessed individuals who almost never get headaches, this sharp needlepoint of agony behind my left eye came to obsess me. I knew very well, in my right mind, that I did not share Mike"s illness; but every time the pain returned, I tumbled into the abyss of irrationality and thought, "I"ve got brain cancer. There"s a gray pudding on the grow back there behind my eye." It was crazy; and when I saw Woody Allen"s Hannah and Her Sisters in the middle of March, and Woody went through exactly the same hypochondriacal situation, I laughed at myself. But I could not shake the terrible thought, and finally I made an appointment with John Romm, who has been my doctor for decades, and I went to find out if I was more irrational than usual.
John examined me, put the light up to the eye and looked in, and reported back that there didn"t seem to be anything in there pressing against the optic nerve. "Shouldn"t I get a brain scan?" I said.
"Well, if you"re thinking about something like that, there"s better state of the art than a CAT scan. It"s called an MRI and it costs about a grand."
"MRI?".
"Magnetic Resonance Imaging. About a grand. But if you can"t get this lunacy out of your mind, spend the money and put yourself at ease."
"I"ll think about it."
So I thought about it. For several weeks. Went to see Mike in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, couldn"t rid myself of the horror, and finally went in for the MRI. The next day, John called to report the findings on the images. "You"re fine," he said. "No problems in there at all."
I felt the edge of the desk I had been gripping for the first instant since I"d picked up his call, and realized how mad I"d been driven by Mike"s situation. The pain behind my eye vanished instantly.
Then I heard John chuckling. "What"s so G.o.ddam funny?" I demanded, feeling more the fool than ever.
"Well, it"s just something the technician who sent these over said," John replied, trying to keep a straight tone.
"Yeah? And what was that?"
"Uh, well . . . he asked me, "Are you sure this guy is almost fifty-two years old?" And I said, yes, I was certain; that I"d known you for years and that I knew you"d be fifty-two in May, and he said, "This is remarkable for a guy his age. The actual brain matter looks like that of a six-year-old boy."" And John broke up again. When he had it under control he said, "I always suspected you had the brain of a six-year-old."
That was what I thought in the moment before answering the academics. Because it was the anecdote that informed what I"ve always considered to be a pretty workable definition of maturity. And I said to the questioner, "I take to mean, when you say maturity, that you"re asking what I think an adult is. And my answer is that being grown-up means having achieved in adult terms what you dreamed of being as a child. In other words, you"d be mature, and an adult grown-up, if-say-when you were a kid you wanted to be a cowboy and now you owned a cattle ranch. Or if you wanted to fly like Superman when you were a kid, if you were now an airline pilot."
And I added this quotation from Rimbaud: "Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."
These thoughts, as random as most with which I open this column every time, tie in with observations about childish and adult visions of what to make as a motion picture in an era when the studios check the growth-rings of writers and directors before they commit to a project.
As rare as it has been in the history of motion picture writing for talent of a high order to emerge-Richard Brooks, James Goldman, Richard L. Breen, Paddy Chayefsky, Herman Mankiewicz, Ring Lardner, Jr. and the Epstein brothers come immediately to mind, though the list is a lot longer than you"d care to have me reproduce here and, sad sad sad, you wouldn"t recognize the names of those who dreamed the dreams and put the words into the mouths of Bogart and Lancaster and Bergman and McQueen-as rare as it"s been till now, the situation today is f.u.c.kin" b.l.o.o.d.y tragic. We operate in The Age of the Know-Nothing Tots.
Kids raised not on literature, or even on films, but on television reruns, are being hired every minute to write and produce films that have the social import and artistic longevity of zweiback.
(Here are some grim statistics. The current membership of the Writers Guild of America, west is 6181. Of that number only 51% is currently employed. That"s 3152 men and women. But of that percentage, while 61% of WGAw members under forty years of age are working, only 43% over forty have a job. Don"t ask what it"s like for directors.) The deals being made at Cannon, at Fox, at Paramount and Universal, are deals for projects brought to executives by second-rate and derivative talents. Deals brought to men and women whose backgrounds are seldom in filmmaking, whose expertise and store of literary precedents is at best meager. (This is a series of generalizations. Of course not everyone who sells a script, or more usually a script idea, is a superannuated surfer. There are Larry Kasdans and Vickie Patiks and Tom Benedeks who have as much elan as Shelagh Delany or Harold Ramis or Horton Foote at the top of their form. But the generalization speaks unquaveringly to the reality of the industry practice today. The young and dumb sell to the only slightly less young and much dumber.) These deals being made, and the films often made as a result of the deals, are films that cannot be viewed or critiqued by standards that have always obtained for literature, movies or even television segments.
Consider: we learn from the trade papers that filmgoing dropped another 15% last year. We learn that more and more of the audience that used to go out to, say, a movie a week, now stays home and watches videoca.s.settes. The weekly opening of movies convinces us that overwhelmingly the theater-viewing audience is made up of teenagers. In the week that I write this column, here is what dominates the screens of Los Angeles, not much different from the screens where you live: Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink; Judd Nelson in Blue City; Sean Penn in At Close Range; Band of the Hand; Nicolas Cage in The Boy in Blue; Ally Sheedy in Short Circuit; Dangerously Close; Fire with Fire; Echo Park; Free Ride; Girls Just Want to Have Fun; Lucas and Top Gun with Tom Cruise.
These are all films either about teenagers, or starring teenagers (though most of them are now in their twenties . . . the Brat Pack begins to creak and suffer morning arthritis). Most of them belabor the rite of pa.s.sage, the dawn of s.e.xuality, the pair-bonding of prep school twits, or the confusion of mid-life crisis occurring at age eighteen.
And one realizes, with a shock, that the tradition basics for reviewing films is inapplicable these days. One cannot, at peril of being hincty and irrelevant, evaluate a film on the merits of screen writing, editing, direction or even design. None of these staples seem to matter to the merchandisers of modern films. Apart from splashy special effects (which is a criterion that has begun to pall for even the most unjudgmental Kallikak), the sole criterion of a movie"s worth-looney! lunatic! loopy!-is if the soundtrack can be melded to two-second snippets of the action sequences to form a music video for MTV, producing, of course, a gold alb.u.m.
It doesn"t matter if the film is a medieval fantasy (Ladyhawke), a contemporary aerobatics adventure (Top Gun), a western (Silverado), an Eddie Murphyclone cop rampage (Running Scared), or retold fairy tales (Legend, Company of Wolves). All that counts is that a sound is produced that can function in the secondary markets for appeal only to those who cannot listen to music in anything under 200 decibels. That the music doesn"t fit, that the music jars, that the music distracts and blunts the mood of scene after scene, seems not to enter into consideration by those responsible for the film"s artistic gestalt.
It is adolescent adults playing three-card monte with the captive kiddie audience, or actual tots saying f.u.c.k you to the rest of the world, both younger and older.
This cynical pandering to the soph.o.m.oric, unformed and utterly undiscriminating hungers of a juvenile audience disenfranchises the rest of us, both younger and older than the demographic wedge that buys rock music . . . or worse, that even smaller wedge that doesn"t buy but merely derives its calorie-poor musical diet from watching television!
Take Short Circuit (Tri-Star) and Legend (Universal) as specimens under the microscope.
Short Circuit is nothing more than a sappy replay of E.T. with a cuddly, anthropomorphized runaway robot replacing a cuddly etcetera etcetera alien. It is last year"s D.A.R.Y.L. Martinized and reworn. (Only difference is that Barrett Oliver as the robot in D.A.R.Y.L. had his gears and cogs and chips camouflaged, while No. 5 in Short Circuit has metal in view.) Both films paint authority as not merely inept and evil-with-a-Three-Stooges-silliness, but as implacably stupid and brutish.
Granted, Short Circuit posits the philosophical position that violence and killing are not nice things to do, which is a salutary message in this era of Cobra and Rambo; nonetheless it is a film that panders to the youth audience by giving them two of the three staples of all these teen-slanted films.
What are the three?
1) Bare t.i.ts. (Absent from this movie, presumably because Ally Sheedy, the omnipresent Ally Sheedy, is such a box-office draw that she doesn"t have to bare her bosom.) 2) Disdain for authority.
3) Casual destruction of personal and public property.
No. 5 is just a kid, after all. It may be a kid with molybdenum paws, that runs on trunnions instead of sneakers, but it"s just a kid. And, like James Dean, it is having a hard time learning who it is. It suffers existential angst in trying to reconcile the creative abilities of humans with the species" need to slaughter. It is the same, tired rebel without a cause yarn. It invests the young with a n.o.bility that is unpossessed, presumably, by anyone over the age of twenty-one.
Short Circuit did big ticket business, but no amount of giving-the-benefit for its anti-killing aspect can disguise the fact that this plate of spinach is a manipulative, sappy truckling to teen hungers and fantasies. And having Steve Guttenberg standing around like something carved from Silly Putty don"t help beat the bulldog, if you catch my drift.
Yet Short Circuit soared. I suggest this phenomenal turn of events can be linked to the promotion of the film via music videos and its totemization of adolescent rebellion fantasies. It sure as h.e.l.l couldn"t have been on the basis of freshness of material or superlative acting.
It is a kiddie film, made by adults pretending to have the souls of the pure and innocent. Porky, duded up like Peter Pan.
A sidebar thought, probably deeper than we have s.p.a.ce here to explore: Is film rendering our impression of the mutable world meaningless?
For more than sixty years we have received a good proportion of our understanding of the world around us from movies. Film was seldom at the cutting edge of the culture in portraying trends, but as soon as a trend became clear, movies were in there, commenting on it, well or badly. On the Waterfront may have come to the subject of labor corruption late in the game, but when it came, it made its position known. America took notice. Sat.u.r.day Night Fever may look cornball today, only nine years later, with its stacked-heel dis...o...b..ots and its Nik-Nik shirts, but it drove America into a spin when the Bee Gees and Travolta made their statement about the social set that lived and foamed in disco palaces. (And it was only about five years into the trend before it got the wind up; pretty good for an essentially conservative industry.) But is this ability to mirror the world still operating in the mainstream of motion pictures?
I think not. The numbers are skewed, the facts distorted, the picture out of focus. One of those Polaroid shots in which everything comes out roast beef red. Such films as Short Circuit-the sf version of a typical teen rebellion flick-send us a view of the world that resembles Lord of the Flies more than it does reality. Kids run everything in these movies. Either kids grown a little older, like Guttenberg and Sheedy and Cage and Estevez and Moore, or kids in their native habitat, like Nelson and Macchio.
It was bad enough when movies beat us about the blades to accept obscurantism and illogic like Amityville as the secret formula to understanding Life, but the current flood of discarded immaturity that pretends to be How It Is looks real, no matter how twisted and bent. And this, I submit, is hardly the meal we need to enrich us.
They are films that reject maturity, even in the loose terms I suggested at the outset of this essay.
Films made that play to childish (not childlike) ideas of what the Eternal Verities might be.
Films that sell smash-cut music videos to an audience with only dawning responsibility toward itself and its Times, an audience with too much money burning a hole in its pocket, and the blood-level belief that its youth is the n.o.blest state to which a person can aspire.
Films that sell, with obvious and hidden tropes, in every frame, the bill of goods that anyone not capable of appearing on Soul Train is beyond consideration, so what the h.e.l.l does it matter if we bust up their property and give "em the finger?
When this pretense of innocence, as in Short Circuit, is swallowed whole by presumed adults, we have a situation where filmmakers who should know better gull themselves into selling that hype of Youth Eternal with no understanding of how they corrupt not only their talent, but the very audience they pretend to serve.
Such is the case with Legend, which I"ll deal with at full length next time. Suffice to say, for now, that this epic brought forth by Ridley Scott and a battalion of equally talented creators, panders as shamefully as Top Gun or Porky"s to teenage fantasies of Good and Evil, Rebellion and Authority, Youth and Age. And does it with the breakneck pace of an MTV potboiler, so loud and so demented in its headlong flight, that we emerge from the screening room gasping for breath, praying for a moment of surcease.
There is no room to breathe in Legend, even as there is no room to breathe in Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun. We are not permitted a moment"s respite to think what all this kiddie fascination with faeries and unicorns and demons and goblins is all in aid of.
Do not mistake my meaning. Legend is an astonishing film in many ways. The eyes will behold things they have never seen, have only conjured in dreams. And that is wonderful, because it"s what movies are supposed to do for us.
But Legend becomes, in its final American version, a telling example of studio interference, of Art twisted to serve the ends of Commerce Unchecked, of a creative intellect operating without maturity. I"ll talk about it next time.
Because Legend is something really strange: a fifty-two-year-old man with the brain of a six-year-old. Something really strange like that.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1986 INSTALLMENT 20:.
In Which Manifestations Of Arrested Adolescence Are Shown To Be Symptoms Of A Noncommunicable Dopiness, Thank Goodness
No, no, no, and no! Absolutely not. The threat doesn"t exist that could get me to do it. Beg and plead and try to bribe me, it"ll never happen: this time I"ll get right to it, without one of those convoluted, rambling digressions. Right into it, that"s how it"s gonna go. Pick up exactly where I left off last time, and complete the thought without maundering on into some cobwebby corner of esoteric philosophy.
Not going to diverge from the main thrust by mentioning that readers familiar with my previous involvement with a writer-director name of James Cameron (The Terminator, Rambo) will recall that I am not exactly moved to feelings of kiss-kiss cuddle-cuddle when dealing with films he has had hands and feet in, and thus find it painful but evenhanded to note that his new epic, Aliens (20th Century Fox), is a rather good action-adventure with a script by Mr. Cameron that provides the best role for Sigourney Weaver since last she played Warrant Officer Ripley, lone survivor (if you exclude the cat s.h.i.thead) of the doomed starship Nostromo"s original encounter with the horrendous Alien (1979). Not going to be swayed into sidetracks by observing that though Mr. Cameron seems to have only one story to tell-a story that involves one or more Rambo-like protagonists blowing away as many of the opposition as they can manage with exotic armaments that clearly fascinate Mr. Cameron the way lepers are fascinated by their own sores-it is a story that works like crazy in this sequel to what was arguably the most terrifying film made in the last thirty years. Not going to be diverted into gritting my teeth at having to commend Cameron for a job well done, at having to recommend you plonk down your cash for a nifty little film that I"d sorta secretly hoped would bomb out. Not going to do it.
No sidebars, no offshoots, no deviations from completing the arguments begun last time.
Absolutely not going to babble about how much fun Big Trouble in Little China (20th Century Fox) turned out to be. Won"t register surprise that after the infamous writing-credit imbroglio attendant on the filming of this send-up of the cinematic genre known as "looneytune-fu" (or "kung-kookoo"), that it came up so sweetly nincomp.o.o.pish that only someone who takes George Bush seriously could find it less than charming. Not going to get into that, because if I did, I"d have to swerve into a discussion of the cupidity and disingenuous obfuscation of director John Carpenter when he blamed the on screen credit ha.s.sle on the Writers Guild of America, west and its punctiliously fair adjudication of just who would get awarded final and sole screenplay credit. To be lured away from the spine of this column"s matters-at-hand to explain the fascinating way in which the WGAw sorts out credit controversies, would be to wander even farther from a simple statement that Big Trouble is (in the words of gin rummy players) a real no-brainer, intended for one of those nights when you feel lower than Edwin Meese"s respect for the First Amendment; a film in which Kurt Russell does an even better imitation of John Wayne than he did of Elvis Presley; a film that combines Indiana Jones-swashbuckle, Oriental goofery, special effects magic, contemporary hoodlum-kitsch, pell-mell action to the exclusion of logic but who gives a d.a.m.n, good old down home Yankee racism, parody, satire, the art of the Jongleur, and some of the funniest lines spoken by any actor this year to produce a cheerfully blathering live-action cartoon that will give you release from the real pressures of your basically dreary lives. To deal so would be to forget myself and commit another of those long, drawn-out wanderings in the desert of my brain. No way. No way, I say!
Sure, certainly, yes of course, I could get involved with one of those "ancillary matters" I tack onto the end of these essays, in which I scream, "Awright awreddy, get off my case, I admit I was wrong about the Thames not having frozen over in recorded history!" But that would entail me having to credit the dozen or so readers of this column who took gleeful opportunity to let me know, in the words of Cooper McLaughlin of Fresno, that "Ellison has made an a-hole of himself." It would necessitate my acknowledging Arthur Ellis of Parsippany, New Jersey and his doc.u.mentation that the Thames froze so solid in 1684 that a Frost Fair was set up on the ice, with bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet shows and fast-food stands; that it froze again in 1739 and again in 1814. (McLaughlin even sent Xerox copies of etchings, fer crissakes!) I"d love to do one of my famous tap dances about how it was all the fault of my POSSLQ Susan, who a.s.sured me such a miracle had never happened, but she"s from Manchester, so what the h.e.l.l does she know? But if I were going to roam instead of bearing down on the real topic here, I"d get into all that and admit I was utterly wrong in that one complaint against the interior logic of Young Sherlock Holmes but remain unswerving in my belief that it defaces the Holmes canon, and then I"d get into a shouting match with the lot of you, who would start giving me opinions, when you know d.a.m.ned well I"m receptive to no voice but mine own. That"s what would happen, so I will avoid the tussle. I will, I swear I will.
So okay, no fooling around here with random diversions, such as pointing out to those of you who know the cla.s.sic film Lost Horizon (the 1937 original, not the musical abomination of 1973, which-even if you are dyslexic and reverse the numbers-could not be mistaken one for the other), and those of you who don"t but ought to, that one of the finest fantasies ever dreamed on celluloid has been restored as a result of thirteen years of intensive research and reconstruction by Robert Gitt (now with the UCLA Film Archives) to its original roadshow release running time of 132 minutes, and is coming to major cities throughout America, and you miss it at your peril. If I had the time here, which I don"t, because I have serious matters with which I must deal, I"d tell you that Susan and I went to see it a few weeks ago and it was as breathtaking as ever. I"d tell you that Ronald Colman was never better, that Sam Jaffe as the High Lama remains mystical and touching as ever, that Jane Wyatt and Edward Everett Horton and dear Tommy Mitch.e.l.l and H. B. Warner and all the rest of the cast capture the heart no less fully than when the film was first released. I"d tell you that next to Lost Horizon and its perfectly conjured sense of wonder, the dreck we have on view in Cineplex coffins these days pales into utter disposability.
I"d tell you that, and beg you to go see this labor of love as reconstructed by men and women who cannot be turned from their love of the medium by the trash wallows that dominate the screen scene in this age of cinematic adolescence.
But I am sworn to a policy of no digressions this time, and you can count on me. Foursquare. As good as my word. You could beat me with I-beams and I wouldn"t even mention The Great Mouse Detective (Walt Disney Productions), the first new Disney animated to recapture the incomparable wonders of Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio and The Three Caballeros. For almost forty years we who experienced terror and amazement when taken to our first movie-and it was always a Disney by way of introduction to the aphrodisiacal dark-dwelling that affected our lives so profoundly-we who laughed and cried and shivered through that rite of pa.s.sage, secure in the hands of Walt and his staff of artists, we have observed with dismay the long, embarra.s.sing slide into mediocrity of the genre known as "the Disney animated feature!" And were I not committed to sticking to the main topic, I would trumpet long and loud that Walt"s ghost has had enough of the okeydoke, and his ectoplasmic hand guided the brushes on this delicious, imaginative interpretation of the Eve t.i.tus Basil of Baker Street books about the mouse detective who lives underneath 221B Baker Street. Here is all the old Disney hoopla: the character movements so verisimilitudinously human yet always slightly in defiance of the laws of physics; the precisely selected human voices (with special kudos to Vincent Price"s Prof. Ratigan, Candy Candido"s Fidget the pegleg bat, and Susanne Pollatschek"s winsome Olivia Flaversham); the genuinely fright-producing moments of menace, that fools like the saintly Rev. Wildmon and other "protectors of young minds" have managed to leach out of tv cartoons, on the censorial ground that the kiddies should never be scared (perhaps because they"re afraid the kids will turn into foolish adults like themselves . . . but I doubt it . . . that much insight is clearly beyond them); the fun and wit and humor that functions as well on the level of adult enrichment as it does on the level of children"s enjoyment. If I had the s.p.a.ce and inclination to ramble, I would, yes I would, tell you to take the nearest child and go watch Basil and Dr. Dawson save The Mouse Queen of England from the dastardly designs of Ratigan. I would, yes, I would.
But, of course, I can"t; so I won"t.
I can"t even indulge myself by thanking readers like Erick Wujcik of Detroit or Dennis Pupello II of Tampa, or the half dozen others, who sent me their attempts at savagery where Enemy Mine is concerned. I asked for amateur efforts at scathing film criticism, but I"d be forced to tell all you folks (if I were digressing, which clearly I am not) (and doing it rather rigorously, if I say so myself) that your barbs were velvet-tipped and your brickbats as damaging as cotton candy. Obviously, you need me on a regular basis to show you how to vent your animosity at the low state of American cinema. (And if you need verification from a n.o.bler source, of the things I"ve been saying here for the last year or so, I would recommend in the strongest possible terms that you obtain a copy of the 21 July issue of New York magazine, in which the excellent critic David Denby goes point for point with your humble columnist, and arrives at the same conclusions [albeit with fewer digressions] in a long article t.i.tled CAN THE MOVIES BE SAVED?) And it"s a good thing I"m pledged to begin this installment right on the money, without hugger-mugger or higgledy-piggledy, because if this were one of the essays in which I start off from left-field and circle around till the seemingly-irrelevant metaphor begins to glow and suddenly shines light on the greater terrain of the real subject-a technique used in Forensic Debating that is known as arguing from the lesser to the greater-I would indulge myself with self-flagellation for having spent two hours, as so many of you did, watching a bit of flim-flam called The Mystery of Al Capone"s Vaults on television back in April. Were I not dedicated this time to plunging straight into it, I"d suggest that the producer of that two-hour con job, Doug Llewellyn (the guy who interviews the plaintiffs and defendants on The People"s Court), and the host, the increasingly lacertilian Geraldo Rivera, be forced to defend their hoodwinking of the American tv-viewing audience not before Judge Wapner, but before Judge Roy Bean. With the hemp already knotted.
But because I started some serious discussion of films made by adults with the sensibilities of adolescents; of films that are childish but not childlike; of films that pander to an erroneous conception of what even kids want to see; of films that are so commercially slanted for the MTV mentality that they disenfranchise most of the rest of us to the extent that a recent study commissioned by Columbia Pictures tells us that in a nation where for half a century going out to the movies was as formalized a part of the week"s activities as saying grace at the dinner table, three out of four Americans now never go to a movie; of films that have so cheapened and trivialized what was well on its way to becoming a genuine art-form that the Hollywood movie has become irrelevant, not to mention laughable, in the eyes of the rest of the filmgoing world; because I started that train of thought on its journey last time, I must deny myself the luxury of divertiss.e.m.e.nts. So no time wasted, I will get into a resumption of last time"s discussion.
And I trust in the future you"ll grant me my little auctorial ways. I really do pay attention to your carping, as you can see from how a.s.siduously I bowed to your wishes this time.
Let us look at two recent films whose similarities of plot and theme and production are far greater than their differences in these areas; whose similarities of quality and intelligence and purpose are almost minuscule and whose end-results up there on the screen could not be more glaringly opposed. The beautiful failure is Legend (Universal). The charming success is Labyrinth (Tri-Star Pictures).
Ridley Scott is, in my estimation, one of the most exciting talents ever to turn his hand to the genres of film fantasy and science fiction. I"m sure that somewhere back in the early days of this column I related the incident in which Mr. Scott came to my home and sounded me out on my interest in doing the screenplay for Dune, which at that time he was contracted to direct. It was a marvelous afternoon of conversation, in which his grace and intelligence proclaimed themselves sans the affectations I"ve come to a.s.sociate with directors of germinal films . . . men and women who, for all their pretenses to literacy and omniscience, are buffoons not fit to be mentioned in the same occupation as Fellini or Hawks or Kurosawa. As the afternoon wore on toward dusk, Mr. Scott said something to me that I took to be anything but self-serving. He said: "The time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films to emerge. And I"m determined to be that director."
When he said it-and this was after Alien-it struck me with the force of unadulterated True Writ. Yes, of course, I thought. Who else fits the bill? Kubrick had had his shot and had made his mark with 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (and thereafter with the quirky but laudable The Shining), but there was something, for all his undeniable genius, that was distancing, cool and too contemplative; something so individual that the films remain almost like views of the human race as seen through the eyes of an alien. No, I thought, as devoutly as I worship the work of Kubrick, he isn"t The One. Spielberg, perhaps? E.T. remains a great film, as important in its way as The Wizard Of Oz or Lost Horizon, and whatever his part in the making of Poltergeist, his hand can be seen in the final production. But (as I sensed then, and have gone on at length about in these pages for more than a year) there is something sadly hollow at the core in Spielberg"s oeuvre. Something otiose and ultimately trivial. No, not Spielberg. Then how about George Lucas? Had I been ravished by the wonders others had found in Star Wars, I might have considered the man who was, at that moment, the biggest moneymaker in the history of cinema, The One. But even then, as now, I thought American Graffiti a far superior film, and more likely to stand the test of time than the s.p.a.ce operas. And nothing much since that time has happened to alter my opinion. Perhaps one day soon, but not then, and not now. Beyond those three prominent directors, who was there: Nicholas Roeg? Louis Malle? Brian De Palma? John Boorman? I think not. The concerns are too great for the long haul with each of them.
Yes, I thought at that moment, Ridley Scott is The One. If anyone can bring to the sf/fantasy film the same level of High Art and High Craft that Ford brought to the Western, it is this man. I dreamed of the elegance and respect for original source that Scott had shown with The Duellists in 1978. I extrapolated from the sheer virtuosity and Cedric Gibbons-like love of setting and background that had gone so far to making Alien a masterpiece of clutching terror. (And if I were not committed to eschewing digressions, I"d suggest a linked viewing of Scott"s film and the James Cameron sequel which, as decent a piece of work as it is, cannot even hope to rival the original foray for transcendence of trivial subject matter.) Since that afternoon that wore on toward evening, I have come to believe that Scott is, indeed, The One. Even Blade Runner, which did not collapse me as it did so many of you, has come to look to me, after repeated re-viewings, as a significant achievement, deeper in human values than I"d supposed, far more than a glitzy melodrama of sci-fi machinery and thespic posturing. Over time, my respect and admiration for Scott"s vision has grown substantially.
But Legend, years in the making and the sort of production nightmare that all but the Michael Ciminos of the world would shun like putting on the feed-bag with Falwell, is a tragic enterprise. It is a long, self-conscious Jungian dream filled with awkward symbolism and an adolescent sensibility that I find bewildering in the light of Scott"s frequently-manifested maturity and insight. What we received here in America was a chopped-up 89-minute version of the full 129-minute film released in the U.K., so there is no telling if the tale told at greater length worked better.
Legend has a surreal quality, almost Dali-esque; or perhaps reminiscent of the paintings of that school known as the Orientalists-Gerome and Regnault and Debat-Ponsan. If wonder is the creation of a world in which one would love to live-Oz, Lawrence"s Arabia, the streets of Blade Runner-then this film conveys wonder. The things that come before one"s eyes in this motion picture are quite remarkable. Things we have never before seen. The camera roams as wide-eyed and innocent as Charlie Chaplin through Modern Times, and I defy anyone to name another director whose eye for the outre is keener.
But after eighty-nine minutes of rushing and flinging and breakneck visuals that leave one gasping, begging, desperate for a moment of peace and leisure-the stillness of the lake, the smooth swell of the lea-all is emptiness. This elaborate fairy tale of Good and Evil, of barechested Tom Cruise playing Bomba the Jungle Boy as if he were Mother Teresa, of unicorns and demons and dryads, is ridiculous. Like Boorman"s Zardoz and Dante"s Explorers and Boorman"s Excalibur, it is the attempt to lift to adult level what is essentially the plaything of children.
As children we found in such fables-Aesop, Howard Pyle, Uncle Wiggily, Grimm and Andersen-touchstones for ethical behavior in the real world. They were tropes, intended to impart broad and simplistic versions of charity and honor, loyalty and gumption. But as adults we learned to our shock and often dismay that the real world was more complex than the fairy tales led us to believe. And we always felt cheated; we always found ourselves thinking, "They lied to us. They didn"t tell us life would be this big a pain in the a.s.s!"
Legend is a film made by an astute adult who, when turned loose, when given the power to create any film he desired, fled into a throwaway universe of childish irrelevance. Legend is, at final resolve, a husk. A lovely, eye-popping vacuum from which a sad breeze blows. Because it finally gives nothing. It steals our breath, captures our eyes, dazzles and sparkles and, like a 4th of July sparkler, comes to nothing but gray ash at the end.
Unlike Labyrinth, which is a film made by adults that renews and revitalizes the perception of the world we held as children, yet operates on many other levels-as does all High Art-and invigorates the adult in us. Labyrinth, were it the first film to which you"d ever been taken, would be as memorable to you as Snow White or The Wizard of Oz. And it is as important a film as those; and it is as original as those; and it is as rich in multiple meanings as those.
And I will conclude these thoughts about films made by adults that are childish, and those that are childlike, next time. Because I seem to have run out of s.p.a.ce.
I don"t know why that might be.
G.o.d knows I"ve hewn to my stated purpose. I mean, I might have rambled on about all the other films I"ve seen of late, films I think you might want to know something about, but I didn"t. I just hung right in there.
Hoping you are the same . . .
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / December 1986 INSTALLMENT 21:.
In Which You And A Large Group Of Total Strangers Are Flipped The Finger By The Mad Masters Of Anthropomorphism
If this afternoon you are walking down the street and some geek in a window three storeys above you decides to be cute, and s/he dumps a paper bag full of t.u.r.ds into the abyss, and as you pa.s.s beneath you get slimed from head to toe with ka-ka, and you look up and scream at the sonofab.i.t.c.h, and s/he gives you the finger, I"d be willing to make book that you"d register about 9.6 on the p.i.s.sed-Off Scale.
If you picked up today"s paper and read where Reagan and his cronies had managed to push through a hundred and fifteen million to aid the Contras, but were trying to reduce the aid to r.e.t.a.r.ded children from 9% (which is what it is, though it was supposed to have been 14% and then go as high as 30%, but they never quite got around to doing it) to 7 %, and they tried to con you by telling you we had to do it because of the Domino Effect in Latin America that would permit the Communist Menace to gain a toehold in this hemisphere, I"d put good money on your responding with outrage and a verbal explosion of naughty words.
If you go out to dinner tonight and a car full of no-neck spuds pulls up alongside you at a traffic light, and the feeps inside look across at the one you love, sitting beside you, and yell, "Hey, that is the ugliest piece of c.r.a.p I"ve ever seen, I hacked up something prettier than that when I got drunk on Friday, it looks like something I fished outta the sink disposal this morning!" I"d bet my paycheck for this column that your first instinct would be to deck it as you leave the light and centerpunch those dirtb.a.l.l.s into a better life.
Yet by the time you read these words many of you (and many of your friends) (and a large group of total strangers all across these great Yewnited States) will have sh.e.l.led out as much as six bucks a head to sit through Flight of the Navigator (Walt Disney Pictures), and I"ll take odds not one of you took sufficient offense at having had your intelligence insulted, at having been flipped the bird by Disney"s head of production, Michael Eisner, by director Randal Kleiser (the man who gave you Grease, The Blue Lagoon, Summer Lovers and Grandview, U.S.A., four of the dreariest films of the past eight years, despite having made indecent amounts of money, thereby guaranteeing Mr. Kleiser unlimited shots at your insipience threshold), and by a trio of writers named Baker, Burton and MacMa.n.u.s whose first names ought to be Larry, Shemp and Moe, that you rose up in wrath and demanded your money back. Go ahead, tell me that you felt so d.a.m.ned affronted by Flight of the Navigator that you nailed the poor theater manager"s head to the candy counter. Tell me you felt as used as you did after seeing The Secret of Al Capone"s Vaults; that you knew to the core of your being that once and for all you weren"t going to have the Hollywood c.r.a.p Mill stick it to you and break it off inside. Go to it; tell me: I"ll believe anything; h.e.l.l, I"m just a critic, not one of the Great Wad that goes to these abominations and doesn"t understand that it"s had its pockets picked. And then I"ll tell you that pigs can fly, and we"ll start even.
What I"m trying to say is that Flight of the Navigator is just awful. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it. From a plot that has approximately half as much logic as a Creationist tract to a nauseating pa.s.sion for anthropomorphizing every machine that they can flog across the screen, this no-brainer is an insult to anything crawling across our planet with the vaguest scintilla of a claim to sentience.
Navigator combines the worst elements of Explorers, Short Circuit, Goonies and The Last Starfighter, with treacly homages to those early Disney True-Life Adventures in which all manner of flora and fauna were imbued with human characteristics.