But there is a craziness, a disregard for approbation, a dismissal of posterity, a dangerous recklessness in those seven and in Ken Russell (and in Orson Welles), that sets them above and apart. In my view.
Notwithstanding all of the preceding, no one will hit me with a brick if I name the seven and say they can"t be touched; but let me add that guilty pleasure Ken Russell, and all of my well-ordered theorizing crumbles. Laughter begins. People will point their fingers and then make circular motions with that finger alongside their ear. They will stare and wonder how anyone who admires Kurosawa can even tolerate the blatancy, the gagging bad taste, the ridiculousness of Ken Russell! I mean, fer pete"s sake, do you remember that idiotic scene in The Music Lovers where Russell accompanied the cannons in the "1812 Overture" with the heads being blown off mannequins bearing the visages of characters from Tchaikovsky"s life? Come on! That was soph.o.m.oric . . . no, h.e.l.l, it was downright dopey!
Hold the brick.
Yes, that was downright dopey. And in every Ken Russell film there is dopiness; pure Howdy Doody time. And there is excess. And there is bad taste. And there is imaginary gone bugf.u.c.k. And there are performances by actors who seem to have dined alfresco on jimson weed.
But in that same film, The Music Lovers, Ken Russell put on celluloid the single most frightening cinematic image I can remember in nearly fifty years of moviegoing. (Because the morbidly curious will demand I specify, I will recount it here for you. If you are easily shocked, or even if you are hard to shock, I urge you to skip to the paragraph below beginning with the big bullet: * I am not being facetious. There is no coy duplicity in my warning. I am not trying to t.i.tillate you with a "guilty pleasure." What I will describe rocked me even when I saw it; the theater audience with whom I shared the raw experience was moved in large numbers to depart the screening. You have been alerted. Read on if you wish, but don"t send one of those outraged letters to the n.o.ble Ferman Editors; if you remained, it was free choice.) In The Music Lovers, a bizarre film biography of Pe"tr Ilich Tchaikovsky that distorts historical fact and the flow of the composer"s real life to Russell"s nefarious ends, we are presented with an encounter in the open yard of a madhouse between Tchaikovsky"s nymphomaniac wife, Antonina Milyukova, and her mother. Nina (who actually only lived with Tchaikovsky for a few weeks) has been consigned to bedlam by the mother who, in the film, is portrayed as a monster who has pimped her daughter to well-heeled gentlemen in Moscow. Nina is so far gone into lunacy that the mother presents these callers (who have been told they can f.u.c.k "Tchaikovsky"s wife" for a few rubles) as "Rimsky-Korsakov," "Mussorgsky," "Borodin." Nina has already slipped so far into suicidal psychosis that she accepts the duplicitous fantasy, and becomes a merchandised s.e.x object for her mother"s gain. She contracts syphilis, goes completely out of her head, and is sent to the inst.i.tution. (In fact, this happened three years after Tchaikovsky"s death, but Russell uses it to his own purposes as having happened while Tchaikovsky was still a youngish man.) The mother, decked out in rare plumage, silks and a haughty manner, comes to see her daughter. Nina, played by Glenda Jackson, joins her in the exercise yard. All around we see barred windows and grates set into the ground, and from these cell openings we see hands and scabrous arms reaching, reaching, imploring. Jammed into every cell in this awful place are those the nineteenth century chose to lock away rather than attempt to understand and cure. The screams. The wails of the d.a.m.ned. It is as flamboyant and sickeningly sensual as Russell has ever been. Nina is covered with running sores, her eyes red-rimmed and lit with the fire of lunacy. She wears a gray rough-cloth shift that billows around her feet.
They have a conversation that only faintly touches on reality. And at the end of the chat, Nina wanders coquettishly toward one of those grates in the cobblestones, from which hands reach, from which fingers writhe like fat white worms, against which faces of demented men are pressed, their rheumy eyes shining out like those of rats in a sewer.
And with the grace of a royal courtesan, Nina begins to lower herself onto the grating, thighs wide, bending at the knees, settling down like an ashy flower, shift spread wide around her to cover the grate. She settles down till she is pressed to the grate, naked beneath her garment; and as the mother (and we) watch in disbelief, we hear the slurping, sucking sounds of those diseased madmen working at the secret places of Tchaikovsky"s mad wife.
* To those rejoining us, relax: you"re safe now. For those who traveled through the preceding four paragraphs with me, I cannot apologize for having demonstrated my eloquent gueule-which translates from the French, roughly, as "bad mouth." As George Orwell once pointed out, "There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a madman." Real Art has the capacity to make us nervous. In my view, that scene is Real Art. Twisted, depraved, wildly disturbing Art, but Real Art nonetheless. It is the essence of Russell"s raw power to capture something infinitely darker in the human psyche than Lovecraft at his most beguiling. I cannot apologize for exposing you to Art, no matter how deeply it distresses either of us. It is important, if you are to understand why I perceive Russell as a Great Director, that specifics be tendered.
For all of his shenanigans and his belly-whoppers, Ken Russell uses film to look at things we not only don"t care to see, but to look at things we don"t even imagine exist!
Does that not lie near to the burning center of what we seek in fantasy literature? The unknowable. The inexplicable. The monstrous that abides in sweet humanity. Is it not what we see corrupted and ineptly proffered by the slasher-film directors? Does it not tear at our perceptions in ways that treacly abominations like Short Circuit and Gremlins cannot?
So here we have Russell"s vision of that single night-June 16, 1816-in the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland; a night on the sh.o.r.es of Lac Leman in which the opium addicted poet Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, in the company of his lover, Mary G.o.dwin, her wild half-sister Claire, Dr. Polidori, and their cruelly jesting host Lord Byron, experience the debauchery and reckless mindgames that will one day produce Polidori"s The Vampyre (from which, authorities argue, Dracula and the genre of horror fiction as we know it, proceeds) and Mary Sh.e.l.ley"s Frankenstein.
In fact, the session went on among these five for an entire summer; but Russell gives us a night of storm and drugs and s.e.x and terror and frenetic submission to the moist and gagging secret fears that encapsulates for dramatic effect, all that transpired during that legendary encounter.
The film has the surrealistic feel of such cla.s.sics as Arrabal"s 1970 Viva la Muerte (Hurrah for Death), Bunuel and Dali"s 1928 Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau"s 1950 Orphee. Mark my caution: this is nowhere near being in a cla.s.s with such great films, but it has the same sensibility. Images flash and burn and flee almost before we have had the moment to set them correctly into the jigsaw. An attack by a suit of armor culminates in the helmet"s visor being thrown up to reveal a face of raw meat writhing with leeches. A painting on a wall, representative of the work of Henry Fuseli, showing a troggish demon astride the naked body of an houri, comes to life and Mary sees herself as the violated victim. It is an Odilon Redon nightmare come to the tender membrane of sanity and clawing its way into the real world. It is redolent with symbolism.
Much of that symbolism is ludicrous: Miriam Cyr as Claire, in a laudanum-induced vision as perceived by Sh.e.l.ley, bares her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and in place of nipples there are staring eyes . . . which blink at him. The audience roars with laughter. Russell had overindulged his adolescent fantasies.
And this excess, ultimately, undermines the film. What was there to be discovered, is revealed at last to be the silliness and self-indulgence of people we find foolish and vain and empty. As Mary G.o.dwin and Lord Byron and Polidori and Sh.e.l.ley were not. Like a child trying too hard to get the attention of adults, finally p.i.s.sing on the living room carpet, Russell"s conceit shreds itself with its strumpet-painted nails. It is too diffuse, too bizarre, too distorted to be taken seriously.
By presenting the acc.u.mulated phantasms of a summer in one night"s grisly carrying-on, Russell has reduced the premier idea of a horror film to the level of Bogdanovich"s What"s Up, Doc?-a running, jumping and standing still charade; the shipboard stateroom scene from the Marx Bros." A Night at the Opera. Distorted closeups like parodies of shots from Sergio Leone westerns. Icons of slime, rats, ichor, cobwebs, dirt, meat, blood, water. Gothic? No, more precisely, rococo; grotesquerie piled on grotesquerie without pause, without release, without a moment for reflection. Formless, over the top, obsessively goofy . . . such screaming and running around and eye-rolling that we perceive the film as one cacophonous shriek. While at the same time it takes itself so seriously we feel we must laugh behind our hand. And all of this played out to Thomas Dolby"s molar-grinding electronic score. Whatever happened to real symphony orchestras, playing scores by Waxman and Newman and Rosza, as background for "big" pictures such as this?
No one in his or her right mind could truly be said to "like" this film, for in this film no one is in his or her right mind; and so we have no place to moor our sympathy.
At final consideration, Gothic is loopy and fatally flawed and an aberration.
Yet I treasure this film. So may you. If you, as am I, are out of your head . . . you will cleave to this tortured bit of cinematic epilepsy because it is alive. It is yet another crime of pa.s.sion committed by Ken Russell, and his sort of berserk creativity has fallen on such hard times in this age of Reagan and yuppie sensibility, that simply to be exposed to the ravings of an inspired madman is cathartic.
I came away from Gothic with my soul on fire. It drove me to this essay, all 5000 + words of it.
Back to the Future had no such effect on me. Nor have any of the hundred or so films I"ve seen in the last six months had anything remotely like that effect. We live in a time of "safe" art that is no way art, but merely artifice. Gothic frightens, after the fact, because it is dangerously conceived, impudently mounted, uncaring of its footing, determined to crawl the wall or tumble into the abyss, all in the name of disgorging the absurd demon in the thought.
I cannot in conscience recommend Gothic to anyone. You would no doubt lynch me. But I tell you this: for every teenager in Canton, Illinois who would have us believe his "age-group" is free of potential slashers, there are a hundred slashers-in-waiting within the bedlam cells of our natures to populate a Lovecraftian duchy; for every insipid film that rakes in millions by offering 1980s visions of floating ethics and looking out for # 1, there are greedyguts viewers who see such films as a license to indulge moral turpitude; and for every nutcase like your faithful columnist, who tells you to embrace a wonky failure like Gothic because a pulse beats in it, a pulse that signifies life means more than what one finds confined to the screen of a tv set, there will be legions who tell you disorder is chaos, riot is recklessness, art is quantifiable.
The final a.s.sertion of critical judgment on Gothic is not whether or not it is good, or whether one likes it or not. The undeniable truth of Gothic, as in all the work of Ken Russell (an artist who is either so mad or so foolhardy as not to care if he wins or loses), is that it is palpably alive. It is riot and ruin and pandemonium. But it will have you by the nerve-ends.
And isn"t that what Real Art is supposed to do? Even in Canton, Illinois?
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / September 1987 INSTALLMENT 26:.
In Which A Good Time Was Had By All And An Irrelevant Name-Dropping Of Fritz Leiber Occurs For No Better Reason Than To Remind Him How Much We Love And Admire Him
Though her name be not Calliope, Euterpe, Thalia or any of the other six, a Muse of my East Coast acquaintance also happens to be on a first-name basis with John Updike, and she happened to mention a month or two ago that Updike had said the new Warner Bros, film adaptation of his 1984 fantasy The Witches of Eastwick only superficially resembled the novel, but it sure as h.e.l.l captured the feeling of the book.
Now, this was not Updike"s first picnic in the enchanted forest of our mythic genre. Back in 1963, he did a sorta kinda symbolic fantasy called The Centaur. It is my least favorite of all the fifteen or sixteen Updike books I"ve read. No, let me be more specific: surgeons have it easier; they are blessed and cursed with the ability to bury their mistakes; novelists have to live with the walking dead of their failed efforts. The Centaur made my hide itch. I ground away valuable layers of tooth enamel during the reading.
So it was with considerable pleasure that I found Updike"s second sojourn down our way considerably more successful. (Like all of us who have access to the range and spiced variety of fantasy literature that includes writers The New York Review of Books has never even heard of, I often find myself subscribing to the Accepted Wisdom that visitors from The Mainstream more often than not make a.s.ses of themselves when they decide to try their hand at what we do. I am ashamed when I catch myself thinking that way; and for every Doris Lessing, Herman Wouk, Jacqueline Susann, Taylor Caldwell or Andrew Greeley who makes us rend our flesh and spit up our breakfast, there is an appositely wonderful Peter Straub, Naomi Mitchison, John Hersey, Peter Carey or Russell Hoban who teaches us old dogs some new tricks. So it is surely unfair to me, of us, to go to our graves bearing that ign.o.ble misconception. So I was happy that Updike pulled it off, rather than wallowing in smug pleasure at his earlier misstep.) While it is impossible to read any novel in which suburban witches appear in a contemporary setting without taking out the prayer rug and intoning the hallowed names of Fritz Leiber and Conjure Wife, Updike"s literary conceit is a good read, an honest reexamination of the basic fantasy construct, and is filled with some of his liveliest writing.
What would be made of the book by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer, the brilliant Mad Max director George Miller, and the "hot" but frequently tasteless producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters (we"re talking here Flashdance, A Star Is Born, The Deep and The Color Purple, among others), was anybody"s guess. But the odds weren"t terribly terrific. Updike ain"t that easy to translate onto celluloid, and the stats of previous attempts look like readouts on the value of the Mexican peso.
But I am here to tell you that The Witches of Eastwick is great fun. Get it out of your head that it"s Updike"s book, scene for scene, or line for line, or even character for character. But no matter how you saw Darryl Van Home (they"ve dropped one of the "r"s from his first name in the film), Alexandra, Jane and Sukie in the novel, you would have to possess the soul of a pigeon-kicker to object to the interpretations of those characters by Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Mich.e.l.le Pfeiffer. Veronica Cartwright and Richard Jenkins are also not too dusty as Felicia and Clyde Alden.
Updike"s Eastwick, Rhode Island (found and filmed in Coha.s.set, Ma.s.sachusetts) is the safe, settled Late George Apleyesque cubbyhole of life in which Alex, Jane and Sukie mark off the days of their lives as victims of "the dreaded three D"s": death, desertion and divorce. Alex"s husband is dead, Jane"s husband has divorced, and Sukie"s old man has deserted, leaving her with six daughters.
The women possess "the source," the secret power of witchcraft that all men-naively or cynically-believe lies in the female. (Van Home delivers a brief but impa.s.sioned codification of this cliche near the beginning of the film and, near the end, does it again with the kid gloves off, inquiring whether G.o.d has made women as a mistake or as some sort of ghastly punishment for men. I take no side in this matter. I merely report what is on the screen.) This power manifests itself fully only with the arrival in Eastwick-perhaps by wish-fulfillment of the women"s group fantasy-of "a prince traveling under a dark curse . . . very handsome . . . with a c.o.c.k neither too large nor too small, but right in the middle": Daryl (one "r") Van Home.
Well, Jack Nicholson may be many things, but "handsome" ain"t one of them. There is too much pasta in that face. Yet in a few minutes, like the exquisite three women, we are conned into accepting Nicholson and Van Home as just such a "dark prince." And he proceeds, without too much b.u.t.ter, to seduce all three of them. To tell you more would steal from you that which you deserve: the pleasure of getting coshed over the noggin by a satanically charming romp courtesy of all concerned.
And even if Fritz Leiber did most of this to perfection in 1943, preceded only by Rene Clair, Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway and Robert Benchley (from a screenplay by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly) in 1942"s I Married A Witch, you would have to be the kind of person who enjoys p.i.s.sing on the snowy egret to carp about this delicious film.
As Stan Lee would put it, "nuff said!
But: Unceasing in my efforts to broaden your filmgoing experience (and by way of thanking all of you for saving Woody Allen"s life by retroactively awarding him a Hugo for Sleeper in 1974, which fannish largesse was imparted to him on the operating table, thereby giving him the will to live), I have preserved my notes from the Warner Bros, screening, and I offer them here in brief, to give you things to watch for.
*The Writers Guild fought long and hard for proper credit onscreen for the scenarist(s). But notice, when you go to see The Witches of Eastwick, how cunningly the Directors Guild has circ.u.mvented the rules. All but two of the opening credits are committed, concluding with the writer, before there is an intrusion of a complete scene. Then, after that s.p.a.ce, we return to more bucolic camerawork (by the inspired Vilmos Zsigmond, who could make rice pudding as breathtaking as Walden Pond) and in the artistic respite that follows, the downtime, as it were, they flash the producers" and director"s credits. It isn"t exactly a degrading-to-writers cheat, but in terms of cinematic vocabulary, of what the eye sees and registers, it is a now-commonplace dodge that establishes who is below the salt and who ain"t. Watch for it. Notice it.
*The editing by Richard Francis-Bruce is marvelous. Very suspenseful. Particularly in the ways in which it is integrated with what may be the best film score by John Williams in a decade. The aural package melded to the visual freight is as good as anything you"ll currently find on the big screen. It looks like a movie, not just another of those slambang tv eye-rippers tossed into the microwave and toughened up for theater release.
*Note the intelligence of everyone in the film. People may act weirdly, but consistently. There are no dopes in this story. Which is a tribute to Cristofer and the canny players, because Updike gave us a fantasy trope, and the scenarist and actors have rendered it mimetically, sequentially, logically.
*Catch the flies. Every time Nicholson comes onscreen, we get a not-obtrusive Lord of the flies echo. More would have been to pull a Spielberg ("Hey, looka me! See how well I know my subtext! See how cute I am!") and less would have been lost in the rush of the story.
*Consider if it isn"t time to send a letter to your regional movie maven, to suggest we may indeed have had enough vomiting scenes in films. The Exorcist did it as well as any of us cared to have it done, and if quality of puke were not sufficient, Terry Gilliam gave us Mr. Creosote in Monty Python"s The Meaning of Life for sheer quant.i.ty. Beyond those seminal upchuck icons, all else is, well, simply parking the tiger. Calico carpet comment. What I mean, mate, you seen one spring-loaded tsunami of york, you"ve seen it all, in"t it?
*The tennis scene. See and delight. Then catch the resonance from the ultimate sequence in Antonioni"s Blow-Up (1966). Upper crust athletic activity as mystical ritual.
*If costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers doesn"t get an Oscar for Jack Nicholson"s wardrobe (provided by Cerruti 1881 Paris), then we ought to call in Lt. Col. Oliver North to start collecting funds for the overthrow of Hollywood"s Academy.
*Rob Bottin"s special makeup effects. Are you, as am I, getting weary of that same Bottin monster look? Would you kindly pay some attention to it in this film and ask your kids or the nearest SFX freak if it doesn"t look boringly as if Bottin uses the same d.a.m.ned slavering, hunching critter every time, with a bit more or a bit less hair. Tell his mother. Bottin"s, not the critter"s.
In conclusion: I"m not sure John Updike would like one of his serious novels thought of as simply great fun, but that"s the way this film has turned out. And unless I"m off my feed, I think you"ll look at this drollery and recognize it as a germinal piece of American cinema. One of those films people will use as reference for years to come. A very American movie, beautifully directed by an Australian, co-produced by a talented ex-hairdresser (we"ll never let you get above your station, Jon), persuasively acted by three of the most seductive women in film today, and written with brio by a man who should be kept working at his craft by whips, if necessary.
Even Fritz Leiber will enjoy this one.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1987 INSTALLMENT 27:.
In Which The Fur Is Picked Clean of Nits, Gnats, Nuts, Naggers And Nuhdzes
Because it might get nasty, I"ve been putting off having this little chat with you. But when I walked in this evening, your mother told me you"d been absolutely impossible all day-"just wait till your father gets home!"-so just ignore the fact that I"ve removed my belt and have it lying here waiting for you to cop an att.i.tude; and let us discuss this stuff as calmly as possible.
First, let"s get this understood: unless I lose my mind entirely and make the error of savaging someone so scurrilously that it falls beyond the First Amendment"s protection of opinion and criticism-which is simply not gonna happen as I have recently won a bogus, six-year-long slander suit brought against me and a magazine to which I gave an interview, and I am up to here in casebook law smarts about what berserk lengths one would have to go, to write something truly actionable-there is no way your cranky letters will convince The Editors Ferman to drop this column. That righteously ain"t gonna happen, so save your breath.
Let me tell you why that ain"t gonna happen . . .
Oh, wait a minute. Just so you don"t think this entire column will be housekeeping, cleaning up ancillary hokey-pokey, here is a review for you.
Robocop (Orion), despite its popularity, is as vicious a piece of wetwork* as anything I"ve encountered in recent memory. Devoid of even the faintest scintilla of compa.s.sion or commonsense, it is as low as the foreheads of those members of the screening audience who cheered and laughed at each escalated scene of violence. It is a film about, and intended for, no less than brutes. It is a film that struck me as being made by, and for, savages and ghouls. Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, and directed by the Dutchman Paul Verhoeven, this is a template for everything rabid and drooling in our culture. That it has been touted-after the fact-as being a "satirical" film, a "funny" film, is either a.s.s-covering or a genuine representation of the filmmaker"s ethically myopic view of what they"ve sp.a.w.ned. If the former, it"s despicable hypocrisy; if the latter, that"s just flat scary.
*"Wetwork": the "intelligence community"s" currently fashionable doublespeak for the dirtiest of dirty deeds, the act of a.s.sa.s.sination, termination with extreme unction, or whatever.
It is also, clearly and shockingly, a ripoff of the Judge Dredd comic strip from the U.K. And if the creators and owners of that character fail to initiate a copyright infringement action against producer Jon Davison, Orion and the scenarists, they are missing what is, in my opinion, an opportunity to get rich by bringing what appear to be literary graverobbers to justice. Stay away from this one at all costs.
Now, where were we? Right.
Why it isn"t in the cards that your outraged letters will convince the management of this publication that I am a blot on their table of contents.
These essays are exceedingly popular.
Despite the half dozen or so letters that have been pa.s.sed on to me, complaining about . . . well, I"ll tell you what they"ve been complaining about in a moment . . . there have been hundreds of letters commending the work. And even when one of you stomps his/her widdle foot and demands his/her subscription be terminated forthwith, it isn"t even a piddle matched against the occasional readers who have subscribed just so they can be a.s.sured of getting the material. (It"s also bone stupid, and severs nose from noggin just to spite itself, because this is a wonderful magazine, filled every month with the best writing being done in the genre, and maybe some of the best being done in America in any form; with Budrys and Asimov working at the peak of their form in their specialties; and just ripping out or flipping past that which offends thee, is far more rational.) Now we come to the bottom line, which is purely that ten times the number of you who fret over my essays tell the Fermans and me that the first thing they turn to is Watching. And that is just the letters received. Most readers are decent folks who either like what they"re getting, or flip past/rip out what they"re getting that they don"t like. So unless a groundswell of vituperation is raised, and an economically-potent segment of the readership says it"s had enough, we"re going to be locked in this literary embrace for some time to come.
I must make a clear distinction here, about the types of letters we get. There are times when I make mistakes, either out of ignorance or slipped memory, and those of you who bring me to task for such errors are dear and valuable to me. At such times, I make every effort to retrace my steps in a later column, to clean up the picnic grounds, as it were: (F"rinstance. Two issues ago, in reviewing Gothic, I opined that director Ken Russell was indulging his adolescent fantasies when he presented us with a scene in which the poet Sh.e.l.ley has a vision of Claire Clairmont"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s with eyes that blink in place of nipples. Three or four readers-most notably Margaret L. Carter, Ph.D. and Teresa Nielsen Hayden-hurriedly [but politely, informedly] advised me that "every well-read devotee of Gothic horror knows that Sh.e.l.ley actually experienced such a vision . . . It"s in writing . . . Sh.e.l.ley was inspired by a cryptic pa.s.sage from Coleridge"s "Christabel," describing the vampire-witch Geraldine: "Behold! her bosom and half her side-a sight to dream of, not to tell!""
(I freely cop to not being as encyclopedic in my familiarity with Gothic literature as many of you, but, in fact, I was aware of the referent. Nor is there anything in what I actually wrote that indicates otherwise. Here is what I wrote: It is redolent with symbolism.
Much of that symbolism is ludicrous: Miriam Cyr as Claire, in a laudanum-induced vision as perceived by Sh.e.l.ley, bares her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and in place of nipples there are staring eyes . . . which blink at him. The audience roars with laughter. Russell had overindulged his adolescent fantasies.
(What I was saying-and I think clearly-was that Russell had made an artistic choice in showing breast-eyes that blink. I then described the reaction of an audience to that choice. The question raised by readers familiar with the actual historic background, is moot. Whether the image as presented by Russell sprang from the director"s imagination, or from Sh.e.l.ley"s, is beside the point.
(Frequently, in writers" workshops I"ve taught, someone will hand in a story in which something happens that is of great importance to the writer, but which does not work on the page. And when it is brought to the writer"s attention that it isn"t believable, the unvarying response is, "But this really happened to my cousin Ernie and his wife. I was there, I saw it happen." To which, the proper reply is precisely the same I offer to Dr. Carter and Teresa: it doesn"t matter if it"s true; it matters if we believe it"s true. The question, thus, devolves not on authenticity, but verisimilitude. This is a lesson difficult to impart to novice writers, for whom craft and expertise come only with time and trial.
(What I said in that snippet of the essay, was that Ken Russell, as the guiding intelligence behind the film, had chosen to show b.r.e.a.s.t.s with eyes . . . and then to make them blink. Now it is possible that merely the sight of the eyes would not have sent the audience into paroxysms of hilarity; but topping the grotesquerie by having those nipple-orbs blink was pure vaudeville; and the audience responded appropriately, thereby breaking the mood of bizarre fascination Russell was striving for. I was writing about a film, friends, not trying to demonstrate how arcane my wisdom might be.
(The interesting thing here, it seems to me, is that not one of the persons who called me on this "omission," had seen the movie. I was being chided for apparently not knowing something, even though the knowing or not-knowing didn"t mean a whistle in context. For the purpose of the critique, I gave every bit of information that was needed.
(And as Einstein once observed, "Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler."
(Get what I"m saying here? Gothic was not a film in which Sh.e.l.ley"s fantasies, adolescent or otherwise, were being presented; it was a film in which Ken Russell"s interpretation of those fantasies was being presented. The choice was not Sh.e.l.ley"s, it was Russell"s. And in my view-shared with a large audience-it was a ludicrous artistic choice.
(And isn"t that what film, or book, or dance, or art criticism is about? The correctness of choices. The coherent and effective vision that coalesces from a congeries of artistic selections.) With such letters, I have no problem. The careful reader has caught what mayor may not be a slip in the critic"s mantle of authority. As we have nothing to go on with a critic but our agreement to trust him/her and his/her viewpoint based on past performance, it is absolutely proper-and appreciated-for the careful reader to suggest, "You seemed not to know such&such, and this puts your infallibility in shadow. Please comment."
But there is another sort of letter. It is the splenic rodomontade that is intended to dismay the editors and pique my animosity. These are written by people who need attention. As one who needs attention, and who works out that need in a constructive manner by pursuing a career in which I write what I want to be noticed, I am on to these twits from line one, in which they say things almost always like this: "You think you"re pretty cute, don"t you, Mr. Allison. Well, my name is George S----, and you"ve never heard of me, but I just wanted to tell you that you"re rude and stupid and not nearly as sharp as you think you are . . . " (But then, George, who among us is?) These letters almost always go via the editors, and lament the leavetaking of the former film observer from these pages, suggesting that said person should be sought out with sled-dogs and sonar, and be brought back to that previous state of critical beat.i.tude. On pain of having George"s subscription canceled, should the suggested program not be adopted.
Well, forget that, too. It ain"t gonna happen.
So if it isn"t legitimate attempts to have errors corrected, to what complaints do I object?
There are three, basically.
1) Ellison doesn"t do reviews. He does these long, weird essays that once in a while mention a movie.
2) The first rule of being a columnist is that s/he will appear in each and every issue of the publication. Ellison keeps appearing irregularly. He"ll do three or four in a row, then miss a month.
3) Ellison usually talks about movies that have come and gone from the theaters. He doesn"t give us reviews that we can use as a guide to what to see.
There is also a lesser 4) which speaks to my not "reviewing everything," which usually means I"ve missed telling you about the latest autopsy movie in which a doorway to h.e.l.l opens in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a boutique in a shopping mall built over an ancient graveyard that has been defiled by rutting yuppies, and a succubus takes possession of the mind and body of the busty jazzercise instructor, who slinks out whenever there"s a Conelrad test on the Top 40 station, and eviscerates people in Ban-Lon pullovers by slovenly use of a cheese grater or apple corer.
Let me respond once and only, for the record, to these cavils. Here"s where it may get nasty.
1) You"re correct. I don"t do reviews. I"m not much interested in doing reviews. There is a plethora of such reviewing already being done. In magazines published weekly, in newspapers published daily, on telecasts aired hourly; in specialty magazines used to huckster forthcoming films, that are endowed by the film companies themselves, available at every video shoppe and theater lobby in America; on the radio, in American Film and Starlog and Cinefantastique and Prevue. We are hip-deep in reviewers, ranging from Pauline Kael and Molly Haskell, who know what they"re talking about, to Gary Franklin and David Sheehan, who have the intellectual insight of a speed b.u.mp. I won"t even comment on the Siamese-critics whose syndicated review shows demonstrate even greater snippiness and discordancy than I visit on you.
What I am interested in (and the vast majority of those who have commented on these columns seem to share that interest) is the concept of film as potential Art. Books are reviewed in these pages by Mr. Budrys in essay form, speaking to the intentions of the creators, the effectiveness of their vision, the value of the writing in the greater context of establishing artistic criteria by which we can make informed judgments as to what is, and what ain"t, worth our valuable reading time. Why should films not be treated equally as seriously?
These are essays on film. Not academic, stodgy Cahiers du Cinema wearinesses, intended to demonstrate the cineaste"s erudition, or his Trivial Pursuit noodling of the least line from an obscure offering by Arnold Fanck (German director, 18891974, known for his mountaineering films), but an attempt by one who both loves and works in film, to illuminate technique, intentions, historical context, ethical values . . . choices . . .
The better to widen the aperture of a filmgoer"s perceptions. The better to suggest a subtext for what may appear to be only momentary entertainment. The better, some might say, to educate and broaden horizons and afford more pleasure; as well as to suggest bases on which critical judgments can be made.
If the essays seem inconsistent, well, I rush to the words of Bernard Berenson: "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
As for the way in which I write these essays, well, I write to please myself first. If they also please you, then that"s swell. If they don"t, sorry about that, kiddo, But if I were to write for a supposed audience, I would wind up as bland and shallow as most of the reviewers you channel-hop to avoid. I write what interests me, and that pretty well takes care of complaint 4) because I am utterly disinterested in most of the hack films slambanged at you in saturation tv advertis.e.m.e.nts. I have no axes to grind, I am on the secret payroll of no studio or filmmaker, and if you think I"m going to sit through Evil Dead 2 or The Barbarians just so your avaricious little heart doesn"t feel it"s missed something, then you"d better get out pad and pencil and dash off one of those letters to the Fermans, threatening them with loss of readership if they don"t recall the previous tenant; because that is not what I"m about, and stop eyeing the belt, I haven"t threatened you once, have I?
2) is easily handled. I do the best I can. I appear as frequently as my often-otherwise-occupied schedule permits. I do have to make a living writing other things. And though suchlike as Charles Platt and Christopher Priest bend themselves into hyperbolic pretzels proving I"ll never complete The Last Dangerous Visions, that and other matters of import command most of my attention most of the time. I enjoy writing these essays. I do them because they are things I want to write, not because I have a deadline that demands I write them. It is my naive belief that you would rather read something the author was compelled to write, rather than just s.p.a.ce-filler because a presumed readership expected to see something in this s.p.a.ce. Don"t fret about it: when I"m not here, there"ll be a nifty story in this s.p.a.ce that has put food on the table of a deserving writer.
And sometimes-though I know you"ll find this difficult to believe-even though I once did a column saying just this-every once in a while I have nothing to say. It may have been a dry period for films worth detailing, it may have been that my brain wasn"t all that fresh with concepts, it may have been that even films worth noting had been covered in kind in a previous column.
So. Sometimes I"m busy. Sometimes I miss my deadlines. Sometimes the well is dry. That"s life, kids. It"s also Art. You can have it good, but you may not have it Thursday.
But I"ve never seen stone tablets with the "rules for columnists" (as one jerk suggested) on which it is chiseled that a columnist has to appear regularly. I do the best I can, and I trust that when I can, it serves. If not, turn the dial or get out that pencil and pad.
On the third count, 3) that is, many of you do not seem to understand that this is a monthly publication, a.s.sembled at least three months before you get it. I"m writing this column on September 17th, having missed two issues because I was earning my living writing a two-hour sf film for Roger Gorman and NBC. Check the date on which you"re reading this. That"s what the lead-time is, every issue.
Now, because I live and work in the center of the film industry, I get to screen a great many films long before they are released, so I can cut down the lead-time in certain cases. And you reap that benefit, for whatever it"s worth. I mean, how many of you will actually avoid seeing Robocop on the basis of my warning? You do have, after all, Free Will, despite what John Paul II tells you.
But even if I were to see any film I wanted to discuss in rough cut (and finding producers who"ll let you see a film in that state of pre-final edit, no matter how knowledgeable you may be, is like trying to find a viable concept of ethics in Fawn Hall"s tousled head), we"d still get that critique to you after the film had vanished from your Six-Plex.