Harlan Ellison's Watching (18 page)

Perhaps I do it by analyzing the film in terms of the great cinematic moments. Perhaps by telling you the chilling and wholly logical story so you'll want to see how it all comes out. And perhaps I just do what I've done—advise you that the only person who could walk away from
Joe
without a new awareness of the treadmill to tragedy on which America is running is the kind of person who
is
Joe Curran.

And maybe I just suggest, in a soft whisper, that the beast who is Joe lives in all of us, longhair or hardhat. And then, friends, we drop to our knees and pray.

Los Angeles Free Press
/September 25, 1970

Cogito ergo comparare
. As a thinking animal, the species homo sap has this positively lemminglike urge toward myth and archetype. Every little kid lost on the grounds of Disneyland is a parallel to the Wandering Jew; every poor sonofabitch hoist on his own petard harkens back to Christ; every septuagenarian who slips out of Sun City for a stroll in the countryside is a
Doppelgänger
for Nietzsche's Old Man in the Woods; Henry Ford opened Pandora's box, Wilbur and Orville were Daedalus and Icarus, Howard Hughes is Croesus; every writer who writes lean and tough is obviously emulating Hemingway. Well,
sheet!

And every sf film released post–
2001: A Space Odyssey
will have to suffer with comparisons to Kubrick's jellyroll; most of the time, the contender's going to come away bloodied. Apparently, in the massmind, it isn't enough for the creator of whatever film comes into question to have had the
dream
and the skill to solidify that dream on film. It isn't enough, because homo sap seemingly can't handle all that fresh input each time, consequently has to gauge the new film by the old one, even when they bear only the most superficial similarities to each other.

Well, hell, leave us cease beating around it. I'm talking about
Silent Running
, an outstanding film, albeit seriously flawed conceptually, and how much nonsensical balderdash it's going to have to put up with because it is the illegitimate son of
2001
.

Perhaps not all comparisons between the two are invidious, however. Special effects on
2001
were conceived and effected by a team of four, most prominent of whom was Douglas Trumbull:
Silent Running
was directed by Douglas Trumbull.
2001
depended heavily for its ambience of wonder on the hardware of space travel:
Silent Running
takes place entirely aboard the American Airlines space freighter
Valley Forge
. Heads dropped their tabs and went to freak behind the
2001
visual psychedelics of a jaunt through hyperspace: the most potent filmic technique surfacing in
Silent Running
is a violent, shuddering, kaleidoscopic ride through the maelstrom rapids of the rings of Saturn, using the same Trumbull-conceived cinematic vocabulary. Both are morality plays. Both anthropomorphize machines. Both deal with astronauts
manqué
. Both flaunt the minutiae of space travel and life aboardship inspace.

Yet these are merely surface similarities. The two films are as dissimilar as
Lolita
and
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
, though both possess dirndl youth and femininity.

The dissimilarities of
2001
and
Silent Running
are infinitely more striking than their lookalikes:

2001
had no human characters with whom one could identify;
Silent Running
pivots on the character of Freeman Lowell, the last ecologist Earth ever produced.
2001
was heavily mystical;
Silent Running
is a myth anchored in materialism and realism, despite its fantascience trappings.
2001
was optimistic in the final analysis;
Silent Running
is a cautionary tale with a downbeat ending.
2001
was scientifically accurate (with only
very
minor errors) down to the last grommet and spanner;
Silent Running
makes no attempt to disguise its mythic qualities and the flaws in its physical sciences are numerous, consequently.
Silent Running
is essentially a romance,
2001
was not. There are more.

But the most important difference between the two films, from the standpoint of criticism, is that
2001
so stunned with its metaphysical and cinematic overkill that virtually nothing but "Oh wow!" is available to its audience after they have seen it (a common denominator for Kubrick films, from
Paths of Glory
through
Spartacus
to
Dr. Strangelove
and up to
A Clockwork Orange
); Kubrick is clearly a genius, well ahead of the game; while the makers of
Silent Running
are merely extraordinarily talented men, and the film can be commented upon rationally because it
isn't
that
rara avis
, the fever-dream of a Polanski, a Fellini or a Kubrick. It is susceptible to comment and criticism, it is flawed, it is—at core—more
human
than
2001
. And for that reason is more valuable to students of speculative fiction in films than
2001
because it bears the marks of human hands, it speaks to trends, it casts illumination on the directions sf can take in films:
2001
does not. It is a special vision and cannot be duplicated; it can tell us little beyond the rare qualities of a Kubrick.

So, at last, fighting off the lemming-urge to comparison, we come to
Silent Running
which, like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead, is very very good when it's good, and when it's bad ought to go and sit on a cucumber.

Blatantly—and to its disadvantage—it is a message film. It says: Don't kill off the forests. It says: We have to be more ecologically humane. It says: If we keep going the way we're going, we'll fulfill Joni Mitchell's warning, "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot." And the film says these now-all-too-familiar-yet-nonetheless-inescapably-true clichés
just that
nakedly. Making for some very difficult, pretentious speeches by the protagonist, played by Bruce Dern. It is a mark of Dern's acting expertise, and the exquisitely special quality he displays in the role of Lowell, that the speeches just manage to slide by without rasping the nerve-ends. But it's bad scripting.

More on Dern, and more on the script, later.

Shunting aside for the moment the plot-holes in which one could lose a cab rig and trailer, the story is an uncomplicated one. The last botanical specimens from an Earth devoid of vegetation (and I won't even comment on
that
wonky concept at this point) have been enclosed in enormous domes, have been attached to space freighters, and have been orbited out near Saturn. Lowell and his three shipmates have been on the
Valley Forge—
one freighter in a large flotilla—for eight years, tending the forests and desert areas in each of the five geodesic domes. One day they receive the long-awaited message from the flagship that tells them the final dispensation of the botanical specimens. Not the recall Lowell was hoping for, the recall to return the vegetation to Earth where it would flower anew, but a message that delights the three jaded and bored shipmates: uncouple the domes, blow them out into space and vaporize them with atomic charges. Lowell's buddies love the message because it means they're going home. Lowell is appalled. He has come to love the forest, its denizens, its foods he grows with his own hands and eats (to the amusement of his shipmates living off dried and fortified synthetics from the robochef onboard).

The others blow three of the domes, but when one of them comes to Lowell's forest to plant the charge, Lowell—carried away in a violent fit of survival in the name of the land—kills him. Lowell then blows the fourth dome with the other two caretakers trapped inside. It explodes and Lowell has committed triple murder to preserve the forest.

He then plays a game of duplicity with the flagship, advising those in charge that malfunctions aboard the
Valley Forge
make it impossible to jettison the final dome, and he thinks his companions were in one of the blown domes. Then he pirates the freighter and, kidnapping the forest dome, he plunges into the rings of Saturn to escape.

With the aid of a pair of memorable drone robots—one other was lost during the wild ride through Saturn's rings—Lowell "runs silent" through uncharted space beyond Saturn, tending the forest, programming the drones to repair his injured leg, teaching them to play poker, and finally coming to grips with his horror at the murders he's done in the name of goodness.

Finally, Lowell is confronted with the situation of the forest dying. For moments a moviegoer dwells on the fascinating allegorical possibility that the corpse of the man Lowell killed, buried in the forest, has somehow poisoned Paradise. But it is merely that the freighter has sailed too far from the Sun, and the plants are unable to sustain the photosynthetic process needed to keep them healthy. At that point a search party from the flotilla, having been sent around Saturn in search of the
Valley Forge
, locates Lowell and advises him they're coming alongside to dock. Lowell rigs high-intensity lamps in the forest, tells the remaining drone robot that the responsibility for caring for the forest is now his, blows the dome into deep space where, ostensibly, it will continue on its trajectory to infinity, and alone save for a crippled drone that has become his friend, he assuages his guilt over the death of his companions by atomizing the freighter, thereby committing a kind of noble suicide.

Patently, the base story is ludicrous. Its errors in logic and science are horrendous. (When I approached director Trumbull, after the first time of the three on which I've seen the film, and asked him why in the world the simplest rules of physical science, rules known to every junior high Physics 101 student, were not observed—like, for instance, when the domes are jettisoned and exploded we
hear
the sounds in space, when
everyone
knows space is a vacuum and sound cannot be transmitted through a vacuum—he responded that they were telling a kind of "fable" and though they had dubbed the film originally
without
the misconceived soundtrack explosions, they felt an audience would prefer to have the sounds, it would make the whole thing seem more identifiable. I conceive of this as a dodge on Mr. Trumbull's part, a weak response intended to fend off a criticism that cannot be overlooked. But further, it is a pandering to early-1950s horror film misconceptions of the ways in which sf should be treated. It may have worked to hear rockets blasting in deep space, to hear the sound of wind as meteors whizz by out there in the dead place between the stars, back in the moron days when Zsa Zsa Gabor was always a member of the first crew to the Moon, but
2001; Marooned; Forbidden Planet; Planet of the Apes; THX-1138; Charly; A Clockwork Orange; Colossus: The Forbin Project
and a host of others have clearly taken us past such redneck errors in filmed sf.)

The script is rife with such errors and skip-logic in basic construction:

If
all
plant life had vanished on Earth, as the film advises us, the ecological chain would have been broken before
anything
could be saved; Man would have vanished early on, the rains would have ceased to fall, the oceans would have died, and the story would never have taken place.

Why orbit the freighters out by Saturn? The cost of shipping even the most essential items into space would make the shipping of whole
forests
unfeasible by their incredible cost; and even if they
could
do it, orbiting around the Moon is far more logical than sending a whole flotilla out to Saturn. To what end? Why not Mars or Venus, closer in?

Our best astronomical information tells us that the rings of Saturn are only perhaps a dozen miles thick, flattened in their rotation around the planet by the enormous gravitational fields; further, the rings seem to be made up of ice particles. A spacegoing vessel like the
Valley Forge
would have had to be going at least four or five miles per
second
, and would have passed through the rings in a blink of the eye, rather than the minutes-long rapids-run
Silent Running
offers, though I freely grant the filmic twisting of astronomical realities made for good visuals.

Or, even granting the ship its journey, and taking the acceleration rate at a
very
conservative two miles per second, if it hit even a tiny particle, the impact would have torn the ship to flinders.

And how did the astronauts manage to keep walking around on the decks when the freighter was not spinning to induce artificial gravity? Why didn't everything float in free fall?

And how can we accept a science of Man advanced enough to accomplish the unbelievable feat of sending whole forests into space that would also build a drone robot that would catch its "foot" in a strut and get ripped off the gantrywork of the freighter?

The holes are many and gigantic.

Yet the film succeeds. Somehow, despite all the idiot errors that could have been so easily avoided had Trumbull and producer Michael Gruskoff merely sought out the technical assistance of, say, Dr. Robert S. Richardson of the Palomar and Griffith Observatories, the film makes it. (Jesus, they needn't have even sprung for an expensive authority like Richardson. Any moderately competent sf writer could have saved them this embarrassment. Even a hip sf fan could have poked holes easily filled during the scripting. But the scenarists, Deric Washburn & Mike Cimino and Steve Bochco were clearly inept choices, and on their heads rests most of the denigration of this film.)