Harlan Ellison's Watching (26 page)

Incident:

I called Tony, to ask him if he and Gail wanted to go to dinner. Gail sounded terrible. "What's the matter?" I asked, thinking maybe Tony had gone back to the bottle. "I haven't seen him in a week," she wailed, actually crying over the phone. "Where the hell is he?" I asked, thinking maybe I'd have to go pry him out of an X-rated motel down on Ventura Boulevard. "He's seeing
Star Wars
," she said, sobbing. "I think he's seen it fifteen or sixteen, maybe more, times. He won't come out of the theater, except to come home and shower and then go find another place where it's playing. What am I gonna do!?!"

Incident:

I stopped off at A-1 Record Finders, to pick up the new Jaco Pastorius side, and the dude behind the counter asked me if I'd seen
it
. No name, just
IT
, like the Second or Third Coming. So I ran a few negatives, and then I noticed these two teenaged kids lounging against one of the record bins, giving me sidelong glances one usually reserves for butchers who have a thumb on the scales.

I had to go out to my car, parked right in front of the shop, and they watched me. When I returned to the shop and resumed the conversation, the two young gentlemen walked out, got their bicycles from the wall, and crossed the street right beside my car.

The neatly-furrowed gash that runs from my left front fender all the way to the left rear tire-well, handsomely engraved with a house-key held tightly in a teenaged fist, is charming testimony to the religious fervor
Star Wars
junkies manifest. Fortunately, I drive a very old, very funky car, and the gash doesn't distress me overmuch; but if I ever need crazed True Believers to help me Kill for the Love of Kali, liberate The Holy Grail, or Save Ammurrica from The Red Menace, I will begin my recruiting activities at the Avco Cinema Center on Wilshire.

These three incidents are only grassroots reflections of the blind fanaticism
Star Wars
has generated in such pro- and anti-Establishment journals as
New Times, New York, New West, American Film
and
Time
magazine . . . good old
Time
magazine that set off the main charge with its six-page, four-color, May 30th story and banner-headlined cover (INSIDE: THE YEAR'S BEST MOVIE) (that's what I hate about
Time:
they're so wishy-washy).

Time
was so determined to looooove that film, they even told an outright lie. On page 57 of the May 30th article, the following excerpt appears:

"
Star Wars
is the costume epic of the future," says Ben Bova, editor of
Analog
, one of the leading science fiction magazines. "It's a galactic
Gone with the Wind
. It's perfect summer escapist fare."

Now Ben is one of my closest friends, and I simply could not believe he had bubbled along that way. He's too smart for such an okeydoke. So I called him and asked him if he'd said what
Time
said he's said. After the bellowing ceased, he made it clear that
Time
's reporters simply were not going to hear anything negative about that flick, no matter what was actually said. Two issues of
Time
later, the following item appeared on page 6, in the Letters column:

Your quotation of my comments about George Lucas's film
Star Wars
makes it appear that I liked the film. I most emphatically did not. Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-'em-ups when we go to a science fiction film. We have been disappointed many times, but I had expected more of Lucas. Somebody Up There likes the film, it seems, and no dissenting views are allowed. Too bad.

Ben Bova, Editor
Analog
New York City

And that's what has been going down with
New Times
with its June 24th cover story likening the comic-strip characters of
Star Wars
to such American myth heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Joe DiMaggio and The Lone Ranger. Hurray for the robots, R2D2 and C3PO!
New Times
' Jesse Kornbluth sees in the film reassurance that machines are not taking over, that NASA isn't involved in a sinister conspiracy to keep us from knowing there is intelligent life on Mars, and that The Ole Debbil Technology will not savage us further. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.

People
raves.
Starlog
gushes. Rona Barrett vociferates. The world loves
Star Wars
! And the studios and the television networks and the fastbuck blue sky independents and the mass media have once again discovered science fiction. Except they think it's hip to call it by that hideous neologism "sci-fi" and nowhere can be heard a discouraging word. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.

And that is precisely where my cavils with
Star Wars
begin.

As I write this, only the much-damned critic John Simon of
New York
magazine has had the courage to say the emperor is buck naked. While those who seem oblivious to the occasionally honorable and more-frequently trashy history of fantastic films that stretch back to Georges Méliès whoop and simper about how enriching
Star Wars
is, Simon puts his finger dead on the plague-bearing nature of this film and the way it's being received. In the June 20th issue of
New York
he said, in part:

I don't read science fiction, of which this may, for all know, be a prime example; some light years ago I did read
Flash Gordon
, of which
Star Wars
is in most respects the equal. But is equaling sci-fi and comic strips, or even outstripping them, worthy of the talented director of
American Graffiti
, and worth spending all that time and money on?

I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don't: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip
Star Wars
of its often striking images and its high-falutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality . . . trite characters and paltry verbiage . . .

Still,
Star Wars
will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be childish or unlucky enough never to have grown up.

Were it not for Simon's sobriety—for which he must be commended in the face of such overwhelming mass hysteria—I would think I was the only one marching to the beat of that other drummer. Because, when I emerged from the 20th Century Fox advance screening, as far as I could tell, I was the only turkey evil enough to have ambivalent feelings and a beetled brow. It took me several days to codify my unease.

I pilloried myself. What's the matter with you, Ellison? The damned film is a wonder . . . filled with sight and sound and flash and filigree. It soars, it sings, it thunders through a wholly-realized universe of Lucas's imagination! Why do you feel as if you've been had? You're always bleating about the lack of magic and simple wonder in contemporary film, the kind of swell dazzlement you knew in Saturday afternoon dream-days of your youth . . . serials, B westerns, Val Lewton suspense films, great fantasies! Why does this
hommage
to
Flash Gordon
distress you? Have you lost the ability to see as a child sees?

And then I realized that was the problem. When I was a child, I learned from movies. I learned that you never screw a friend, never snooker him or her behind the eight ball; I learned that systems and governments intended to serve human needs frequently spend their time maintaining themselves in power to the anguish of the people; I learned that Hemingway had a workable definition when he said guts was grace under pressure; I learned about what was in store for me when I became an adult. All of these I learned without realizing I was being taught, because even those sappy, illogical schlock flicks of the Forties and Fifties had
people
in them.

Star Wars
has no people.

Which instantly brought to mind a rule-of-thumb for films of this sort: any motion picture—such as
2001: A Space Odyssey; Demon Seed; Silent Running
or
Forbidden Planet—
or
Star Wars—
in which the most identifiable, likeable characters are robots, is a film without people. And that is a film that's shallow, that cannot uplift or enrich in any genuine sense, because it is a film without soul, without a core. It is merely a diversion, a cheap entertainment, a quick fix with sugar-water, intended to distract, divert and keep an audience from coming to grips with itself.

And in these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy, future shock, belief in coocoo conspiracies and Bermuda Triangle/UFO/reincarnation/Atlantis/est stupidities, information overload, urban terror and television stereotype, anything that keeps people stupid
is
a felony. "Entertainment is back!" the reviewers trumpeted, as if it had ever vanished. Nabokov is entertainment; Shakespeare is entertainment; Katherine Anne Porter is entertainment. Must "entertainment" be synonymous with "mindless" or "without content"? How foolish of us to have thought Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
was entertaining, or Poe, or Pinter, or Scorsese's
Taxi Driver
. Troubling, yes; forcing us to think, yes; but entertainment nonetheless.

But not
Star Wars
. For all of its length, for all of its astonishing technical expertise, its headlong plunge and its stunning effects, at no time can one discern the passage of a thought. It is all bread and circuses. The human heart is never touched, the lives are unexamined, the characters are comic strip stereotypes.

But that's the point!
is the single defense I get when I alienate myself at dinner parties by my negativity.
It's
supposed
to be mindless
, I'm told. And then those professorial types who are safe in loving
Star Wars
where they might be attacked for reading the latest Robert Silverberg or Thomas Disch sf novel, explain to me as carefully and quietly as one would a retarded child, that
Star Wars
is a return to the worship of the Eternal Verities: honor, truth, fighting Evil. All black and white.

Try black and white in a world of credit cards, punk rock, mastectomies, Watergate, the rise of homegrown Nazism, Anita Bryant, and the terrifying fact that more than half of all serious crimes in the United States are committed by people between the ages of ten and seventeen—and that includes rape, murder, robbery, aggravated assault and burglary.

In the Real World, anything that keeps people stupid is hardly a chuckleable item. And for several weeks I resisted putting
Star Wars
in that category. It was fun, I told myself. It was
good
for people to see a simple film in which the Good Guys were extraspecial good and the Bad Guy wore not merely a black hat, but black body-armor and a black death-mask, I told myself. Nor could I bring myself to fault Lucas, who had clearly set out to make an
hommage
to the Saturday afternoon serial and had done it with what Flaubert called "clean hands and composure." Then I heard the comment I mysteriously referred to earlier, from Alan Dean Foster; and I felt no qualms about pinning the butterfly to the board.

Not to keep you in suspense a moment longer. There we were—Alan, myself, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Catalano—all of us properly or erroneously tagged "science fiction writers"—sitting on a panel at
Space-Con IV
, fielding questions about
Star Wars
. And I began the raving you've witnessed here. And I said the movie keeps people stupid. But I didn't have chapter and verse. All I had was a vague feeling. I said Lucas had done what he wanted to do, and all honor to him for that; he hadn't compromised. But then I remarked that one of the things in the film that was indicative of keeping people stupid was the constant boom one heard when something blew up in outer space throughout the film. And, as everyone
should
know, but most people
don't
know, since there is no air in deep space, since it is for all intents and purposes total vacuum, there can be no transmittal of shock waves, no displacement of molecules of air, and thus . . . no sound. And I said this was another example of giving people what they want to hear, literally, though it contravenes the laws of the physical universe. And in a time when we're so abysmally uneducated about technology, which rules our lives more each day, that was a criminal act of artistic prostitution.

Then Alan looked thoughtful and seemed reluctant to speak, perhaps because he had just written the sequel to the
Star Wars
novelization that Lucas had sold to Ballantine Books, but in his reserved and gentlemanly fashion he told the audience of a day when he had seen a rough cut of the film and had remarked on just this scientific illiteracy to Lucas. He had even suggested a workable alternative . . . no,
two
workable alternatives . . . and Lucas had said words to the effect of (approximate quote), "There's a lot of money tied up in this film and people
expect
to hear a boom when something blows up, so I'll give them the boom."

And at that moment, the cynicism showed through.

If the masses want bread and circuses, we give them bread and circuses. If they want witch-hunts, bear-baitings, kinky sex, Inquisitions, burning crosses, scapegoats, trivia and persiflage—we give it to them. Keep them entertained and they'll never hear the whistle of the executioner's axe.