Harlan Ellison's Watching (43 page)

As of March 10th,
2010
had earned $40,700,000 in domestic box-office, with foreign and ancillary monies yet to come. It was a coup for Hyams. But it didn't save Yablans. Moneyman Kirk Kerkorian was "impatient" with the results and, as of March 13th, Frank Yablans (and later his entire cadre) was fired from MGM/UA Entertainment as President and Chief Operating Of ficer of MGM Films. And we just might lament that there ain't no justice; but with that slash of the scimitar of retribution heard by the drunk driver who doesn't get nabbed the first fifty times he runs a stop sign and takes a fall on the single occasion he's innocent of wrongdoing, the ever-watchful universe caught up with Frank Yablans for such offenses to the tender sensibilities of filmgoers as
Monsignor
.

Justice: swift and sure.

But
2010
is left to us as merely another movie that didn't quite make it.

ANCILLARY MATTER: Though my mandate in these essays is serviceable only when dealing with motion pictures (though one TV column will soon manifest itself for good and sufficient), I risk your wrath with advisement of an item usually beyond my purview, by use of the specious logic that it is
visual
in nature, and thus can be fudged into this space.

It is the latest book to be illustrated by the man his publisher calls "one of the foremost wood engravers in the United States." This is disingenuousness on the part of The University of California Press, because Barry Moser is to wood engravers as Lenny Bruce was to comedians, as Brother Theodore is to monologists, as Poe was to writers. If you have not seen his Pennyroyal Editions of
Moby-Dick
(1981),
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
(1982 & 1983) or
Huckleberry Finn
(1984), yours is an empty life, devoid of beauty or meaning.

Barry Moser's illustrations are exquisite beyond the telling. He soars at an altitude where only such wondrous birds of passage as Lynd Ward and Rockwell Kent have tasted the wind. The passion, craft and imagination of Moser's work have an impact that leaves the viewer speechless.

Thus, it is a visual event of considerable importance when Barry Moser illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's
Frankenstein
. Again in a Pennyroyal Edition designed by the artist, this 255 page large-size (8 ½? × 12?) interpretation of the 1818 text is the best $29.50 you will spend this year. Fifty-two chilling and unforgettable illustrations in black and white and duotone. A book you must not deny yourself. Such art as this is surely the reason we were given eyes.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/September 1985

I don't know about you, but as a film critic I view the onset of summertime with an almost Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, a sickness unto death. While
you
stretch with yearning toward rubicund visions of two weeks in the Poconos or sipping a Pimm's Cup on the veranda of the Hotel Aswan Oberoi, overlooking Elephantine Island in the middle of the Nile,
I
contemplate being dragged twitching and foaming into screening theaters where I must, perforce, view this year's pukeload of "vacation films." Films, that is, conceived and executed to a warped perception of that demographic wedge of American humanity known as "the teenage audience."

As through a glans dorkly, the demented entrepreneurs who piss down summer plagues of
Porkys, Friday the 13ths
and
Stayin' Alives
, see that wedge of the wad as follows:

From out of the shadows of the parking lot shamble a boy and a girl, mid-teens, savaging gobbets of Bubblicious like brachiosauri masticating palmetto fronds, their hirsute knuckles brushing the tarmac as they shuffle, blank-eyed, toward the lights of the Cineplex. Hanging from the boy's belt is a skin-pouch of goodies to be consumed during the film: Jujubes, chicken heads, balls formed of the soft center of slices of Wonder Bread soaked in caramelized sugar and suet, blood sausage and M&M peanut chocolate candies. The girl's bare left breast bears a tattoo portrait of Tom Cruise in his Jockey shorts. They pause for a moment before entering the theater to drool and smack their paws together at the sight of a ratpack of
vatos locos
stomping and disemboweling a 76-year-old Gold Star mother in a wheelchair, beset while trundling home from the supermarket with her dinner cans of Alpo, purchased in exchange for the entirety of her Social Security check and a quart of plasma. They steal her bedroom slippers as the
pachucos
run off, and they enter the theater. To be enriched intellectually. The film is
Rambo: First Blood Part II
.

No sooner does the bell ring through the halls and classrooms of Charles Manson High School, signaling the disengorgement of post-pubescent fans of John Landis and Joe Dante films, than the film industry unleashes its locust swarm of summertime idiocies. Each film kissed on its flaccid lips by studio shamans, and sent aloft bearing the multimillion-dollar box-office dreams of execs before whose eyes dance the revenue figures of
Beverly Hills Cop
.

But hark!

What is this we see? Only into June (as I write this), the ticket sales for the big summer films are off, way off, terrifyingly off. In the first week of the Summer Push, revenues fell off by 13% from last year's bonanza; second week, the drop was by 27%; and this week the bottom made bye-bye . . . a 35% drop.

What in the world can this mean?

Is it possible that the malformed image of the youth audience heretofore nuzzled by the industry is a chimera? Has it dawned on (what Robert Blake calls) The Suits that there is strong evidence to support the belief that not all kids are slope-browed, prognathic vermin lusting after cheap thrills and rivers of blood? Have we a hope that The Suits noticed huge teen audiences patronizing
WarGames
year before last, and
Amadeus
last year (neither of which, by any stretch, is a monkey-movie)? Is this heart-stopping statistic the clarion call of a small revolution? Can The Suits extrapolate the success with kids of these two exemplary and intelligent motion pictures—albeit containing youth-resonant elements—into commercial realms where the movies serve the dual purpose of entertaining
and
uplifting the dear little tots?

One can only hope. Two can only hope. That's you and me, kid. But if either of us expects the barricades to be manned
this
year, color us premature. For, like the brachiosaurus, the industry has its brain located somewhere down at the root of its tail . . . and is slow slow slow to react. Maybe next year.

But
this
year, as summer lazes toward us, I would fain regale you with views of four films created to honor the conceit that the youth audience has a limitless appetite for gore, counterfeit emotion, macho patriotism, repetition of formulaic plots and, on sum, movies best identified as
emptyheaded
.

Rambo: First Blood Part II
(Tri-Star) and
A View to a Kill
(MGM/UA) may seem peculiar choices for consideration in a critique supposedly dealing with fantasy and science fiction films; at first they may seem so. Nor will I dodge the issue with an imperious wave of my hand and the magisterial utterance that I'll review what I damned well please and if you don't like it you can go squat on a taco. No, I will treat you as equals (though I'd hope you want better for yourselves) by pointing out that both of these films defy even the most minimal judgment of what is "reality" by offering us stories and characters who are
clearly
fantasy constructs. These are films of purest phantasm, no matter
how
they're marketed; and thus become fair game for our scrutiny in the context of this essay.

Or if you'd prefer, "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." (
The Merchant of Venice
; Act I, Scene iii.)

Sporting a title as graceful as a hyena with a shattered spine dragging itself to a waterhole,
Rambo: First Blood Part II
proffers despicable manipulation and revisionist history in place of serious consideration of America's reaction (even more than a decade after we got the shit kicked out of us) to the Vietnam War. We are sucked into 92 minutes of nonstop emptyheaded violence through the use of a greased icon known as John Rambo—ex-vet, sullen and
angst-
ridden survivor not only of a war "we didn't really want to win" but of the (real or imagined) disdain of a nation that "refuses to honor those of us who died for you."

As if you didn't know, Sylvester Stallone is Rambo. Or more precisely, Rambo is Rocky. Mike Hodel suggests that this is a film about revenge, and they might as well have staged it as a P.S. to the Napoleonic Wars if they thought Stallone would look good in tights. He's correct, of course. Thematically, it's the
Death Wish
genre, cast in jungle combat. But . . .

It's one hundred and seventy years since the Napoleonic Wars, and only twelve since the Nam. We don't ache in every tendon from the former as we do from the latter. So screw it as regards thematic rationalization. What we have to deal with here is pure fantasy twisted to the service of implanting and/or ripening a hateful, destructive Newspeak. Rambo is as real as Conan; and intellectually, I'd venture to say, the barbarian swordsman could spot Rambo three pawns and a rook, and still whip the vet with the Schoolboy Gambit.

In the previous Rambo film, based on a strong novel by David Morrell, the cranky Viet-vet is arrested for chickenshit reasons in a small town, escapes, lays out half the police department, is hunted through nearby woods and hills, demolishes state troopers, posse comitatus, and National Guardsmen utilizing guerrilla tactics he employed as the most fearsome weapon of Special Forces in Southeast Asia, and finally lays waste to the hamlet itself. Brought to book for his rampage, Rambo (get the suggestion of assonance-rambo/rampage?)* is talked down from the summit of his destructive fever by his former boss in Special Services, the always-watchable Richard Crenna.

In this second chapter of the Rambo Saga—which now has made so much money that there will
fer shure
be a
Rambo III—
this contemporary Myrmidon is in prison, making little ones out of big ones. He gets sprung by Crenna to tackle a one-man mission the purpose of which is to take photos of a VietCong prison camp (from which Rambo escaped during the War) in order to discern if they're holding GI POWs. He is strictly forbidden from attempting rescue of any such personnel, which naturally grinds Rambo's gears, and is offered to us as an allegory for America's alleged refusal to "go all the way" in Vietnam.

Silverberg suggests, in a display of lexicological wordplay worthy of Phil Farmer, that this assonance is only marginally likely, while it strikes him as possible that Morrell gave his vengeful fury the name
Rambo
as a homophone for
Rimbaud
, who was also a wild and crazy guy. This way lies madness.

Of course, there's a plot twist here—story by Kevin Jarre and screenplay by the omnipresent Stallone in collaboration with James Cameron of
The Terminator
fame—that sends Rambo off on yet another quotidian binge of mayhem during which he wipes out what appears to be half the population of the area. And this is what makes up the bulk of the film: free-fire zone elevated to the status of
chanson de geste
. Yankee pluck winning, in small, what it lost in large.

And in the process Rambo is submitted for our emptyheaded adoration as a fantasy construct. Stallone—photographed by director George P. Cosmatos (whom I encountered many years ago as Georgios Pan Cosmatos) all sweat-slick and pumped up to produce a creature both tumescent and iconic, a thing not-quite- and more-than-human, a poster-ready hunk guaranteed to create masturbatory longings in leather gays and feverish schoolgirls alike—is held center frame virtually every moment, the camera panning in sensual closeup across every last convex surface of deltoid, tricep and trapezius, not to mention the ever-popular latissimus dorsi. Like something fallen off a pedestal in Thrace, Rambo surges, boils, say rather
ejaculates
through this warrior-fantasy, glowing with Vaselined pectorals, as one with The Lone Ranger, Superman or the cinema image of Bruce Lee; the National Rifle Association's own
Übermensch
; the wet dream of every king-cab-riding, deer-hunting, longing-to-be-macho American redneck, slugging away brew after brew at the drive-in, pounding the steering wheel and screaming himself hoarse as Zorro Rambo wipes away his country's shame at having picked a fight it couldn't win, against a tiny adversary, that left names like William Calley to haunt us on Veterans' Day.

A proper fantasy for examination here, Rambo walks through fusillades of machine-gun fire, belts of bullets wrapped around his forearm, impossibly firing something that looks like an M60E1 machine-gun with one hand; and he sustains, if I recall correctly, one minor flesh wound. Never does the weapon track up and to the right, as such ordnance is wont to do, defoliating every rubber tree and banyan in the vicinity. Never does the barrel seize up when overheated by Stallone's visually dramatic but utterly fanciful long bursts. Never do the massed volleys of heavy and light armament fire touch this impossible avenger, not even at point-blank range. But Rambo cleans clocks on every side, blowing the little yellow men into the water and through hooch walls as if they were springloaded.