Harlan Ellison's Watching (61 page)

I nodded. "Can you read it?"

He got cold and angry. "Yeah. I can, if I want to." I didn't push it.

But when I returned to my chair, with most of them still holding the books as if they didn't know what to do with such alien objects, one of them yelled across the room, "You write movies?"

"Yeah. And the stuff you see on teevee," I said, thankful for
any
point of entry.

And here's where the digression ties in.

Another kid yelled, "You write that
Friday the Thirteen, Part Two?
"

"No," I said, smiling, not knowing what was about to transpire, "I don't like movies where people get stuck with icepicks. I don't even go to that kind of—"

(What an asshole, Ellison! Don't just put in the time and make the best of a bum deal, don't just try to keep them distracted for an hour, be a hotshot: give 'em a moral! Jeezus, what a nitwit, Ellison! Go get your brain lubed.)

I may still have been speaking, but they didn't hear it. They were now yelling back and forth to one another. They were, for the first time, animated, interested, excited. And here's what they were saying:

"Oh, yeah, man, didju see that part where the woman gets the axe in her back?"

"Yeah, that was cool. She wuz crawlin' 'cross the floor, an' the guy was cut-tin' on her!"

"That was okay, but you see that one where the guy stuck that bitch through the mouth with the power drill an' the guy who's comin' to save her sees the drill come down through the ceiling upstairs?!!!"

"Oooh,
yeah!
That was cool . . . but didju see . . . "

How, I wondered insanely, could he remember which part movie of the
Friday the 13th
series it had been?

I tried shouting into that maelstrom of voices. Almost every kid in the room was enthusiastically recounting his favorite slaughter scene to some kid sitting in the circle. And their voices rose and rose in the cage, and they got into it, warmed it in their mouths, relishing every nuance, recounting every cinematic trick that had been used to hook them—squirting eyeballs, faces ripped away in bloody strips, limbs torn off but still quivering, the stroke of the muscled arm as the razor came away festooned. And on, and on, and on . . .

When I left Central Juvie, the recreation director Ford, having had an evening of recreation, took pleasure in my stunned condition. The nice white boy from showbiz looked as if he'd been gutted. He thanked me prettily for donating my valuable oh so valuable time to these deserving unfortunates; and he smiled straight and hard and with obvious amusement into my look of horror; and I stumbled out into the lightless, empty parking lot, got into my car, dropped my keys, fumbled in the darkness for them, and got out of there as if the demons of hell were after me.

Not for the first time did I cast back in memory to the time Bob Heinlein described to me the horror he had felt when he'd learned that Charlie Manson adored
Stranger in a Strange Land
, thought of it as his bible, and had named his child Valentine Michael Smith. But for the first time I
knew
how Bob had felt. For the first time, in all the times I had had that intellectual discussion with myself and others about the responsibility of what a writer writes, was I frozen at the point of knowledge that yes, maybe, yes, what we write has a demonstrable effect on
them
.

Don't ask me, please, to identify "them." I mean the
them
who go to see larger-than-life-size mayhem on the silver screen and think of those fantasies of gore as templates for reality.

These films that teenagers go to see so avidly. These films that make box-office millions from ticket sales to teenagers. These films that John D. Payne of Canton, Illinois tells me "his age-group" does not condone, if I read the psychometric messages correctly.

These secret icons. These guilty pleasures.

No, I'm not talking about
those
guilty pleasures. At least, I don't think I am. What I'm talking about, is secretly loving the films of Ken Russell, the way you secretly love Baby Ruth bars and
Gilligan's Island
reruns, and won't cop to such love in open court. I think what I'm talking about is admiring and secretly loving the violence and ruthlessness in Ken Russell films, brought to these pages now on the release of Russell's latest film,
Gothic
(Virgin Vision and Vestron Pictures).

Ken Russell. Where do I begin . . .

Once I wrote that, in my view, there were only seven genius-level directors currently working in film. Just seven. That is,
Directors
. Unmistakable talents of the highest order of Art. I named them: Altman, Coppola, Fellini, Kurosawa, Resnais, Kubrick and (then alive) Buñuel. I hastened to add that this list was not intended to denigrate the work of other directors, merely that I saw all the others as
craftspersons
. As creative intellects of greater or lesser ability—from, say, Woody Allen and David Cronenberg and Ron Howard above, to Brian De Palma and Frank Perry post-1974 and Alan Rudolph (always) below. (Not to mention Richard Land, Mark L. Lester and Joe Zito, from whom all is dross and chaff.)

I fudged the list. I was reluctant to endanger the credibility of that list of seven by including Ken Russell. But if my definition of
directorial genius
is the one by which my opinions stand or fall, then Russell makes that short-list, despite his lunacy and colossal pratfalls, his mind-boggling gaffes and infantile obsessions.

(Definition: the genius director is one whose work bears little or no resonance of any predecessor; whose work is so determinedly
his
that even if you walk in during the middle of the film, you can look up and say, "Fellini" or "Kurosawa"; whose work is never safe, never calm, never predictable; whose work never elicits the phrase, as one leaves the theater, "That was a nice film." Examples:
Providence; Paths of Glory; Dersu Uzala; The Godfather, Part Two; La Strada; McCabe and Mrs. Miller; Los Olvidados
.)

There is no other Fellini, no other Kubrick, no other Kurosawa. Try to think of one, Try to fit any others into all the points of that compass. Some come close. Some may yet reach that Apennine headiness of individuality. Most will, at best, only get as staggeringly superlative as Capra or Ford or Von Stroheim or Wilder at their breathtaking best. That is not, as you can see, chopped liver.

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 sophomoric . . . no, hell, 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 bugfuck. 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 titillate 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 Noble Ferman Editors; if you remained, it was free choice.)

In
The Music Lovers
, a bizarre film biography of Pê'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 fuck "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 sex object for her mother's gain. She contracts syphilis, goes completely out of her head, and is sent to the institution. (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 damned. 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 shores of Lac Leman in which the opium addicted poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the company of his lover, Mary Godwin, 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 Shelley'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 sex and terror and frenetic submission to the moist and gagging secret fears that encapsulates for dramatic effect, all that transpired during that legendary encounter.