Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 11

BERT: Yuh. Fried bread's nice.

Unless you have heard me do my absolutely hilarious Pinter parody, or have seen every Pinter play and film out of unconstrained admiration for the man's work-as have I-then the foregoing copy cannot possibly read well; nor should it, by all the laws of dramaturgy, play well onscreen. But it does. I cannot decipher the code; but the cadences work like a dray horse, pulling the plot and character development, the ever-tightening tension and emotional conflict, toward the goal of mesmerizing involvement that is Pinter's hallmark.

We have in this use of revivified language a sort of superimposed verbal continuum at once alien to our ear and hypnotically inviting. To say more, is to say less. It does work.

But if we use the special written language of Bradbury and Hemingway as examples, we see that such "special speaking" does not travel well. It bruises too easily.

Perhaps it is because of the reverence lavished on the material by the scenarists, who are made achingly aware of the fact that they are dealing with literature, that blinds them as they build in the flaws we perceive when the film is thrown up on the screen. Perhaps it is because real people in the real world don't usually speak in a kind of poetic scansion. Perhaps it is because we love the primary materials so much that no amount of adherence to source can satisfy us. But I don't think any of those hypotheses, singly or as a group, pink the core reason why neither Bradbury's nor Hemingway's arresting fictions ever became memorable films. When Rock Hudson or Rod Steiger or Oskar Werner mouth Bradburyisms such as: "Cora. Wouldn't it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress swishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don't drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan's Pier for a box supper and listen to the bra.s.s band. How about it? . . . If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-lined country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?"

or Gregory Peck or Ava Gardner carry on this sort of conversation from Hemingway: "Where did we stay in Paris?"

"At the Crillon. You know that."

"Why do I know that?"

"That's where we always stayed."

"No. Not always."

"There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there."

"Love is a dunghill. And I'm the c.o.c.k that gets on it to crow."

"If you have to go away, is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?

I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armor?"

what we get is the auditory equivalent of spinach. The actors invariably convey a sense of embarra.s.sment, the dialogue marches from their mouths like Prussian dragoons following Feldmarschall von Blucher's charge at Ligny, and we as audience either wince or giggle at the pomposity of what sounds like posturing.

This "special speaking" is one of the richest elements in Bradbury and Hemingway. It reads as inspired transliteration of the commonplace. But when spoken aloud, by performers whose chief aim is to convey a sense of verisimilitude, it becomes parody. (And that Bradbury and Hemingway have been parodied endlessly, by both high and low talents, only adds to their preeminence. They are sui generis for all the gibes.) The links between King and Bradbury and Hemingway in this respect seem to me to be the explanation why their work does not for good films make. That which links them is this: Like Harold Pinter and Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King are profoundly allegorical writers.

The four of them seem to be mimetic writers, but they aren't! They seem to be writing simply, uncomplicatedly, but they aren't! As with the dancing of Fred Astaire-which seems so loose and effortless and easy that even the most lumpfooted of us ought to be able to duplicate the moves-until we try it and fall on our faces-what these writers do is make the creation of High Art seem replicable.

The bare bones of their plots . . .

A sinister manservant manipulates the life of his employer to the point where their roles are reversed.

An ex-prizefighter is tracked down and killed by hired guns for an offense which is never codified.

A "fireman," whose job it is to burn books because they are seditious, becomes secretly enamored of the joys of reading.

A young girl with the latent telekinetic ability to start fires comes to maturity and lets loose her power vengefully.

. . . bare bones that have underlain a hundred different stories that differ from these only in the most minimally variant ways. The plots count for little. The stories are not wildly inventive. The sequence of events is not skull-cracking. It is the style in which they are written that gives them wing. They are memorable not because of the thin storylines, but because the manner in which they have been written is so compelling that we are drawn into the fictional universe and once there we are bound subjects of the master creator.

Each of these examples draws deeply from the well of myth and archetype. The collective unconscious calls to us and we go willingly where Hemingway and Bradbury and Pinter . . . and King . . . beckon us to follow.

Stephen King's books work as well as they do because he is writing more of shadow than of substance. He drills into the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid with the dialectical function of a modern American mythos, dealing with archetypal images from the pre-conscious or conscious that presage crises in our culture even as they become realities.

Like George Lucas, Stephen King has read Campbell's The Masks of G.o.d, and he knows the power of myth. He knows what makes us tremble. He knows about moonlight reflecting off the fangs. It isn't his plots that press against our chest, it is the impact of his allegory.

But those who bought for film translation 'Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine, "Children of the Corn" and Firestarter cannot read. For them, the "special speaking" of King's nightmares, the element that sets King's work so far above the general run of chiller fiction, is merely white noise. It is the first thing dropped when work begins on the script, when the scenarist "takes a meeting" to discuss what the producer or the studio wants delivered. What is left is the bare bones plot, the least part of what King has to offer. (Apart from the name Stephen King, which is what draws us to the theater.) And when the script is in work, the scenarist discovers that there isn't enough at hand to make either a coherent or an artful motion picture. So blood is added. Knives are added. Fangs are added. Special effects grotesqueries are added. But the characters have been dumbed-up, the tone has been lost; the mythic undercurrents have been dammed and the dialectical function has been rendered inoperative. What is left for us is bare bones, blood and cliche.

It is difficult to get Steve King to comment on such artsy-fartsy considerations. Like many other extraordinarily successful artists, he is consciously fearful of the spite and envy his preeminence engenders in critics, other writers, a fickle audience that just sits knitting with Mme. Defarge, waiting for the artist to show the tiniest edge of hubris. Suggest, as I did, to Steve King that Cujo is a gawdawful lump of indigestible grue, and he will respond, "I like it. It's just a movie that stands there and keeps punching."

How is the critic, angry at the crippling of each new King novel when it crutches onto the screen, to combat such remarks? By protecting himself in this way-and it is not for the critic to say whether King truly believes these things he says in defense of the butchers who serve up the b.l.o.o.d.y remnants that were once creditable novels-he unmans all rushes to his defense. Yet without such mounting of the barricades in his support, how can the situation be altered?

Take for instance Children of the Corn (New World Pictures). Here is a minor fable of frightfulness, a mere thirty pages in King's 1978 collection Night Shift; a one-punch short story whose weight rests on that most difficult of all themes to handle, little kids in mortal jeopardy. Barely enough there for a short film, much less a feature-length attempt.

How good is this recent adaptation of a King story? Los Angeles magazine began its review of Firestarter like so: "This latest in a seemingly endless chain of films made from Stephen King novels isn't the worst of the bunch, 'Children of the Corn' wins that t.i.tle hands down." That's how bad it is.

Within the first 3 minutes (by stopwatch) we see four people agonizingly die from poison, one man get his throat cut with a butcher knife, one man get his hand taken off with a meat slicer, a death by pruning hook, a death by sickle, a death by tanning knife . . . at least nine oncamera slaughters, maybe eleven (the intercuts are fastfastfast), and one woman murdered over the telephone, which we don't see, but hear. Stomach go whooops.

Utterly humorless, as ineptly directed as a film school freshman's cla.s.s project, acted with all the panache of a grope in the backseat of a VW, Children of the Corn features the same kind of "dream sequences" proffered as shtick by Landis in An American Werewolf in London, De Palma in Carrie and Dressed to Kill, and by even less talented of the directorial coterie aptly labeled (by Alain Resnais) "the wise guy smart alecks." These and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-had-all-been-a-bad-dream inserts, which in no way advance the plot of the film, are a new dodge by which Fritz Kiersch, Corn's director, and his contemporaries-bloodletters with viewfinders-slip in gratuitous scenes of horror and explicit SFX-enhanced carnage. This has become a trope when adapting King's novels to the screen, a filmic device abhorrent in the extreme not only because it is an abattoir subst.i.tute for the artful use of terror, but because it panders to the lowest, vilest tastes of an already debased audience.

It is a bit of cinematic shorthand developed by De Palma specifically for Carrie that now occurs with stultifying regularity in virtually all of the later movies made from King's books.

I submit this bogus technique is further evidence that, flensed of characterization and allegory, what the makers of these morbid exploitation films are left with does not suffice to create anything resembling the parent novel, however fudged for visual translation. And so fangs are added, eviscerations are added, sprayed blood is added; subtlety is excised, respect for the audience is excised, all restraint vanishes in an hysterical rush to make the empty and boring seem scintillant.

Children of the Corn is merely the latest validation of the theory; or as Cinefantastique said in its September 1984 issue: "King's ma.s.s-market fiction has inspired some momentous cinematic dreck, but Children of the Corn is a new low even by schlock standards."

Of the nine films that originated with Stephen King's writings, only three (in my view, of course, but now almost uniformly b.u.t.tressed by audience and media attention) have any resemblance in quality or content-not necessarily both in the same film-to the parent: Carrie, The Shining and The Dead Zone.

The first, because De Palma had not yet run totally amuck and the allegorical undertones were somewhat preserved by outstanding performances by Sissy s.p.a.cek and Piper Laurie.

The second, because it is the vision of Kubrick, always an intriguing way of seeing, even though it is no more King's The Shining than Orson Welles's The Trial was Kafka's dream.

(The sort of people who call Kubrick's version of King's The Shining "self-indulgent" are the same kind of people who think secular humanism is a religion, or that there is some arcane merit in astrology. If I hear "self-indulgent" used once more as a pejorative, violence will follow. Listen very carefully: what else is Art but self-indulgence?

(Only the blamming of rivets into Chrysler door panels escapes the denotation "self-indulgent." The Sistine Chapel ceiling is the artistic self-indulgence of Michelangelo; Moby-d.i.c.k was Melville's self-indulgence; sculptor Gutzon Borglum indulged himself by creating Mount Rushmore National Memorial; and bombing Pearl Harbor was the self-indulgence of j.a.pan's prime minister, Hideki Tojo. The former trio of artistic "self-indulgences" brought their creators fame and approbation; the latter "work of art," World War II, got its architect hanged as a war criminal. There is a lesson here.

(It seems somehow beyond the intellectual grasp of those who widely disseminate their opinions on cinema, that King's The Shining is not Kubrick's The Shining, any more than Kafka's The Trial is Orson Welles's The Trial; but all four of these creations of a superior, individual intellect bear the stamp of High Art. Kubrick is one of only seven real directors in the world. By that I mean superior beyond comparison. All the rest are craftspersons of greater or lesser merit, but simply not touched by the divine madness suffusing every frame of work by these seven. That to which Kubrick turns his hand becomes, despite your affection for the original, something different, something equally as great as the original. In some cases, greater: Capra's Lost Horizon beats out James Hilton's famous novel of the same name by a dozen light-years.

(Apart from Jack Nicholson making a meal of the sets and situation, foaming and frothing to a fare-thee-well, I am nothing less than nuts about Kubrick's film.) The third, because David Cronenberg as director is the only one of the field hands in this genre who seems artistically motivated; and because Christopher Walken as the protagonist is one of the quirkiest, most fascinating actors working today, and his portrayal of Johnny Smith is, simply put, mesmerizing.

But of Cujo's mindlessness, Christine's cheap tricks, Firestarter's crudeness, 'Salem's Lot's television ridiculousness, Children of the Corn's b.e.s.t.i.a.l tawdriness and even Steve's own Creepshow with its intentional comic book shallowness, nothing much positive can be said. It is the perversion of a solid body of work that serious readers of King, as well as serious movie lovers, must look upon with profound sadness.

We have had come among us in the person of Stephen King a writer of limitless gifts. Perhaps because Stephen himself has taken an att.i.tude of permissiveness toward those who pay him for the right to adopt his offspring, we are left with the choices of enjoying the written work for itself, and the necessity of ignoring everything on film . . . or of hoping that one day, in a better life, someone with more than a drooling l.u.s.t for the exploitation dollar attendant on Stephen King's name will perceive the potential cinematic riches pa.s.sim these special fantasies. There must be an honest man or woman out there who understands that King's books are about more than fangs and blood.

All it takes is an awareness of allegory, subtext, the parameters of the human condition . . . and reasonable family resemblance.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / December 1984 INSTALLMENT 5:.

In Which The Left Hand Giveth Praise And The Right Hand Sprayeth For Worms Of Evil

I have suffered for your sins, children. I have seen Buckaroo Banzai (20th Century Fox). So you don't have to. An unintelligible farrago of inaudible sound mix, bad whitefolks MTV video acting, blatant but hotly denied ripoff of the Doc Savage crew and ouevre spiced with swipes from Mike Moorc.o.c.k's Jerry Cornelius stories, a plot that probably makes sense only in Minkowski s.p.a.ce, six funny lines, four clever sight gags, and billions of dollars' worth of promotional hype such as Big Brother-style rallies at sf conventions-all intended to make this "an instant underground cult cla.s.sic."

Were you to fail to heed my warning, you might go to see this village idiot of a movie; and you might go back to see it three or four times more in an effort to unravel a storyline in which mindlessness reaches deification and in an effort to decode the garbled soundtrack; all in aid of gleaning some sense from a film you'll be told is "fresh and innovative."

But if you are thus foolhardy, you will find yourself at one with Brother Theodore's monologue about rats, in which he says: "You can train a rat. Yes, if you work for hours and days and months and years, you can train a rat. But when you're done, all you'll have is a trained rat!"

This has been a homiletic a.n.a.logy. G.o.d knows I've done all I can.

What Buckaroo Banzai pretends to be (and with the pretense brings new meaning to the word boredom), Repo Man (Universal) sure as h.e.l.l is. Cleverly constructed, freshly mounted, engagingly acted, bizarrely inveigling and, in the words of Pliny the Younger, sui generis. Ninety-two minutes of enthusiastically nihilistic anarchy.

This is a first feature for writer-director Alex c.o.x and as a virgin effort indicates arrival on the cinematic scene of a quirky, elitist (in the positive sense) intelligence worthy of our close attention. Through word-of-mouth prior to its initial release, I had been advised there was "something special" going on in Repo Man, and I shouldn't miss it. As I had not been as warm to Quadrophenia or Liquid Sky-"punk" films about which I'd heard raves-as I'd hoped to be, I didn't expect much from Repo Man. In fact, as a "control" element of viewing, I took along both a devotee of the music of Steve Reich (which music makes my headbone throb) and a Jewish American Princess. My thought was that these disparate world-views would provide insights into my own opinion. The overage new-waver burbled with joy, and the Beverly Hills materialist grew more and more bewildered. But when we emerged from the screening, both admitted the film refused to let go of their risibilities.

My Reichfreak contends Repo Man is about belief systems. My social b.u.t.terfly insists it's about people purposely alienating themselves from reality.

I think both of them have too much book-larnin'. This movie is about Otto, a spike-haired layabout who falls in with Bud, a car repossessor; falls in l.u.s.t with Leila, one of the happyface-wearing numbers of the Smiley cult who live by the tenets of a philosophy to be found in the book Dioretix: The New Science of the Mind; falls into trouble with the thuglike car thieves, the Rodriguez Brothers, with Agent Rogersz and her cadre of secret service bloodhounds, with his ex-buddies of the pink&purple hair set whose collective social conscience is best expressed by Duke, who says, "Let's go do some crimes," to which Archie responds, "Yeah, let's go order sushi and not pay," and falls into the middle of a situation in which the burned-out nuclear scientist J. Frank Parnell tries to stay ahead of all or some or none of the above who are trying to filch his '64 Chevy Malibu, in the trunk of which reside deadly aliens who can fry you to taco chips with a h.e.l.lish blast of light.

That's what it's about.

And get away from me with that strait jacket.

If for no other reason-and don't tell me the plot as outlined above doesn't make you go squishy all over-the acting by the inimitable Harry Dean Stanton as Bud, and Emilio Estevez as Otto makes this a don't-miss flick. Throughout my screening of the film I kept mumbling, "That kid playing Otto is a dead ringer for the young Martin Sheen, even the way he walks, the way he stands, jeez it's uncanny," until my maven of minimalist music thumped me and pointed out that Marty Sheen's real name is Estevez, and that Emilio is his kid. Oh.

Dozens of little touches in the movie provide a deranged superimposed reality that draws nothing but admiration: all the food is generic, including blue-striped cans that are simply labeled FOOD; Otto's family is mesmerized by TV evangelist Reverend Larry and his Honor Roll of the Chariots of Fire; no faintest touch of sentimentality is permitted onscreen distraction, as when Otto is about to fly off with the aliens and Leila screams, "But what about our relationship?" and Otto remains true to the tone of the film by replying, "f.u.c.k that!"

Repo Man, when first released, drew such confused reviews that Universal pulled it back quickly. But true madness cannot long be squelched by the mentality of accountants; and now this looney thing has been let loose again. Look around and find it. Unless you are one of those dismal unfortunates who thinks Jerry Lewis is funny, you are guaranteed a filmic experience that can only be compared, in terms of a good time, with watching Richard Nixon sweat on television.

Ghostbusters (Columbia), as most of you know, was the box-office smash of the summer. Good. It is more wonderful than one would have expected from the directorial paws of Ivan Reitman, source of Cannibal Girls, Animal House, National Lampoon's Vacation and Heavy Metal, among other cla.s.s acts.

But Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, Annie Potts and Dan Aykroyd all running amuck chasing demonic presences in what starts out to be an urbane yet c.o.c.keyed slapstick fantasy that smoothly turns into something Lovecraft might have scripted if he'd beaten the Man with the Scythe and lived on into the era of SFX, provide Reitman with such a gobbet of goodies that Ghostbusters emerges as one of those films you see again and again for mounting pleasure.

Had I not spent two columns on the Stephen King essay, and had I not been captured by extraterrestrials masquerading as Moonies, who spirited me away to their underground lair beneath Orem, Utah, where they tortured me with Naugahyde and hot fudge sundaes, thereby causing me to miss my deadline last issue (you don't think I was intentionally late, do you?)-I'd have had this review of Ghostbusters to you in time for you to have made an informed viewing decision, rather than just stumbling across it in the twelve hundred theaters where it was blockbooked through the hot months.

And you'd also have gotten my vituperative observations about an evil little item called Gremlins. But that will have to wait till next time, when We Who Have Gone Blind From Watching Awful Films On Your Behalf return with the startling conclusion of (wait for it) Worms of Evil!

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / January 1985 INSTALLMENT 6:.

In Which We Learn What Is Worse Than Finding A Worm of Evil In The Apple

Some of us are better than the rest of you. Oh, yes we are. One who is better than the rest of you is a guy who lives in Somerville, Ma.s.sachusetts, name of John G. Maguire. And John G. is better than most of you because not only won't he support corrupt films by buying a ticket to something he's been told overandoverandover is The One Not To Miss!!!, but he can smell the puke smell made by the Worms of Evil and he protects his kids from such movies.

Not in the Falwell m.o. that entails the burning of books and the regimenting of thought and the stifling of imagination, but with a sense of responsibility toward the lives he helped bring into the world. That used to be called being a good father.

And that makes John G. better than lots of you who went, like the pod-people you are, right into the burrows of the Worms of Evil.

You were warned, not just twice by me, but by dozens of other film critics all over America, who advised you in clear, precise language that could not be misunderstood: stay away from Gremlins (Warner Bros.); it is a corrupt thing, vicious at its core; meanspirited and likely to cause harm to your moral sense. Specifically you were warned: keep little kids away from this thing. Don't equate the frights it can cause youthful, plastic minds with the tolerable terror you cherish from your first viewing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when you were an impressionable tot. This ain't the same frisson. But you went, anyhow, didn't you?

And that makes John G. Maguire leagues better than the rest of you. Better than those of you I've seen in theaters, late at night, last show, with a kid half-dozing in the seat beside you, watching violent movies and teaching your kid to applaud wildly when some stunt double gets blown apart by a shotgun blast, when the Trans Am of the bad guy gets bulldozed over a cliff and tumbles and tumbles and impacts on the hillside and disintegrates into a flaming h.e.l.l flower. I've seen you, and I know Falwell's got you in his pocket, with your viciousness and your sanctimoniousness. And I dote on the goodness of John G. Maguire.

How do I know about John G. Maguire? I know about him because he wrote to this magazine between the time of my first warning in this column (October 1984) and when I sat down to write this critique; and he said, "I appreciated your warning-off on Gremlins. I haven't seen the movie. I read a promo about it in Newsweek and decided not to take my kids to it: too vicious. Any movie that seems too vicious for me is too much for my kids. I'm old-fashioned like that."

Good for you, John G. No pod-person you.

But as for the rest of you, those of you who have happily contributed to Gremlins doing more than $143,000,000 worth of box-office in the first fifteen and a half weeks of its theatrical release . . . as you sat there watching the ripping and rending . . . did it cross your mind that Gremlins might be less significant as a cinematic event than it is as a grotesque breach of trust with all the kids who hear Spielberg and think E.T.? And if you can desist for a moment from the kneejerk animosity this attack on your bad taste boils up in you, could you give the barest consideration to the concept that one definition of evil is the manipulation of human emotions to support and excuse the excesses of dishonest art?

Understand: gremlins are a mythic construct toward which I am particularly well-disposed. Few of you out there will have heard of a 1943 Walt Disney production, Victory Through Air Power, but that film contained a marvelous episode t.i.tled "The Gremlins" (which, with artwork based on the animation cels, appeared as a children's book from Random House that year; a children's book written by a certain Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl: I still own that book). It was my first exposure to the concept of gremlins, and even at the age of nine, which was what I was in 1943, 1 resonated to the idea. Dinosaurs, lost lands, the t.i.tanic, gremlins.

Gremlins, like Kilroy, were the creation of a modern world needing modern mythology. I didn't understand (nor had I, in fact, ever heard of) the dialectical function, Joseph Campbell's cosmological symbolism, Jungian archetypal images or the universal psychic structure called The Trickster. But I knowed gremlins was real neat. Me loved they puckish pranks. Not just as Disney fifinellas and widgets, but as a character on a radio program I listened to every Sat.u.r.day morning: Smilin' Ed McConnell's Buster Brown Gang, featuring Froggy the Gremlin.

No one who remembers the famous phrase, "Plunk your magic Tw.a.n.ger, Froggy!" could suspect this reviewer of anything but an overwhelmingly positive att.i.tude as I sat there in the pre-release screening of Gremlins.

Further: while I am of a mixed mind about the Spielberg canon, having known him since his days on the Universal TV payroll, I would have to say that I'm solidly in his camp. (For the record-and you'll understand in a moment why I go into such minutiae-I admire the following Spielberg films: Duel, Sugarland Express, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. I'm not even as great a critic of 1941 as the rest of the world seems to be; it had its whacky moments and I think Steve need not be too bothered that it didn't turn out as he'd intended. My favorite film from the Spielberg factory is, oddly enough, an a.s.sociational item, as is Gremlins: the vastly underrated and strangely unsung Poltergeist, which I view as a Tobe Hooper film, influenced by Spielberg. On the other side of the ledger I confess to a dislike of much of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Twilight Zone-The Movie.) Thus, my remarks here about Gremlins should not be construed as part of a pattern of denigrating what it is Steven Spielberg turns out. I offer the foregoing as credential in aid of establishing biases.

Thus lighthearted, I jigged a little jog in my seat as the lights dimmed, and with growing horror became as one with the many film critics-from Time and Newsweek to Gahan Wilson in The Twilight Zone magazine-who have perceived Gremlins as a film utterly without restraint, exhibiting a streak of malign viciousness that I now suggest has been a part of Spielberg's oeuvre from the first . . . subverted and camouflaged heretofore, but now, with Spielberg's ascendancy to the throne of power and freedom in Hollywood, freed from its Pandora's Box and permitted free rein.

Gremlins suffers from the dreaded Jerry Lewis Syndrome: it vacillates between a disingenuous homeliness and an egomaniacal nastiness. It is by turns so bewilderingly schizoid that one reels from the shifts, cloyingly cut and cuddly-so arch, so coy, so aspartameously endearing that Tonstant Viewer fwowed up-and monstrously evil in such a way that one spike speaks to all crucifixions; embodying in the gremlins the most loathsome traits of human beings without a compensatory balance of positive human values. It is all the specious arguments you've ever heard as to why the human race should be nuked till it glows, rolled into one vile paradigm and served up with an aw-shucks, toe-scuffling, ain't-we-cute anthropomorphism so contemptible one leaves the theater wanting to get one's soul Martinized.

We have been convinced, through hundreds of interviews and a.n.a.lyses of Spielberg's motivations, that he makes the kind of films he wants to see, the kind he liked when he was a kid. Thus we are led to believe that what we're getting, expensively turned out, made with the highest level of cinematic expertise and most courant SFX state of the art, are films dreamt by an adult who sees with the eyes of a child. But if this is so, then there is surely a twisted adolescent intelligence at work in this picture. Because, as one of the stars of the film, Hoyt Axton, has said: "Gremlins is E.T. with teeth."

Fangs is more accurate.

And so, we trust Steven Spielberg. Unlike Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released at nearly the same time as Gremlins and bearing some sidebar attention (later in this essay) to the thesis at hand, which is obviously a film intended for the mentality of Huck Finn boys, no matter how old they may be, Gremlins has been aimed straight at little kids. The same wide-eyed tots who wept when E.T. gasped his last. A trusting, innocent audience that cannot discriminate between Lucas films and Spielberg films-so umbilically linked are these two old chums-and so, when it sees "Steven Spielberg presents Gremlins" it thinks Star Wars; it thinks E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial; it thinks Reese's Pieces (or M&Ms); it thinks Oh boy!

But the mind of Steven Spielberg is not that of a child grown older but not grown-up. It is a mind, from the evidence pa.s.sim this film, of an adult who has grown to maturity with a subliminal freightload of cynicism and meanspirited animus. Cloaked in the gee-whiz of hommages to B sci-fi flicks and simplistic Capra paeans to a small town America that truly existed only in the wish-fulfillment of Hollywood scenarists, Gremlins comes to that tot audience with comfy images of lovable aliens, sweetfaced urchins, incompetent parents and stories that come right in the end. All set? Now scare the h.e.l.l out of those kids! Suck them in, con them with what went before, and then open that corroded Pandora's Box. Let the Worms of Evil eat their fill!

An adult who sees with the eyes of a child? I think not. More probably an adult who retains the meanness of kids in the schoolyard, waiting to strike back for the inequities of getting teased, and being sent to bed without any supper, and having to do as one is told because. Let me not venture too deeply into cheap, vest-pocket psychoa.n.a.lysis. I don't know what is in Steven Spielberg's mind; all I know is what I saw on the screen. And what I saw, apparently what many others also saw, was a grotesque breach of trust with that tot audience.

I heard children scream and cry in Gremlins.

I spoke to the manager of a theater in Columbus, Ohio who told me he has never before had so many instances of people demanding their money back. I have my own loathing to reconcile.

One can rend this film on many levels, apart from the ethical. What are we to say about the remarkable similarity between the mogwai stage of gremlin development and artist Michael Whelan's conception of Piper's Little Fuzzys? (One tries to be even-handed when crediting the "influences" on Lucas and Spielberg. One credits a lot to hommage-until the moment comes with De Palma films, for instance, when one chokes on the phrase "homage to Hitchc.o.c.k" and simply shouts, "Thief!" One tries to overlook memories of Edd Cartier's hokas when one sees ewoks. Yet one cannot indefinitely put from mind the many, many press items about plagiarism suits directed against this most successful of director-entrepreneurs. One remembers Richard Matheson's short story and Twilight Zone teleplay, "Little Girl Lost," and wonders why Matheson never raised a question about Poltergeist . . . until one remembers that Matheson-hardly a member of the Spielberg coterie-was hired to write Spielberg's subsequent production of Twilight Zone-The Movie. And one smiles to oneself at the possibility that this gentle, vastly talented writer may have escaped the toils of a decade-long legal imbroglio while yet preserving his integrity. Shadows darken the mythic Spielberg kingdom.) And what of those endlessly distracting hommages that tremble in the corners of every jam-packed frame? (For director Joe Dante has absorbed Spielberg's patented technique of packing every shot as if it were your Granny's bric-a-brac cabinet.) Polly Holliday stalks down the street and the background music, as well as her demeanor, reminds us of Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz; a poster half-seen on a wall is for Agar Pest Control, and we're supposed to chuckle at the reference to John Agar's co-starring role in the 1955 Tarantula; at a gadgeteer's convention we see the time machine from the 1960 George Pal adaptation of Wells's cla.s.sic, we cut away, and when we cut back . . . it's vanished a la 1979's Time After Time; a legend on a door tells us this is the Office of Dr. Moreau; the marquee of a theater, seen fleetingly as the camera pans, announces Watch the Skies (the original t.i.tle intended for Close Encounters and the last line of the original version of The Thing) and A Boy's Life (the working t.i.tle for E.T The Extra-Terrestrial), and we are not supposed to snort at the filmmaker paying homage to himself, fer chrissakes; as Hoyt Axton makes a phone call a man in a hat stands behind him making notes, and the man is the film's composer, Jerry Goldsmith . . . we cut away . . . and when we cut back Goldsmith has been replaced by Robby the Robot, wearing Goldsmith's hat, speaking precisely the lines he spake in Forbidden Planet. But it goes on and on and on, world without end, amen. This is no longer the mild amus.e.m.e.nts, the inside jokes of those who love film and its history. It is intrusive. It keeps one's attention partially distracted from the emptiness of soul up there on the screen where the action is hysterical. Gremlins, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and as many other Lucas-Spielberg products as you care to recall, is a showoff's movie.

Spielberg and Lucas and their proteges are scabby-kneed, snotty-nose neighborhood urchins scaring the c.r.a.p out of their elders by walking a plank across a building excavation. They are so busy letting us know how clever they are, that they counterproductively shatter the best, first rule of film direction: don't make the direction obvious.

As Frank Capra, who is hommaged to exhaustion in Gremlins, proved: the most artful direction is that which warms the audience into thinking the film was not directed at all, that it's just happening as they watch.

Further, it is possible to savage Gremlins on the level of character and motivation. The boy and girl who play the leads are impossible! The boy is supposed to be one of those apple-cheeked virgins Capra used as icons, but he's old enough to work in a bank-though he lives in his parents' attic in a room filled with the toys of a ten-year-old-and his girlfriend is Ms. Phoebe Cates, who has managed to shed her clothes in every film I've seen in which she has a speaking part. (And though I'll be accused of something or other, I suppose we're expected to comment on Ms. Cates's firm flesh, otherwise why are we gifted with such regular peeks at it?) Ms. Cates is also supposed to be an apple-cheeked virgin, yet she is privileged to deliver the speech that is possibly the moment of worst taste in the film, a verbal recounting of that old Gahan Wilson cartoon about daddy dressed as Santa Claus and suffocating in the chimney on Christmas Eve. I submit that this iniquitous moment encapsulates the meanspiritedness of the film: taking the Capra Christmas motif and turning it into a toxic waste dump.