Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 14

"Wait there for Wright's call back," he said. I thanked him, hung up, and relayed the chain of command to Booker, who seemed vastly relieved.

Ten minutes later (Variety and The Reporter had arrived) the phone rang, Booker picked it up, listened, said okay, and hung up. He turned to me, shook his head, and said, "Frank says you can't see the picture."

I left.

But if that was what happened to a reviewer from something as important to Universal as USA Today, do you begin to understand how, before the film ever opened, the critical film community was made to feel nervous, negative and nasty about Dune?

On Wednesday, December 12th, 1984-just two days before the rest of the world gained access to Dune after fifteen tortuous years-I and a carefully-filtered audience of tv pundits, film critics, magazine reviewers and hangers-on were seated in the Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Theater on the Universal City Studios lot, and I listened to all the idle chat around me. It's bad. It's dead. It's confusing. It's gonna die. Dune's in, Dune's out.

At 8:30 PM they rolled the film.

When it ended, I took my notes, raced back to my office and wrote the review. The next morning, the 13th, I dictated the entire review via long-distance telephony to one of USA Today's copyeditors. The review ran in conjunction with a critique by Jack Mathews on Friday the 14th, the day Dune opened.

Here, reprinted with permission of USA Today, is-at long last-what I originally wrote, with everything that was cut for s.p.a.ce reinstated. This is what I thought of Dune, and this is what I said for "the nation's newspaper" and an audience of 1.3 million readers who would see my words before they rushed toward or away from the nearest theater showing Dune.

Only the demon specter of George Lucas looms between Dune and millions in box-office profits.

After seven years of having its senses jackhammered by witless s.p.a.ce adventures like Star Wars and its endless clones, the American filmgoing audience may have lost the ability to appreciate a movie demanding an attention-span greater than that required for a Burt Reynolds car crash. But for those whose brains have not been turned to guava jelly by special effects and cartoon plots, Dune is an epic adventure as far ahead in this cinematic genre as 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey was in 1968.

It is the Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation of science fiction films. Filled with ideas and art-directed with a wonderful baroque look, Dune is a complex symphony of mystic grandeur. In its way as compellingly surreal as something Bunuel or Fellini might conjure up, this faithful translation of the enormously popular Frank Herbert novel offers the wonder of secrets within secrets; a congeries of Chinese puzzle boxes opening into visual and intellectual realms the world of cinema has never before revealed.

Simply put, Dune is filled with magic! And like an encounter with a wizard, the film stuns normal perceptions, demanding a sense of wonder and close attention.

Scene after scene presents fresh images, cosmic concepts, plot twists and innovations for which standard filmviewing att.i.tudes are wholly inadequate. And therein may lie the essence of the nightmare for director David Lynch, producer Raffaella De Laurentiis, and Universal Studios.

The very strengths of Dune contain the seeds of its possible failure in 1984. And it is a casebook study of why most science fiction films of recent memory have been so soph.o.m.oric. If one goes to see a western, no explanation is needed to set up the background. See a man in a Stetson with a bandanna over his face, lying in wait with a Winchester, and you know the Wells Fargo stagecoach will be coming down that road in a moment. See a patient being wheeled into a hospital on a gurney, and you know that in mere seconds a n.o.ble physician will be performing a tracheotomy. Boy and girl meet cute, and you know love and laughs are on the way.

But science fiction postulates worlds that might be, but have never been. So everything has to be explained. And with a devious, imaginative story involving four planets, warring Imperial households, alien technology and deeply mystical concepts about our need for messiahs . . . even the smallest details must be explicated. Can an audience corrupted by the soundtrack of an explosion in the airless vacuum of deep s.p.a.ce retool its viewing habits to appreciate a film of such complexity?

There are trade-offs that may make it more difficult. In exchange for scope and grandeur, the enormity of vast forces in conflict, the color and fascination of alien places we have never seen, Dune sacrifices that which science fiction has too often jettisoned: characters whose hearts we know, humor and wit, insights into the human condition. For all its heroes who are competent and heroic beyond measure, for all its villains so malefic that they make Darth Vader no more ominous than a mugger, Dune has no Rocky or Chariots of Fire sprinters to root for. Because we did not need to have the Civil War explained to us, Gone with the Wind could concentrate on the travails of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

Yet Dune proffers unusual, some might say greater, treasures. For a generation of kids who've grown up with word processers and s.p.a.ce shuttles and Isaac Asimov on the bestseller lists, an sf film with a brain. For moviegoers treated to the moral and ethical bankruptcy of slasher films and Porky's, a film that deals with concepts of home and courage, loyalty and love of family, nationalism and the wonders of the universe.

If the adults who have reviewed this film with confusion are wrong, and more than fifty years of the popularity of serious science fiction has created an audience capable of the joys of the intellectual mind-leap, then Dune will reach and uplift its intended viewers. But if the audience has been too far debased with simplistic twaddle, then like 2001, this film will have to wait for the judgment of time.

The first week Dune made $6 million.

Beverly Hills Cop, which premiered December 3rd, in its three-day opening pulled in $15,214,805. The five-day total: ever so close to $20 million.

In five weeks, by which time it had nearly vanished from the movie screens of America, Dune ama.s.sed a total of $27.4 million. In five weeks Beverly Hills Cop did more than $122 million in box-office revenues.

As I write this, Dune still cost $4041 million to produce, with (an estimate) of between $710 million for prints and advertising. In its first 110 days of release Beverly Hills Cop has made one hundred and ninety-one million, eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and fifteen dollars. And change.

It is safe to say Dune was a disaster. Because not one of you was satisfied.

And I submit that you were dissatisfied before you ever got to your theater seat, because the priests of the Black Tower, from Frank Price and Frank Wright on down, quaffed deeply from the cup of derangement that is the brew of choice at Universal. They threw the film community into panic, the stock market into flux, the waiting millions who had hungered for Dune for a decade and a half into confusion. And they destroyed what I view as a film of considerable worth. h.e.l.l, you read my review; I'm on record.

Apparently, only two of the many critics writing for national publications derived sufficient joy from Dune to overcome the bad vibes to give the film a positive review. One was David Ansen in Newsweek. The other one has just said he's on the record. And nothing could more ironically keynote the symbiotic relationship I described earlier than that Universal, in the person of Frank Wright, after doing everything in his power to scare me off and tilt me toward negativity, exploited my review in major newspaper advertising. With a rueful shake of my head I perceive this to be a demonstration of the kind of chutzpah one a.s.sociates with embezzlers running for public office.

And Frank Herbert suggests that the phrase "Dune was a disaster" be amended by one word. Dune was a created disaster. Of the five hours of Dune committed to film, only two hours and seventeen minutes made it to the screen. Exhibitors like a flick that runs two hours seventeen, rather than five: they can show it more often in a day. They can empty the theater more often, they can pour in a fresh audience more often, they can sell more c.o.ke and popcorn and tooth-rot. Maybe De Laurentiis dad&daughter can cut together a tv miniseries with the outtakes. Maybe they can do a theatrical "special edition" a la Close Encounters. But it won't be done for the videoca.s.settes (say, in two versions, such as was effected by Warner Home Video when they recently released both the emasculated theatrical version and the full director's cut of Sergio Leone's wonderful Once Upon a Time in America). It won't happen-at least not in the foreseeable future-because they've already announced an early release for Dune sometime this summer: two hours seventeen. So Frank Herbert's suggested revision tastes in no way of sour grapes. It was a created disaster. Slash out nearly three-fifths of a film for the convenience of cineplex operators trying to push Mounds Bars, and what you offer to the public is a quadriplegic commanded to dance the gavotte.

Overseas, where Frank Price's writ don't run, Dune is breaking box-office records in West Germany, Italy, Austria, South Africa and France. In England, in its third week, Dune's take was up by 39%, the sort of increase in attendance generally credited to word-of-mouth promotion. Opening night in Paris saw queues of more than 40,000 filmgoers.

Dune will no doubt earn out in foreign revenues, cable and ca.s.sette sales, and may already have turned a profit just from merchandising. One never knows. But in the logbook of film history, Dune is a major disaster. Heaven's Gate, Cleopatra, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Ryan's Daughter, Dr. Doolittle, Sorcerer . . . and Dune.

And here is a grace note for you. Something I got from Frank Herbert for use in the review, for which there was no room, so it was put aside. I reveal it here (Frank a.s.sures me) for the first time: the precise moment in which Frank Herbert conceived the grand scheme that became Dune: "I had long been fascinated by the messianic impulse in human society; our need to follow a charismatic leader, from Jesus to John Kennedy. Men who ought to have a warning sign on their forehead reminding us that they, like us, are subject to human frailties. I wanted to write a meaningful book on the subject, but though I had the theme, I couldn't find just the right setting. Then, early in the 1950s, I was doing a piece on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's project controlling dunes on the Oregon coast, near Florence. I was in a Cessna 150 looking down on that rolling expanse of sand, and suddenly I made the connection between deserts and the rise of Messiahs in such barren lands, and in an instant I had my canvas, the planet Arrakis, called Dune."

Herbert was the G.o.d-emperor of Dune, and De Laurentiis was the great sandworm he rode to the big screen. But in that game of G.o.ds and businessmen the rules change at the whim of the players; and not even the G.o.d-emperor of Dune could triumph over the derangement of the priests of the fabled Black Tower.

This has been a true story.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1985 INSTALLMENT 11:.

In Which Nothing Terribly Profound Occurs

Let's see, now. Didn't I promise to say a few words about 2010 (MGM)? That was a while ago. Put on the side-counter warmer till I'd wrung myself dry in re Dune, by the way of explanation. Seems somehow moot now. But, as I said I'd say, I'll say so now.

2010 is a great deal smarter and more high-minded than the first reviews would have had you believe. For instance, a critic named Michael Ventura appraised the film in the L.A. Weekly under the headline 2010: A COMIC BOOK IS NOT A POEM. He didn't consign the movie to h.e.l.l, but he said it wasn't the lyric icon Kubrick gave us; said he had trouble remembering the sequence of scenes; said it was devoid of that quality we might call "divine." Well, that's true.

And granted that once you get beyond the mystical trappings the plot is considerably thinner than 2001 (with which 2010 has been, and perhaps should be, inevitably compared), and the "philosophy" is homespun, it nonetheless seems to me that the most salient praise one can direct toward 2010 is that the film has a brain. It is about something.

In a year redolent with smarm-the clone grotesqueries of the s.e.xually corrupt Hardbodies and Risky Business's ethically bankrupt popularity with filmgoers of all ages-a movie that attempts to say the universe does still contain wonders and intellectual uplift must be treasured. That ain't, as we say in the world of comestibles, chopped liver (a food of my people).

As one who has gone on record at obnoxious length about the inadequacies of director Peter Hyams, I hear the glinkety of your eyebrows lifting when I report that if there be substantive inadequacies in 2010, they cannot be levied against Hyams. He has directed with cool composure and high craft. And as one who has been friend to Arthur Clarke for more than thirty years, again I perceive furgling at my belief that the things-wrong with this film stem directly from Arthur's novel, a book I suggest never should have been written.

Ask Budrys to deal with that aspect of the matter. He's the book evaluator; I'm just the joe who goes blind sitting in dark rooms on your behalf.

For me, a sequel to something as remarkable as 2001 must not only answer the cosmic questions joyously left unanswered in the original, it must take me into equally as extrapolative places. 2010 attempts the former, and I'd rather have been left with my own suppositions. What was proffered as solution to the puzzle seemed rinkytink, commonplace, unmemorable.

Yet feeling the oppression of the sequel's inadequacies is very likely because one has the unrelenting drive to believe that all this ma.s.sive machinery-$27 million in production and another $24 million for prints and advertising? that's what I think it was-must have been set in motion for some Deep Purpose; and when the payoff comes, the flashing lights and terraforming scintillate not in the glare of the memory of that star child floating toward Earth at the conclusion of A s.p.a.ce Odyssey.

There are nice, subtle, futuristic touches that the alert viewer remembers-one player's tie, collar and watch-Arthur feeding the pigeons from a park bench-but one comes away from 2010 with two impressions: First, that it is a peculiarly earthbound film, returning from the wonder and mystery of that ebon slab floating in s.p.a.ce to the mundane (by comparison) concerns of loved ones left behind, and terrestrial political squabbles. Literally, a bringdown.

Second, that Peter Hyams pulled off something of a small miracle. Given the book as basis, a story at best mildly innervating; and given the necessity to make the movie based solely on the Everest Principle ("because it's there"); and given that MGM's then-chief operating officer Frank Yablans needed a major vehicle to save his a.s.s at the studio so the film was rushed into production; and given that Hyams at his top-point efficiency isn't Kubrick after a sleepless week; and given that the expectations of those who deify 2001 can never be fulfilled; it is something of a small miracle that 2010 is as intelligent, as inventive, as handsome as it is.

That it makes sense at all, given the above, is much to the director's credit. It earns him respect and a stay on the note of foreclosure that has haunted his previous films.

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 advis.e.m.e.nt 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 s.p.a.ce.

It is the latest book to be ill.u.s.trated 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-d.i.c.k (1981), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Gla.s.s (1982 & 1983) or Huckleberry Finn (1984), yours is an empty life, devoid of beauty or meaning.

Barry Moser's ill.u.s.trations are exquisite beyond the telling. He soars at an alt.i.tude where only such wondrous birds of pa.s.sage as Lynd Ward and Rockwell Kent have tasted the wind. The pa.s.sion, 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 ill.u.s.trates Mary Wollstonecraft Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein. Again in a Pennyroyal Edition designed by the artist, this 255 page large-size (8 ? 12?) interpretation of the 1818 text is the best $29.50 you will spend this year. Fifty-two chilling and unforgettable ill.u.s.trations 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 INSTALLMENT 12:.

In Which Several Things Are Held Up To The Light . . . Not A Brain In Sight

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 p.i.s.s 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, b.a.l.l.s 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 cla.s.srooms of Charles Manson High School, signaling the disengorgement of post-p.u.b.escent 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 l.u.s.ting 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 appet.i.te for gore, counterfeit emotion, macho patriotism, repet.i.tion 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 d.a.m.ned 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 t.i.tle 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 s.h.i.t 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 p.a.w.ns 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 chickens.h.i.t 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 a.s.sonance-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 a.s.sonance is only marginally likely, while it strikes him as possible that Morrell gave his vengeful fury the name Rambo as a h.o.m.ophone 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es 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 a.s.sociation's own ubermensch; 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.sed 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.

One wonders-if one wonders at all-if one isn't emptyheaded-how we managed to lose a war to these inept gooks or slopes or d.i.n.ks or whatever the h.e.l.l we're supposed to call Third World Peoples Arrayed Against Us: they can't hit a bull in the a.s.s with a scoop-shovel, but our Sylvester needn't even aim to take out two or three of them with each round. Sort of the way John Wayne and Gene Autry used to snap off a shot over the shoulder from a galloping horse, and three firewater-crazed Comanches would tumble off their mounts, dragging the horses with them. (One wonders why we never beat the Seminoles. h.e.l.l, they didn't even have horses. Used to ride alligators, as I understand it.) But this is all part of the fantasy.

As unreal as Starman or The Thing (remake version), and no less a misuse of the fantasy idiom for dubious ends.

Rambo Etc. is making megabucks this summer, and it is an example of empty-headedness difficult to deny. I admit to being swept up in the breakneck action, no n.o.bler than the drive-in dolt whose camper bears the b.u.mper sticker MY WIFE YES.

MY DOG MAYBE.

MY GUN NEVER.

and who will certainly go for the twisted "philosophy" that the only thing Rambo wants for himself, after rescuing the POWs and shooting down a latest-model Russian gunship, is that "America love us as much as we love America." I admit to the visceral punch of clever filmmaking, and I warn you that it is all artifice, as manipulative as Rocky and as slick as a De Palma knife-kill flick . . . and as detestable. It is, of course, these smoothyguts versions of otherwise-dismissible genre films, no more important than cartoons, conjured to go through us like merde through a merganser, wherein lies the danger. Emptyhead is as emptyhead does. Unthinking, all receptor and no intellect, we sit unprotected before the tsunami of counterfeit emotion, turned into empty vessels waiting to be filled by cheap bravado, bathos and sonic stimuli, becoming mere stipules for the walking vegetation of a vengeance parable.

That it is a man-eating plant never seems to occur to the brew-swillers or the teenage shamblers. But then, isn't that the essence of emptyheadedness?

Nowhere nearly as vile as Rambo Etc. but even more emptyheaded is the latest James Bond film, what I wearily perceive to be the eleven hundredth film in the endless series. (When the human race goes to the stars, there will surely be only three things of sufficient obstinacy-of-existence, from all that our species has produced, that will go with us: the little plastic beads that fall out of UPS packages no matter how you struggle to contain them; James Bond films; and Swedish meatb.a.l.l.s.) The menace this time is an uncomfortable-looking Christopher Walken, who should have known better. Oddjob this time is rock singer Grace Jones, who looks incredible (and has always, it seems to me, looked a lot better than she sings), but who ain't even a close second for deadliness to the late Lotte Lenya as SMERSH's liquidator, Rosa Klebb, in From Russia with Love. And as the nubbin from which the film grows is a minor Ian Fleming short story originally published in Playboy (under the more grammatical t.i.tle "From a View to a Kill"), what pa.s.ses for plot is the now-h.o.a.ry Bond jiggery-pokery, with gags no more innovative or memorable than those to be found in the last half dozen. This film is pure Grub Street (look up the reference), and the very model of brainless. Running, jumping and standing still, with Roger Moore looking more exhausted and threadbare than ever before. It's a shame, really. Moore seems a right decent chap when he's being interviewed; takes it all with the proper modic.u.m of unselfconscious parody; very little of the Colonel Blimp about him; the sort of elegant gentleman one would like to invite over for an evening of billiards and Mexican coatepec. And if you never saw him in a little adventure film called ffolkes, you might continue to believe, incorrectly, that he can't act with any depth of emotion.

But Bond goes on and on, yet another fantasy superman, nattier (G.o.d knows) than Rambo, and quarts less oily; but no more a part of the mimetic universe than Tarzan, Conan or Sir Launcelot. Emptyheaded filmmaking long-since canonized and as exquisite an example of how preserved like a fly in amber these things become when they hit the rut of formula.

I go to them on the Everest Principle: "because it's there." But I blush to tell you I fell asleep three times.

And I've saved the remaining pair of emptyheaded summer films with which you'll be tempted for last, because I have some small personal stake in them. And because I don't think they deserve to be savaged as Rambo Etc. demanded.

The first is The Black Cauldron (Walt Disney) and I'm saddened to have to report that it is utterly and completely emptyheaded. The tip-off, I guess, is that nowhere in the credits will one find a listing for an author. More than ten years in the making, at a cost of more than twenty-five million dollars, and described by its producer as "the most ambitious animated production since Pinocchio," this is the 25th full-length animated feature from the Disney Studios; and it is a waste of time.

Pre-screening scuttleb.u.t.t had it that the animation techniques were the most extraordinary since the heyday of the Nine Old Men who worked with Walt on Snow White and Pinocchio and Fantasia. Scuttleb.u.t.t had it that since the leavetaking of Don Bluth and his cohorts, and the deaths or retirements of the remaining Old Men, it had become necessary for the new crew of young turk animators to rediscover the old tricks or invent new ones equally as impressive. That was the scuttleb.u.t.t and if, like me, you got wind of such rumors and, like me, you hitched your hopes to that sticking-place, you will be dismayed beyond the containing of such pain. I left the studio screening with a leaden heart. Jessie Horsting and Howard Green suggest I was revved too high. That there was no way my expectations could have been honored.

Well, maybe. Who knows?