Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 20

I was talking to Woody Allen the other afternoon, as we sat together in a bathyscaphe at the bottom of the Cayman Trench, trying to decide if marshmallow toppings on our hot fudge sundaes was Us or Non-Us, and he looked at me out of the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, and he asked me, "How come they've never given me a Hugo award? Whaddaya think, anti-Semitism?"

Startled? Well, just you bet I was. It took me a while to recover, and while so doing I kinda fumfuh'd and a.s.sured him, "It's not because you're a Jew. They're forever giving Hugos to Jews. They gave one just a while ago to Orson Scott Card, and he's a Jew. They even gave me one last year, and I'm sure they know I'm Jewish. Of course, they keep nominating Silverberg and then give the award to anybody else in the category, so maybe it has something to do with sounding, as if you're Jewish. We could get Sam Moskowitz to do a paper on it."

Then I shrugged and said, "What the h.e.l.l do you expect from such schmucks? They gave a Hugo to that piece of drippy dreck, Back to the Future, and ignored Brazil. They didn't even put The Purple Rose of Cairo on the final ballot. Go figure."

Woody looked forlorn. I was getting a tot forlorn myself. "But I've done so much fantasy and science fiction," he said. There was a lamentable Weltschmerz suffusing his words, a gray threnody undertoning his precise phraseology. "Sleeper was pure sf. So was Zelig. And what about that flying saucer at the end of Stardust Memories? Or the fantasy subtext of A Midsummer Night's s.e.x Comedy; or the sperm fantasy segment in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About s.e.x (But Etcetera)? I bet if L. Ron Hubbard had written Purple Rose of Cairo they'd have given it a Hugo . . . I mean, it is sort of a hip, updated version of Typewriter in the Sky. Pa.s.s the marshmallow topping."

Well, after we surfaced-a bit too rapidly and Woody got the bends and had to be admitted to Flower & Fifth Avenue Hospital-I decided to put some megawattage of thought into this apparent unfairness, prompted by Woody's last words to me as he was schlepped away on the gurney: "Do you think they'll even notice that my new film, Radio Days (Orion Pictures), is a loving tribute to the sense of wonder?"

So I thunk about it some heavy. One doesn't like to think s/he is wasting his/her time on a species that watches wrestling on television-staged bogus "feuds" everyone knows are lousy ch.o.r.eography neither The Supremes nor The Temptations would tolerate, among grown men who, if they dressed that way in the city streets, would not only make Mr. Blackwell's Worst-Dressed List every year, but might be netted and taken in for psychiatric evaluation-voluntarily buys Barry Manilow, Prince and Beastie Boys alb.u.ms; bans forty-five textbooks in Alabama because they contain humanistic values, on the bonkers theory that "humanism" is a religion; complains because it isn't permitted to f.u.c.k up other people's lungs with cigarette smoke on the Me-First grounds that their civil rights are being infringed; and gives Hugos to dopey flicks like Back to the Future while ignoring Brazil and The Purple Rose of Cairo.

I mean, if you don't mind slapstick burping from alien critters, then I suppose Enemy Mine is a great film; but by the same judgment, so is Porky's.

And I was ready to pack it in, throw up my hands as well as my lunch, and just say to h.e.l.l with it, give the whole inhabited parking lot to the c.o.c.kroaches!

But suddenly I remembered this great quote from John Simon, a critic most of you can't stand because he's smarter than you and I and George Bush, en ma.s.se, en grande tenue, en ca.s.serole; and just because he had the honesty once to point out that Liza Minnelli has about as much talent as a rug-beater and looks a whole lot like a plucked chicken, you all get down on his case and think him a meanie. Well, I'm here to tell you he's no meaner than I. And so . . . he said this thing that gave me pause: "The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the const.i.tuents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed n.o.bility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate."

The thought of n.o.bility, as manifested in the art and craft of Woody Allen, came to the rescue. In a week during which I sat through the entertaining but outstandingly mindless Lethal Weapon; Heat, the latest Burt Reynolds gawdawfuller, made even more unpalatable by having been lugubriously scripted by William Goldman from his dreary novel (a situation that distresses me more than I can say, for one of my all-time favorite writers has been Bill Goldman, whose fiction-with intermittent echoes of the books of grandeur-The Temple of Gold, The Thing of It Is, No Way to Treat a Lady, Soldier in the Rain, The Silent Gondoliers, and Marathon Man-for the past eleven years has seemed to me more and more slapdash, more and more written as way-station incarnation on the way to becoming screenplays); and Mannequin, a soph.o.m.oric "youth-oriented" ripoff of One Touch of Venus, Pygmalion and John Collier's "Evening Primrose," well, in such a week the thought of Woody Allen somehow keeps me from taking the gas pipe, saves the world from being consigned to the cucarachas.

But I think of Woody lying there in the hospital, losing all fight to live as he becomes more forlorn in the contemplation that the fans who vote the Hugo awards will not understand that Radio Days is a wondrous paean to the joys of imagination. Is the c.o.c.kroach creator equivalent of Woody waiting to be born out there in some damp sewer? Will the insects have more love for their special visionaries? On some day a mere dozen million years from now, will the Academy of Orthopterous Arts & Sciences convey to that splendid Periplaneta americana, all six legs' worth of him, the entomological equivalent of an Oscar, while insect fandom bestows the Jiminy on Larva Trek IV?

My mind whirls.

Can I be the only reader of fantastic literature to perceive that Woody Allen has been, and continues to be, one of our best filmic interpreters of that je ne sais quoi we call "the sense of wonder"? Surely not. Surely some other observer of the flickering screen image has stumbled on this obvious truth!

But I search in vain through all the treatises on Woody, and I find no support for my theory. Nowhere outside the specialist semiotics of cinema lucubration (do I speak their langwidge or don't I!?) a.n.a.lyzing The Terminator till one could retch; nowhere in the totality of non-fantasy incunabula. They talk of his ambivalence between roots as a Brooklyn Jew and foliage as an adult who wants to make it with goyishe cheerleaders. They prate of his influences; from Wittgenstein to Ingmar Bergman. They totemize him as the germinal influence in raising the nerd to hunk status. But nowhere does anyone simply say, "This guy has a for-real science-fictional-fantasy outlook."

So in the spirit of unalloyed n.o.bility, I bring to the wandering attention of the genre audience that has poured millions into the pockets of Spielberg and Lucas, the advis.e.m.e.nt that Radio Days is a miraculous fantasy of imagination, drenched in the sense of wonder. A film about those of us who learned the universe is filled with magic through the medium of voices drifting to us in the night. The days of radio listening, the days before television turned us into wombats who will tolerate the cacophony of John Madden's voice, the empty Barbie-ism of Vanna White, the sleaze of telemogrified Judith Krantz potboilers; the days of adventure and suspense and drama that we conjured in our own minds, without recourse to the production budgets of businessmen in charge of an art-form; the days of The Green Hornet and Jack Armstrong and Buck Rogers and Sam Spade; the days when listening to the radio was an integral part of one's education, rather than an induced zombieism, an interruption of life, sitting goggle-eyed before that box that permits of no imaginative partic.i.p.ation from the drowsing dreamer.

Radio Days, a kind of c.o.c.keyed and utterly dear variation on the multiple-plot-thread structure Bunuel pioneered in The Phantom of Liberty (what Leonard Maltin calls "a dreamlike comedy of irony, composed of surreal, randomly connected anecdotes"); it is narrated by Woody, word-painting a portrait of life in America in the early Forties, when one's imagination could encompa.s.s a wealthy playboy whose alter ego could cloud men's minds so they could not see him, a temple of vampires through which a Jack, Doc and Reggie would wander in constant jeopardy, and a "Masked Avenger" whom we did not need to see in the flesh of Wallace Shawn to understand the nature of Good and Evil. In Radio Days-absolutely dripping with scenes that could make a paving stone roar with laughter-Woody Allen has created a fantasy structure of affection and memory that no one over the age of forty dare miss at peril of forgetting how wonderful was that time of youth, a film that no one under the age of forty dare miss at peril of being misled into accepting the squalor of television as the best of all possible mediums.

I have told you nothing much of the plot. That's not my job. I wouldn't steal an instant of Radio Days from your joy of discovery. But in the name of unalloyed n.o.bility I beg you to do yourself a favor . . . go see it. Don't wait for the ca.s.sette . . . go see it. See it today, this very evening, and then go see it next week, to prove to yourself that the rush you got was not an aberration.

And send a get-well card to Woody. Tell him Harlan sent you.

Woody, that brave little beast (as Moorc.o.c.k once called your humble columnist), was the fauna (or is it faunum?) (what the h.e.l.l is the singular of fauna?) (who the h.e.l.l am I?) (it only hurts when I screw the electrodes too tightly, doctor) who saved all of us from the c.o.c.kroaches, but to b.u.t.tress my new faith in the human race you also have to thank the flora called Audrey. A bloodsucking, flesh-nibbling, bada.s.s-talking, monomaniacal plant that dominates the spectacularly enjoyable Little Shop of Horrors (Warner Brothers).

I, like you, enjoyed the old Roger Gorman film of 1960; I, like you, applauded the 1982 off-Broadway musical version; but neither predisposition to be charmed provided one one-millionth of the pleasure I derived from this film. Ellen Greene, Rick Moranis, Vincent Gardenia and a Greek Chorus of (Supremes-) manques simply wow the spats off you. And one may now add to the W. C. Fields list of those with whom a smart actor should never work-dogs and children-talking plants. Because as sublimely cavorting as the people are, Audrey d.a.m.ned near steals the film. Howard Ashman's screenplay adds an almost believable sf rationale to the absolutely believable fantasy of it all, and gives Audrey a raison d'etre for fly trap behavior that was absent in the Gorman original; a conceit that enhances the story immeasurably.

Flora and fauna. Came they hence to save y'all from paying property taxes to the termites, t.i.thes to the c.o.c.kroaches, dues to the potato bugs. And I'm feeling so up about a human race that includes Woody Allen and Howard Ashman, if the bugs try to claim dominion I'm prepared to introduce them to Audrey.

ANCILLARY MATTERS: The follow-up essay on new technology of the Dr. Frankenstein style is in the works. Joe Dante is busy editing his new film, so we haven't had a chance yet to go do the Sam Spadework. Be patient. But until that time, let us stop referring to the depredations visited on The Maltese Falcon, et al., as "colorization." Colorization is the trademarked process and the name of the company that does the butchery. What it is, folks, is simply coloring. Apart from resisting the academese of what R. Mitch.e.l.l calls "the educationists," we must not permit the coloring thugs to get us thinking their way at all. If we begin by using their heavy-breathing circ.u.mlocutions (like calling rebel insurgents "freedom fighters" and the napalming of villages as "Operation Sunshine"), then too soon we will not perceive that when Reagan's current mouthpiece says, "Yesterday's statements are inoperative," it is simply doublespeak for, "What he told you yesterday was a lie," and then, finally, they may be able to convince us that "colorization" is something n.o.bler than parvenus with computer Crayolas. So eschew "colorization," good readers. Call it what it is, call it coloring. Call it merde.

Also in work is the long study of David Cronenberg's films. I've been busy writing a pilot film for NBC and Roger Gorman, completing The Last Dangerous Visions, putting together a volume of film essays that include these columns, handing in The Harlan Ellison Hornbook to Jack Chalker, who's been waiting more than ten years for it, and in general trying to clear away all my debts to people like Stuart Schiff, who has been patient to the point of beatification. So please don't nuhdz me; when it gets written, it'll get written.

And finally, I must bring to your attention volume two of a work already noted in these columns.

Bill Warren, who knows more than any person in his or her right mind ought to know about American science fiction films of the fifties, gave us volume one of Keep Watching the Skies! in 1982. He has now lost complete control of the beast, and volume two, at 839 pages with a price tag of $39.95, has escaped to terrorize a placid world and . . . it's alive!

If you missed volume one-a mere piddly 467 pages covering hundreds of films released between 1950 and 1957-a staggering compendium of wise, witty, weird essays on everything from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars to Zontar the Thing from Venus, then fer pete's sake don't let volume two slip past you.

Yes, these books are pricey. (Of course, if you buy them separately they're $39.95 each, but if you buy the duo, it's only $65.00.) But, on my oath as a methane-breathing ent.i.ty, this is a buck well spent. Warren doesn't merely give you the plot synopsis and the cast and the rest of the creative team, he doesn't merely put the film into historical and cinematic context, he doesn't merely describe the advertising and promotion and effect the film had on America as a whole or the sf world in part, he also lavishes each essay with bits of minutiae, arcane knowledge, bizarre connections and berserk influences, sidebar comments about the personal lives of the stars and writers and directors and producers. But on the plus side he does it with an absolutely charming affection for even the worst dog, the most inept pig, the lamest dromedary of a stinkeroo. Bill Warren really and truly loves this stuff, and his honest obsession cannot be resisted.

Volume two covers 1958 through 1962, with appendixes that list full cast and credits, order of release of the films, announced (but not produced) t.i.tles, a bibliography, an addendum and an index to the more hundreds of movies that Bill has sat through from beginning to end so we don't have to.

These are the sort of books one keeps to hand in the bathroom. As those of you who read understand, that is high compliment indeed. The potty is the last private place for a reader in the world. No one bothers you. Unless you live in large Italian family, which is another sociological can of worms entirely. But you can't be in there too long, or someone will think you're enjoying yourself in ways you're not supposed to, so you have to have reading material that can be enjoyed in medium-short bursts. Time is okay, and a book of Fredric Brown's short stories; comic books work well, and The National Review (because no one can read it for very long without throwing it across the toilet into the tub). Which is to say, Keep Watching the Skies is made up of delicious morsels that can be enjoyed over a long period of time. At peace, and with pleasure.

If your bookstore has trouble ordering them, suggest they contact McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers; Box 611; Jefferson, North Carolina 28640. Pony up the sixty-five bucks for the pair. I do not think you will hate me too much for this recommendation.

And tell 'em Woody sent you.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / July 1987 INSTALLMENT 25:.

In Which The Specter At The Banquet Takes A Healthy Swig From The Flagon With The Dragon, Or Maybe The Chalice From The Palace

Let us speak of guilty pleasures, and of outre nights at the cinema. Of windows nailed shut in the soul, and of dreadful dreams we would pay never to have again. Of winds that blow out of our skulls, carrying with them the sounds of sparrows singing in the eaves of madhouses. Of chocolate decadence, sleek limbs, cheap adventure novels, people we ought not to have anything to do with, and the reflection off the blade.

When I rise at six every morning, and pad into the kitchen naked and still warm from the bed where my wife lies till a decent hour, to begin building my first great mug of Mexican Coatapec or Guatemala Antigua, the first thing I do is turn on the radio to KNX, L.A.'s CBS outlet. And as I spoon in the nutmeg and cardamon, the mortar-and-pestle-ground chocolate from El Popular in East Chicago, Indiana . . . I listen to the doings of my species. I listen to tales from the night before: a fourteen-year-old boy gunned down by vatos locos as he walked home from a basketball game; another dead black woman found in a dumpster, possibly the latest victim of the uncatchable South Side Killer; a disgruntled electrician who had been fired by a computer company, who returned with a pump shotgun and blew three night shift workers into pieces; a bomb thrown into a crowded bus station in Colombo, Sri Lanka, by Tamil separatists one week after a hundred men, women and children were machine-gunned to death on a rural bus: another 156 dead; another fourteen-year-old boy shoots a truck driver on a bet by a playmate; in Soweto township, South Africa, a grenade thrown into a group of police trainees on a parade ground, shredding the face of a young black man.

These are not guilty pleasures of which we speak here.

These are the manifestations of the amateur sporting events my species has enjoyed for at least the last million years. There is nothing secret about these pleasures. They are as openly trumpeted as home run statistics. They are the cold wind that blows from windows in the soul, whose nails have been prised loose, the sash thrown open wide.

The guilty pleasure of violence that intrigues us. Draughts from the flagon with the dragon, filled with the opiate of the human race. The brew that is true.

One is told that if one wishes to survive a rattlesnake's bite, one should imbibe incrementally larger doses of rattler venom, proceeding from soupcon to spoonfuls, to build up a tolerance that results in immunity when the snake strikes. If that is so, then why do we not grow inured to violence? Why must we always have more, and more imaginative, cinematic depictions of slaughter? Do I hear a demur from Canton, Illinois? From teenager John D. Payne, who wrote the editor of this magazine urging him to drop my little essays because I'm always b.u.mrapping "his age-group (those between thirteen and nineteen)" which slavers after rip&rend flicks like turkey vultures after carrion? (That's the species that forks out the eyeb.a.l.l.s of the carca.s.s first.) I presume I'm getting these psychometric readings from Johnny D. because everyone in "his age-group" in Canton, Illinois puts in a minimum of forty hours a week doing community service, belongs to the 4-H Club, eschews Bud Light and Maui Wowie, and the police force in Canton, Illinois had to be reduced to one septuagenarian on a Schwinn because of lack of youthful indiscretions. Do I hear another wail of pain for a savaged segment of the species? Or is it possible that the age-group that includes Johnny D., the group for whom knife-kill flicks and Spring Break movies are made because that is the group that spends its newspaper route and ch.o.r.e money to see such films, is an age-group that does not consider films of excessive mad violence a guilty pleasure, but an openly-stated staple of its intellectual (?) diet?

There is a critique of an important new film somewhere in this essay; but let me run one of my little digressions on you . . . as lead-in to that critique. By way of offering Johnny D. and all of his clean-scrubbed, G.o.d-fearing Skippy age-group in Canton, Illinois some data that may persuade them their Frank Capra-like town must be a singular, an anomalous Valhalla, free of the horrors that afflict the rest of the nation. And the digression is this: On Wednesday, March 27, 1985, at about four in the afternoon, I drove off the CBS Studio Center lot where we'd been filming The Twilight Zone-one sort of world in which I live from time to time-and entered the real twilight zone. I had been asked (as it turned out, I'd been conned) to speak to the inmates of Central Juvenile Hall. Anybody under eighteen who had committed a crime in Los Angeles serious enough to have drawn time inside, was to be my audience. About seven hundred boys, I'd been told by the "recreation director," name of Ford. It seemed weird to me . . . to be asked to come and lecture kids that age . . . for the most part hardcases convicted of everything from shoplifting to aggravated a.s.sault to manslaughter. It had been years since I'd worked with juvenile delinquents, and though I'd spoken at joints where the population had been adults pulling hard time, this was a situation that somehow didn't pa.r.s.e.

Central Juvie, as they call it, is located at the a.s.s-end of nowhere on Eastlake Avenue down in the center of the old city. It is like every other grand slam I've ever entered-big, square, squat and ominous-as much iron and concrete as you'd ever want to be inside-and though Ford was pleasant enough, I soon realized I'd been jobbed by one of the kids working as trusty for him. This kid, unlike all the others I encountered that evening, had been remanded for boosting thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment; a kid from an upper-cla.s.s family in the posh Pacific Palisades section of L.A. He was a con man of the first order, and he had been reading my books, and had decided that meeting me would be a nice break in his otherwise boring routine. So he'd lied when he'd called me, telling me that he was an a.s.sistant recreation director; he'd lied when he'd told me that the staff had asked him to contact me as part of their "recreation" program; he'd lied when he'd told me the kids were big fans of my work and were anxious to hear what I might have to say about this'n'that.

But I was in it before I figured out that I'd been hustled. (Remember: your brain never outgrows its need to have games run on it.) I had imagined it would be one session of talking to the few inmates who gave a d.a.m.n that a live human being had come in to take up the slack of their empty hours, but I soon found out that it would be three separate encounters. The older kids were a.s.sembled at one time, the younger at another, and a third off-the-cuff presentation after I'd had dinner with them. Jail food is no better now than it was years ago when I'd been compelled to eat it.

All went fairly well through the first two meetings. There were mostly trusties at the dinner thing. And the younger kids in the second get-together responded well enough to anecdotes about old gang days in Brooklyn and running away from home and staying smart enough to avoid people who'd skin you . . . the kind of bulls.h.i.t a fifty-year-old man hopes won't bore a ten-year-old kid serving time for bludgeoning an eighty-year-old woman for her social security money and food stamps. I don't fool myself that I was of any value beyond distraction of the same sort that could be provided by watching a mouse work on a slice of Wonder Bread. All I wanted to accomplish-after I got hip to what was really happening-was to recount enough anecdotes not to bore the a.s.s off them. It went fairly well.

Then came the session for the older boys who had been fed on the second shift, who had been given the head 'em up, move 'em out treatment through the showers, and who had been ordered to attend the evening's festivities. Under the direction of guards with billy clubs-evident but not used-seventy or so teenaged boys were herded into a large day room with chairs set up around the perimeter. My chair was in the center of the ring.

They looked at me as if I'd come from Mars. Or Beverly Hills. The latter no more alien than the former to street kids from Watts and the barrio. I confess to trepidation: only twice, in all the times I have been inside the joint as a visitor, have I felt fear. Once, on a journey to Death Row at San Quentin (about which I've written elsewhere) . . . and at Central Juvie that evening, surrounded by kids as cold and mean as any I've ever been around. These were children who had killed, raped, set fires that incinerated whole families; who had been in pachuco street gangs since they could walk, who had been heavy dopers since they could swallow, who had discovered just how crummy the world can be for those the city pretends don't exist. (Not knee-jerk Liberalism, only pragmatic observation.) Few of them could read anything beyond the level of comic books, all of them came with a freightload of anger and distrust that could be physically felt. They sat there, under the gaze of the guards, waiting and watching this Martian from Beverly Hills.

I'd sent on ahead, earlier that week, a carton of paperbacks. Fifty mint copies of Memos from Purgatory, a book I'd written about gangs, and about being in jail. So now, seeing the veil that hung between me and my "audience," I asked one of the guards if the books had been given to the kids. (Hoping, I suppose, that the reality of holding a book in one's hands would lend some credibility to the person sitting in front of them.) All the boys looked at one of the guards, a man who seemed to be in charge. He looked chagrined for a moment, then muttered that the box had been kept in the office. I got the immediate message that those books had been picked over by the staff, and if the occasion presented itself to reward one of the inmates, a paperback book might be liberated from the cache.

I said, "Well, I'll tell you what: let's haul that box out and we'll pa.s.s around some books so these guys know I'm at least what I say I am."

There was a moment's hesitation. The guard was clearly not overjoyed with my suggestion. But there wasn't much he could do about it. Not in front of seventy pairs of eyes watching to see where the control was going to come to rest.

He nodded to the guard nearest the door, and he left. In a few minutes the box had been shlepped in, and set at my feet. It had been opened. Ten or fifteen copies were gone. I asked the boy nearest me to a.s.sist, and we handed out as many of the books as remained. I gave them a few minutes to examine the artifacts, and then the weirdness that prompts this digression began.

"Hey, man," one of the kids said, turning the book over and over in his hands, "what is that?"

I thought he was kidding. "It's a book. I wrote it."

"No it ain't," he said.

"Like h.e.l.l,"' I said. "It's my book . . . I wrote it."

"How do I know that?"

"Because it's got my name on the front cover, bigger than the t.i.tle."

"The what?"

"The t.i.tle. The name of the book."

"Where's that?"

I realized at that point that he wasn't hosing me. He had no idea what a t.i.tle was, and maybe couldn't even read it-or my name-if he did understand which was which.

I got up and walked across the big circle to him. The others watched, still holding their copies as if they were plates of something wet and slippery they'd been ordered to eat. I leaned over the kid and pointed to my name. "See that. 'Harlan Ellison.' That's me."

"How come?"

"Because I wrote it."

"What'cha mean, you wrote it? You wrote this?" And his ringer pointed to the letters that made up my name above the t.i.tle. It took me a moment to understand that he thought I'd been saying I'd written those two words. "No," I said, very carefully, riffling the pages of the book he held, "I wrote all of this. Every word in here."

"Get outta town!" he said, and I could see other boys in their chairs also riffling the pages, as if they'd never examined a book this close up in their lives. He didn't believe me.

"I'm not kidding." I said. "This's what I do for a living. I write books and movies and tv."

He looked at me with the look that says you got to open the sack before I'll believe there's a cat in there. "How do I know that's you?"

I turned the book over. My picture was on the back cover. That should do it. "That's me," I said.

He looked closely at me, hovering over him, then he looked at the photo again. "No, it ain't."

Kafka had programmed the evening. "Sure it is," I said, "look at it . . . that's me . . . can't you see it?"

"No it ain't," he said. "This guy ain't wearin' no gla.s.ses."

Miguel De Unamuno once wrote: "In order to attain the impossible one must attempt the absurd."

I took off my gla.s.ses. "They took that picture of me about five years ago," I said. "It's me. Look close." He looked, and looked back, and looked at the photo again; and reluctantly he decided I wasn't lying to make myself a big man. Then he riffled the pages again. "You wrote all this in here?"

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 a.s.shole, Ellison! Don't just put in the time and make the best of a b.u.m 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s, faces ripped away in b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s...o...b..z 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 h.e.l.l 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) Bunuel. 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 G.o.dfather, 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 compa.s.s. 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.