The Essential Ellison Part 119

" Three Faces of Fear," Cinema, March 1966 Our journey is nearly over; our look at this potent manifestation of Iai almost done.

It' s been a long journey, and no doubt many of you have discovered a few unexpected surprises in where it took us- some ideas and images and points of view that were often far from what was expected, perhaps even far from what was wanted.

We have a few more steps to go, but take heart. If you have read this far- whatever the force and form of your reactions-you have pa.s.sed a curious test and already know what your reward is. If you have read fairly; noticed Harlan' s commitment as storyteller, essayist, critic, editor, public voice- the rich flow of ideas and images and conviction harnessed to a vital task- then you understand, too, the dilemma facing such a writer.

In the Reed translation of the Berlin Papyrus 3024, we see how the hour of spiritual transformation arrives for the individual in whom the Rebel has manifested itself. That is at the heart of the problem. For the artist must reach beyond the transformation, beyond the vision and the drive he has experienced, and sell the idea to others. He must show, display, enact what has been perceived- render it, package it so it is accessible.

This is where Iai' s battle really begins, for here in the public expression lies the reason why Hypatia was murdered, why Giordono Bruno went to the stake, why there is censure and threat and oppression.

And then, too, there is the world itself- caught in flux as ever, encompa.s.sing both the guiding past and the questionable future. What we and the years have to judge is the effectiveness of anyone voice like Harlan' s. It is one thing to speak of a liberation from the darkness of the past and the darkness of the future, quite another to succeed at it. There have been so many other Rebels, so many honest, committed, sometimes extraordinarily gifted folk who never managed to be heard, who never got to measure their times, who were daunted or went under, who were broken or even lost their lives.

The more we consider Harlan' s position, the more we should marvel at how widely his voice has been heard.

There lies cause for real optimism.

The six pieces reprinted here show us in turn the compa.s.sion in that voice; the courage, the self-examination, the disgust, the stridency; finally the liberation; these many voices are all one voice, Harlan' s voice, as he demonstrates the necessity to take a stand, a position, to be one' s own person.

" The Thick Red Moment" (1982) began as Harlan' s revulsion at excessive, gratuitous screen violence and the embrace of that violence by contemporary audiences. His examination of " knife-kill" or " splatter" films and the reasons for their popularity becomes, in the end, an indictment of cowardice: emotional, moral, intellectual.

" The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge" (1978) sprang from Harlan' s outrage at his own involvement with a venal building contractor. But even this power fantasy of revenge (a fantasy which, oddly enough, appeared in that hardest of science fiction magazines, a.n.a.log) recognizes that no one lives in a vacuum, that the ripples of a single event never quite stop, that one must be careful what one wishes for.

" Driving in the Spikes" (1983) is Harlan' s manual for dealing with injustice: be your own Zorro, because chances are no one will do it for you. Like most of Harlan' s serious work it is shot through with humor, but the barbs are still there, under the surface.

An Edge in My Voice: " Installment 55" (1982), not surprisingly, is Harlan' s favorite of all his columns in the series. Not only does the Author do his best to prevent a fellow American from becoming just another statistic, simply another crazy, one more interesting story for the evening news, he works at keeping Norman Mayer a person who believed he had something important to say and did it in the only way he thought would be heard. As Harlan says in " With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole," " You should know names."

The Streets: " Installment 1" (1990) is the first of Harlan' s columns for Buzz magazine and appeared in its debut issue. A scathing diatribe against what' s wrong with America as occasioned by the opening of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library & Birthplace at Yorba Linda in Greater Los Angeles, it caused rather a substantial uproar when it was first published.

" Xenogenesis" (1990) was originally presented as a Guest of Honor speech at Westercon 37, Portland, Oregon, in 1984, then published twice in rapid succession in 1990 in the expanded form you see here. Because of the potentially controversial nature of the essay, Harlan had editors Jessica Horsting and Gardner Dozois authenticate the originals of all doc.u.ments quoted.

In these pieces, indeed throughout this book, Harlan uses the darkness and the light. He works with contrast and chiaroscuro, with whatever is needed to throw things into relief. Fantasy and truth. Intermingled.

And as he cautioned us earlier, if our world becomes bereft of artists who genuinely care about their craft and the ends to which that craft is applied, where will we go to keep our thoughts free, to find new concepts that will help us to see more than the darkness?

Such artists are often our best Rebels, some of our best repositories for Iai- not just as a vital private voice but as a courageously outspoken public one. And Harlan would be the first to remind us that the artist is not the only source of this voice. The purity of inspiration and imagination always favors such a figure, but the abuses and temptations and compromises are just as real as the blessings.

So we must look to our Rebels, whether they are artists or scientists or social workers, journalists or statesmen or shopkeepers, from whichever direction they come to us. We must seek out and recognize the ones who do, who see, who care enough, those who are " original both in content and form" or who work to present an old truth in a new exciting way. If they seem trustworthy, we must hear them out, for they have the courage to put themselves on the line.

We do not have to love them, but we must not lose them.

" The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust."

Introduction to The City on the Edge of Forever, SIX SCIENCE FICTION PLAYS, edited by Roger Elwood, Washington Square Press, 1976 The Thick Red Moment Once upon a time not too long ago I was married to a young woman whose every waking moment was underlain by a preoccupation with thanatopsis.

Perhaps it was only Weltschmerz; but I ruminate about her occasionally, and I' m more and more inclined to believe it was genuine thanatopsis.

I won' t make you go to the dictionary. Weltschmerz is one of those words that sums up in German what would take paragraphs to ill.u.s.trate in English. It means sorrow which one feels and accepts as his/her necessary portion in life; sentimental pessimism; literally, world-pain. Thanatopsis comes from the Greek personification of death, Thanatos. Like thanatophobia, it is a view or contemplation of death that transcends mere mortal awareness that we all come to an end in darkness.

I lived with her for a year, and was married to her for somewhat less than another year; and on November 20th, 1976, I sent her away and divorced her when I finally realized, for reasons I will not go into here, that I could not trust her. It was a culmination of a chain of events that I number among the most debilitating in my variegated life.

One month earlier, on October 8th, 1976, my mother died, after a long and dehumanizing illness. She had spent too long on the machines that kept her alive in the biological sense, but which could not bring her back from the condition of vegetable thing she had become.

She lay in the hospital bed, having become a cyborg.

Half-human, half-machine...extruding tubes...as one with the ohm and the kilowatt...without tears or smiles...having no need to brush her teeth in the morning, or a magazine to help her sleep at night. I touched her face and she did not know it. I put one of my tears on her cheek and it did not move.

And so, finally, it came to the end of the story, came to final moments when someone had to make the decision to kick out the plug. Someone made that decision.

Those ashen months of 1976, for those and other reasons, were a terrible time for me. Yet as barren of sunlight and joy as those days were, I never shared the world-pain or the absorption with thanatopsis my ex-wife had known. She would often say to me, " Why bother? What does it all mean? What' s the point of living?" I would wither a little inside, because no argument suffices if the skin and bones don' t understand that the answer is: we live to say " No!" to death.

Through all the days and limitlessly longer nights, I never felt my soul in the grip of the fist, never lost the humanism that keeps me warring with the rest of my species. We are one of the universe' s n.o.blest experiments; we have a right to be here, I' ve heard; and if we struggle long enough against the forces of ignorance and mischievousness that bedevil us, we will be worthy of that place in the universe. I believed that, continue to believe it, and only once during that monstrous period was my faith in the n.o.bility of the human race shaken.

A month after my marriage became a portion for foxes, two months after my mother finally found the trail opened for her reunion with my father, I experienced the lowest moment I' ve ever known in my consideration of those with whom I share common heritage. On December 22nd, 1976- for the first and I sincerely hope only time- I was dashed to despair in the sure and certain knowledge that we are an ign.o.ble, utterly vile form of life, unfit to steal s.p.a.ce from weeds and slugs and the plankton in the sea.

That moment came in a motion picture theater, and I, who fear almost nothing, was frightened. Not at what was on the screen: at the audience around me. Fellow human beings, a stray and unspecific wad of eyes and open sensory equipment, common flesh and ordinary intellects, so petrified me with horror that I had to hold myself back from screaming and fleeing. I wanted to hide. I can' t get over it, even now: I wanted to hide. I was more scared than I' d ever been, before or since.

Pause. Deep breath. Quell the memory. Force back the abreaction. Stop the shiver as it climbs.

On that Wednesday night I was escaping my life. I got in the old dirty Camaro and drove into the San Fernando Valley, just over the hill from my house. Down there in the Valley is not Hollywood, it is not Brentwood or Westwood, it is barely Los Angeles. In many ways it is a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. As writer Louise Farr has said, it is the edge of the American Dream that bindlestiffs and bus-riders have come to seek where the sidewalks are made of gold. Or at least partially inlaid with bronze stars. But it is Country, in the way Fort Worth will always be Country, no matter how urbane and cosmopolitan Dallas becomes. It is tract homes and fast food and the Common Man keeping barefoot and pregnant the Common Woman.

Oh, there are fine shops and big homes- in Woodland Hills and the newer 850-to-million-five estates- there are nonpareil French restaurants like Aux Delices and Mon Grenier; there are pseudo-hip boites like Yellowfingers and L' Express, but every once in a while they get the French syntax wrong and wind up with names like Le Hot Club. Nonetheless, it ain' t all no-necks and polyester crotches. It is just, like where you live, The Valley. As close to the American Dream as Common and average may ever hope to get.

I drove out, drove around, could not escape myself. And decided to take in a movie. Any movie. Didn' t give a d.a.m.n what or which.

In Tarzana, out along Ventura Boulevard, near the big tree under which I am told Edgar Rice Burroughs lies buried, in the bedroom community named after his greatest creation, there is a multiple cinema like the thousands thrown up in every American city these past decades. Cinema I- Cinema II- Cinema III- Cinema IV they call themselves, these windowless, airless cubicles. They are not theaters. Theaters had s.p.a.cious lobbies and balconies; they had cut gla.s.s chandeliers and ushers with flashlights; they had an authoritarian manager in an impeccable tuxedo to whom you could complain when the noisy schmucks behind you wouldn' t shut up; they had a candy counter with freshly popped popcorn that got real b.u.t.ter slathered over it, not some artificial crankcase drainage that had never seen the inside of a cow. They were theaters, not these little boxes which, if they had handles, would be coffins. In Tarzana they have caused to be thrown up a six-box edifice called Theeeeee Movies of Tarzana.

I didn' t care what I saw, just as long as I hadn' t seen it before. Every screening room had a double feature. I picked the one that had two films I hadn' t heard much about. I don' t remember what the A film was, but the second movie, the B, was one that had been around for a few months, that I' d missed.

It was called The Omen. You may know of this film.

It was crowded for a Wednesday night and the lights were up as I wandered down the single aisle to find a seat. The Omen would start in a few minutes.

I gauged the audience. I' ve come to hate seeing films in ordinary theaters since the advent of television. People talk. Not at the screen, an occasional bon mot as response to something silly in the plot or a flawed performance, but to each other. Not sotto voce, not whispered, not subdued, with the understanding that there is something going on here, but at the top of their lungs, as if they were yelling in to someone in the kitchen to fetch them a fresh Coors. They are unable to separate reality in a theater from fantasy in their tv-saturated home. They babble continuously, they ask moronic questions of each other, they make it impossible to enjoy a motion picture. It is the great dolt audience, wrenched from the succoring flicker of the gla.s.s teat, forced out into this Halfway House between television stupor and the real world: not yet fully awake, merely perambulated into another setting where the alpha state can be reinduced. I looked around at my fellow filmgoers. Not much different from the crowd you last shared a Sat.u.r.day Night at the Movies with.

I do not think I malign them too much by characterizing them as eminently average. From their behavior, from the mounds of filth and empty junk food containers I had to kick aside to get to my seat, from the stickiness of my shoes from the spilled sugar-water, from the beetled brows and piglike eyes, the feet up on the backs of seats in front of them, from the oceanic sound of chewing gum, I do not think I demean them much by perceiving them as creeps, meatheads, clods, fruitcakes, nincomp.o.o.ps, amoeba-brains, yoyos, yipyops, kadodies and clodhoppers. But then, the garbage dump smell of bad breath, redolent armpits, decaying skin bacteria and farts mixed with bad gra.s.s always gives me a headache and puts me in one of my foulest Elitist humors.

Nonetheless, I was there, the film was to start in a few minutes, and I was trying to escape (in the worst possible situs) the world. So I took a seat next to a young man and his date, a young woman. I gave them the benefit of the doubt: a young man and a young woman. I was shortly to learn that I had misjudged them. Actually: were-things pa.s.sing for human.

I will describe them physically.

The young woman was vibrating against the membrane of her twenties. Gum moving in the mouth. Shortish. Ordinary in every esthetic consideration. Just a female person, holding the right hand of the young man who sat to my right. What distinguishes her most in memory is that she was with him.

Ah. Him.

There is a sort of young man, never older than twenty-five, that I occasionally encounter at college lectures. The somatotype is one that you' ll recognize. Large, soft, no straight lines, very rounded. A lover of carbohydrates. Pale. An overgrown Pillsbury doughboy. Weak mouth. Alert. Very sensitive. And I usually have to confront this type when I' ve done a number on Barbra Streisand, with whom I' ve had a number of path-crossings in my life, and whom I do not like a lot.

So when I' ve mentioned Ms. Streisand, and have expressed my opinion of her, one of these great soft things leaps up in the- audience and, usually with tears in his eyes, hysterically reads me the riot act. " Barbra is glorious! Barbra is a star! What do you know about anything? You' re just jealous of her!" Followed by exeunt trembling.

(G.o.d knows how much I envy her. She can wear a cloche and wedgies so much better than I. Don' t shoot the shwans.) Beside me sat one of those. He looked like Lenny in Steinbeck' s OF MICE AND MEN. Probably not all there: several bricks short of a load: only 1.6 oars in the water. Big, soft, holding her hand.

Enough. Let me get directly to the moment.

This film, The Omen, is a textbook example of what we mean when we speak of gratuitous violence. That is, violence escalated visually beyond any value to plot advancement or simple good taste. That which makes your stomach lift and your eyes look away. Not the simple ballet of death one accepts in Straw Dogs or The Wild Bunch or Alien or Bonnie and Clyde: I' ve seen death close up a few times. Those films are okay. No, The Omen is another can of worms. And the moment came like this: There is a scene in which David Warner gets his head cut off by a sheet of plate gla.s.s. We have been set up for this scene in a number of ways, so we will feel trepidation and mounting tension. Warner has evinced that sweaty, doomed att.i.tude we have come to know through years of movie going as endemic to those the plot demands get wasted. The whining pa.s.sengers of the Poseidon; the downy-faced aviator on his first recon flight with Gable or Robert Taylor; the PFC who stands up in the Bataan jungle to yell to his rifle squad, " Hey, it' s all clear, no more snipers!" Pee-ing! Bullet through the brain. We know poor David Warner is about to get s.h.i.tcanned in some earsplitting way.

As the group of which Warner is a member rushes through the street of some Algerian-style city (it' s been over five years since I saw the film and detailed specifics of plot are blurred), we get artful intercuts by director d.i.c.kie Donner of Warner' s sweaty, crazed face...a truck or wagon or somesuch with a large sheet of plate gla.s.s lying flat on the bed, protruding off the rear of the vehicle...Warner rushing...the truck trundling...the gla.s.s looking ominously ready...an impediment in the way of the truck...Warner...gla.s.s...ohmiG.o.d! we know what' s going to happen because the intercuts are harder, closer together, the music begins to crescendo...the impediment stops the truck...the wheels of the truck smash into it...the truck stops short...the gla.s.s wrenches loose and zips off the rear of the truck...Warner seeing the gla.s.s coming toward him...

Now we know he' s going to get hit by the gla.s.s.

And because we' re trained to drive instantly to the most morbid escalation of the death-equation, we suspect he' ll be decapitated. And that' s the point to which violence is at least tolerable, acceptable, required by the plot.

But.

Little d.i.c.kie Donner, famed far and wide as the director of the television kiddie show The Banana Splits and a movie about a super-hero, charming Richard Donner directs the scene like this (remember, you' re sitting in a theater all unaware of what' s coming at you): Intercuts. The gla.s.s slicing through the air. David Warner' s face registering terror as he sees it coming. His eyes starting from his head. His mouth open in an animal scream of horror. The faces of the other actors distorted in ghastly expectation of the impact. Gla.s.s! Warner! Screams! Closeup on the gla.s.s slicing into Warner' s neck. Blood spurts across the gla.s.s. The head rolls onto the gla.s.s. Gla.s.s and body carried backward to smash against a wall. Gla.s.s splintering.

Okay, we think, horrible. That' s it, though. It' s over.

Wrong, and wrong.

Now the head rolls down the gla.s.s, draining blood from dangling cords and emptying carotid artery. Blood smears on gla.s.s in long slimy streaks.

Enough!

The head bounces off the gla.s.s, hits the cobblestones, rolls.

Enough!

Camera follows the head bouncing down the street.

Enough! Enough already!

The head rolls into a corner.

Enough! G.o.d, cut me a break here!

The head comes to a stop as the camera comes in on the final spurting of blood, the face contorted in horror, the eyelids still flickering...

And here is the ultimate ghastliness of that moment, close to Christmas of 1976. Not on the screen. In the theater.

The audience was applauding wildly.

They were, G.o.d help them, laughing!!

And beside me, that great soft average American boy and girl, fingers twined tightly, were pounding their fists on his knee. From him: moaning bursts of sound, as if he were coming. From her: sharp little expletives of pleasure, as if she were coming.

Rooted, unmoving, my hair tingling at the base of my scalp, memorable fear overwhelming me, I sat there in disbelief and dismay. What kind of lives could these people live? What awful hatred for the rest of the human race did they harbor? What black pools of emotion had been tapped to draw such a response? The character David Warner played was not a villain, so they couldn' t be excused or understood on the basis of catharsis...that no-less-b.e.s.t.i.a.l but at least explicable release of applause and whistling when the Arch-Fiend or the Renegade White Man or the Psychopathic Terrorist gets blown away. No, this was a high from the violence, from the protracted, adoring closeups of blood and horror.

This was America experiencing " entertainment."

I can' t remember the rest of the film. I' m not sure I actually stayed to the end. I know I didn' t see the feature film I' d come to see. I may have stumbled up the aisle and into the night, decaying inside from the death of my mother, the breakup of my marriage, loneliness, sorrow...and the evil rite I had just sat through. But now, five years later, I recall that moment as the absolutely lowest point I' ve ever reached in loathing of my species. I could not even fantasize wiping them off the face of the Earth. That would have been to join with them in their unholy appreciation of the senselessly violent. I just wanted to be away!

Now, five years later, I see the twisted path stretching from that night of monstrous perception to an omnipresent mode in current movies.

In the phrase credited to writer-interviewer Mick Garris, knife-kill movies.

How many have you seen?

Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Ma.s.sacre, Prom Night, He Knows You' re Alone, Don' t Answer the Phone, Dressed to Kill, When a Stranger Calls, Motel h.e.l.l, Silent Scream, Blood Beach, My b.l.o.o.d.y Valentine, Friday the 13th, The Omen II, Mother' s Day, Zombie, Eyes of a Stranger, The Boogey Man, New Year' s Evil, Maniac, Terror Train, Humanoids From the Deep and, yes, I' m sorry to include this for those of you who adored it, The Howling.

How many knife-kills have you sat through?

More important: ask yourself why you went to some of these films, when you knew in advance how twisted, how anti-human, how s.e.xist, how degenerate they promised to be?

Are you a great soft average American boy or girl? Did you come when the sharp stick gouged out the eyes? Did you applaud when the heads were sawed off? Did you gasp with pleasure at the special effects when the straight razor sliced and the blood spattered the camera lens?

Are you still deluding yourself that you' re sane?

As I was saying. Knife-kill flicks. The subject of a new book t.i.tled SPLATTER MOVIES. You like that a lot? Splatter movies. Cute.

Though there are exceptions the apologists will always cite, the bulk of the violence- total, psychopathic, sudden and seemingly the only reason for making these films- is directed against women.

Oh sure, there are a few men who get whacked out in these films; but their deaths are usually perfunctory, sort of pro forma; almost as if they were reluctantly added to the script against the advent of just such criticisms as these; so the righteous director (who is usually co-scripter) and the producer can justify slaughter by saying, " Well, h.e.l.l, didn' t you see the guys who got snuffed? How can you say we hate women?"

But that' s misdirection. Afterthought. It' s like George Wallace talking about state' s rights when what he really means is, let' s keep the n.i.g.g.e.rs in chains. It' s on the moral and ethical level of those who excuse Nixon' s criminal acts by saying, " h.e.l.l, everybody does it!"

No, what we' re dealing with in nifty little films like Brian De Palma' s Dressed to Kill and Blow Out is a concerted attack on females.

Females burned alive, hacked to ribbons, staked out and suffocated slowly, their limbs taken off with axes, chain saws, guillotines, threshing machines, the parts nailed up for display. The deification of the madness Jack the Ripper visited on pathetic tarts in Spitalfields in 1888.

As a man who hit a woman once in his life and swore never to do it again, I reel back from these films where hatred and brutalization of women is the governing force of plot. I' ll admit it, I cannot watch these films. I get physically ill.

But they must be drawing an audience. More and more get made each season. Saturation advertising on television pulls you to them. They make money. And money begets money; and the begetting sends even greater numbers of minimally talented filmmakers to the form. They proliferate. And the sickness spreads.

You wonder why the Moral Majority has some coin with otherwise rational Americans? It is because they fasten on festering sores like the spate of knife-kill films and they argue from the solitary to the general: moral decay, rampant violence, rotting social values. Joining with these latter-day Puritans on a single issue, though one may despise what they' re really trying to do, is the downfall of all liberals.

Even so, their revulsion at these films (which they patronize like crazy) is the healthiest thing about such movies. Everything else, from motivation to making them to artistic values, drips with perversion.

I have a theory, of course. Don' t I always.

These are not, to me, films of terror or suspense in the time-honored sense of such genre definitions. The Thirty-Nine Steps, North by Northwest and Gaslight are cla.s.sics of suspense. Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and Alien are cla.s.sics of terror. The lists are copious. Rosemary' s Baby, Knife in the Water, Repulsion, The Haunting, The Innocents (from Henry James' s " Turn of the Screw" ), Psycho, The Birds, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dead of Night. Add your own. You know which ones they were that scared you, held you helpless in the thrall of fear, gave you memories that chilled not sickened you. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Parallax View and Carrie.

It was always the scenes leading up to the violence that you remember. You needn' t watch the death...you had been wrung dry before it ever happened.

What do I consider a terrifying scene? Here, try this: Chill beneath a cadaverously-gray autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else: A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.

Chill beneath a crawling terror of spotted death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.

A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the bakery, get flour for father' s dinner bread. The child shows a moment of fear...the animal they haven' t found yet...

The mother insists, it' s only a half block to the bakery. Put on a shawl and go get that flour, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the sack of flour held close to her, the street empty and filling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough in the blackness behind her. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.