INSTALLMENT 18:
In Which Youth Goeth Before A Fall

Completing the thoughts begun last time. Subject under scrutiny: Hommage, the unsought gift that blights the original creation. In specific: Young Sherlock Holmes (Paramount).

It has been a month since I began this rumination, and the anger that seemed to build in me as I wrote the previous installment has abated somewhat. When I tried to analyze exactly what had sent me up into that spiral of rancor, no rational explanation presented itself. Like each of you, from time to time I find myself furious-beyond-proper-response; but whatever the stimulus—whether something I'd just read, or a snatch of radio news overheard while passing through a room, or a snippet of some television image—when the madness passes and I peel away the layers of emotion, I find that the snatch or snippet was only something that produced a resonance. The home videos of Imelda Marcos and her degenerate guests at Bonbon's birthday party in the Malacanang Palace, punked out and festooned with diamonds while 73% of the Filipino people were subsisting below the poverty level and scrounging for food in garbage heaps; rapists of a nation, cavorting and singing into Mr. Mikes; and the song they were singing was "We Are the World, We Are the Children." An item in the Birmingham, Alabama News about a woman clerk in an airport newsstand who had been arrested for selling Playboy, and had drawn two years in jail for disseminating pornography. A moment of infuriating disingenuousness during a radio broadcast the day after Tombstone Tex Reagan won one for the Gipper in his shootout with Qaddafi—wrong or right, agree with him or not—that set my teeth on edge: stickily referring to the two F-111 pilots who went down as "heroes of our hearts."

Each produced a level of blinding animosity that spoke to something deeper than the events themselves. For, in truth, unpalatable as it is to admit, the starvation of thousands of little black babies in a faraway place does not affect us as deeply or lastingly or immediately as a stye on our eye, a particularly nasty cold sore on our lip, or our inability to have a good bowel movement. That we can be distracted at all from the petty yet vitally urgent imperatives of our petty yet vitally urgent personal existences is the miracle of the human race. That we can transcend the counterfeit emotions of the nanoseconds in which we lament the travail of those less fortunate than ourselves to feel genuine sorrow for others of our species, that transcendence that produces a Sojourner Truth, a Ralph Nader, or the man who passed the helicopter rescue ring to a drowning woman after the Washington, D.C. airliner crash, that creates Live Aid or the Red Cross, is the miracle that makes us the noblest experiment the universe has ever conjured up. Humbling and shaming as it may be to admit such weakness in ourselves, nonetheless it remains that what sends the burst of adrenaline through us at the snatch or snippet may only be the echo of an entirely personal, entirely human misery.

Shaking my head to clear the fog of anger, I finally located the source of my animosity toward Steven Spielberg and scenarist Chris Columbus and those who made Young Sherlock Holmes; the source of my rage at the cavalier rationale called hommage that permits, even encourages, less-talented johnny-come-latelies to corrupt the creations of their betters.

I fear another weird digression, by way of explanation, is necessary.

Here, elsewhere, and on many other occasions, I have railed against the indiscriminate acceptance of the loathsome theory of cinematic creation called the "auteur theory," wherein all glory and condemnation falls to the director. The writer is merely a hired hand; merely the one who constructs from nothing the "plan" on which the Noble Director builds the edifice of a movie; the creator who dreams the dream, sets it down so the package can be financed by a studio, the one who merely . . .

But listen to Francis Ford Coppola on this subject:

"I like to think of myself as a writer who directs. When people go to see a movie, 80 percent of the effect it has on them was preconceived and precalculated by the writer. He's the one who imagines opening with a shot of a man walking up the stairs and cutting to another man walking down the stairs. A good script has pre-imagined exactly what the movie is going to do on a story level, on an emotional level, on all these various levels. To me, that's the primary act of creation."

There. Just that and no more. And insert auteurism where the passion don't never shine.

Of late, the auteur theory has crept into the world of comic books. (I said weird digression, but if you need an excuse not to screw up your face, consider that the comic book is more similar to a film than any other art-form, including the stage play; and thus, if you wanna duke it out, fit grist for this column.)

In some ways it is more a manifestation of the Starfucker Syndrome in commercial circles, but auteurism is what it is in bold terms. Whichever comic artist is this week's Big Star, why he or she is the one given carte blanche to rewrite the canon of any pre-existing character. Not even that universal icon, Superman, is safe.

DC Comics hired John Byrne away from Marvel by handing over the fifty-year-old legend of The Man of Steel for Mr. Byrne's tender attentions. With a hubris that would make even Paul Schrader or John Carpenter (but not Michael Cimino) blush, Byrne as auteur announced to anyone who would listen that everything that had gone before, from Siegel and Shuster's moment of creation through the decades of writers and artists who worked with the character, till this very instant, was null and void. He demanded, and got, DC to renumber Superman Comics—nearing issue #425 as I write this—from #1 with the pronunciamento that his was to be the only, the true, the preferred Superman.

Jim Shooter, at Marvel Comics, wields the auteur theory for his personal aggrandizement by creating "a new Marvel universe" containing an entire line of new books featuring characters who will not have to be introduced with the line Stan Lee Presents. Now they will say Jim Shooter Presents; and since kids only have x number of bucks to spend on items that cost 10¢ when I was a tot, but now cost between 75¢ and $2.50 a pop, that means sales will be diverted from such as Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Thor—creations of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee—that have become staples of the American pop culture idiom, staples whose fame surely must rankle the overweening ego of Mr. Shooter.

Back at DC, simply for bucks because he has confessed in interviews that he never cared a gram about the character, auteur Howard Chaykin has taken The Shadow and turned him, in a four-issue mini-series, into a sexist, calloused, clearly psychopathic obscenity. Rather than simply ignoring characters from the Shadow's past, Chaykin has murdered them in full view, blowing off their heads with shotguns through the peephole of apartment doors; strangling and stuffing them into water coolers; recasting them as winos and setting them on fire; impaling them (in defiance of the laws of gravity) through the neck with fireplace pokers and hanging them from balconies; and smashing in their skulls with hospital bedpans. And when Mr. Chaykin was asked why he had this penchant for drawing pictures of thugs jamming 45s into the mouths of terrified women, Mr. Chaykin responded that the only readers who might object to this bastardization of a much-beloved fictional character were "forty-year-old boys." These comics bear the legend FOR MATURE READERS.

For MATURE read DERANGED.

Here is hommage run amuck. Here is the delivering into the hands of artistic thugs the dreams and delights of those who were clever enough, and talented enough, to be prime creators. Not enough to suggest that they cobble up their own inventions as sturdy and long-lived as Superman or The Shadow. Not enough to suggest they retain some sense of their place in the creative world. Not enough to suggest they have a scintilla of respect for all the forty-year-old (and in this writer's case, fifty-two-year-old) boys who grew up on these wonders. Not enough.

No, these are the depredations that invoke wrath, that blind us with fury at their temerity, their callous disregard for those who made their employment and elevation to Stardom possible, their dishonest assumption of control of the treasure that ends in debasement of that which succored us in our adolescence.

The digression winds back on itself through funnybookland to the Spielberg-influenced Young Sherlock Holmes, written by Columbus, directed by Barry Levinson. And through the wandering, at last the explanation why writing a negative review of what is, at most, an exceedingly dumb movie produced such an unreasoning fulmination. The river runs swiftly, and it runs deep.

Last time I apologized for the seemingly unceasing attacks on Steven Spielberg. Since writing that previous installment I have been apprised that Steven takes no offense at my diatribes, that even when I savage him he finds the locutions so fascinating he cannot get upset. Well, maybe; and I hope that's the case; but it don't beat the bulldog. Spielberg reached the pinnacle of a certain kind of personal filmmaking with E.T., and another summit with Raiders of the Lost Ark; pop masterpieces with their own voice and with a reverence for those genres and the best they had produced that endeared him to the cinemagoing world. But his olympian success has brought forth as predictable side-effect a Visigoth horde of lesser-talented imitators who eschew genuine creativity for the despicable auteurism they rationalize as hommage.

Incapable of creating Superman or The Shadow or Sherlock Holmes, they steal the dream and turn it to their own ends, debasing it in the process.

Young Sherlock Holmes is the prime example.

Holmes, as a prep school boy, is made idiot foil to the extraneous special effects of Industrial Light & Magic truckling to the pinhead sophomorism of today's Cineplex audience needing its bread&circuses of cartoon ghoulies. Nowhere in the film do we see Holmes employ that aspect of his nature that has provided a niche in posterity for the Doyle-created detective—the use of observation, deductive logic, and ratiocination raised to a heroic level. The film is yet another dumb action-adventure featuring racist stereotypes, virgin sacrifices, running and jumping and hooting.

Columbus and his compatriots have swallowed whole the Spielberg idiom and reduced Holmes to a jerk. He dashes about, mostly to ill effect, with a boobish Watson puffing along behind, landing in one imbecile situation after another. The puzzle is finally solved, in defiance of everything in the Holmesian canon, not by logic and deduction, but by brute Ramboism.

Forget the infelicities of plot logic. Forget that one of the basic premises of this puppet-show is that Thuggees could build a gigantic wooden pyramid in the center of London without anyone noticing. Forget that even facts of weather are bent to a moron plot: a major sequence, for instance, demands that we believe the Thames froze over. According to my research, not in recorded memory has the Thames frozen over. Much of the river is, incidentally, tidal; show me such a river that freezes. Forget that everything we found dear in the stories is contravened.

Forget all that. Even forget that the film is mostly boring. But don't forget that hommage such as this is simply the muddying of the waters, that it is dirty business.

The fifty-two-year-old boy speaks. Why must the johnny-come-lately destroy the dream? To what end? Is this the act of the responsible artist; is it even the act of one who loves the original?

Does Chaykin care that we derived our understanding of the simplistic but effective ethic that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit" from a pulp hero who came to us in magazines that flaked apart in our laps, across the ether through cathedral-shaped radios before which we lay with eyes wide?

Does John Byrne consider for a moment between bouts with his own ego that some great section of the world looks on Superman as a paradigm for our own alienation and need to believe there is superness in each of us somewhere?

We chew up and spit out our past.

Honor lasts less long than Warhol's fabled fifteen minutes of notoriety. What remains for the dreamer capable of ushering out a Conan, a Sam Spade, a Tin Woodsman, a Wonder Woman, when any parvenu can misappropriate the vigorous conceit and cripple it by inexactitudes and ineptitude? If this can be done to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to Burroughs's Tarzan, to Pyle's Robin Hood or Johnston McCulley's Zorro or Bad Bill's Hamlet . . . what chance do the rest of us have?

Is this too great a stretch of comprehension for you? Have you never slaved and sweated over something—as simple as a brick wall or as complex as a screenplay—and done it with all the grace and talent in you, only to see it taken over by some jamook who puffed himself up with arrogance like a banjo player who had a big breakfast?

We are talking here about the primacy of interest of the creator. We are talking about what it is that steals the souls from filmwriters in Hollywood who are compelled to turn their creations over to effectuators who label themselves auteurs.

Here is where the word hommage turns to ashes. Once permitted the incursion into the sacred preserve under the terminological rationale hommage—as twisty a device as calling revolutionaries "freedom fighters"—anything is permitted. If it succeeds, we say nothing, because art has asserted itself, even if it is derivative art of a secondary importance, of a flesh with pastiche. If it fails, we cluck our tongues and forget it.

This is a dismissal of the artist. It is the corruption in the bone marrow that destroys the purity of the dream. It is the leavening out, the "equality" of the untalented. It is in no way freedom, but a blanding that permits anything, without the nobility of the struggle for originality.

And it seems, these days, to be the pry-bar of the young. That arrogance shrieking at us from billboards and television sets and midget-sized screens of coffin movie theaters—proclaiming (in the words of Ed Begley, senior not junior, in Wild in the Streets) that the young conceive of youth as the noblest state to which a human can aspire. Perhaps it is because this fifty-two-year-old boy spent those fifty-two years working toward some small proficiency in life and craft, that such fury is generated. Perhaps it is because movie studios, geared to the viewing tastes of an audience for whom nostalgia is remembering breakfast, refuse to give contracts to writers over the age of thirty. Perhaps it is because more than half the membership of the Writers Guild over the age of fifty is not just unemployed, but unemployable. I speak here not of old farts who can't cut it, but writers of both sexes who have won Oscars, who have written the films we call classics, and who merely want to write the best they can, but who have been denied access to the marketplace because every twenty-year-old fresh out of some cornball media communications class in the boonies is pushing another tits&ass coming-of-age flick bearing no greater worth than as perfect vehicle for Molly Ringwald or Tom Cruise. Vehicle they calls it; shitwagon, I calls it. Either way, it's spinach, and I don't give a damn.

Spielberg hath wrought a generation of young punks for whom hard work and patience are anathema. And what we have to deal with at the local cinema, what I have to deal with in these columns, is transient as snot and only half as uplifting.

Destruction of the past, whether as another De Laurentiis King Kong abomination, or as the leveling of an Art Deco building, is an American tradition. We eat yesterday and say it is of value only as sauce for our french fries.

Age, in and of itself, means nothing. But where age has produced craft and invention of a high order, there youth must wait its turn. Trevanian said, in Shibumi, "Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty times."

Contrariwise, do not think that brashness and the moment's limelight can supplant years spent making an artist. That is why Picasso remains a giant and Norman Rockwell can never be more than an enormously talented craftsman. Because Picasso could do what Rockwell did, but Rockwell was incapable of doing what Picasso did.

That is to say, Chris Columbus can write from now till doomsday, he can do hommage to Charles Foster Kane or Harry Lime till he's blue in the face, but Orson Welles, were he still around, even fat as Iowa, could create him into the ground.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, maybe I can get some sleep.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1986