INSTALLMENT 19:
In Which We Long For The Stillness Of The Lake, The Smooth Swell Of The Lea

At one of those college literary bashes where The Celebrated Visiting Author sits alone on the stage and academics with clipboards pelt him or her with "insightful" questions, I was recently hit with the poser, "What is your definition of maturity?"

I thought about that for a moment before answering.

And in that moment, here is the anecdote that flashed through my head, that I did not impart to the gathered sages:

Most of you know by now that my friend Mike Hodel, host for more than fifteen years of the Hour 25 radio show on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, died of brain cancer on Tuesday, May 6th. Because he learned of his terminal state in February, and because the continuation of the program was a matter of concern to him, Mike came to visit and we talked about the darkness soon to come; and Mike asked me to host the show for him when he was gone. Because I loved him, and because his show has been so important to writers and readers of the genre for so long, I agreed to take over Hour 25.

But the foreknowledge of Mike's imminent leavetaking, added to the weight of the deaths of so many close friends these last few months, sent me into a tailspin. My thoughts grew wearier and grimmer by the day. Until the anguish and the pressure began to produce a sharp pain behind my left eye.

As I am one of those blessed individuals who almost never get headaches, this sharp needlepoint of agony behind my left eye came to obsess me. I knew very well, in my right mind, that I did not share Mike's illness; but every time the pain returned, I tumbled into the abyss of irrationality and thought, "I've got brain cancer. There's a gray pudding on the grow back there behind my eye." It was crazy; and when I saw Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters in the middle of March, and Woody went through exactly the same hypochondriacal situation, I laughed at myself. But I could not shake the terrible thought, and finally I made an appointment with John Romm, who has been my doctor for decades, and I went to find out if I was more irrational than usual.

John examined me, put the light up to the eye and looked in, and reported back that there didn't seem to be anything in there pressing against the optic nerve. "Shouldn't I get a brain scan?" I said.

"Well, if you're thinking about something like that, there's better state of the art than a CAT scan. It's called an MRI and it costs about a grand."

"MRI?"

"Magnetic Resonance Imaging. About a grand. But if you can't get this lunacy out of your mind, spend the money and put yourself at ease."

"I'll think about it."

So I thought about it. For several weeks. Went to see Mike in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, couldn't rid myself of the horror, and finally went in for the MRI. The next day, John called to report the findings on the images. "You're fine," he said. "No problems in there at all."

I felt the edge of the desk I had been gripping for the first instant since I'd picked up his call, and realized how mad I'd been driven by Mike's situation. The pain behind my eye vanished instantly.

Then I heard John chuckling. "What's so goddam funny?" I demanded, feeling more the fool than ever.

"Well, it's just something the technician who sent these over said," John replied, trying to keep a straight tone.

"Yeah? And what was that?"

"Uh, well . . . he asked me, 'Are you sure this guy is almost fifty-two years old?' And I said, yes, I was certain; that I'd known you for years and that I knew you'd be fifty-two in May, and he said, 'This is remarkable for a guy his age. The actual brain matter looks like that of a six-year-old boy.'" And John broke up again. When he had it under control he said, "I always suspected you had the brain of a six-year-old."

That was what I thought in the moment before answering the academics. Because it was the anecdote that informed what I've always considered to be a pretty workable definition of maturity. And I said to the questioner, "I take to mean, when you say maturity, that you're asking what I think an adult is. And my answer is that being grown-up means having achieved in adult terms what you dreamed of being as a child. In other words, you'd be mature, and an adult grown-up, if—say—when you were a kid you wanted to be a cowboy and now you owned a cattle ranch. Or if you wanted to fly like Superman when you were a kid, if you were now an airline pilot."

And I added this quotation from Rimbaud: "Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."

These thoughts, as random as most with which I open this column every time, tie in with observations about childish and adult visions of what to make as a motion picture in an era when the studios check the growth-rings of writers and directors before they commit to a project.

As rare as it has been in the history of motion picture writing for talent of a high order to emerge—Richard Brooks, James Goldman, Richard L. Breen, Paddy Chayefsky, Herman Mankiewicz, Ring Lardner, Jr. and the Epstein brothers come immediately to mind, though the list is a lot longer than you'd care to have me reproduce here and, sad sad sad, you wouldn't recognize the names of those who dreamed the dreams and put the words into the mouths of Bogart and Lancaster and Bergman and McQueen—as rare as it's been till now, the situation today is fuckin' bloody tragic. We operate in The Age of the Know-Nothing Tots.

Kids raised not on literature, or even on films, but on television reruns, are being hired every minute to write and produce films that have the social import and artistic longevity of zweiback.

(Here are some grim statistics. The current membership of the Writers Guild of America, west is 6181. Of that number only 51% is currently employed. That's 3152 men and women. But of that percentage, while 61% of WGAw members under forty years of age are working, only 43% over forty have a job. Don't ask what it's like for directors.)

The deals being made at Cannon, at Fox, at Paramount and Universal, are deals for projects brought to executives by second-rate and derivative talents. Deals brought to men and women whose backgrounds are seldom in filmmaking, whose expertise and store of literary precedents is at best meager. (This is a series of generalizations. Of course not everyone who sells a script, or more usually a script idea, is a superannuated surfer. There are Larry Kasdans and Vickie Patiks and Tom Benedeks who have as much élan as Shelagh Delany or Harold Ramis or Horton Foote at the top of their form. But the generalization speaks unquaveringly to the reality of the industry practice today. The young and dumb sell to the only slightly less young and much dumber.)

These deals being made, and the films often made as a result of the deals, are films that cannot be viewed or critiqued by standards that have always obtained for literature, movies or even television segments.

Consider: we learn from the trade papers that filmgoing dropped another 15% last year. We learn that more and more of the audience that used to go out to, say, a movie a week, now stays home and watches videocassettes. The weekly opening of movies convinces us that overwhelmingly the theater-viewing audience is made up of teenagers. In the week that I write this column, here is what dominates the screens of Los Angeles, not much different from the screens where you live:

Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink; Judd Nelson in Blue City; Sean Penn in At Close Range; Band of the Hand; Nicolas Cage in The Boy in Blue; Ally Sheedy in Short Circuit; Dangerously Close; Fire with Fire; Echo Park; Free Ride; Girls Just Want to Have Fun; Lucas and Top Gun with Tom Cruise.

These are all films either about teenagers, or starring teenagers (though most of them are now in their twenties . . . the Brat Pack begins to creak and suffer morning arthritis). Most of them belabor the rite of passage, the dawn of sexuality, the pair-bonding of prep school twits, or the confusion of mid-life crisis occurring at age eighteen.

And one realizes, with a shock, that the tradition basics for reviewing films is inapplicable these days. One cannot, at peril of being hincty and irrelevant, evaluate a film on the merits of screen writing, editing, direction or even design. None of these staples seem to matter to the merchandisers of modern films. Apart from splashy special effects (which is a criterion that has begun to pall for even the most unjudgmental Kallikak), the sole criterion of a movie's worth—looney! lunatic! loopy!—is if the soundtrack can be melded to two-second snippets of the action sequences to form a music video for MTV, producing, of course, a gold album.

It doesn't matter if the film is a medieval fantasy (Ladyhawke), a contemporary aerobatics adventure (Top Gun), a western (Silverado), an Eddie Murphyclone cop rampage (Running Scared), or retold fairy tales (Legend, Company of Wolves). All that counts is that a sound is produced that can function in the secondary markets for appeal only to those who cannot listen to music in anything under 200 decibels. That the music doesn't fit, that the music jars, that the music distracts and blunts the mood of scene after scene, seems not to enter into consideration by those responsible for the film's artistic gestalt.

It is adolescent adults playing three-card monte with the captive kiddie audience, or actual tots saying fuck you to the rest of the world, both younger and older.

This cynical pandering to the sophomoric, unformed and utterly undiscriminating hungers of a juvenile audience disenfranchises the rest of us, both younger and older than the demographic wedge that buys rock music . . . or worse, that even smaller wedge that doesn't buy but merely derives its calorie-poor musical diet from watching television!

Take Short Circuit (Tri-Star) and Legend (Universal) as specimens under the microscope.

Short Circuit is nothing more than a sappy replay of E.T. with a cuddly, anthropomorphized runaway robot replacing a cuddly etcetera etcetera alien. It is last year's D.A.R.Y.L. Martinized and reworn. (Only difference is that Barrett Oliver as the robot in D.A.R.Y.L. had his gears and cogs and chips camouflaged, while No. 5 in Short Circuit has metal in view.) Both films paint authority as not merely inept and evil-with-a-Three-Stooges-silliness, but as implacably stupid and brutish.

Granted, Short Circuit posits the philosophical position that violence and killing are not nice things to do, which is a salutary message in this era of Cobra and Rambo; nonetheless it is a film that panders to the youth audience by giving them two of the three staples of all these teen-slanted films.

What are the three?

1) Bare tits. (Absent from this movie, presumably because Ally Sheedy, the omnipresent Ally Sheedy, is such a box-office draw that she doesn't have to bare her bosom.)

2) Disdain for authority.

3) Casual destruction of personal and public property.

No. 5 is just a kid, after all. It may be a kid with molybdenum paws, that runs on trunnions instead of sneakers, but it's just a kid. And, like James Dean, it is having a hard time learning who it is. It suffers existential angst in trying to reconcile the creative abilities of humans with the species' need to slaughter. It is the same, tired rebel without a cause yarn. It invests the young with a nobility that is unpossessed, presumably, by anyone over the age of twenty-one.

Short Circuit did big ticket business, but no amount of giving-the-benefit for its anti-killing aspect can disguise the fact that this plate of spinach is a manipulative, sappy truckling to teen hungers and fantasies. And having Steve Guttenberg standing around like something carved from Silly Putty don't help beat the bulldog, if you catch my drift.

Yet Short Circuit soared. I suggest this phenomenal turn of events can be linked to the promotion of the film via music videos and its totemization of adolescent rebellion fantasies. It sure as hell couldn't have been on the basis of freshness of material or superlative acting.

It is a kiddie film, made by adults pretending to have the souls of the pure and innocent. Porky, duded up like Peter Pan.

A sidebar thought, probably deeper than we have space here to explore: Is film rendering our impression of the mutable world meaningless?

For more than sixty years we have received a good proportion of our understanding of the world around us from movies. Film was seldom at the cutting edge of the culture in portraying trends, but as soon as a trend became clear, movies were in there, commenting on it, well or badly. On the Waterfront may have come to the subject of labor corruption late in the game, but when it came, it made its position known. America took notice. Saturday Night Fever may look cornball today, only nine years later, with its stacked-heel disco boots and its Nik-Nik shirts, but it drove America into a spin when the Bee Gees and Travolta made their statement about the social set that lived and foamed in disco palaces. (And it was only about five years into the trend before it got the wind up; pretty good for an essentially conservative industry.)

But is this ability to mirror the world still operating in the mainstream of motion pictures?

I think not. The numbers are skewed, the facts distorted, the picture out of focus. One of those Polaroid shots in which everything comes out roast beef red. Such films as Short Circuit—the sf version of a typical teen rebellion flick—send us a view of the world that resembles Lord of the Flies more than it does reality. Kids run everything in these movies. Either kids grown a little older, like Guttenberg and Sheedy and Cage and Estevez and Moore, or kids in their native habitat, like Nelson and Macchio.

It was bad enough when movies beat us about the blades to accept obscurantism and illogic like Amityville as the secret formula to understanding Life, but the current flood of discarded immaturity that pretends to be How It Is looks real, no matter how twisted and bent. And this, I submit, is hardly the meal we need to enrich us.

They are films that reject maturity, even in the loose terms I suggested at the outset of this essay.

Films made that play to childish (not childlike) ideas of what the Eternal Verities might be.

Films that sell smash-cut music videos to an audience with only dawning responsibility toward itself and its Times, an audience with too much money burning a hole in its pocket, and the blood-level belief that its youth is the noblest state to which a person can aspire.

Films that sell, with obvious and hidden tropes, in every frame, the bill of goods that anyone not capable of appearing on Soul Train is beyond consideration, so what the hell does it matter if we bust up their property and give 'em the finger?

When this pretense of innocence, as in Short Circuit, is swallowed whole by presumed adults, we have a situation where filmmakers who should know better gull themselves into selling that hype of Youth Eternal with no understanding of how they corrupt not only their talent, but the very audience they pretend to serve.

Such is the case with Legend, which I'll deal with at full length next time. Suffice to say, for now, that this epic brought forth by Ridley Scott and a battalion of equally talented creators, panders as shamefully as Top Gun or Porky's to teenage fantasies of Good and Evil, Rebellion and Authority, Youth and Age. And does it with the breakneck pace of an MTV potboiler, so loud and so demented in its headlong flight, that we emerge from the screening room gasping for breath, praying for a moment of surcease.

There is no room to breathe in Legend, even as there is no room to breathe in Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun. We are not permitted a moment's respite to think what all this kiddie fascination with faeries and unicorns and demons and goblins is all in aid of.

Do not mistake my meaning. Legend is an astonishing film in many ways. The eyes will behold things they have never seen, have only conjured in dreams. And that is wonderful, because it's what movies are supposed to do for us.

But Legend becomes, in its final American version, a telling example of studio interference, of Art twisted to serve the ends of Commerce Unchecked, of a creative intellect operating without maturity. I'll talk about it next time.

Because Legend is something really strange: a fifty-two-year-old man with the brain of a six-year-old. Something really strange like that.

 

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1986