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So, I picked up a copy of Harlan Ellison’s Watching yesterday and I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces for the last two days. It’s a strangely nostalgic experience, because even though I’d never actually read any of his movie reviews, the bulk of the columns in this collection cover films I saw when I was a kid-- it mostly comes from a monthly feature he wrote for The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the 80’s, along with some 60’s reviews that range far away from science fiction and a handful of 70’s pieces expressing his disdain for Star Wars and the first Star Trek film. It was while reading the latter than I noticed an obvious similarity between Ellison’s reviews and the nonfiction work of my longtime heroes Lester Bangs and Hunter Thompson-- he can’t help but insert himself into the story, and his tangled history with Trek creator Gene Roddenberry keeps winding in and out of the main argument, so the reader’s left to wonder whether or not Ellison’s capable of any sort of objective perspective on the film. Then again, one of the things I always loved about Bangs and Thompson is how they call that whole notion of objectivity into question-- everyone’s got their own views on things, and those views are shaped by our experiences, so why not just acknowledge it and incorporate those experiences into the finished article instead of trying to make everything fit some ideal standard of objectivity that’s totally unrealistic? Ellison doesn’t pull it off quite as well as those guys did, but he has moments where he comes close, and his perspective as a frustrated screenwriter dealing with frequently idiotic studio executives makes these reviews unlike your standard movie-critic fare.

He’s also not afraid to express contrary views that he knows will probably be unpopular. This is immediately apparent in that Star Wars essay, where Ellison finds the key flaw in George Lucas’s work that would become apparent to most only years later when the prequels were received with disappointment-- the lack of strong human characters and stories at the heart of the films, shoved aside in favor of an emphasis on special effects and scientific inaccuracies in the name of pleasing the audience (Ellison is especially indignant about the whole sound-in-outer-space issue). Now, I don’t entirely agree with everything he says in this piece, and I think that The Empire Strikes Back succeeded in establishing that emotional identification and humanity that Ellison found so lacking in the first film; but then again, it was mostly written by Lawrence Kasdan, not Lucas, and Ellison’s comments seem prescient in the wake of those more recent efforts where Lucas refused to relinquish his grip on any aspect of the production. One of the strengths of Ellison’s reviewing is his sensitivity to the writer’s role in film, and how that role is often subverted by the stupidity of studio execs trying to make a more commercial, crowd-pleasing film; I found his recounting of Robert Towne’s problems on Chinatown and Greystoke fascinating, though the masterfulness of the former does suggest Roman Polanski knew what he was doing when he edited Towne’s script.

Ellison also shares Bangs’s tendency to reconsider his former opinions, often without letting you know that he’s reconsidered them. His contemporaneous piece on 2001, for instance, is full of skepticism and a general sense that the film was overrated, and he specifically says it has no plot. Many years later, writing about 2010, his view has changed: “the plot is considerably thinner than 2001.” Sometimes Ellison does note these shifts in perspective, as in a review of an early Francis Ford Coppola movie where Ellison’s explanatory, apologetic footnote goes on longer than the actual review. Most of the time, these apparent contradictions slip past under the radar, and I felt they reinforced Ellison’s credibility rather than undermining it-- I’d rather read someone who’s willing to admit they were wrong and re-evaluate their ideas rather than someone who rigidly sticks to a single ideological script for the sake of consistency.

My absolute favorite review in the book is his unsparing evisceration of Gremlins. For years, I thought I was the only one who found that pestilent nightmare distasteful, but it turns out I wasn’t alone, and Ellison’s thoughtful analysis examines not just what’s wrong with that film alone, but with the entire Lucas-Spielberg oeuvre (his comments on Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom, released in that same era and nearly as mean-spirited and ugly as Gremlins, further confirmed that Ellison was on the same wavelength as me when it comes to these films). I’m less convinced by his enthusiasm for Dune, a film I’ve always considered David Lynch’s absolute worst work (and yes, I’m including On The Air in that assessment), but Ellison’s piece did make me consider revisiting it to see if my old opinion still holds. But I’ll do that later, I’ve still got that long-delayed Persepolis review to write… redface