The Science Fiction Shop, Baird Searles 's Greenwich Village emporium, is a seductive and dangerous place, probably the most complete specialty store on the East Coast. My wallet goes into spasms at the mere thought of it. My credit cards squeal "Feed me! "
Searles does occasionally take time off from feeding the in
satiable hunger of science fiction collectors, to write. He did the
Cliff Notes guide to Robert Heinlein, and co-wrote A Reader's
Guide to Science Fiction (with Michael Franklin, Beth Mea
cham, and Martin Last) and A Reader's Guide to Fantasy (with
Michael Franklin and Beth Meacham). He writes a monthly column reviewing, and usually bemoaning, the state of science fiction cinema and television for Amazing magazine.
There have been worse years for the science fiction film, I guess. For instance, 1783 comes immediately to mind. In point
of fact, there was exactly one film in 1981 * that could be considered real SF and not some mass media idea of the field, or a bastard combo with some other genre. That one film was Outland, and as the sole representative of its kind, it's too bad it wasn't better.
But it was a serious effort. It was action-oriented, but not childishly so, and it was written and produced with comparative intelligence-at least to the degree that there were no blatant scientific bloopers and the word "intergalactic" was not used for "interstellar" or even "interplanetary." And it had the distinct advantage, not usually enjoyed by an SF film, of two excellent actors, Sean Connery and Francis Sternhagen.
But with all this, it so thoroughly violated one of the prime tenets of the field that it might legitimately be suspected of being as spurious as the rest of the year's lot. Practically the first thing the aspiring science fiction writer learns (one hopes) is that the plot must arise from the science-fictional elements; in other words, you can't just take a Western, transfer it to Mars, call the Indians and horses exotic names, and end up with a piece of valid SF. So what does Outland do? It takes the classic Western film High Noon and transfers it to lo. Yup, the bad guys are comin' in on the noon shuttle, and nobody's willin' to help the sheriff. Despite a lot of shooting, breakage, and general mayhem, it's pretty tedious, and it has about as much sense of wonder as High Noon itself. A Western doesn't need that sense of wonder, but despite the tiredness of the phrase, it's still a sine qua non for good SF and fantasy.
Probably the closest thing otherwise to a true science fiction film was Heartbeeps, going on the theory that it was close to anything definable at all. The universal reaction to this tale
* Note for nitpickers: it is sometimes difficult to pin a movie to an exact year, given the variables of distribution, opening dates in various locales, and so forth. For instance. Flash Gordon opened in my area in the pre-New Year's holiday season of 1980, but was seen by the majority of its audience in 1981. So the movies mentioned were for 1981-give or take a month or so at either end.
of star-crossed robots was utter bafflement, and as is so often the case when the mainstream starts fooling around with robots, the temptation toward allegory-and what's worse, whimsical allegory-was irresistible. The peculiar talents of Bernadette Peters, who sometimes manages an eerily fey quality that is indeed unearthly, didn't help in this case.
Heartbeeps closed the year, and closed itself, with remarkable rapidity. I think it played in my area for about half a day, and showed up on cable TV with great dispatch.
The year opened with Flash Gordon, the first of several entries from the comics with some relationship to SF. (I, unlike the French and a fair number of Anglo-American illiterates, do not believe science fiction and the comics to be one and the same.) The new Flash followed the original (comic and film) pretty closely in plot, tried to give a contemporary look with an expensive production and effects, and did indeed use the word "intergalactic" (or, even worse in this case, "intergalactical"-urgh) for "interplanetary." The new look turned out to be closely akin to The Wizard of Oz, which was made about the same time as the first Flash Gordon, and the recent version more or less fell between stools, not quite camp and not quite straight. Sam J. Jones wasn't macho enough for the football-hero Flash, and Melody Anderson as Dale came across like Gilda Radner playing Little Eva, simpering and abrasive at the same time. But all in all, it was harmless and sometimes handsome fun.
The year's pits were reached with the Heavy Metal movie, which advertised itself as "beyond science fiction." And just as well, too. Just so nobody confuses it with the real thing. An anthology of stories in the fashion of the magazine Heavy Metal, which were animated in its visual style, it ranged from horror to pseudoscience fiction, linked by a device of utter inanity. It was a tossup as to which was more tasteless and inept, the content or the graphics.
The third major comix opera of the year was, of course, Superman II. It was a worthy successor to Superman, which
does not necessarily mean that it was particularly good. Or particularly bad, for that matter. Unlike most sequels, it gave the public what its predecessor had-a festival of special effects, razzle-dazzle photography, and nonstop action, all done with a lightness of touch that is creditable in a production so big it could have sunk of its own weight.
There is a fine distinction between comic fiction and pulp fiction, but it would take a lot more space to make that distinction than I have here. Two of the year's films harked back to pulp fiction in different ways; though superficially having nothing to do with SF, they are probably more closely related to it (given the pulp ancestry of the field) than are contemporary comics.
One was, of course, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which by some miracle recaptured the old pulp action-adventure spirit without missing a beat. It could well have been written by Robert E. Howard in his nonfantasy vein, and, in fact, whether it has any fantasy content at all depends on how one feels about Judeo-Christian mythology.
The other was yet another remake of Tarzan; it starred someone named Bo Derek, which sounds like a derelict oil rig. Despite that, most of the film's publicity and much of its footage was devoted to this person, who portrayed Jane. The result was a curious shift of balance, as if Fay Wray had suddenly become the size and weight of King Kong. And despite all the hoopla, the swimming scene between Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in an early Tarzan film had this one beat for eroticism.
It's only recently that the science fiction film has become separate from the horror film to any degree, and the combination is still a hardy cinematic perennial. A couple could be sorted out. this year from the geek and splatter films as being of some serious intent. Nobody seemed to notice that Altered States was simply a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the polarity of good and evil changed to the more contemporary advanced and primitive. It was, in fact, all of the mad scientists who had ventured where man was not meant to
go, with untoward results. (I kept thinking particularly of a horrendous little number from 1958 called Monster on the Campus, wherein a staid professor is changed into a Neanderthalesque monster at awkward moments, thanks to a serum he has whipped up from some primitive fish ichor.)
Writer Paddy Chayevsky. known for realism and satire (Marty, Network), and director Ken Russell, with a reputation for extravagent dramatics (Women in Love, The Devils) were something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde act in themselves, and despite jazzy "trip" sequences, atmospheric photography, and some muscular special effects, they still weren't able to disguise the basic banality of their story.
Then there was Wolfen, in which something-or-other chomped up people in the more blighted sections of New York. The something-or-other turned out to be either supernaturally intelligent or naturally superintelligent wolves. Despite the ambiguity, which led some confused mainstream critics to refer to it as a werewolf movie, it was effective and not dumb by any means.
The most interesting development for the science fiction film in this year was not a science fiction film (as you might guess from the sad showing listed above), but the emergence of the fantasy film; 1981 could go down in history as the year when fantasy came into its cinematic own.
Not that fantasy had been lacking on screen until this year, but it had almost always been whimsical, cute, and if not for children, certainly childish. (The 1940s were big on this kind of thing.) The exceptions, such as Cocteau's Beaw1, and the Beast, were rare indeed. But suddenly budgets were being expended on special effects that were not science-fictional, and there was a spate of films that might be considered heroic or even adult fantasy.
The word adult is, of course, relative; there was nothing that came close to the maturity of such works of literature as Titus Groan and Islandia among the fantasy films of the year. In fact, adolescent might be a better word than adult-it was at least a step up from childish.
Excalibur gave us a comic-book look at the life of King Arthur from Uther to Avalon, rendered in a series of brightly colored panels with dialogue of about the quality that you find in comic balloons. It was relatively sophisticated about the sexual side of the saga (What Tennyson Never Told Us) and mixed in a lot of magic, often on the obvious side, such as Morgan's Magic Grotto, which looked like a Disneyland reject.
Dragonslaver was about, of all things, a person who slew a dragon. It was curiously low-keyed, and showed some sensibility. Clash of the Titans slid us back to childishness in an awkward (in writing and special effects) retelling of the story of Perseus, leaving out the shower of gold and wasting some masterful British actors as a group of squabbling Olympians. Less juvenile despite a child as protagonist, Time Bandits tried so hard for laughs that it undercut any coherence as fantasy, but there were good moments, in particular a trip to the Greece of the Heroic Age, with Sean Connery as a noble Menelaus.
The most interesting of fantasy films for the year premiered on television with little fanfare or recognition. Fugitive from the Empire was set in a created world of sorcery and inhuman beings. An evil Empire dominated things from afar; the story was set on its fringes, among barbarians and nomads. There was a quest, a witch girl, and a magic bow (the type that uses arrows); the special effects were small-scale but used with good sense and imagination. Good sense, in fact, was the key quality; I felt, here in a fantasy mode, as I had felt with Star Wars in a science-fictional mode, that at last I was seeing onscreen the kind of work I had read all my life, but had never before seen transferred to another medium. Naturally, since it received nothing like the hype that the big-screen features had, it was dismissed by the majority of fantasy aficionados.
The rest of what happened on TV during the year was nowhere near that level of originality. More mileage was gotten out of that other comics-derived space opera, Buck
Rogers. With its second season delayed to midseason by the directors' strike of '80, it reappeared with some new additions: a boldly going starship a la the Enterprise, complete with an "Admiral Asimov," a hoity-toity robot named Crichton, and a dear, dithering old scientist. What it had lost, though, was the combination of strong-jawed seriousness that didn't take itself too seriously, and camp (typified by the wicked princess's wardrobe), which some of us had found so endearing in the first season. There was no third season.
New series got nowhere. Mr. Merlin had the enchanter running a garage in contemporary San Francisco and trying to break in a new Arthur; there were some good sorcerer'sapprentice jokes, but they ran out rapidly. Darkroom tried to recapture the spirit of The Twilight Zone; most of the stories in its short run were ghastly in the wrong way. The several good ones showed what it might have been.
Not a good year for particular works, certainly. No 200/, no Star Wars. And on the audience side of the screen, developments whose end we haven't seen. The science fiction and fantasy consumer was now as likely to be a viewer as a reader; the Trekkies of a decade ago had spawned a mass whose bodies and paraphernalia had practically taken over the conventions. They had their own magazines, which were, of course, mostly pictures, and the only writers they'd heard of if they even knew what a writer was-were those who had written for the big or little screens.
Changing also was the manner of viewing and the access to and acquisition of things to be viewed. Cable stations and networks and videotape and video discs were fragmenting what had once been a mass audience into myriad specialty audiences; movies and shows moved closer to being marketed as books have been.
It is customary to end this sort of piece with some kind of thumping generality. But for the life of me, given the scene I've just described for 1981, I can draw no conclusions whatsoever. So no epic long shot to conclude-just a quiet fade ....
