The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers

ALL THOSE OF YOU out there among the great unwashed who ever believed that TV sucks were dead wrong, you see; as Harlan Ellison pointed out in his sometimes amusing, sometimes scathing essays on television, TV does not suck; it is sucked. Ellison called his two-volume diatribe on the subject The Glass Teat , and if you've not read it, be aware that it comes recommended as a kind of compass with this particular stretch of the territory. I read the book with amazed absorption three years ago, the fact that Ellison had devoted valuable time and space to such forgettable series of yesteryear as Alias Smith and Jones barely obtruding on a total volcanic effect that made me suspect I was experiencing something roughly similar to a six-hour rant delivered by Fidel Castro. Always assuming that Fidel was really on that day.

Ellison circles back and back to television in his work, like a man held in thrall by a snake he knows to be ultimately deadly. For no apparent reason, the longish introduction to Strange Wine (a book we'll discuss at some length next chapter), Ellison's 1978 collection of short stories, is a diatribe on TV titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself.” When you strip Ellison's TV-rap to its core, it is simple enough and not blazingly original (for blazing originality, you have to read how he says it) : TV is a spoiler, Ellison says. It spoils story; it spoils those who make the stories; eventually it spoils those who watch the stories; the milk from this particular teat is poisoned. This is a thesis I would agree with completely, but let me point out two facts.

Harlan has a TV. A big one.

I have a TV which is even bigger than Harlan's. It is, in fact, a Panasonic CinemaVision which dominates one whole corner of my living room.

Mea culpa , all right.

I can rationalize Harlan's TV and my own monster, although I cannot completely excuse either of us-and I should add that Ellison is a bachelor, and he can watch the thing twenty hours a day if he wants and hurt nobody but himself. I, on the other hand, have three young children in the house-ten, eight, and four-who are exposed to this gadget; to its possible radiation, its untrue colors, and its magic window on a vulgar, tawdry world where cameras ogle the butts of Playboy bunnies and linger over endless visions of an upper-upper-upper-middle-class materialism that, for most Americans, has never existed and never will. Mass starvation is a way of life in Biafra; in Cambodia, dying children are shitting out their own collapsed intestines; in the Middle East a kind of messianic madness is in danger of swallowing up all rationality; and here at home we sit mesmerized by Richard Dawson on Family Feud and watch Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones. I think my own three kids have a better fix on the reality of Gilligan, the Skipper, and Mr. Howell than they do on the reality of what happened at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. In fact, I know they do.

Horror has not fared particularly well on TV, if you except something like the six o'clock news, where footage of black GIs with their legs blown off, villages and kids on fire, bodies in trenches, and whole swatches of jungle being coated with good old Agent Orange sent kids into the streets, where they would march and light candles and say dopey, talismanic "in” things to each other until we withdrew, the North Vietnamese took over, and more starvation on mass levels resulted-not to mention opening the way for such really upstanding, humanitarian personages as Cambodia's Pol Pot. The whole sour stew sure wasn't much like a TV show, was it? Just ask yourself if any chain of events so ridiculous could ever have happened on Hawaii Five-O . The answer is of course not. If Steve McGarrett had been President from 1968 to 1976, the whole abortion could have been avoided. Steve, Danny, and Chin Ho would have cleared the mess up.

The sort of horrors we have been discussing in this book labor under the very fact of their unreality (a fact which Harlan Ellison himself recognizes well; he refuses to allow the word fantasy to be printed on book covers as a descriptive term for the stories inside). We have treated the question "Why do you want to write horror stories in a world that is so full of real horrors?"; I am now suggesting that the reason horror has done so poorly, by and large, on TV, is a statement which is closely related to that question, to wit: "It is very difficult to write a successful horror story in a world which is so full of real horrors." A ghost in the turret room of a Scottish castle just cannot compete with thousand-megaton warheads, CBW bugs, or nuclear power plants that have apparently been put together from Aurora model kits by ten-year-olds with poor eye-hand coordination. Even Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre pales beside those dead sheep in Utah, killed by one of Our Finer Nerve Gases. If the wind had been blowing the other way when that happened, Salt Lake City might have gotten a really good dose of what killed the sheep. And, my good friends, someday the wind is not going to be blowing the right way. You may count on it; tell your Congressman I said so. Sooner or later the wind always changes.

Well, horror can be done. That emotion can still be triggered by people who are dedicated to doing it, and there's something optimistic in the fact that people can still, in spite of all the world's real horrors, be brought to the point of the scream by something that is patently impossible. It can be done by the writer or the director . . . if their hands are untied.

For the writer, the most galling thing about TV must be that he or she is forbidden from bringing all of his or her powers to bear; the predicament of the TV writer is strikingly similar to the predicament of the human race as envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," where bright people are fitted with electro-shock caps to disrupt their thinking periodically, agile people are fitted with weights, and people with great artistic talent are forced to wear heavy, distorting glasses to destroy their clearer perception of the world around them.

As a result, a perfect state of equality has been achieved . . . but at what a price.

The ideal writer for the TV medium is a fella or a gal with a smidgen of talent, a lot of gall, and the soul of a drone. In Hollywood's current and exquisitely vulgar parlance, he or she must "give good meeting." Let any of these qualifications be tampered with, and the writer is apt to start feeling like poor old Harrison Bergeron. It has made Ellison, who wrote for Star Trek , The Outer Limits, and The Young Lawyers , to name just a few, a little bit crazy, I think. But if he weren't, it would be impossible to respect him. His craziness is a kind of Purple Heart, like Joseph (Police Story ) Wambaugh's ulcers. There is no reason why a writer cannot make a living doing TV on a constant week-in-week-out basis; all that writer really needs is a low Alpha-wave pattern and a perception of writing as the mental equivalent of bucking crates of soda up onto a Coca-Cola truck.

Part of this is the result of federal regulation and part of it is proof of the maxim which states that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. TV is in almost every American home, and the financial stakes are enormous. As a result, television has become more and more cautious over the years. It has become like a fat old spayed tomcat dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and to the concept of LOP-Least Objectionable Programming.

Television is, in fact, like that fat, wimpy kid who most of us can remember from our childhood neighborhoods, the big, slack kid who would cry if you gave him two-for-flinching, the kid who always looked guilty when the teacher asked who put the mouse in her drawer, the kid who was always picked on because he was always afraid of being picked on.

Now the simple fact of horror fiction in whatever medium you choose . . . the bedrock of horror fiction, we might say, is simply this: you gotta scare the audience. Sooner or later you gotta put on the gruesome mask and go booga-booga. I can remember an official in the fledgling New York Mets organization worrying about the improbable crowds that gang of happy-go-lucky schmucks was drawing. "Sooner or later we're going to have to sell these people some steak along with the sizzle," was how this fellow expressed it. The same is true with horror. The reader will not feed forever on innuendo and vapors; sooner or later even the great H. P. Lovecraft had to produce whatever was lurking in the crypt or in the steeple.

Most of the great film directors in the field have chosen to get the horror up front; to cram a large block of it down the viewer's throat until he almost chokes on it and then lead the viewer on, teasing him, drawing every cent of the psychological interest due on that original scare.

The primer that every would-be horror director studies in this matter is, of course, the definitive horror film of the period we're discussing-Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho . Here is a movie where blood was kept to a minimum and terror was kept to a maximum. In the famous shower scene we see Janet Leigh; we see the knife; but we never see the knife in Janet Leigh.

You may think you saw it, but you did not. Your imagination saw it, and that is Hitchcock's great triumph. All the blood we see in the shower is swirling down the drain. *

Psycho has never been shown during prime time as a network movie, but once that forty-five seconds in the shower has been removed, the film could almost be a made-for-TV movie (in content, anyway; in terms of style, it is light-years from the run-of-the-tube TV flick).

In effect, what Hitchcock does is serve us a big raw steak of terror not even a quarter of the way through his film. The rest, even the climax, is really only sizzle. And without that forty-five seconds, the film becomes nearly humdrum. In spite of its reputation, Psycho is an admirably restrained horror movie; Hitchcock even elected to shoot in black and white so that the blood in the shower scene would not look like blood at all, and one oft-told tale-almost surely apocryphal-is that Hitch toyed with shooting the movie in color-except for the shower scene, which would be in black and white.

*I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde .