Harlan Ellison's Watching Read Online Free PDF Page B

remained a sweet, obedient human being who never uttered a cross word, never saw the flaws in the commands and dicta of Authority Figures, never became so obsessed with animated cartoons and other cinematic marvels that he became a film critic . . . and might today be a registered Republican.
     
    Had it not been for Hoppity, I might well have remained untwisted, uncorrupted, placid and pliant. I would not have been arrested as many times as I have; I would not have had as difficult a time in the Army as I had; I would not punch out television and film producers when they mess up my screenplays; and the world would have been a quieter place.
     
    I was a helpless pawn, caught in the grip of animation evil. You can call me Hoppity.
     
     
     
PART TWO:
In Which The Critic Turns His Forepaw To Semiotic NeoMarxist Post-Feminist Post-Structuralist Lacanian Kristévan Uninvested Postmodern Deconstructionist Cine-Fabulist Scholarship Thingee Stuff
    You go to a movie. You turn on the set and watch a tv show. You don't think about it. You just see it. When you rise, leave the theater or punch the remote to kill the set, if you are thinking at all, your thought is usually something no more complex than I liked that or I didn't like that . (Actually, the latter impression is more likely to be What a waste of time . I call that the Geraldo-Rivera-Opens-Al-Capone's-Vault response.)
     
    For an appreciably smaller number of exposures to film or television, the gray matter has not been stunned, and you very likely think about what you've seen. Then I liked and I didn't like become What a terrific movie ! or Gawd, I hated that, I'd like to slug the Producer, knock him down, go through his pockets, and get back the ticket money, the parking lot fee, the cost of the babysitter, and a few bucks for punitive damages!
     
    Filmgoers and television-viewers (and their mind-sets, which are completely different) justifiably judge a work in these visual mediums by what it is, not by the intentions of those who created it. They assume that what comes to them across the screen large or small is exactly what its makers wanted it to be. They have no idea—however knowledgeable they may be in the abstract—of the disruptions, the compromises, the disappointments and artistic roadblocks that come with the territory. Nor do they care. (I'm not sure anyone should care, on one everyday level. It is surely enough that the audience has trusted the creators sufficiently, in advance, to give over their time and their money.)
     
    But, in truth, the average member of the viewing audience would rather cobble up his/her uninformed opinion that goes beyond merely I liked or I didn't like , and visit it on anyone who'll listen, with the force of an Obiter Dictum, rather than learn what really transpired in that minefield between initial conception and final presentation, why some movie succeeded or failed, sans conspiracy paranoia or, worse, the naive rural-hayseed folderol of Those Who Never Get the Message.
     
    Because what is being indulged is a desire to comment, to voice an opinion, in short . . . to criticize.
     
    Considering the question from both sides of the plow—as both scenarist and critic-insider and just-like-you moviegoer—I discover, to my surprise and pleasure, that the single most important problem of film criticism, whether scholarly or casual, is easy to pin. It is the same problem from either side.
     
    Because movies (and by extension, television) are so damned accessible—they are the "common denominator" art forms of the masses, as pulp magazines and radio dramas were before them—they lie naked to the attentions of both the wise and the foolish. Where criticism of work in the print mediums requires having to read and (one hopes) a heightened degree of insight, if not good old simple common sense, as well as (again, one can only hope) some background in the form being discussed, anyone who plonks down the price of a ticket feels