The Duck Speaks

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America is a wasteland, filled with murderous rover-packs, radiation ridden mutants, and solos like Vic just trying to get by. Vic has an edge, though: his telepathic dog, Blood, who is able to smell out women and fight with equal skill. The two have a bickering, affection relationship, with Blood trying to teach Vic of the past and Vic constantly trying to get laid. Then one day Blood sniffs out a new girl, and this one’s different; she’s from downunder, where all the rich folk went to hide when the bombs fell. She’s beautiful and great in the sack, but when Vic gets involved with her over Blood’s fervent protests, he might get more than he bargained for…

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Harlan Ellison.

Growing up in Maine, you don’t get a lot of access to the genre’s more obscure material. This was before the Internet, before Amazon and all its ilk- for me, the only places to find books were a couple of libraries, the local Bookland, and Waldenbooks at the mall. As I got older, I grew more and more interested in reading things that weren’t classics or bestsellers; unfortunately, that interest went mostly unsated.

I first heard of Ellison in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. I was eleven or so, and at that point, any endorsement by King was enough to get me looking. (This is how I “discovered” Peter Straub and H.P. Lovecraft, among countless others.) But there was no Ellison to be found, anywhere. So I sorta gave up.

Then I caught the end of a weird movie on PBS. It had Don Johnson in it, of all people, and Jason Robards in freaky make-up. The ending was a surprise; it took me a day or two to convince myself that what I thought had happened, had really happened. The best part, though, was Ellison’s name on the credits; I was one step closer to my goal. (A very small step, granted, but you take what you can get.)

A couple of years passed and finally, finally Borders came to town. Say what you want about the destruction of small bookstores; this was one of the best things ever to come to town. For the first time, I found a place with a horror section bigger than a shelf. And they had trade paperbacks! Richard Matheson novels! I didn’t even recognize a good three-quarters of the names, but it all looked so cool.

Even cooler: the science fiction section had two Harlan Ellison short story collections. I bought Angry Candy. Haven’t been the same since.

Now that ample material was available, I devoured the man’s oeuvre (sounds kinda nasty, doesn’t it?), and for a brief period, Ellison became like a god to me. I thought he was the coolest guy around. He was angry, eloquent, passionate, seemed to believe in all the things I believed in, and wouldn’t let anyone push him around. I knew this because he told his readers repeatedly. Not in a needy sort of way, mind you- more like, Hey, I kickass for me, so pay attention or get out.

I was very susceptible to role-model-itis at that point in my life, and while Stephen King was (and probably always will be, disillusionment included) the biggest father figure I had- aside from the real one, of course- Harlan Ellison was the big brother I never knew I wanted. This, I decided, was who I wanted to be.

Also, this is the kind of writer I want to be. I was used to solid, unfancy prose at that point, and to read someone who was willing to take chances with just about everything a typewriter had to offer was a revelation.

So I read a lot of his stuff. I bought more books, searched on-line, made some idiotic posts on the b-board of the web’s primary Ellison site. And eventually, as it goes with all things, my fervor faded. I still read his new stuff when I found it, but I stop looking quite so hard. His influence remained, but with the flush of infatuation gone, I was hungry for new crap.

It’s only recently that I started to hear that Ellison isn’t as overwhelmingly loved as I once assumed. He’s a loud-mouth, some say, a trouble-maker, an arrogant know-it-all who can’t stop picking fights. It was sort of depressing to hear this, like someone was trying to tell me I’d been duped; he wasn’t perfect. Big brother just got drunk and started beating up school kids.

I’m not sure what, if any, of what I’ve heard is true. I do know he’s a far more complex character than I’d ever realized, and this will probably make it difficult for me to enjoy his non-fiction work as much. But he’s got a ton of short stories, and many of them are excellent, and that’s probably what matters most to a reader like me.

Cue music, spotlight fades, thundering applause.

You may be wondering at the length of this intro. (I know I am.) Well, every review of Ellison’s work I’ve ever read has made some comment about how it’s important to separate the work from the man, and how difficult that is to do.

Screw that, I say. The man is his work, for christ’s sake. He’s a life-time performance artist, and his written stuff is only half of his art. The rest is the Myth; the above should tell you what I think of that myth, and how it might inform my review, for good or for bad.

Besides, this is probably the only Ellison review I’ll be able to do on my site, so I had to get all my psycho-dramas out at once.

Anyway, remember the movie I half-remembered seeing on TV? That was A Boy and His Dog, and it’s about the only movie adaptation you’ll find of an Ellison story. He doesn’t work well with movie folk, from all accounts. (Actually, from his accounts, it’s movie folk that don’t work well with him. Having watched The Player a few times, I’m inclined to side with Mr. Ellison.)

The original story- or novella, as some call it- is considered one of his essential pieces of work, right alongside “The Deathbird” and “’Repent, Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman.” (I know this because the big story collection I have puts them all in the same section.) He says in “The Deathbird” that he wrote “A Boy and His Dog” for his dog Ahbhu. If you know the story, it makes you wonder exactly what that dog was like.

The story is told in first person, from the perspective of Vic. This is a neat trick; it gives us a very strong conception of who Vic is from the start (he’s smart, sorta uneductated, and weirdly good-natured), and also provides an easy method of setting the scene. When you force your audience to see through the eyes of a character, you can slip in whatever weird stuff you want, and provided the narrator buys into it, the reader will as well. We won’t even notice it.

So there’s minimal exposition throughout. We get the sense that a nasty nuclear war happened, destroying most of America, and leaving in its wake the sort post-apocalyptic wasteland one has seen in countless 80’s Italian movies. Ellison wasn’t ripping anyone off here, though; his story was first published in 1969, and while a nuclear holocaust wasn’t an entirely new idea, it wasn’t as overused as it came to be after The Road Warrior.

Vic and Blood spend their days hunting for food, with Vic pushing Blood to find him a woman so he can get laid. It’s a sparse, existential sort of existence, constantly searching for the means to keep searching for the means to keep etc, and aside from the occasional sex, the only two pleasantness the two seem to find in the world is in each other’s company.

Which isn’t to say they have a sappy, Disney-like relationship; they spend most of their time together cursing each other out, like a foul mouth Abbott & Costello. It’s a well-used archetype: the pair of best friends, forever joined at the hip, and eternally berating one another for their fate. Deep down, they hafta like each other, else they wouldn’t stick together, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be polite about it.

One night, Vic and Blood decide to take in a movie. One of the neater elements in this post-apocalyptic world is that you can see little pieces of civilization beginning to reform. Everyone concedes that they need movies, so the rover pack (gang) which holds the movie theater simply has to keep the theater in good condition, show movies regularly, and no one will bother them.

There are other rover packs with similar situations mentioned, including a group working a power plant. This, to me is a logical manner for society to begin reconstructing itself: agreements being made that everyone goes along with, with one party providing a service that guarantees its safety.

V and B go to the movies. The show opens with a forties gangster pic (Raw Deal), then a propaganda flick from the third world war (Smell of a Chink), and then settles in with a porno. Again, there’s a small amount of hope offered for humanity here; the porno makes sense, of course, but so do the other pictures. The need for narrative still exists even when just about everything else doesn’t. Gives the writer in me a warm fuzzy feeling.

During the movie, Blood senses a woman nearby. Vic’s skeptical at first, but he soon becomes convinced when he spots her himself, dressed up like a guy and playing with her herself during the porno. The woman is almost certainly not native to the area; it’s not unheard of, though, for a chick from downunder to come up (or “cumup,” as Vic puts it) to get a glimpse of life on the surface. This is a rare find, and if Vic can grab her, he can get all the action he wants, and probably better than just about anyone else he’s been with.

Once the show lets out, they track her to an old YMCA, and Vic sneaks in to find her in the gymnasium, naked. He pauses, and it’s here where the trouble begins so to speak; he’s shocked at how soft she is, how pretty and untouched. The concept of “virgin” here is as important in the general sense as it is more physical; this is a woman whose never seen hardship or pain like Vic has, who has never been beaten or raped or half starved while just trying to get buy.

He grabs her, and her effect on him grows even stronger because she doesn’t behave like a normal woman would, at least not his idea of a normal woman. She keeps staring at him, and asks his name, and doesn’t scream or struggle.

Which completely new thing for Vic. I’m not sure if “love” is exactly the right word here, but her apparent vulnerability and complete unwillingness to play the part of the victim unnerves him. Vic is not a natural psychotic; he’s just a guy who lives in the world he was given and does the things he can to get by. The sudden possibility of another world where things aren’t quite like that connects in a way he is not immediately able to recognize.

Before the two can go at it, Blood shows up with bad news: another rover pack has sensed the girl, and is preparing to attack the building. Vic and Blood try to fight them off, with some help from the girl, Quilla, but in the end, there’s too many; so Blood decides to burn down the building, while the three of them hide inside the empty boiler downstairs.

Hiding in the boiler, Quilla truly begins to work her way under Vic’s skin. They screw almost constantly, and it ain’t rape; she even initiates much of the time, which baffles Vic to no end. Blood, on the other hand, is getting resentful- he’s forced to listen to the sounds of their frequent copulations. But it’s only after the fire that the conflict comes to its head, when Vic and Blood go out to scout the ruins, and Blood demands that they leave the girl behind.

His points are valid: they can’t afford to have a third party slowing them down, one who can’t support her way and has no experience in the “real” world to boot. The unspoken criticism here is that they’ve always been a partnership, and with Quilla along, things would change. For the worse, in Blood’s opinion; which pisses Vic off to no end, so much that he almost hits the dog, something he’s never done before.

The problem is, he doesn’t want to give up either side: not the strange, intriguing woman who puts out so regularly or the canine that has been his constant companion for the last few years. Quilla makes the choice for him. When Vic returns to the boiler, she knocks him unconscious with his gun, and flees.

Which should be the end of it, but Vic is furious with her, and in a strange way, it’s possible to sympathize with him. While his initial intentions were to rape her brains out, the relationship has changed, and her attack is a violation of the odd trust they had building. He wants to go after her, and as if the gods themselves were on his side, he finds she’s left behind a key to the downunder entrance.

The only thing holding him back are Blood’s fervent protests. Again, his arguments are rational: the downunders have experience with rovers coming below to raid their cities, and have most likely built up extensive safety precautions to prevent people like Vic from ever bothering them again. Vic ignores this, and leaving a severely wounded Blood (with a promise that he’ll be back soon), he goes through.

Aside from the relationship between Vic and Blood, the exact nature of the downunder is the most interesting and entertaining part of the story. It seems that all the bourgeois who went to hide under the ground when the bombs started going off, decided that the problems with the world above stemmed from change: and that the best way to do things was to set up life as it was in the twenties in small town America, and never, ever alter it. So no one is allowed to swear, there are fairs and gallantry and fire engines and hopscotch and everything’s wonderful all the time.

Except, for some strange reason, new boys aren’t being born. The community, designed to be entirely self-sufficient, will die out in the next fifty years if something isn’t done to keep them going.

Which is where Vic comes in. Quilla was a trap, a trick to lure him below, and now that he’s there, they want him to impregnate all the girls and women who don’t have husbands.

It sounds like the ideal arrangement on the surface: all the sex and food you want for the rest of your life, and no catches. But the place is boring as hell for all it’s safety, and Blood’s still waiting above. What’s a boy to do?

Like I said, this one’s a classic, and while I’ve read it too many times at this point to truly get off on it, it does deserve it’s reputation. The story is utterly fearless- Vic is never made nicer in order to ensure the reader’s sympathy, there’s no sentimental hugging and petting between him and Blood to convince us they like each other. (There’s a bit of sentimentality at the end, but let’s just say it’s much easier to swallow.)

There are the usual Ellison word tricks in the narration, phrases pushed together for slang, puns in the names of the rover packs. “Our Gang” is a particular favorite- picturing the Lil’ Rascals as a bunch of psycho marauders has a certain appeal: “Spanky, get Alfalfa some poon-tang tonight or it’s your ass!”

Also, this is one of the few things I’ve read where background information helps: knowing that Ellison wrote it out of love for his dog makes Vic and Blood’s relationship all the more moving, and gives the ending a layered wallop that it might not normally have.

The movie folks, being the smart ones they are, stuck very closely to the novella in their adaptation. (Helps that Ellison wrote some of the screenplay.) The movie was made in the seventies, and as the saying goes, there’s no way in hell it would get made today. And if it did, certain plot elements would have to be changed beyond recognition to get a major studio’s approval. This version was done independently, possibly one of the reasons they chose the source material they did. Nothing says “cheap” like “wasteland.”

The acting is uniformly solid, with Don Johnson doing a surprisingly good turn as Vic. Jason Robards plays a town elder downunder, and his presence gives the movie a certain heft; it’s difficult to believe that anyone else could have been quite as nonchalantly evil as he is in his role. Susanne Benton makes a good Quilla Jones: she’s hot, and she’s bitchy, which is all the role really requires. (More on that in a sec.) For Blood, they have a mutt not unlike the Shaggy Dog, voiced by Tim McIntire. I wasn’t a huge fan of Tim’s; he isn’t terrible, but he adds a nasty edge to the character that I hadn’t got from the story.

As for the changes from the plot, the first big one is when Vic and Blood come across a caravan of folks, led by a black guy in a colorful get-up. V and B watch as the Black Guy orders his followers to start digging in a certain hole in the ground. Eventually, we see that they’re looking for food, and they find it in spades; enough to motivate Vic to run in and grab a couple of bags. While this is going on, a group of strangers (we only see their feet) watch, and one of them says of Vic, “He’s the one.”

It’s not a bad scene, but it’s goofy for a couple of reasons. For one thing, why the hell couldn’t anybody see anybody else? The caravan never notices Vic until it’s too late, and Vic never sees the other folks watching them. It’s a flat desert, for crissakes. You can see folks from a thousand yards away.

Also, I’m not a big fan of the “selection process” implied here. The group of strangers are town elders, and they’re searching for the next person to impregnate their ladies. While this makes sense on one level- the folks in the downunder seem like the type who would be very picky about where they get their sperm- it strains plausibility in terms of the trap. How could they be sure Quilla would get her man, so to speak? How did they know he would go to the movies? And afterwards, how did they know he’d be the one to follow her first? In the story, Quilla’s just trolling for any sexually active male, which makes more sense.

The movie theater is a bit different, in that there’s nothing but soft-core porno, with some occasional violence thrown in. This was probably a rights issue more than anything else, as all the films are clearly homemade; but it is a tad more misanthropic than the story.

The biggest changes from story to film are in the downunder, and Vic’s eventual “job” there. The short story presented it as a small town right out of The Music Man; its major fault was its stifling complacency and obsession with maintaining the status quo. The movie version takes this a step further and makes the Committee that run the place actively evil. Not only is any sort of disobedience against the law, but in every case we see, anyone caught breaking the law is sent to the Farm, a euphemism for being executed. It’s all done casually, and it’s very, very creepy.

But what the hell is up with the face make-up? To varying degrees, everyone is made up like a friggin mime or something. Maybe it’s supposed to be satire of something, but it comes off as being weird for the sake of being weird, and mostly serves as a distraction.

The other major difference is in what the Committee wants out of Vic: his sperm, and nothing else. This leads to an entertaining sequence where Vic is “married” to a number of women while laying tied down on a hospital bed as his semen is drained out of him. It’s a clever twist, and makes a bit more sense than the story version, especially in this context; it’s hard to imagine the movie Committee being willing to let some young stuff start screwing everyone.

However, both these changes have a major drawback, at least thematically. But let me talk about the movie-Quilla first.

In the story, Quilla is more a cipher than anything else. She entices Vic like her elders tell her too, and then she tries to escape with Vic later on; she shows a fair amount of hatred for her parents, but given the situation she’s in, it’s difficult to blame her.

Movie-Quilla, on the other hand, is a manipulative bitch. We get a few scenes with her alone downunder, as she tries to weasel her way onto the Committee, and her frustration afterwards show she’s excessively hungry for power. Not necessarily an evil thing, but her willingness to manipulate others to achieve her ends is. She gets three or four of her friends killed and lies at a drop of a hat to anyone who can get her what she wants. Her reach exceeds her grasp, though, and in the end, she gets what’s probably coming to her.

And that’s the sticking point. (Here’s where I try to juggle five balls at once. Watch me give myself a concussion!) “A Boy and His Dog” works in a lot of ways as a basic allegory. You have the narrator, Vic, and while he’s clearly out of puberty, his basic interactions with the world are that of a pre-teen; he doesn’t think about consequences, he’s driven by emotions, and he doesn’t give much thought beyond tomorrow.

Fortunately, the world he lives in is perfect for this attitude, and his partner, Blood, is the best friend a guy could have; a never-failing companion who’ll find you chicks when you want some, and who’s constantly trying to teach you crap you don’t really need.

Into this Edenic-paradise comes a woman. She’s great in the sack, but she brings with her a host of problems, mainly the one of responsibility; with her around, he can’t just do whatever the hell he wants, he’s got to think about her safety, and he’s got to start planning ahead. But there’s this promise of continual sex and mutual affection that keeps him from ditching her straightaway, as much as he probably should.

One way or another, he finds himself in the downunder- or, Adulthood. Here are families, town meetings, jobs and kids to be raised and lawns to mow. Boring as hell, but again, there’s the sex thing, and the fact that an adult can’t really live in the above world. An adult is defined by his knowledge of consequences; and since Vic is getting older, maybe he’s tired of the wandering around. Maybe he wants those consequences and the responsibilities that comes with them.

Here’s the problem with the movie version: the choice is made for him. Sure, in the story downunder, it’s not that strong a temptation to stay- Vic never once seems truly interested in sticking around. But he does choose to go himself, and it shows the nature of his character, his essential and never faltering boyhood: he can only really exist in the desert with Blood. In the movie version, everyone’s so obviously Eeeeevil, and the “sex” so unsex-like, that it’s doesn’t mean anything at all when he decides to leave. Of course he leaves! He doesn’t want to get killed after being pumped like a cow for a week.

So the movie ruins the allegory. It also, with its additions to Quilla’s character, makes the ending more misogynistic than was originally intended. And here’s where I’m going to get fairly oblique, to try not to ruin every last detail. Apologies if this ends up more confusing than anything else.

In the story, Quilla’s fate is creepy; but because she is for the most part “innocent,” and thus a victim, the author’s intent is clear. He’s not saying “Do this to all women cause I hates them.” He’s saying “A boy loves his dog.” Vic is willing to sacrifice anything in the end for Blood, and in that way, it’s a moving moment. You wouldn’t want to run into either of them in the real world, but in the world they exist in, they make sense. They really do love each other, and that’s the important thing to walk away with.

In the movie, because of Quilla’s apparent nastiness, it’s more like she deserves what happens to her, and oddly enough, that makes it more unpleasant. In the story, Vic was making his final choice between adulthood and his life with Blood; in the movie, you know he has to choose one way, because if he doesn’t Quilla’s gonna stab in the back the soonest chance she gets. It’s a character depiction that not only dulls the most important thing about the friggin story, the nature of Vic’s final choice, but also opens up the movie to allegations of misogyny. The implication could be read as: women aren’t to be trusted. The best way to deal with them is- this.

I’m not saying the movie truly is misogynistic. Perhaps I’m reading too much into something that was merely done to flesh out the original story. But it’s a mistake in either case; we shouldn’t know Quilla well at all by the end. Otherwise, the conclusion is too disturbing to work.

If you’ve been avoiding Ellison because of his less than saintly reputation, you owe it to yourself to track down some of his writing. I strongly recommend Deathbird Stories as one of his overall best collections; if you’re hankering to read “A Boy and His Dog,” take a look at The Essential Ellison, for more of his stuff than any sane person could ever need. Also, the movie is decent, if not remarkable. If it pops on PBS sometime, watching it won’t ruin your day.

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SCREEN: QQ.5
For Don, it was all downhill after this. “Heartbeat” anyone?