Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison, Leonard Maltin Page A

his Times and the pressures of a System he cannot even comprehend, much less fit into. (The parallel to K., the hapless protagonist of The Trial , is inescapable.) The girl becomes the symbol of rationality. The club manager, Fryer (played with some confusion in a shrieking key by the usually memorable Jeff Corey), becomes the element of consciencelessness in modern man, the attitude that it is not the individual's responsibility what horrors are perpetrated on his fellow man.
     
    But even here, in the area of symbolism, an area usually so mystic and clouded by variant definitions, Penn supersedes the trite, and parallels the Kafka implementation of double-level representation. For instance:
     
    At oddly disjointed and seemingly irrelevant junctures of the fast-moving plot, a tiny Japanese junk-artist appears, motioning to Mickey One. The comic sees him everywhere: in an alley, beckoning with terrifying immediacy; riding on a junk wagon pulled by a blind white horse (the classic death symbol as typified in Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds ); on a lakefront staging-area in front of Chicago's Marina Towers, displaying a whirling madcap construction of spare junk parts and fireworks; and finally, when Mickey is contemplating suicide, in an automobile destruction yard where cars are squashed into cubes à la Goldfinger .
     
    Every time Mickey sees the little Oriental, he flees in panic, and throughout the picture we come to believe the Japanese is Penn's handy pocket symbol of death and pursuing evil. Yet the construction is called YES! and in the end it is the little Japanese man, beckoning to Mickey, standing on the edge of that car-cubing destroyer, who saves Mickey from suicide. And in the final moments of the film we come to the realization that Penn has had us, that we have smoothly swallowed his red herring, that the Japanese artist is literally the manifestation of Yes! Yes to life, yes to courage, yes to continuing the fight, yes to fighting conformity and the System, all Systems that threaten to deaden and punch-file the individual in an era where the individual is subjected to the rigors of keeping the machinery functioning smoothly.
     
    An example of consummate directorial artistry.
     
    Further indicated in the use of camera and editing. Penn has employed many of the Richard Lester/Sidney Furie/John Schlesinger techniques, but has studiously—and laudably—avoided their excess, their silliness or their bizarre aspects. There are no shots through keyholes, no slantwise camera postures that force one to tilt in the theater seat, no camera obtrusiveness for the sheer sake of brio . In point of fact, the dissolve (a sadly-neglected technique) has been utilized much more than the smash-cut or the upside-down camerawork.
     
    (In one shot, Mickey, large in the foreground, stares into a destruction tunnel at the car-squash yard, where a vehicle suddenly erupts in a bouquet of flame. As this shot fades, and the car, tunnel and flames vanish, leaving only Mickey corporeal in the foreground, the incoming shot superimposes, and we see Mickey in the background, walking toward himself, up a dark alley. It is a very poignant and subtle way of showing a man literally looking at himself, studying his past, contemplating his future.)
     
    Kafka's habit of sketching-out the denouement of a story, resolving the problems through the use of absence of resolution, is employed here by Penn, and inherent in this tactic is the seed of the tragedy mentioned above, for it will only serve to confuse the filmgoer who expects everything spelled out for him like a Giant Golden Book. Mickey is on the verge of being murdered by the Mob, and then, suddenly, without warning, he is free, and we see him playing the piano on Chicago's lakefront, the world stretching out all around him, open and free.
     
    But for those who wish to seek beneath the surface, the point is fulsomely made: a man may win his freedom, even through endless flight, if he