This really is how these stories have to be done. Not the faux-realism of the movie of Silence of the Lambs. That approach jars with Anthony Hopkins' (less than entirely successful) attempt to capture the uncanny and semi-demonic nature of Hannibal himself, who was always a creature of evil magic. Look at Harris' descriptions of him in Red Dragon, with his maroon eyes and his extra finger and his preternatural senses.
What the TV version of the stories has done is capture (with the proper ambiguity) the essentially magical nature of Hannibal and his world. He lives in a twilight interzone between our world of quotidian normality and the deep, dark pit where human nature as brutish meat intersects with human nature as beset by devils and shades.
Yes, it glamourizes him and his violence, in contrast to real murderers... but that seems a superficial way to look at these stories, even if it's a perfectly valid one which should be given its own space. Below that, there is more to say. Treating Hannibal as an uncanny creature who blurs our senses of place and time and knowledge is actually much better in this respect than the 'realist' approach, which ends up straightforwardly making him a glamorous monster.
I love that this show dances on the borderline between diegetic materialism and a diegetic acknowledgement of a supernatural world. It leaves open to us the possibility that Hannibal truly is a demon, or a demon-inhabited man. By refusing to foreclose upon the literal supernatural reading, the show leaves the incredible oneiric fertility of the supernatural story open to us. It does what lesser works like The Babadook and The Innocents fail to do. It respects the uncanny, and it also allows it a possible existence without making it anything less than numinous and ineffable. It ultimately asks us to not care - but in a constructive way. It asks us to recognise the essentially uncanny, weird, gothic, sick, twisted, irrational nature of reality itself as we live it.
Phil Sandifer (I suspect) enjoys the show in terms of Blakean visions. I enjoy the show in terms of the Gothic Marxist insistence upon the really existing world as a twisted, phantasmagorical and irrational hellscape, but also as a site of the creative and expressive production of phantasms.
Season 3 is surely the fruition of this approach, as begun (falteringly) in Season 1 and continued (far more confidently) in Season 2. And the great thing is that they've recognised this strain in the original stories, particularly in Red Dragon (which really stands above and apart from the other books), by placing the story of Francis Dolarhyde as the terminus of the season.
Dolarhyde is the figure who, through his Blakean-inflected hallucinations and his status as tragic and enmonstered outsider, allows the categories to crash into each other in horrific but visionary ways. I love how Harris does all this in the book without ever losing track of Dolarhyde's viciousness, or his essential patheticness. One uncomfortable thing about the book, of course, is the way it insists upon the victim-status of a violent white man... but this looks set to be reframed by the TV series (as the TV series always does reframe the original stories creatively) by the superb decision to cast a black actress as Reba, which follows the show's splendid line of transmuting male characters into women, and rescuing monstrous female characters from caricature. (I expect a more nuanced take on Dolarhyde's backstory too.)
(By the way, I'm sure the actress playing Reba was cast solely on her evident talent... I'm just glad they were open to doing so rather than thoughtlessly following the source material, as many other production teams would have done.)
One thing I'm very interested to see is how they transmute Lecter's helplessness and frustration at his incarcerartion in the book. In the TV show, Lecter's incarceration is almost voluntary, the next step in his game, a way of staying in Will's life. I think his frustration (which is very integral to both the plot and his character) can be rescued by reframing it as frustration at Will's refusal to engage with him.
I'll be fascinated to see how they do it.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Saturday, 8 August 2015
Saturday, 4 July 2015
Shabgraff in Wonderland (Shabcast 7)
"[T]he speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life."
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Today is the 150th anniversary of the origins of Alice in Wonderland. A century-and-a-half ago today, Lewis Carroll took a boat trip with the Liddell family, and told the children a story. Alice Liddell asked him to write it down. He started the next day.
To celebrate, follow me down the rabbit hole and listen to Shabcast 7 - here.
A special one, this. I'm once again joined by Josh Marsfelder (of Vaka Rangi) and for the first time by the wonderful Jane of many fames. We watch (and chat about) the neglected 1966 Jonathan Miller TV version of Alice in Wonderland. A forgotten masterpiece. Well, maybe not forgotten... but not exactly remembered either.
This podcast had various titles before I settled on my final choice: 'Alice Narrates Herself'. It was going to be called 'Cobwebs on the Tea Urn', then 'Mock Turtles all the Way Down', then 'Pig Latin'... I even toyed with a facile but amusing 'Shabcast Madness Returns'. I eventually settled on a title which reflected something myself and my guests all seemed to notice and cherish: the fact that this production gives control of the narrative to Alice herself, and lets her tell the story. One of the many things which makes this production unique.
I'm very proud of this episode, not just because I was lucky enough to get Jane to guest with myself and Josh, but also because the dynamic of the discussion is lovely. The three of us attend a tea party, detached from time (it's the evening for them, the middle of the night for me) and talk at cross purposes for ages... though, of course, unlike the Hatter and his friends, we're hopefully not talking nonsense. I love the way our distinct perspectives each hook into something different about the story we're watching, and the way we overlap and converge. We don't always end up in exactly the same territory... but we get to read and enjoy each other's maps.
What could be more apt?
*
UPDATE (Same day):
I somehow forgot to link to Josh's pieces about Alice. Here they are:
http://forest-of-illusions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/pet-hobby-of-mine-has-always-been.html
http://vakarangi.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/and-when-i-grow-up-ill-write-one-once_26.html
http://forest-of-illusions.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-second-song-of-queen-aliissa.html
And here's Jane's essay about LOST, mentioned in the Shabcast:
http://www.philipsandifer.com/2013/11/pop-between-realities-home-in-time-for_27.html
*
EDIT (Also same day):
In the original version of this post I mistakenly claimed that today was the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book. I have corrected this howler.
Saturday, 23 November 2013
1
What can I do but cheat?
Three moments, not in chronological order.
1
Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She's in a large, brightly lit control room.
This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have "discovered television". We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids - the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces - can be made visual.
Doctor Who's very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d'etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I've said elsewhere, 'The Space Museum' pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking... and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show - which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production - crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.
This is analogous (I'll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It's fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from 'historicals' and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children's literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.
2
The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.
Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about 'cavemen' who are dying out because they've forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.
The use of tools played a crucial role in the evolution of humanity, making us the creature with a 'species-being' bound up with conscious labour. Fear played a crucial role too. 'An Unearthly Child' is obsessed with fear, both as a poison and as a source of solidarity. "Fear makes companions of us all," says the Doctor when he comes to Barbara's aid. Fear melds society together.
In a talk I linked to here, China Mieville spoke about octopuses that have been observed picking up weapons just in case they need to use them later. That looks like the beginnings of conscious foresight. Maybe something like that happened to our ancient ancestors. Maybe the avoidable 'dreaded outcome' sparked the dialectic that began the transformation of the hand and brain. This is a vital part of a Marxist defence of the value of scaring kids. (That's irony on the square, by the way.)
This is particularly ironic in terms of 'An Unearthly Child' if you suspect, as I do, that the bickering and jockeying cavemen are not our ancestors, but the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust that people in 1963 expected at any time.
The tool helped bring us into being... but it was always both map and club. Its progress was always towards television and nukes. It isn't a popular insight, but that tragic doubleness is just what progress is.
3
Susan looks through a book about the French Revoution.
This revolution was probably the event most foundational to the modern world. It was a process which drastically marked the beginning of the end for feudalism in Europe. It was a popular revolt which heralded the beginning of the great dialectic of class struggle that would mark all bourgeois society and history.
She looks through a schoolbook account, doubtless a safe and sanitised version, the way such books usually are. She, one of those unpredictable and scary 'teenager' things that they have nowadays, one of those people who is puzzlingly neither child nor adult, one of those unearthly children, one of those youngsters listening to the Common Men, a member of a generation who would soon lead a worldwide political and cultural revolt... she reads a book about revolution that her teachers have given her, and she says to herself, in a whisper of surprised outrage...
"That's not right!"
Fifty years later, it still isn't right. But, for better or worse, the show goes on.
*
Finally, an invitation to speculate. Given that Doctor Who was so much better under social democracy than under neoliberalism, imagine how wonderful Doctor Who would be under socialism.
Admittedly, it would have to find new things to talk about...
Three moments, not in chronological order.
1
Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She's in a large, brightly lit control room.
This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have "discovered television". We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids - the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces - can be made visual.
Doctor Who's very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d'etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I've said elsewhere, 'The Space Museum' pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking... and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show - which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production - crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.
This is analogous (I'll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It's fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from 'historicals' and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children's literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.
2
The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.
Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about 'cavemen' who are dying out because they've forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.
The use of tools played a crucial role in the evolution of humanity, making us the creature with a 'species-being' bound up with conscious labour. Fear played a crucial role too. 'An Unearthly Child' is obsessed with fear, both as a poison and as a source of solidarity. "Fear makes companions of us all," says the Doctor when he comes to Barbara's aid. Fear melds society together.
In a talk I linked to here, China Mieville spoke about octopuses that have been observed picking up weapons just in case they need to use them later. That looks like the beginnings of conscious foresight. Maybe something like that happened to our ancient ancestors. Maybe the avoidable 'dreaded outcome' sparked the dialectic that began the transformation of the hand and brain. This is a vital part of a Marxist defence of the value of scaring kids. (That's irony on the square, by the way.)
This is particularly ironic in terms of 'An Unearthly Child' if you suspect, as I do, that the bickering and jockeying cavemen are not our ancestors, but the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust that people in 1963 expected at any time.
The tool helped bring us into being... but it was always both map and club. Its progress was always towards television and nukes. It isn't a popular insight, but that tragic doubleness is just what progress is.
3
Susan looks through a book about the French Revoution.
This revolution was probably the event most foundational to the modern world. It was a process which drastically marked the beginning of the end for feudalism in Europe. It was a popular revolt which heralded the beginning of the great dialectic of class struggle that would mark all bourgeois society and history.
She looks through a schoolbook account, doubtless a safe and sanitised version, the way such books usually are. She, one of those unpredictable and scary 'teenager' things that they have nowadays, one of those people who is puzzlingly neither child nor adult, one of those unearthly children, one of those youngsters listening to the Common Men, a member of a generation who would soon lead a worldwide political and cultural revolt... she reads a book about revolution that her teachers have given her, and she says to herself, in a whisper of surprised outrage...
"That's not right!"
Fifty years later, it still isn't right. But, for better or worse, the show goes on.
*
Finally, an invitation to speculate. Given that Doctor Who was so much better under social democracy than under neoliberalism, imagine how wonderful Doctor Who would be under socialism.
Admittedly, it would have to find new things to talk about...
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
10
"We waited here in the dark space," booms the Dalek Emperor, "damaged but rebuilding. Centuries
passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting
the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed.
They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The
seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit
to be nurtured."
So, In Russell's rewrite of 'Revelation of the Daleks' (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward's script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite. Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the 'dregs'... which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows. The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale. Because the Daleks have become TV producers. They've become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link. They've become the bosses of reality TV. They've become Simon Cowell. (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)
Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell's omniscient totalitarian leader; he's now the eternal, ever-watching viewer. He's us. Just like the Daleks are now us.
"So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead," says the Doctor.
Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.
"That makes them half human," mutters Rose... as always, she is straight to the quick.
"Those words are blasphemy!" bellows the Dalek Emperor.
The Daleks chant in unison...
"Do not blaspheme! Do not blaspheme! Do not blaspheme!"
"Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?" asks the Doctor.
"I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!"
The Daleks chant in unison...
"Worship him! Worship him! Worship him!"
Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the 'War on Terror', two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists. The world is in the middle of an apparent 'clash of civilisations', with religion as the supposed organising logic. But are these new fundamentalist Daleks - 'Fundamentaleks' - supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda? Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders? Both? Two sides of the same coin?
To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.
They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition. The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness. The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right. The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors. Society has become "a charnel house" in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles. You have to step on the other poor schlubs in order to win. This system is publically fronted by celebrities reconfigured as hollow, inhuman monsters. It is run by ordinary people who do evil things not because they're personally evil, but because they are employed by a systemic evil. And it's all owned and controlled by Daleks who have absorbed a feverish and callous determination that can best be described, at least as far as RTD is concerned, as fanatical religion.
The Daleks have become neoliberals. Capitalist crusaders, ruling a resurgent yet insane system, presiding over a world divided between the starving and the obese who "just watch telly", absorbing the working body utterly and assimilating it into themselves. And the logic behind it all has penetrated human culture to the extent that TV runs the world, and relentlessly pushes an ideology of total competition, total dog-eat-dog. (That this is, essentially, the world we live in is obvious since RTD uses shows of the present day, projected into the future.) Survival has finally been formally and openly marketised. The spectacle is omnipresent and it brazenly expresses the relations at the base of society: compete with each other so that your rulers can profit.
The Daleks have become market fundamentalists.
So, In Russell's rewrite of 'Revelation of the Daleks' (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward's script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite. Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the 'dregs'... which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows. The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale. Because the Daleks have become TV producers. They've become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link. They've become the bosses of reality TV. They've become Simon Cowell. (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)
Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell's omniscient totalitarian leader; he's now the eternal, ever-watching viewer. He's us. Just like the Daleks are now us.
"So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead," says the Doctor.
Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.
"That makes them half human," mutters Rose... as always, she is straight to the quick.
"Those words are blasphemy!" bellows the Dalek Emperor.
The Daleks chant in unison...
"Do not blaspheme! Do not blaspheme! Do not blaspheme!"
"Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?" asks the Doctor.
"I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!"
The Daleks chant in unison...
"Worship him! Worship him! Worship him!"
Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the 'War on Terror', two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists. The world is in the middle of an apparent 'clash of civilisations', with religion as the supposed organising logic. But are these new fundamentalist Daleks - 'Fundamentaleks' - supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda? Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders? Both? Two sides of the same coin?
To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.
They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition. The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness. The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right. The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors. Society has become "a charnel house" in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles. You have to step on the other poor schlubs in order to win. This system is publically fronted by celebrities reconfigured as hollow, inhuman monsters. It is run by ordinary people who do evil things not because they're personally evil, but because they are employed by a systemic evil. And it's all owned and controlled by Daleks who have absorbed a feverish and callous determination that can best be described, at least as far as RTD is concerned, as fanatical religion.
The Daleks have become neoliberals. Capitalist crusaders, ruling a resurgent yet insane system, presiding over a world divided between the starving and the obese who "just watch telly", absorbing the working body utterly and assimilating it into themselves. And the logic behind it all has penetrated human culture to the extent that TV runs the world, and relentlessly pushes an ideology of total competition, total dog-eat-dog. (That this is, essentially, the world we live in is obvious since RTD uses shows of the present day, projected into the future.) Survival has finally been formally and openly marketised. The spectacle is omnipresent and it brazenly expresses the relations at the base of society: compete with each other so that your rulers can profit.
The Daleks have become market fundamentalists.
Saturday, 16 November 2013
20
For March Against the Mainstream Media Day
The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity. Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...
"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?" His tone is patronising. Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.
"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."
"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."
"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"
The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.
"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."
Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.
"What is that?" she asks.
"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."
Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.
"I don't know anything," she says proudly.
"Don't you even ask?"
"Why would I?"
"You're a journalist."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
She genuinely doesn't understand him. She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold". She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up". Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures. And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains. For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.
"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.
When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.
"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.
"She's working," says Rose.
In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.
"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."
There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.
"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."
His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat. The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting. The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling. But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth. At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks. It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race.
"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."
"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.
"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"
"Yes," says the Doctor simply. He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading. If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won. It becomes Question Time. It becomes safe.
Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.
The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity. Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...
"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?" His tone is patronising. Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.
"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."
"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."
"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"
The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.
"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."
Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.
"What is that?" she asks.
"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."
Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.
"I don't know anything," she says proudly.
"Don't you even ask?"
"Why would I?"
"You're a journalist."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
She genuinely doesn't understand him. She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold". She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up". Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures. And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains. For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.
"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.
When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.
"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.
"She's working," says Rose.
In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.
"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."
There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.
"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."
His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat. The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting. The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling. But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth. At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks. It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race.
"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."
"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.
"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"
"Yes," says the Doctor simply. He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading. If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won. It becomes Question Time. It becomes safe.
Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.
Saturday, 23 March 2013
You'll Go Blind
After two decent episodes dealing with the Victorian creation of the concept of pornography (i.e. as a closed-off anteroom of culture, only to be studied... and perhaps enjoyed... by responsible, educated males) in the wake of the unearthing of Pompeii, and the revolutionary porn writing of the Enlightenment, the series starts dwelling on 20th century visual forms, from the photograph to the internet.
The last episodes are particularly mired in the stagnant and repellent atmosphere of their era. All the hallmarks of the late-90s intellectual milieu (during which I endured acres of trendy theory at University) are there. The social and political cynicism masquerading as consumerist utopianism. Utopianism itself stripped of all noble and liberationist inflections and fused with a kind of gleeful dystopianism, reflecting the way that the post-Cold War intellectual landscape, with its End of History vibe, saw the future horrors and joys of unfettered capitalism as being equally inevitable... and then celebrated this with a knowingly sick grin of elitest contempt. The countdown to an apocalypse of banality and boredom that was supposedly hiding just around the millenium. The dyspeptic, misanthropic celebration of supposedly new and bleeding edge trends that are (perpetually) said to be just about to change/destroy social life irrevocably. The putative change to a post-industrial economy, the putative unravelling of social life and the rise of the ubiquitous selfish individual (phenomena that, in as much as they were real, were not actually new).
The series is stuffed with comment from entrepreneurs or capitalists (without the word or topic 'capitalism' ever being properly mentioned), or from 'social critics' who generalise about what 'we' are becoming (with 'we' implicitly standing for all humanity while actually referring to a tiny sliver of the urban upper middle classes in the developed West). It's enormously telling that, in the midst of scads and scads of pontificating about the meaning of things from the P.O.V of the producer or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the P.O.V of the worker, of the... if you'll pardon me... working stiffs getting screwed. Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser's excellent Reefer Madness will know what this TV series left out. At one point, a theorist is talking about how internet porn (which is solitary, private and interactive) takes the 'imposition' out of the equation... even as the camera shows a semi-naked woman gyrating around on a bed, being given orders by paying customers who are watching her on their monitors. Nobody's 'imposing' on her then. I guess she's economically independent but does that job purely for the lulz. Who knows? Admittedly, they interview her later, but she talks about what she does, not why she has to do it.
The oppression of women, the objectification of female bodies, patriarchy, sexism... these do not pop up. (This is actually a tad surprising... though feminist theory at that time was often comfortable forgetting about such things too.) Despite a female voiceover, and some interviews with quirky 70s porn actresses, this series is resolutely and unselfconsciously focused on the male experience of enjoying his sexual dominance. Rape culture is hardly a glint in the script writer's eye.
This kind of comatose, complacent apoliticism is rampant throughout the series. There is nothing about the inequalities of internet access (or access to media more generally) in any of the discussion of porn consumption, videocameras and cybersex. In the midst of all the profound thinkerizing about porn's journey into 'the mainstream' there is precious little time left for wondering who sets the agenda of the mainstream. Media ownership is not a topic, except for the times when a handful of porntrepreneurs (presented as pioneers and farseeing cultural trendsetters) get to gibber their self-seeking spin.
Far from being a 'secret history of civilisation', this is a celebration of an open secret... couched in the fashionable idiocies of vulgarised late-90s po-mo posturing. It's telling that several of the 'social critics' in the series make predictions about what will have come to pass 10 to 15 years in the future (i.e. now) all of which are resolutely wrong. Porn isn't as mainstream as microwaves (it is still cordoned off by very, very old power structures), nor is it democratized by public 'gonzo' participation (it's still a massive corporate business, intensely undemocratic and still based on mass exploitation), nor is it the pervasive preserve of an entire planet-ful of lonely, isolated, selfish, hedonistic individuals who live in the ruins of a social polity decimated by new media, finding ultimate nirvana in disconnected masturbation (this is still but a fragment of a truth, restricted to a narrow band of the relatively privileged). Still, it's not surprising that they guessed wrong, given that their guesses about the future were just extrapolations of what they thought was going on in 1999, most of which was based on the rhetorical exaggeration of half-truths.
This is a rant, not an attempt to provide an alternative analysis... I know for a fact that I'm not needed (or qualified) to provide one of those. I will just say this: you can't understand the commodification of fetish without understanding the fetishizing of commodities. Indeed, if there was ever a 'proof' (whatever that might mean in the social sciences) of the theory of commodity fetishism, it's the porn business. Not that you'd know that from watching Channel 4's best attempts at analysis.
As we all know, history didn't end in the 90s. Despite the lingering 'mainstream' idea (who sets these agendas? ...be nice to know, wouldn't it?) that There Is No Alternative, capitalism triumphant was nevertheless undermined by its own blowback (9/11, the environment, the crash, etc). It's telling that, though wrong, Fukuyama looks insightful compared to the throngs who followed in what they took to be a cultural variant of the same 'sense of an ending'. The idea that history, culture, society etc were all grinding to a halting death/mutation in the chilly-yet-glorious dawn of 'postmodern' hyper-techno-consumerism was the bugbear/fantasy of a layer of intellectuals who read too much Baudrillard and were given too many opportunities to pontificate on TV.
Is it any better now? Well, I've not been around academia for a good long while now (I do not miss it) but I'm guessing that much of the same balls is still being talked, albeit in a less confidently millenarian manner. But that's got to be some improvement, hasn't it?
I liked being 23. Otherwise, I really don't miss 1999.
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to...
This article - from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian - is really great. It's about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism... and all that kind of stuff. Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty - all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes. Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies... just in a way acceptable to liberals.
Here's a snippet:
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal 'humanitarian intervention'. I'm all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn... but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can't help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here's blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the 'nuanced' Zero Dark Thirty. Like this 'nuanced' response, for instance:
Nothing like 'nuance' is there?
(Actually, I've blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama's aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects - here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she's not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people's opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a 'philosopher', but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
"This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale." - Žižek, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable (Pretty good, though he wobbles at the end.)
Here's a snippet:
The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don't shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can't get enough of them. Perhaps it's because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don't know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal 'humanitarian intervention'. I'm all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn... but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can't help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here's blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the 'nuanced' Zero Dark Thirty. Like this 'nuanced' response, for instance:
Nothing like 'nuance' is there?
(Actually, I've blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama's aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects - here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she's not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people's opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a 'philosopher', but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
"This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale." - Žižek, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable (Pretty good, though he wobbles at the end.)
Thursday, 6 September 2012
We are the Borgias. You will be Excommunicated. Renaissance is Futile.
It's good that TV dramas have become more complex and ambiguous, particularly with regards to morality. But there is a tendency for them to lose any moral compass in their eagerness to show us the dark sides of the characters with whom they want us to empathize and to care about.
The Borgias wants us to follow Cesare's career with sympathy, but also shows him having people tortured into madness. What is the show's position on this? Oddly, it tries to whitewash him even as it revels in his dark side. It makes his victims into rapists and murderers. It depicts him as personally involved in tormenting Savonarola, but makes Savonarola a fanatic (of course) and a vicious homophobe. Now, it's true that Savonarola instituted strictly puritanical laws in Florence, including against sodomy... but that was applicable to hetero sex as well as homo. Of course, I wouldn't want to defend Savonarola's views in their entirety. He was not a modern democrat. But he and people akin to him - Munzer, Cromwell, the Levellers, the Diggers... the p/Protestant revolutionaries of the era of transition from feudalism to capitalism - were more than just foaming fanatics. They meant more than that. Of course, revolutionary ideals are always depicted as fanatical and dangerous in mainstream culture, more horrible by definition than any status quo they may challenge. c.f. anybody in Gotham City who doesn't like draconian laws and huge imbalances of wealth.
On the subject of Savonarola, we of course get a depiction of the revolution he led in Florence against the Medicis as an irrational explosion of fanaticism and lunacy. We get no hint of the scale of corruption and oppression committed by the Medicis, no real hint of the horror of poverty in Florence alongside the amazing cultural flowering and explosion of wealth. We get nothing about the popular support for Savonarola, the support of artists like Michaelangelo and Botticelli (we even get Machiavelli and Cesare tutting over the burning of a Botticelli on one of the Bonfires of the Vanities). The Florentine republic created after the people kicked out the Medici was astonishing for its time. The franchise was extended, public office was opened to lower ranks, the use of capital punishment was limited, etc. None of that. Natch.
And, to loop back to what I was saying earlier, we get no sense of the scale of corruption in the Catholic Church that Savonarola and people like him were rebelling against. Pope Alexander VI, played (ludicrously, with stuck out chin and silly gruff voice) by Jeremy Irons, is shown to be a libertine, a spendthrift, a buyer and seller of offices, etc... but we're evidently meant to relish him as a morally ambiguous figure whose passions are enjoyable to witness. He is also shown giving a shit about the poor of Rome, going out at night in secret to investigate why the orphans don't got no clean water. He even gets to deliver John Ball's line "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" in response to aristocratic bigotry.
So, moral ambiguity at all costs... even at the cost of any moral compass in the drama, or any semblance of historical truth. There are, I think, worse sins in drama than areas of moral clarity.
The Borgias wants us to follow Cesare's career with sympathy, but also shows him having people tortured into madness. What is the show's position on this? Oddly, it tries to whitewash him even as it revels in his dark side. It makes his victims into rapists and murderers. It depicts him as personally involved in tormenting Savonarola, but makes Savonarola a fanatic (of course) and a vicious homophobe. Now, it's true that Savonarola instituted strictly puritanical laws in Florence, including against sodomy... but that was applicable to hetero sex as well as homo. Of course, I wouldn't want to defend Savonarola's views in their entirety. He was not a modern democrat. But he and people akin to him - Munzer, Cromwell, the Levellers, the Diggers... the p/Protestant revolutionaries of the era of transition from feudalism to capitalism - were more than just foaming fanatics. They meant more than that. Of course, revolutionary ideals are always depicted as fanatical and dangerous in mainstream culture, more horrible by definition than any status quo they may challenge. c.f. anybody in Gotham City who doesn't like draconian laws and huge imbalances of wealth.
On the subject of Savonarola, we of course get a depiction of the revolution he led in Florence against the Medicis as an irrational explosion of fanaticism and lunacy. We get no hint of the scale of corruption and oppression committed by the Medicis, no real hint of the horror of poverty in Florence alongside the amazing cultural flowering and explosion of wealth. We get nothing about the popular support for Savonarola, the support of artists like Michaelangelo and Botticelli (we even get Machiavelli and Cesare tutting over the burning of a Botticelli on one of the Bonfires of the Vanities). The Florentine republic created after the people kicked out the Medici was astonishing for its time. The franchise was extended, public office was opened to lower ranks, the use of capital punishment was limited, etc. None of that. Natch.
So, moral ambiguity at all costs... even at the cost of any moral compass in the drama, or any semblance of historical truth. There are, I think, worse sins in drama than areas of moral clarity.
Friday, 22 October 2010
Blobs in a Snowstorm
With extra material by Charles Daniels (so there'll be at least one bit of it worth reading).
What is Doctor Who but a "carnival of monsters"? A peepshow for kids that want to look in on lots of other worlds full of funny little creatures doing funny little tricks, like arguing and fighting and being chased and eaten by monsters? In fact, that's TV generally. Well, actually, it's fiction generally. But Doctor Who is what's being examined here. A cheap 'n' cheerful carny entertainment, proffered by el cheapo entertainers. The purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse. Nothing serious, nothing political......
Except that entertainment is inherently political, as is fun, as is the imagination, as is the love of monsters. Monsters, as China Miéville has put it, are "good at meaning" things. He says that we're a teratoculture, that we make monsters as part of our inherent humanness. They're all over the caves that prehistoric man painted. We're the animal that is scared of our predators... but also wonders how cool it would be if four of our different predators all donated body parts to some chimera creature that exists only in our heads. And we still love monsters, even in our world of technology and capitalism. We go to them for amusement, to fend off the boredom. And they mean things for us at the same time.
Inter-Minor (a world whose name suggests interiority and petty little concerns) is run by grey-faced, bureaucratic, xenophobic, snobbish, isolationist killjoys. It reminds me of what James Connolly said about the consequences of dividing Ireland, that it would be a “carnival of reaction”. And right he was too. The Inter-Minoran rulers could be the Catholic Church in the South, cracking down on fun (though they’re a bit too disapproving of colourful kitsch and bling to convince as Catholics) or the Protestant ruling minority in the North, holding down the Catholics. Bit of a stretch? Yeah, okay, probably. But either way, they hate the Scope because it might amuse the Functionaries, the exploited underclass who are shot down for stopping work and protesting. And the Functionaries do look interested! The "official species" won’t let them look, however. They fear the contamination brought by the multi-coloured, sequin-plastered fakers who want to bring colour and fun to their world. They don't want the functionaries getting ideas. Like the British imperialists on the SS Bernice who generalise about “Johnny Chinaman” and the laziness of their “Madrassi” (which is a racist slur, in case you didn’t know), the Inter-Minorans don't think their beasts of burden can be trusted to pause working without also losing their discipline and becoming dangerous.
Is this a protectionist state tyranny that fears the freedoms brought by the free market - personified by the entrepreneurial Vorg? Maybe, but this story also critiques British imperialist racism... and Vorg is hardly an ethical paragon. His business is the cruel and utterly callous exploitation of the "monsters" that find their way into his little malfunctioning techno-zoo. A machine that separates people into their little boxes and keeps them there, running round in circles, doing the same things over and over, stuck in time, unalive and unaware of it. If capitalism is better than the state bureaucracy of the Inter-Minorans, it is still depicted as a system of exploitation and alienation... which the Doctor shuts down too.
Also, when Kalik outlines his plan for allowing some drashigs to escape (thus causing havoc, leading to a war, increased xenophobia, regime change, national unity and docile functionaries) it sounds like what some would now call ‘shock therapy’. Use the terrorist attack, hurricane or invasion as a cover under which to restructure society along reactionary neoliberal lines while everyone is scared and reeling. No doubt Kalik would have his own version of a PATRIOT Act and lots of Lurmanophobic terrorist scares, probably followed by a savage spending review. If Kalik is a protectionist and a statist, he’s behaving like a neoliberal. Or a neoconservative. They're pretty much different facets of the same thing. Of course, one of the things one learns from reading people like Naomi Klein and Chomsky is that the ideologues of the weak state and free trade are the very people who advocate protectionism and ultra-statism in practice. The free market couldn’t afford to run itself and still make profits without massive public investment and subsidies. But I digress…
Meanwhile, the metaphor of the Scope for all fiction continues. It's a machine that moves characters around from box to box. The people inside are also characters controlled by a lazy author (like the soldiers in the War Games or the characters in the Land of Fiction)... or perhaps even existential beings observed but unhelped by amused and detached gods. As flies to wanton boys to the gods are we, etc... Vorg twiddles the dials to make the monsters in his technological flea circus jump. He’s a script writer adjusting the characters. He twists the “aggrometer” (!) and the people on the screen start fighting… he twists it back and they wander off for tea. And Jo gets to comment further on the mechanics of Who story construction: “isn’t it time for the monster bit about now?”
If TV is a system of levels, one within the other, dimension within dimension, play within play... then Doctor Who, with its integral system of big spaces inside little boxes is the same TV dimensional system ramped up and amplified, something that this story analyses and cheekily disrupts. The TARDIS inside the boat inside the Scope inside Inter-Minor inside your TV inside your world... and the Doctor walks around inside your TV breaking down the barriers between the compartments, screwing up the circuitry... the different genres (the historical and the monster story) break into each other, just as the entire system of worlds within the Scope eventually breaks out into Inter-Minor, leaving you wondering - at that back of your mind, especially if you're a kid - if the Drashigs are also going to break out of the TV into your living room... and devour you before they rampage through Britain devouring all the xenophobes and bureaucrats and little Englanders and carny show people and bored workers...
On top of all this we have a satire of bad sci-fi that is ten times better and cleverer (and considerably less smug) than anything Douglas Adams would later go on to do, either in Who or elsewhere. In fact, it also simultaneously satirises anti-sci-fi snobbery. Kalik mutters at the ridiculousness of the Lurman names. They have a weapon called "the Eradicator" and a leader called "Zarb" and they think the Lurmans are daft!
Speaking of daft… why is the Skarasan in ‘Terror of the Zygons’ widely held to ruin (or nearly ruin) the story, while the plesiosaur and drashigs in ‘Carnival’ are not? The answer is as interesting as it is simple: ‘Zygons’ attempts some kind of naturalism in its aesthetics; ‘Carnival’ does not. Proof that the effectiveness of an effect is as much to do with its context as its intrinsic realism (or lack thereof).
I could go on. At length. But I'll have mercy on you and hand over to Who forum legend, party animal and eccentric genius Charles Daniels. Here is his take on ‘Carnival’. I don’t personally agree with absolutely every word of it (and it goes without saying that my quoting him here doesn’t mean he agrees with me about everything… or even anything), but it’s brilliant – no doubt about that. Read it:
Oh wait! That's Shirna and Vorg. Easy mistake to make.
I'm sure the eeriely mirroring situation is just a freaky coincidence. After all, this is
a Pertwee story, and subtext wasn't invented until 1982 when they aired ‘Kinda’.
Anyway, I don't know how I confused them with the Doctor and Jo Grant, they didn't arrive in the TARDIS. They arrived on an assembly line where they were treated like mass produced objects. Again, no possible hint of irony could possibly have been in Robert Holmes' mind when he wrote that. He's not exactly a writer known for using comedy double acts to promote subversive material, now is he? I'm sure he didn't mean to say that Doctor Who had become rather formulaic in recent years.
Right, so everything I said before, let's just take that as unintentional co-incidence.
You write about two people travelling through space to exotic worlds together, there's bound to be some overlap with a completely different set of characters in the same universe who just happen to travel through space together.
So what about Vorg and Shirna? Well Shirna is the assistant. And Vorg is a somewhat shady seeming, but apparently nice enough, alien with a small, innocuous-looking, machine that can manipulate time and is bigger on the inside than the out. (It's the size of a tall trash can, and can contain entire oceanliners and desert planets.)
Oh and while Vorg tries to calm his assistant when the machine starts to go bonkers, he keeps insisting that everything is alright and he knows how to operate the machine, when he blatantly doesn't.
So yeah, it just gets more and more dissimilar a parallel as I continue. Doesn't it?
Okay, enough with the sarcasm.
Vorg and Shirna are Doctor Who.
They are a statement about Doctor Who WITHIN a serial of Doctor Who.
And what are Vorg and Shirna (aka Doctor Who) trying to do? Well they arrive, reckon their audience is stupid, and then try to con as much cash out of them as possible.
"Step up step up for the monster show! Step up for the monster show! You schmucks!"
Not exactly the BEST thing you can say about Monster Show fan-...oops, I mean Doctor Who fandom, is it?
No nostalgia. Just plain old "Get the mark's money/viewing figures/AI numbers."
Nearby two aliens note that their scientists are puzzled as to why virtually every alien species looks more or less roughly humanoid. Again -- SERIOUS. TAKING. THE. PISS.
Meanwhile the Doctor and Jo are running around in corridors, getting captured, escaping, getting terrified by monsters, running around in corridors, getting captured, escaping, getting terrified by monsters, running around in corridors which Jo insists they've been in before but the Doctor assures her that the corridors all look identical and it's just her imagination, and then they discover that it actually IS the same corridor again and again. And they are surrounded by people who repeat the same actions AGAIN AND AGAIN!
The Doctor's life comes into peril on multiple occasions -- he's almost microwaved to death due to some rather harsh immigration laws, he's almost eaten, etc etc. But for once it's not the Doctor being generally clever, insanely lucky, or his foe's being generally bad at killing people that saves him.
This time around, at every turn the Doctor has saviours who step in on his behalf.
Who are these saviours? A bunch of bickering bureaucrats with unbelievably awful hair. Each of the bureaucrats is driven by a need to outdo the other in a petty game of political backstabbing. Each time the Doctor is threatened, petty bureaucrats advance their own agendas to save Doctor Who... I mean, the Doctor. I mean...well, I don't want to suggest that Robert Holmes was suggesting something about the way decisions were made at the BBC in the 1970s. It's just an eerie coincidence, just like the Vorg/Shirna parallel we debunked earlier.
In brief, the entire history of Doctor Who is deconstructed and taken the piss out of.
And that's not too terribly hard; We've seen horrifically unsubtle stabs at it, say with the LITERAL cliffhanger in ‘Dragonfire’. But what makes Robert Holmes impressive is that he did it under the nose of fans who have seen the episodes multiple times. The difference is that the same fans who are happy to pick apart the socio-political importance of ‘Battlefield’, tend to dismiss Pertwee as a load of old pro-establishment rubbish. Which doesn't pan out if you actually sit down and watch Pertwee stories.
Things like ‘The Green Death’, which was entirely blatant and in-your-face, were far more relevant and necessary than say -- an impassioned speech against nuclear war, which by 1989 wasn't too terribly controversial an idea. You've got the Peladon stories, the ‘Frontier In Space’, the Silurians -- all of which are trying to address relevant points with varying degrees of success. But ‘Carnival of Monsters’ is the Pertwee story that looks inward, and gets away with it.
Now, I should finish on that last line but that would mean I'd have to drop another point entirely, but it's one thing that I mustn't over look -
The Pertwee stories also are a great source to see the fundamental shift of social expectation.
Dystopia, oppression, and state violence were THE EXPECTED NORM of the 1970s. In a modern production all social ills are cured or taking their first steps to being healed within 45 minutes of the opening credits. For instance, even in the first Ood story we see the human characters shift their perceptions radically at the end of the story when they record the Ood deaths. And that sets the stage for the ABSOLUTELY UNAVOIDABLE sequel in which the Ood are freed.
In the ‘Carnival of Monsters’? The powers that be of Inter-Minor push the working class to the brink of insanity and then shoot them dead in cold blood.
Not only is this NOT all fixed with a happy warm bow at the end of the story -- it's NEVER EVEN ADDRESSED.
The Doctor doesn't get involved. He doesn't free the enslaved masses. He doesn't demand retribution for the "forcibly retired" members of the workforce. He just pisses off.
But he doesn't piss off before he laughs, chuckles, and essentially endorses Vorg on his quest to con innocent people out of as much credit bars as possible.
I’ll only say one thing in response to the above. The Ood aren’t “freed”, they free themselves. And in the last episode of ‘Carnival’, Pletrac can’t get the transport to take Vorg and Shirna away because “the functionaries are refusing to work double shifts”. When they protest on their own they can be shot down. When they unite, all the ruling class can do is grumble and look scared. That’s why I like the fact that the Doctor doesn’t free them. They don’t need him to. They can do it themselves. We need a bit of that sort of thing ourselves.
What is Doctor Who but a "carnival of monsters"? A peepshow for kids that want to look in on lots of other worlds full of funny little creatures doing funny little tricks, like arguing and fighting and being chased and eaten by monsters? In fact, that's TV generally. Well, actually, it's fiction generally. But Doctor Who is what's being examined here. A cheap 'n' cheerful carny entertainment, proffered by el cheapo entertainers. The purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse. Nothing serious, nothing political......
Except that entertainment is inherently political, as is fun, as is the imagination, as is the love of monsters. Monsters, as China Miéville has put it, are "good at meaning" things. He says that we're a teratoculture, that we make monsters as part of our inherent humanness. They're all over the caves that prehistoric man painted. We're the animal that is scared of our predators... but also wonders how cool it would be if four of our different predators all donated body parts to some chimera creature that exists only in our heads. And we still love monsters, even in our world of technology and capitalism. We go to them for amusement, to fend off the boredom. And they mean things for us at the same time.
Inter-Minor (a world whose name suggests interiority and petty little concerns) is run by grey-faced, bureaucratic, xenophobic, snobbish, isolationist killjoys. It reminds me of what James Connolly said about the consequences of dividing Ireland, that it would be a “carnival of reaction”. And right he was too. The Inter-Minoran rulers could be the Catholic Church in the South, cracking down on fun (though they’re a bit too disapproving of colourful kitsch and bling to convince as Catholics) or the Protestant ruling minority in the North, holding down the Catholics. Bit of a stretch? Yeah, okay, probably. But either way, they hate the Scope because it might amuse the Functionaries, the exploited underclass who are shot down for stopping work and protesting. And the Functionaries do look interested! The "official species" won’t let them look, however. They fear the contamination brought by the multi-coloured, sequin-plastered fakers who want to bring colour and fun to their world. They don't want the functionaries getting ideas. Like the British imperialists on the SS Bernice who generalise about “Johnny Chinaman” and the laziness of their “Madrassi” (which is a racist slur, in case you didn’t know), the Inter-Minorans don't think their beasts of burden can be trusted to pause working without also losing their discipline and becoming dangerous.
Is this a protectionist state tyranny that fears the freedoms brought by the free market - personified by the entrepreneurial Vorg? Maybe, but this story also critiques British imperialist racism... and Vorg is hardly an ethical paragon. His business is the cruel and utterly callous exploitation of the "monsters" that find their way into his little malfunctioning techno-zoo. A machine that separates people into their little boxes and keeps them there, running round in circles, doing the same things over and over, stuck in time, unalive and unaware of it. If capitalism is better than the state bureaucracy of the Inter-Minorans, it is still depicted as a system of exploitation and alienation... which the Doctor shuts down too.
Also, when Kalik outlines his plan for allowing some drashigs to escape (thus causing havoc, leading to a war, increased xenophobia, regime change, national unity and docile functionaries) it sounds like what some would now call ‘shock therapy’. Use the terrorist attack, hurricane or invasion as a cover under which to restructure society along reactionary neoliberal lines while everyone is scared and reeling. No doubt Kalik would have his own version of a PATRIOT Act and lots of Lurmanophobic terrorist scares, probably followed by a savage spending review. If Kalik is a protectionist and a statist, he’s behaving like a neoliberal. Or a neoconservative. They're pretty much different facets of the same thing. Of course, one of the things one learns from reading people like Naomi Klein and Chomsky is that the ideologues of the weak state and free trade are the very people who advocate protectionism and ultra-statism in practice. The free market couldn’t afford to run itself and still make profits without massive public investment and subsidies. But I digress…
Meanwhile, the metaphor of the Scope for all fiction continues. It's a machine that moves characters around from box to box. The people inside are also characters controlled by a lazy author (like the soldiers in the War Games or the characters in the Land of Fiction)... or perhaps even existential beings observed but unhelped by amused and detached gods. As flies to wanton boys to the gods are we, etc... Vorg twiddles the dials to make the monsters in his technological flea circus jump. He’s a script writer adjusting the characters. He twists the “aggrometer” (!) and the people on the screen start fighting… he twists it back and they wander off for tea. And Jo gets to comment further on the mechanics of Who story construction: “isn’t it time for the monster bit about now?”
If TV is a system of levels, one within the other, dimension within dimension, play within play... then Doctor Who, with its integral system of big spaces inside little boxes is the same TV dimensional system ramped up and amplified, something that this story analyses and cheekily disrupts. The TARDIS inside the boat inside the Scope inside Inter-Minor inside your TV inside your world... and the Doctor walks around inside your TV breaking down the barriers between the compartments, screwing up the circuitry... the different genres (the historical and the monster story) break into each other, just as the entire system of worlds within the Scope eventually breaks out into Inter-Minor, leaving you wondering - at that back of your mind, especially if you're a kid - if the Drashigs are also going to break out of the TV into your living room... and devour you before they rampage through Britain devouring all the xenophobes and bureaucrats and little Englanders and carny show people and bored workers...
On top of all this we have a satire of bad sci-fi that is ten times better and cleverer (and considerably less smug) than anything Douglas Adams would later go on to do, either in Who or elsewhere. In fact, it also simultaneously satirises anti-sci-fi snobbery. Kalik mutters at the ridiculousness of the Lurman names. They have a weapon called "the Eradicator" and a leader called "Zarb" and they think the Lurmans are daft!
Speaking of daft… why is the Skarasan in ‘Terror of the Zygons’ widely held to ruin (or nearly ruin) the story, while the plesiosaur and drashigs in ‘Carnival’ are not? The answer is as interesting as it is simple: ‘Zygons’ attempts some kind of naturalism in its aesthetics; ‘Carnival’ does not. Proof that the effectiveness of an effect is as much to do with its context as its intrinsic realism (or lack thereof).
I could go on. At length. But I'll have mercy on you and hand over to Who forum legend, party animal and eccentric genius Charles Daniels. Here is his take on ‘Carnival’. I don’t personally agree with absolutely every word of it (and it goes without saying that my quoting him here doesn’t mean he agrees with me about everything… or even anything), but it’s brilliant – no doubt about that. Read it:
Imagine that Carnival of Monsters had been made in 1988, with the 7th Doctor
What's the FIRST THING WE SEE in Carnival of Monsters? The Doctor arrives on the planet in outrageous attire, with his lovely girl companion complaining about how disappointed she is with his choices of destination.
and Ace. Fandom would have been all over every frame - debating the origin of the Scope, how the Doctor TRULY ended up in there -- did he plan it all along for some arcane purpose? Trying to find meanings hidden within the design of the machine; The choice of the exhibits.
FFS -
The Doctor coming out and using his status as a Time Lord to control the situation!! That would have been wrapped IMMEDIATELY into the Cartmel Masterplan, with loads of needless bitching about how "the Doctor never did that in the olden days!"
In truth, the Carnival of Monsters is extremely subversive stuff. There are elements in there that make any McCoy tale look positively tame when it comes to self-referential context.
Leslie Dwyer's time as the Doctor is widely held to have been undermined
by the loud, tasteless, multi-coloured coat that he was forced to wear.
by the loud, tasteless, multi-coloured coat that he was forced to wear.
Oh wait! That's Shirna and Vorg. Easy mistake to make.
I'm sure the eeriely mirroring situation is just a freaky coincidence. After all, this is
a Pertwee story, and subtext wasn't invented until 1982 when they aired ‘Kinda’.
Anyway, I don't know how I confused them with the Doctor and Jo Grant, they didn't arrive in the TARDIS. They arrived on an assembly line where they were treated like mass produced objects. Again, no possible hint of irony could possibly have been in Robert Holmes' mind when he wrote that. He's not exactly a writer known for using comedy double acts to promote subversive material, now is he? I'm sure he didn't mean to say that Doctor Who had become rather formulaic in recent years.
Right, so everything I said before, let's just take that as unintentional co-incidence.
You write about two people travelling through space to exotic worlds together, there's bound to be some overlap with a completely different set of characters in the same universe who just happen to travel through space together.
So what about Vorg and Shirna? Well Shirna is the assistant. And Vorg is a somewhat shady seeming, but apparently nice enough, alien with a small, innocuous-looking, machine that can manipulate time and is bigger on the inside than the out. (It's the size of a tall trash can, and can contain entire oceanliners and desert planets.)
Oh and while Vorg tries to calm his assistant when the machine starts to go bonkers, he keeps insisting that everything is alright and he knows how to operate the machine, when he blatantly doesn't.
So yeah, it just gets more and more dissimilar a parallel as I continue. Doesn't it?
Okay, enough with the sarcasm.
Vorg and Shirna are Doctor Who.
They are a statement about Doctor Who WITHIN a serial of Doctor Who.
And what are Vorg and Shirna (aka Doctor Who) trying to do? Well they arrive, reckon their audience is stupid, and then try to con as much cash out of them as possible.
"Step up step up for the monster show! Step up for the monster show! You schmucks!"
Not exactly the BEST thing you can say about Monster Show fan-...oops, I mean Doctor Who fandom, is it?
No nostalgia. Just plain old "Get the mark's money/viewing figures/AI numbers."
Nearby two aliens note that their scientists are puzzled as to why virtually every alien species looks more or less roughly humanoid. Again -- SERIOUS. TAKING. THE. PISS.
Meanwhile the Doctor and Jo are running around in corridors, getting captured, escaping, getting terrified by monsters, running around in corridors, getting captured, escaping, getting terrified by monsters, running around in corridors which Jo insists they've been in before but the Doctor assures her that the corridors all look identical and it's just her imagination, and then they discover that it actually IS the same corridor again and again. And they are surrounded by people who repeat the same actions AGAIN AND AGAIN!
The Doctor's life comes into peril on multiple occasions -- he's almost microwaved to death due to some rather harsh immigration laws, he's almost eaten, etc etc. But for once it's not the Doctor being generally clever, insanely lucky, or his foe's being generally bad at killing people that saves him.
This time around, at every turn the Doctor has saviours who step in on his behalf.
Who are these saviours? A bunch of bickering bureaucrats with unbelievably awful hair. Each of the bureaucrats is driven by a need to outdo the other in a petty game of political backstabbing. Each time the Doctor is threatened, petty bureaucrats advance their own agendas to save Doctor Who... I mean, the Doctor. I mean...well, I don't want to suggest that Robert Holmes was suggesting something about the way decisions were made at the BBC in the 1970s. It's just an eerie coincidence, just like the Vorg/Shirna parallel we debunked earlier.
In brief, the entire history of Doctor Who is deconstructed and taken the piss out of.
And that's not too terribly hard; We've seen horrifically unsubtle stabs at it, say with the LITERAL cliffhanger in ‘Dragonfire’. But what makes Robert Holmes impressive is that he did it under the nose of fans who have seen the episodes multiple times. The difference is that the same fans who are happy to pick apart the socio-political importance of ‘Battlefield’, tend to dismiss Pertwee as a load of old pro-establishment rubbish. Which doesn't pan out if you actually sit down and watch Pertwee stories.
Things like ‘The Green Death’, which was entirely blatant and in-your-face, were far more relevant and necessary than say -- an impassioned speech against nuclear war, which by 1989 wasn't too terribly controversial an idea. You've got the Peladon stories, the ‘Frontier In Space’, the Silurians -- all of which are trying to address relevant points with varying degrees of success. But ‘Carnival of Monsters’ is the Pertwee story that looks inward, and gets away with it.
Now, I should finish on that last line but that would mean I'd have to drop another point entirely, but it's one thing that I mustn't over look -
The Pertwee stories also are a great source to see the fundamental shift of social expectation.
Dystopia, oppression, and state violence were THE EXPECTED NORM of the 1970s. In a modern production all social ills are cured or taking their first steps to being healed within 45 minutes of the opening credits. For instance, even in the first Ood story we see the human characters shift their perceptions radically at the end of the story when they record the Ood deaths. And that sets the stage for the ABSOLUTELY UNAVOIDABLE sequel in which the Ood are freed.
In the ‘Carnival of Monsters’? The powers that be of Inter-Minor push the working class to the brink of insanity and then shoot them dead in cold blood.
Not only is this NOT all fixed with a happy warm bow at the end of the story -- it's NEVER EVEN ADDRESSED.
The Doctor doesn't get involved. He doesn't free the enslaved masses. He doesn't demand retribution for the "forcibly retired" members of the workforce. He just pisses off.
But he doesn't piss off before he laughs, chuckles, and essentially endorses Vorg on his quest to con innocent people out of as much credit bars as possible.
I’ll only say one thing in response to the above. The Ood aren’t “freed”, they free themselves. And in the last episode of ‘Carnival’, Pletrac can’t get the transport to take Vorg and Shirna away because “the functionaries are refusing to work double shifts”. When they protest on their own they can be shot down. When they unite, all the ruling class can do is grumble and look scared. That’s why I like the fact that the Doctor doesn’t free them. They don’t need him to. They can do it themselves. We need a bit of that sort of thing ourselves.
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