Yet more audio news, listeners.
This time I'm a guest on the lovely, cuddly, clued-up Oi! Spaceman podcast, hosted by married couple Daniel Harper and Shana Wolstein.
Here's my episode.
We discuss the Big Finish cyber-masterpiece 'Spare Parts' by Marc Platt, and loads of other stuff including Cybermen in general, emotion in drama, capitalism, communism and fascism...
I know, it sounds a bit dry, but we also do loads of nerdy chatting about Doctor Who, and there's plenty of mucking about and giggling. Also, I receive my first ever aural blowjob.
Shana and Daniel have a great podcast going (I've been enjoying their back catalogue and its been a blast) and I was honoured to be asked on. I had a great time, and I think you will too if you lend us your ears. Your spare ones will do.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label big finish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big finish. Show all posts
Wednesday, 1 July 2015
Friday, 26 June 2015
Insider Trading
Remember Lance Parkin's Big Finish audio 'Davros'? It's quite good, isn't it... if far too long. But he does some interesting stuff with Davros' backstory, subverting your expectations a bit. (It's got really good music too.)Interesting stuff in it. The Doctor is depicted as wanting to stop the fall of the corporations. And, actually, I can see his point. At the moment, anyway. And as long as we're talking about a sudden, instant fall.
Simply remove capitalism at the touch of a button today and human civilisation as it stands would fall, and the human race might die out... for much the same reason that the animals in a battery farm would all die if you murdered all the farm workers and the crime went undiscovered for weeks. As bad as it is, it is currently how things work. The system doesn't function efficiently, or for human benefit, but it does basically function, and it relies upon keeping a sufficient number of people alive, and a sufficient level of social wellbeing going, simply because it lives off its human livestock. So it keeps the livestock alive by propping up the support systems that keep them alive, at least as a mass.
On the other hand, isn't the continuation of capitalism itself a kind of slow-mo apocalypse? Is the damage currently being wrought upon the planet's ecosystem not going to add up to the end of the world? Does not the system as it stands condemn millions to death every year, and billions more to an alienated and impoverished living death? There's a case for saying that quotidian reality itself is a crisis, that our day-to-day world is not only leading us to armageddon but that, even if we survive it, that would not automatically for the best? Couldn't we reasonably say that the fall of the system, even in flames and mass-starvation, would not be inherently worse than allowing it to continue?
It's tempting to not only appreciate the aesthetics of apocalypse, but to go beyond such an appreciation as an asesthetic statement and turn it into a political one. As cold-blooded as this sounds, isn't it possible to see the end of the world - millions of deaths and all - as a price worth paying for the end of capitalism? The end of the world... I mean the end of the world as it stands economically, politically, culturally, structurally... would at least be general. As the man said: "the thing about chaos is it's fair". It could be seen as having greater moral integrity to say 'let it all come down' as opposed to 'prop it up at all costs until we can change it piecemeal and as peacefully as poss'. Propping it up doesn't have such terrible consequences for me and a lot of other comfortable Western leftists and liberals. I'm not personally all that harmed by day-to-day capitalism. I don't like it, but my outrage is mainly on behalf of others, and on behalf of humanity generally. It's abstract. Meanwhile, billions of other people (people elsewhere; people usually darker skinned than me, etc) suffer very non-abstract grinding consequences from the limping along of the status quo. Calling for the total, immediate, unconditional fall of capitalism however, would at least be bound to effect me negatively to some degree. I'd take some hits from that. I wouldn't be saying to the shanty-dwellers of the global south "yeah, I know it's bad, and I sympathise... but it could be worse for all of us, so you just stay where you are, and your kids too." Exactly what have such people got to lose? For a lot of them the best answer is probably 'only their chains'. Well, isn't it selfish of me to moralise about the disastrous consequences of a conflagration that would melt those chains along with my laptop?
One of the hardest concepts to get people to come to terms with is the concept of structural violence. The violence that the social superstructure does to us (to varying degrees according to who we are and where we are) every day. People occasionally contact me to helpfully inform me that communism killed so many millions of people. They tend to understand what I'm getting at if I point out the need to historicise such things, and if I point out that not everything that ever called itself 'communism' is neccesarily something I'd support, etc. They don't agree but they understand what I'm saying. The issue of the structural violence of capitalism, however, is almost never understood, even as a proposition. Point out that capitalism as a historical epoch or mode of production has caused the deaths of far more people than all the political movements which called themselves 'communist' put together and you get head scratching, followed by accusations of goalpost-moving. The idea that a historical mode of production might strucuturally cause genocide upon genocide (through generating war, colonialism, imperialism, poverty, back-breaking labour, stress, depression, racism, misogyny, etc etc etc, over centuries) is an encrypted anathema to most people. And you can't really blame people. From day one we are trained to view events like the Nazi holocaust as a random outgrowth of a fanatical ideology, rather than as a result of the imperialism of a capitalist state. And 'our' own genocides are not even talked about, so we never need to ponder whether the Irish potato famine was an outgrowth of the fanatical ideology of free trade.
I'm working, by the way, on the assumption that we're talking about capitalism as the reigning global economic system rather than as an 'ethos' or a 'method' or anything like that. (It's by no means clear from 'Davros' that Parkin sees things in this way, but that's by the by.) I'm talking about, in the Marxist language, capitalism as a mode of production and as a world system. The idea of capitalism as a historical mode entails a social superstructure built upon the economic base (we won't quibble here about exactly how this works). The social superstructure includes the state. Indeed, that's a way of putting it warrantable only as what scientists call a 'model', an explanatory simplification, akin to saying that a bird's wing is 'designed to be aerodynamic'. The capitalist state isn't a 'thing' that sits somewhere in a framework of other 'things', all of which taken together constitute capitalist 'society'. The state saturates every aspect of life for people who live in a modern capitalist productive mode. The state is fundamentally a mode itself, a mode within a mode, rather than a 'bit' of capitalism.
Back on the subject of survival, the capitalist class is more than ready to tolerate and fund a 'strong state' in those areas where the market alone can't do the job of keeping survival going. Capitalism doesn't always need everyone to survive, and at times it explicitly needs people to die, but it basically depends upon the survival and continuance of humanity and human social reproduction... I mean, it basically is a system of social reproduction, given that (in the Marxist view) the basis of the social is the economic! By that I just mean that 'economic', in the Marxist sense, refers to the mode whereby societies make the things they need in order to reproduce. (I'm straying into a forest of tautologies here, but some tautologies do need to be pointed out or people don't notice them.)
Capitalism, via the state or otherwise, is equally capable of managing the production of mass death, when it needs mass death instead. It is also prepared - as we see with people like Ian Duncan Smith - to use the state for purposes of structural mass homicide within the confines of a domestic state apparatus... when such strategies are a) a side-effect of an austerity project, or b) a salutary warning of the consequences of unwillingness or even inability to conform to ideological discipline.
The state doesn't seem to exist in Parkin's picture of a future effectively run by corporations. The corporations themselves seem to fill the gap left by the state. I think this is pretty unlikely, just as I'm sceptical of the kind of rhetoric which sees Late Capitalism as trying to restructure the world along the lines of a kind of neo-feudalism. But, of course, Parkin isn't involved in futurology or actual prognostication. He's playing the age-old (and thoroughly venerable) game of commenting on the present by exaggerating characteristics of it in the notional narrative space of 'the future'. But this leads us to another interesting irony: the story critiques capitalism while the literal meaning of the text is that capitalism will endure well into the future.
Again, this scenario is hardly an innovation on Parkin's part (I hope I don't sound like I'm snarking at him - that isn't my intention) so he can hardly be held responsible for it, as if it were a brand new technique which he pioneered for some new and unique purpose of his own. It happens again and again in SF in general, and in Doctor Who in particular. And why not? As in 'Davros', it is a technique which can open up possibilities for critique ranging from the mild to the savage to the wistful. 'Davros' is fairly strong in its aesthetic contempt for corporations. Parkin is especially strong on poking fun at corporate PR doublespeak and management jargon. There are blissful scenes where Davros gets angry at being regaled with phrases like "blue skies initiative" and asks "Did you resurrect me merely to gibber at me?". Meanwhile, the Doctor gets offered advice on corporate dress codes from an implant stuck in his ear which bullies him about protocol. Hilariously, he is told (this is Six we're talking about, remember) that if he wishes to mark himself out as an individual within the office context he can choose from some pre-chosen novelty ties.
But the point I was making was that the postulation of corporate capitalism as a triumphant and enduring system centuries hence, surviving to the point where corporations dominate human civilisation across a multi-planet galactic empire, actually bolsters capitalism more than it attacks it. It buys into the lie of capitalism as a kind of transcendent and ahistorical plane of eternity. It buys into the lie that the system, with all its iniquities, is so well adapted to 'human nature' that it will carry on as long as we remain fallen, selfish things. It buys into the lie that capitalism can rid itself of crisis and reach eternal equilibrium. Even the economic collapse that is threatened within the story comes from outside the system, from the extraordinary and malicious intervention of an ancient alien. (He's also a fascist... remember what we were saying earlier about the systemic evils of capitalism being reframed as aberrant horrors caused by ideological fanatics?) This isn't to say that simply depicting the survival of capitalism is a lie because it ignores crisis. For all its inbuilt and inescapable systemic predisposition to crises, capitalism has survived. Indeed, the crises are part of how it survives. The expansions and contractions are like respiration. It's quite true, I suspect, that capitalism (periodic crises and all) would probably be capable of maintaining itself as a system across different planetary societies. It would be foolish indeed to set any kind of plausibility threshold on the capabilities of capitalism. The system is incredibly hardy and dynamic, and is probably limited only by pre-existing material constraints. Remove such constraints by opening up a new natural biosphere and I imagine capitalism would have a bloody good try at spreading into it. However, it should now be clear to any thinking person that capitalism has set a very near date for its own fall simply because it is in the process of destroying the viability of what is currently its sole natural biosphere. We're not anywhere near escaping this planet any time soon. Meanwhile, the destruction wrought upon the natural environment by capitalist industry is inducing a terrifyingly near extinction event scenario. I was saying earlier that capitalism basically keeps most of us alive because it needs us. That's only a short term thing. Capitalism (being an aggregation of competing capitals rather than a sentient group mind) is very bad at long terms. It will exploit a buck today and fuck tomorrow. Which is essentially what it has done to the entire planet and its ability to sustain human life. Put plainly: we won't have time to colonize other worlds; we'll all die on this one first.
Sorry to bum you out, it's just that we do need, as a species, to get the grips with this truth. And writing SF which satirises capitalism by setting stories about capitalism in the future really doesn't help. It actually helps to push the idea that we'll survive our current environmental crisis and go out into the universe. These stories help lull us into a false sense of security. They're just one note in a symphony of false reassurance, but still. There's a very real sense in which stories like 'Davros' (and 'The End of the World' and 'The Sun Makers', etc) contribute towards the likely destruction of all life on Earth. Again I ask... is the instant and catastrophic fall really all that terrible a concept?
Also interesting to me is the way the audio play in question apparently believes - or at least portrays all its characters (including the Doctor) as believing - that the fluctuations of the market could (at least theoretically) be predicted with absolute precision with a sufficiently powerful bit of maths. This is not only reductionism and determinism of an extremely crude kind (a similar kind of crude reductionism and determinism to that which Davros is shown to indulge in when it comes to social Darwinism, etc) but also a form of commodity fetishism. It imagines a social and man-made phenomenon like the market as working like natural, physical process such as fluid dynamics. Of course, it's by no means certain that this idea isn't just a chimera of Davros's diseased and reactionary brain, which the other characters credit because of his avowed intellectual power, or their own positionality within a corporate system.
Working on the assumption that the equation could successfully predict the stock market, it would presumably only give you a picture of what the stock market would do as long as you chose not to act on your foreknowledge. I mean, that's kind of the inherent nature of all predictive calculations: to provide an ostensible snapshot of the future, based on the extrapolation of the present and past, with predictable interventions taken into account and sans any other unpredictable intervention which (by definition) can't be included as a variable. If the prediction concerns a human organised system open to human intervention, the moment you act on your supposed foreknowledge you alter the state of the reality that has been predicted. This would probably be more of a problem the more powerful the predictive modelling was. The more exact its predictions, the more delicately balanced they are. Of course, if only one person has possession of the equation, and this person alone intervenes, the model might well work for them. They would be coming to the party late, so to speak. Their interest in a certain sector of the market would effectively post-date the interest of other investors, even if the equation-user actually invested before the others. There is a strange way in which the predictive equation (assuming it worked as well as Davros says it would) would actually warp the temporal sequence. As perfect foreknowledge, it would be a little like time travel. What this suggests to me is the irony of the Doctor's foreknowledge. The Doctor has never, as far as we know, used his access to time travel to ascertain in advance the winning lottery numbers, or the winner of the Grand National, or the state of tommorrow's Dow Jones. More the Monk's style, that one. But he could do it, if he wanted to. Effectively, the Doctor is already in possession of the power that Davros claims to wield in the form of his equation. He could generalise future stock market knowledge obtained from voyages to the future, just as easily as Davros could generalise the equation. According to this story, the Doctor has, and has always had, the power to bring down capitalism.
This may just be a restatement of something we pretty much knew anyway, but it does rather bring it into focus. The Doctor is manifestly one of those comfortable people saying "sit tight and wait" to the people who have nothing to lose but their chains. To his credit, however, and unlike many such people, he does actually get out there and help them make reforms and even revolutions from time to time. There's also a case for saying that he, the eternal outsider, doesn't have the right to foist his solution upon us. We should get to choose for ourselves if we want to cling to quotidian oppression in the hope of improvement, or to embrace the beautiful, beautiful, blood-splattered apocalyptic reset button.
Of course, in order to see the Doctor this way, you do have to buy into Davros' assertion that generalising the equation would bring down capitalism. Firstly, as noted, this involves accepting his rampant reductionism and determinism. Secondly, a stock market in which everybody has the ability to always predict what the stock market is going to do is very different from the kind of stock market the equation was designed to predict. The equation's own effect, if generalised sufficiently widely, would cancel out its own power as a predictive tool. The equation cannot possibly have the effect it supposedly threatens to have, even if - for the sake of argument - perfect mathematical predictions of random and socially contingent outcomes were even possible (which they aren't). It simply must be an insane delusion on Davros' part, which everyone else is silly enough to believe because they're not economists. Or, more likely, because they are economists. Mainstream neoclassical economics is about as intellectually and empirically secure as Creationism... and criticising Creationism is, as we know, like shooting fish in a barrel. (Or rather, shooting fish that've grown legs and climbed out of a barrel.)
Now, this actually works! Corporate drones, CEOs, academics, liberal activists... none of them could be trusted not to credit the market with the ability to do, or be, the impossible. But it's a little upsetting to see the Doctor going in for this kind of fetishizing of the market. Especially when, by the logic of this same story, he manifestly has the power to destroy it. The Doctor is caught in a paradox here. If he fetishizes the market then he also has the power to destroy it. If he refuses to fetishize the market, there's nothing he can do about it. This is just the kind of paradox that capitalism generates and traps all of us in all the time.
Friday, 1 May 2015
May is Macra Madness Month (Shabcast 5)
Fraternal May Day greetings to all workers by hand or by brain, all socialists, and all anarchists. Have a good one, comrades. And implacable hatred, opposition and ill-will to all capitalists and their class allies. Boo, hiss, etc.
This month, both the Pex Lives Podcast and the Shabogan Graffiti Podcast are covering the classic 60s Doctor Who adventure 'The Macra Terror' by Ian Stuart Black, sadly junked long ago, and represented nowadays only by a soundtrack and a reconstruction.
Shabcast 5 (download or listen here) sees me joined by my longstanding online buddy, actor Elliot Chapman, who also happens to have recently been cast as the new Ben Jackson by Big Finish. The Early Adventures will be available soon, and will feature Elliot alongside Anneke Wills and Frazer Hines.
Elliot is so smart and erudite that he seems to be on some kind of mission to singlehandedly disprove the old stereotype about actors being thick. And he likes my blog, which proves he's clever. Our chat was fantastic fun, and I've had to edit it down savagely to make the episode anything approaching a reasonable length... but this means I've got loads of good offcuts, which may appear in later Shabcasts as something in the manner of 'deleted scenes'.
This Shabcast is possibly the most shabgraffy Shabcast yet, i.e. lots of Doctor Who and lots of politics... as well as unrestrained ramblings from both of us about stuff as diverse as complicity, conspiracy, CRPGs, The Prisoner (of course), Herbert Marcuse, Universal horror films, Abbott and Costello, Marshall Berman, the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Should keep you nice and distracted as you toil in the pits.
Shabcast 6 (which will be along later this month) will be Phil Sandifer and myself continuing our discussion about the fascists and the Hugo awards.
Also look out for our forthcoming commentary tracks for 'The Three Doctors'.
Shabcast 7 is already recorded and waiting for its June release. That's going to be a special one.
*
Here's my previous writing about 'The Macra Terror', a story I appear to be slightly obsessed with:
Skulltopus 3: Yes We Have No Macra
Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited
Happy Workers
32
*
Also, here are links to all my previous audio stuff:
Shabcast 4 (Second part of my interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 3 (the emergency anti-fascist Hugo-awards edition with Andrew Hickey and Phil Sandifer)
Shabcast 2 (First part of interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 1 (Interview with Phil Sandifer)
'Mind Robber' commentaries (I join Phil)
'The Rescue' commentaries (I join Phil)
These are best listened to while watching the stories, as long as you've seen them once before. If you're very familiar with the stories, you can listen to them on their own.
Pex Lives Frankenstein podcast (I join Kevin and James, and Gene Mayes)
Pex Lives TV Movie podcast (Myself and Josh join Kevin and James)
This month, both the Pex Lives Podcast and the Shabogan Graffiti Podcast are covering the classic 60s Doctor Who adventure 'The Macra Terror' by Ian Stuart Black, sadly junked long ago, and represented nowadays only by a soundtrack and a reconstruction.
Shabcast 5 (download or listen here) sees me joined by my longstanding online buddy, actor Elliot Chapman, who also happens to have recently been cast as the new Ben Jackson by Big Finish. The Early Adventures will be available soon, and will feature Elliot alongside Anneke Wills and Frazer Hines.
Elliot is so smart and erudite that he seems to be on some kind of mission to singlehandedly disprove the old stereotype about actors being thick. And he likes my blog, which proves he's clever. Our chat was fantastic fun, and I've had to edit it down savagely to make the episode anything approaching a reasonable length... but this means I've got loads of good offcuts, which may appear in later Shabcasts as something in the manner of 'deleted scenes'.
This Shabcast is possibly the most shabgraffy Shabcast yet, i.e. lots of Doctor Who and lots of politics... as well as unrestrained ramblings from both of us about stuff as diverse as complicity, conspiracy, CRPGs, The Prisoner (of course), Herbert Marcuse, Universal horror films, Abbott and Costello, Marshall Berman, the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Should keep you nice and distracted as you toil in the pits.
Shabcast 6 (which will be along later this month) will be Phil Sandifer and myself continuing our discussion about the fascists and the Hugo awards.
Also look out for our forthcoming commentary tracks for 'The Three Doctors'.
Shabcast 7 is already recorded and waiting for its June release. That's going to be a special one.
*
Here's my previous writing about 'The Macra Terror', a story I appear to be slightly obsessed with:
Skulltopus 3: Yes We Have No Macra
Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited
Happy Workers
32
*
Also, here are links to all my previous audio stuff:
Shabcast 4 (Second part of my interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 3 (the emergency anti-fascist Hugo-awards edition with Andrew Hickey and Phil Sandifer)
Shabcast 2 (First part of interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 1 (Interview with Phil Sandifer)
'Mind Robber' commentaries (I join Phil)
'The Rescue' commentaries (I join Phil)
These are best listened to while watching the stories, as long as you've seen them once before. If you're very familiar with the stories, you can listen to them on their own.
Pex Lives Frankenstein podcast (I join Kevin and James, and Gene Mayes)
Pex Lives TV Movie podcast (Myself and Josh join Kevin and James)
Thursday, 21 November 2013
8
"Is there anything the servants can get you Doctor?" asks Edward Grove over the deep, low tolling of the clock. "It is such fun giving them little chores to do!" he chortles, using the voice of the butler, Mr Shaughnessy.
"No thank you," says the Doctor icily.
"Very well," says Edward, vocally turning to the servants, "You may leave, all of you. Return to your duties. I shall chime if I need anything."
The clock is central to the organisation of time in capitalist society. It regulates work. Since work is life, it regulates life. The chiming of the clock, like the jangling of the bell, is a summons to the servant, just as the factory worker must clock in and clock out at the right times. The industrial revolution fundamentally changed how people perceived time, not only by drastically changing how long it took to do certain things, but also by subjecting the workforce to new schedules. The organisation of labour in capitalist production centres also made time seem repetitious, on a permanent loop. The same set tasks, over and over again, for hour after hour. The clock is a heavily freighted symbol in any discussion of class. The class war will centre upon the organisation and reorganisation of time. Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours play - this was a demand of the workers' union struggle... though, of course, this is a gendered issue. For women, both integrated into the workforce and expected to perform unpaid domestic labour, it was always something of a joke. In the life of a domestic servant, especially a female domestic servant, the idea of time separated from the demands of 'the household' was almost an oxymoron.
"No doubt I'll need another death at some point," says Edward, "when I'm feeling hungry. I'll let you know which one of you I'll choose nearer the time."
They thank him. It is part of the sick joke of it all, this obligatory gratitude.
"You do need death, don't you," observes the Doctor.
Edward is a sentient house. He is The Household (also the workplace, to servants) come alive. He's a haunting that has become a mind, inhabiting a building. He was created by the constant looping and re-looping of a paradox. The Doctor has realised that the paradox which forms the foundation of his structure was created by a death. He now needs to feed on the deaths of his servants, the workers trapped inside the paradox. They each take a turn dying for him every time his two hour span replays itself. For them, even being murdered has become a chore, a duty, part of their employment. A task to be performed for the master, upon orders, and upon a fixed schedule.
Edward insists that he is alive, but the Doctor dismisses this. Edward isn't a person, he is a pile of bricks and mortar, a loop of hours, a schedule. He's an era. Well, he's the Edwardian era. He's a system that has come alive. He's commodity fetishism, of course. Just like the stock market is a man-made thing which is treated like a living beast, with belches and farts that 'just happen' like the weather. He's one of those concentrations of capital that has become so concentrated that he assumes the contours of life. But, as the Doctor points out, he has no existence except through the people that make him work.
"I can only communicate with you through Shaughnessy," points out the Doctor. Edward has no voice except for a larynx he utilises. Even Shaughnessy's throat has become capital to be used.
"I know," says Edward sadly, "I know I can only be a fraction of the simplest of my servants. They will always be more than me."
This has all happened because Edith Thompson killed herself. She was the cook in the house of the Doctor's friend Charley, when Charley was a little middle-class Edwardian girl. Beaten down by a lifetime of class oppression and sexist and/or sexual abuse, Edith formed an attachment to the little girl, imagining her to be her only friend. Charley was, as it turns out, only vaguely aware of the woman and, when she does finally remember her, thinks of her as someone who provided pudding. She wasn't Edith's friend; she was a little middle-class Edwardian girl, the child of Edith's employers. She was, to use Philip Sandifer's phrase "the nicest of her [Edith's] oppressors". (This entry is heavily indebted to Sandifer's excellent essay about 'Chimes of Midnight'.)
Edith killed herself when Charley died... except that Charley didn't die. The Doctor saved her. He didn't save Edith, because the universe is unfair. And it is predictably unfair upon certain pre-set lines. Some people can cheat death and fate, and others get crushed by time. You can usually tell which people will end up where by looking at where they start from. Charley started upstairs, Edith downstairs. Like Rafallo, Edith is one of those grease monkeys backstage who gets squashed instead of whisked off to see the universe. The difference is that, in the case of Edith, there were consequences for the Doctor. His failure to save one of the grease monkeys came back to bite him in the form of Edward Grove. It's difficult not to accept Edward's assertion that the Doctor and Charley are his parents... and he takes after them. He is a time traveller, and he grasps after experience. He lives because Edith died. He is fond of his servants.
In the end, the Doctor and Charley escape because they convince Edith to 'choose life' and then give her a little pat on the head as a reward. But for Edith, choosing life means choosing that lifetime of class oppression and sexist and/or sexual abuse we mentioned earlier. It still means being locked inside Edward Grove, dominated by the chiming of the clock. It isn't much of an escape for her. Charley escapes because of her privilege. The Doctor likewise (he has spent the story being mistaken for a gentleman, understanndably enough). The angriest thing about this angry story is that Doctor Who can comment on things like predatory capital and class oppression but can never change them... not just because it's only a TV show (or a series of audio dramas, or comics, or novels) but because it isn't in its interest to do so. It needs settings and plots and morals and things to be angry about.
Doctor Who is, in the end, rather more like Edward Grove than anyone would like to admit. A commodity that endlessly loops through time, feeding on the staged death tableux of its trapped playthings... but sometimes, as in this case, capable of self-awareness about it.
"No thank you," says the Doctor icily.
"Very well," says Edward, vocally turning to the servants, "You may leave, all of you. Return to your duties. I shall chime if I need anything."
The clock is central to the organisation of time in capitalist society. It regulates work. Since work is life, it regulates life. The chiming of the clock, like the jangling of the bell, is a summons to the servant, just as the factory worker must clock in and clock out at the right times. The industrial revolution fundamentally changed how people perceived time, not only by drastically changing how long it took to do certain things, but also by subjecting the workforce to new schedules. The organisation of labour in capitalist production centres also made time seem repetitious, on a permanent loop. The same set tasks, over and over again, for hour after hour. The clock is a heavily freighted symbol in any discussion of class. The class war will centre upon the organisation and reorganisation of time. Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours play - this was a demand of the workers' union struggle... though, of course, this is a gendered issue. For women, both integrated into the workforce and expected to perform unpaid domestic labour, it was always something of a joke. In the life of a domestic servant, especially a female domestic servant, the idea of time separated from the demands of 'the household' was almost an oxymoron.
"No doubt I'll need another death at some point," says Edward, "when I'm feeling hungry. I'll let you know which one of you I'll choose nearer the time."
They thank him. It is part of the sick joke of it all, this obligatory gratitude.
"You do need death, don't you," observes the Doctor.
Edward is a sentient house. He is The Household (also the workplace, to servants) come alive. He's a haunting that has become a mind, inhabiting a building. He was created by the constant looping and re-looping of a paradox. The Doctor has realised that the paradox which forms the foundation of his structure was created by a death. He now needs to feed on the deaths of his servants, the workers trapped inside the paradox. They each take a turn dying for him every time his two hour span replays itself. For them, even being murdered has become a chore, a duty, part of their employment. A task to be performed for the master, upon orders, and upon a fixed schedule.
Edward insists that he is alive, but the Doctor dismisses this. Edward isn't a person, he is a pile of bricks and mortar, a loop of hours, a schedule. He's an era. Well, he's the Edwardian era. He's a system that has come alive. He's commodity fetishism, of course. Just like the stock market is a man-made thing which is treated like a living beast, with belches and farts that 'just happen' like the weather. He's one of those concentrations of capital that has become so concentrated that he assumes the contours of life. But, as the Doctor points out, he has no existence except through the people that make him work.
"I can only communicate with you through Shaughnessy," points out the Doctor. Edward has no voice except for a larynx he utilises. Even Shaughnessy's throat has become capital to be used.
"I know," says Edward sadly, "I know I can only be a fraction of the simplest of my servants. They will always be more than me."
This has all happened because Edith Thompson killed herself. She was the cook in the house of the Doctor's friend Charley, when Charley was a little middle-class Edwardian girl. Beaten down by a lifetime of class oppression and sexist and/or sexual abuse, Edith formed an attachment to the little girl, imagining her to be her only friend. Charley was, as it turns out, only vaguely aware of the woman and, when she does finally remember her, thinks of her as someone who provided pudding. She wasn't Edith's friend; she was a little middle-class Edwardian girl, the child of Edith's employers. She was, to use Philip Sandifer's phrase "the nicest of her [Edith's] oppressors". (This entry is heavily indebted to Sandifer's excellent essay about 'Chimes of Midnight'.)
Edith killed herself when Charley died... except that Charley didn't die. The Doctor saved her. He didn't save Edith, because the universe is unfair. And it is predictably unfair upon certain pre-set lines. Some people can cheat death and fate, and others get crushed by time. You can usually tell which people will end up where by looking at where they start from. Charley started upstairs, Edith downstairs. Like Rafallo, Edith is one of those grease monkeys backstage who gets squashed instead of whisked off to see the universe. The difference is that, in the case of Edith, there were consequences for the Doctor. His failure to save one of the grease monkeys came back to bite him in the form of Edward Grove. It's difficult not to accept Edward's assertion that the Doctor and Charley are his parents... and he takes after them. He is a time traveller, and he grasps after experience. He lives because Edith died. He is fond of his servants.
In the end, the Doctor and Charley escape because they convince Edith to 'choose life' and then give her a little pat on the head as a reward. But for Edith, choosing life means choosing that lifetime of class oppression and sexist and/or sexual abuse we mentioned earlier. It still means being locked inside Edward Grove, dominated by the chiming of the clock. It isn't much of an escape for her. Charley escapes because of her privilege. The Doctor likewise (he has spent the story being mistaken for a gentleman, understanndably enough). The angriest thing about this angry story is that Doctor Who can comment on things like predatory capital and class oppression but can never change them... not just because it's only a TV show (or a series of audio dramas, or comics, or novels) but because it isn't in its interest to do so. It needs settings and plots and morals and things to be angry about.
Doctor Who is, in the end, rather more like Edward Grove than anyone would like to admit. A commodity that endlessly loops through time, feeding on the staged death tableux of its trapped playthings... but sometimes, as in this case, capable of self-awareness about it.
Friday, 24 December 2010
Jack's Alternative Xmas Playlist (and other stuff)
Hate Christmas movies? Unable to stomach their revolting mixture of exhausted iconography and sentimental platitudes? Tempted to suspect that most Christmas movies and/or TV specials are so staggeringly bad that they must be fiendishly disguised satires, made by people who secretly consider their viewers to be dribbling simpletons? Unable to get excited about the prospect of watching yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens’ second worst novel? Wondering if this year the makers of EastEnders will achieve what is clearly their dearest desire and start a wave of Christmas Day suicides across the nation? Dreading the prospect of all the ordure adumbrated above yet simultaneously unable to contemplate surviving the “festive” season without the merciful presence of the gogglebox? Tired of rhetorical questions?
Okay then, here’s Jack’s Alternative Christmas Playlist....
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Christmas is a time for family arguments. You know how it is, everybody stuck together, desperately trying to get on and have fun… it’s a recipe for disaster. But nobody had a Christmas quite like the Plantagenets’ in this film.
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole are the warring married couple, King Henry II and his older Queen Eleanor, who spend Christmas 1183 tearing great lumps out of each other with a non-stop mutual barrage of staggeringly vicious barbs, taunts, insults, paradoxes and lies. Add their three ruthlessly ambitious sons to the mix – the brutal Richard (Tony Hopkins), the cold-blooded Geoffrey (John Castle) and the cretinous John (Nigel Terry) – and Christmas (which comes complete with hilariously anachronistic trees and wrapped presents) becomes an excruciating familial apocalypse of plots, schemes, murder attempts, humiliating revelations and heart-shredding passions.
Ultimately, this film is only superficially about a struggle for the crown. The crown, the lands, the money, the power… these are the playing pieces in a game that is really about a family eating itself alive over lost love, sour love, delusional love, destructive love and the lack of love. When Kate Hepburn’s Eleanor says that “we” are the cause of history, she doesn’t mean royalty, she means we humans. At the season of love, as she watches her family attack itself, and watches herself join in, she wonders aloud why they can’t just love each other. “We have so much to love each other for,” she says, “we have such possibilities.”
It may be Albee-lite (and Anouilh-liter) but it’s still amazing, moving stuff, entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality… and guaranteed to put your own family squabbles into some kind of perspective.
Shooting the Past (1999)
Stephen Poliakoff’s masterpiece (from before he turned into an utter wanker) begins with Christmas lights. Christmas is something happening in the outside world. Within the peculiar space of the Falham Photo Library, time works differently, as does value and history and emotion. The modern world (in the form of an American corporation) buys this little island and starts to invade it, planning to sell it off and turn it into some piffling corporate ballsup… their interest in the gigantic library of old photos being precisely zero. Until, that is, they start to be absorbed into the alternative world of the photographs and their off-kilter guardians.
Tim Spall delivers his greatest performance as Oswald Bates, an unhappy and heroically annoying man who has been left behind by modernity, who wants to live within his photos and his own thoughts, away from the crass commercialism and humourless dedication of the professional and the self-professedly ‘real’… none of which has as much human reality as the tragic and resounding stories to be found in the still and sepia past.
Die Hard (1988)
Holiday carnage. Bells jingle and Christmas songs tinkle as people are eviscerated by sprays of bullets and their corpses are arranged wearing Santa hats.
Whether they knew it or not, in Die Hard, Hollywood created a sort-of-anti-capitalist revenge fantasy. The Japanese corporate boss asks Rickman (who has invaded his skyscraper with a gang of armed men) if “this is all about our project in Indonesia?” before protesting that they (i.e. his corporation) want to develop not exploit that region. Rickman says, apparently sincerely, that he believes this. Thing is… this is 1988… and they’re setting up in Indonesia… which means they’re in business with General Suharto, who was responsible for arguably the worst act of genocide committed in the 20th century apart from the Holocaust. Said corporate boss later ends up with his brains splattered all over a set of glass doors, which is very satisfying; you don’t often get to see corporate imperialists get exactly what they deserve in a big-budget Hollywood actioner. What’s happening here, you see, is that the Nakatomi Corporation is being confronted by its own values; Rickman and his gang turn out to be ruthless thieves rather than ideological enemies… though, having said that, the film’s beef with capitalism seems to be that sometimes there are Japanese capitalists who come over to America and lure married American women away from their wifely duties with promises of careers, independence, executive bathrooms and Rolex watches. At the end, Mrs Bruce Willis has to symbolically sacrifice her Rolex watch and reassume her clean-cut hubby’s name in order for him to finally defeat the beardie foreign baddie.
The film is also a pioneering gay romance, depicting the mutually-supporting and fulfilling love that blossoms between two men. At the end of the film, Willis gets to consummate his over-the-radio relationship with beat cop Richard Veljohnson in a hysterically romantic clinch, accompanied by music that sounds almost like that bit of Tschaikovsky that lovestruck couples in films always hear when running towards each other on beaches. Veljohnson (who has been deskbound after accidentally shooting a kid) gets to regain his male potency and ‘climaxes’ by emptying both barrels (so to speak) into one last terrorist, thus proving that Willis’ love has made him whole again… or whole enough to kill someone… which is this film’s idea of the highest male self-expression.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
One of the problems the people running World War I (on all sides) continually had to face was the sheer reluctance of their troops to kill the ‘enemy’. They would deliberately fire above the heads of the opposing soldiers, etc., behaviour that had to be stamped on ferociously. Everyone knows about the Christmas truce of 1914… well, this moving film depicts that truce and its consequences, from the perspectives of the French, British and German soldiers themselves. We see not only the eagerness of the ordinary soldiers to stop killing each other, and their fraternisation, but also the horror at this behaviour evinced by the generals. We see a Bishop preaching the virtue of killing Germans to British troops… after the soldiers of all nationalities held mass together in Nomansland.
Brazil (1985)
First, let’s go through what it isn’t. It isn’t set in the future. It isn’t set in a totalitarian society. It’s set now (we’re still “somewhere in the 20th century”). And it’s set in our world.
Ducts and pipes and paperwork and the 1940s still dominate our world; our world abducts and interrogates and tortures people; our world is run by family men who love their children and give their workmates Christmas presents and file reports on how many dissidents they’ve interrogated this week. Our world is still a stifling miasma of filing cabinets and sociopathic bureaucrats and malfunctioning technology. Our world is still a place where the surface glitz of wealth and commercialism covers reservoirs of corruption, confusion, incompetence, cruelty, systematised madness and emotional frustration. And this is never truer than at Christmas, which is when this story is set. The shopping malls and fake snow and gift wrap are the garnish on a state gone mad. You feel that this place always pretends to be in the middle of festivities. One gets the sense that it’s always Christmas where Sam Lowry lives, which brings me to…
Death in Santaland (2007)
Jon Ronson visits North Pole, Alaska, where every day is Christmas Day. While retaining his customary air of amiable innocence, Ronson reveals this concept to be every bit as ghastly as it sounds. A place invented solely for the Christmas industry, the decorations stay up all year long. Ronson perambulates his way through this horrifying tinsel-laden dystopia, becoming increasingly incredulous.
The adults here all claim to really believe in Santa – even to the point of going into denial about their local Santa Claus (name legally changed to Kris Kringle, god help us) being killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, the local school kids are dragooned into answering the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to ‘Santa, North Pole’, like unpaid elves in a festive sweatshop. The teenagers, driven to distraction by the lunacy around them, carry guns and plot school massacres. To we Who fans, it might recall ‘The Happiness Patrol’.
In any case, if you want a window into the planned neo-liberal millennium, look no further. Schools voluntarily training dispirited children in the ideology of consumption and P.R., populations of happy drudges smiling through the crushing alienation, communities enslaved to consumer tat and mindless kitsch, people driven mad by the banality… and anybody who dares to notice the madness dubbed a freak. Watch this and save yourself the trouble of having nightmares brought on by too much accelerant-steeped pudding.
What Would Jesus Buy? (2007)
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir tour just-before-the-recession America, hoping to cure people of their addictions to credit and consumerism, exorcise the sweatshop-running demons of Starbucks and stop the ‘Shopocalypse’ – a term of Rev. Billy’s own devising that the vacuous, tittering TV News anchors (who treat this particularly astute brand of satire/performance/comedy/activism as nothing but a jokey novelty) are unable to pronounce.
On his way through the privatised, mall-dominated USA, littered with monolithic cathedrals of consumption, the Reverend Billy gets himself arrested for declaring that Mickey Mouse is the Anti-Christ, sets up a booth on the streets for taking people’s ‘Shopping Sins Confessions’ and exhorts congregations to hold up their credit cards (“magnetic strip facing Reverend Billy”) and tear them up.
(As you can tell, this protest has religious overtones… but that’s okay with me. Reverend Billy prays to “the Fabulous Unknown”, which I believe in. And, in any case, I’m sick of being told - by supposed progressives - that the biggest problem with America is its religiosity and that the American faithful are all right-wing, which is bullshit. The left-wing Christians just don’t own megabuck media churches. Besides, religion is the spirit of a spiritless situation, etc., etc.)
Disneyland (corporate sociopathy expressed as architecture) gets invaded by the choir. Wal-Mart gets a trouncing. Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller. (Pardon me, but I can no longer say the words “Wal-Mart” without also saying “Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller”.)
On our way with him we encounter shop assistants who’ve been spat on by old ladies because they’ve run out of X-Boxes, miniature dogs with their own Christmas wardrobes and more evidence of a culture driving itself insane with the worship of stuff. Meanwhile, the antics of the Reverend and his choir are as amusing and moving as their chosen foe (Christmas capitalism gone mad) is terrifying.
A Life in Pieces – with Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (1990-91)
Also terrifying (to me) is the realisation that it was twenty years ago… that’s TWENTY YEARS AGO… that I was first paralysed with laughter watching these twelve short interviews with the inimitable Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling.
In each interview, the heroically straight-faced Ludovic Kennedy presents Sir Arthur with a chosen gift and then quizzes him about his life. The various gifts (the first is a partridge in a pear tree… and I’m sure you can guess the rest) start Sir Arthur off on a number of interesting reminiscences. The three French hens remind Sir Arthur of his days in Brussels, attempting to devise the “Single European Hen”. The five gold rings remind him of when he ran for Barbados in the 1936 Berlin Olympics at the special request of Hitler (whom Sir Arthur remembers as “not the practical joking type”). Nine drummers drumming gets Sir Arthur started on how he was recruited as a “deep level mole” at Cambridge. The ten pipers piping remind him of his former friend Peter Piper, who was such a cricket enthusiast that he actually took a group of crickets on tour so that paying audiences could hear them rubbing their legs together. And so on, through such topics as cannibalism, the use of goats to raise children and secret farming.
As for Christmas itself, well Sir Arthur thinks it was “great fun in the old days when it was just an orgy of commercial excess, but now I find that people are tainting the whole thing with a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo.”
*
But what about Christmassy Who, you ask? This is supposed to be a Who blog, isn’t it?
Oh, okay. But I’m not enthusiastic. I mean, look at the forthcoming Christmas Special. A version of A Christmas Carol. Hmm. Written by a man with all the political savvy of Jan Moir and all the genuine progressive feeling of Vince Cable. C’mon, it’s bound to be shit. Alison Graham (absolutely no relation of any kind whatsoever, I hasten to add) has already given it a rave review, which is never a good sign.
A Christmas Carol (the book, I mean) is already a problematic text. Yes, there are wonderful bits where Dickens has his spirits inveigh against “the insect on the leaf proclaiming there is too much life amongst his hungry brothers in the dust” and revealing the huddled symbolic children Ignorance and Want… but, ultimately, it’s just a plea for capitalist bastards to be bit nicer to their staff and make charitable donations. After all, when Dickens warns that Ignorance and Want will bring downfall if ignored, this is a warning that he wants his world – the bourgeois Victorian imperial world – to heed and profit from.
That’s why I love Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, which ruthlessly inverts Dickens’ tale and, in the process, undermines his every sentimental bromide and his every hypocritical appeal to the goodness of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Ebeneezer Blackadder, at the end of the story, is the kind of successful Victorian gentleman who really made that era… it’s just that, in reality, people like him knew how to talk the charitable talk and lecture the poor on morals. (I only failed to include Blackadder’s Christmas Carol above because everyone’s seen it 48 billion times.)
Of course, Who has done a (sort of) version of this story before. Let the Ghost of Series’ Past transport you back to 2005, to the third episode of the first season of RTD’s glorious revival, ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Sadly, what Elton and Curtis did knowingly and with irony, Mark Gatiss did apparently accidentally and in all seriousness. By the end of this wretched episode, we are actually supposed to be inspired by Dickens’ transformation from a miserable old sourpuss into a newly-invigorated happy-chappy… but Dickens’ life-changing encounter with festive spirits is somewhat different to Ebeneezer Scrooge’s. Where Scrooge learns that charity is a moral obligation and empathy a human benefit, Dickens learns that empathy and kindness towards those who are desperate is dangerous folly, to be resisted on pain of self-destruction.
It’s perhaps unfair and unreasonable to be too harsh. After all, every single televised Christmassy Doctor Who story (with the exception of the largely enjoyable ‘Christmas Invasion’) has been scarcely-endurable ordure.
I don’t normally *do* Big Finish here, but I’ll make an exception because they’ve managed a bit better.
Rob Shearman’s ‘The Chimes of Midnight’ is a lovely, angry Christmas ghost story with dialogue that – in places – is so calculatedly absurd and so laced with inner savagery that it verges upon the Pinteresque. A story of servants as endlessly-usable chattels in the service of a cynical master that needs to feed on them to survive. While one might kvetch over the idea that a drudge’s life is made bearable by simply knowing that she has the respect of one member of the middle classes, this doesn’t really matter all that much because, like much of Shearman’s work, this is less political than it is a meditation on parents and children. The relationship between Charley and Edith is clearly the embodiment of a longed-for motherhood… and the presence that becomes the Doctor’s antagonist is a child that demands life at the expense of parents it feels entirely entitled to abuse.
And then we have Marc Platt’s mighty ‘Spare Parts’, which is easily the finest Cyberman story made in any medium and also manages to be an emotionally haunting Christmas story of families gathered around scraggy old fake trees, while outside the cold draws in… and in… and in… Politically, Platt’s story flirts with the Trekish mistake of making the emotionless cyborgs into an expression of collectivism (with Thomas Dodd as the dodgy but preferable embodiment of free enterprise)… but it isn’t long before the story has a crowd of ordinary people protesting outside the palace, resisting police brutality and opposing a People’s Committee that has become a tyranny. If the Committee are “the champions of the proletariat” then it’s only in the same way, and to the same extent, as Stalin.
Gareth Roberts’ and Clayton Hickman’s ‘The One Doctor’ is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of space comic-opera, as long as you don’t start sharing their impression that they’ve satirised anything… and as long as you don’t worry about the fact that so much of it seems so reminiscent of the second season of the Hitch Hiker’s radio series.
Of course, there’s always one at every Christmas party isn’t there… one that spoils things for everybody else. In this instance, it’s Jonathan Morris’ ‘Flip-Flop’, a revolting Daily Mail-ish parable about the horrific dangers posed by dishonest, power-hungry immigrants. The immigrants in question are (adding insult to injury) giant slugs with bad eyesight and a wheedling, faux-humble Uriah Heapesque manner. They complain of prejudice and discrimination, explain that no human can comprehend their “ethnic experience”, call themselves a downtrodden minority despite covering nine tenths of the humans’ planet (“being a minority is a state of mind”) and, all the while, they’re scheming to take over and make the humans their slaves… which is achieved – and the story is quite explicit about this – through “positive discrimination”. The alien boss is called the “Community Leader”, which is one of those terms that tabloids use whenever they want to preach to Muslim communities about how they should do more to combat ‘extremism’. The aliens even want to ban Christmas. I fucking ask you.
I’m not saying anything about Jonathan Morris. I don’t know the man or anything about him. He might be the cuddliest pro-immigrant liberal there is for all I know. But ‘Flip-Flop’ is an egregious piece of shit and everyone involved in making it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Besides, the time travel paradox doesn't work because the Doctor, Mel, Stewart and Reed don't bump into alternative versions of themselves when they go back to the night of President Bailey's assassination. So there.
*
Actually, I’ve been a bit hard on televised Who. I forgot about one story. It’s isn’t a “special” and it wasn’t broadcast on the 25th December… but it’s certainly a bit Christmassy and is one of the best episodes of the 21st century series. I’m referring, of course, to RTD’s miraculous ‘Turn Left’. Not only is it a reworking of It’s a Wonderful Life (with Rose earning her wings by giving Donna a chance to see what the world would be like without the Doctor) but it also has an entire ‘act’ set at Christmas. Donna and family spend the holidays in a hotel room, waited on by a maid who, it is implied, is a foreign worker. From their holiday retreat, the Nobles (who are really the commoners) witness the explosion that destroys London and turns them into refugees.
As Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM 410, although ‘Turn Left’ is “not per se a story about recession, the parallels – unemployment, homelessness, a military presence on the streets – are exactly what scaremongering media pundits are anticipating is going to happen this summer.” He was writing in early 2009. Things aren’t quite as bad here yet as they get in ‘Turn Left’, but..
Well, there you have it. Bah humbug, Changealujah, Seasons Greeblings, and a very Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
Okay then, here’s Jack’s Alternative Christmas Playlist....
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Christmas is a time for family arguments. You know how it is, everybody stuck together, desperately trying to get on and have fun… it’s a recipe for disaster. But nobody had a Christmas quite like the Plantagenets’ in this film.
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole are the warring married couple, King Henry II and his older Queen Eleanor, who spend Christmas 1183 tearing great lumps out of each other with a non-stop mutual barrage of staggeringly vicious barbs, taunts, insults, paradoxes and lies. Add their three ruthlessly ambitious sons to the mix – the brutal Richard (Tony Hopkins), the cold-blooded Geoffrey (John Castle) and the cretinous John (Nigel Terry) – and Christmas (which comes complete with hilariously anachronistic trees and wrapped presents) becomes an excruciating familial apocalypse of plots, schemes, murder attempts, humiliating revelations and heart-shredding passions.
Ultimately, this film is only superficially about a struggle for the crown. The crown, the lands, the money, the power… these are the playing pieces in a game that is really about a family eating itself alive over lost love, sour love, delusional love, destructive love and the lack of love. When Kate Hepburn’s Eleanor says that “we” are the cause of history, she doesn’t mean royalty, she means we humans. At the season of love, as she watches her family attack itself, and watches herself join in, she wonders aloud why they can’t just love each other. “We have so much to love each other for,” she says, “we have such possibilities.”
It may be Albee-lite (and Anouilh-liter) but it’s still amazing, moving stuff, entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality… and guaranteed to put your own family squabbles into some kind of perspective.
Shooting the Past (1999)
Stephen Poliakoff’s masterpiece (from before he turned into an utter wanker) begins with Christmas lights. Christmas is something happening in the outside world. Within the peculiar space of the Falham Photo Library, time works differently, as does value and history and emotion. The modern world (in the form of an American corporation) buys this little island and starts to invade it, planning to sell it off and turn it into some piffling corporate ballsup… their interest in the gigantic library of old photos being precisely zero. Until, that is, they start to be absorbed into the alternative world of the photographs and their off-kilter guardians.
Tim Spall delivers his greatest performance as Oswald Bates, an unhappy and heroically annoying man who has been left behind by modernity, who wants to live within his photos and his own thoughts, away from the crass commercialism and humourless dedication of the professional and the self-professedly ‘real’… none of which has as much human reality as the tragic and resounding stories to be found in the still and sepia past.
Die Hard (1988)
Holiday carnage. Bells jingle and Christmas songs tinkle as people are eviscerated by sprays of bullets and their corpses are arranged wearing Santa hats.
Whether they knew it or not, in Die Hard, Hollywood created a sort-of-anti-capitalist revenge fantasy. The Japanese corporate boss asks Rickman (who has invaded his skyscraper with a gang of armed men) if “this is all about our project in Indonesia?” before protesting that they (i.e. his corporation) want to develop not exploit that region. Rickman says, apparently sincerely, that he believes this. Thing is… this is 1988… and they’re setting up in Indonesia… which means they’re in business with General Suharto, who was responsible for arguably the worst act of genocide committed in the 20th century apart from the Holocaust. Said corporate boss later ends up with his brains splattered all over a set of glass doors, which is very satisfying; you don’t often get to see corporate imperialists get exactly what they deserve in a big-budget Hollywood actioner. What’s happening here, you see, is that the Nakatomi Corporation is being confronted by its own values; Rickman and his gang turn out to be ruthless thieves rather than ideological enemies… though, having said that, the film’s beef with capitalism seems to be that sometimes there are Japanese capitalists who come over to America and lure married American women away from their wifely duties with promises of careers, independence, executive bathrooms and Rolex watches. At the end, Mrs Bruce Willis has to symbolically sacrifice her Rolex watch and reassume her clean-cut hubby’s name in order for him to finally defeat the beardie foreign baddie.
The film is also a pioneering gay romance, depicting the mutually-supporting and fulfilling love that blossoms between two men. At the end of the film, Willis gets to consummate his over-the-radio relationship with beat cop Richard Veljohnson in a hysterically romantic clinch, accompanied by music that sounds almost like that bit of Tschaikovsky that lovestruck couples in films always hear when running towards each other on beaches. Veljohnson (who has been deskbound after accidentally shooting a kid) gets to regain his male potency and ‘climaxes’ by emptying both barrels (so to speak) into one last terrorist, thus proving that Willis’ love has made him whole again… or whole enough to kill someone… which is this film’s idea of the highest male self-expression.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
One of the problems the people running World War I (on all sides) continually had to face was the sheer reluctance of their troops to kill the ‘enemy’. They would deliberately fire above the heads of the opposing soldiers, etc., behaviour that had to be stamped on ferociously. Everyone knows about the Christmas truce of 1914… well, this moving film depicts that truce and its consequences, from the perspectives of the French, British and German soldiers themselves. We see not only the eagerness of the ordinary soldiers to stop killing each other, and their fraternisation, but also the horror at this behaviour evinced by the generals. We see a Bishop preaching the virtue of killing Germans to British troops… after the soldiers of all nationalities held mass together in Nomansland.
Brazil (1985)
First, let’s go through what it isn’t. It isn’t set in the future. It isn’t set in a totalitarian society. It’s set now (we’re still “somewhere in the 20th century”). And it’s set in our world.
Ducts and pipes and paperwork and the 1940s still dominate our world; our world abducts and interrogates and tortures people; our world is run by family men who love their children and give their workmates Christmas presents and file reports on how many dissidents they’ve interrogated this week. Our world is still a stifling miasma of filing cabinets and sociopathic bureaucrats and malfunctioning technology. Our world is still a place where the surface glitz of wealth and commercialism covers reservoirs of corruption, confusion, incompetence, cruelty, systematised madness and emotional frustration. And this is never truer than at Christmas, which is when this story is set. The shopping malls and fake snow and gift wrap are the garnish on a state gone mad. You feel that this place always pretends to be in the middle of festivities. One gets the sense that it’s always Christmas where Sam Lowry lives, which brings me to…
Death in Santaland (2007)
Jon Ronson visits North Pole, Alaska, where every day is Christmas Day. While retaining his customary air of amiable innocence, Ronson reveals this concept to be every bit as ghastly as it sounds. A place invented solely for the Christmas industry, the decorations stay up all year long. Ronson perambulates his way through this horrifying tinsel-laden dystopia, becoming increasingly incredulous.
The adults here all claim to really believe in Santa – even to the point of going into denial about their local Santa Claus (name legally changed to Kris Kringle, god help us) being killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, the local school kids are dragooned into answering the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to ‘Santa, North Pole’, like unpaid elves in a festive sweatshop. The teenagers, driven to distraction by the lunacy around them, carry guns and plot school massacres. To we Who fans, it might recall ‘The Happiness Patrol’.
In any case, if you want a window into the planned neo-liberal millennium, look no further. Schools voluntarily training dispirited children in the ideology of consumption and P.R., populations of happy drudges smiling through the crushing alienation, communities enslaved to consumer tat and mindless kitsch, people driven mad by the banality… and anybody who dares to notice the madness dubbed a freak. Watch this and save yourself the trouble of having nightmares brought on by too much accelerant-steeped pudding.
What Would Jesus Buy? (2007)
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir tour just-before-the-recession America, hoping to cure people of their addictions to credit and consumerism, exorcise the sweatshop-running demons of Starbucks and stop the ‘Shopocalypse’ – a term of Rev. Billy’s own devising that the vacuous, tittering TV News anchors (who treat this particularly astute brand of satire/performance/comedy/activism as nothing but a jokey novelty) are unable to pronounce.
On his way through the privatised, mall-dominated USA, littered with monolithic cathedrals of consumption, the Reverend Billy gets himself arrested for declaring that Mickey Mouse is the Anti-Christ, sets up a booth on the streets for taking people’s ‘Shopping Sins Confessions’ and exhorts congregations to hold up their credit cards (“magnetic strip facing Reverend Billy”) and tear them up.
(As you can tell, this protest has religious overtones… but that’s okay with me. Reverend Billy prays to “the Fabulous Unknown”, which I believe in. And, in any case, I’m sick of being told - by supposed progressives - that the biggest problem with America is its religiosity and that the American faithful are all right-wing, which is bullshit. The left-wing Christians just don’t own megabuck media churches. Besides, religion is the spirit of a spiritless situation, etc., etc.)
Disneyland (corporate sociopathy expressed as architecture) gets invaded by the choir. Wal-Mart gets a trouncing. Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller. (Pardon me, but I can no longer say the words “Wal-Mart” without also saying “Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller”.)
On our way with him we encounter shop assistants who’ve been spat on by old ladies because they’ve run out of X-Boxes, miniature dogs with their own Christmas wardrobes and more evidence of a culture driving itself insane with the worship of stuff. Meanwhile, the antics of the Reverend and his choir are as amusing and moving as their chosen foe (Christmas capitalism gone mad) is terrifying.
A Life in Pieces – with Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (1990-91)
Also terrifying (to me) is the realisation that it was twenty years ago… that’s TWENTY YEARS AGO… that I was first paralysed with laughter watching these twelve short interviews with the inimitable Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling.
In each interview, the heroically straight-faced Ludovic Kennedy presents Sir Arthur with a chosen gift and then quizzes him about his life. The various gifts (the first is a partridge in a pear tree… and I’m sure you can guess the rest) start Sir Arthur off on a number of interesting reminiscences. The three French hens remind Sir Arthur of his days in Brussels, attempting to devise the “Single European Hen”. The five gold rings remind him of when he ran for Barbados in the 1936 Berlin Olympics at the special request of Hitler (whom Sir Arthur remembers as “not the practical joking type”). Nine drummers drumming gets Sir Arthur started on how he was recruited as a “deep level mole” at Cambridge. The ten pipers piping remind him of his former friend Peter Piper, who was such a cricket enthusiast that he actually took a group of crickets on tour so that paying audiences could hear them rubbing their legs together. And so on, through such topics as cannibalism, the use of goats to raise children and secret farming.
As for Christmas itself, well Sir Arthur thinks it was “great fun in the old days when it was just an orgy of commercial excess, but now I find that people are tainting the whole thing with a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo.”
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But what about Christmassy Who, you ask? This is supposed to be a Who blog, isn’t it?
Oh, okay. But I’m not enthusiastic. I mean, look at the forthcoming Christmas Special. A version of A Christmas Carol. Hmm. Written by a man with all the political savvy of Jan Moir and all the genuine progressive feeling of Vince Cable. C’mon, it’s bound to be shit. Alison Graham (absolutely no relation of any kind whatsoever, I hasten to add) has already given it a rave review, which is never a good sign.
A Christmas Carol (the book, I mean) is already a problematic text. Yes, there are wonderful bits where Dickens has his spirits inveigh against “the insect on the leaf proclaiming there is too much life amongst his hungry brothers in the dust” and revealing the huddled symbolic children Ignorance and Want… but, ultimately, it’s just a plea for capitalist bastards to be bit nicer to their staff and make charitable donations. After all, when Dickens warns that Ignorance and Want will bring downfall if ignored, this is a warning that he wants his world – the bourgeois Victorian imperial world – to heed and profit from.
That’s why I love Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, which ruthlessly inverts Dickens’ tale and, in the process, undermines his every sentimental bromide and his every hypocritical appeal to the goodness of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Ebeneezer Blackadder, at the end of the story, is the kind of successful Victorian gentleman who really made that era… it’s just that, in reality, people like him knew how to talk the charitable talk and lecture the poor on morals. (I only failed to include Blackadder’s Christmas Carol above because everyone’s seen it 48 billion times.)
Of course, Who has done a (sort of) version of this story before. Let the Ghost of Series’ Past transport you back to 2005, to the third episode of the first season of RTD’s glorious revival, ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Sadly, what Elton and Curtis did knowingly and with irony, Mark Gatiss did apparently accidentally and in all seriousness. By the end of this wretched episode, we are actually supposed to be inspired by Dickens’ transformation from a miserable old sourpuss into a newly-invigorated happy-chappy… but Dickens’ life-changing encounter with festive spirits is somewhat different to Ebeneezer Scrooge’s. Where Scrooge learns that charity is a moral obligation and empathy a human benefit, Dickens learns that empathy and kindness towards those who are desperate is dangerous folly, to be resisted on pain of self-destruction.
It’s perhaps unfair and unreasonable to be too harsh. After all, every single televised Christmassy Doctor Who story (with the exception of the largely enjoyable ‘Christmas Invasion’) has been scarcely-endurable ordure.
I don’t normally *do* Big Finish here, but I’ll make an exception because they’ve managed a bit better.
Rob Shearman’s ‘The Chimes of Midnight’ is a lovely, angry Christmas ghost story with dialogue that – in places – is so calculatedly absurd and so laced with inner savagery that it verges upon the Pinteresque. A story of servants as endlessly-usable chattels in the service of a cynical master that needs to feed on them to survive. While one might kvetch over the idea that a drudge’s life is made bearable by simply knowing that she has the respect of one member of the middle classes, this doesn’t really matter all that much because, like much of Shearman’s work, this is less political than it is a meditation on parents and children. The relationship between Charley and Edith is clearly the embodiment of a longed-for motherhood… and the presence that becomes the Doctor’s antagonist is a child that demands life at the expense of parents it feels entirely entitled to abuse.
And then we have Marc Platt’s mighty ‘Spare Parts’, which is easily the finest Cyberman story made in any medium and also manages to be an emotionally haunting Christmas story of families gathered around scraggy old fake trees, while outside the cold draws in… and in… and in… Politically, Platt’s story flirts with the Trekish mistake of making the emotionless cyborgs into an expression of collectivism (with Thomas Dodd as the dodgy but preferable embodiment of free enterprise)… but it isn’t long before the story has a crowd of ordinary people protesting outside the palace, resisting police brutality and opposing a People’s Committee that has become a tyranny. If the Committee are “the champions of the proletariat” then it’s only in the same way, and to the same extent, as Stalin.
Gareth Roberts’ and Clayton Hickman’s ‘The One Doctor’ is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of space comic-opera, as long as you don’t start sharing their impression that they’ve satirised anything… and as long as you don’t worry about the fact that so much of it seems so reminiscent of the second season of the Hitch Hiker’s radio series.
Of course, there’s always one at every Christmas party isn’t there… one that spoils things for everybody else. In this instance, it’s Jonathan Morris’ ‘Flip-Flop’, a revolting Daily Mail-ish parable about the horrific dangers posed by dishonest, power-hungry immigrants. The immigrants in question are (adding insult to injury) giant slugs with bad eyesight and a wheedling, faux-humble Uriah Heapesque manner. They complain of prejudice and discrimination, explain that no human can comprehend their “ethnic experience”, call themselves a downtrodden minority despite covering nine tenths of the humans’ planet (“being a minority is a state of mind”) and, all the while, they’re scheming to take over and make the humans their slaves… which is achieved – and the story is quite explicit about this – through “positive discrimination”. The alien boss is called the “Community Leader”, which is one of those terms that tabloids use whenever they want to preach to Muslim communities about how they should do more to combat ‘extremism’. The aliens even want to ban Christmas. I fucking ask you.
I’m not saying anything about Jonathan Morris. I don’t know the man or anything about him. He might be the cuddliest pro-immigrant liberal there is for all I know. But ‘Flip-Flop’ is an egregious piece of shit and everyone involved in making it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Besides, the time travel paradox doesn't work because the Doctor, Mel, Stewart and Reed don't bump into alternative versions of themselves when they go back to the night of President Bailey's assassination. So there.
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Actually, I’ve been a bit hard on televised Who. I forgot about one story. It’s isn’t a “special” and it wasn’t broadcast on the 25th December… but it’s certainly a bit Christmassy and is one of the best episodes of the 21st century series. I’m referring, of course, to RTD’s miraculous ‘Turn Left’. Not only is it a reworking of It’s a Wonderful Life (with Rose earning her wings by giving Donna a chance to see what the world would be like without the Doctor) but it also has an entire ‘act’ set at Christmas. Donna and family spend the holidays in a hotel room, waited on by a maid who, it is implied, is a foreign worker. From their holiday retreat, the Nobles (who are really the commoners) witness the explosion that destroys London and turns them into refugees.
As Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM 410, although ‘Turn Left’ is “not per se a story about recession, the parallels – unemployment, homelessness, a military presence on the streets – are exactly what scaremongering media pundits are anticipating is going to happen this summer.” He was writing in early 2009. Things aren’t quite as bad here yet as they get in ‘Turn Left’, but..
Well, there you have it. Bah humbug, Changealujah, Seasons Greeblings, and a very Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
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