Secret Reality

Spoilers



The last episode of The Blacklist was hilarious.  Red describes an international cabal - comprised of people in government and the private sector - who run the world behind the scenes, start wars, control the media, kill to protect their power, etc.  It’s supposed to be so edgy.  Dark, terrifying conspiracy.  He has to get loads of investigate journos to attend his briefing in secret.  They’re all stunned by what he says.  But… he’s just describing the ruling class!  Seriously, the ‘Cabal’ is just the capitalist military-industrial-media-government complex.  But we’re supposed to be shocked by the existence of this group.  Once informed about it, the Washington Post runs a front page story telling everyone of the breaking news.  SHOCK NEW REVELATION: SMALL NUMBER OF POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND GET UP TO STUFF FURTHERING THEIR OWN POWER WITHOUT TELLING US!  The evil director of the CIA looks at the paper in horror, like he’s thinking “oh no, now everyone knows!”  It’s like structuring the big, dramatic denouement of a drama series around the astonishing revelation that water is wet, and having all your characters suddenly back away in terror from any rivers or taps they happen to be standing next to.

On the other hand, I can't help thinking this is still more charged than a story in which such facts of life are ignored.  Even presented as an outlandish, shocking revelation, it's still presented.  Even framed as a surprise, it's still there.  

Reminds me of the best Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, in which a bunch of corporations, eco-businesses, military hardmen and Western politicians are presented as members of a secret criminal cartel who are trying to take over Bolivia's water reserves.  Now this basically happened in the real world.  The film depicts it as an evil secret conspiracy that MI6 wants to stop.  It also depicts Quantum as sneakily damming up loads of water to create an artificial shortage.  But it basically connects with the real world, albeit distantly.  It's far more connected to the real world than anything in the follow-up movie Skyfall (which is total shit, by the way, both politically and as entertainment).  Quantum of Solace also connects with the idea that powerful Western interests are behind politically-motivated Right-wing coups in South America... which is just one of those things that any sensible person takes for granted as an established historical truth, but which the mainstream media treats as a bizarre revelation.  But Quantum of Solace at least acknowledges it.  The movie puts the evil secret conspiratorial organisation behind such things rather than, y'know, the CIA and the US government... though it does have the CIA complicit in Quantum's machinations, even if it is because one CIA guy is a rotten apple.

Is this subversive?  Of course not.  It's gatekeeping.  It acknowledges things about the real world that people either know about or strongly suspect.  It then packages them in the classic methods of containment of such incendiary truths.  Bad Apple Theory.  Conspiracy Theory (which works either way - either as instant dismissal or as an obfuscation of the structural and legal nature of most real conspiratorial shenanigans).  Etc, etc.

On the other hand, I think the capitalist culture industries may underestimate the potential ultimate result of such things.  When such things become common knowledge, something that people all take for granted, even in a watered-down and ideologically-neutered form, that tells us something.  Loss of any confidence in the current state of the world may not start any fires, but it does erode. This isn't what the capitalist culture industries want to do.  It's something they have to do in order to appear even superficially plausible.

As I say, it's gatekeeping.  But the thing about gatekeeping is that it constitutes an acknowledgement that the gate is somewhat insecure, and that there are people who want to break through it.

Also, James Spader kicks it.

Powerlessness Corrupts

More curated tumblr jottings, which some people seemed to like.  Rewritten and expanded.


There is, in fandom, an impulse to denounce which is very congruent with a similar impulse that exists in some iterations of right-on politics.  It comes from a similar place: helplessness.  We’re always told that power corrupts, and it certainly does.  But powerlessness corrupts too.  People in fandom get accustomed to worshipping that which is handed down to them.  They can then discover the opposite but equal pleasure of execrating that which is handed down to them.  What both have in common is the idea of passively accepting what you’re given.  And yes, hating on something is a form of passivity quite distinct from the activity of criticism.  Passive acceptance of texts is, contrary to myth (a myth largely put around by fans, amazingly enough) far more common within fandom/s than in the general television viewing public. 

Jane Q Citizen puts Doctor Who (or whatever) on her telly, doesn’t like it, and so switches over to hunt for something she does like… or she likes it (having no long-cherished internal needs that she has trained herself to expect to be met by it), so she watches it, and then she forgets about it.  John Z. Fan puts Doctor Who on his telly, doesn’t like it, but cannot switch it off because he is a fan (and yes, this can apply to me too in some ways).  So, passive and powerless to influence the show that he loves but finds disappointing, he rages.  He isn’t writing it or producing it himself, and he doesn’t even have (because he’s chosen to abnegate it) the basic and paltry consumer freedom that capitalism grants us and lauds so much: the freedom to hunt for another product that will satisfy us where one product has failed.

Meanwhile, in many sections of right-on politics, splittery and sectarianism and denunciation rule the day because the right-on either have no real mechanism by which they can actually change any of the stuff they don’t like (clicktivism being such a dead end, and most branches of direct action and protest being dead ends too when taken by themselves) or they despair of the one thing that really can change things - mass, working class action - because we’re in a long-term trench of neoliberal downturn.

The powerlessness corrupts.

Meanwhile (again), there is another strange tessellation.  The gap between fandom and actual critical savvy is uncannily similar to the gap between right-onitude per se and actual critical political education.  The fan mindset can (notice I say can) leave one hungry for the tools of proper critical analysis but does not itself supply them.  Similarly, right-onitude (however well intentioned and sincere) can leave one hungry for the desire to think politically but does not itself supply the actual critical understanding one needs in order to do so sensibly or usefully.

Between the desire and the reality falls the shadow.

(And I’m not being patronising because I have in the past fallen into most of these traps myself, and still occasionally do today.)

Meanwhile (yet again), the fan's attitude to a commodity they don't like, but to which they are attached by fan loyalty (those long-cherished internal needs we were talking about earlier), is eerily like the attitude of passive reformism to politics itself.  'The political' is that which exists within a band as narrow as the identity of a show.  You could even look at 'the News' as the show that is being followed.  As the fan saying goes "if you don't like the show at the moment, wait a bit and it'll change".  At most, the angry fan might engage in 'activism' like starting tumblrs with names like 'pleasefiremoffat' etc.  Because firing the current guy and getting a new guy instead will solve all the problems.  But when it comes to the right-on critique of Moffat (which has some points to make, don't get me wrong) too often what is missed is that Moffat is just a new development in a long-standing systemic issue. 

The fan loyalty, even when it is a twisted and angry loyalty to iterations of a franchise that you don't like, is itself probably a sign of commodity fetishism triumphing over actual critical engagement.  You are religiously following the logo (to paraphrase my friend Josh Marsfelder) because you are treating the commodity like an entity to which you owe allegiance, rather then critically following texts because - for whatever reason - you want to. 

(I like to think that I do it differently, but then I like to think lots of things.) 

Ultimately, of course, discontent with the narrative commodity you enjoy (or to which you have ingrained loyalty, or which you have fetishized) is far less an issue than discontent with society.  You can put up with a show being rubbish or reactionary (as long as you don't fail to speak up when it publically makes a political misstep, with that judgement being based on good faith critical engagement and some knowledge of how texts work).  But we're severely mistaken if we think we can put up with society being so royally fucked up for much longer.  The danger is that otherwise potentially useful right-on people might think that the critique of a particular set of texts (often based on a shoddy and crusading form of particularist politics) is a substitute for the critique of capitalist society as a unified juggernaut of exploitation and oppression - just as some people think that if Moffat would only STFU then modern TV would be pretty much peaches.

The mistake is waiting to be made in the powerless mire that so many people feel - not without some justification - that they are stuck in.

Pyramids of London ('Deep Breath' 1)

I've realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from 'Allo 'Allo.  But not as good.  That's a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax's misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of 'Deep Breath' for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he's already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from 'Allo 'Allo - he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded - upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase - from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out 'Allo 'Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner - with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it - is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can't be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can't really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn't as good as the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo... because the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words - it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they'll get it... because English is the only proper language, and people who don't speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don't mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn't overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He's supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance.  He is the other, sure, but the other muddling along amongst us and basically on our side.

But here we run into yet another twist in the story... because this alignment of the other with 'us' is worrying in itself.  This recurring team - Vastra, Jenny and Strax - worries me.  It represents the reconciliation of the antagonist with 'us'.  They don't just live with humans, they live in Victorian London, and this seems to me to be the most blatant possible way of integrating them into a kind of aggressively middle-class, twee, cutesy, ostensibly lovable, yet aggressive and insular and ressentimental Britishness, a Britishness at its most iconically imperialistic and hierarchical.  Victoriana is the heavy drapes and elaborate dresses and cravats and top hats of the middle-classes.  Victoriana is the coughing, shivering, gin-swilling street poor as an essential background decoration, a set of tropes to locate us.  Victoriana is brown derby-wearing police inspectors (probably called Lestrade) who consult toff private detectives because, being working class, they're too thick to do their jobs themselves (the implicit goodness and necessity of the police is never questioned in Victoriana - something that wasn't true amongst common people in actual Victorian London, who often saw the bobbies as incompetents at best, violent spies at worst).  Victoriana is empire as backdrop.  Queen and country.  Big Ben.  Smog, gaslight, cobbles, hansom cabs, etc etc etc.  This is the milieu that Vastra, Jenny and Strax have assimilated themselves into.  Vastra even challenges the bad guys "in the name of the British Empire!"  This sort of thing no doubt seems desperately cute to Moffat, and all those people who write those rubbishy Jago & Litefoot audios for Big Finish, but its only our historical amnesia to what the British Empire was that allows this kind of desperate cutesiness to subsist.  The subsistence of it, in turn, allows the amnesia.  And boy, do we love our symptoms... hence our desire to inflict them on everyone and pull everyone, and everything, into them.  The Silurian and the Sontaran, for instance, have joined us in our adorable, pop-Conan-Doyle-inflected national fantasy of a penny dreadful past of wonders and horrors.  The horrors are all safely in the past (things we've cured now) and the wonders remain as a kind of nostalgic longing for the lost times when, right or wrong, he had confidence and lush gothic cliches galore on our side.  Vastra - the representative of a displaced people who are perpetually denied redress and justice (umm... imperialism? colonialism?) - has isolated herself from her people and integrated herself into imperial Britain.  She has ceased to be any kind of rebuke to 'our' world, or 'us'.  And 'we' have become the national gestalt that once lived in the United Kingdom of Sherlock.  Strax - the representative of a culture of militarism and conquest - has similarly integrated himself.  His imperialist attitudes are turned into cute, amusing misprisions which allow him to sink with ease into the warm slippers of imperial Victoriana.  The militarism of the Sontarans is no longer a rebuke to 'our' militarism.  The Sontaran may not be a threatening other anymore, but he is now no longer, in any sense, a mirror reflecting our own nastier values back at us.  He's not a reflection that attacks.  He's a stooge who safely reminds us of our foibles by being sillier than us, and then puts on the uniform of a servant and takes his place in the pyramid.  The good pyramid.  'Our' pyramid.  The pyramid we all fit into somewhere, nicely and neatly.  The pyramid that even the comedy tramps fit into.  The pyramid in which the chirpy cockney maid voluntarily calls people "ma'am" and serves them their tea, as an empowered life choice.  The pyramid of contextless, gutted, sanitised tropes.  This is partly why our representations of the Victorian era are so tropetastic... because tropes slot neatly into each other (hence all the Victoriana crossovers, i.e. Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc), arrange themselves into pyramids of perceived cultural weight, and start to resemble a vertiginous but orderly class structure, a sort of naturally-occuring periodic table of the social roles, which is the ideology of Victoriana that we are sold by every bit of culture the tropes come from.  This is why 'actually existing steampunk' (which 'Deep Breath' appropriates in predictable fashion, Moffat having been pulling at this particular thread for some time) is so pernicious.  Because the iconography of the high era of industrialisation, imperialism and colonialism is reduced to contextless fetishized commodities, sumptuous archaic kit, and safely de-conflicted social classes.  And even the identification of the cogwheel and the top hat with villainy nevertheless makes no apology for the joy we're supposed to take in the sheen of the 19th century machine. 

Of course, once again, we shouldn't be too hard on Moffat.  He's just doing what lots of people do.  He's just going along.  And he's not doing anything worse than Robert Holmes did in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  In fact, he's better than that.  His obligatory Victorian chinese person looks right, according to the big book of stereotypes... but at least he was played by an actual Chinese person.  And at least he wasn't being singled out.  At least he was just another brick in the pyramid, another character on the picturesque Quality Street tin that Victorian London has been turned into by our culture industries.  That's what we do now.  We don't do stories about Victorian London in which Chinese people are The Enemy.  The sneer at the foreigner has been displaced elsewhere, translated into code.  Now, we do stories in which all races and classes, all costumes and styles, all tropes, are brought together, all present and correct, all slotted into place.

Is that so bad?  I honestly don't know.  I'm not necessarily arguing that we're looking at a regress.  But I'm pretty sure we're not looking at progress.  And I'm not talking about the paucity of round things on the wall.

Koba the Ape

Post-Spoilerocalyptic.


I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Banalities first:  A well-crafted film.  Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as "Maurice").  Nicely acted by the principles. 

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the 'good' ape leader is Caesar and the 'bad' ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans.  Koba is the nasty one who can't let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn't trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome.  Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don't help him up and dust him down.  No.  You stand on his neck.

Here's Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse.  Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand.  She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind... which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or - horror of horrors - winning.  You're allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure.  That's why Rosa Luxemburg - through no fault of her own, may I stress - is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There's been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well.  Bollocks.  Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy.  He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard.  You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar's benevolent dictatorship.  As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil.  The radical is, by definition, an 'extremist', and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn't the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history.  'Koba', you'll no doubt remember, was a nickname once used by Stalin.  Hence the title of Martin Amis' truculently inconsequential book Koba the Dread.

It will be noticed that, after his insurrection succeeds, Koba immediately sets about herding humans into a gulag, killing any apes who defy his authority, and locking up any potential dissidents who may be too loyal to Caesar's old regime - presumably to await show trials.  His revolt takes on the inevitable contours of any radical change - as told by the drearily predictable liberal view of politics.

Koba is, once again, the revolutionary as maniacal murderer, as traitor and tyrant, as cheerleader for slaughter, as the foaming radical who really just wants power.  This characterisation sits perfectly happily alongside the efforts made in every other bit of the script to indicate nuance and complexity - precisely because, in the mainstream liberal view of politics, the depiction of the firebrand as instant tyrant is considered a nuanced and complex view (instead of, say, a childish, smug, ahistorical oversimplification).

There is simply no need for the text to explain how and why Koba goes from his entirely reasonable mistrust and hatred of humans (see below) to his conspiracy, his bid for power, his betrayal of his old comrade Caesar.  It is so self-evident to this way of thinking that it requires no explanation.  The opponent of 'peace' and 'stability' (i.e. Things As They Are) is, by definition, also the tyrant-in-waiting.  The radical is, by definition, a psychopath.

But, until he fails to die the hero and thus lives long enough to see himself become the villain, Koba is objectively a better judge of what's going on that Caesar... or, apparently, the writers.

We're supposed to be watching a story about 'two tribes' who mistrust and fear each other, with 'extremists' on both sides who hate the other side unreasoningly.  The idea is the standard liberal accounting for inter-group rivalry and violence.  Ethnic differences + fear + extremism x misunderstanding = war.  But in this movie, the equivalence between the two groups and their responses - which we are clearly meant to take for granted - is always false.

On the human side, the warmonger characters hate the apes because they started the Simian Flu which wiped out most of the human race (a view explicitly shown to be wrong and unfair by another human character), or because "they're animals" (thus bigotedly rejecting the apes' claim to fair treatment by disputing their sentience).  That's it.  On the ape side, by marked contrast, the warmonger characters - chiefly Koba - hate the humans because they kept apes in cages (true) and tortured them (true) and mutilated them (true) and experimented upon them (true), and because they're dangerous owing to their enormous stockpile of deadly weapons (true).  The initial contact between Caesar's groups of apes and the human survivors in San Francisco comes when humans trespass upon ape terrirory (albeit unwittingly) and immediately shoot an ape without provocation, nearly killing him.

In measured response to this, Caesar decides upon a show of strength and a warning.  The apes turn up on the humans' doorstep and say "don't come back".  Whereupon the 'goodie' human character - Malcolm (played by some guy who isn't Mark Ruffalo) - goes back into the apes' forest, this time fully aware that he is trespassing and unwelcome.  Okay, he's trying to prevent an attack upon the apes by Dreyfuss (the boss of the survivors, played by Gary Oldman)... but his aim is to get permission for his team to work on the dam situated in the apes' forest, and get power flowing back to San Francisco. Malcom tacitly accepts the premise that the apes must agree to human terms or be annihilated.  He doesn't like it (you can tell because he frowns a lot) but he accepts it.  He never gives any apparent thought to challenging Dreyfuss' authority.  There doesn't appear to be any semblance of democracy in the human camp.  Malcolm certainly never raises the possibilty of asking the people what they think.  The film seems to work on the assumption that the ordinary people are a fearful mass who alternate between mindless panic and obedience to the guy with a megaphone... at least until they get too hungry, whereupon they will tear him to pieces.  (An essential corollary of the 'two tribes' paradigm is that people are 'tribal' in the worst and most racist sense of that term, i.e. a cowering mass of ignorant savages waiting on the word of the Chief.)  So Malcolm undertakes to explain to the apes that they must let humans fix their dam.

Gee, giving humans power.  What could possibly go wrong?

Let me ask you something.  If you were living in the ruins of a planet destroyed by the technology of a specific group of people, and that same group of people had kept you in cages, tortured you, experimented upon you, maimed you, dissected your kids and hunted you almost to extinction (or wrecked the ecosystem to the point where your people found it increasingly hard to survive), and that group of people was powerless... wouldn't you feel safer?  And would you think it a tremendously attractive and sensible idea to let said group of people add a constant source of electrical power to their already existing stockpile of high-tech weaponry?

Okay, so I get that the human survivors in San Francisco are not specifically the same humans who are personally responsible for all that stuff... but the logic of the film depends upon that 'two tribes' thing I was just talking about, and thus depends upon the idea that we're seeing two groups with essentialised and generalised features who face each other across a chasm.  By that logic, Koba's mistrust of humans as a group, or a race, is entirely reasonable.  It's not how I look at humans (balls to collective responsibility - most of what's wrong with this planet is the work of a minority and their system), but it seems to be how the filmmakers do - and Koba has, quite reasonably, picked up on this facet of how his world works.

At the point where Koba tries to kill Caesar, Caesar is handing the humans access to electricity.  Caesar is himself a despot, albeit a benevolent one from 'our' point of view (i.e. he is sympathetic to humans and wants peace... or, to put it another way, he's a reasonable negotiating partner 'we' can get round the table with... because that's all 'we' ever want, right?).  When Koba shoots Caesar, it isn't like he's stepping that far out of the established ape custom of settling disagreements over status through fights.  Yes, he's violating the commandment 'APE NOT KILL APE', but then Caesar is endangering the lives of the apes by helping the humans.

Let's be honest here.  The humans, at this point, have a huge stockpile of deadly weapons, no semblance of a liberal democratic political structure, urgent needs for land and food, a miserable track record when it comes to apes, newly restored electricity and - as is soon shown - contact with other groups of armed humans!  They are, by any sane definition, a deadly threat to the apes.  It's ludicrous to pretend otherwise, even within the schema of the text.  (Outside the schema of the text, such pretence depends upon complete ignorance of how armed modern Westerners behave towards small groups whom they consider 'primitive' and who happen to live on land they want.)  Koba is, sadly, absolutely right in his judgement.  It's all very well to shake one's head and say, echoing the movie's familiar tagline, "it was our last hope for peace"... but that view depends upon the idea that a few compromisers on either side can efface that fact that one group is the long-established historical oppressor and now, once again, has access to overwhelming strength.

In the end, Apefall is just another new reiteration of a very old American story: the struggle over land, with the role of Americans taken by humans ("there's humans and then there's Commanches") and the role of 'Indians' taken by apes.  In the old days, the narrative was fairly simple and crude.  Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties.  These days we're more nuanced.  Now it's Guilt-Ridden Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties, some of whom are almost as reasonable as 'us'.

(BTW - if you think I'm being racist when I compare the apes to, say, Native Americans... well, it was the film that started it.  I'm just running with their logic.  And you should note that it is a racial logic deeply embedded in the franchise.  The original Charlton Heston movie is a 'satire' of the civil rights movement - via an employment of the 'world turned upside down' trope - in which black people are implicitly represented as apes.)

In yet another way, the idea that the two sides are balanced is untrue.  The film tries to put roughly equivalent characters on either side of the human/ape divide.  But Caesar's counterpart is Malcolm and Koba's is Dreyfuss.  So on the ape side we have a well-meaning leader, and on the human side we have a well-meaning subordinate (thus effacing the important reality of power in favour of the value of intentions - a classic liberal mistake).  On the ape side we have a psychopathic killer driven by personal ambition versus a human warmonger who is actually shown to be a well-intentioned leader.  Dreyfuss wants to save the human race and is humanised via a scene where he cries over photos of lost sons.  Thus an evil revolutionary is pitted against a misguided patriot - we even see Dreyfuss' old photos from his army days in the desert.

Even as the film strives to create a morality play about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and there being faults on both sides, etc, it falls back into ideology.  It falls back into the classic ideological demonology of fearful liberalism: those who strive stumblingly for compromise versus the vicious zealot.

Koba is outnumbered.  He has to shoulder all the burden of radicalism, and thus become a monster, while the rest of the protagonists - even the most bastardly of the humans - get at least partially absolved.

In Ape Trek into Darkness, as always, the oppressed are held to a higher standard of morality, forgiveness and forbearance than the oppressors (or, in this case, the erstwhile oppressors).

Koba's great crime is that he refuses the onus of greater moral responsibility foisted upon him by his former oppressors (and the filmmakers).  He quite rightly tells them to go fuck themselves, and the pleas for peace they bring too late to the table, alongside their quest for back-up and juice.  And then he starts fighting against what is, as I say, by any sane definition, a proven and deadly threat (I'm sure someone, if the roles were reversed, would call it a 'clear and present danger' and authorise drone strikes against it).

I bow to no-one in my loathing of Stalin.  He was arguably the most despicable human being who ever lived.  He is a smear of blood and shit on the good name of socialism.  But he was the embodiment of class forces, and rose to power on his opportunistic co-optation of those class forces, not on a wave of charisma and evil stemming directly from his ideology or fanaticism.  He was the most ruthless and well-placed representative of the bureaucratic layer in the Soviet government which filled a gaping hole in the power structure after the Russian Civil War (which was forced on the Bolsheviks by Western capitalist aggression) decimated the Russian working class, thus gutting the soviet system.  He wasn't the bogey man.  He wasn't Bolshevism in its true and terrible form, or any such ahistorical nonsense.  He was the head of a bureaucratic state capitalist government (in which capital still existed, but as an exploitative relation between the worker and the state) which put Russia through a speeded-up and concentrated form of capitalist development and industrialisation.  Russia did in the space of a couple of decades what the European capitalist powers had taken a couple of centuries to do.  Stalin matched them point for point.  All the horrors of primitive accumulation (the early stage of capitalist development) are represented in the Stalin years.  In the West they were called the enclosures, in Stalin's Russian it was called 'collectivisation'.  It was essentially the same thing: the state-enforced destruction of feudal property and the peasantry - and its transformation into capital of one kind or another - leading to dispossession, famine, the theft of common lands, the severing of people from direct access to agricultural production, and the forcing of people into wage labour.  Stalin engineered terrible famines.  The British Empire did exactly the same thing in Ireland and India.  In Stalin's Russian you had the horrors of the Gulag; in Europe and America you had the horrors of plantation slavery, child labour and the industrial revolution.  The state owned and controlled all capital in Russia, and it was administered by a class of bureaucrats.  In rising European capitalist formations, the state played a less direct but no less crucial role in enforcing the 'rights' of private capital, and financially supporting the new system.  Both Russia and the West engaged in ruthless imperialism to acquire territory, manpower and resources to feed into the system.  If Russia was 'totalitarian', the Britain of Pitt was no democracy. Stalin was a monster because he was the dictator of a state engaged in industrialisation at breakneck speed.  All the horrors of emergent capitalism were squeezed into the tight space of the rule of one man.  Stalin is horrific because he is Russia's version of all the capitalists and prime ministers of Europe, fused into one bloated personage.  That isn't to excuse him, any more than to point out that capitalism is a systemic evil is to excuse Rupert Murdoch, but it does put him in context.  He may have been a psychopath, but millions didn't die solely because he was, and it wasn't Bolshevism that made him one.  It was the logic of capital, albeit state capital.  Industrialisation, squidged into a sliver of historical time, because - as Stalin himself pointed out - of the need for the Soviet Union to compete militarily and economically with the Western capitalist powers.  (This, by the way, is why I find it beyond comprehension how anyone can fail to see the state capitalist nature of Stalin's Russia - if it competed economically with capitalist powers in a capitalist world system, how can it possibly have been anything other than some form of capitalism?)

(Quite apart from anything else, if we allow Koba the Ape to stand for Koba the Dread, this does the Dread a massive favour.  Stalin was a nonentity and a workhorse in the early Bolshevik party, who played little significant role in the Russian Revolution, contrary to his own subsequent mythmaking.  He certainly never charged at rocket launchers.)

It is, by the way, explicitly capitalism that the humans want to bring back.  The dam is a symbol for holding back the tide of untamed and destructive nature (and/or time), and a vast engineering project of modernity that reshapes the natural world to human needs, and a way of providing water and power to settlements and thus making 'civilisation' possible.  By 'civilisation', in Planet of the Apes 2.2: Age of Extrinction, we are to understand capitalism.  The humans explicitly talk about wanting to bring back the life they once had.  In other words, they want our world back - the very world that caused its own downfall in the first place.  The film makes it aesthetically explicit that the return of capitalism is aimed at.  When the humans manage to get their dam working again, and thus get power to flow back to San Francisco, they celebrate in the reactivated shell of a petrol station, and people dance through a relit shopping mall.  Dreyfuss celebrates by turning on his expensive Apple rectangle for the first time in years and looking through his My Pictures folder.

It's only to be expected.  Popular movies are currently absolutely stuffed with the motif of the hero and/or the world fallen and trying to arise.  You don't need to be a particularly subtle critic to work out what that's all about (though, needless to say, it escapes most of the professionals).  It stretches from Bond and Batman recovering their mojos, to the de rigeur device of the fallen paradise that must be reclaimed (Oblivion, Elysium, The Hobbit, etc).  It is a current inflection of the perennially-popular apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movie.  The Apeit: The Desolation of Koba is no exception.  It fits into the currently popular trope in a way similar to Game of Thrones, with its mantra "Winter is coming".  A great crisis has come or is approaching (Game of Apes manages to at least make the crisis something of our doing... though there is something to be said for GRRM's great inevitable cycles of boom and slump that helpless people get caught in).   In both, the legions of the disavowed will swamp us along with the glaciers or germs of doom.  We squabble about the political organisation of structures that will soon be rendered obsolete by waves of inexplicable and uncanny and unappeasable apocalypses that steadily approach.  The White Walkers are the unknowable shock troops of the big freeze that will paralyse the clockwork and the engines that we currently rely on.  The apes, similarly, are the post-apocalyptic hordes, resentful and out for revenge.  Again, in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, none of this is especially hard to parse.

Of course, by enjoying Koba's brave rebellion, I am only really doing something the text wants me to.  The moral rhetoric of the narrative may not support him (even though the facts of the plot do), but the whole aesthetic logic of the film is predicated upon him and his war.  We go to see films like this for the same reason that we recessionitizens go to see so many zombie films.  We want to see the world smashed up by the monsters in a state of riotous assembly and insurrectionary carnival.  It connects with a deep-seated desire to see the world turned upside down.  Of course, the dominant ideology demands that the carnival of the oppressed be curtailed in salutary fashion.  But even so...

I wrote here about how attractive villains are, about how they often appear to have an objectively better moral and political position than the goodies (who are often only good by default because they represent established power structures and their violence is institutionalised), about how seeing the monsters rip the world to bits can be very thrilling if you're not keen on the world as it stands, about how the villains shoulder the burden of perpetual defeat so that we can learn our lesson of obedience... but also so that we can get a charge from their rebellion against the status quo, and about how the evil objections of the villain often represent a garbled form of protest against the established order.

For instance, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise represents - like so many villains - the distant and distorted echo of the snarl of radical anger.  He is himself thoroughly unsympathetic, as Koba comes to be when he starts murdering other apes.  However, even thoroughly unsympathetic villains like Voldemort (who, as the snobbish fuhrer of the magic-Nazis, is not someone I’d vote for) tend to represent the - to use a hackneyed phrase - ‘return of the repressed’.  And repression is political.  That which is oppressed is also repressed in mainstream discourse.  Voldemort can ascend because he takes advantage of faultlines in Wizarding society that reveal deep, structural injustice and hypocrisy, ie the ethnic cleansing of the giants, the economic ghettoisation of the Goblins, the resolutely undemocratic and unaccountable nature of Wizarding government, the enslavement of the Elves, etc.  Now, J.K. Rowling never really addresses these problems.  She occasionally has goodie characters display a bad conscience about them (ie Hermione’s patronising SPEW campaign and Dumbledore’s occasional remarks to Harry about how badly Wizards have treated other races) but the addressing or remedying of these injustices is NEVER made crucial as a precondition of saving the Wizarding World.  The Wizards never really have to face the consequences of these injustices, or change them.  Harry & Co fight to reinstate the status quo that includes all these structural injustices.  The happy ending involves no emancipation of the Elves, no change in Wizarding attitudes to giants (indeed, Rowling makes it clear that the Wizards are essentially right about the respectively servile and primitive nature of these races!)  The happy ending involves no real tackling of the deep strain of racial prejudice about bloodlines.  The happy ending involves one of the goodies being ‘appointed’ the new (unelected) Minister of Magic.  Etc.  It’s clear what this means.  The only person fighting to change the Wizarding World was Voldemort.  The baddie.  The goodies were all fighting to, a few tweaks aside, keep it exactly the same.  This is why I have a sneaking sympathy even with Voldemort.  He was, at least, trying to change things.  Like Koba, he represents the deep-seated assumption in capitalist media culture that any attempt at radical social change must be, by definition, evil: fanatical, twisted, dangerous, pathological, selfish, etc.  Voldemort doesn’t espouse values I’d embrace… but I do feel a certain kinship even for him, as a figure within the text.  Because he’s the guy who says ‘this society is broken and we need to radically change it’.  His ideas about how it’s broken are noxious, but that’s because he’s a bourgeois echo - distorted and distant - of anyone who wants radical change.  It’s like with Shinzon: he’s personally vile, but - being the leader of a slave rebellion which confronts the oppressing empire - he’s also a reflection (in a shattered mirror) of Spartacus.

Similarly, in Koba and the Deathly Humans, Koba is the only one fighting to radically change the status quo, the only one with a practical grasp of what needs to be done to keep the apes safe from the danger they clearly face, and the first one with the guts to pick up weapons and fight.  If he has to trick the rest of the apes into following him, that just shows that the filmmakers are working on the same assumption about the 'ordinary' apes as they made about the 'ordinary' humans: they're sheep.

The passivity of the masses is a theme right the way through the film.  There are a quartet of Alpha Males (of different styles) making all the running.  The climax of the film depends upon two seperate sets of Alpha Males duking it out between them.  (Incidentally, the only women in this film are... well... incidental.  Malcolm has a girlfriend who is there to give people antibiotics and look sad and be supportive; Caesar has a mate who is there to have babies, be ill and then get better - much to his relief.)

It's possible that the Alpha Males, the submissive Beta Males and the Obedient Females are there on both sides as part of the declared strategy of showing the humans and apes mirroring each other, of showing how much they have in common.  If so, its not really exceptional in terms of being reactionary and reductionist and biological determinist - these sorts of assumptions are widespread, especially in narrative culture - but it is noticeable how they do it without so much as whispering about evolution or common descent.  Presumably this is from fear of incurring the wrath of America's Christian Creationist hordes (just goes to show how seriously they take ideological sensitivities when they sense box office impacts). 

On a related issue, I personally found it irritating how undecided the filmmakers were about how to present ape culture.  On the one hand they want the apes to be 'advanced' and human-like in their social organisation, yet they also want them to act like stereotypical apes.  So you end up with a mish-mash.  The apes are shown to have a literate culture, with written words and sign language alongside the few who can speak, and with a school for the little 'uns - complete with anachronistic lessons in chalk on an improvised blackboard (insert blackboard jungle joke here).  They have midwives, buildings in their settlement, etc.  Yet they have none of the broadly egalitarian social structure that you tend to see in real hunter-gatherer groups untouched or unmenaced by exterior threats.  Of course, they're apes rather than human hunter gatherers... but then, with such intrusions of human social structure into the apes' society (including such wholly anachronistic ones as school and the nuclear family), why not also bring in egalitarianism?  The answer lies in the overarching view of people as 'tribal' in the negative sense.

It's this view that ultimately underwrites all the stuff about Koba the demagogue, swaying the apes to become his whooping pawns in a race war.  If people - hairy or smooth - are hierarchical, sheeplike, aggressive, fearful, passive, prone to obedience, naturally separated into Alpha Males and their subjects... and if they're prone to this because of their essentially apelike nature... then no wonder attempts to rebel against the status quo always end up with someone like Koba taking charge and becoming the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.

This is the logic of the work, and it has never been more necessary for the capitalist culture industries to peddle this message than at times of crisis.  If you think I'm being paranoid, then you're missing neoliberalism's skill at regulating opinion using marketised ideology.

I hear that Andy Serkis (who plays Caesar in this film via motion capture) is going to be doing a CGI/mo-cap version of Animal Farm.  Another retelling of that simplistic fable that puts an allegorical revolution into the world of the beasts, showing the inevitable course of that revolution from liberation to tyranny, from the charisma of the leader to the totalitarian rule of the dictator.  In the film I just saw, the animal/tyrant is indirectly named after Stalin.  In Animal Farm, the animal/tyrant who represents Stalin is called Napoleon.

Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin.  The inevitable gravediggers of revolution* - as long as you ignore all context and look upon them as ahistorical bogeymen.

You see, you animals, where trying to change the world gets you every time? 



*It's actually a bit more complicated than that in the case of the real Julius Caesar.

Piece of Cake

Someone nice on tumblr just asked me:

Do you think that it's fair to criticize a work of art for the failings of the culture around it? This is a question I've been mulling over the past few days and I'm sure you have an interesting response.

My answer got a bit long, so I decided - opportunistically - to post it here.


*

I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.

What do we mean by 'failings'?

What do we mean by 'culture around it'?

Failure is, of course, subjectively judged.  Something I think is bad may be seen as good - or neutral, or normal, or inescapable - by others.

It is perfectly possible for something that is a 'failure' with regards to general human wellbeing to be a 'success' for a social system.  (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)

Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society - including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture - then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.

*phew* long sentence.

This is the 'culture around it'...

BUT...

I think it's really important to realise that art doesn't just sit there surrounded by culture.  It is culture.

We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced.  It's just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks... and that's without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.

More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.

A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit... but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism.  The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things.  Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it's impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.

The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.

You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.

And yet... the analysis which allows us to see the cultural product as a fetishised commodity, produced by a cultural industry which actively perpetuates and reproduces itself, is also the analysis which can provide a way to see the cultural product relatively clearly... and a big part of the method for doing so is also suggested by the same analysis, at least when properly applied.

There's a vulgar Marxist approach which sees the circumstances of production as deterministic of the 'meaning' of a cultural product.  This, ironically enough, fails because it entails a reiteration of the exact same fetishising of commodities, not to mention a fetishising of production at the expense of other sites on the circuit of capital.

This is not a true Marxist approach because true Marxism sees commodities - indeed, capital in general - as relations rather than things (albeit relations fundamentally grounded in the material, which is to say the social).  This is really what is meant by - or is at least a good demonstration of - dialectical materialism (forget about vulgarised state religions). 

Luckily, this kind of vulgar Marxism is more honoured in the breach than the observance, at least outside of phone box cults or rump Stalinist states (their big cousins).

I'd argue for a dialectical-materialist way of looking at texts.  That's the analysis which remembers that the text is a social relation, produced by social relations, and viewed by social relations.

This would involve such basics as:

i) always remembering that they are social products, produced for material reasons,

ii) always remembering that, in a system of generalised commodity production, such cultural products are going to be overwhelmingly produced as commodities, or subject to commodification, etc.

iii) always remembering that, "in any epoch, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class" [approximate quote from Marx, from memory]

And:

iv) always remembering that we cannot step outside the current social relations, ideological relations or dominant hierarchies in order to, as it were, see the text and its culture from the outside, from a disengaged and impartial standpoint,

v) that we must, therefore, take sides.  We must take a side simply in order to see the text anything like 'square on'.  Not from an impartial standpoint, but from a standpoint which recognises that no such asocial view is even possible.

Before we can even start judging the cultural product itself, we need to accept that it exists in and as part of a matrix of social relations which are hierarchical, self-perpetuating, fetishised, but also inescapably social.  We need to have a standpoint from which to judge what constitutes a 'failure'. 

This, I think, is an especially pronounced need when we're talking about anything with a story.  Because stories are almost always, on some fundamental level, implicitly posing issues of justice and injustice.  Even if only by negation.  That may not be trans-historically true, but it's at least largely true in the bourgeois West in the modern era (which is understandable when you consider the cultural revolution brought about by the bourgeois revolutions and the subsequent rise of 'morality' as an ideological prop of bourgeois culture - which is always double-edged because of its partly revolutionary and emancipatory origins).

I think the idea of judging a work of art aside from the values of the culture around it is just impossible in real terms.  It's like trying to judge a slice of cake aside from the taste of the rest of the cake.  The slice is something you make, by violence, not a property of the cake itself.  The work of art is like this.  We make it a slice by viewing it out of context.  But we can't then judge it alone.  To taste it and evaluate its flavour is to evaluate the flavour of the entire cake.  Try and do otherwise and you'll fail.  Having said that, rummaging around in the rest of the cake is vital.  The slice you tasted may happen to be the bit with no arsenic in it.  That doesn't put you in a very good position to judge the whole cake.  On the other hand, the slice you cut may happen to have failed to intersect with the file hidden inside the cake... the file which might just contribute (as something that was originally an innocuous commodity, but which your friend on the outside has socially repurposed) to your escape.

Remember, to you, the file is a success.  To the Warden, the file is a failure.

To say that art - or texts, or cultural products, or whatever - are an integral part of bourgeois culture is not necessarily to say that they are useless.  They may have emancipatory promise, much as Duchamp's readymades had promises beyond their origins as commodities, once he assisted them into new contexts.

They may be relations rather than things, but then so are we.

See.  Piece of cake.



ADDENDA:

1.  I don't use Marx's term 'fetishism' with reference to commodification without an awareness that the whole concept of fetishism is Eurocentric and racist.  Marx, I'd argue, utilised the concept and turned it against bourgeois culture, thus making it fight against such Eurocentrism and racism.   See David McNally for a nice little parenthetical discussion of this.

2.  Nothing above is particularly original.  I just can't be bothered to go looking for sources and quotes.  Read the usual suspects.

3.  This post shows me up, because I very often fail to bother with anything like this level of theoretical thinking when I actually tap something about some TV show/film/book I've just consumed into Facebook/twitter/tumblr/Shabgraff.

4.  I'd agree with China Mieville that sometimes there just isn't anything very much to say about a particular cultural product, precisely because its a commodity.  We get over invested in our commodities (this blog is evidence of that) and forget that they sometimes lack even a semblance of semiotic density.  Even when a text can be interpreted against the dominant culture, subjected to detournement, or mined for abuse of bourgeois values, that doesn't always make it significant enough to be worth picking on.

2

"Go on, tell them," says Jacko to Sean. 

"Tell them what? I'll tell them nothing. They're not people like us, they're just a bunch of sardines."

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

"You heard me," jeers Sean, "Cold-blooded fishes. You haven't got a drop of good red blood in your body."

They don't like that either.  They've been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it's implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don't make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

"A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!" Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say... Sean's Irish, hence his "gift of the gab" (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

"All right, all right, all right," laughs Sean, "Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?"

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he's like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff's regime.  He hasn't been surgically mutilated, but he's been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and... oh look, I'm reiterating.)

"Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?" asks Sean rhetorically, "It can't be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That's why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You're men, aren't you? Well, start the blockade right now!"

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people's expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won't attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people's underwater strike is indescribable.  And that's good.  It must be seen to be believed... and by that I don't mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that's good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It's a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially.  These days, there is no struggle, no contestation... or rather, the struggle has been effectively muffled and edited out of the mainstream media continuum, mirroring the way it has been materially suppressed.  These days, you beat the baddies by monologuing about how wonderful you are while the orchestral music goes insane, CGI roars at you, a pretty (white) child cries and the audience cries too (cry damn you, cry!).  Back when 'The Underwater Menace' was made, it was possible for slaves to beat the baddies with collective action, with agitation and unionisation and strikes and blockades, by the class struggle, by the revolt of the oppressed... and it was expressed (in the middle of a kids' tea-time adventure show!) as a weird and wonderful ballet, overlaid with sine waves and defamiliarising dots of electronic sound from the Radiophonic Workshop.  It was expressed as something that broke the boundaries of the everyday, both in narrative terms of workers disrupting the quotidian routine of exploitation, and in aesthetic terms as an explosion of the genuinely, unashamedly, discomfortingly strange and unfamiliar.  The gothic and the surreal and the just plain silly, self-consciously bizarre yet steeped in real history and work and politics, joining the picket line alongside the militant and the collective and the pissed-off.  That really is how its supposed to be.  That really is, ultimately, what is supposed to make Doctor Who good (when it is good) and more than just another cult franchise: its ability to express the struggle in terms of the strange.

Yes, you could see the strings holding the fish people up as they 'swam'.  Yes, you could see they were just actors in silly suits and masks.  Yes, you could see that the bubbles were a light show.  But that in itself was part of a connection to the materially real, to actual history, to the spontaneity of human action... ultimately, to labour, and thus to the essence of humanity.  Now, everything is far more 'convincing' while simultaneously being far more obviously false.  The fish people are evidently not fish people, but they evidently are solid, material, alive.  They are there.  In the plastic, flat, dead, synthetic world of CGI, everything looks more 'real' while also being evidently phantasmic, unreal, unpresent, immaterial.  The gleaming commodity has completely pushed the human hand out of view.

Just as the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the underwater strike ballet (d'ya see what I did there?) is a perfect representation of the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the collective resistance to power that it depicts, so is the smooth and depthless world of CGI a perfect representation of a world slumping into eternal neoliberal lassitude.  It is the visual expression of the glossy, shiny, expensive patina of capitalist realism and neoliberal hegemony.  It is a pretty picture that pretends, apparently with a straight face and an expectation of being believed, to be reality.

Give me the irony, the materiality and the anger of the 'hand-made' anytime.

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.

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.

32

The Doctor, Polly and Jamie have been condemned to the pits, to the 'Danger Gang', for the crime of proving to the Pilot that his world is run by secret things that constantly order him to not notice them. 

The trio are entering the pithead to begin their work as miners, mining the deadly gas that the Colony collects for its unseen masters.  One of the Colony's jolly little work ditties plays in the background.  A loud, insanely chipper voice sings lyrics about how happy everyone should be to work and serve the Colony.

The Doctor groans as if in terrible pain.

"What's the matter?" asks Polly.

"Ooooh, dreadful!" exclaims the Doctor, "Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that ought to be sent to the Danger Gang, not us!"

Jamie laughs.

The Doctor's concern isn't for the danger of the mines.  It's for the ugly, crass, aesthetic banality of tyranny; for its kitsch horrors; for its lack of imagination.  This might seem like a failure of proper priorities... until you remember that such crassness is a symptom of the infection in the social wound, the same wound in which the macra teem.

In a society that demands you work for hidden, secret, ineffable, insane masters that you never see and can't control, the mass-produced art that surrounds you is always going to be so much slop.  Its function is to soothe, to reassure, to distract.  It may not be consciously crafted to do these things, but if it doesn't do them it simply doesn't get mass-produced in the first place.  In a world so riddled with secrecy and injustice that psychosis becomes a necessary feature of social life, the songs you hear on the radio are always going to hide repressed lunacies within their mindless platitudes.  When you are expected to never question and never stop smiling, what chance is there that culture will be anything other than bland, safe, comforting pap?

And shitty, rubbishy, worthless, careless songs hurt us.  Songs that side with power are injurious, especially if they're dripped into your ears day after day after day.  Songs that are just ugly and dull, because they are made in the same way as spam, are just as bad.  They hurt our hearts and souls and guts.

The Doctor's priorities are just fine.

46

The committee want to know about Vorg and Shirna's 'ritual'. 

Shirna tries to explain.  "We're entertainers."  She does a little dance.  "Understand?"

Pletrac regards her, his face blank.

"No," he says.

Vorg jumps in.

"Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse... nothing serious, nothing political."

Who is he talking to?  The committee?  The BBC?  Us?

In any case, the commitee retire - scandalised - into secret session.

"Amusement is prohibited," gabbles Kailk in cold panic, "it's purposeless."

"Zarb is considering lifting that restriction," says Pletrac.  Zarb is their leader.  "The latest thinking is that the latest outbreak of violence among the functionaries is caused by lack of amusement."

The 'functionaries' are their slaves.  (Sadly, they are portrayed as rudimentary and stupid.)

The committee members are caught between two possible choices, both of them extremely attractive to any ruling class: stop the 'functionaries' thinking about anything but their function, or amuse the 'functionaries' and thus keep their mind off the fact that they are slaves.

So it turns out that amusement is pretty serious and political after all.

Meanwhile, inside Vorg's silly, apolitical machine, white English imperialists complain about the idleness of the "madrasis".

"Won't have 'em on the plantation," says Major Daley.

A Role Model

In an age when the suffocating omnipresence of the imperatives of neoliberalism has penetrated every single corner of culture - aggressively colonizing even the formely overlooked, underpoliced nooks and crannies where eccentricity and offbeatitude used to be free to spring up like hardy weed - and even the supposedly nerdy heroes have to be marketably thin, sexy and dressed in geek chic, it might do us all good to remember...

My.  Fucking.  Hero.

That Isn't Right

It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at 'The Reign of Terror' for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should've been called 'That Isn't Right'. So I've given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.

I wasn't going out on much a limb dissing 'The Reign of Terror' (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it.  'The Aztecs', by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good.  It isn't that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it's Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.

I'm not actually going to say that it's bad, as such.  On the whole, it's very well made.  But....


Black and White and Red All Over

"Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa...
do you approve of interracial marriage?"

Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people.  It's not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are 'darked-up' (what would you call it... bronzeface?).  It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they've been reddened.  But even if they weren't actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another.  Costume, ostensibly 'native' mannerisms and speech patterns, etc.  It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar.  Remember, not all blackface involves actual 'darking-up'.  These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not.  As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal "modern blackface" by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they're not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of 'the Few', thus implicitly comparing today's supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, 'entitled' youngsters with the generation of the "finest hour".  Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys 'putting on' verbal fancy dress such as "innit") are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows.  The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.

While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of 'darking-up' was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when 'The Aztecs' (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made.  Even so, it's far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice.  It was common practice, but that isn't an excuse.  Lots of things are common practice.  Excluding young women from important jobs was common practice when Sydney Newman hired Verity Lambert.  Admittedly, when early Doctor Who puts actors in dark make-up, it's usually as part of an attempt to represent other cultures with a degree of integrity rather than to outright parody them.  The educational remit was (at least to start with) a kind of guaranteur that other cultures were to be represented more-or-less 'factually' rather than in parodic terms.  Lucarotti is clearly trying to 'play it straight' in both 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs', as is David Whitaker in 'The Crusade'.  It's fair to say that people at the time may have genuinely perceived a gulf between 'appropriate' make-up conventions in drama about 'foreign' cultures and what went on in The Black & White Minstrel Show.  They were fundamentally different projects.  Still, the implicit assumption of 'The Aztecs' is that Aztec culture is 'ours' (i.e. white Europe's) to represent as we will.  This is the implicit assumption underlying all variants of blackface. It is an inherently imperialistic assumption.

It has recently been suggested to me that criticising old episodes on this basis is like criticising them for not having CGI effects: it is anachronistic.  This is, of course, partly true, in that the idea of this being a criticism would not have occured to many people at the time... but it obscures more than it reveals.  Firstly, it's actually just a restatement of the problem.  Secondly, the analogy fails because the concept of CGI was not only impossible but actually inconceivable in 1963.  There were no similarly ontological reasons why the idea of casting Mexican actors to play Mexicans was impossible and inconcievable.  CGI hadn't been invented then; Mexicans had.  (We must, I suppose, add the rider that modern Mexicans - Mestizos - are, unlike the Aztecs, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.)  The fact that the idea probably didn't occur to anybody isn't an alibi for the series; it is, in and of itself, an indictment of the society of which the series was a product.  In short, it doesn't neutralise the criticism but rather widens it.  It takes us beyond aesthetic nitpicking, moralistic fingerpointing or identity politics, into the realms of broad social critique.

But am I really having a go at such a treasured old episode on these grounds?  Is that okay, even with the alibi that it serves as a 'way in' to wider social issues?  Well, yeah, I think so.  As I say, I'm not moralising (that doesn't interest me) but I am putting forward the 'bronzeface' issue - and its wider implications of appropriation - as a reason to criticise the story.  I think it's altogether too easy and casual the way we tend to toss off phrases like "oh, well, it was of it's time" as though that answers everything and makes it all unproblematic.  I'm sorry, but we're talking about a culture that was genocidally destroyed by Europeans.  Should we really be so sanguine about such sanguinary history?  Isn't there room for a qualm or two about the fact that Europeans are still merrily dressing up as people that Europeans annihilated?  (Yes, yes, I know the Aztecs were themselves conquerors, and Cortés had help from other indigenous Mexicans... that's not the point.  Every imperialist army finds local support and many conquered cultures had their own crimes to answer for... none of that effaces the issue of imperialism itself.  There is a fundamental, quantitative, qualitative difference between, say, the forms of slavery once practiced within Africa and the genocide stemming from the modern European slave trade.  To not see this is to be morally blind.)

There might be a case for saying 'let it go' if we weren't still plagued by blackface and its variants, as well as the social causes which make it seem entirely unproblematic for the dominant (white) culture to represent certain groups as it pleases, without their views being taken into account.  But.  Johnny Depp is soon to appear in redface as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie.  Ben Affleck played a hispanic-American character in Argo (which also assumed the right to use Iran as a foil for American moral superiority).  Look up how they celebrate Christmas in Holland, and have a look at Sinterklaas and his little helper Zwarte Piet, a comedy golliwog (played by white Dutch people in black make-up and wigs) who follows Sinterklaas around on a lead, performing menial chores, begging for scraps and generally being comedically stupid.  Even the Telegraph doesn't think it's acceptable.  Relatedly, anybody who wants to know about 'cripping up' in theatre, films and TV (i.e. 'able bodied' or 'full size' people playing the wheelchair bound or dwarves, thus taking work away from disabled and/or dwarf actors) only needs to mention it to Nabil Shaban on Facebook. 

The Aztecs may be gone, but there are still millions of oppressed people in the world who have to watch as dominant media culture appropriates their appearance and culture as it pleases, representing them in ways which range from the excluding to the patronising to the dehumanising. Does it help anybody if I snipe at an old episode of Doctor Who?  No.  But nor does it help to allow oneself to become innured to the cultural evidence of oppression, to the point where one doesn't notice it enough to be uncomfortable.  Discomfort is sometimes a duty.  It's just far too easy to be comfortable with the representation of others, especially for someone like me whose own group is never going to be patronisingly represented by someone else.  There's an argument you hear about, say, the casting of John Bennett as Chang in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  It goes something like 'well, they just cast him because he was a good actor who suited the role'.  Well, that way of doing things might arguably be fair enough in a post-racist society.  But we don't live in a post-racist society.  Not by a loooooooooong chalk.  Not by white-cliffs-of-Dover-levels of chalkiness.  At the moment, the privilege of behaving and thinking as if we do belongs to the people unaffected by racism. 


A Clash of Civilisations

Even if the actors in 'The Aztecs' weren't darkened with make-up (on the whole, I think they were but, as I said, it's hard to be entirely sure from the visual evidence) they were still part of a production which goes out of its way to excuse Europeans of responsibility for the genocide of the Aztecs.  Barbara, supposedly an expert, makes it very clear, though she doesn't say it explicitly: Cortés destroys the Aztecs because he is horrified by their practice of human sacrifice. If she can talk the Aztecs out of their barbarism, she can save them.  This is couched in terms or salvaging everything good about their culture... yet we see very little of this.  There is little in the story to support the (in itself patronising) idea that the Aztecs, as a whole, were as good as they were bad.  Even their splendid artefacts are only really shown in Yetaxa's tomb... with the emphasis firmly on a sinister, gothic, skull-like face. 

So... a fairly clear stance being elaborated there, I'd say. 

The story does not even gesture towards the idea that Cortés and his men may have set about the violent subjugation of the Aztecs - leading to their effective extermination - for imperialistic reasons; for gold, conquest, power and the imperatives of religious bigotry.  Instead the story aligns itself with an excuse seized upon by the conquerors: that the Aztecs essentially doomed their own culture by dint of their backwardness.  The Spanish demanded conversion and obedience.  In this way, the Aztecs would be 'saved'.  Similarly, Barbara's project is to socially re-engineer Aztec society (from the top down, naturally) so that it loses those aspects supposedly most repellent to the Europeans, i.e. the civilised people.  That is how the Aztecs can be delivered.  The Spanish told themselves they were fighting the Devil.  Barbara is fighting History.  But the logic is the same.

Barbara's struggle is underwritten by the implicit assumption that European civilisation doesn't practice barbarism like human sacrifice.  With reference to the Conquistadors, this is so wrong it's almost funny.  Spain, and other European powers, slaughtered and tortured and enslaved their way through the 'New World' with unrelenting ferocity.  Even if we take this to be some kind of aberration, we need only look at what was going on in Europe itself at the time.  When Cortés arrived in Mexico, it was barely thirty years since the Alhambra Decree, by which Castille and Aragon had formally expelled all Jews unwilling to convert on pain of death.  (A clue that this didn't stem from barbaric practices, that Barbara might have tried to make the Jews renounce, lies in the fact that the expelled Jews weren't permitted to take any of their gold or silver with them.  Go figure.)  This genocidal cleansing was part of the Spanish Inquisition.  It was well underway when Cortés found himself shocked by the Aztecs.  The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to myth, was actually far more careful, sparing and legalistic with torture than most European courts of the time... they only used torture rarely, unlike just about every other legal system in Europe.  Also, the Spanish Church itself never executed anybody.  With Christian piety, they'd hand you over to the state for public burning (or garotting then burning, if you confessed and repented).

Let's imagine a Doctor Who story that never really happened.  'The Spaniards' by Johnvid Whitcarotti (broadcast 32nd Octember 1963½).  Hartnell, Hill, Ford and Russell arrive in 16th century Spain.  Torquemada is played by Dickie Henderson (thus doing Torquemada a disservice, to be honest).  Would the story have been about Barbara trying to convince the Spaniards to change their ways so that Napoleon wouldn't be so shocked by their backwardness and feel the need to invade and spread the Enlightenment by force?  Or would the story have been about the need for the heretics to change their evil ways and thus not incur the righteous wrath of the inquisitors?  I somehow doubt the fuck out of it.  It's usually fairly predictable which victims will be blamed and which will not.

Going back to the supposed binary character of Aztec culture, the dichotomy between their noble side and their savage side remarked upon by all the white, 20th century European characters and the aliens that look and act like white, 20th century Europeans...  Look, I'm sorry, but what culture in human history since the rise of settled civilisation hasn't been capable of both immense goodness and immense cruelty?  It reminds of 'The Visitation', in which the Doctor claims to be baffled that the Terileptils love both art and war... as though this is something unusual.  The unspoken assumption there is that there are cultures which, in distinction to the culture of England in 1666, get their moral priorities mixed up to the point where they can't tell the difference between civilisation and savagery.  To his immense credit, Saward subverts this rather crass implicit assumption by having the debate then swing back and forth, with the Terileptil pointing out that the humans also consider war honourable, whereupon the Doctor retorts that they (unlike Terileptils) have the excuse of not being from a technologically advanced culture.  It turns out that the Doctor's puzzlement stemmed from seeing a highly advanced civilisation still fixated on the 'honour' of war.  Now, the characterisation of any group as "primitive" is troubling, but at least Saward is talking about Europeans, not a culture decimated by Europeans.  Lucarotti, on the other hand, is dragging imperialist baggage along in his brain... and even in a text that bears hallmarks of being a 'labour of love', it shows.


Terror of the Autlocs

Even with some gestures towards Aztec spirituality, history, teaching and law, human sacrifice is still depicted as the central fact of their culture, the keystone to it.  It's hard to see how this stems from anything other than the European obsession with it.  It was undoubtedly a very important aspect of the Aztec worldview... and the story deserves a lot of credit for trying to show their cultural priorities.  However, sacrifice seems as unintegrated as it is dominant.  Its social hegemony doesn't seem to apply to everyone.  Meanwhile, we are given clear guidance as to with whom our sympathies should and shouldn't lie.  Autloc and Cameca are the Nice-But-Then characters (see here) in implied sympathy with the detached, modern observer in front of the TV.  They supposedly stand for us in their moral qualms.  Autloc in particular, in that he tells Tlotoxl that "the rains will come even without sacrifice".  He is something of a proto-sceptic and empiricist.  He accepts Barbara's assertion that people shouldn't be punished for breaking laws with which they're unfamiliar (a doctrine that even today we will not implement).  He regrets the violent punishments faced by Susan and Ian.  He is Barbara's champion and friend precisely because he is humane and rational, unlike his fellow Aztecs.  As Ian says "Autloc is the extraordinary man here", the civilised man, the man who can be saved.  The others are write-offs, utterly resistant to the reasonable words and moral teachings of European conscience.  Barbara's project of humanitarian intervention fails because she meets only one Autloc.

By the way... am I the only person uncomfortable with how much lying Our Heroes do to Autloc and Cameca in this story?  The Doctor manipulates Cameca's love for him and only her own perspicacity brings her to realise that he's going to jilt her.  Autloc, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of making himself a pariah by standing alongside Barbara when she forbids sacrifice, movingly pleads that she not prove false... and she lets him go on believing that she's the reincarnation of Yetaxa so that she can count on his support.  In the end, the Doctor asserts that Barbara has "saved one man" and helped him find "a better" faith.  Well, Barbara's own bad faith is itself a minor illustration of the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of this.  Her absolution of the Conquistadors and her victim-blaming of the Aztecs are the major illustration... with their impending extermination always lurking in the background, undermining any valid way in which superior European morality can possibly stand up as a notion.  Autloc, meanwhile, has lost his friends, his wealth, his position, his house and his religion, and ends up wandering alone, a social outcast.  I hope Barbara never helps me, that's all I can say.

This leads me to consider what is, I think, the biggest aesthetic flaw in 'The Aztecs', the flaw that either spoils it or comes pretty close (I fluctuate on this point).  Tlotoxl.  Everything else I've been moaning about in this post can be put aside, at least for a while, for the pleasure of watching the story.  I do that sort of thing all the time.  Indeed, the vast majority of capitalist cultural production is so multifariously offensive and repellent that, if I weren't capable of just pushing political qualms aside in order to simply enjoy things, I'd probably never be able to switch on the TV, log on to the internet, open a book or go outside.  No, no.  The thing I have most trouble with in 'The Aztecs' is the portrayal of Tlotoxl. 

Tlotoxl is the High Priest of Sacrifice and is supposed to be the representative of Aztec barbarism, opposed to Autloc who is the High Priest of Knowledge.  Well, okay, there's a problematic notion right there: that Aztec 'knowledge' was in some way distinct from, and contradictory to, Aztec religious practices.  I think part of the point is that they weren't antithetical.  But, we'll let that pass.  The point here isn't to critique the episode's inbuilt assumptions (that's what the rest of this post is for) but to track its internal, dramatic consistency... what makes it or breaks it as a coherent and enjoyable story.  So, Autloc and Tlotoxl are set up as antithetical.  Well... that's a problem dramatically.  Isn't part of the whole point of the story that sacrifice cannot be easily detached from the rest of Aztec culture, the 'good bits' so to speak?   If the place of sacrifice in Aztec culture were so separate, so totally bound up with one individual and his prejudices and power base, then wouldn't it be much easier for Barbara to combat?  Just as Tlotoxl tries to discredit her isolated ideas by impugning her and her friends, so she could attack his dogma by isolating him.  She cannot do this.  She doesn't even try.  The episode seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it.  Sacrifice is at once an integral and indivisible aspect of Aztec culture and the pathological ideology of one man and a few loyalists.  (Part of the problem, as ever, is that we're getting history from above, as something that occurs within the minds and maneuvers of the ruling class, without 'the people' being involved, or even much represented.)

There's a rather pleasant irony in the way Tlotoxl becomes a sceptic towards an apparent manifestation of the gods.  Autloc, the man of knowledge, the proto-empiricist, credulously assumes Yetaxa's reincarnation, while Tlotoxl, the man of faith, becomes a sceptic about it.  The man who charges others with heresy becomes a heretic.  The man who questions divine intervention becomes a villain in a story which revolves around the idea that people should be sceptical of apparent divine influence in the natural world.  We are meant to boo him for being a religious zealot and an opponent of Barbara's truth... yet he spends the entire story trying to prove her a liar (which she is) for pretending to be a god when she isn't!  These ironies, by themselves, aren't the problem.  The problem lies in the way Tlotoxl is depicted.  Tlotoxl is machiavellian.  

"I've got a hunch you're not really a god."

John Ringham plays Tlotoxl in full Richard III-mode.  Tlotoxl is hunched, insinuating, greasy, snide, etc.  He even adopts a clipped, sneering manner of speech that seems reminiscent of Olivier's movie performance as Richard.  This is something we're all so familiar with that the randomness of it seldom gets remarked upon.  Why?  What possible need is there for a Richard III-esque villain in a story about the Aztecs?  Of course, it isn't really Ringham's fault.  He takes his cues from his costume (he gets that sinister line of make-up across his mouth, messy dark hair, darkened eyes, etc) and from the rest of the production, including the script.  When first seen, Tlotoxl is loping around in a corner like a crookback.  He is made visibly different from the other Aztecs, to the point where Ian and the Doctor can immediately tell - just by looking at him - that he's "the local butcher" (that one-man pathology again).  This, in itself, isn't much like Richard III (most people in Shakespeare's plays tend to initially find Richard quite plausible) but Tlotoxl as scripted recalls Richard in other ways, especially in his villainy, his manipulativeness, his plotting, his promises of advancement to allies, and his theatricality.  He distorts others around him with his showish puppeteering.  Tonila and Ixta both get drawn in and set on sneaky courses that otherwise they'd probably have avoided. (It should be added that, though drawn from Richard, Tlotoxl is considerably different in that Richard is a kind of just punishment upon a set of people who have devoutly deserved him... something often not realised by people unfamiliar with the earlier plays in the tetralogy.)

Let's be clear: this is rubbish.  It does great damage to the whole narrative thrust of the story, which is supposed to be about a people inextricably both noble and cruel.  Whatever we might think of that characterisation, or the project of characterising an annihilated culture that way, that's still what the story is supposed to be about.  Instead, we get a culture that looks like it would probably be pretty much okay if only it could be rid of the evil, sneaky, oily, crafty, religious fundamentalist limping around the margins.  Just think how much more powerful 'The Aztecs' would have been if Tlotoxl had been a character of integrity, of dignity, of honest faith.  The tragedy here is that, dramatically, Autloc and Tlotoxl should be different aspects of one man.  At the very least they should be close friends who like and respect each other, more similar than different.  That would not only resolved a deeply jarring dramatic problem, it would also have resolved some of the thematic problems with the story, taking away the idea that Aztec 'knowledge' was antithetical to Aztec belief, taking away the easy Nice-But-Then character, etc.

On the whole, however, even a 'good' High Priest of Sacrifice would still leave us with the problem of Autloc as the one "extraordinary man".  Indeed, it might even exacerbate it.  At least Tlotoxl of Gloucester, the emblem of sacrifice as a lone villain, might be seen as undermining the idea that Autloc is unusual.  Tlotoxl looks like the extraordinary man instead... extraordinarily evil.  But, in that case, why did Barbara fail?

You see, much as I'm not in favour of human sacrifice (no more than anybody else anyway), I'm kind-of on Tlotoxl's side.  Who precisely is this person claiming to be a goddess, lying, cheating, undermining the law, foisting her alien values upon his society, endangering (as Tlotoxl and most others would see it) the continued favour of the gods and, thereby, the survival of the people?  Why does she know better than him and the rest of his society?  Of course, Barbara doesn't articulate why she assumes her greater wisdom.  But the story has its implicit assumptions about this (see above) and I don't like that the one guy who stands against them is depicted as a villain.  (Of course, from another angle, Tlotoxl is a member of the Aztec ruling class and, as such, I'm against him.  Historical materialism... which is one way of describing my outlook... requires this kind of flexibility all the time.)


Resistance was Futile

In the end, it's History that dooms the Aztecs.  All historicals are inherently conservative because they all have the immutable writtenness of History lurking in the background.  Even when the story doesn't tilt on the axis of changing or preserving history, there is always a shape to events that cannot be changed.  Owing to its educational remit and supposedly rationalist stance, the show cannot (Inglourious Basterds-style) change the pre-written plot and go against what Teacher Says at School.  In historicals, The Way It Happened (or at least The Way We Think It Happened) is always a limiting factor.  It patrols the boundaries.  It limits the perimeter of the possible, must as capitalist realism limits the range of the thinkable within the mainstream media.  This may be the reason why the psuedo-historical was invented.  Dennis Spooner chose the classic example of school history (1066 and all that) and stuck a time meddler into it, threatening to erase all the books.  But 'The Time Meddler' is the story that proves the rule.  No matter how cheeky or satirical it is about the whole concept of representing History (knowingly showing us the TV strategy of cliche, employed even in the 'straight' mode) it cannot escape the overriding imperative to stick to the established arc.  There is literally no escape from this innately conservative impulse within the bounds of the historical... and the inevitability of aligning with the history books creates a dramatic effect whereby those doomed by History come over as inevitably doomed, inescapably trapped.  They were always doomed.  Coupled with the implication of progress (to which all those Nice-But-Then characters implicitly attest) and the imperialistic appropriation involved in representing non-European cultures, you get an effect whereby There Is No Alternative but for the conquered to be conquered, the exterminated to be exterminated.  You can't have the Saxons beat back the Normans.  You can't have the French Revolution succeed against reaction and counter-revolution, thus becoming able to fulfill its promises.  You can't have the Aztecs escape the swords of the Conquistadors.  As the exhausted cliche goes: history is written by the victors... so you end up with an acceptance that you can't rewrite the judgements of the powerful, of the conquerors, of the imperial culture.

Not one line.

Apparently they were also noble and artistic.

I know I complain a lot... but I don't think I've ever gotten over just how much wasted promise there is in the fact that one of the very first things the series did was have a young person reading a school textbook about the French Revolution and declaring "That isn't right!". 

Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.