I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives Podcast, which looks at 'Paradise Towers'. During it, Kevin and James' guest Jane (of achairforjane and many fascinating comments - and an amazing guest post on Lost - at Phil Sandifer's blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them. Totally valid and satisfying reading. (And I'm grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)
I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a 'Marxist reading' or a 'Marxist analysis'. I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn't in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a 'Marxist analysis' would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle. I hold my hands up: that's often what I do here, and it doesn't really cut the mustard.
To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production. A more proper sense of the term 'Marxist analysis' would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production - in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like 'the culture industries' or 'ideology' or 'hegemony' (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another). I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation. For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including - but also beyond - texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.
I'm often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis' of this or that. This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I'm not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing. Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.
I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative. Ye gods, I hope not. I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact. One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age. I worry that someone out there might read me and then think they know what 'Marxist criticism' is. I may be vain, but I know my limitations, and I hate the idea of doing my own beliefs a disservice, even in a very small way.
I've reacted to 'Paradise Towers' in a way that is actually a bit more properly Marxist than I usually manage. In this post, I at least gesture towards a proper Marxist contextualising of the story (i.e. I mention the dawning neoliberalism of 1987 as a context for the production of the story, for the way it references modernism, which I also historicise very briefly.) Even so, I'd hesitate to claim the status of a 'Marxist analysis' for that post.
And I wouldn't want to claim that I always even do as well as I do in that piece. My 'essay' about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for instance, has been called a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis'. I'm really not sure it qualifies. It gestures in that direction towards the end, but I think of it as a personal reaction which has a background in my Marxist convictions - something quite distinct.
Going back to 'Paradise Towers', and addressing some of the things said in the podcast... Jane doesn't actually say that the Rezzies represent capitalists or capitalism, but she nevertheless uses the word 'bourgeois' to describe them. Now, that's right - I agree. They clearly (through their aesthetic representation - something Jane is very hot on) signify a certain stereotypical middle-class, middle-brow social position which is deeply associated - and not inaccurately - with a strata of people in bourgeois society who combine the passive, the complacent, the ressentimental, the reactionary and the aspiring. But we should remember to separate the 'bourgeois' from the 'bourgeoisie'. The Rezzies are not capitalists. (To be clear: Jane doesn't say they are.)
Similarly, neither are the Caretakers. Here I have a more serious quibble with Jane, because she says they are the proletarians in Paradise Towers. I don't think that's right... or rather, I think it needs nuancing. Jane mentions elsewhere in the podcast that the Caretakers are costumed in military style... but they are explicitly not the military, because the military took all the rest of the males away to war. The Caretakers are the police. And the police are not proletarians. In capitalism, the police are ultimately aligned with the class interests of the capitalist class. They are, essentially, defenders of private property (and of the peace of the system which normalises and legitimises private property) against people who don't own anything. (This is one big reason why the end of 'Paradise Towers' clangs for me, at least politically. If you wait for the police to align themselves with anybody other than their masters, you will wait forever.)
Jane goes on to say interesting things about how, if viewed as proletarians who have achieved positions of authority, the Caretakers can be seen as an illustration of how power corrupts any class. And that's true too (as long as we expand a bit on what we mean by 'power'). Jane takes this observation on to see a polemic against Stalinism lurking within the story, with the Caretakers as being a kind of nomenklatura, and the Chief Caretaker as a General Secretary. I think it'd be dangerous to generalise that into any kind of ahistorically-detached model, but it isn't inaccurate as a description of what happened in the Soviet Union. A segment of the working class achieved political power and then, detached from the rest of the class (owing to historical circumstances that 'Paradise Towers' almost acknowledges via the business of the male population disappearing into a war), they become a bureaucratic tyranny. (Jane also stresses - in an almost neo-Trot way - that the Stalinists are merely posturing as being in charge while capitalism still runs the show in a hidden form below the surface. All lovely stuff, and music to the ears of someone like me who accepts the argument that Stalinism is the political expression of authoritarian, bureaucratic state capitalism.) But I don't think you need to go as far as post-Civil War Soviet Russia to see what the Caretakers represent. In capitalist society, the police are just what Jane describes: a layer of the working class that is detached from the class position (and therefore the class interests) of the rest of the workers. Even in openly capitalist society, the Caretakers are there.
Kroagnon, by the way, doesn't really convince me as a manifestation of capitalism... though, as a representation of the authoritarian inner-core of some variants of modernism, he obviously reflects capitalism because modernism is part of the cultural logic of early-C20th Euro-American capitalist culture.
For me, 'Paradise Towers' is not really a picture of a capitalist dystopia so much as a picture of a post-industrial one. The theory of the post-industrial is about to be massively in vogue in Britain as 'Paradise Towers' appears. It's an idea that is aloft on the postmodernist wind. It ties in with certain non-Marxist or pseudo-Marxist Left impulses to declare that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of classical Marxism. And it also ties in with impulses within the burgeoning neoliberal Right to claim that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of even old-style social democracy. The response of the anti-Thatcher Left is to point to post-industrialism as a kind of social dysfunction. An understandable (if ultimately unsatisfactory) position which, I think, we see mirrored in 'Paradise Towers'. None of this makes 'Paradise Towers' any less angry and wonderful (I adore it, by the way), but it marks the circumstances of its production as being within the cultural context of early-neoliberal Left thinking. It also allows us to loop back a tad and join this ramble up in a notional loop of logic... because it illustrates the distance between finding a Marx-friendly allegory within a narrative, and actually analysing said narrative using a material-dialectic method (not that I'm claiming to have done more than gesture vaguely towards that here.)
Oh, one more thing. During the podcast, Jane asks James if he thinks Mel has changed at all during the course of the story. James says she's learned a Moral of the Week. I agree, and I've been trying to think how to formulate the Moral of the Week that she learns. I've decided that it would be best expressed as: 'a monomaniacal obsession with swimming pools can be fatal under certain extremely specific circumstances'.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label paradise towers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paradise towers. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 February 2015
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
Build High
Some tumblr jottings, curated with pictures.
Modernism. The International Style. Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, etc.
A clean, white world of clean white buildings and glass boxes. Machines for living in. Born of the utopian hopes of early Modernism. Destined to become the opulent apartment blocks and corporate skyscrapers of Chicago capitalism.
Based on a dream of optimised people in an optimised world. You had to be perfect to live in a glass box. And the glass boxes were going to make people better, cleaner, fitter, healthier, more productive, and now this sentence is (tellingly) becoming the lyrics from that Radiohead song. Because that’s where that kind of top-down utopianism ended up; the dream of Modernism became the malaise of late-C20th/C21st modernity.
Whatever the admirable radicalism - and there is much admirable radicalism in Modernism - it culminated in a convergence with the Nazi fantasies of order and hygiene (even as the Modernists were hated and driven out by the Nazis) and, in the end, with the corporate capitalist fantasies of perfect and rational utility. The skyscraper as a machine for doing business in.
In both iterations of the same anti-human and elitist reactionary fantasy, the individual becomes a cog, to be permitted as long as they play their role within the machine, as long as they do not disgrace the gleaming interior of the glass box.
It found its way into another iteration: C20th century elitist reformism, the provision of rational living units for the drones, the erection of housing estates and tower blocks. Look at those 60s constructions - built along the same elitist/top-down/utopian lines as all Modernist architecture - and today they seem like ugly sinkholes (the vile word used to describe them), but at the time they were supposed to be clean, ordered, rational, humane and utopian.
So, in 'Paradise Towers', the tower block becomes the once-hopeful/now-decaying symbol of entropic utopianism. Social democracy, with its aesthetic roots in Modernism, falling apart in the neglect and ruin of the dawning neoliberal age. Inside, of course, are trapped the archetypes (in parodic form) of Thatcher’s Britain. Feral kids, Daily Mail readers, the Police.
And the roving, murdering cleaners are clearing up the “human garbage” to make way for the return of Kroagnon’s anti-human and authoritarian vision of cleanliness and order. The dark side of the Modernist dream returns from the gothic basement of repression to take revenge on the last remnants of Modernism’s own light side. The authoritarian variant tries to reconquer the self-defeated social-democratic variant.
And Kroagnon’s shocktroops the cleaners are clean, white constructions in straight lines. They are miniature, mobile buildings in the International Style of high, early Modernism.
They are like Corbusier houses crossbred with Mies skyscrapers, come alive and on the attack.
Corbusier was friendly with a fascist sympathiser, Pierre Winter. They both joined the right-wing Faisceau Party.
Fascism lurks within the utopianism of Modernism, which lurks within the utopianism of social democracy. As Benjamin might say, fascism lurks within the entire C20th.
*
Modernism. The International Style. Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, etc.
A clean, white world of clean white buildings and glass boxes. Machines for living in. Born of the utopian hopes of early Modernism. Destined to become the opulent apartment blocks and corporate skyscrapers of Chicago capitalism.
Based on a dream of optimised people in an optimised world. You had to be perfect to live in a glass box. And the glass boxes were going to make people better, cleaner, fitter, healthier, more productive, and now this sentence is (tellingly) becoming the lyrics from that Radiohead song. Because that’s where that kind of top-down utopianism ended up; the dream of Modernism became the malaise of late-C20th/C21st modernity.
 |
| Prora, the elephantine Strength Through Joy holiday camp. Nazi Butlins. |
Whatever the admirable radicalism - and there is much admirable radicalism in Modernism - it culminated in a convergence with the Nazi fantasies of order and hygiene (even as the Modernists were hated and driven out by the Nazis) and, in the end, with the corporate capitalist fantasies of perfect and rational utility. The skyscraper as a machine for doing business in.
In both iterations of the same anti-human and elitist reactionary fantasy, the individual becomes a cog, to be permitted as long as they play their role within the machine, as long as they do not disgrace the gleaming interior of the glass box.
It found its way into another iteration: C20th century elitist reformism, the provision of rational living units for the drones, the erection of housing estates and tower blocks. Look at those 60s constructions - built along the same elitist/top-down/utopian lines as all Modernist architecture - and today they seem like ugly sinkholes (the vile word used to describe them), but at the time they were supposed to be clean, ordered, rational, humane and utopian.
So, in 'Paradise Towers', the tower block becomes the once-hopeful/now-decaying symbol of entropic utopianism. Social democracy, with its aesthetic roots in Modernism, falling apart in the neglect and ruin of the dawning neoliberal age. Inside, of course, are trapped the archetypes (in parodic form) of Thatcher’s Britain. Feral kids, Daily Mail readers, the Police.
And the roving, murdering cleaners are clearing up the “human garbage” to make way for the return of Kroagnon’s anti-human and authoritarian vision of cleanliness and order. The dark side of the Modernist dream returns from the gothic basement of repression to take revenge on the last remnants of Modernism’s own light side. The authoritarian variant tries to reconquer the self-defeated social-democratic variant.
And Kroagnon’s shocktroops the cleaners are clean, white constructions in straight lines. They are miniature, mobile buildings in the International Style of high, early Modernism.
They are like Corbusier houses crossbred with Mies skyscrapers, come alive and on the attack.
Corbusier was friendly with a fascist sympathiser, Pierre Winter. They both joined the right-wing Faisceau Party.
Fascism lurks within the utopianism of Modernism, which lurks within the utopianism of social democracy. As Benjamin might say, fascism lurks within the entire C20th.
*
In 'Paradise Towers', as in the 80s DWM comic strip ‘Profits of Doom’, the old capitalism/tentacles connection still lurks, largely abandoned and almost forgotten.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
The Real McCoy and the Forgotten (Sacrificial) Lambs
I continue to round up my Timelash II stuff with these bits 'n' bobs about the McCoy years. There will eventually be separate posts on some of the 'big hitters' left out below.
Paradise Towers
Very Whoish ideas. Lots of clever use of language, from the street names to the slang which incorporates degenerated formal rules, to the Caretaker lingo full of subsections and codes, etc.
It suffers from 'Mysterious Planet' disease in that the production looks good but nothing looks right.
Mel's apparently monomaniacal fixation upon the swimming pool is decidedly odd. But, if you approach this as children's television (which is clearly what it thinks it is) then you can enjoy it as a surprisingly sophisticated story about social entropy.
Brings to mind Le Corbusier and his notion of houses as "machines for living in"... which always had a tinge of the authoritarian about it, amidst all the utopianism of early 20th century modernism (which also always had a hidden inner core of mysticism beneath all the pseudo-rational stright lines, etc). The insistence upon a buried notion of virtue (you had to be a certain kind of healthy, high-minded, thin, modern-minded, puritanical person to live in a gleaming white box with glass walls) leads to a kind of disillusion, a bit like the contempt felt by Kroagnon. The modernists (Mies, for example) got chased out by their shadowy reflections in the utopian, mystical, 'modern', puritanical Nazi party and ended up creating gigantic monuments to corporate capitalism in Chicago. The cleaners seem to represent the intersection of these ideas, rounding up the "human garbage", the unwanted elements, the uncontrolled human detritus that ruins the idealistic/totalitarian perfection embodied in the architecture.
I don't like the ending, with all the antagonistic social groups suddenly realising they don't hate each other after all and making friends. Even the Daily Maily Rezzies turn out to be mostly nice, with only two of them being murdering cannibals.
Delta and the Bannermen
Dispiriting. So ill judged, so clashing that you can't even laugh at it.
Loud, multi-coloured, sequin-covered, self-consciously zany, folksy and naff... yet there is something melancholic, even quietly apocalyptic about watching this.
You are watching Doctor Who die. The show that gave us 'Genesis of the Daleks' is dying. In a puddle of Diet Coke. It's like watching George Orwell being kicked to death by Mr Blobby and the Krankies.
This taste malfunction carries over into the heart of the story itself. It's a story about genocidal racism... set in a holiday camp and starring light entertainers. It's like the Eichmann trial being held in Toys R Us. It's like a bright green water pistol filled with orphans' tears. It's like being murdered by being force-fed party balloons.
My god, it hurts.
The Happiness Patrol
I just love this story. Last time I put it on, I spent the whole 75 minutes giggling, grinning, cheering and clapping like a loon.
This is a liberal attack on Thatcherism as a psycho-cultural style... but it also notices that Thatcherism's rhetoric about personal liberty was pure hypocrisy.
The economics are absent, as they usually are in Who. Terra Alpha is a Stalinist 'paradise', i.e. everyone pretending to be deliriously happy... or pretending that they're pretending... and pretending that everyone else is pretending... while surrounded by corruption, decay and authoritarian brutality. But it's also a capitalist world, with an evil version of Bertie Basset (himself a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages your kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit) at its core.
The Kandyman is the state torturer of a dictator... but he's also a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist... and a tool... and alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power... and bureaucrat (picks up phone - "Kandyman?")... and parent ("what time do you call this?")... etc.
Like 'The Sun Makers', 'Happiness Patrol' notices the fundamental synergy and compatibility and similarity of Stalinism with 'market Stalinism', of authoritarianism with psuedo-libertarian neoliberalism. Helen A likes Silas P's "enterprise and initiative" as a murderer of dissidents. Thatcher admires the 'law and order' inherent in the criminal attacks (by government or police) upon miners, while always speciously excoriating the "moaning minnies" and preaching personal freedom, i.e. the personal freedom to stamp on the poor and powerless as long as you own the bought virtue that comes with wealth.
And it's a union of displaced/oppressed natives, dissidents, foreigners and striking/demonstrating workers that brings down the government. Helen loses control of the state, factory by factory. It ain't quite Leninism for kids... but it's getting there.
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
As long as you remember to watch it as children's television, 'Greatest Show' is superlative on many levels. Just this simple decision helps you get past the rapping ringmaster without eating your own tongue.
Viewed this way, the clearly non-realist portrayals of Whizzkid, Nord and Cook etc. seem like what they are: deliberate and witty riffs on established stock characters. Cook's gradual self-revelation (from windy, pompous bore to ruthless self-preserving bastard) looks, from this angle, like a swipe at Thatcherism (with colonialism also implicated, via Cook's pith helmet).
Whizzkid is, of course, the archetypal (or should I say stereotypical) dweeby geeko nerdmeister sci-fan fan. But he's also far too kind a picture of fans. He's enthusiastic, optimistic, idealistic, etc. He reflects the awareness of past glories and limited appeal. He's a queasy little joke by the show at its own expense. He's the forerunner of LI'n'DA... though less human and more of a cypher.
The story has cheeky things to say about television itself, and the failure of idealism... "You were a geat clown once... funny, inventive..."... or the failure of the 60s counter-culture, or even the failure of culture itself.
The Circus could be a metaphor for all human cultural endeavours in a world run by people like Cook and presided over by unforgiving, demanding, self-involved, ossified power. Begun in idealism, hijacked by cynicism, ending in disrepute and cruelty, ravaging the lush world around it. Astonishingly thoughtful and bleak, for a kids's show. And remember that bread and circuses (by which they actually meant things more like races) were what the Roman elitists said were the prime concern of the Roman plebs.
Beautifully directed, especially in Episode 1 during the chase across the sand dunes. Bellboy and Flowerchild, pursued by the white-faced clown in the gliding hearse, with music that's eerily good... at times, reminiscent of Peter Gabriel round about that time.
The junk mail bot is oddly prescient of spam email.
Great cast. Peggy Mount and T. P. McKenna. Ian Reddington and Chris Jury.
Great production design. The Gods of Ragnarok are an unforgettable image. Stone idols, sitting and sitting (as gods tend to do in Doctor Who), reminiscent of the heads on Easter Island.
The gods are clearly the audience, which reveals the inherent theology of all TV shows. Who seems more aware of this than most shows, with almost all its gods being seated voyeurs.
The decision to suddenly make the Doctor one jump ahead in the last episode is misguided. I've no fundamental objection to the cunning, scheming Doctor that sometimes surfaced during this era, but its unecessary in 'Greatest Show' and even disrupts the plot (not that they're paying much attention to making it make any kind of logical sense by that point anyway).
But, when he says he's been fighting the Gods of Ragnarok for millenia, he means it generally. He's always been against immovable, unaccountable, abusive, self-gratifying 'gods'. Against idols. Against the kings and rulers that sit and watch and judge and consume.
All in all, very good indeed - a refeshing leap back into creepiness, surrealism and semiotics for Doctor Who.
One great regret however... imagine this as a TARDIS team: the Doctor, Ace, Mags and Deadbeat. I'm not a crowded-TARDIS advocate, but that's a team I'd have killed for.
Battlefield
Ben A clearly had John Boorman's Excalibur in his head. Shot, acted and scored like that, 'Battlefield' could've gotten away with it and seemed pretty darn good. Sadly, it got shot, acted and scored like a corporate training video. I'm not a Keff-basher particularly, but Wagner he ain't.
Even so, there are some magical moments here and there. Ace being mistaken for the Lady of the Lake, for example. And, as so often in this era, there are superb ideas under a surface mess. The Merlin thing is a wonderful conceit.
Sadly, confusing as it is, this story undermines itself by trying to be too literal and too self-explanatory. It loses any air of mystery and ambiguity.
The worst thing, however, is the painful, self-conscious, overcooked, hectoring right-on-ness of it all. We get an anti-nuke sermon delivered in the crassest, most patronising terms imaginable... with Sylv's purple-faced scenery-chewing at the end being particularly painful... and the worst crime imaginable to Ace is to utter a (clunky and naff) racial slur to her new mate.
It's all very banal and hypocritical (as is the Doctor's queasy pacifism) - especially since two of Our Heroes in this story are military people, and the cutesy happy ending depends upon people (other than the morally-superior, disapproving Doc, natch) fighting and killing and dying.
Survival
It's really quite astonishing how 'Survival' feels like the last part of a trilogy dealing with 'social Darwinism' but also with free market values and female experience in a male dominated world (which are related issues). And I think the much-maligned "if we fight like animals!" scene is much better than the anti-nuke foaming in 'Battlefield' precisely because it has an awareness of its own potential for ridiculousness. It even switches to a comic mode the second time McCoy shouts his credo. The vertiginousness of this is quite dizzying.
This is one of the few stories to dwell on the feminine principle, exploring female solidarity, female vs male forms of agression, etc. (People always forget about 'Brain of Morbius' in this context.) Moreover, it has a female 'companion' who is as far as female companions ever get from being there for males to gaze at (pardon my half-remembered feminist film criticism) because her own gaze comes under her control and becomes a weapon. The fierce, amoral, female monster character Kara is skewered by the Master (who's even dressed like some patrician Victorian dandy/Dracula) and, instead of this being a restoration of male order, it is an obscene tragedy. We're a long way even from seeing 'femininity' restored in Helen A by the death of her pet.
It's notable how deliberately jumbled the masculine and feminine becomes. You have Ace at the end, almost surrounded by young males, obviously about to be attacked by representatives of the Master/Midge's new order - which strongly suggests a ruthlessly literal version of the kill-or-be-killed 80s political/economic ideology - and yet the power that has infused them comes from a world that embodies aggression in a natural form via intensely female symbols.
The Master has never been more hateful than he is here, where he starts embodying patriarchy and ideological Thatcherism.
They do overegg the spelling out of the theme a bit. I snark at 'The Daemons' for doing that, and even tick at Bidmead for it, so if I don't acknowledge the same problem in 'Survival' then I'm a rotten old hypocrite.
Paradise Towers
Very Whoish ideas. Lots of clever use of language, from the street names to the slang which incorporates degenerated formal rules, to the Caretaker lingo full of subsections and codes, etc.
It suffers from 'Mysterious Planet' disease in that the production looks good but nothing looks right.
Mel's apparently monomaniacal fixation upon the swimming pool is decidedly odd. But, if you approach this as children's television (which is clearly what it thinks it is) then you can enjoy it as a surprisingly sophisticated story about social entropy.
Brings to mind Le Corbusier and his notion of houses as "machines for living in"... which always had a tinge of the authoritarian about it, amidst all the utopianism of early 20th century modernism (which also always had a hidden inner core of mysticism beneath all the pseudo-rational stright lines, etc). The insistence upon a buried notion of virtue (you had to be a certain kind of healthy, high-minded, thin, modern-minded, puritanical person to live in a gleaming white box with glass walls) leads to a kind of disillusion, a bit like the contempt felt by Kroagnon. The modernists (Mies, for example) got chased out by their shadowy reflections in the utopian, mystical, 'modern', puritanical Nazi party and ended up creating gigantic monuments to corporate capitalism in Chicago. The cleaners seem to represent the intersection of these ideas, rounding up the "human garbage", the unwanted elements, the uncontrolled human detritus that ruins the idealistic/totalitarian perfection embodied in the architecture.
I don't like the ending, with all the antagonistic social groups suddenly realising they don't hate each other after all and making friends. Even the Daily Maily Rezzies turn out to be mostly nice, with only two of them being murdering cannibals.
Delta and the Bannermen
Dispiriting. So ill judged, so clashing that you can't even laugh at it.
Loud, multi-coloured, sequin-covered, self-consciously zany, folksy and naff... yet there is something melancholic, even quietly apocalyptic about watching this.
You are watching Doctor Who die. The show that gave us 'Genesis of the Daleks' is dying. In a puddle of Diet Coke. It's like watching George Orwell being kicked to death by Mr Blobby and the Krankies.
This taste malfunction carries over into the heart of the story itself. It's a story about genocidal racism... set in a holiday camp and starring light entertainers. It's like the Eichmann trial being held in Toys R Us. It's like a bright green water pistol filled with orphans' tears. It's like being murdered by being force-fed party balloons.
My god, it hurts.
The Happiness Patrol
I just love this story. Last time I put it on, I spent the whole 75 minutes giggling, grinning, cheering and clapping like a loon.
This is a liberal attack on Thatcherism as a psycho-cultural style... but it also notices that Thatcherism's rhetoric about personal liberty was pure hypocrisy.
The economics are absent, as they usually are in Who. Terra Alpha is a Stalinist 'paradise', i.e. everyone pretending to be deliriously happy... or pretending that they're pretending... and pretending that everyone else is pretending... while surrounded by corruption, decay and authoritarian brutality. But it's also a capitalist world, with an evil version of Bertie Basset (himself a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages your kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit) at its core.
The Kandyman is the state torturer of a dictator... but he's also a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist... and a tool... and alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power... and bureaucrat (picks up phone - "Kandyman?")... and parent ("what time do you call this?")... etc.
Like 'The Sun Makers', 'Happiness Patrol' notices the fundamental synergy and compatibility and similarity of Stalinism with 'market Stalinism', of authoritarianism with psuedo-libertarian neoliberalism. Helen A likes Silas P's "enterprise and initiative" as a murderer of dissidents. Thatcher admires the 'law and order' inherent in the criminal attacks (by government or police) upon miners, while always speciously excoriating the "moaning minnies" and preaching personal freedom, i.e. the personal freedom to stamp on the poor and powerless as long as you own the bought virtue that comes with wealth.
And it's a union of displaced/oppressed natives, dissidents, foreigners and striking/demonstrating workers that brings down the government. Helen loses control of the state, factory by factory. It ain't quite Leninism for kids... but it's getting there.
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
As long as you remember to watch it as children's television, 'Greatest Show' is superlative on many levels. Just this simple decision helps you get past the rapping ringmaster without eating your own tongue.
Viewed this way, the clearly non-realist portrayals of Whizzkid, Nord and Cook etc. seem like what they are: deliberate and witty riffs on established stock characters. Cook's gradual self-revelation (from windy, pompous bore to ruthless self-preserving bastard) looks, from this angle, like a swipe at Thatcherism (with colonialism also implicated, via Cook's pith helmet).
Whizzkid is, of course, the archetypal (or should I say stereotypical) dweeby geeko nerdmeister sci-fan fan. But he's also far too kind a picture of fans. He's enthusiastic, optimistic, idealistic, etc. He reflects the awareness of past glories and limited appeal. He's a queasy little joke by the show at its own expense. He's the forerunner of LI'n'DA... though less human and more of a cypher.
The story has cheeky things to say about television itself, and the failure of idealism... "You were a geat clown once... funny, inventive..."... or the failure of the 60s counter-culture, or even the failure of culture itself.
The Circus could be a metaphor for all human cultural endeavours in a world run by people like Cook and presided over by unforgiving, demanding, self-involved, ossified power. Begun in idealism, hijacked by cynicism, ending in disrepute and cruelty, ravaging the lush world around it. Astonishingly thoughtful and bleak, for a kids's show. And remember that bread and circuses (by which they actually meant things more like races) were what the Roman elitists said were the prime concern of the Roman plebs.
Beautifully directed, especially in Episode 1 during the chase across the sand dunes. Bellboy and Flowerchild, pursued by the white-faced clown in the gliding hearse, with music that's eerily good... at times, reminiscent of Peter Gabriel round about that time.
The junk mail bot is oddly prescient of spam email.
Great cast. Peggy Mount and T. P. McKenna. Ian Reddington and Chris Jury.
Great production design. The Gods of Ragnarok are an unforgettable image. Stone idols, sitting and sitting (as gods tend to do in Doctor Who), reminiscent of the heads on Easter Island.
The gods are clearly the audience, which reveals the inherent theology of all TV shows. Who seems more aware of this than most shows, with almost all its gods being seated voyeurs.
The decision to suddenly make the Doctor one jump ahead in the last episode is misguided. I've no fundamental objection to the cunning, scheming Doctor that sometimes surfaced during this era, but its unecessary in 'Greatest Show' and even disrupts the plot (not that they're paying much attention to making it make any kind of logical sense by that point anyway).
But, when he says he's been fighting the Gods of Ragnarok for millenia, he means it generally. He's always been against immovable, unaccountable, abusive, self-gratifying 'gods'. Against idols. Against the kings and rulers that sit and watch and judge and consume.
All in all, very good indeed - a refeshing leap back into creepiness, surrealism and semiotics for Doctor Who.
One great regret however... imagine this as a TARDIS team: the Doctor, Ace, Mags and Deadbeat. I'm not a crowded-TARDIS advocate, but that's a team I'd have killed for.
Battlefield
Ben A clearly had John Boorman's Excalibur in his head. Shot, acted and scored like that, 'Battlefield' could've gotten away with it and seemed pretty darn good. Sadly, it got shot, acted and scored like a corporate training video. I'm not a Keff-basher particularly, but Wagner he ain't.
Even so, there are some magical moments here and there. Ace being mistaken for the Lady of the Lake, for example. And, as so often in this era, there are superb ideas under a surface mess. The Merlin thing is a wonderful conceit.
Sadly, confusing as it is, this story undermines itself by trying to be too literal and too self-explanatory. It loses any air of mystery and ambiguity.
The worst thing, however, is the painful, self-conscious, overcooked, hectoring right-on-ness of it all. We get an anti-nuke sermon delivered in the crassest, most patronising terms imaginable... with Sylv's purple-faced scenery-chewing at the end being particularly painful... and the worst crime imaginable to Ace is to utter a (clunky and naff) racial slur to her new mate.
It's all very banal and hypocritical (as is the Doctor's queasy pacifism) - especially since two of Our Heroes in this story are military people, and the cutesy happy ending depends upon people (other than the morally-superior, disapproving Doc, natch) fighting and killing and dying.
Survival
It's really quite astonishing how 'Survival' feels like the last part of a trilogy dealing with 'social Darwinism' but also with free market values and female experience in a male dominated world (which are related issues). And I think the much-maligned "if we fight like animals!" scene is much better than the anti-nuke foaming in 'Battlefield' precisely because it has an awareness of its own potential for ridiculousness. It even switches to a comic mode the second time McCoy shouts his credo. The vertiginousness of this is quite dizzying.
This is one of the few stories to dwell on the feminine principle, exploring female solidarity, female vs male forms of agression, etc. (People always forget about 'Brain of Morbius' in this context.) Moreover, it has a female 'companion' who is as far as female companions ever get from being there for males to gaze at (pardon my half-remembered feminist film criticism) because her own gaze comes under her control and becomes a weapon. The fierce, amoral, female monster character Kara is skewered by the Master (who's even dressed like some patrician Victorian dandy/Dracula) and, instead of this being a restoration of male order, it is an obscene tragedy. We're a long way even from seeing 'femininity' restored in Helen A by the death of her pet.
It's notable how deliberately jumbled the masculine and feminine becomes. You have Ace at the end, almost surrounded by young males, obviously about to be attacked by representatives of the Master/Midge's new order - which strongly suggests a ruthlessly literal version of the kill-or-be-killed 80s political/economic ideology - and yet the power that has infused them comes from a world that embodies aggression in a natural form via intensely female symbols.
The Master has never been more hateful than he is here, where he starts embodying patriarchy and ideological Thatcherism.
They do overegg the spelling out of the theme a bit. I snark at 'The Daemons' for doing that, and even tick at Bidmead for it, so if I don't acknowledge the same problem in 'Survival' then I'm a rotten old hypocrite.
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