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Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale's dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It's one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In 'The Time Meddler', Edith's implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In 'Vengeance on Varos', Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It's utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That's not worse... except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that - it's Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she's a ruthless killer in battle... but slapping a 'hysteric' like she's James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors' code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She's even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela - or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela - has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as "the owner's fancy woman".  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways... but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it's quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on "men's clothes... working clothes", etc.  Leela's actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn't just a dishrag because she's a woman; she's like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class... a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap... which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or 'Human Nature').  The slap comes from Leela, who transgresses Edwardian sensibilities in so many ways.

Using what is sometimes charmingly called a 'real world point of view', this is probably to do with the fact that some 'Edwardian attitudes' had been internalised by the author of the story.  (That this is going on in 1977 tells us a lot.)  Employing a strategy I'm usually wary of - the redemptive reading - Leela's slap can be seen as evidence that even she starts to absorb psychological/ideological aspects of a heavily gendered oppressive system simply by being surrounded by it, by being locked in with it in a cramped space.

That's hegemony for you: you don't have to agree with the ideology in order for it to work on you.

Unhappy Soldiers (The 1917 Zone - Part 2)

On 'The War Games'. From the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon.


The last Doctor Who story of the 1960s is the high point of the show’s attempts to engage with the radicalism of that era. It was made just as the worldwide protests against the Vietnam war reached a crescendo. It’s been called an ‘anti-war’ story, but this is wrong. It’s an anti-imperialist story and, up until the last episodes, it supports revolution.

Pacifism is not advocated. Carstairs uses his pistol to protect the Ambulance and the Doctor never bats an eyelid. The Resistance kill guards all over the place. The Doctor’s aim for much of the story is to raise an army to fight the aliens. 'The War Games' supports revolutionary violence.

The violence that 'The War Games' condemns is that of imperialism. The aim of the aliens is conquest. That’s all that lies beneath everything that goes on in their War Zones. Meanwhile, ‘Butcher’ Smythe and von Weich amuse themselves playing Risk with human lives. It goes beyond noticing that top brass can be callous. The British and German commanding officers have more in common with each other than with their men. They are fundamentally different – alien – to the grunts whose lives they control and squander. They report to the same system of aggressive expansion, and both keep their communication devices hidden behind portraits of their monarchs. Under patriotism, imperialism lurks.

This is really about class. The generals are one class, the soldiers are another. Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh but, otherwise, the soldiers in 'The War Games' are the workers (and peasants) of the world. They’re pawns on the board of the ‘great game’. The map of the War Zones even looks like a game board. Those soldiers who throw off their mental processing (ie the ideology of their rulers) start cooperating across lines of nationality and race. Russell looks like he comes from a British imperial war of the 19th century, but he treats Harper, a black man, as a trusted ally. They even start to overcome sexism. Zoe lectures Arturo Villa about tactics and forces him to listen. Kidding aside, Jamie supports her. When the soldiers fight together instead of against each other – like Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned – they can end the war. That’s why the First World War Zone is constantly referred to as “the 1917 Zone”, because it was in 1917 that a revolution in Russia started a chain of events which lead to a revolt against the Kaiser and the end of the slaughter.

Terrance Dicks’ story about people on a game board (which he tells repeatedly) probably got inflected with revolutionary politics via ex-communist Malcolm Hulke. 1968 re-radicalised him, it seems. However, in the end, although the Doctor’s vanguard conquers the imperialist stronghold and stops the war, they don’t take over. Instead, the Doctor calls in the ‘good’ establishment to clear up after the ‘bad’ establishment. The Resistance will end up back in their ‘real’ wars, their minds wiped of the internationalism and solidarity they learned through struggle. Dumped back in Scotland in 1745, his memory altered, Jamie goes back to attacking Redcoats rather than teaming up with them.  In fairness, he is ousting an invader, but this turnabout still highlights faultlines in the radical subtext. The Resistance is never a mass movement. There’s elitism in the idea that only a superior few can see through the brainwashing. The Doctor’s aim turns out to be reformist rather than revolutionary. He collaborates with the forces of law and order to curb the worst excesses and then put things back the way they were. So Russell, for instance, will go back to his imperialist war without any memory of his alliance with a black comrade.

All the same, this story remains remarkably radical in its portrayal of war as a great conspiracy of conquest, perpetrated by a cynical ruling elite to whom all generals on all sides belong, reliant on the brainwashing of the ordinary soldiers who - if they only realise it - can stop the whole thing by cooperating in revolution. Perhaps this sort of thing was only possible in 1969. Perhaps.

Skulltopus 13: Return to Fang Rock

My monomaniacal focus on the quasi-Weird(ish/esque) in Doctor Who resumes (after a bit of a hiatus... during which I just couldn't be arsed) and reaches the Graham Williams years, the heyday of the tentacular in the Baker era.  See here for links to all previous Skulltopus posts and here for the last one (which includes a summary of the whole thing so far).

I started the whole Skulltopus thing with 'Horror of Fang Rock', but that was ages ago (and before I really knew where I was going with this topic) so I feel the need to go back to it, if comparatively briefly.

Okay, so 'Fang Rock'.  Hmm.  Well, it's a Terrance Dicks script, isn't it?  Uncle Tel is, as we all know, well dodgy on politics.  He writes about how the working classes are happy being poor, and aristocrats are dandy, and the empire was kind of okay.  His baseline assumption is one of contented 'capitalist realism', of unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.  Plus he's rubbish on the question of women and sexism.  He's so bad on issues of sexual exploitation that he actually seems to be rather too keen on bringing up the subject of rape.

Right?

Weeeeell... however true the above charges may or may not be with regard to his spin-off novels, the funny thing is that, in practice, his actual TV scripts don't show much evidence of these traits.  For instance, 'Fang Rock' is obsessed with class, hierarchy, status, property and money... and not in an obviously reactionary, or smugly-liberal way.  In fact, it's kind of edgy (as these things go).  It's one of those relatively few Who stories outside the early Pertwee years which portrays people performing waged labour, let alone showing the working people of twentieth century Britain.  And, generally speaking, the story is greatly and openly more sympathetic to the working stiffs, and what they have to put up with, than it is to the gentry.  The world the Rutan comes to and fits into is a world of deep economic and social divisions between classes based on work, finance, empire and gender.  The workers have to work for a living, and do.  They are explicitly below the gentlefolk in a very visible social hierarchy that is painted in unmistakably negative terms, to the point where their lives are shown to be implicitly considered of less value.  The business of who does and who doesn't get a lifeboat when Palmerdale's yacht goes down foreshadows the sinking of the Titanic, probably the most famous example of 'gilded age' social injustice in popular consciousness.  We are evidently invited and expected to be angry about this, to side with Harker.  Indeed, in his rush to indicate his line on this, Dicks makes Lord Palmerdale just a tad too obviously despicable.  Palmerdale's wealth is evidently based on financial speculation.  Skinsale's position comes from his status as an M.P., as an old imperial soldier and (presumably) his respectable birth (i.e. he's a son of an old propertied family).  Adelaide is subordinate to these two because of her position as an employee and a woman (she entirely accepts her lower status and behaves according to cultural norms associated with her gender, presumably having been brought up a 'lady') but she's still above Vince, Reuben and Harker.  Vince is evidently taken with her but, to her, he's an instrumentum vocale (a tool that talks), not a young man.  Meanwhile, it's heavily hinted that she's also Palmerdale's mistress, which seems almost like one of her tasks as his secretary!  Thus sex is hinted to have been commodified, with the woman as commodity... something which is picked up on by various little details in the story, i.e. the commercially printed porn the Doctor finds under Reuben's bed. 

It'd be easy to mistake the portrayal of Adelaide (who is annoyingly snooty and then annoyingly wimpy) as misogynistic... but for the fact that Dicks writes Leela brilliantly, giving her guts, brains, determination, initiative and plenty of her own ideas about things.  When Adelaide gets hysterical and 'needs' a slap, Dicks gives the job to Leela.  The strong woman (Leela is a genuinely strong woman here - compare and contrast with Moffat's ersatz models) is impatient with the woman who has allowed herself to be infantilised by male rule.  (The slap is still an uncomfortable moment... it's like Leela has internalised male attitudes to 'the weaker sex' and has become an 'honorary man'.  Ewww.)

The story also strongly hints at an awareness of imperialist competition as a major force in the Europe of the new 20th century, linking this to the rise of new technologies.  The Rutan is an imperialist, speaks in a tone of snobbish and racist and militarist arrogance, has a peculiarly technological interior nature (it speaks of its shape-shifting as a "new technique"), has an affinity with electricity, adapts the electrical generator and leaves communications tech around the place.   Reuben's grumblings about the newfangled meshes with his anxieties about foreign spies.  He even names various competing imperialist nations who will be involved in the forthcoming 'Great War'.  Meanwhile, Palmerdale (the arriviste "money grubber") and Skinsale (the politician and old imperialist) are squabbling over financial dealings and clashing conceptions of social priorities (profit versus 'honour')... and their conflict comes to pivot on control of a wireless telegraph.

Class, snobbery, militarism, imperialism, new technology, new communications.  The Rutan is like the twentieth century itself, crashing in upon the stranded Edwardians like a lethal, inundating, incomprehensible "cold wave".  So recently they were Victorians, Britannia ruled the waves unrivalled, the balance of power in Europe (between "the French, the Russkies," etc.) was relatively stable and everyone (workers and women, for instance) knew their place, etc.  But here comes trouble.  The Rutan embodies this trouble, and the repressed fears of the Edwardian characters about this trouble.  We, the audience, relate to this via a sort of thematic dramatic irony.  We know what the Edwardian characters don't.  We know what awaits them just round the corner of history.

'Fang Rock' even gets closer than most stories to noticing that inequality, xenophobic nationalism, imperialism and modern war are things generated by capitalism.  The lighthouse is a workplace, staffed by people who've been "fisherfolk for generations" but who are now evidently proletarians.  The toffs embody empire, parliament, wealth, finance, speculation, sexual oppression and blatant disregard for even the lives of the workers.  The lighthouse showcases the twentieth century arriving, in the form of electricity, modern communication and the suspicious guarding of European coastlines... and because the setting is, above all else, a modern workplace, the story gets so close to noticing capitalism as a connective skein.  There have, of course, been lighthouses since ancient times... but the modern lighthouse - a technological workplace staffed by waged labourers - is explicitly counterposed with the ancient lighthouse powered by slaves.

Dicks was, of course, the script editor during much of the Pertwee era, when the evasive semiotic link within Doctor Who between capitalism and the tentacular was first developed.  He seems to carry the connection with him into the Williams years.  And so the monster - the locus where all this might have gelled (sorry) into coherent critique - becomes something gelatinous, protean and unpindownable, both in its physical form and in its metaphorical valences.  Part of the strategy whereby this is achieved is the utilisation of the Weird maritime, the tentacular. The radical incoherence of the tentacular is again resorted to as an escape route, as in 'Spearhead' and 'Claws of Axos'.  Once again the tentacles are linked to a fudging, an obscuring, a clouding at the central point at the story where these modern nightmares meet, where they threaten to join up.  The crux of the story, of its meaning - namely, the Rutan - becomes irresolveably fuzzy.  I'm not sure if the tentacular nature of the Rutan is what achieves this fudging, or whether the fudging leads to the choice of the tentacular form.  (Being a Marxist, I can simply wheel out my big cheat button and call it 'dialectical'.)  Either way, while we can still discern the contours of some kind of critique of imperialism in the Rutan, we cannot make a coherent and convincing case for it as representing either a critique of British imperialism generated by a system of class exploitation (which the rest of the story generally leans towards) or a defence of British inter-class national unity against foreign imperialist threats.  (I've gone into all this in greater detail here.)  And, of course, while the Rutan suggests many things - snobbery, militarism, new technology, modern communications - it pointedly fails/refuses to suggest capitalism in any way.  It's uninterested in commodities or profit.  Skinsale gets himself killed ducking back for Palmerdale's diamonds; the Rutan shows no interest in them at all.  At the place where the diagnosis might have been, we find instead an amorphous mass of phenomena.  This is the early-Pertweean mode of the tentacular repeating itself in the join between Hinchcliffe and Williams, thanks to Dicks (that relic of Pertwee, returning for the first time since 'The Brain of Morbius' got savagely rewritten).

Maybe Dicks' reinsertion of the old Pertwee-era tentacular mode is what sets the scene for the frequent recurrence of tentacles (and other Weirdish/esque things) throughout the next few years.

Next... 'Image of the Fendahl'.  That's a BIG one.

Shabby Efforts

I'm sometimes rather startled to realise just how much Doctor Who I've missed.

I mean, chronologially, the last actual TV episode I saw was 'Night Terrors'.  I watched that ages after transmission, as part of a foolhardy attempt to catch up with the series (which I finally gave up watching upon transmission roundabout the time of 'A Christmas Carol', which I liked about as much as I like Ian Duncan Smith).  I was hoping that I'd either get my mind changed by the catch-up session - i.e. become persuaded that Who under Moffat isn't just empty, bombastic, cynical, reactionary, sexist, culty drivel - or, alternatively, that my justified hatred of what I was seeing would give me something to furiously blog about.

As it turns out, my undignified little scrape with 'Night Terrors' (see here) put me off the project again.  Initially inclined to be soft on it, despite some nitpicks, I was soon convinced by commenters that it's actually the story where the Doctor becomes David Cameron, lecturing the clueless working schlubs on how to solve their problems by being better parents.  Dispirited, I quit again.  So, I've not seen anything after 'Night Terrors'.  And I feel just peachy about this, to be honest with you.

Besides having been driven away from the TV show, I was surprised to realise, as I was following Sandifer's analysis of the Virgin New Adventures at his blog, how many of those I'd missed back in the day.  I always thought of myself as a follower of the line, but it seems I neglected to read a fair few of them.  Still, I was going through college and university at the time.  I had other things to read.  The menus of pizza restaurants, for example, and loan forms, and letters about my overdraft.

It's the same with Big Finish.  I've heard, I suppose, about a fifth of their Who output - at most.  I guess I just haven't tried hard enough. 

And as for the late-90s BBC novels line... well, I think I've read all the Lawrence Miles ones and all the Chris Boucher ones, but beyond that... I think I tried reading one by Justin Richards once.  It was called 'The Burning', as I recall.  It's possible that my copy (with the first 12 pages lightly thumbed) may still be being used as a wedge under a table leg in a rather seedy set of student digs on the South coast.  I wouldn't be surprised.

I actually suspect there are a lot of fans like me.  In this respect, anyway.  But the point I'm limping towards is this: there are lots of things that a sizeable number of Who fans know about that I simply don't.  I don't know what's so bad about those John Peel Dalek novels, for instance.  Never read 'em.  Never will.  I also don't know (not from personal experience anyway) what's so bad about 'The Eight Doctors' by Terrance Dicks, though I know that it is generally considered to be absolutely awful.

So I was fascinated to learn at Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum that this book sees Dicks

managing to be more prone to waxing poetic about the need for great and noble leaders to rule over the common rabble than ever. The stuff with the Shobogans in the Sixth Doctor segments is absolutely vomit-inducing, with Dicks establishing them as the Gallifreyan working class/criminal underworld (these seem to be the same thing in his mind) who the Doctor enjoys getting drunk with and dispensing favor to. With astonishing creepiness, Dicks ends their plot by saying “even the Shobogans were content with their lot” and leaving it at that, a line that comes horrifyingly close to just saying that the working class are just meant to be poorer than the nobles.

This interests me for obvious reasons.  I have, for one thing, made the Shabogans into the... emblems? motifs? mascots? heroes? ...of this blog.  Also, of course, there are the implications of someone with attitudes like those described above being so central to creating Who over the years.  Of course, it's not news exactly... but it is interesting.

And, as I say, it worries me slightly because I suddenly feel a little self-conscious to realise that I've got a blog called 'Shabogan Graffiti', and yet a fair few of the people reading it are likely to be more familiar with how the Shabogans have been characterised than I am.  Still, it's not as though I'm unused to being surrounded by people who know more than me.

However, I do want to make a few things clear.  It's Shabogans, not Shobogans.  I've checked it on the BBC website.  So there.

And it's pronounced "Shaboogans", just in case anyone was wondering.  George Pravda knew best and must be obeyed in this.  I mean c'mon... his very name means 'truth'.

Oh, and one other thing... they are quite definitely not content with their lot.

Fang Rock, Class and the Tentacular Revolution

If you ask me, 'Horror of Fang Rock' is one of the best ever; a thriller that focuses on characters who really interact while they're trapped together, featuring Tom and Louise at their acme.

It investigates the nature of belief in an age of rising science and technology: Adelaide's astrology fetish compares to the superstition of Vince and Reuben, with Vince's terror as real as hers, and Reuben's fear of monsters more a manifestation of melancholy stubbornness at the rise of unsympathetic forces he doesn't understand (like electricity... which is also the weapon of the monster that kills and impersonates him). Meanwhile, Leela lectures Adelaide that consulting her "shaman" (despite Adelaide's denial, that is the right word for people like Miss Nethercote) is a "waste of time"... but, with relishable irony, the semi-educated Leela simply believes in science because her mentor has told her to.

'Fang Rock' has a quiet undercurrent about sex too. Adelaide is understood by Harker to be Palmerdale's "fancy woman" and Skinsale obviously envies this (though god knows why)... but he's also clearly very taken with Leela. Paddy Russell gives us a whole shot simply to establish how much Skinsale digs Leela on sight. Vince is very flustered by Leela's impromptu striptease (which she completely fails to understand) and pays attentions to Adelaide, which she simply treats with a patronising indulgence (to her he's an instrumentum vocale, not a young man). And then we have the porn under Reuben's bed. Mind you, I'm not a Freudian so I'm not saying anything about phallic symbolism. Sometimes, a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

'Fang Rock' is also very interested in class and the way it was changing in the early 20th century. Palmerdale is loaded and is therefore a scumbag, obviously. Crude but very Whoish... and true enough in general terms. He seems dead posh to the keepers... but to Skinsale (a wonderfully apt name, considering the manner of his death) Palmerdale is a nouveu riche, arriviste, vulgar little money-grubber... and such things obviously matter to Palmerdale since he has evidently purchased his lordly title. He tries to buy everything. He even seems to be paying his mistress (albeit for being a secretary rather than a concubine). Skinsale, meanwhile, considers himself Palmerdale's social superior, despite obviously being skint (old money, obviously... and with a reputation built on enforcing empire in India). Palmerdale gets loads of his sailors killed but makes sure that he escapes (there are lifeboats enough for the gentry, as with the Titanic disaster, but not for the commoners) after causing the crash because he's anxious to use insider info to fleece the markets... and then views Harker's recriminations as irrelevant impertinence, and the keepers as more servants.

It's worth noticing that the Doctor treats the workers (other than the cloddish and xenophobic Reuben) with respect. He starts off calling Vince "Mr Hawkins" while the poshos automatically talk to him like he's a footman.

Vince, upon realising that Palmerdale is dead, burns the cash that His Lordship gave him, instinctively understanding that if he's found in possession of it, the society he lives in will simply assume that he murdered the venal, titled git for the money.

Perhaps you think I'm imagining that this story is obsessed with class, status and snobbery? I ask you to remember that seemingly throwaway detail that the Rutan refers to the Sontarans as "rabble". See what I mean?

Okay, it ain't revolutionary. Very little Who is. 'Fang Rock' offers a lefty/liberal critique rather than a radical challenge. But the critique is quite strong and sophisticated.

It does occur to me that the Rutan embodies electricity and technology and militarism... and the oncoming 'Great War' was pretty indiscriminate in the way it killed, precisely because of the startling new military technology that it produced.

It's interesting to ponder what China Miéville calls "the tentacular revolution", that strange occurrence within sci-fi/horror fiction, roughly starting round about the turn of the century, in which the West suddenly discovered the uncanny potential of the giant squid and the octopus. The tentacled beast also saturates political posters and propaganda round about this period (reaching a crescendo in the twenty years or so around WWI). Have a look at this amazing blog.

Miéville doesn't give a straightforward or reductionist reading of this tentacular trend. He suggests it represents a failure of meaning (the octopus is amorphous and terrifyingly unlike anything else specific, hence it's like everything) in an age of uncertainty. But it seems to me that it can also be connected to the rise of modern communication and travel (railways, telegraphs, etc) and to the rise of global companies, global military aims and political movements. Which is precisely the sort of thing the Rutan embodies - an imperialist philosophy, communication (his signal modulator), new weaponry, new tech, etc - and which the other characters talk about too (i.e. Palmerdale with the wireless telegraph, etc).

The most salient physical feature of the octopus/squid is its many arms - which is graphically perfect for representing 'global reach' of the kind attributed to countries, companies, ideas, technology, imperialist armies, etc... especially in an age of expansion (or, to use our terms, globalization). In political posters, the octopus is constantly represented hugging a map or globe, with its arms in many places.

Of course, 'Fang Rock' was made in the 70s not the 1910s, so it doesn't have quite the same meaning as octopus horror stories by H.G. Wells or Tsarist anti-semitic octopus posters... so this is a case of semiotic drift. The signs and symbols of one age get a piggyback ride on its representation in a period drama. But there were similar things in the air in the 70s too, thanks to Vietnam, etc. And now also, which might be why the tentacle is making something of a comeback in political posters (often with either 'al-Qaeda' or 'Neo-liberalism' written on it, depending on who produced it) and also in modern fantasy writing.