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.

Victory of the Icon 4

At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction.  This is still the mainstream view today.  But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest.  For instance...

The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.

In the Second World War, many - probably most - ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but

the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war.  Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia. 

The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean.  He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.

Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.

The quotes are from Chris Harman's, A People's History of the World.

The Cut

On 'The Space Museum'

Recently, while tracking some hits this blog received, I discovered a new Doctor Who podcast called Pex Lives.  It's great stuff, well worth listening to... and I'm not just saying that because the guys who make it - Kevin Burns and James Murphy - kindly linked to me and mentioned me in one of the episodes.  Their third and latest podcast is just out, and centres upon 'The Krotons'.  Their second podcast is about 'The Space Museum' and they delve into the piece with lots of wit (in both senses of the word) alongside anarchism, Tolstoy, progress and political change.  Not many Who podcasts touch on stuff like this.  My favourite quote: "we're both ambivalent about violent revolution".  (For the record, so am I.)   It also helps that they both have likeable voices.  Kevin sounds like Terry Gilliam (i.e. he has one of those American voices that sounds as though it is filtered through a permanent grin of enthusiasm) and James sounds like a gigantic, sentient, wryly raised eyebrow that has somehow gained the ability to talk with the voice of a hip-hop DJ.  Even so, I kept on wanting to interrupt them... which I mean as a compliment.  So I made some notes instead, and they turned into this:


1. Freeze Frame

The Doctor, Vicki, Barbara and Ian spend episode one wandering around the museum unseen and unheard, unable to interact with events and apparently seeing glimpses of their own future, culminating in their encountering themselves as exhibits. The explanation for this is that they’ve “jumped a time track” and arrived before their arrival, so to speak. Vicki ponders what this means in a speech that, as the Pexcasters remark, is as poetic as it is scientifically meaningless:

Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, also has dimensions of its own.

However, I think that “time”, as used here, really refers to narrative, particularly TV narrative. One of those inner dimensions of narrative is, of course, metaphor. So when Vicki uses the word “time” metaphorically to refer to TV narrative (hereafter TVN), and thus says that narrative has dimensions of its own, she identifies one of those dimensions by using it.

But let’s look at the moment when the ‘time track’ is ‘jumped’. This happens at the very beginning of part one, which is also a reprise of the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Crusade’.  This cliffhanger was a sudden and uncanny 'freezing' of the characters.  The Doctor & Co. are still frozen in their medieval duds at the beginning of 'Space Museum'.  They then unfreeze in their regular clothes (Ian in suave catalogue menswear, Vicki in teenybopper pop-socks, Barbara in her oh-so-practical cardigan, and the Doctor in his usual quasi-Edwardian proto-Adam Adamant gear). The Doctor, upon being questioned about this by the baffled Ian, says that the answer is “time and relativity, dear boy”.

This 'jump' occurs at the junction of two stories, one ending and the other starting.  At the start of the new TVN, the characters are still, so to speak, stuck at the end of the last TVN.  They're frozen, despite the fact that a new TVN has begun without them. This is, of course, just a literalization of what always happens: the characters freeze for a week.  But this time we actually see the freezing at the end of one story, continuing into the start of the next.  Indeed, as noted, the freezing was the cliffhanger.  The extra-diegetic business of the freezing of the characters has become a diegetic occurence.  It is an in-narrative effect of which the characters are conscious. 

But boil it down: what have we actually seen? 

We’ve seen a cut.

(Pause to recall the momentous, primal importance of the cut in Doctor Who up to this point… the fact that a cut makes it possible for ‘An Unearthly Child’ - in a moment of pure television amidst what would otherwise look very much like televised theatre - to put the TARDIS console room inside a police box, to move Barbara and us instantly from the junkyard to the alien ship via an apparently instantaneous physical movement through impossible space, to put the latter inside the former, to do something that is possible now that we’ve “discovered television”, i.e. to put the massive building inside a small box.)

The jumping of the time track in ‘Space Museum’ is a cut. Moreover, it is the kind of cut that indicates a temporal gap, the skipping over of a movement through time. It is the moment when the narrative jumps forward, using the grammar of television; snipping out the boring and non-dramatic bits that are not relevant to the audience, slicing away the mundane ‘dead time’ of the characters which we don’t need to see and can happily take on trust. It is the kind of cut (between the reprise of a cliffhanger at the end of one story and the first scene proper of the new story) that represents a movement not only through time but also from one unit of TVN to another. It’s the kind of cut that signifies a dramatic/televisual moment, thus unifying dramatic time and TVN. The break in time is, in this kind of case, also simultaneously a break between stories. Just as the break in time sews together two discrete but separate dramatic moments, so it sews together two narratives.  (In so doing it also undermines the rather dodgy premise that there really is such discreteness in the separation of narratives - a premise that fails to hold up when you delve into the actual behind-the-scenes business of writing and script-editing.)  Thus it is, strangely, both a moment of progress and of stasis.

The cut signifies not only an implied/annihilated fictional half-hour of cleaning-up, wardrobe diving and changing, but also a handover - at least in broad terms - from one story/writer to a new one.  The difference here is that the characters notice it. Or rather, they notice the absence/break that it signifies. They notice the stitching along the join. They notice that this hypothetical half-hour never existed for them. They have moved and not moved.  They notice that strange unity of progress and stasis.  They have not inherited the obliviousness to this that should come with a cut. They notice that their clothes changed in an instant. That isn’t supposed to happen… at least, not in drama. Such moments of meta-awareness are a staple of comedy (and have been long before the 60s when they started to become the vogue in TV comedy) which may be why the moment of awareness in ‘The Space Museum’ is marked by a comedic moment (the “Doctor we’ve got our clothes on!” bit).

In noticing the cut, the characters have noticed the syntax and grammar of TVN which ought to just underly their actions as structure. Just as sentences become nonsensical when you concentrate on their arrangement, or on the brute fact of the arrangement of letters, so a fissure opens up in the story by the characters’ awareness of narrative structure. This single glitch is enough to put them out of proper contact with the story into which they have just hurtled. It is enough to leave them stranded, skewiff in relation to the narrative. Out of phase, out of synch, out of time. The Doctor’s casual dismissal of the moment may be persiflage, but it also gets right to the root of the problem. His words make sense, as long as we take “time” to mean TVN (and, if you think about it, how could “time” possibly mean anything else within a story on TV?).

The Doctor and his friends have been propelled into one of the other interior dimensions of narrative: the relative distance between the characters and the narrative. Their freak moment of awareness of the functioning of the TVN (in which they are trapped like ball-bearings inside a mechanism) has allowed a distance to open up between them and the symbolic order that makes narrative function... and so, because narrative essentially is this symbolic order, the distance is between them and the narrative itself. This is how they can arrive and not arrive… and, really, this is just an extrapolation of what Doctor Who always does by its very nature: it unglues characters within TVN from the conventional causal rules of TVN, allowing them to see the future and the past, allowing them to move freely (more or less) within the interior, relative dimensions of narrative.


2. Empire Hears the Sound of Doctors Toppling

So, thus freed, they see a possible future, a possible - as yet unsettled - narrative conclusion, to which they would not otherwise have advance access... and what they see is their own possible, nay probable, defeat.  I don't buy that they've arrived before themselves.  That doesn't work.  They have arrived on Xeros after themselves, after their probable defeat.  They find the TARDIS and their own frozen selves in the Museum.  They have already arrived, wandered in, been captured and frozen and exhibited.  What they see is the aftermath of this, of the whole trajectory of a Doctor Who story going wrong and being aborted.  And it's not just this story that goes wrong... it's a whole new kind of trajectory for Doctor Who (the Doctor/show with an anti-imperialist and revolutionary energy) being truncated before it can get going.

The skewiff time travellers, detached from their own assigned dimension within the TVN and stuck in a subsidiary one, walk around in the remains of a story after it has ended, in the aftermath of an alternate story, a story that is literally impossible within Doctor Who but which nevertheless seems to have tried to transpire. The version of the museum they wander through in episode one is itself an exhibit of a long-settled past. Like museum exhibits, it is a mute testament to a deactivated, finished, concluded story. In the case of the desynchronised world of episode one, it is a frozen exhibit of the concluded story of the Doctor and his friends being defeated. This story is already over. In that story, Our Heroes were captured and frozen and turned into exhibits, never to travel again, never again to jump from one narrative to a new one.

The great consequence of the Doctor's capture and pickling is that the Xeron revolution never happened.  Vicki never got the chance to bully the Xerons into it.  So, in the version of the last episode that the TARDIS crew get to spectate at during episode one, the Xerons are still slaves and the Moroks are still masters.  The museum endures.  And Doctor Who is over.

You want proof?  There is a Dalek, dead and hollow, displayed as a harmless exhibit, a thing of the past.  Already, by this point, the Dalek was the other part of the dyad that made Doctor Who into itself.  If its dead, so is the show.  (The final proof that the Doctor has won comes at the very end, when a new cliffhanger brings a new TVN... and it features reactivated, reanimated, resurgent Daleks.)

What the travellers see as they wander around the museum in their disconnected state is nothing less than post-Doctor Who.  It is the Doctor Who universe continuing after the character and his show have been destroyed.  It is the universe without the Doctor.  And it manifests not only as a universe of eternally preserved blandness and futurelessness, a universe of frozen entropy (and thus of frozen time and frozen narrative), but also as a universe of eternal empire.  Tyranny will last forever now that the Doctor is just an exhibit in a museum.  The Doctor's failure to foment revolution (by proxy... because we're still feeling our way cautiously into this new energy) is what destroys him and his show.  Empire gets him before he can escape it or topple it.  This is not a connection that the show would ever have made before.

This is new.


3. Strange Matter

All this can happen only because of the material practices of TV production, because of their recursive re-entry into the narrative as a creatively distorting force.  Just as the console room can only be within the Police Box because of the material reality of the cut influencing what is physically possible for the characters within the story, so the time track can only be jumped through use of the same technique. When they walk out onto the surface of Xeros, the time travellers leave no footprints and, when they don’t speak, there is nothing but silence. In being detached from the plot (and TVN and diegetic time) they have become materially detached... or, to look at it from the other side, re-attached to the material reality of production.  They have become diegetically aware of another inner dimension of TVN: the material dimension, i.e. the setness of the set, the studioness of the studio... all this as a follow-on from their awareness of the cuttedness of a cut. I’m surprised they don’t notice their own shadows cast upon the supposedly distant mountains. This is an astonishing intrusion of the material reality of TV production into the diegesis, into the ‘consciousness’ of characters within a television story. Without actually breaking the fourth wall (which is always rather glib and obvious and bathetic whenever it actually happens) there’s very little more that can be done to make material production intrude deliberately into the narrative it produces.

In the time period / narrative dimension that Our Heroes get temporarily stuck in, their feet make no impression on the sand… because it’s a studio floor. The diegetic rationale is opaque. What matters is that the in-narrative consciousness of the material reality of TV production allows the proliferation of TVN’s interior dimensions. That’s also how Vicki’s glass can break and reform: the material reality of film (wind forward, wind backwards) can increase and decrease entropy for the characters (remember, entropy cannot decrease in our universe, which is why we can’t really travel backwards in time… but in the interior dimensions of TVN, it can… hence the possibility of time travel within TVN).  The material reality of TV production is how the characters can inhabit the strange zone of skewiffness in which they spend episode one, even when inside the museum.  This is how Vicki can wave her hand through the exhibits.  It's how the TARDIS can be transparent and insubstantial. 


4.  No Future

Entropy is, of course, a perennial obsession of SF, and decidedly of Doctor Who. Who has an ambivalent relationship with the concept. The ethical value attached to order and disorder swings back and forth, and this oscillation is inherently political in its implications. There is an enormous difference between the imposition of order and stability at the end of ‘The Web Planet’ and the gleeful abandon with which disorder and instability reign at the end of ‘Power of the Daleks’. On Vortis, the Animus (a communist cancer) is defeated, the proper lords of the planet return to rule again and the formerly “militant” beasts of burden resume their due subservience. On Vulcan, various competing forms of political domination are allowed to annihilate each other while the Doctor chuckles. Arguably, the Hartnell era up to this point (’Space Museum’) has the Doctor largely playing the role of a force for entropy-minimisation. He either escapes historical narratives in which disorder is depicted as political ferment (’The Reign of Terror’) or ‘primitivism’ (too numerous to need adumbration, but...), or re-establishes order by catalysing some bourgeois political settlement (’The Sensorites’). Despite his debut as a force of anarchic interruption of bland, post-war, liberal normality in ‘An Unearthly Child’, he soon settles into the role of Guardian of Order in past and future. You can’t rewrite History: not one line. Etc.

However, in ‘The Space Museum’ something changes. Not totally, not for all time and in all instances. But the balance shifts, or begins to. The centre of gravity of the series/character starts to change. At the very least, the potentialities become wider, more open, more radical. (James and Kevin note that, in this story, Hartnell's character becomes, for the first time, something like the Doctor as we know him.)  The threat which catalyses this shift is the threat of the utter foreclosure of potentialities, the loss of future, the doom of becoming an exhibit in a museum.

A museum is, of course, a place built to house objects with no future, objects upon which all potentialities have foreclosed, objects for which all possible destinies (apart from eternal static preservation and display) have collapsed. The threat of the Morok museum is of freezing, of the complete minimisation of entropy, and hence of future time… and hence, as we’ve seen, of the future dimension of TVN. The threat is of No More Stories. To Doctor Who, an anthology series to end all anthology series, this is an existential threat in both senses, i.e. a threat to its meaning and to its continuance. (See section 2, above.)  Such a thing has already been hinted at in the previous story, ‘The Crusade’, in which Saladin interprets Barbara as a member of a troupe of travelling players, casts her in the role of Scheherezade, and tells her that if she runs out of stories to tell, she dies. In ‘The Space Museum’, this threat stems directly from the political project of a declining empire. It goes beyond narrative collapse.  It looks more like narrative annihilation. It is a directly political threat.


5. When the Sky Falls / When it Crumbles / We Will Stand Tall / Face it All Together*

In ‘The Space Museum’, the threat to the Morok’s declining empire is directly the threat of entropy. They fight entropy with stasis.  That the emblem of their empire is a museum is telling.  A museum is, as noted, the place where the future is frozen and stasis eternally preserved.  In order to preserve the exhibits, the Moroks have to literally freeze them, which seems to also freeze them in time, thus arresting entropy (which is, of course, both waste heat and time's arrow).  On Xeros, their colony which they have overwritten with their own history in the form of their museum, all is silence and stillness.  Morok anti-entropy has leaked out and freeze-dried the planet.  The Xerons themselves have been reduced to a race of children.  Nobody seems bothered by the idea that they might grow up.  If they prove to be capable of it, they can always be exterminated - that's Lobos' stated plan.  Meanwhile, frozen at the point of adolescence (a curiously bland and placid adolescence, but with all the essential impotence of that part of life), they hang around doing nothing.  The Moroks hang around doing nothing too.  The exhibits hang around doing nothing. Nobody visits the museum. The Moroks can’t wait to get home. Boredom reigns. It prefigures Doctor Who’s great fixation upon eternal, existential boredom in the 80s. And for the same reason.  Like those 80s episodes, which came during Thatcher's great quest to freeze social progress while dressing her project up as a resurgence of national/imperial status, 'Space Museum' dramatises the calculated and cynical freezing of imperial decay.  As in the 80s stories, in 'Space Museum' it leads to the stunting of progress, the dawn of a bland circularity, a smothering silence and stiltedness, the feeling in everyone that they're rolling a boulder eternally up a hill without ever getting nearer the top.  Just think of Vicki's irritation at the way the Xerons just sit around indulging in melancholy dreaming.  (Vicki, of course - as Kevin and James recognize - is the emblem of a hopeful, Moddish, 60s optimism about the future and about youngsters.)

As the Pexcasters also point out, the Morok empire is, of course, the British empire in decline. But the metaphor actually does the Morok/Brits some favours, depicting them as pitiably bored and mostly-passive, all assuming that their glories are in the past, doing little that is proactive to defend their standing and influence, sitting around bemoaning the way their own people seem uninterested in past glories. They have, the odd bit of half-hearted repression aside, apparently accepted that their empire is over. This at a time when the British (under Harold Wilson) were still fighting a rearguard action to shore up their influence by getting militarily involved in Malaysia (a country pretty much created to serve British tactical interests in that region), and assisting General Suharto’s bloody coup in Indonesia, which entailed displacing the neutralist Sukarno and massacring leftists, and paving the way for Suharto’s genocidal invasion of East Timor. The Moroks are part-and-parcel of the widespread idea that Britain dismantled her empire largely peaceably… forgetting about the bloody rampages against the Mau Mau, and plenty of other sanguinary attempts at holding back the tide of anti-colonial resistance. If Britain sometimes yielded to the the inevitable a bit more easily than other European colonial powers, the underlying reasons were economic rather than moral.

Glyn Jones was, of course, an exile from South Africa, and ‘The Space Museum’ clearly swipes at colonialism… but you have to wonder if he was thinking of British colonialism against the Boers, forgetting that the South African state was built on the bloody, racist colonialist repression of native Africans by the Dutch settlers. The Xerons are often observed to be “kids” but they are also definitely “white kids” (as Ace might put it). In some ways, this is preferable to the attempts at implying ethnic and/or racial difference in the ‘oppressed natives’ in other stories. The Swampies are bad enough (though their portrayal as characters could have been a lot worse, as Avatar proved) but even the Kinda - characters in a much more complex and politically sophisticated story - are problematic, being an example of Whitey taking it upon himself to represent a version of conquered peoples. Even so, the Xerons are white kids displacing, in true settler style, the real victims of Western imperialism and colonialism. They are an echo of very old imperialist stereotypes of ‘natives’ (who were, according to Kipling, “half child”) as helpless, clueless, passive and foolish, while also being a negation of the whole existence of people of colour as victims of colonialism. It might be observed here that programme makers can’t win. They either leave people of colour out completely, thus negating their existence, or put them in and thus practice the inherently imperialistic project of appropriating their experience and representing their stories for them. And it’s true: they can’t win. The necessary response to this isn’t to look harder for ways to square the various vicious circles of liberal media in imperialist, white-dominated societies… the necessary response is to stop society being imperialist and white-dominated. (If pointing out the impossibility of squaring such circles on a little-read blog contributes towards this aim, then I’m doing my part. /irony/)

Of course, the 60s had Vicki as a possibility because, even as it was the era of British imperial decline (often resisted with great savagery) it was also the era of burgeoning social and political struggle, resistance and cultural insurrection.  The link was there between the liberation struggles of the colonised peoples and the struggles of Western students and workers (which is, of course, why the Xerons are both colonised 'natives' and dissatisfied youngsters).  Even outside or before the realms of radicalism, there was a widespread feeling that progress was, if not inevitable, certainly hard to resist.  In the 80s, what radicalism there was was reactive and defensive... and 80s Doctor Who (the odd bit of mordant satire notwithstanding) doesn't really start engaging with this until Cartmel comes along.  Hence the fixation of the pre-Cartmel 80s upon entropy and decline and tedium.

'The Space Museum' is when the show really begins any attempt to engage with these syndromes.  When you start looking for it, the whole of 'The Space Museum' is about entropy stalled and/or reversed, with this minimisation being the central threat and the imperial project. The intersection between the narrative manifestations of this (the jumped time track, the empty museum) and the thematic/political manifestations (The Decline and Fall of the Morok Empire, artificially paused) is what makes this story tick… or rather, not tick.

This is key.  The big threat to our heroes, to their and our presumed values, to the show itself, is not entropy (or its effect/appearance: time).  The threat is no entropy.  The threat is the restriction of entropy, the stopping of the clocks, the freezing of decay.  We want the Morok empire to decay.  The Xerons and the TARDIS crew need entropy in order to liberate themselves via the continued crumbling of Morok power.  The effect of the Morok effort to preserve their tyranny in amber is the creation of a massive system of freezing, of stalling, of pickling, of preserving, of exhibiting.  Their museum is more than just a standard way of imposing imperial power and knowledge over the conquered, using their world as a palimpsest.  Their museum is the ultimate symbol of their attempt to arrest entropy - and thus time, and thus progress (as an anti-imperialist would define it) - itself.

Now, given that we've already established entropy as synonymous with time, and time in a TVN as essentially synonymous with narrative, and narrative as essentially synonymous with the symbolic order that makes it work, so we can now see how and why that time track got jumped.  When the TARDIS - the device that unglues characters from the conventional rules of narrative and allows them to travel within its interior relative dimensions - got too near to Xeros, a world overwritten by the Morok museum - and thus soaked in the toxic by-product of the Moroks' cold, anti-entropy juice - it juddered, stuttered, stammered, faltered and froze along a vulnerable fault-line of TVN - that cut we were talking about earlier, that unity of stasis and progress - thus throwing the characters off at an angle.

The material reality of TV production is the machine, the dimensions of TVN are the product, and the anti-entropic politics becomes a spanner in the works.  The machine lurches and the ball-bearings inside get to see a glimpse of its destruction.

The end of Doctor Who nearly comes about because the machine nearly chokes on the way post-imperial decline and resistance to progress effects it.  Why is it so effected?  Because it's a series so open to radical possibilities.  And why is it so open?  By virtue of all those interior narrative dimensions which proliferate because of the unique way the show harnesses the material methods of TV production!

To stop his entropy being minimised - and thus his future ended - the Doctor must become different… or rather, his show must.  Hence Vicki’s revolution and the story's frank embrace of the idea of revolt, insurrection, violent overthrow, etc.  The show has reached the moment when it must move forward or freeze. 1965. The crux of the 60s.  In many ways, Doctor Who instinctively wants to sit on the fence (it is, after all, the product of a patriarchal, authoritarian, elitest corporation), and this causes it to judder to a halt, to stumble.  It is hardly the first or last institution to trip over such social contradictions.  It falls over the tricky, trippy moment when the narrative dimensions generated by the material conditions of its production bump up against the figure of an entropic empire.  The moment itself demands that the show make a decision.  It's clear - so clear that I might even be tempted to invoke some kind of dialectical law of history - that the show’s survival depends upon the anti-imperial, progressive choice.  Otherwise there is nothing but the freezing, the minimisation of entropy, the defeated embrace of changlessness.  No more history.  No more story.  That's why, for all its faults and failures and compromises, this is the first revolutionary Doctor Who story. To go forward, the show must embrace revolution. This choice unfreezes time, history, progress, narrative, etc.  Like us - then and now - the show must accept the necessity of pulling the communication cord of revolution (as Walter Benjamin put it) to avoid the train crash of history. 

The cut that makes the TARDIS jump a time track is, ultimately, a cut between the show's past and its future. This is, in a way, a conflict that the show - especially the 60s show - goes over again and again and again. Entropy must be released. Time restarted. Progress made possible. Future stories depend upon it.  The battle needs to be constantly repeated.  The superb Vicki becomes the wretched Victoria just a few years later... but then Zoe arrives.  It is partial and imperfect and imprecise and compromised.  It repeatedly fails.  But the process, the dialectic, starts here.  And it opens up the future of the show.  In their podcast, Kevin and James call it "the beating heart of Doctor Who".  This is just a tad romantic and exculpatory for a cynical, Frankfurt School-influenced grump like me... but I know what they mean.  We all do.  And if we don't, we should.

The moral of this story?

Feel free to touch the exhibits.

Come on.

You know you want to.




ADDITION #1:
It can't be insignificant that the Doctor's souvenir of this adventure is a massive television that interprets the entire universe and all of history as TV programming.

ADDITION #2:
In London we have a Science Museum and a War Museum.  As though they're separate things.  Walk around the Imperial War Museum.  It's a museum of science and technology.

10/10/13




*I fucking hate this song.  It is an anthem of British imperial/capitalist values in the face of crisis.  Just like the wretched film it accompanies, it is the heroization of the fallen hero Capital/Empire/Country climbing and clawing its way back to potency and moral authority after a near-fatal collapse/fall/wound/recession.  We're all in this together, etc.  Yeah.  Fuck off.

Damp Little Ideas

Phwoar, look at the imperialist symbolism on that!

That bit in 'The Empty Child' when the Doctor talks about the "damp little island" standing alone against Hitler... when I first saw that I hurled a coat-hanger I happened to be holding at my television.

Okay, so: patriotism as progressive, yeah?  "Don't forget the Welfare State" or whatever he says.

Hmm.  You will unsurprised to learn that I have doubts.


1.

There is sometimes an unwarranted elision of the idea of 'patriotism' with the idea of 'loving one's home'.  This is an elision that many left-wingers have been guilty of, from Orwell to Billy Bragg.  But it confuses distinct concepts.  Moreover, it acquiesces in the ideological project of confusing these concepts, a project of immense utility to ruling classes going back to the very birth of the state.  Patriotism isn't just a cynical scheme of the rulers... though it is  that, amongst other things.  The point here is that it is an ideological construction and a form of social practice which cannot be simplistically overlaid upon personal affection for one's origins and surroundings.

I love London.  In order to get sentimentally misty-eyed about this, I'd have to forget that the city is a concentrated site of racial discrimination, police repression, social cleansing, centralised state bureaucracy, drastic inequality; that it's the hub of the organisation and enforcement (physical and ideological) of a neoliberal and neo-imperialist power, strewn with monuments to one of the most savagely aggressive colonial empires in modern history.  And on and on and on.

The love of one's home is one thing.  'Patriotism' and 'nationalism' are both, finally, ideological notions mapped-onto it.  They both immediately elide the flexible and contextual concept of 'home' with the political category of 'country'.  Even the term 'homeland' starts to do this.  We should never let ourselves become deaf to the shades of meaning imported by extra syllables. 

The idea that patriotism can be a 'way in' to a larger feeling of social involvement is similarly dubious.  To the extent that patriotism makes the individual feel connected to something larger than him-or-herself, the connection is a masochistic one.  It is the sublimation of oneself into a dominating framework, not the integration of oneself into a genuinely collective endeavour, whatever the rhetoric.

Besides, this sublime idea of ecstatic sublimation is not only unduly R/romantic, but is also so vague, and so applicable as a description of so many varied and mutually-exclusive things, that it loses all substantive content. It can refer to mysticism, chauvinism, trade union activity, identity politics, family, etc.  Richard Dawkins feels 'part of something greater than himself'; so does the Pope.  For the idea of personal integration into wider structures to be meaningful, it must be individuated... whereupon we start to see patriotism as a distinct phenomenon, quite separate from, say, social work or progressive activism.  The mooted connection collapses.

Ideas of 'national community' are largely ideological constructions which artificially smooth-out hugely contradictory social arrangements riddled with class antagonisms. The idea that 'the nation' is a space where we can work for 'the public good' is similarly panglossian. In societies divided into social groups of mutually-exclusive interests that are constantly in material conflict, is there such a thing as a 'public good'?  Any concept of 'public good' is always, consciously or unconsciously, an expression of class interest, because it always ends up being an assertion that the interests of one class are synonymous with the interests of all classes.  This is simply impossible, barring something extreme like the immediate threat of a massive nuclear explosion.  Given that even imminent environmental catastrophe has not been enough to convince the bourgeoisie that they share a common interest with humanity as a whole, it's fair to say that 'the public good' is a last, temporary and remote possibility... at best.

The heart of capitalism is the antagonism between the interests of those who produce surplus value and those who pocket it. That makes me very suspicious of 'the nation', which in its modern form, is an integral part of global capitalism. Patriotism, similarly, is an ideological buttress of this system. It is also intimately bound up with imperialism rather than just being an unfortunate side-effect.  Patriotism has always been linked to the competition of states.  Viz the rise of patriotism alongside the rise of the modern state in Early Modern Europe, viz the patriotism of Roman senators, etc, etc.


2.

Does patriotism ever do any good? Well, as far as I can see, only when it's bound up with other ideas that actually conflict with it (which happens, of course).  The great post-war national liberation struggles against European colonial domination, for example... something Orwell never lived to see, leading him to rather simplistically seperate patriotism (good) from nationalism (bad).  Back 'home', many crusading socialists who laid the groundwork for the Welfare State, many Chartists etc., stressed the common welfare of 'the people' of 'the nation'.  Left-wingers such as Michael Parenti still assert that they are the real patriots for opposing America's wars in favour of social programs to benefit ordinary Americans.  This is a widespread strategy.  But it rings hollow.

We can't put the credit for the British Welfare State onto 'Britain' because it was a product of currents within the British polity (i.e. the labour movement, socialism, reformism, and yes even aspects of liberalism, etc) which had to fight long and bitter struggles against other groups in order to achieve any such gains.  (Now, of course, patriotic we'reallinthistogetherness is used to justfiy the wanton dismantling of these gains... which only goes to demonstrate that the patriotic idea is, at best, a tool that can be used by both sides... rather like a blunt instrument that can be snatched back and forth between mugger and muggee... except that the mugger brought it with him and knows how to use it.)

That the NHS happened is no reason to be proud of 'the nation', no more than one person's beauty is reason to praise the attractiveness of everyone on the bus... especially if a significant portion of the people on the bus are actively trying to disfigure the pretty one with knives.  (This is without pushing the analogy further by pointing out that 'beauty' is subjective, means different things to different people, and that praising it is by no means obviously a proper thing to do.  Apart from anything else, praising the beauty of strangers on buses would usually be tantamount to sexual harassment.  Something of the same combination of self-serving motives, arrogant presumption and abuse of privilege - all lurking beneath ostensible nobility - is usually to be found in patriotic waffle.  Even putting this aside, patriotism is an inherently dubious idea, not just because it relies upon a spurious lumping together of hugely disparate groups with hugely disparate interests, not just because it is bound up with the ideological hegemony of powerful interests, but also because it relies upon lazy assumptions that certain things are always positive, always worthy of public pride.)

As ever, we end up with the problem of 'we'.  Is there any word more abused in political discourse than 'we'?  It is abused by all sides, by David Cameron and Tony Benn.  'We' bomb Pakistan.  'We' created the Welfare State.  'We' had an empire.  'We' produced Shakespeare.  What obfuscatory nonsense this rests on.  A lot of those national liberation struggles I mentioned were waged against my very own 'damp little island'.  That this island has wildlife, literature, theatre culture and BBC sci-fi shows that I love, as well as an inspiring history of working class resistance, doesn't make it any less an imperial culture soaked in blood.  If we go along with the essentially patriotic idea of the island as a community, the idea that the material nature of the island creates a meaningful 'national identity' or something like that, then we end up with the dubious idea that, for instance, 'we' unleashed terror and torture against the Mau Mau rebellion. This is the flipside of saying that 'we' fought Hitler.  If the first isn't fair or true, neither is the second.

The only way to efface this is to simply not mention one side or the other.  In the interests of the patriotic mainstream, we never mention the Mau Mau.  This is the time-honoured and constant technique of capitalist media culture, 'The Empty Child' not-excepted: what cannot be said within the confines of mainstream ideological discourse must be passed over in silence... and because it always is  passed over in silence, it stays forever out of the hegemonic mainstream discourse, that discourse being composed of only those notions which can be spoken about without any awareness of breaching the 'common sense' consensus.  A self-perpetuating echo chamber which endures because it has, in many ways, won a kind of Darwinian battle of methods for containing discourse in capitalist societies, winning out over both extreme censorship and over genuine freedom of speech.

To breach this silence is to become political or 'controversial' (while the political valences of those things which *can* be said are not noticed... they simply become the ideological equivalent of wallpaper).  We forget the imperial crimes of Britain and leave it at saying 'we fought Hitler'... but again, the spurious 'we' does its work.  'We' fought Hitler. My grandad, Beaverbrook, Churchill, RAB Butler, Edward and Mrs Simpson... all in it together. It's obvious what's wrong with that, I'd hope. Large swathes of the British ruling class were sympathetic to the fascists as bulwarks against communism.  Unlike Churchill, my grandad ended up with shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life.  It might be objected that 'we' often means 'we the people'... but, as I said, we mustn't be deaf to the syllables.  Even the ones that pointedly aren't there. And even if we are  talking about 'the people'... who are they?  How do you get to be part of 'the people'.  Our latterday English narodniks indulge in this kind of vagueness at best; at worst they indulge in fascist sentimentalism.  The EDL talk about 'the people'.  There's nothing in the term to stop them.  As Walter Benjamin realised, cultural artefacts should be unusable by fascists if they are to be relied upon.

On this subject... I flat-out disbelieve that 'national culture' entails respect for diversity, given the sustained assaults upon diversity that are utterly mainstream in British culture.  We're always hearing about how 'British values' (presumably what is meant are not those values which permit Britain to bomb the shit out of civillians in the Middle East) are under threat from multiculturalism, Islam, etc.  On the ground, some people cling to fictions like 'British fair play' as a way of expressing tolerance and democracy, but at least as often (far more often, I suspect) such notions are employed by xenophobes, ressentimental Tories, Dailymailistas, and those fascist sentimentalists already mentioned). I don't even think that the aggregation 'national culture' is actually possible.  Such aggregations are highly selective ideological fictions.  But even if it were true, it leaves us with the problem of respect for diversity *outside* the artificially/ideologically-constructed idea of 'the nation'. This is especially problematic when the nation being talked about/celebrated is also an empire, or a former empire, or run by 'humanitarian interventionists'.


3.

Of course, in the mainstream, all this isn't even a blip. In the near-constant drip-drip-drip of popular culture, Britain is a collective hero (a crusty John Bull, flawed and old-fashioned, but coming-out-swinging for freedom) fighting evil German imperialism. Our own imperialism is effaced, eternally.  In this context, the true history of the British ruling class' role in tolerating fascism, comforting fascism, enabling fascism, and finally fighting fascism only when their own imperial hegemony was threatened, must be left out because it strays out of the mainstream 'common sense' and into the 'political' or 'controversial'.  And so we end up with the Doctor praising the damp little island.  Somebody pass me a sick bag.

Another favourite example of mine is in Agatha Christie's Poirot , in an adaptation of 'The Clocks'.  Poirot is confronted by a German spy motivated by appeaser-sympathies who sneers at "weak, liberal England".  Poirot angrily retorts that "weak, liberal England" gave him a home when the Germans overran Belgium during the First World War.  What isn't mentioned, amidst all this moving drama about standing up to tyranny, is the teensy-weensy little business of Belgium's utterly murderous and racist imperial domination of the Congo, which King Leopold initiated in order to compete with the imperialism of other European powers such as Britain, and which was immensely profitable because of trade with Britain, amongst other countries.

'We' all know about German imperialism... well, about bits of it.  As has been said elsewhere, the real problem with German imperialism (the problem that makes it exceptionally memorable) is that they tried standard European methods of violent colonial landgrabbing, repression and racial mass-murder in mainland Europe rather than in Africa... after all, nobody in mainstream media-culture remembers the Kaiser's genocide of the Hereros and Namaquas in Namibia.  'We' also remember German imperialism for another reason: it is the imperialism that excuses, effaces, blots out our own.  The writer of the Poirot episode knew that Nazi Germany was bad, and that Britain 'stood against it'.  He knew Poirot was the hero, and so had to give voice to these uncontroversial notions.  He probably didn't know much about the Belgian Congo, about Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy , about Tintin in the Congo... after all, we don't get morality plays about how dreadful Belgian imperialism was rammed down our throats in constant TV/film dramas.  Nothing in it to make 'us' brits feel good about 'our' heroism. 

This is not, by itself, a huge problem within the confines of a TV show... and, indeed, The Empty Child is probably Moffat's best work precisely because it manages a certain scepticism towards the idea of an untroubled national community, albeit mediating its issues with this notion through the free-floating conduit of sexual repression. The last refuge of the scoundrel, however, leaves a nasty taste in my mouth when it makes its appearance in a quite good piece of work like 'Empty Child'.

We might ask why it was possible to do a WWII Who story in 1989 that did not embrace the concepts of patriotism or 'the nation' uncritically, but it no longer seemed possible in 2005. The degeneration of our 'national' political discourse since 1989 surely has a fair bit to do with it.  Maybe Moffat shouldn't shoulder all the blame.  Thanks be to many, but perhaps especially to Blair.

Prometheus Underground

Warning: Triggers and Spoilers.  And waffle.


Sex & Monsters

In Prometheus, the Engineers are ancient Titans who created humanity... and, it is implied, seeded the galaxy with their DNA. There is something very noticeable about them: they are all men. Meanwhile, there is a definite vaginal look to a great many of the alien bio-weapons they created and which then subsumed them. However, I don't think its really possible to read the battle between Engineers and their bio-weapons as a battle of the sexes. The weapon creatures are also phallic and penetrative, as in previous iterations of the Alien universe. All the same, it's true that presenting the creators of life (in their own image) as exclusively dudes does imply that generative power resides in the male alone. It is enough for one Engineer to dissolve his DNA into the waters of a planet to kickstart the process that will lead to animal life (if that's how the opening scene is meant to be read). The Engineers are male but apparently sexless, capable of asexual reproduction. The deadly runaway bio-weapons, which seem hermaphroditic, look like the intrusion of sex into a male but sexless world. Sex is thus a terrifying eruption that destabilises a male utopia. The sexual nature of the weapons suggests that the Engineers - we might even be tempted to facetiously re-christen them the 'Mengineers' - find sexual reproduction to be inherently threatening. They set about devising weapons of mass destruction and what do they come up with? Biological goo that sets off a chain reaction of tentacle rape, fanged vaginas and violent monster pregnancy.

Foz Meadows at her blog Shattersnipe (which I heard about from Jon Blum) has made some apt observations about the film's dubious concentration upon highly impractical female underwear, grueling 'ladypain' and forced impregnation. She goes on to say:

Insofar as the alien attacks go, I’ll give Scott some credit for trope subversion: twice in the course of the film, male characters are violently orally penetrated – and, in the process, killed – by phallic alien tentacles. This is visually disturbing on a number of levels, but given the near universal establishment of tentacle rape as a thing that happens to women, I’m going to give him a big thumbs up for bucking the trend. That being said, what happens to Shaw is awful on just about every level imaginable.

And so it is.

One of the interesting things about the original Alien is that it is a man - Kane (John Hurt) - who is the victim of the facehugger rape and the violent birth of the phallic infant Alien. So, although the alien pregnancy also suggests infection, cancer, parasitism and other horrors attendant on life, there is clearly a way in which the original Alien is a personification of sexual violence. This violence is directed at both sexes and emerges through the violation of a man and a subsequent male pregnancy... however, the creature itself is also intensely male. It has that famously phallic head and yet another phallic symbol springs out of its mouth, this one complete with a snapping set of teeth. Even its tail is like a barbed cock which gropes Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) before killing her. Later on, when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is menaced by the creature in the escape shuttle, she has stripped to her underwear. This scene is the film at its most sexploitative. In many ways, it's a textbook example of lingering over needlessly-exposed female flesh. But even in this scene it seems that a trap is being set: encouraging those who are so inclined to leer... before showing them their own reflection in the creature when it reappears, languid, slowly playing with its phallic inner jaw, dripping drool/jizz, forcing Ripley to run and hide like someone stalked by a rapist.

As a man, I want to be very careful about declaring that Alien is or is not dodgy in its depiction of sexualised violence against women. If it is, then I also think there is a distinct ambiguity about it. The sexualised, phallic vileness of the Alien itself seems to have been the intention all along. If the film wallows in the sight of a half-naked woman threatened by a monster that is, essentially, an evil penis with teeth, then it also seems aware of the queasiness of what it is doing. The very obscenity of the Alien suggests an awareness of the obscenity of sexual violence... beyond what is arguably the film's more general concern about the horror of physicality itself, with all its attendant violation, infection, pain and predation.

There is something of the same horror of sex in Prometheus. Fertility seems to be the terrible mistake that the Mengineers made, the mistake they wish to erase. They made the infertile fertile (their weapon specifically does this to Shaw) and set in motion the end of their outpost world. But note how the 'fertility nuke' the Mengineers developed actually works. With men, it gets in through the mouth. The Generic Asshole Biologist with Glasses gets done in by a kind of phallic worm with a cobra hood which penetrates his suit and then dives into his mouth. Holloway inadvertently drinks some of the goo and begins to turn into a kind of rampaging mutant (we see the final stage later when Fifield turns up again). Shaw, however, is impregnated in the regular way. She is impregnated via sex - with her husband, no less! That this is a kind of rape-by-proxy committed by David (who spikes Holloway's drink with some of the black goo) doesn't change the point. The creature inside Shaw gestates in what looks like a placental sac, complete with a umbilical cord. I'm not sure if we're meant to think the squid thing was going to exit Shaw violently via the belly... but, the undulations of the entity beneath her skin notwithstanding, there's actually no reason to think it wasn't going to be born via the vagina. So, the Mengineers' weaponized sex gets into the man via an orifice that does not play a specific biological role in sexual reproduction and turns him into a beast. It enters the woman via sex itself, gestates like a baby in the uterus and may even be born vaginally rather than bursting out. I'm almost fearful to think how this system is supposed to work. Once the infected male has become a mad monster, does he go on a rape rampage? If so, I'm glad it's left undepicted and undescribed. In any case, it looks uncomfortably as though the Mengineers specifically decided to use the female as a vector in the progress of their bio-weapons. They chose to use female fertility as a part of their attack. Sex is the weapon; the female is the delivery system.


Race & Monsters

The other thing about the intense un-sexual maleness of the Engineers is that it seems to suggest a monastic warrior brotherhood with fascist overtones.

Image / Reality.

The Engineers look like the camp, macho, pseudo-expressionistic and/or neoclassical fascist statues which decorated Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. They are utterly white, with blank eyes, as though made of marble. They represent a kind of aggressively male, body fascist ideal, with all their bulging muscles and rippling pectorals. Neoclassicism, as it was co-opted by fascism, reproduced the physiques of Michaelangelo's David and Adam as an actual physical ideal rather than as an emblem of human beauty, uniqueness and capability. Humanism became the worship of the allegedly biologically 'perfect', embodied in fascist ideology by the white, male, sexless warrior.

The Engineers tie into this in another way. They are like the giants of Norse myth as it was recycled by Wagner and then by later anti-Semites. There is something of Nazi mysticism about the story of the Engineers. They are the perfect giants from before history who supposedly founded all the life and culture of the human age, their chosen people being, of course, the Aryans. Vickers is a blonde ice maiden, which either implies the Aryan credentials of the Weyland family (if she is Weyland's biological daughter) or his fetish for the Aryan type as representing perfection (if she is an android of his design). David (interesting choice of name there) is also an image of superhuman white European 'perfection'. He dyes his hair blonde to seem even more Aryan and models himself on Peter O'Toole's portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, a chiseled white European hero who is presented as overcoming pain and taking upon himself leadership of the Arabs. (Incidentally, this paradigm - whitey becomes the leader of the natives - recurs in popular SF. Think Paul Atreides in Dune, or Jake Sully in Avatar.)

There is yet another element of the film that ties in with this.  The concentration on language.  David studies ancient human languages, explicitly including 'Indo-European'.  His fez-wearing, English-accented holographic teacher says "...whilst this manner of articulation is attested in the Indo-European descendants as a purely paralinguistic form, it is phonemic in the ancestral form dating back 5 millenia or more....".  I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this means anything, but it still specifically mentions Indo-European.  It is also possible that Sanskrit is explicitly mentioned or alluded to in the film.  There is some disagreement (here, for instance) most of which is well above my head.  But, in any case, David is studying Indo-European languages in an attempt to find some kind of 'root' language which will enable him to communicate with the Engineers, if they do indeed prove to be the progenitors of humanity. The implication is that the Engineers - our ancient creators or ancestors - will have bestowed language upon us. Our languages will be descended from them, just as we are... therefore, the further back into language David can go, the better his chance of finding some way of comprehending the language of the Engineers. And it works.

This is a reiteration of as aspect of the imperial ideology of Aryanism. To quote Richard Seymour in The Liberal Defence of Murder:

The Aryan idea has its origins in the heart of the British Empire. It was a result of the Company's growing control over revenue-collecting and the need to develop an understanding of the texts and languages of the colonized. Not merely a suppuration of imperialism, it became an important fact about the way the empire was organized, and eventually it was offered as the reason why the empire had come about. Essentially, it posited an Indo-European race based upon certain philological affinities between Sanskrit and the Greek and Latin languages. The thesis was that the world's populations could be divided into 'races' descended from Biblical figures - Aryan, Semitic and Tartar. The Aryan race had, it was maintained, invaded and inhabited India during the Vedic 'golden age' and formed a precocious civilization. The post-Vedic age in India had been a sustained period of degeneration: by contrast, the Aryans of Europe were in rude health. These categories not only provided an argument for empire; they also helped to cement British power with the caste system.

(Seymour's notes refer to a book called Orientalism and Race by Tony Ballantyne, which looks both illuminating and dauntingly scholarly.) Note, by the way, how Seymour refers to the East India Company as "the Company".

The concept of Aryanism later found its way into German Romantic occultism and, from thence, into Nazism. The whole idea of an Aryan 'master race' responsible for the primordial foundation of Western civilization - and just about all subsequent Western cultural achievement - is bound up with the theory that the European languages can be traced back, via commonalities with Sanskrit, etc., to a root language: Proto-Indo-European. The subsequent supposed 'degeneration' of the East as the West thrived was put down to several possible influences. In the 18th and 19th centuries, especially after upsurges of rebellion, the intellectuals of the British imperium (including the liberals, by the way) put it down to the malign influence of Islam, and this notion is a direct ancestor of modern liberal Islamophobia. In the even more delusional line of descent which culminated in Nazism, biological notions of Teutonic superiority came to the fore. The biological and culturalist variants of racism have never been as separate as some claim. And both are aspects of imperialist ideology.


Tropes & Implications

Now, this is really as old as the hills. In many respects, it is a slightly more elaborate version of the von Danikenism that has infected so much SF. There is a kind of Eurocentric paternal condescension built into von Danikenism. Ancient peoples, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and South America, are assumed to have been incapable of creating their own cultures and languages. This trope has been widely used in SF. In Doctor Who alone, it has appeared in 'Death to the Daleks', 'Pyramids of Mars', etc.

But it goes further. In Prometheus, the Engineers created all humanity and all human language from their own selves. This 'strong version' too has been utilised before, though possibly never quite so explicitly. In Quatermass and the Pit, we humans have race wars because we are the genetically engineered creatures of Martian insects who went in for ethnic cleansing.... but we don't speak a language descended from theirs, at least not explicitly.

In Prometheus it is not just ancient cultures that owe their technology, design sense, religion and language to aliens, it is all humanity - possibly all life in the galaxy. Taken literally, this obviates humanity's claim to have made its own history. The various revolutions of history - argicultural, urban, industrial - are simply developments towards greater and greater convergence with the culture of the creators. High technology becomes a telos, preset in our chromosomes. The impetus is the pattern within humanity that matches the Engineers. Human biological origins lead to human historical development from cave dwelling to space ships. Our Engineer DNA leads us to develop their language and their technology. The information in our genes makes us create the corresponding information in our culture. This is a kind of biological determinism (rampant in SF) that, through the issues mentioned above, ties the film to a view of human history which stems from the primal influence of godly progenitors who seem associated with patriarchy, imperialism and Aryanism. (By the way, it also explains the film's obsession with information. The star charts; the DNA sequences; the concentration on language and hieroglyphs; the way the two ships both project massive holographic displays that map out space, geography, cartography and architecture. The film depicts a stream of information flowing from the Engineers' genes all the way up to the humans' maps.)

To an extent then, Prometheus adapts an ideologically imperialist, patriarchal, sexist and racialist view of of human history and presents this as a truth. The truth underlying human biology and also, in a deterministic way, the history of human civilisation, is that all our information stems from a kind of Aryan master race who also speak Proto-Indo-European, represent camply fascistic ideas of physical perfection, seem like a monkish warrior brotherhood and look like an all-male group mortally threatened by any other gender but prepared to use rape as a weapon delivery system.

Yet it's hard to say that this makes the import of the text reactionary in a straightforward way. After all, the character of the Engineers seems to be genocidal, ruthless, cruel, sterile, entropic, capricious.... and they are also defeated by their own creations. Moreover, their ship is brought down by a black man and their last survivor (at least on their weapons planet) is outwitted by a woman. It doesn't look as though the film is asking us to worship them or admire them. And the film definitely expects us to be pleased when their plans are thwarted by those more sexually and racially diverse. (On a basic level, it's just nice to see a genre action movie where the black supporting character doesn't die in the second act.)

The Engineers are like the Eurocentric, patriarchal, white, imperial 'origin story' made flesh. They are the idea of the herrenvolk, literalised so that it may be rejected. Weyland's dying words imply that, as gods, they fall short. They have no answers, no meaning. Indeed, they seem to seek the eradication of meaning. They conceive of information - whether it be sexual reproduction or the mechanics of travel - as ways of erasure. They are an idea that seems inimical to other meanings. This inimical idea is then negated by the return of the meaning it tried to revoke and erase. This happens to them, so to speak, twice. They wish to eradicate the first meanings they created - life/civilisation on Earth and perhaps elsewhere - by creating new, deadly meaning in the form of weaponized sex... but this new meaning again turns upon them. (They are, by the way, quite reminiscent of Light - the white, male, authoritarian scientist/angel that wishes to eradicate meaning when it cannot be controlled and classified - in the Doctor Who story 'Ghost Light'.)

If the Engineers are white, male, imperial gods - and redolent of fascism, which is the ultimate syncresis of all these reactionary power principles - then it must be said that they hardly reflect well upon these principles. They are exterminators, stockpilers of biological weapons, purgers of meaning and information when it fails to meet their inscrutable and vindictive standards, etc.


Gardeners & Engineers

In Prometheus, just as in Christian mythology, we are banished by our creators to wander alone, even as everything that we are comes from them/Him. But Prometheus not only reiterates this mythology, it also does that other quintessential job of SF: it ponders the autonomous (alienated and fetishized) product.

It's no shock that SF continually tells stories which reiterate Genesis while also thinking about the alienation of humanity from the produce of their labour. Genesis is about the alienation of humanity from nature brought by the rise of agriculture, surplus and class. SF reiterates Genesis because it is the modern cultural genre that most directly addresses the unprecedented alienation brought by capitalism, modernity, industry and technology. Genesis is about the relationship between humanity and nature, altered by tools. SF is about the constantly changing and decaying and threatening relationship between humanity and the tools themselves as they careen out of our control.

Genesis is, as noted, hardly the first myth to tread this path. Prometheus brought fire to humanity. Fire is knowledge. Science. Technology. It is the first discovery, the first tool, the first weapon, the first product. In so doing, Prometheus dared to suggest not only that humanity should have knowledge, but also that humanity should have the ability to create. More than it destroys, fire transforms. It is the basis of chemistry. It reveals that matter may change its state, be split in various different states, when altered deliberately by humanity.

Prometheus is far from the first SF story to reiterate these matters. It treads directly in the footsteps of Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein was the 'modern Prometheus' because he revealed the next stage of what may be done with matter by human hands. Frankenstein fails because he does not take social responsibility for his creation. His 'son' is the first product-monster, the first great monster in the history of European culture that is manufactured. But it is only dangerous because it is abandoned, left without care or justice. Frankenstein's monster is the foundation of SF, which is obsessed with the autonomous product that threatens its creator, the manufactured monster. It is terrifying because it is, ultimately, our responsibility and our punishment.

We humans auto-generate. God is our attempt to infer a 'first cause' in this chain of auto-generation and to spiritually imbue it. Modernity is the rising of the productive forces to an unprecedented level, in which we may produce things of unprecedented power at unprecedented speed and in unprecedented numbers. Frankenstein the book appears at the interface of

i) our awareness of ourselves as biologically generated entities,

ii) our idea of ourselves as the creations of God, and

iii) our dawning realisation that modernity - industry, science, technology - allows us to create things more powerful than us, i.e. things more powerful than our bodies or even our gods (which are themselves our creations, after all).

Personally, we all encounter the book at this interface. This is because the book was written at the moment when European civilisation reached such an interface in history.

Humanity has always been quintessentially productive. The ability of our front two feet to leave the ground and become organs of manipulation is what drove the rise of the human brain. Humans are, above all else, the animal that makes tools. Capitalist modernity thus deeply effects our view of ourselves because it revolutionizes the way we produce. The products of modernity are - simply by virtue of their greater numbers, power and speed, if nothing else - more fetishized, more alive, more able to dominate us and run out of our control. They are more able, at least potentially, to mesh with our biology. Mary Shelley saw this potential meshing in the electrode that made the dead convict twitch and clench his fist. It is also implicit in the machine that steals labour, or which sucks the labourer into its embrace, needing to be set in motion by the workers and expressing this by encircling and towering over them. Today, the intrusion into biology becomes ever more clear. We now have cameras that can relay images directly to the brain, cloned creatures, and other wetware. And there are now more ways than ever in which the worker is towered-over and encircled by the hardware and the software.

Since Frankenstein, SF has harped on these issues. SF is a litany of robots, androids, gynoids, computer sentiences, of thinking weapons, of tools that rebel, or scientific experiments that lash back upon the experimenter. Within the settings of 'space' or 'the future' - which represent the dizzying possibilities of modernity, technology and science - the human as a producer of marvels is also a producer of nightmares than cannot be controlled. The line between the producer and the artifact is always being attacked, if only by some new technical innovation. This is the real reason why the robots attack us. This is why so many of the artifacts claim parity with humanity and demand this parity be accepted... and we're lucky if parity is all they want. Also, in SF humans seem to seek unity and merging with the machine, with its uncontrollable power. The machine seems alive; the living thing tends towards the mechanical. The boundry line between the territories is heavily disputed. Like any such border, there are wars over it.

Beyond its Freudian dimensions, Alien ponders these issues covertly.  Its ancient spacefaring aliens (the ones that created the derelict ship) seem inextricably both biology and technology, their pilot looking like an extrusion of beast and engine that has grown within a ship of bones and bulges and arterial corridors and vast hot stomachs in which parasites have laid their eggs.  The thing that is born from Kane's chest is a thing of tendons and pulleys, veins and cables, phallic symbols and skin criss-crossed with what look like the outlines of circuits.  What people often forget is that the 'Xenomorphs' live up to their assigned name.  Their shape morphs to resemble the 'other' in which they grow.  The Alien in the first film has taken on the bio-mechanical nature of the pilot on the crashed ship, and it has also taken on the humanoid size and shape of Kane.  The machine has penetrated the DNA and is now biologically heritable as a trait.  The 'Xenomorph' is the terrifying vehicle/product of this penetration.  And don't forget Ash, with his android-madness apparently triggered by resentment and frustrated sexual hatred, his injuries dripping hydraulic fluid that looks like milk or semen, his synthetic innards looking like white and blue plastic intestines.

Prometheus ponders the same issues overtly.  Just as Frankenstein displaced God by doing what God does, so the Engineers displace God by being what He is supposed to be.  But they also displace Darwinism, at least in the opinion of the biologist.  And they displace Frankenstein again because, by having created us artificially, they trivialize the achievement of Weyland in having made David.  They even displace Tyrell in Blade Runner and the crisis of simulation that his simulacra have triggered.  The simulacrum becomes nothing of the kind when the creator of the simulacra proves to be as engineered a thing as his simulation.  Deckard may have had ambiguous dreams about unicorns but Weyland knows, unambiguously, that he is as much a manufactured entity as David.  This state of having been manufactured is his new normality.  In this state of affairs, who cares that the simulacrum is indistinguishable?  The internal distinction that makes this collapse of distinctions significant has been neutralised.  Just as Natural Selection is overthrown by the revelation that all life is a product of technological engineering, so is Artificial Creation.  You can engineer life at all levels.  Creation dissipates.  The Engineers have manufactured micro-organisms and macro-organisms.  Microbes in the goo, all the way up to giant squids.  They have manufactured not only life but life-cycles.

Of course, these biological manufactoids get 'out of control'.  Creations always do in these tales.  That story goes back to Genesis and before.  Long before.  As noted, SF has continually retold these ancient stories as a way of grappling with the modern era of technological mass-production.  In Frankenstein, the process turns runaway because it is abandoned.  In The Island of Dr Moreau, the process turns runaway even though, possibly even because, it has not been abandoned.  As China Mieville puts it, Frankenstein says that we are failing the Enlightenment and Moreau says that the Enlightenment has failed.

The project of modernity is unstable, uncontrollable, dangerous because even the best efforts to control it founder on the autonomy of the product.  What we might, in political terms, characterise as Mary Shelley's 'reformist' project - drawn from her situation amidst Wollstonecraft (her dead mother, present in her life as stories and texts), Godwin (her father) and Percy Shelley (her husband) - is to nuture and care for the product so that it becomes socially responsible, an agent of justice rather than one of horror.  Frankenstein is her prescient caution of what will ensue if this is not done.  The product will annihilate us.  Mieville says that Frankenstein and Moreau mark opposite ends of the trajectory of Fabianism, mapped out in advance.  Moreau is the despairing terminus of Fabianism, written before Wells joined the Fabians.  Wells says (without knowing it) that, contra Shelley, the 'reformist' project to nurture and care for modernity is doomed to failure because the product will not be controlled, even with the best efforts.  The autonomous product - which is what industry and capital and the fetishized commodity look like in SF - is too much for us to control.

David in Prometheus is, yet again, the autonomous product.  At first, he seems tame because of his position.  He's been subject to a stringent attempt to integrate him into Weyland's Western, capitalist, patriarchal hierarchy.  Like Ash and Bishop, David is a white male.  Unlike those untrustworthy agents, he has been fashioned as an heir.  Weyland shows him preference over his daughter (if she is a biological daughter).  David is "the closest thing" Weyland has "to a son".  The daughter doesn't count.  It's like Dombey, forgetting Florence and putting "only child" on Paul's tombstone.  But still David moves beyond control.  On the contrary, he is in control of everyone else, all the way through the film.  The story happens because of David's agency and actions.  He is evidently not working for Weyland.  Little he does directly serves Weyland's interests.  When he finally does serve Weyland, he gets the old man killed.  How are we - or anyone - to know what David says to the Engineer before the Engineer kills Weyland with David's severed head?  David is unsurprised by Weyland's dying declaration.  David knew better than to expect answers from a manufacturer-god who has been attacked by his own autonomous product.

Prometheus makes the gods themselves into Engineers. Their name itself appropriates the tool, manufacture, industry, technology. It makes production into our master. We become the object of production not the subject. It expresses alienation. We do not make the engines. We are the engines. The engines we do make (David) are therefore the products of products, made because we were made to make them. Our evolution, our social and agricultural history, become products of alien engineering, made by us because we are machines designed to make them.

When we become the autonomous product (as we do in Prometheus), we become as alienated from our manufacturers as any commodity. But that isn't necessarily bad. Why should we care that something is 'out of control'? Whose control? And, as noted, in Prometheus our alien/ated manufacturers are Eurocentric gods. They are Aryan gods. Fascist myths come alive. Patriarchs and warrior elites. It is as though the problems identified in Frankenstein and Dr Moreau have finally been blamed on somebody. Should they be in control?

Is it conceivable - I ask this tentatively - that, in Prometheus, Hollywood has accidentally created a parable about the need for the alienated to revolt against the alien/ating gods of the era of technology? To reject a power that is conceptualised as the ultimate in white, male, imperialist, theocracy? To reject a power that is, furthermore, a personification of the alienation of humans from their ability to freely produce themselves, their lives, their sexuality, their language and their culture?

These are not profundities that were deliberately crafted into the script of this massively expensive bit of commercial entertainment. They are complexities, intimations and ironies that may be teased out of the text and willfully construed because the text stands as a garbled synthesis of many of the tropes of SF, a genre that has been pondering the issues of modernity for so long.

The best way of looking at it is to say that the film Prometheus itself is an autonomous product that seems to have partially and furtively escaped the control of its reactionary manufacturers.

But then, don't they all?



EDIT:  In the original version of this article, I wrongly used the term 'Caucasian' as a synonym for 'white' and/or 'European'.  I have amended this.  JG, 4/4/14