22

The Doctor, Romana and Duggan have found a painting hidden behind a panel in the basement of Count Scarlioni's house in Paris.

"It's the Mona Lisa!" says the Doctor.

"Must be a fake," replies Duggan.

The Doctor says he doesn't know what's currently hanging in the Louvre, "but this is the genuine article".

Duggan's astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa.  And another.  And another.  Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.

"They must be fakes," says Duggan again.

"The brushwork's Leonardo's," the Doctor asserts, "It's as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too."

"What," blithers Duggan, "on all of them?"

"What I don't understand is why a man who's got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh."  (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)

This is Duggan's area.  "Come on, Doctor, I've just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody's going to buy the Mona Lisa when it's hanging in the Louvre!"

"Of course," says Romana, "They'd each have to think they were buying the stolen one."

Because only 'the original' is valuable.  These collectors wouldn't even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display... they'd want it for - to use Duggan's phrase - the "expensive gloat".

But where does the value of the work of art lie?  In its 'authenticity'?  Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the 'authenticity' of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins.   Experts compete over the 'authenticity' of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the 'real' one.  Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their 'authenticity', and hence their 'value'. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)

In the modern age, the 'age of mechanical reproduction' as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way.  The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator.  The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter's role as portrayer of the patron's property and ideology.  Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the "aura" of a work of art (Benjamin's word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context.  The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world.  It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre.  It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists' photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels.  All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness. 

This very proliferation of copies is what makes the 'authenticity' of 'originals' so valuable as a commodity.  The original is now just that: an original.  It is something it never was before: the source of the millions of copies.  As John Berger puts it: "the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction."

Scarlioni is really Scaroth: a ruthless and callous and self-involved warlord who found himself splintered into fragments across human history, manifesting in many different ruling classes over the centuries, as we see during his moments of trans-temporal communion.  He is himself a system of copies, mass-reproduced, distributed across time and space, his uniqueness destroyed, each copy identical, none truly the 'original' because the 'original' Scaroth was destroyed... and all by technology.

He is a thoroughly modern man in some of his iterations, a man of power and property.  He's a rich, titled, bourgeois art-thief in 1970s Paris, selling foundational objects of Western civilisation such as Gutenberg Bibles to fund his capers.  He is one of the Borgias, or at least part of their coterie, acting as patron (i.e. employer and paymaster) to Leonardo, getting him to paint multiple copies of his portrait of Lisa Gheradini; copies which can then be hidden, so that his future self can unearth them.  "A very nice piece of capital investment" as the Doctor puts it... a view that Scaroth can only take because he is part of modernity, from the Early Modern period which saw the rise of banking and commerce, to Late Capitalism which sees the commercialisation of absolutely everything.  The irony which unites these eras along a single trajectory is the joke that, in this case, it was Leonardo himself who was payed/forced to begin the process of endless copying, reproduction and proliferation.  All the copies are 'real', sharing an aura, made valuable by the same labour power of the same man... yet this wouldn't cut any ice with the collectors of the 1970s.

Scaroth's plan to reunite himself depends upon raising enough money to fund time experiments... and he plans to do this by selling the Mona Lisa seven times over, each to a buyer who thinks he's getting 'the original' (which, in a way, they would be!).  But his scheme depends upon his ability to push humanity towards modernity - i.e. capitalism - because it is modernity that brings not only the necessary level of scientific and technical skill to make time travel possible, but also the rise of mass-reproduction, and thus the destruction of aura and the commodification of authenticity.  Scaroth thinks of himself as pushing mankind on the path of progress... but his planned terminus of this progress is his reintegration at the cost of our annihilation. 

Scaroth is a concentrated bundle of the nightmares of history.  Borgia and bourgeois.  Ruler, inscribing himself in the friezes telling the stories of the pharaohs.  Warlord.  "Insanely wealthy man."  User and abuser of science via his ability to fund it.  User and abuser of a wife who never really knew who he was underneath.  Bringer of technological doom.  Owner and destroyer of aura.  A suave, handsome shell; a staring eye and a mass of writhing worms beneath. 

He recalls another of Walter Benjamin's works: 'On the Concept of History', which is all about how the 'cultural heritage' is formed from the spoils of rulers who march onwards towards a future strewn with broken wreckage.

How Curses Work 3: That Whole Rabbits/Tennis Connection There

I always dimly assumed that Stephen Harris - whatever combination of real people he may pseudonymically represent - got the idea for a story about pyramids on Mars from all that guff about there supposedly being pyramids and giant monkey faces on Mars.

However, I learn that the 'face' and 'pyramids' on Mars were not 'discovered' until the NASA Viking missions, which didn't snap pictures of the region of Mars known as Cydonia (where all the pyramids, town squares and giant useless chimp portraits are said to be) until after 'Pyramids of Mars' was broadcast.

The whole pyramids / Mars thing is alive and well today, beyond Who-dom.  Viz, this species of utter balls:

This kind of drivel has not been stopped - or even slowed - by better and more detailed images taken by NASA since.

Here, for instance is an image of the 'pyramid', taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001:

Self-evidently NOT an artificial, architectural structure, I'm sure you'll agree.  (If you don't, you have no business reading this blog.  Go away immediately.)

Here, is the spooky 'simian' 'face' on Mars, imaged by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007:

Looks exactly like Roddy McDowell in Planet of Apes, doesn't it?

And yet, despite the fact that we now have very detailed images of this LUMP OF ROCK clearly showing it to NOT be a sculpted face, a brief (and depressing) googling session will turn up wonders such as this...

Sometimes, scientists must wonder why they bloody bloody bloody-well bloody bother.

But, yet again it seems, good old Who may claim to have 'got there first'.  Hinchcliffe and Holmes did the pyramids / Mars thing before anybody thought there were any Martian pyramids.  That's almost as good as predicting a woman Prime Minister and the existence of Jim'll Fix It... and it tops Bob Holmes' previous best of satirising Star Trek: The Next Generation before most British people had even seen Kirk and Spock.

Back before Viking, if Mars had structures (an idea which the Mariner missions had already dented), they were supposed to be canals... even though the guy who first talked about Martian canals was being metaphorical.  In Italian.

Of course, most of 'Pyramids of Mars' is a concentrated rip-off of Hammer's The Mummy with some von Daniken-esque seasoning... but still, it seems to have done something original.  "Egyptology and Mars", as Lawrence Scarman put it, before such a connection had appeared elsewhere.

(If anyone knows of previous connections, please do let me know.)

Even some of those who take the pyramid/face stuff seriously seem happily aware of Doctor Who's prior claim:

So - without wanting to become like one of those pompous bumholes like David Aaronovitch (yes, a relation) who write smug, chin-scratchy things about conspiracy theorists and homeopaths - what does this all mean?

After a cursory glance at many of the sites where people pick over photos of Mars looking for evidence of alien buildings, I'm very tempted to wonder about the readiness of our culture to associate Mars with the motifs of the ancient East.

Much of this stuff is just turgid von Danikenism.  But von Daniken was himself a practitioner (at the wacky end) of a patronising attitude towards ancient, non-European cultures... all of it based on the implicit assumption that there is something inherently puzzling about the idea that 'primitives' in Africa, Asia and pre-Columbian America could possibly create great art or architecture or technology out of their own culture without the intervention of alien astronauts.

This is strangely mirrored in the Nigel Knealey way in which 'Pyramids of Mars' essentially obviates the claim of ancient Egyptians to having created their own culture.  Apparently, they just copied all their gods and stuff from... you guessed it... from alien astronauts.

This sort of thing pops up again and again.  'Death to the Daleks' invokes the Exxilons to explain how Peruvians could possibly have built their own temples.  In 'City of Death', Scaroth claims that he "caused the pyramids to be built".  Meanwhile, he never claims that he gave Leonardo any ideas... apparently the white European fella from the early modern period can achieve his feats of cultural greatness without any help from old wormface.

Of course, there are an awful lot of social scientists who harbour Eurocentric assumptions that are, in their way, hardly a million miles away from such stuff... so I think I'll stop laying into soft targets like people who really think there are monkey faces on Mars, or dead TV script writers.

In the DNA

Happy birthday Douglas Noel Adams.  Shame about you dying, but still.

I hear there's a new TV series based on Dirk Gently.  I haven't watched it.  With is odd.  If someone had told me, even ten years ago, that there would one day be a Dirk Gently TV show and I wouldn't watch it, I'd have thought they were insane.

But look at this.

That's Dirk, apparently.

Funny.  It reminds me of something.

Oh yeah.

In the novels, Dirk is described as fat, ugly and toadlike with a wildly mismatched clothes, a long leather coat and a ludicrous red hat.

Still, that wouldn't make good telly, would it?

Adams was, in his way, as concerned with entropy as Bidmead.  He even has Skagra mention it in 'Shada'.  Entropy, of course, is the shuffling of everything into predictability.  The ultimate terminus of increasing entropy is the reduction of all things to homogeneous porridge.

Just saying.

Adams himself was very concerned with the corporate crapization of everything into synthetic banality.  It's a running concern of the Hitch Hikers books, from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to Infinidim Enterprises.

Funny thing is, if you were going to do Dirk as he's written, you'd probably end up with something not entirely unlike this.

Damn that Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser.

Pudgy, loud, obnoxious, loquacious, domineering, tasteless, grumpy.  Just add chain-smoking, pizza-addiction, slovenliness and a tendency to con rich old ladies.

Adams was sometimes very influenced by Doctor Who.  For instance, the cricket-commentator stuff in Life, the Universe and Everything is highly reminiscent of similar scenes in 'Volcano' (but funny) and Arthur Dent even finds himself faced with a gigantic stone image of himself on an alien planet in the second series of the Hitch-Hikers radio show, just a few years after pretty much the same thing happened to the Doctor.

I'm not accusing Adams of plagiarism, you understand, just of having been influenced... and no writer can work without influences.  Indeed, one view of writing is that it consists of the shuffling around and misinterpretation of what other people have already done in some way or another.  Nothing wrong with that.  And Adams was one of the most brilliant comic writers who ever lived, so....

But I've often wondered if the Sixth Doctor bequeathed a little something of himself to Dirk.  Was Adams watching the show in 1985-6?  The first Dirk book came out in '87.

Perhaps its just the elision that I created in my own mind when reading the Dirk Gently novels as a teenager.

In any case, happy posthumous birthday Douglas.  Thank you for 'Pirate Planet' - a deceptively angry story about imperialism and the cost of prosperity - and for co-writing 'City of Death'.  Sorry about what they did in that fucking film.  And sorry about that Artemis Fowl  bloke pissing on your grave while lighting cigars with banknotes.  And thanks for creating an award for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Fuck in a Serious Screenplay.  I remember reading that at about the age of 16 and laughing so much I nearly suffocated.