Insider Trading

Remember Lance Parkin's Big Finish audio 'Davros'?  It's quite good, isn't it... if far too long.  But he does some interesting stuff with Davros' backstory, subverting your expectations a bit.  (It's got really good music too.)

Interesting stuff in it.  The Doctor is depicted as wanting to stop the fall of the corporations.  And, actually, I can see his point. At the moment, anyway.  And as long as we're talking about a sudden, instant fall.   

Simply remove capitalism at the touch of a button today and human civilisation as it stands would fall, and the human race might die out... for much the same reason that the animals in a battery farm would all die if you murdered all the farm workers and the crime went undiscovered for weeks. As bad as it is, it is currently how things work. The system doesn't function efficiently, or for human benefit, but it does basically function, and it relies upon keeping a sufficient number of people alive, and a sufficient level of social wellbeing going, simply because it lives off its human livestock. So it keeps the livestock alive by propping up the support systems that keep them alive, at least as a mass. 

On the other hand, isn't the continuation of capitalism itself a kind of slow-mo apocalypse?  Is the damage currently being wrought upon the planet's ecosystem not going to add up to the end of the world?  Does not the system as it stands condemn millions to death every year, and billions more to an alienated and impoverished living death?  There's a case for saying that quotidian reality itself is a crisis, that our day-to-day world is not only leading us to armageddon but that, even if we survive it, that would not automatically for the best?  Couldn't we reasonably say that the fall of the system, even in flames and mass-starvation, would not be inherently worse than allowing it to continue?

It's tempting to not only appreciate the aesthetics of apocalypse, but to go beyond such an appreciation as an asesthetic statement and turn it into a political one.  As cold-blooded as this sounds, isn't it possible to see the end of the world - millions of deaths and all - as a price worth paying for the end of capitalism?  The end of the world... I mean the end of the world as it stands economically, politically, culturally, structurally... would at least be general.  As the man said: "the thing about chaos is it's fair".  It could be seen as having greater moral integrity to say 'let it all come down' as opposed to 'prop it up at all costs until we can change it piecemeal and as peacefully as poss'.  Propping it up doesn't have such terrible consequences for me and a lot of other comfortable Western leftists and liberals.  I'm not personally all that harmed by day-to-day capitalism.  I don't like it, but my outrage is mainly on behalf of others, and on behalf of humanity generally.  It's abstract.  Meanwhile, billions of other people (people elsewhere; people usually darker skinned than me, etc) suffer very non-abstract grinding consequences from the limping along of the status quo.  Calling for the total, immediate, unconditional fall of capitalism however, would at least be bound to effect me negatively to some degree.  I'd take some hits from that.  I wouldn't be saying to the shanty-dwellers of the global south "yeah, I know it's bad, and I sympathise... but it could be worse for all of us, so you just stay where you are, and your kids too."  Exactly what have such people got to lose?  For a lot of them the best answer is probably 'only their chains'.  Well, isn't it selfish of me to moralise about the disastrous consequences of a conflagration that would melt those chains along with my laptop?

One of the hardest concepts to get people to come to terms with is the concept of structural violence.  The violence that the social superstructure does to us (to varying degrees according to who we are and where we are) every day.  People occasionally contact me to helpfully inform me that communism killed so many millions of people.  They tend to understand what I'm getting at if I point out the need to historicise such things, and if I point out that not everything that ever called itself 'communism' is neccesarily something I'd support, etc.  They don't agree but they understand what I'm saying.  The issue of the structural violence of capitalism, however, is almost never understood, even as a proposition.  Point out that capitalism as a historical epoch or mode of production has caused the deaths of far more people than all the political movements which called themselves 'communist' put together and you get head scratching, followed by accusations of goalpost-moving.  The idea that a historical mode of production might strucuturally cause genocide upon genocide (through generating war, colonialism, imperialism, poverty, back-breaking labour, stress, depression, racism, misogyny, etc etc etc, over centuries) is an encrypted anathema to most people.  And you can't really blame people.  From day one we are trained to view events like the Nazi holocaust as a random outgrowth of a fanatical ideology, rather than as a result of the imperialism of a capitalist state.  And 'our' own genocides are not even talked about, so we never need to ponder whether the Irish potato famine was an outgrowth of the fanatical ideology of free trade.

I'm working, by the way, on the assumption that we're talking about capitalism as the reigning global economic system rather than as an 'ethos' or a 'method' or anything like that.  (It's by no means clear from 'Davros' that Parkin sees things in this way, but that's by the by.)  I'm talking about, in the Marxist language, capitalism as a mode of production and as a world system.  The idea of capitalism as a historical mode entails a social superstructure built upon the economic base (we won't quibble here about exactly how this works).  The social superstructure includes the state.  Indeed, that's a way of putting it warrantable only as what scientists call a 'model', an explanatory simplification, akin to saying that a bird's wing is 'designed to be aerodynamic'.  The capitalist state isn't a 'thing' that sits somewhere in a framework of other 'things', all of which taken together constitute capitalist 'society'.  The state saturates every aspect of life for people who live in a modern capitalist productive mode.  The state is fundamentally a mode itself, a mode within a mode, rather than a 'bit' of capitalism.

Back on the subject of survival, the capitalist class is more than ready to tolerate and fund a 'strong state' in those areas where the market alone can't do the job of keeping survival going.  Capitalism doesn't always need everyone to survive, and at times it explicitly needs people to die, but it basically depends upon the survival and continuance of humanity and human social reproduction... I mean, it basically is a system of social reproduction, given that (in the Marxist view) the basis of the social is the economic!  By that I just mean that 'economic', in the Marxist sense, refers to the mode whereby societies make the things they need in order to reproduce.  (I'm straying into a forest of tautologies here, but some tautologies do need to be pointed out or people don't notice them.)

Capitalism, via the state or otherwise, is equally capable of managing the production of mass death, when it needs mass death instead.  It is also prepared - as we see with people like Ian Duncan Smith - to use the state for purposes of structural mass homicide within the confines of a domestic state apparatus... when such strategies are a) a side-effect of an austerity project, or b) a salutary warning of the consequences of unwillingness or even inability to conform to ideological discipline.

The state doesn't seem to exist in Parkin's picture of a future effectively run by corporations.  The corporations themselves seem to fill the gap left by the state.  I think this is pretty unlikely, just as I'm sceptical of the kind of rhetoric which sees Late Capitalism as trying to restructure the world along the lines of a kind of neo-feudalism.  But, of course, Parkin isn't involved in futurology or actual prognostication.  He's playing the age-old (and thoroughly venerable) game of commenting on the present by exaggerating characteristics of it in the notional narrative space of 'the future'.  But this leads us to another interesting irony: the story critiques capitalism while the literal meaning of the text is that capitalism will endure well into the future.  

Again, this scenario is hardly an innovation on Parkin's part (I hope I don't sound like I'm snarking at him - that isn't my intention) so he can hardly be held responsible for it, as if it were a brand new technique which he pioneered for some new and unique purpose of his own.  It happens again and again in SF in general, and in Doctor Who in particular.  And why not?  As in 'Davros', it is a technique which can open up possibilities for critique ranging from the mild to the savage to the wistful.  'Davros' is fairly strong in its aesthetic contempt for corporations.  Parkin is especially strong on poking fun at corporate PR doublespeak and management jargon.  There are blissful scenes where Davros gets angry at being regaled with phrases like "blue skies initiative" and asks "Did you resurrect me merely to gibber at me?".  Meanwhile, the Doctor gets offered advice on corporate dress codes from an implant stuck in his ear which bullies him about protocol.  Hilariously, he is told (this is Six we're talking about, remember) that if he wishes to mark himself out as an individual within the office context he can choose from some pre-chosen novelty ties.  

But the point I was making was that the postulation of corporate capitalism as a triumphant and enduring system centuries hence, surviving to the point where corporations dominate human civilisation across a multi-planet galactic empire, actually bolsters capitalism more than it attacks it.  It buys into the lie of capitalism as a kind of transcendent and ahistorical plane of eternity.  It buys into the lie that the system, with all its iniquities, is so well adapted to 'human nature' that it will carry on as long as we remain fallen, selfish things.  It buys into the lie that capitalism can rid itself of crisis and reach eternal equilibrium.  Even the economic collapse that is threatened within the story comes from outside the system, from the extraordinary and malicious intervention of an ancient alien.  (He's also a fascist... remember what we were saying earlier about the systemic evils of capitalism being reframed as aberrant horrors caused by ideological fanatics?)  This isn't to say that simply depicting the survival of capitalism is a lie because it ignores crisis.  For all its inbuilt and inescapable systemic predisposition to crises, capitalism has survived.  Indeed, the crises are part of how it survives.  The expansions and contractions are like respiration.  It's quite true, I suspect, that capitalism (periodic crises and all) would probably be capable of maintaining itself as a system across different planetary societies.  It would be foolish indeed to set any kind of plausibility threshold on the capabilities of capitalism.  The system is incredibly hardy and dynamic, and is probably limited only by pre-existing material constraints.  Remove such constraints by opening up a new natural biosphere and I imagine capitalism would have a bloody good try at spreading into it.  However, it should now be clear to any thinking person that capitalism has set a very near date for its own fall simply because it is in the process of destroying the viability of what is currently its sole natural biosphere.  We're not anywhere near escaping this planet any time soon.  Meanwhile, the destruction wrought upon the natural environment by capitalist industry is inducing a terrifyingly near extinction event scenario.  I was saying earlier that capitalism basically keeps most of us alive because it needs us.  That's only a short term thing.  Capitalism (being an aggregation of competing capitals rather than a sentient group mind) is very bad at long terms.  It will exploit a buck today and fuck tomorrow.  Which is essentially what it has done to the entire planet and its ability to sustain human life.  Put plainly: we won't have time to colonize other worlds; we'll all die on this one first.

Sorry to bum you out, it's just that we do need, as a species, to get the grips with this truth.  And writing SF which satirises capitalism by setting stories about capitalism in the future really doesn't help.  It actually helps to push the idea that we'll survive our current environmental crisis and go out into the universe.  These stories help lull us into a false sense of security.  They're just one note in a symphony of false reassurance, but still.  There's a very real sense in which stories like 'Davros' (and 'The End of the World' and 'The Sun Makers', etc) contribute towards the likely destruction of all life on Earth.  Again I ask... is the instant and catastrophic fall really all that terrible a concept?

Also interesting to me is the way the audio play in question apparently believes - or at least portrays all its characters (including the Doctor) as believing - that the fluctuations of the market could (at least theoretically) be predicted with absolute precision with a sufficiently powerful bit of maths. This is not only reductionism and determinism of an extremely crude kind (a similar kind of crude reductionism and determinism to that which Davros is shown to indulge in when it comes to social Darwinism, etc) but also a form of commodity fetishism.  It imagines a social and man-made phenomenon like the market as working like natural, physical process such as fluid dynamics. Of course, it's by no means certain that this idea isn't just a chimera of Davros's diseased and reactionary brain, which the other characters credit because of his avowed intellectual power, or their own positionality within a corporate system.

Working on the assumption that the equation could successfully predict the stock market, it would presumably only give you a picture of what the stock market would do as long as you chose not to act on your foreknowledge.  I mean, that's kind of the inherent nature of all predictive calculations: to provide an ostensible snapshot of the future, based on the extrapolation of the present and past, with predictable interventions taken into account and sans any other unpredictable intervention which (by definition) can't be included as a variable.  If the prediction concerns a human organised system open to human intervention, the moment you act on your supposed foreknowledge you alter the state of the reality that has been predicted.  This would probably be more of a problem the more powerful the predictive modelling was.  The more exact its predictions, the more delicately balanced they are.  Of course, if only one person has possession of the equation, and this person alone intervenes, the model might well work for them.  They would be coming to the party late, so to speak.  Their interest in a certain sector of the market would effectively post-date the interest of other investors, even if the equation-user actually invested before the others.  There is a strange way in which the predictive equation (assuming it worked as well as Davros says it would) would actually warp the temporal sequence.  As perfect foreknowledge, it would be a little like time travel.  What this suggests to me is the irony of the Doctor's foreknowledge.  The Doctor has never, as far as we know, used his access to time travel to ascertain in advance the winning lottery numbers, or the winner of the Grand National, or the state of tommorrow's Dow Jones.  More the Monk's style, that one.  But he could do it, if he wanted to.  Effectively, the Doctor is already in possession of the power that Davros claims to wield in the form of his equation.  He could generalise future stock market knowledge obtained from voyages to the future, just as easily as Davros could generalise the equation.  According to this story, the Doctor has, and has always had, the power to bring down capitalism.

This may just be a restatement of something we pretty much knew anyway, but it does rather bring it into focus.  The Doctor is manifestly one of those comfortable people saying "sit tight and wait" to the people who have nothing to lose but their chains.  To his credit, however, and unlike many such people, he does actually get out there and help them make reforms and even revolutions from time to time.  There's also a case for saying that he, the eternal outsider, doesn't have the right to foist his solution upon us.  We should get to choose for ourselves if we want to cling to quotidian oppression in the hope of improvement, or to embrace the beautiful, beautiful, blood-splattered apocalyptic reset button.

Of course, in order to see the Doctor this way, you do have to buy into Davros' assertion that generalising the equation would bring down capitalism.  Firstly, as noted, this involves accepting his rampant reductionism and determinism.  Secondly, a stock market in which everybody has the ability to always predict what the stock market is going to do is very different from the kind of stock market the equation was designed to predict.  The equation's own effect, if generalised sufficiently widely, would cancel out its own power as a predictive tool.  The equation cannot possibly have the effect it supposedly threatens to have, even if - for the sake of argument - perfect mathematical predictions of random and socially contingent outcomes were even possible (which they aren't).  It simply must be an insane delusion on Davros' part, which everyone else is silly enough to believe because they're not economists. Or, more likely, because they are economists.  Mainstream neoclassical economics is about as intellectually and empirically secure as Creationism... and criticising Creationism is, as we know, like shooting fish in a barrel.  (Or rather, shooting fish that've grown legs and climbed out of a barrel.)

Now, this actually works! Corporate drones, CEOs, academics, liberal activists... none of them could be trusted not to credit the market with the ability to do, or be, the impossible.  But it's a little upsetting to see the Doctor going in for this kind of fetishizing of the market.  Especially when, by the logic of this same story, he manifestly has the power to destroy it.  The Doctor is caught in a paradox here.  If he fetishizes the market then he also has the power to destroy it.  If he refuses to fetishize the market, there's nothing he can do about it.  This is just the kind of paradox that capitalism generates and traps all of us in all the time.

13

"All the resting ones I have used were people of status, ambition," says Davros.

The quintessential 80s heroes.  They had themselves brought to his business, Tranquil Repose, when they wanted to pay to cheat the ultimate human frailty.  Death was a weakness they felt they had a right to buy off.  They paid to rest until they could be awoken and cured.  They would then resume their positions of power.  Money would conquer death.  Just as Timon and Marx knew, as the ultra-commodity in a system of total commodification, money has a fantastic and phantasmic power.  It can dissolve even the most drastic boundaries and oppositions.  It can even make the dead into the living.

Davros' clients had the same dream as all ruling classes.  Their ancient forebears had themselves buried in their finery, surrounded by their treasure, expecting to take it with them.  If they couldn't take it with them, they weren't going.  That was the logic behind the pyramids...  and those monuments to dead pharoahs helped bolster the power of the living ones.  They were a unified statement of divine and material power. 

When Jobel and Takis prepare the body of the President's wife, it looks as though they have put her in an Egyptian sarcophagus.  In the long shots of Tranquil Repose, the facility is made of pyramids.

But Davros has been harvesting the bodies of all these thrusting executives, billionaires and society ladies (the only people that are considered of any value by people like him) and turning them into Daleks. In this story, the Daleks have become Cybermen: zombies constructed from bodies eviscerated and infibulated by technology... except that Cybermen are labour power reduced to pure meat, whereas the Daleks are the rulers refined and rendered into fascist tanks.  Capital is still gothic.  'Dead labour' as Marx called it.  Zombie labour.  Undead labour.  The property created by past work, accreted and collected and owned, towering over the living labourer and sucking on his or her blood.  In Doctor Who, such dead labour, alienated from people until it becomes literally alien, fetishised until it comes alive, constantly meshes with the human body.  The Daleks are another expression of this.  In this story, this vampire capital feeds even on the bodies of the rich... but, for them, this is an opportunity for expansion.  It salvages them, the way fascism always salvages capitalism when it comes under existential threat.  It opens up new vistas and markets, the way imperialism always does.

Like Milo Minderbinder in the movie, Davros thinks the rich will get how this works.

"They would understand," he claims blithely, "especially as I have given them the opportunity to become masters of the universe!"

Masters of the Universe was a range of mega-successful toys in the 80s, one of the quintessential commodities of the decade.  Tom Wolfe would adapt the phrase to describe the new bucaneers of Wall Street in his satire The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Those people made money even more phantasmic, floating it around the world in clouds of information, making it a spirit... but one that still commanded material things and living bodies.

The Doctor wonders what will happen to those deemed unworthy of promotion to the top level of Davros' new corporate/fascist regime.  The non-Masters of the Universe; those bodies who fail in the marketplace of Dalek ideas.

"Will they be left to rot?"

No such luck.

"You should know me better than that, Doctor," says Davros, "I never waste a valuable commodity."

Again, human bodies as commodities.

"The humanoid form makes an excellent concentrated protein," he continues, "This part of the galaxy is developing quickly. Famine was one of its major problems."

Needless to say, this wasn't because there was not enough food.  Under global capitalism, famines are allowed to happen essentially because the market is a shitty way to distribute resources.  You can make more profit selling too much food to a few than you can selling enough food to a lot.

"You've turned them into food?" splutters the Doctor, "Did you bother to tell anyone they might be eating their own relatives?"

"Certainly not," replies Davros, "That would have created what I believe is termed consumer resistance."

He learns the rules of business fast, this parochial fascist scientist.  His background allows him to mesh himself seamlessly into the pyramidal structure of the corporation, with its absolute apex and its total lack of accountability.  Chomsky says that corporations are "pure tyrannies", among the most 'totalitarian' organisations ever devised.  I might quibble with his analysis here and there, but he describes something utterly real.  Davros knows how the propaganda model works too: the provenance of commodities, and the brute pragmatism of power, needs to stay behind closed doors.  Davros keeps himself hidden behind a decoy, in a cellar, at the centre of a labyrith, under the presentable foyer and the marble corridors of his going concern.  He hides himself and his name behind his connections and deals.

In his crude way, Davros has literalised something about the nature of capitalist relations in the age of consumerism.  Consumerism, in its material form as advertising and branding, is cannibalistic.  It feeds us back to ourselves as images.  We consume the human form - suitably treated and cooked-up and filled with unnatural additives - all the time, in advertising, fashion, celebrity culture, dolls in shop windows, TV, movies, pornography.  We consume media ideas about how to look, how to dress, how to eat, how to speak.  We eat ourselves all the time, every day, as a meal prepared for us by the hidden and the powerful

Davros has adapted to capitalism so well that he has realised one of its strategies into real, literal, material terms.  He has fed us to ourselves.

Private Ownership of the Means of Inhumation

or 

Sex, Death and Rock 'n' Roll - Part 2

(Part 1 can be found here.)


Some disjointed observations about 'Revelation of the Daleks'; fragments of a larger and uncompleted essay that's been in the draft drawer for ages... just so that I can say I've served up more this month than an off-the-cuff whinge about how much I hated P.E. lessons.


Hang the D.J.

He skulks in his private studio. He almost prefigures RTD’s quasi-fan characters. He’s a geek, a dweeby enthusiast. He sits alone, watches TV, greets a visitor very shyly and comes alive when given a chance to enthuse about his pet obsession: the old style D.J.s and music of America. When he learns that Peri is really American, he reacts like… well, like a Who fan meeting Nicola Bryant. You get the feeling that he might ask for her autograph. He’s almost a parody of the nerdacious loner. He has little or no direct contact with any of the other characters. Apart from Peri, he’s only ever seen with Jobel – and they don’t speak to each other. One gets the sense of someone asocial and detached, always watching the goings on around him but never getting personally involved. In a way, he’s like an anti-Davros. Both are holed up in their personal hideaways, watching everything via cameras, commenting on the action like choruses… but from different perspectives. Where Davros schemes and snarls and giggles at the suffering of others, the D.J. takes the piss out of his place of employment and plays around with words, songs and personas.

(There are a lot of these chorus/voyeur characters in 80s Who, from Arak and Etta in ‘Varos’ up to the culmination of the trend in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, which sees the Doctor himself become a member of the audience watching his own adventures on television!)

The other thing the D.J. does is play. He plays records, plays at disguise, plays at dressing up, plays at accents and attitudes and styles. This seems to be partly for his audience and partly for his own amusement. He comes over as a childman, an innocent. He’s not unaware of “the humanoid female form” but mentions it to “those of you who appreciate” it. He’s not personally interested, or his desire is submerged, or he’s too shy. His reaction to Peri is appreciative, but the oily, wandering-handed, heavy-breathing, harassing lust of Jobel is a counterpoint that throws the D.J.’s childish reaction into sharp relief.

Mind you, he’s not so innocent that he doesn’t know what’s going on and he clearly has no vociferous loyalty to his employers. He finds the notion of bodysnatchers making away with a cadaver rather funny and makes no effort to report them to his superiors. His off-mic comments to himself about George’s wife show that he’s savvy about the kinds of people his workplace caters for. To him, Tranquil Repose is a job. Okay, it’s a job that he has somehow managed to warp around his own personality and in which he plainly finds some pleasure, but essentially this guy is a working stiff.

In fact, this story is full of working stiffs (who work with stiffs). Almost all the relationships are economic. They are relationships between business partners, between boss and secretary, knight and squire, hitman and client, owner and manager, manager and staff. Even the relationships that are not blatantly exploitative are still tainted by their economic nature. Vogel plainly performs more than secretarial duties for his Sunset Boulevardy dominatrix boss, but her reaction to his death is to complain – albeit sounding shocked - about the difficulty in finding such good help. Apart from Peri and the Doctor, and the friendship that Peri strikes up with the D.J., the only entirely non-economic relationships are between Natasha and Gregory (they talk like dissidents or rebels) and between Natasha and her father.


The Capitalist Way of Death

All these economic relationships (with the exception of Orcini and Bostock, who seem like relics of a feudal order) look like they’re based on wages. Wages are never specifically mentioned (unless you count Orcini’s fees... which I don't because they're payment for services) but it is implicit that Takis, Lilt, Vogel, etc., are all being paid for turning up in the morning. Even Jobel is clearly a senior employee rather than the proprietor. These employment relations, along with the fact that Kara and Davros are both clearly in private business, place the story in a highly capitalist world.

Doctor Who doesn’t always depict the future as capitalistic. Many Who stories set in the future (or on other planets) seem to show a post-economic world in which people just exist in societies which lack forces of production, distribution and exchange (Marinus, Atrios, Karfel); or which achieve such things by a kind of tacit, quasi-magical, hyper-technological advancement (Gallifrey... unless, as I suspect, the unseen Shabogans do all the actual work); or through some dastardly trick which becomes the focus of the plot (Zanak, the Elders); or through the providence of some hidden exploiters (the Krotons, the Macra); or the dirty work is done by a slave class (Inter-Minor, Thoros-Beta, Kaldor City). Of course, this is because the writers are less interested in intricate worldbuilding than in creating drama or developing their big concepts. Who comes from myth, children’s fiction and B-movies: nobody is interested in who manufactures the stirrups for the horses in Narnia, or how much they get paid for doing it. In historicals and present-day stories we occasionally get some sense of economic relationships. We are, at least, more likely to meet characters with jobs (like Anne Chaplet) or with executive positions (Hibbert of Auton Plastics for example).

But sometimes, Doctor Who takes us to future societies with recognisable forms of economic organisation. Sometimes it is feudalism, as on Tara and the planet in E-Space where the Three Who Rule lord it over their peasants. But occasionally we encounter some of the recognisable hallmarks of capitalism: wage labour, industrialised or technological capital in private hands, large scale financial transactions, mass media and conspicuous consumption. Every one of these markers is to be found in 'Revelation of the Daleks'.

Necros is obviously part of a wider interplanetary economy which is based on the capitalist mode. Davros appears to have somehow bought-out the old management of Tranquil Repose. He owns (or at least controls) the means of inhumation. He presumably pays the wages of the people that work and train there, including the D.J. who represents the media, supposedly relays news and current events to his 'listeners' and appears as a selling point in the advert that is played for the Doctor and Peri. Davros is involved in a direct financial partnership with another firm, Kara's food producing company. He funds his work (R&D, one might call it) with investments from Kara alongside the profits that TR presumably makes from selling funerary services. The death business is big money for him, just as it is in our society. Anyone who has read Jessica Mitford's classic The American Way of Death will know that the funeral industry was (and is) rife with abuses and swindling; moreover, it is a mass service industry (no pun intended). It is an emblem of the capitalistic way in which our basic needs and feelings are appropriated by business, reconstituted and then sold back to us. It is thoroughly consumerist. Your average grieving consumer gets stung, in their most desperate and vulnerable hour, for spurious extras like airtight coffins (which often explode owing to a build up of gas within) or velvet pillows upon which the oblivious dead can eternally lay their unfeeling heads. Meanwhile, the financially overloaded - remembering, perhaps, the old dictum "if I can't take it with me, I don't want to go" - can (theoretically) stump up for any bizarre posthumous luxury that their hearts desire. You can have your ashes shot into orbit. You can pay of a private mausoleum. Wanna be frozen in the hope of one day being defrosted, cured and welcomed back to the head of the boardroom table? There are companies that claim to be able to provide this service... well, they can freeze you after you're dead anyway. The rest of it... well, you're gambling on future technology that can both thaw you out and then cure death... and on anybody in the future thinking it would be a good idea to bring back someone stupid and narcissistic enough to have themselves frozen in the first place. And then there's the concern raised in 'Revelation': would the living want their dead/frozen rivals to be resurrected? There's an urban legend that Walt Disney was frozen and stored under Disney World. Imagine how the current President and CEO of the Walt Disney Company would feel if told that Uncle Walt was ready to be defrosted and resume his old position. I imagine he or she'd be quite keen to keep the old man on ice.


Consumer Resistance is Useless

One of the wider points here is to do with the consumerist cycle of representation, which latches on to human needs, commodifies them, rebrands them, turns them into images and ideology, and then feeds them back to the consumer via the media. The strange thing is that, in the process, the needs themselves are lost in all sorts of ways. The human need to take in liquids, the human desire to take in pleasant-tasting liquids... this is the basis of soft drink adverts, but what are soft drink adverts really selling? Anyone who has read Naomi Klein's No Logo - and the literature that followed in its wake - will be familiar with the fact that many corporations do little actual production. The dirty task of actually producing the commodities is farmed out to other companies, often based in Third World countries with no pesky labour regulations, where they can work the local paupers longer and for less money, often at the sharp end of vicious bullying, sometimes corralled in virtual concentration camps. The corporations then buy the products that are produced under conditions of virtual slavery and flog them on the Western market for inflated prices. The process has many advantages for capitalists. The less they personally spend on production, the more surplus value they pocket when their products are sold... the more domestic jobs they destroy (or threaten to destroy) the more they can blackmail their remaining domestic workers to accept lower pay, longer hours, harder work and lower job security... and they can carry on selling their primary product: brand images. That's what corporations tend to produce and market now: brand images and identities. They market the idea that certain brands (and their products) embody and thus confer certain values and philosophies. This is why adverts try to associate their products with desires, aspirations, trends and ideas that are seen as popular. One of the ironies here is that, while the images in adverts are often designed to appeal to our basest urges or our prejudices, they can also reflect values diametrically opposed to the values actually practiced and pursued by the corporations that produce them. Clothes manufactured under ghastly conditions by bullied, repressed, half-starved, overworked, brown-skinned unpeople are marketed to the Western consumer with inspirational images that reflect public concerns like anti-racism, egalitarianism and rebellion against authority. Gorgeous models throw molotov cocktails at menacing riot police while backed by 60s tunes about revolution; hunks rescue innocent Asian children from oncoming fascist tanks... be like these inspiring (sexy) heroes, the ads imply, by wearing the same mass-produced, overpriced jeans.

Okay, I've galloped off on a hobby horse... but there is a point here. In the age of the mass media and branding, consumerism is cannibalistic. It makes us consumers not only of products, but of our own images. It feeds us images of ourselves, altered and doctored to fit a certain agenda, but recognisable as us, or as the kind of people we want to be, or as the kind of people that they want us to think of as normal. They sell us images of beauty and we consume them, internalise them and they become irrational yardsticks by which we measure each other. They sell us ourselves to consume.  Even our anti-corporate sentiments are sold back to us.  Our green sentiments are sold back to us by BP.  And all too often, we gobble them up with relish.  It should not be hard to see where 'Revelation of the Daleks' hooks into this.

An Epic Whinge

A review of 'The Stolen Earth' / 'Journey's End'.  This is from the old site; heavily edited and partly rewritten.  Not much politics in this.  It's mostly about what I see as shortcomings in dramatic values.  


So, it’s the end of the season again and it’s time for the Earth to be invaded again, by semi-mechanical aliens again, some of them flying down from the sky to shoot the people who are conveniently milling about in the streets like targets. Again.

Meanwhile, the obligatory soldiers are dying as they fight their obligatory pointless last stand while General Dempsey (or is it Makepeace? I never could remember which was which) gets to say things like “Ladies and Gentlemen… we are at war!” (how original) and hand Martha the obligatory Ominous Bit of Unexplained Technology, which this week has a name that sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel.

But all that stuff is happening in the background, ceding the foreground to the Meeting of the Spin-Offs.

The fact that we are watching the linkage of bits of a franchise (rather than, say, characters meeting each other) is underlined by the fact that they meet on a screen, as though Rose (who’s been off doing all the stuff that would’ve constituted Rose Tyler: Earth Defence if it’d got made) is watching four different Doctor Who programmes at once.

But what is the point of all this multi-show and multicontinuity convergence? ‘The Stolen Earth’ is behaving like it is trying to “sum up an era” (i.e. the last four years) in order to provide a fittingly epic swansong for David Tennant. In fact, it seems almost as if this vast fanwank panorama has been created in order to gull the unwary (all those people who hadn’t seen the pics from the filming of the Christmas special) into thinking that a proper regeneration really is on the cards.

The approach taken by ‘The Stolen Earth’ might be the kind of thing that the general public would expect from a Tennant bow-out. A ‘Greatest Hits’ medley before the curtains come down. How strange that ‘Rose’ insisted on behaving as though the fans didn’t exist and now ‘The Stolen Earth’ treats the entire nation like fans, expecting them to put up with acres of technobabble and to be thrilled by the reappearances of Harriet Jones, Captain Jack, Sarah-Jane, the Judoon, etc., etc., etc. They are even expected to be thrilled by the return of Davros. Even the continuity announcer talked about “the return of an old enemy”. Hearing that, those millions of non-fan viewers watching probably expected to see the Master turn up, or Margaret Slitheen, or the Dalek Emperor.

The only explanation seems to be that RTD & Co. are actually thinking of their viewership as all being fans. That’s why they can pitch ‘The Stolen Earth’ as David Tennant’s Epic Last Story (Or Is It?), Featuring All Your Old Favourites.

Thing is… from amidst this vast collision of back-references, something bigger does emerge. A feeling of unity. And, with it, a feeling of mythic hugeness. Suddenly, Doctor Who seems aware of its vastness and seems to be trying to unify its disparate but interconnected parts. Sadly, the feeling is very superficial and entails the further fetishisation of Our Hero, shown in the way people are talking about him in hushed tones when he's not around.

The end result? A sort of volcanic eruption of a story, caused by the tectonic plates of three linked TV shows (and at least two more untelevised ones, if you follow me) smashing into each other and grinding against each other over a fault-line.

And what a massive fault-line it is. A great big crack up which the programme is disappearing.

The thing that could've made the first episode worthwhile was a follow up episode that closed into a smaller and more intimate drama about people with conflicting viewpoints trying to survive. Not 'Midnight' all over again, but something which nonetheless played to RTD's strengths as a writer about people trapped together in boxes.

Sadly, we got an avalanche of mindless technobabble in the service of a contrived and clunky plot that was, despite some nobler intentions, fundamentally about things exploding.

Davies began in 2005 by trashing the paradigm of Doctor Who as a culty programme about monsters and technology and instead tried to make it human drama against a sci-fi backdrop. How strange that he should end his tenure as show-runner with a dramatically inert orgy of Sawardian narrative spaghetti and Douglas Adamsesque technogobbledegook. And, continuity. Lots and lots of continuity.

There is a quite breathtaking disregard for how stories work. Previously unmentioned plot devices pop up by the dozen in order to do things that don't need to happen, which mean nothing and which don't lead anywhere. Sudden eruptions of apparently improvised nonsense materialise in order to subvert the Doctor’s regeneration, create a second Doctor, turn Donna into a demi-Time Lord, and so on.

Mickey and Jackie are brought back for no reason. There wasn’t anything done by Mickey and Jackie that couldn’t have been done by Gwen and Ianto, or more properly by Wilf and Sylvia, but they’d all been clumsily written out or sidelined in order to make space for… Mickey and Jackie.

The sidelining of Wilf is a particular shame. The Cribbmeister really was the jewel of the season and I did enjoy seeing him running around a Dalek-infested London in ‘The Stolen Earth’. I kept on expecting to see adverts for Sugar Puffs behind him.

The TARDIS ends up crammed with pointless passengers in a way not seen since the limp final scenes of ‘The Awakening’. The actual story (regarding the threat to the universe and other little things like that) ends ages before the credits in order to let the Doctor say “emotional” farewells to passenger after passenger. There simply wouldn’t be time for this sort of thing, plus all the febrile technobabble, plus the ridiculous sequence in which the TARDIS tows the Earth home, plus the nonsense with the Osterhagen Thing (of which, more later), plus all Davros’ sub-Lecter taunts, etc., etc., etc… except that RTD was by now in a position to get an extra 20 minutes of episode length into which it can all be crammed.

As for Donna’s destiny… well, the companion gets infused with yellow energy that gives her special powers that enable to her save the day when all seems lost; this event ripples back through time causing peculiar foreshadowings to occur in the previous episodes of the season. Heard that before somewhere.

Thing is, Donna's thunder is stolen by the totally unnecessary duplicate Doctor, who seems to be in the episode solely so he can go back to the alt-universe with Rose and become her Time Lord-shaped love toy. We don’t need the duplicate Doctor. He does nothing for the plot that a Gallifreyanised Donna couldn’t do. Apart from doing the genocidal dirty work for the real Doctor (a particularly weasley cop-out), he’s just another flapping indulgence in a whole script full of them.

At least the Osterhagen Wossname gave us the only really witty and pointed sequence in the episode, the scenes in Germany with Daleks gliding around the sylvan birthplace of legally sanctioned Nazi anti-semitism, shouting at the locals in German!

Sadly, this whole sequence seems like an afterthought. The reference to Nazism is clearly deliberate (the Osterhagen Thingummyjig could’ve been anywhere, it didn’t need to be Nuremberg) and links up to the running themes of ‘Midnight’ and ‘Turn Left’ about xenophobia and hysteria, but in the middle of ‘Journey’s End’ it just floats there, looking promising but not really doing anything. The Daleks’ plan is, presumably, predicated upon their conviction that nobody in creation deserves to live except them, but at no point did the episode try to bring their ultra-racist ideology to the fore.

There was, seemingly, an attempt to hint at a sort of sub-theme regarding apocalyptic human destructiveness. Nuremberg has inescapable connotations. Osterhagen turned out to be a load of nuclear weapons (tediously enough). But, sadly, none of the hints add up anything particularly interesting or intelligible… which is a shame because the episode tries, several times, to hark back to one of the most sophisticated and intelligent of all classic Who stories: ‘Genesis of the Daleks’. We have a Wisher-style Davros who once again meets Sarah-Jane. Shame Sarah says something silly about having “learned how to fight”. She knew how to fight in ‘Genesis’! She organised a slave rebellion, bravely endured torture and egged the Doctor on to commit genocide!

Audios aside, in ‘Journey’s End’, Davros was probably at his best (at least as a character in his own right) since his first appearance... though that isn’t to say he was particularly interesting. Julian Bleach gave a superb performance and relished those few scenes in the story in which Davros is allowed to do anything vaguely interesting, i.e. the scenes in which he taunts the Doctor for his alleged hypocrisy. Once again, Davros becomes worthwhile (just about) whenever he starts talking like a person with a viewpoint. The view of the Doctor that he expresses is quite fitting. To him, the Doctor is a war criminal with a sanctimonious line in false pacifism.

Davros accuses him of taking “ordinary people and turning them into weapons” and “murderers”. But, the thing is, Davros doesn’t really have much of a point. He contradicts himself by earlier accusing the Doctor of being a mass murderer. Well Dav, which is it? Is the Doctor a coward who gets other people to do the dirty work for him or is a he “a Time Lord who butchered millions”? You can’t have it both ways. The Doctor’s response to this incoherence is to go all wobbly-lipped and stare at the floor having sad flashbacks.

If the episode is to be anything more than just a load of CGI explosions and continuity porn, then this scene has to amount to something. Davros has to have a point and the Doctor has to have his nose rubbed in it. This is obviously what the episode is aiming for, but it doesn’t happen.

The Doctor’s soul is revealed, we are told, when the “Children of Time” appear and threaten to blow lots of people up. This, supposedly, reveals the Doctor’s inner darkness by demonstrating how he takes harmless people and makes them killers. Davros then lets loose with some spiel about the Doctor “never looking back because he dare not, out of shame.” But shame about what? Turning people into killers? Very little evidence of that in those anguished flashbacks. Harriet might kill the Sycorax but she does so without the Doctor’s prior knowledge or approval. Jabe doesn’t kill anyone. The Controller of the Gamestation organises the harvesting of humans for the Daleks; it’s nothing to do with the Doctor. Lynda doesn’t kill anyone. That bloke from ‘Tooth and Claw’ doesn’t kill anyone. Mrs Moore doesn’t kill anyone. Neither do any of the people in ‘Love & Monsters’, or the Face of Boe! Chantho tries to kill the Master entirely on her own initiative. Astrid kills Max Capricorn, I grant you. Luke kills a load of Sontarans but the Doctor doesn’t ask him to. To be honest, ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ was so boring that I can’t remember if Jenny kills anyone or not, but if she does then it’s because she’s bred for war. River kills no-one (up to this story anyway). The Stewardess from ‘Midnight’ is prepared to commit murder without needing the Doctor’s persuasion or approval, and – apart from herself - she only kills Sky, whose consciousness is probably already dead.

So what, exactly, is the Doctor remembering with such shame. A trail of deaths? Okay, well, that means that the focus has shifted from the Doctor’s hypocrisy in making people into killers (which seems a weak charge on the basis of the evidence so far) and is now on how many people die when he’s around. But, once again, the Doctor is personally responsible for few of those deaths recalled by the flashbacks. It might be sad to remember all those dead people, but I can’t see any reason for the Doctor to feel ashamed.

It’s also interesting that some people are left out of the Doctor’s quivering, angsty, flashback-fit. He forgets about Morvin and Foon and Bannakaffalatta. He also forgets about Gwyneth from ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Funny that she should be left out, because he’s probably more directly responsible for her death than he is for any of the other people in the flashbacks.

Then there’s his failure to remember all the people who died because he drew the Family of Blood to Earth. Surely, if the Doctor was going to feel genuinely conscience-stricken, he ought to be thinking about that poor little girl with the red balloon.

The unfortunate fact is that this sequence, as it stands, fails to say anything meaningful about the character of the Doctor. All it really does is underline the annoying frequency with which people in nu-Who suddenly decide to sacrifice themselves in order to end plots and force the audience to mist up.

Moreover, none of this ersatz soul searching is followed up. There is no scene in which the Doctor is forced to confront a choice that undermines his sense of himself, as in ‘The Parting of the Ways’ or, far more intelligently, in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’. The issues are left unresolved, though not in the same way that ‘Genesis’ refuses to give pat answers to its own knotty questions.

‘Journey’s End’ weasels out. The real Doctor doesn’t have to decide to kill all the Daleks (again) because his double does it for him. Martha’s situation with the Osterhagen device is potentially interesting. In a sense, she’s in the same situation as the Doctor in ‘The Parting of the Ways’: should she destroy the human race in order to end their suffering? But she isn’t forced to make the choice. She is transmatted up to the Crucible for the Big Confrontation… meaning, in practice, to stand around like everybody else until Donna and Doctor2 sort things out with technobabble!

Donna’s doom, being forced to once again become her former self, was probably the best part of the episode - the harshest, most disturbing, most uncompromising part. The only bit with any guts.

So, the season 4 finalé proved not to be a big farewell party for the tenth Doctor, with all his old friends invited; instead it looked like a big farewell party for Russell T Davies, with all his old characters invited. Trouble is, it’s a self-organized party and, like all self-organized parties it’s rather embarassing.

Genesis, Genes, Histories, Holocausts and Hiroshimas

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

- William Shakespeare, Richard III

Science-fiction is the reiteration of myth and legend in the age of science and technology, i.e. the capitalist age, which is also the age of industrialised imperialism and fascism, of assembly line genocide and nuclear warheads dropped on civilian population centres. No wonder then that sci-fi often retells the history of the 20th century in terms of apocalypse and revelation; that’s to say in terms of Christianity, the dominant mythological schema of Western culture. ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ fuses various Christian myths (most especially, the myth of the creator who creates in his own image, endows his creation with free will and is then turned upon by them… but also the fiery last judgement) with a stream-of-consciousness semiotic representation of Nazis, holocausts and Hiroshimas.

We are shown a world in which the Daleks become possible. A world reduced to two decaying cities fighting each other to extinction for no reason that either seems to understand (which reiterates the myth of Greece and Troy). The Kaleds and the Thals are practically indistinguishable (except for their hair and colour schemes... who knows, maybe it all started as a war between the blondes and the brunettes?). The Thals are just as brutal, just as racist. Who's to say they didn't start it? Does it even matter? There is clearly no right or wrong here, no goodies and baddies. The Thals plot genocide, dirty war and the slaughter of those they consider inferior. As such, the Daleks are almost a just punishment upon them. In fact, since Davros and his creatures kill nearly all the Kaleds too, you can look upon these monsters as a kind of judgement visited upon both races for their thousand year war. Divine justice or the revenge of history; it depends if you look at this as history or myth. Of course, it’s both – just like a Shakespeare history play.

A. P. Rossiter called Shakespeare's Richard III an "angel with horns", pointing out that his devilish crimes bring down a kind of divine purification upon an England sullied by usurpation and war. In his evil, he's almost a force for good. Davros is like this. He's very like Richard. Twisted and deformed but able to turn his deformity to his advantage; charismatic and commanding despite being lame and crippled; able to charm and trot out professions of duty while inwardly seething with malice; narcissistic and vain; thirsty for power; driven by a fierce and implacable intellect; driven through ambition to self-destruction. There are even echoes of Shakespeare in some of the dialogue. "Conscience is a word that cowards use" says Richard. To Davros, conscience is an affliction amongst other "creeds of cowards".

I wonder if it's entirely an accident that at least one bit of Davros' dialogue sounds like it's in iambic pentameter:

"That power would set me up above the gods
And through the Daleks I shall have that power."

In ‘Genesis’, Davros is possibly the greatest Doctor Who villain. This has nothing to do with him being “iconic” (oh God, how I am starting to hate that word) and everything to do with the fact that he seems like a person, like a man with a plan that has grown from his ideological convictions and his twisted psychology, rather than just a monster. One can debate him and get intelligible answers. He has an outer shell of rationality. He’s an intellectual, with philosophical views rather than just crazy schemes. He has a delusional but internally-consistent viewpoint. He’s a proper psychopath rather than just a run-of-the-mill mad scientist. He displays behaviour that would be recognisable to a criminal psychologist: narcissism, lack of empathy, paranoia, grandiosity, mood swings. He isn’t the kind of snickering nutcase that usually crops up in Who. He isn’t Soldeed.

The key thing about him is that his motivation is ideological and his ideology is not simply the pseudo-fascism practiced by so many Doctor Who villains. When Davros speaks, he sounds like the real Nazis did (at least when they were giving speeches). Somebody (Robert Holmes I suspect) gave him credible dialogue that genuinely echoes the Nazi mindset. Davros certainly rants, but his rantings are also eloquent statements of ruthless social-Darwinism and political opportunism, of crackpot but internally-consistent Nazi conceptions of universal racial struggle. Davros is a sign that the series’ long-running fascination with Nazis has finally come of age. At no point (in this story anyway) does he let out any maniacal laughter. He is more than just another Morok.

Aside from Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Hitler of pop culture, the other mytho-historical monster whom Davros resembles is God; the terrifying, capricious, vindictive tyrant of the Old Testament. He engineers his own version of the flood to wipe out a world that refuses to obey him, apart from a bunker/ark of obedient Noahs. 'Genesis' is an appropriate word for a story about a megalomaniacal control freak who creates creatures (interesting etymology there) in his own image, imposes his own authority upon them, gives them free will ("they will be entirely independent of all outside influences...") and is then stunned when they rebel.

Just as the Kaleds are destroyed by their pitiless creations - the war, the mutos, Davros (who, if you think about it, is a muto himself) - so is Davros destroyed by his own pitiless creations. Why are the Daleks pitiless? Because he made them that way. He didn't even teach them the word for pity. Suddenly, we see the Daleks as victims of their upbringing, slaves to their origin – their original sin. The Daleks are a product of their pitiless world. You can almost feel sorry for them.

There is a problem here, however, which is that the story represents the Daleks as prisoners of their genesis, and, most specifically, of their genes.  Gharman's great objection to Davros is that he has altered the Daleks genetically so that they are no longer capable of conscience, or understanding right and wrong.  By doing so, it is implied, Davros has condemned the Daleks to always be "unfeeling" and "heartless" by nature.  If the tacit idea of this story, which it keeps worrying at silently, is that we are the Daleks, then this genetic destiny chimes with the Christian notion of original sin, which holds that mankind is inherently fallen and that we all carry this taint from birth by nature of our humanity.  In a watered down version, this is true enough.  We're all, essentially, chimpanzees, with all the limitations that this implies.  We're not blank slates upon which the world inscribes morality any more than we're perfectly free to choose our every impulse and action uninfluenced or unrestrained by any innate tendencies.  Moreover, it's possible that altruism (and, by extention, morality) owes something to complex survival strategies which were naturally selected.  But the idea that morality is something genetically coded in our genes, and that the removal of this coding leaves us without the ability to comprehend morality, is far too reductionist.  Few biologists these days are quite so openly biological-determinist, just as very few theologians or preachers (at least in Britain) are quite so fierce and uncompromising on our supposedly fallen nature.  However, such notions bubble along, somtimes submerged and/or implicit.  These related ideas stem from ideology which seeks to legtimate hierarchy, war, xenophobia etc. by making them innate and unalterable products of 'human nature'.  But human behaviour - and, by extension, the behaviour of any similarly big-brained, sentient, foresight-posessing, tool-using creature - comes about because of immensely complex dialectical interactions between genotype, phenotype, environment, society and history.  Morality may have its roots in naturally selected altruism, but it is also a series of learned social behaviours and personal choices.

Of course, we can say that the Daleks represent not us exactly, but our potential to sacrifice such freedom by reducing ourselves to machine-like automata, to tank-driving warriors who 'just obey orders'.  And, in the end, the Daleks rebel against their creator.  Their programming creates eddies and currents within them that Davros did not intend or foresee.  It doesn't take too much of a stretch to see this as representing emergent properties within their consciousness, brought about by complex dialectical interactions between their inherited mentality and their experiences.  It's a shame that this was never picked up by subsequent stories.  It might have been interesting to see the Daleks emerging even further from their genetic destiny (or original sin, if you prefer) to, perhaps, change for the better.  It would certainly cast the Doctor's refusal to exterminate them in a new light.  As it is, we must now look at that refusal through our retrospective knowledge that this mission was the opening salvo of the Time War, beginning a process which would lead the Doctor to genocidally destroy (or so he thought) both the Daleks and his own people.

The great "do I have the right?" scene is now impossible to watch without thinking about what consequences the decision will have for the Doctor personally.  But it's brilliant in itself because the story deliberately leaves the question unresolved in its own terms. The Doctor dreads the decision, unable to make an ethical choice in which there does not seem to be a right answer. He takes the first opportunity to chicken out. Horrified by the murder of the rebels he makes an emotional decision to go through with it... but a Dalek interrupts him. In the end, the Dalek accidentally makes the decision for him... or does the Doctor lure it over those wires? In any case, by that time, the Doctor has already realised that the destruction of the incubator chamber will only delay the Daleks. He leaves when he's done all that he can do. He's optimistic, and his closing speech invites us to feel the same, but clearly no moral conclusion has been reached. This isn't a cop out; it's a rare recognition that sometimes ethical questions are irresolvable in easy terms.

Of course, it’s hard for me to be objective. Like many of us (I suspect) I spent my childhood playing and replaying the edited-down audio version. It’s probably the primary reason why I’m a fan. That probably goes for lots of us, I’d guess. Which is odd, when you think about it… because this is a highly politically charged story about racism and genocide, laced with irresolvable moral quandries. It’s not the sort of thing that little kids are *supposed* to be listening to. In this, it’s emblematic of the way Doctor Who has often been a ‘smuggler’, bringing queasy and (relatively speaking) hard-hitting, complex political stories to generations of very young chidlers, all under the noses of the sophisticated adults who consider it nothing but a lot of nonsense about monsters.

‘Genesis’ proves that Doctor Who is a children’s programme, and must always stay a children’s programme… but a children’s programme haunted by concentration camps, nuclear warheads and trenches filled with barbed wire and corpses. And quite right too. Children are, in many ways, more equipped to deal with such things with intellectual and emotional honesty than adults. Children don’t have the filters that adults acquire in order to deceive themselves about the true obscenity of war and conquest.

Sex, Death & Rock 'n' Roll

The Curious Orange, before he got the Lee & Herring gig.

In the mid-1980s, Doctor Who (perhaps influenced by a cultural context in which a strict matriarchal figure was punishing the British people for their own submerged desires) developed a habit of delving into surprisingly murky and morbid corners... and no story has corners quite as murky and morbid as 'Revelation of the Daleks'. The undercurrents in this strange tale include unrequited love, lust, suicide, alcoholism, putrefaction, mutilation, cannibalism and even – obliquely – necrophilia. This is a story that has a perverse, sexless, destructive, sado-masochistic anti-romance at its core, relegating all the stuff about galactic conquest to the sidelines.

Naturally, displaying obtuseness that is almost customary, most commentators have missed this and worried volubly about the least of the story’s delectable sins: the onscreen violence, which is only startling when judged against the largely implicit jeopardy of the Davison era and hardly compares to the extremes of, say, ‘The Brain of Morbius’. But ‘Revelation’ looked tame even then, even by the standards of material made for kids. Have you seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? It’s torture porn for finger-painters.


THE DORIAN MODE

The literary novel that we're *supposed* to talk about in connection with 'Revelation' is, of course, Waugh's The Loved One... but, while I don't dispute the Waugh connection, the book that I always find myself thinking of when I watch 'Revelation' is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is a novel that seriously worried some people at the time of its publication, not just because of its determinedly ambiguous morality and gay undercurrents, but because of its sheer, unbridled (and supposedly un-British) sensuality; its focus upon physical details, upon heady emotions and upon lavish descriptions of colours, fabrics, flowers and, most especially, aromas. The eponymous Dorian even spends some of his long life dedicated to the study and enjoyment of perfumes.

We encounter smells in many Saward scripts. In ‘The Visitation’, the TARDIS crew encounters the smell of sulpher and then of the alien gas soliton. In ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’, the bacteriological weapon used against the staff of the prison ship causes the infected to stink even as their skin bubbles and drips off. In ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, the defrosting Telosian tombs give off the smell of bad meat. In ‘The Two Doctors’, which Saward script-edited, the Doctor launches into a little soliloquy about the evocativeness of smell as he and Peri stand in the kitchen of the deserted space station, sniffing the rotting food and – it is implied – the corpses that the Sontarans left in their wake. In ‘Revelation’ we have Bostock who stinks “like rotting flesh” because his personal philosophy forbids him to wash. The smell of the butcher’s shop window is heavily implied by Stengos’ appearance.

Also, as in Dorian Gray, there is a noticeable emphasis on flowers. The Doctor and Peri walk through banks of them on their way to Tranquil Repose; Jobel and his staff are first seen amidst floral decorations; Tasambeker is offered a flower in a cruel parody of a compliment.

The echoes of Dorian continue. ‘Revelation’ is a story unusually interested in surfaces, even if only to highlight the tacky tastelessness of the funeral business. ‘Revelation’, like Dorian, is a story in which inner corruption is hidden by superficial beauty. What does the cosmetic undertaker do but hide the corruption of a cadaver under make-up, creating the illusion of an unblemished loved one sleeping the sleep of the just? The desire for unearned immortality is shared by Dorian Gray and the unscrupulous, frozen, ruling class that seem destined to get their wish horribly fulfilled inside Dalek casings.

'Revelation' might, in very broad terms, inherit a setting and a character from The Loved One, but in just about every other respect, Waugh is jettisoned. Waugh's novel (easily his worst) is about British ex-pats amidst the cultural peculiarities of mid-20th century California. Wilde's novel (in my view, one of the very greatest English novels of the 19th century) donates far more of its concerns to 'Revelation', even if they are the more superficial ones: surfaces, appearances, corruption, immortality, art and odour... and the body.


WRITTEN ON THE BODY

I think that ‘Revelation’ is - perhaps more than any other tale in the canon - about the body. This is quite a large statement, since the list of Who stories that have tried to creep kids out by showing them bodily possessions, bodily infections, bodily mutations, bodily transformations and bodily mutilations is very long. Funny thing is, relatively few of the stories that have featured these things have also really been about the body. ‘Black Orchid’ features disfigurement (both voluntary and involuntary) but that isn’t really what it’s about… if, in fact, it could be said to be about anything. ‘The Seeds of Doom’ dwells lovingly on gradual and grueling physical consumption/transformation of animal by vegetation, but the point is the frightening idea of a natural world that rebels against us, of an inverted food chain as in ‘The Day of the Triffids’. ‘The Caves of Androzani’ features infection by a toxin that mercilessly destroys the body from within, yet only the fever brought on by the closing stages of the poisoning seems to relate to anything beyond pure plot, as Peri’s burning temperature meshes with Jek’s febrile temperament. Jek himself is, in his Richard IIIish way, consumed by his own disfigurement, but this is only a symptom of his morbid narcissism. ‘Inferno’ features werewolvish transformations, but these are more like manifestations of man’s partly brutish nature than meditations on the animal body itself. Cybermen stories have consistently failed to harp on the one potentially scary thing about the Cybermen: the way they physically invade and transform us, revealing a compatibility between organism and artifact. ‘The Ark in Space’ is probably the nearest the series ever came to true and pure “body horror” before ‘Revelation’, but even here, where the horror of compatibility is forcefully expressed, the compatibility with the insectile is stressed as psychological and cultural and social even more than physical. Apart from ‘The Empty Child’ (which is a whole can of worms by itself), the nearest the new series has come to doing a story about the body is probably ‘New Earth’, which has mutants, medicines, cat people and a grotesquely fat man who is turning to stone... the physical concerns continue into the main subplot, which is a ‘body-swap’ comedy of the type that Hollywood produced by the hundredweight in the late 80s (all of them, as far as I can recall, starring either Tom Hanks or people who built their entire careers on looking and sounding vaguely like Tom Hanks). Mind you, it should be noted just how much 'New Earth' owes to 'Revelation'. In the secret, gothic depths below a professional institution seemingly devoted to healing, ghastly experiments are afoot which treat humans as raw material, blah, blah, blah.

I mentioned, above, the failed potential of almost all Cyberman stories to confront the body as a theme or as an opportunity for provoking horror... well, as Tat Wood points out in About Time vol. 6, 'Revelation' is really a Cyberman story but with Daleks instead of Cybermen! Saward was, as everyone knows, obsessed with Cybermen... however, the Cybermen in his stories tend to act and talk more like macho mercenaries than emotionless creatures of pure logic. Of course, there's always been a problem with the Cybermen. Arguably, the only ones that ever really seemed plausibly emotionless and even faintly logical were the ones in 'The Tenth Planet'... but even they are acting irrationally when you really analyse them. It was a bad mistake to ask TV hacks to write monsters who were totally logical; they usually find it hard enough to write human characters who behave according to the ad hoc logic of normal, everyday sanity... but, I'm supposed to be writing about Daleks not Cybermen... which is the same mistake Saward made in 'Revelation'. Everything in 'Revelation' makes it the perfect context in which Cybermen can be properly reimagined as the predatory robozombies that they always coulda/woulda/shoulda been. 'Revelation' is about death and resurrection via technology, about the merging of technology with biology, about the horror of compatibility, about the infiltration of the emotional mind by programmed dogma (Stengos), about the contrast between the eccentricity of human passions coming into conflict with bland and sinister uniformity (there is even a scene in which someone kills Daleks with rock 'n' roll), about humans as meat, about humans as product, etc., etc., etc. The story seems tailor made for the Cybermen. Even the Jobel and Tasambeker subplot fits in beautifully. The rather tragic Tasambeker could actually find relief in losing her emotions whereas Jobel could be semi-redeemed by his ferocious attachment to physical lusts and pleasures. This is a story that could have allowed the show to, for once, actually explore the concepts and implications of the Cybermen rather than just using them as stomping heavies. And so... they put Davros and the Daleks into it. Moreover, Saward actually uses the story to turn the Daleks into Cybermen, i.e. by having the Daleks (for the first time) harvesting humans and transforming them into new Daleks.

The really strange thing is that this happens again in 'The Parting of the Ways'. The 2005 finale episodes would make much more thematic sense as a Cyberman story, though Russell T. Davies stamps his own imprimatur upon matters by making these remade, half-human Daleks into crazed religious fundies. Irony drenches matters when you consider that 'Revelation of the Daleks', a title so arbitrary and irrelevant when applied to the closer of Season 22, would have been a very apt title (on several levels) for 'Bad Wolf', whereas 'Bad Wolf' is what 'Parting of the Ways' should've been called. 'Revelation' of the Daleks' should, of course, have been called 'Resurrection of the Daleks'... which opens the question of what 'Resurrection of the Daleks' should've been called. How about 'The Parting of the Ways'?

Anyway, that's enough title shuffling. Back to the point.

Interestingly enough, the actual Cyberman story which does do more than any other to confront the sheer horror of physical invasion posed by the Cybermen is the Season 22 opener 'Attack of the Cybermen' (which wasn't written by Eric Saward... honest guv). Whatever the overall weaknesses of the story (and they are considerable) it does manage to (sort of) remember that the Cybermen are predatory zombies rather than just robots. As mentioned, the defrosted Telosian tombs emanate a nasty smell; the torture of Lytton for information demonstrates that the Cybermen think of pain as an exploitable weakness of the fleshlings (a point somewhat undermined by their habit in the 80s of yelling and giving every appearance of agony when shot); the half-converted Lytton begs to be put out of his misery and uses his last ounce of self-will to stab the Cyberleader, who then gushes gouts of green hydraulic fluid over him.

It should be no surprise that this happens in Season 22, a run of episodes absolutely obsessed with wallowing in bodily fluids. Now, one can sneer at Saward's desire to make Doctor Who all gory and gungey, but he's tuned into his cultural moment, at least in terms of the genre in which he had found himself working. Saward's tenure (roughly, 1982-1985) coincides with a remarkable period of shift in the aesthetics of mainstream fantasy and sci-fi movies, away from the heroic style epitomised by the ultra-influential Star Wars films (the original ones, I mean... the proper ones) and towards a grottier, grimier, ickier set of visual and thematic concerns. The original Star Wars itself had been a step in this direction, for its time. Unlike the pristine environments of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the "galaxy far, far away" in which Luke, Han and Leia strut their seventies stuff has dirty space canteens full of exotic aliens and waste disposal chambers full of smelly garbage.

But Ridley Scott's Alien (a film that Saward attempted to remake in a Who context at least twice) self-consciously goes a quantum leap further. By co-opting the Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger to do the alien spaceship/creature designs, the producers opened a whole can of very wriggly worms. Giger tapped directly into the unspoken, submerged (possibly unconscious) concerns of the shlocky script and produced some of the most remarkable and influential production design concepts in cinema history. The derelict alien ship discovered by the blue collar astrogrunts is a twisted dreamscape of ribcage corridors, pregnant bulges, labial slits, vaginal openings and penile extrusions. The aliens themselves are separated units of this Freudian nightmareland, created as they are from spidery mobile hands that grab your face and cover your screaming mouth, fleshy probes that thrust themselves down your throat and lay their eggs inside you, aggressive penises with gnashing metal teeth that give birth to themselves through your chest, giant phallic tubed heads and barbed tails that grope you before their grinning faces split open and erupt into yet more fanged cocks, dripping thick goo. Alien may be about space people on a space ship getting killed by a space alien... but its also about lust, rape, sexual sadism, pregnancy as parasitism, childbirth as painful violence... all the horrors that we sometimes detect in the sexual and the physical. Sometimes people look at me funny when I talk like this. But, really, this film has Ian Holm (with white, milky fluid dripping down his face) trying to kill Sigourney Weaver by shoving a rolled-up porn mag into her mouth. This is hardly a subtext at all.

The other interesting thing about the aliens in the Alien movies is that they are "bio-mechanoids", examples of a kind of being that Giger had been imagining and painting and sculpting for years. They are not just made of rude bits and pieces, they're also made of tubing and pistons and pumps. Their skin is patterned like fleshy circuitboards. Look at the way the alien is hidden in plain sight in the final sequence of the original film. As Sigourney strips to her smalls, she wanders round the escape shuttle, oblivious to the fact that the alien is sitting curled up amidst the wires and control panels and pipes that line the walls of the ship. It isn't obscured, or crouching in the dark. It is just sat there. But she doesn't see it, and nor do we... because its head looks like part of the machinery. The same trick is pulled (far less successfully) in the later films.

There are probably all sorts of arthouse and/or cult movies that got there first, but Alien is the one that really got everyone's attention. Ridley Scott didn't invent the idea of "body horror" but he did do it very well and make it phenomenally successful. David Cronenberg had been plugging away making films about the relationships between injury, infection, mutation, deformity, consciousness and sex (sorry, I mean SEX!!!!) since the 60s. Cronenberg, routinely called a genius nowadays, toiled in the wilderness for years making startling, eccentric, deeply unnerving and sexually charged horror films.

Interestingly enough, the Saward tenure on Doctor Who more or less coincides with a shift towards science-fiction in Cronenberg's films. Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986) all come from this period. Cronenberg's films had harped on about scientists and experiments before, but these films are the ones that start worrying about the future of technology and how it will effect human physical existence and experience. These films break new ground in their depiction of tortured human bodies penetrated and meshed with the machines of the future, machines like computers, televisions, video players and telepods.

You'll have noticed that these sci-fi/horror movies I've been talking about have a common theme: the meshing of technology and biology. They also tend to be highly politically charged. Videodrome is about a right-wing conspiracy to infiltrate the minds of TV viewers, turning them into slaves who will commit political assassinations to order. John Carpenter's semi-masterpiece They Live, also from around this time and part of this shift, is about... well, it's about an ordinary American working class man who has been laid off, has to take casual and non-unionised work, lives in a kind of shanty town for the poor, witnesses a violent police attack upon said shanty town and then acquires a pair of magic sunglasses, through which an ordinary American cityscape looks like this:

...and politicians, businessmen, cops and rich people look like this:

Through the glasses, dollar bills are just white oblongs with 'THIS IS YOUR GOD' written on them. The ruling class and their lackeys all turn out to be aliens... an idea also broached in a truly extraordinary film, also from the late 80s, called Society.

I don't want to overstate this. Carpenter's The Thing - a rare example of a remake that comprehensively wipes the floor with its lacklustre original - is a film from around this period that does just about everything imaginable with and to the human body short of meshing it with technology... and it's also noticeably, even remarkably, apolitical for Carpenter. But, on the whole, there is a mini-trend in genre movies around this time for sci-fi and horror to merge, for these mixed genres to feature mergings of human biology with technology, and for these stories to have strong political subtexts.

Much of Saward's oeuvre fits this general pattern... and he was only amplifying and marrying-up tendencies that had already been in Who for some time. The show's second ever story was a political allegory featuring cyborgs! And since 'Inferno', arguably since 'The Tomb of the Cybermen', it had been on the radar of Who creative teams that their show worked as 'horror films for kids' (I forget who coined that phrase but it's perfect). Saward seems to have drawn on the trends in sci-fi/horror filmmaking to synthesize these trends, though he was less interested in the politics than in the cool biomechanoids splattered with gore.

And that's part of how we ended up with Lytton's crushed hands, and Stengos' mutated head - complete with pulsating veins - sitting inside a transparent Dalek casing.

But ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ does more than just present us with cool images. Like Alien (which is clearly an influence on Saward) it really is, in a very essential way, about the human body… and, in a submerged way, about sex (we’ll get to this a bit later). In fact, the story’s preoccupation with physicality is almost obsessional, certainly when compared with most other Who stories. It is quite prepared (ready, happy, eager) to get nasty about the body. There’s a kind of constant background squelch of physical ickiness. ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ gives a booze-swigging coward lines about how he’ll “know the name and function of each organ as it plops out” when he is tortured to death, harps on about bodies decomposing to the point where they “froth” or need to be “ladled” into suitable containers, has crooked accountants make queeny double entendres about “double entries”, smirkingly brings up the subject of nose-picking, shows us a room full of pickled yet living brains and introduces a character who stinks like bad meat because personal hygiene is against his principles. But ‘Revelation’ goes further than that. It doesn’t just mention smells and snot and hint at sodomy. It mentions all sorts of ways in which the body is, or becomes, disgusting and ruined.

Leaving aside the various ways that the story references decomposition, let’s think about disfigurement. Natasha is only threatened with disfigurement before the distinctly unenthusiastic Takis puts the brakes on Lilt’s naked sadism. But just consider, for a moment, the number of people in the story who are disfigured or mangled in some way. First, of course, we have Davros. For much of the story he appears to be nothing but a head in a jar; later, when the real Davros appears, we learn that there’s a bit more of him than that… but he’s still crippled, wheelchair bound, eyeless and one-armed. This is an inheritance from previous continuity, but it still chimes with Orcini’s faulty artificial leg, the leprous mutant who attacks the Doctor and Peri, and even Tasambeker’s crippling awkwardness. The deformity seems to radiate outwards from Davros, making him look like a warping influence upon the world around him. Stengos, in particular, mirrors Davros. By the time Natasha finds him, he’s also a disfigured, mutated, disembodied head meshed with technology, half enclosed inside a Dalek casing. It’s almost as if Davros, who titters like a flasher as Natasha comes closer to finding her father in this state, is trying to recreate himself. Well, he’s always had “a fanatical desire to perpetuate himself in his machine” and, according to the Doctor, Davros has “finally done it… he’s finally managed to create Daleks that can reproduce anywhere.”

Reproduction. Children. Davros and his creatures. Stengos and his daughter. Meanwhile, Tasambeker longs to make her disdainful and contemptuous boss into a sugar daddy, even as Jobel lusts after girls (including Peri) young enough to be his daughter. When stroking his own vanity by cruelly taunting Tasambeker, Jobel’s worst insult is to compare her (and unfavourably at that) to his mother. Anybody who recognises in Jobel the shade of his pseudo-template - the slavish mummy’s boy Joyboy - will know what this suggests. The half-glimpsed hints that gather around these conjunctions are creepy in the extreme.


FREUDIAN TRIPS

Yes, we’re finally onto the sex. The intonations are incoherent and quiet, but they are undeniably sexual and they are the darkest sexual intonations to be found anywhere in Doctor Who. Even those married cousins ‘The Curse of Fenric’ and ‘The Empty Child’ have nothing to match ‘Revelation’ when it comes to furtively murmured sexual undercurrents. ‘The Empty Child’ is saturated in sex (from the girl/woman child/mother Nancy to the omnivorous lothario Captain Jack; from the butcher and his other way of trading meat to that whole conversation about “dancing”; from Algy’s cute bum to the “man” that sent an evacuated boy running back to the safer option of nightly bombing raids) but, while it acknowledges that sex is scary and dangerous, it doesn’t seem to despair of the possibility that most options – including promiscuity and teen-parenthood – can bring fulfillment… indeed, if it has a ‘message’, it is that sex is linked to the fulfillment of real humanity, counterpoised against the emptiness of repression and denial. Even ‘Fenric’ - with its monsters that emerge from the teenage female psyche, mother-hatred, emotional rape and strong intimations of repressed public school gay crushes ending in violence and paralysis - cannot end without suggesting that “dangerous undercurrents” can be banished by having a bit of a swim in your suspenders. Shall we therapeutically regress ourselves back into the show’s black and white superego (skipping tastefully over the Australian woman with a huge, evil, pink snake in her subconscious), all the way back to the early days? Ahh, but things were simpler and more innocent back then when the galaxy was monochome and in 405 lines. ‘The Rescue’ can only (just) be interpreted as being about a teenage girl menaced by a pervert in a fetish costume if you squint at it very hard with ironic determination; ‘The Romans’ refuses to even notice the fact that it makes farcical comedy out of the way a fat murderer attempts to molest a slavegirl; Edith in ‘The Time Meddler’ is assaulted by rampaging Norsemen, but only because Dennis Spooner is raising his authorial eyebrows knowingly at Viking stereotypes.

By contrast, in ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ we are presented with a tubby, toupéed, lecherous embalmer of corpses (first seen showing off amidst a display of peacock feathers: the symbol par excellence of male sexual strutting) who extends his love of playing with bodies to his living female staff members, sexually harasses Peri (taking her every cringe as encouragement) and enjoys himself by viciously insulting and demeaning a young woman who fawns on him like an over-excited puppy. When asked why she dotes on the man who constantly humiliates her, she is unable to answer… but why does anybody keep voluntarily going back for more punishment? Their Master/slave relationship is truly discomforting to watch; her every groveling submission only making him into more of a bully. Her inner hatred of Jobel is toyed with by Davros until she seems ready to murder the object of her hopeless affection, expecting no reward but to be freed from her body and made into a Dalek. It is left ambiguous whether this idea genuinely appeals to her, or whether it is just her sycophancy to Davros and fear for Jobel that makes her seem to accept it… but one can almost understand how the idea might appeal to her: the idea of shedding her body. When Takis playfully, mockingly, gives her a flower, she throws it away like contact with something beautiful is a reproach to her. It seems to be this action that entices Davros to start playing with her… perhaps he sees himself in her gesture, empathizing with the trapped rage that makes her want to destroy and reject beauty. In any case, by the time she reaches Jobel she has decided to warn him. But Jobel is clear: he’d rather “run away” with his mother than “own” her. Despite the pre-watershed code-words, it’s obvious what Jobel is getting at. In his supreme arrogance, Jobel takes her warning as an attempt at ingratiation with a transparent ulterior motive (he may even be partly right) and rather than let anyone imagine that she might be anywhere near his league (ha!), he spurns and needles her until she snaps. How does Jobel manage to upset her so much that she plunges a syringe full of embalming fluid into his heart? Well, there’s the mother comment… but he also says something that, on the face of it, seems almost kind. “You’ve spent too many hours alone in this preparation room,” he says quietly. “Someone as impressionable as you should lavish a little more time on the living rather than fantasizing with the dead.” The italics are mine, but Clive Swift does give those words suggestive emphasis. Remember that pleased little smile on her face when she gets permission to tart up the corpse of the murdered guard? Davros refers to how Jobel likes to “play with the bodies of the dead”. Maybe Tasambeker does too. What kind of “fantasizing with the dead” does this awkward, downtrodden, disliked, vilified, lonely, masochistic woman get up to when she’s all by herself in the preparation room with unresisting, silent playmates? I’m not saying that the intimation was necessarily deliberate, or even conscious, but it’s there all the same. Killing for Company was published the same year that ‘Revelation’ was broadcast. We have waded, perhaps by accident, into very deep and dark waters indeed.

Mind you, even at this point, as Jobel pierces Tasambeker so effectively with his needling that she is driven to pierce him with a needle in return, the story cannot resist undercutting itself ironically with a reminder of the absurdity and fragility of the body and bodily dignity. As Jobel, the preening narcissist, drops to the floor, gasping his incredulity at the idea of anybody thinking they could manage without him, and dies… his ridiculous wig falls off, revealing the pathetic bald pate of a vain old man.

***

This seems like an appropriate moment to end this session, as someone once said. I have more to say about this bottomless pit of a story, but it'll have to wait for another time. Expect politics. Lots of it.