Skulltopus 13: Return to Fang Rock

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

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

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

Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skulltopus 2: Bad Night at Fang Rock

Further to this post, in which I sketched out the ideas of the author China Miéville concerning the relationship between the tentacular and the Weird, and the superpositioning of the Weird and the hauntological in monsterology (please read that before you read anything below), here's my first attempt to look at Doctor Who through that lens.

'Horror of Fang Rock' (1977) seems like an obvious first port of call.  Set just before the First World War (in other words, in the years of the rise of the semiotic octopus, just before the explosion of the Weird), the Rutan is a tentacular monster, though the tentacles are rarely seen and, on the whole, the creature seems more like a jellyfish (even down to its "affinity with electricity").

It seems to be a manifestation of the nebulous electrified military modernity that the character Reuben so resents and fears.  It seems permeated with technology through its affinity with electricity.  It uses the generator, speaks of its ability to shape-shift as a "technique" and leaves bits of its own alien tech all over the place, including a "signal modulator" that chimes thematically with all the concentration on the lighthouse's wireless telegraph.  It also espouses an ideology of empire and militarism, and uses an arrogant tone of snobbery with regards to the Sontarans, which is entirely fitting with the story's intense focus on class.

(So, there's an obvious connection here which I've made before.  'Fang Rock' is set in the early 20th century and features a tentacular monster which seems to carry metaphorical weight to do with imperialism, technology, militarism, global conquest... just the kinds of things that tentacles were being used to signify in the early 20th century political propaganda posters mentioned by Miéville and in my first Skulltopus post.  Obviously, this connection is complicated by the fact that the story I'm talking about was written, made and broadcast in 1977, not 1907 or 1917... but the connection is tempting all the same, as a possible example of semiotic drift, of the cultural bric-a-brac of one age hitching a ride into another via that previous age's representation as a period.)

The story, as a whole, seems more sympathetic to the working class characters than the 'upper class' ones. However, the various strands of the drama which explicitly deal with class only arrive at an open and easily comprehensible liberal critique of snobbery, privilege and inequality, albeit a barbed one.  The nature of the Rutan threatens to sharpen the critique, though it is ultimately far too contradictory a figure to function as a straightforward metaphor, of either a reactionary or radical nature.  The Rutan personifies the oncoming dangers of the twentieth century in a form that associates itself with militarism, military technology, class and imperialism.  However, beyond this core of metaphorical specificity, there is a difficulty in pinning down the Rutan.

It cannot be said to metaphorically embody British imperialism, specifically.  True, it appears in a story in which British imperialism is referenced... but then so is the imperialism of other nations, albeit via the xenophobia of Reuben, who mentions various nationalities engaged in imperialism at this point, saying that none of them can be trusted.  Moreover, the Rutan attacks an island populated entirely by British people.  This is not a difficult semiotic point to parse.  Nor can the Rutan be easily and clearly identified as representing ruling class imperialism.  The story as a whole is intensely concerned with the dynamics of social position, yet the Rutan fails - or refuses - to resolve itself into a part of any clear polemical strategy.

The destruction the Rutan wreaks is general.  It kills all ages, sexes and classes.  It kills the self-consciously 'honourable' officer-and-gentleman who made his name enforcing empire in India.  It kills the titled nouveau riche and his secretary/mistress.  It kills the lighthouse keepers, old and young, and the sailor.  If it stands for the lethal destructiveness of the oncoming era of technology and imperialism... i.e. the 'Great War' that is, to the people in the lighthouse, only a few years away... then it depicts the dangers as generally applicable, regardless of social position.  This is a very deliberate tactic of the text.  There is no other real reason for all the guest characters to die...

...unless it's to imply that Fang Rock will become the setting of a Marie Celeste-style legend.  The last episode ends with the Doctor quoting Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's The Ballad of Flannen Isle, a poem about an actual mystery concerning the unexplained disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1900... which suggests that the story was structured in such a way as to make such a quote appropriate.  This is interesting because it suggests the incomprehensibility of a puzzle, of an attempt to reconstruct a 'crime scene' that will defy accurate reconstruction, of subsequent mythic retellings of the weird goings-on at Fang Rock.

Whatever the rationale, this kind of general slaughter is quite usual in Doctor Who.  The best examples of something similar (i.e. the monster kills all but one or a very few survivors) are to be found in horror films, or horror-inflected films.  In SF, the examples that immediately suggest themselves are Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing... which is interesting.  In both films, as in 'Fang Rock', the alien menace is nearly/almost/kind-of/not-quite tentacular in the full octopoidal sense.  In both films, as in 'Fang Rock' (which antedates them both), there are small groups with complex patterns of social status and hierarchy within them (think of Ripley's initial amused contempt for Parker and Brett; of the way Bennings rudely barracks Nauls the black cook).  Also, both films are heavily "Weird-inflected" (to use a term Miéville has used to describe Alien), in that both feature monsters of unstable physical shape and unknowable mentality (incidentally, that's why I don't like the Director's Cut of Alien - because by reinserting the 'cocoon sequence' Ridley Scott makes the complete disappearance of Brett and Dallas more comprehensible, more purposeful, thus less frightening).

For now let's simply note that 'Fang Rock' depicts a miniature 'British community' - various ages, sexes and classes represented - attacked indiscriminately from outside without regard for the differences within.  You could argue that the reason for the general slaughter is to be found in the failure of the humans to 'pull together'.  In other words, the barbed liberal critique of class collapses into a somewhat moralistic sermon about how, divisions and inequities aside, the British must unite across such barriers to defend themselves against attack from outside.  Looked at this way, the story's liberalism slips into conservatism.  It becomes not merely moralistic but nationalistic.  The imperialism that the Rutan seems to represent becomes forthrightly foreign and aggressive, an alien imperialism of which the British are the victims, to which they must respond, and to which they will collectively fall - if they don't pull together, realise that they're all in it together, keep calm and carry on, etc.  The 'upper classes' come in for some stick, as they sometimes do from various strands of reactionary conservatism, for no longer being sufficiently responsible and effective to 'do their part', unlike the idealised 'rough diamonds' that are the dutiful and comparatively morally elevated working men.  In this mode of reactionary thought, the nation demands that each man do his duty... the responsible working man is to be admired for doing so, whereas the decadent aristocracy is to be scorned for failing.  It's worth noting that the position of lighthouse keeper is freighted with associations to do with duty, lonely sacrifice, guarding the nation's coast, protecting trade, keeping all sea traffic safe, etc.  However, it's also possible to read the text as demonstrating the various ways in which class privilege makes it impossible for the people who enjoy it to co-operate effectively with those below them.  There are constant misunderstandings in the story across the lines of class, with the toffs missing as many cues as the workers and the workers displaying as much savvy as the toffs (think of Vince's naivety about the telegraph message, immediately followed by his understanding that he must burn Palmerdale's bribe or risk being hanged).

When the Rutan steals or copies a human form, it chooses the form of Reuben, the most entrenchedly and doggedly 'old-fashioned' of the working class characters.  His form becomes its chosen vehicle.  Even when it discards his "ridiculous shape", it retains his voice, albeit altered (a point to which I'll return).

But again, it is impossible to fully resolve how this aspect of the text effects the meaning of the Rutan as a depiction of imperialism.   The Rutan remains indeterminate.  Reuben is idiotically xenophobic (much to the Doctor's weary irritation), an aspect of his personality which itself might be seen as undermining the possibility of reading this as a story about the foreign imperialism that he mentions, or as implying that imperialism occurs because of (or functions through) the ignorance, hostility and suspicious nationalism of common people.  In this view, the Rutan's racial chauvinism becomes associated with the xenophobia of the proletarian within an empire; it becomes relocated from the imperial system to the imperial subject.

On the other hand, if we choose to interpret the Rutan as 'using' Reuben (it does, after all, kill him and dump his body in a dark and dirty hole in the course of copying him) then we might see the story as imputing a view of imperialism as the callously lethal forced employment of the working class and the subsequent post-mortem treatment of them as refuse; as a process whereby even the bodies of the workers are stolen from them.  Moreover, when the Rutan appears as itself but continues to use Reuben's voice, that voice is altered... not only by a vocoder, to suggest mechanical reproduction (referring back to the Rutan's strangely and invisibly mechanical interior nature) but also by losing all traces of Reuben's accent and working class modes of speech.  Indeed, the Rutan's voice - though recognisably still voiced by the same actor who played Reuben - has a posh edge to it, an arrogance and swagger which chimes with the militaristic, propagandistic, snobbish, elitist, officer-class tone it strikes in its comments.

So, is there any kind of case for calling 'Horror of Fang Rock' an example of the Weird, albeit only a kind of temporarily resurrected and anachronistic example of it, hauntologically repeating on us via semiotic drift?  Well, we have the early 20th century setting, a tentacular monster which is explicitly formless (even in its 'true' shape it looks more like a dollop of jelly) and protean, with an ability to 'shape shift'.  There is an intimation that the desired effect was to leave the aftermath of the events on the lighthouse as an impenetrable puzzle in the manner of the Flannen Isle mystery.  Furthermore, the monster appears to represent - in a politically irresolvable manner that suggests, from some angles, a reactionary reading - the oncoming nightmares of 20th century modernity: military technology, ruthless imperialism, conquest, general and ignoble slaughter, etc.  The monster has a core of unplaceableness, of unpindownability.  It seems to represent both British imperialism and foreign imperialism attacking Britain, to be both a rebuke to Britain and an alibi for Britain.  Perhaps most particularly, there is the hauntological feel of the piece, which gives way to a non-hauntological monster.  Reuben's talk of the legendary "beast of Fang Rock" and of Ben's soul being likely to walk since those who die unnatural deaths "never rest easy", along with a certain BBC ghost story aesthetic, combine to suggest the hauntological as a feint, only to push such possibilities away once the monster makes its pseudo-fleshy pseudopodia fully visible.

Well... for the reasons above, it might be fair enough to go ahead and call 'Fang Rock' "Weird-inflected", but only to a slight degree.  Many Weird tales are maritime (Hodgson's Sargasso Sea stories, for example), but so are many non-Weird stories.  The mystery of what happened at the lighthouse will be a mystery only to those who find the bodies.  We know exactly what happened.  We saw it all.  The Rutan killed everyone.  We know how and we know why.  Its lethality is clearly and (pseudo)-scientifically explained in terms of electricity.  Its motivation is clearly explained in political, ideological and pragmatic military terms, even if the precise inflection of its imperialism is impossible to fully parse.  If we accept Miéville's definitions, then the Rutan fails to be Weird at the most fundamental hurdle: it is intelligible.  At the crudest level, the problem is that it speaks.  It converses, rationally and intelligently.  It has a point of view, stated aims, even an ideology.  It has a being, an ontology rather than a hauntology or a Weirdity.  (Though it does retain enough of the spectral or phantasmic to make itself insubstantial when Leela throws a knife at it.)

Moreover, it means... and, however irresolvable (confused might be a less charitable word) that meaning may be, it doesn't mean meaninglessness.  It evades a single, unitary, clear-cut political meaning, but it doesn't evade meaning itself.  It might reflect the bemused and suspicious fear of modernity seen in the character of Reuben, it might reflect a kind of oncoming 'general imperialism' in which imperialism of an international and thus non-localisable kind is 'the problem', but however fuzzy and deferred that meaning becomes, it still is a meaning intended to mean.  The problem embodied in the Rutan is blurred, nebulous, non-local, indeterminate, irresolvable in linear terms... but it isn't fundamentally unknowable.  And it seems to convey things that we (like Reuben) recognise and already fear, hauntology style.  Moreover, we're clearly being asked (as we so often are in this show) to draw moral conclusions.  'Fang Rock' rejects the idea that the horror of modernity makes modernity incomprehensible in principle, and rejects the idea that it is morally neutral.  For all that it flirts with reactionary import, it doesn't come anywhere near that radically scared fugue state in which the 'reactionary ecstatics' of the Weird despaired of meaning entirely.  Doing something like that - i.e. a monster with no apparent motivation, no mentality, no ideology, no discernible purpose, no comprehensible methods even - would likely have been percieved (probably wrongly) as too extreme or unsatisfying for the kid viewers.  It would also approach something that the Weird often does but which Who can never do, simply because of its function within the culture industry: abandon or neglect narrative.

All the same, there is something interesting in the way 'Horror of Fang Rock' comes close to the Weird in some ways, suggests it, skirts it, toys with it, distantly reflects it, attempts (unsuccessfully) to meld it with the hauntological.  This - I'm probably going to argue - is a recurring inflection in Doctor Who.  It's to be expected, given that Doctor Who is a kind of shaggily indiscriminate collage, rudely assembled by too many cooks from the cultural debris of a century and more of genre, pulp and semiotics.

Last word (here anyway):  It's interesting how Doctor Who's constantly repeating foreclosure upon the idea of the supernatural, which is part of its (generally spurious) inner identification of itself as supporting empiricism and materialism (which itself stems from the original idea of it as 'educational') seems to also foreclose upon hauntological readings... something that 'Fang Rock' demonstrates, with its refusal of the hauntological logic despite the employment of the hauntological affect, its use and subsequent disavowal of "fisherman's tales" of "mythical sea creatures", its rumination on the superstitions of the different classes, the moment it gives Leela to express her (paradoxical) 'belief' in science over shamanism.  And yet, the more I look at the show as a whole, the more I seem to see attempts on its part to 'get around' this foreclosure and to represent the haunting, implicating, being/non-being monster that returns the repressed. Hence the peculiar materialist gothic, a strain that runs through it.  Think of the Cybermen, who are simultaneously the embodied nightmares of the technological and bandage-wrapped crypto-Mummies... but with cloth-faces like the linen thing from the Weird/hauntological buffer zone of M. R. James.

I shall probably be looking at Zygons in this series.  And Krynoids (which, in passing, become much less scary when they speak and explain themselves).  And Axons.  And, I suspect most especially, the Fendahl.  And I'll probably have to look at that Tennant two-parter... you know, the one which attempted to grapple with metaphysical themes, the gothic, the satanic... by invoking the resolutely non-gothic, non-ghostly visual tropes of the Weird, ie Lovecraftian Cthulhu-esque slave monsters in revolt.

More later.