The 1917 Zone - Part 1: Tim Nice-But-Then and the Curse of Downton Abbey

The first in a new series of posts looking at the way Doctor Who has tackled World War One.


Looked at from a certain viewpoint, 'Human Nature' / 'The Family of Blood' makes all the right noises.  All the proper sounds issue from it when it is tapped.  It notices social hypocrisy about war, perhaps even moralising about it.  For instance, while the young boys at the school are taught how to be good little soldiers, a veteran of the Crimean war is to be found begging outside the town hall.

There is also an acknowledgement that war is unpleasant.  The boys tremble and cry when forced to actually point weapons at an approaching enemy, with even the odious Hutchinson is seemingly relieved at the realization that they've been shooting at empty scarecrows.  Joan lost her husband at Spion Kop (a battle of the Second Boer War, which would've been a British victory but for the farcical incompetence of the British generals).  The Headmaster has his speech in which he describes using his dead mates as sandbags.

There is an attempt at balance, at the dramatic demonstration of values rather than the elaboration of a didactic authorial point-of-view.  Yet, the characters' values are not allowed to go uninterrogated.  Irony is much used.  So the Headmaster rounds up his boys to fight, responds with angry self-righteousness to the taunting of Baines/Son, and so on... but also evinces sincere horror at the idea of allowing what he thinks of as a little girl to be caught in the crossfire.  Of course, there's another irony there because he's prepared for male children to be sent into the line of fire.  Females, especially working class females, are to keep silent (presumably unless cheering you on your way to the carnage).

There's an awareness of open sexism and racism in the episodes, issues that other forays into the past - 'Daleks in Manhattan' for instance - have almost entirely ignored and effaced.  Baines and Hutchinson look down on Martha and Jenny and make their nasty little racist joke.  John Smith assumes that Martha's talk of aliens is a case of "cultural misunderstanding"; a primitive failing to comprehend the difference between fiction and reality.  Joan scoffs at the idea of a black maid training to be a doctor, apparently finding this concept even more immediately and self-evidently ridiculous than time travel or aliens.


The Class Struggle in Trumpton

There's quite a common fad nowadays in TV drama, perhaps best exemplified by Mad Men: setting a story in a past era allows lots of implied sneering at crass, blatant, old-style sexism, racism, etc... all underwritten by a kind of tacit, back-slapping awareness of how much better we are than the people back then, now that we're all enlightened liberals, cured of such silly shibboleths.  In 'Human Nature' / 'The Family of Blood' there is at least an awareness of class as a factor, though 'classism' is depicted as just another category of prejudice alongside racism and sexism.  This representation of 'classism' arises through the implicit contrast of the Trumptonesque community that is depicted - Mr Farmer, Mr Baker, Miss Maid, Mr Teacher, etc. - with the willingness of the story to notice inequalities in the way people are treated.  Class is thus effaced via the Trumptonisms while also hinted at as a way in which a minority group of scullions are ill-treated and disadvantaged; a safe way of noticing inequality that permits liberal clucks of disapproval while leaving real class struggle obscured.  There is no inkling that class society may be the fundamental problem, that this may even be the reason why the society of Britain in 1913 has an Empire into which it will soon be feeding an entire generation like steak into a mincer.

Nor would one expect any such inklings.  This story is an artifact of mainstream entertainment production.  It is to be expected that it will fit snugly into the hegemonic ideology of the industry.  It occupies the liberal mainstream and takes the standard approach to the national past: it interrogates aspects of that era which we think we can now look back on with a degree of condescension, disavowing elements of the past that we have supposedly progressed beyond, thus salvaging and embracing wider notions of national identity and heritage which thus seem to have weathered necessary critique.  The solution is implied by the critique, thus rendering the critique a form of support for the wider notion of national progress, of a national virtue more fundamental than the transient flaws.  This is a strategy very much used in such mainstream entertainment, a way of representing our 'national' past (and, in a slightly different mode, our present).  Look at 'The Empty Child' / 'The Doctor Dances' for an in-Who example.   The sexual morality of 1940s Britain is subjected to critique by aspects of the story (i.e. the implied abuse of children co-existing in a society that stigmatizes very-young unwed mothers, different levels of acceptance towards gays at different class levels) but the "damp little island" emerges vindicated by the mending of the central fractured relationship and the surrounding context of progress triumphant, i.e. the supposed national heroism of fighting Hitler, and the promise of social safety nets in future ("don't forget the NHS").


Missing the Target

I think the most telling scene in 'Human Nature' may the one where Tim Latimer is forced to practice using the Vickers gun against some dummies.  It shows the story's highest moments of critique but there is a gaping hole in the scene which shows, by its very near-absence, the issue upon which the story tries to foreclose, partly unsuccessfully, as it turns out... (something I'll write about later).  The scene emphasizes that boys are being taught warfare at school.  Imperial warfare, yes, because the Headmaster says that their targets are "tribesmen from the Dark Continent".  The Head overrides Tim Latimer's qualms about shooting people armed only with spears in the most condescending terms, telling him that he hopes that the boy will one day have a "just and proper war" in which to "prove himself".  This brings on a flashforward in which Tim sees himself and Hutchinson engaged in that very future war, seemingly about to die (as it turns out, the Head is right about Tim "proving" himself... the moment he forsees here is the moment that, we will later learn, both prompts and endorses his decision to take part in the war, instead of being a conshy Red Cross volunteer as in the novel).  Tim hesitates and consequently gets a beating from the sneeringly sadistic Hutchinson, with Smith's approval.

Everything about this scene screams at us that we are supposed to disapprove.  The way the scene is evidently expected to surprise most viewers (those not public school educated) by depicting children being taught how to use machine guns, the incongruously youthful-look of the actor playing Tim, the bluff and blimpish attitude of the Headmaster, the idea of him actively hoping for a war, his notion of war as a proving ground, the overplayed loathsomeness of Hutchinson, the shock of seeing Smith (the quasi-Doctor) consent to the corporal punishment of a child, the stony-faced Joan as she looks on in evident disapproval, the racism inherent in the reference to Africans, the foreshadowing of the horrors of the trenches, etc.  It's all calculated to make the average early-21st century Western liberal everyperson squeal with disapproval, even down to the "beating" that Tim is condemned to.  Is there anything more likely to cause gales of outraged horror than the idea of pulling down a young boy's trousers and thwacking his bottom with a stick?  The scene wields this like a triumph.  'See how horrible it was back then?'

More seriously, we are quite evidently expected, as audience members, to empathize with Tim's moral scruples.  Yet notice what is not said.  Tim doesn't object to shooting at "tribesmen" on the grounds that he has no business being in their country.  He objects on technical grounds, on the grounds that the level of weaponry is mismatched, that such an uneven conflict is unfair.

Of course, we wouldn't expect anybody in such a situation, in that place at that time, to object on anti-imperialist grounds or anti-war grounds.  Nobody in a British public school in rural England in 1913 would be likely to interrupt a lesson to object to imperialism in the manner of the radical Left of the time (indeed, when the crunch came, the majority of the European Left shamefully accommodated themselves to imperialism, nationalism and war).  Nor would anyone in such a context be likely to enunciate objections that reflect our widespread present-day liberal embarrassment over the Empire (bearing in mind that, these days, even apologists for the Empire like Niall Ferguson have to admit that it entailed much that was morally dubious).  However, the scene avoids only the crassest possible method of inserting modern concerns/attitudes into the mouths of characters (the Walking to Babylon method, one could call it, after the novel in which a Victorian male and some ancient Babylonians think like modern Western liberals so that Benny can like them).  If it aims to present a snapshot of the past untainted by our desired attempt to see our own concerns reflected in the thoughts and actions of the characters, it fails.  It succeeds in rejecting modern ways of thinking only to the extent that it rejects any focus upon the issue of British imperialism.  The scene forecloses noticeably upon this issue, while openly addressing other (more mainstream, less radical) modern moral concerns.  It shows us, quite clearly, the problems of the past by which we ought to be shocked... and imperialism doesn't figure, except perhaps as an implied by-product of racism (which is a reversal of the real sequence).  Racism is among the targets of the scene, certainly.  However, this very proffering of racism as an evil of the past effaces both present-day racism (which we like to think of as a rare departure from the norm... which it isn't) and any further investigation into why the Headmaster would characterize the practice dummies as "tribesmen".  He does it because he's a bit of an old racist.  End of.  Gosh, they were politically incorrect back then, weren't they?  Tim's objection to shooting the "tribesmen" despite their lack of modern weaponry is forcefully waggled in our faces as evidence of his (apparently natural and intrinsic) moral extra-sensitivity, his ahead-of-his-time-ness, his like-us-ness, for which he will be martyred to the cane by the posh barbarians of nearly-a-century-ago.


Marching Onwards and Upwards

We are plagued by Downton Abbey syndrome these days: the past re-imagined and sanitised to make it palatable to modern sensibilities.  There are various methods.  The most extreme method is to simply ignore things (for instance, it would surely have been very unlikely that Solomon in 'Daleks in Manhattan' would be able to walk around 1930s New York without anyone discriminating against him on the grounds of race).  Otherwise, aspects that seem unfortunate to us are depicted in a way that makes them seem like aberrations, or as atavistic holdovers amidst the whiggish march of liberal progress.  The real barometers of History are an enlightened few - those most forward-thinking, those most like us, those furthest forward on the upward curve of liberal cultural evolution - grieve over these aberrations and try to combat them, or at least flout them.  They are in the story to represent us in the past.  To be nice - like we are - but back then.  The nice-but-then characters anticipate and/or champion a modern liberal social outlook, despite being decades (or centuries) away from the historical period in which it will develop.  Thus Garrow's Law (a kind of Judge John Deed in period costume... I promise you, it's every bit as ghastly as it sounds) has the 18th century lawyer William Garrow feeling political sympathy and romantic empathy for a persecuted gay couple, thus mapping 21st century liberal notions of sexuality and political morality onto a past era which would've found them incomprehensible.  

Downton Abbey itself is based on this kind of retroactive moralising, but from a deeply disingenuous and outright Tory point of view (in the sense of 'benevolent' patriarchy and one-nation paternalism, not the really-existing-conservatism of ultra-freemarketeering rhetoric).  Downton Abbey's portrayal of class takes in the Trumptonesquerie of the 'we're all in it together, and we all have our role to play' view, mixed with a half-amused (oh-ho-weren't-they-politically-incorrect?!) and half tutting presentation of cultural mores and manners.  The attitudes are depicted so as to simultaneously shock and titilate modern sensibilities.  Class is manifested in terms of cultural attitudes that are funny in their old-fashionedness.  Magge Smith's character is the tell-tale marker of how we're meant to see things: she's outrageously snobbish but her snobbery is evidently supposed to be likeable for its outrageousness, its truculent pig-headedness, its obstinacy.  The old battleaxe is lovable for the very attitudes which are presented as the quaint eccentricities of a noble relic.  She, and the past she comes from, are ultimately absolved.  Meanwhile, Hugh Bonneville is the essence of the benevolent patriarch of one-nation Tory myth.  He's the nice guy who happens to have a duty of care for everyone thrust upon him by his elevated position.  The presentation of the 'Great War' in DA takes a similar route.  It was a catastrophe that engulfed everybody in Trumpton... sorry, Downton, equally; there were some horrible things like shellshock; some of the attitudes of people during the war were amusingly/shockingly 'of their time'; the root cause was cultural rather than structural; the ruling class had a duty of care and, by and large, they made good, etc.  The show even tries (ludicrously crudely) to depict some of the social changes brought about by the war, by having the upper-crust characters suddenly interact far more intimately with the below-stairsers.  The whiggish march continues as His Lordship enjoys a tortured bromance with his valet, etc.  In many ways, Grantham (the Earl of) is a nice-but-then character.  He's not 'the same' as us, but he's one of those who paved the way for the world to reach our wonderful plateau of tolerance and equality... indeed, by the Tory standards of his show, we may have gone to far down that road as a society.  He's a lost ideal that we should aspire to emulate: the man who made drastic class divisions work for everyone, the way they were 'supposed to', without our modern excesses.

'Human Nature' / 'The Family of Blood' is not as bad as DA, but it has a bad case of nice-but-then syndrome.  In just the Vickers-gun-practice-scene, both Tim and Joan are nice-but-then characters.  What the nice-but-then characters disapprove of is very telling.  It is a way to measure what the text expects (so to speak) its audience to disapprove of.  It is a measure of the normative assumptions that the text's creators take for granted.  What they are given to frown at is a way of measuring the parameters of the politically conceivable within the text.  The scene we've been looking at acknowledges the issues of racism, jingoism, blimpishness, physical brutality in education, etc., but, as noted, it forecloses upon the issue of imperialism.

Moreover, even those sins it notices are safely packaged away within the past, within the bad-old-days that may be acknowledged as bad to the extent that bad things like these happened then.  We, from our position of modern-minded, liberated, liberal, tolerant, progressive, humane nowness, can afford to tut at the silly and unpleasant behaviour of the people of 1913.  We can compare ourselves to them and (especially when we see ourselves vicariously present and stony-faced in the persons of the nice-but-then characters) feel mighty good about ourselves.

Of course, this sort of thing didn't begin with Mad Men or Downton Abbey.  The nice-but-then character is not a new invention.  In 60s Doctor Who, just off the top of my head, there's the guy in Nero's court, freeing slaves because he's a secret Christian (don't get me started).  Indeed, the nice-but-then character may be embedded in every foray Doctor Who takes into the past.  It may literally happen within the narratives of 'An Unearthly Child', 'Marco Polo', 'The Aztecs', etc., with Ian and Barbara - the 'civilized', late-20th century Westerners - trying to explain friendship and human rights to the savages, Easterners and natives of yore.

*

Lots more of this to come, I'm afraid.

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.

Historical Memory

On June 16, 1918, Eugene Victor Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio.  He urged workers to resist the draft. 

He also said this:

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.

That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.

If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace.

He was arrested and charged with sedition later that month.  At his trial, he addressed the court.  He made the following statement:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Amnesia Day

I don't wear a poppy.  Laurie Penny has written a very good article, expressing many views that I agree with, here.  I don't engage in the silence at 11 o'clock either.  I know that most ordinary people who do observe the silence and wear the poppy do so for sincere reasons.  But I myself cannot stomach it.  I think my reasons are less intellectual and more to do with the sheer, physical revulsion I feel at the hypocrisy on display in images like this:

What's the collective noun for warmongers?  A troop?  A collateral?  Well, whatever.  There they stand, doing their best sincere and sombre faces.  All guilty of sending people off to fight and kill and die and maim and be maimed in order to protect the interests of the American empire and neoliberalism's access to markets.  And wrapping it all up in the rhetoric of 'sacrifice' and 'freedom'.  The poppy, the cenotaph, the silence, the 'Ode to Remembrance'... I can't help but see it all as cynical and calculated.  As ideology.  As an attempt by a warmongering, imperialist state to normalise the idea of war, to appropriate our memories of loved ones lost or ruined in wars fought for the interests of others, to associate the wars that 'our' country is currently fighting with wars from the past that we've been carefully taught to perceive as 'moral' and 'necessary', to control our responses to the latest news from Iraq and Af-Pak.

Mind you, it's more than just a straightforward bit of reactionary spin; these days people are more anti-war (at least in broad terms) than just about ever before, so the old rhetoric of patriotism is, while not dead, certainly less user-friendly than it used to be.  Remembrance Day still carries jingoistic connotations for many, but for many more there is a need for a different perspective.  There are several different social and political perpectives overlaid upon each other in our cultural understanding of Remembrance Day.  A common variety of liberal spin on it is to remember the 'pointlessness' of, say, World War I.  To tut and shake one's head at a war now culturally understood by many to be a kind of outbreak of mass insanity (see the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), or an illustration of how bad our system used to be, or a bleak but romantic tragedy about sensitive poets.  It's the great noble failure... perhaps with some cynical, port-swilling, incompetent generals to sneer at and blame for the whole thing.  (It's been packaged and sold to us in this way, as has Vietnam to Americans.)  And, of course, there's the redeeming moral clarity of the 'good war' that followed it, the anti-Nazi war, the war that stopped the holocaust, etc.

What's lost in all this is real history.

Both wars were brutal squabbles between rival imperialisms, competing for territory and markets.  WWI wasn't a failure by the criteria of the British ruling class at the time; it was a success.  The British empire ended up with more territory than ever before.  WWI didn't end because sensitive poets made the generals and politicians see the light, nor did it end because of an Allied military victory.  It ended because the Russian and German people rose up in revolution, smashed their ruling monarchies, demanded peace and - all too briefly - started to create workers' states.

The conditions for the rise of German fascism were created by the vicious carve-up at Versaille, combined with the crisis of capitalism called the 'Great Depression'... but there might well have been another imperialist war waged by Germany, even without Hitler and the Nazis.  Germany had been squeezed out of the increasingly balkanised world financial and currency markets.  But Hitler - like Franco and Mussolini - was well-liked by many members of the British ruling class as a bulwark against Bolshevism, and appeasement was still what most of them wanted, even after the war started.  Halifax congratulated Hitler on his achievements.  The British ambassador to Nazi Germany was considered by the foreign office to be almost a Nazi himself.  Members of Churchill's cabinet - most particularly Rab Butler - were involved in trying to arrange a surrender to Germany.  Before the war, Czechoslovakia was abandoned to the Nazis despite having been promised British protection.  British and American businesses did good trade with Nazi Germany, even during the war.  Britain only declared war once it was realised that Hitler represented more than just a continuation of what was percieved as a normal and reasonable German ambition to dominate Mitteleuropa.

Democracy wasn't what Britain entered the war to protect.  When Britain declared war, it declared that its empire was at war too, including vast swathes of colonial subjects who were not consulted.  The British ruling class never questioned its own right to possess an empire, even while trying to stop Germany from having one.

Meanwhile, our disinterest in the persecution of the Jews was near total.  And even well into the war, the Allies refused to lift a finger to impede the frenzied mass-murder of the holocaust.  Auschwitz was never bombed, nor were any of the railway lines used in transporting murder victims, despite the fact that the Allies knew perfectly well what the lines and camps were being used for.  Meanwhile, German civillians were punished with horrific aerial bombardments... while the factories owned by American companies were carefully left intact where possible, to the point that German civillians twigged and started to use them as air raid shelters.  Such companies were never prosecuted for treason.  In fact, a lot of them recieved compensation from Allied governments after the war for accidental damage to their property done by Allied bombs.

The above merely scratches the surface of the cynicism and collusion which gets smothered by our day of 'remembrance'.

Similar murky realities are obscured by the poppy day rhetoric when it's applied to our current dirty military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan... not to mention what British troops have gotten up to in Somalia, Sierra Leone, etc.  This isn't lack of 'support for the troops'.  I protested against their being sent and I demand that they be brought back right away.  That's more supportive than any sentimental platitude which leaves unchallenged the wars in which they are fighting.

Platitudes leave unmentioned and forgotten too many important facts, too much vital context, and too many dead people.  How about the fact that thousands of Allied troops were deployed to Soviet Russia immediately after being withdrawn from the frontlines of the First World War?  How about the fact that our democratic governments immediately attacked and invaded the new worker's state, also aiding the Whites in the civil war, a bunch of Tsarist and bourgeois gangsters who rampaged through Russia with savagery and ferocity that both eclipses and contextualizes the much-more-talked-about Red Terror?

Poppy day obscures the fact that even when fighting Hitler, we were fighting an enemy who was produced by the same system of capitalism and imperialism upon which our own nation was based.  Poppy day doesn't represent the kids who were murdered by the army during WWI for desertion and 'cowardice'.  It doesn't represent the victims of British and/or American imperialism, past or present.  It doesn't represent the genocidal wars inflicted by America upon the Phillipines or Nicaragua.  It doesn't represent the people we kicked off the island of Diego Garcia.  It doesn't represent the Iraqis killed by that helicopter while trying to surrender.  It doesn't represent the innocent people slaughtered at Hiroshima and Dresden and Fallujah.

Remembrance Day isn't what it should be called.  When you remember one vital thing and forget hundreds more, that isn't 'remembrance'.  That's amnesia.

I've just realised what the collective noun for warmongers is: a lie.

Fang Rock, Class and the Tentacular Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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