1

What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.


1

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard.  She walks into a Police Box.  She's in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut.  The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible.  We have "discovered television".  We can put huge buildings inside small boxes.  We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole.  The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids - the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces - can be made visual.

Doctor Who's very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production.  So much so that living on that limit became its raison d'etre.  Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done.  And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next.  As I've said elsewhere, 'The Space Museum' pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking... and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show - which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production - crunch up against an allegory about empire.  This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room.  The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production.  Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told.  The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I'll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works.  The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It's fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history.  It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from 'historicals' and into SF.  Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian.  And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children's literature upon which the show is so reliant.  In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures.  Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.


2

The Doctor picks up a sharp rock.  Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it.  The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool.  Given that this story is about 'cavemen' who are dying out because they've forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.

The use of tools played a crucial role in the evolution of humanity, making us the creature with a 'species-being' bound up with conscious labour.  Fear played a crucial role too.  'An Unearthly Child' is obsessed with fear, both as a poison and as a source of solidarity.  "Fear makes companions of us all," says the Doctor when he comes to Barbara's aid.  Fear melds society together.

In a talk I linked to here, China Mieville spoke about octopuses that have been observed picking up weapons just in case they need to use them later.  That looks like the beginnings of conscious foresight.  Maybe something like that happened to our ancient ancestors.  Maybe the avoidable 'dreaded outcome' sparked the dialectic that began the transformation of the hand and brain.  This is a vital part of a Marxist defence of the value of scaring kids.  (That's irony on the square, by the way.)

This is particularly ironic in terms of 'An Unearthly Child' if you suspect, as I do, that the bickering and jockeying cavemen are not our ancestors, but the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust that people in 1963 expected at any time.

The tool helped bring us into being... but it was always both map and club.  Its progress was always towards television and nukes.  It isn't a popular insight, but that tragic doubleness is just what progress is.


3

Susan looks through a book about the French Revoution.

This revolution was probably the event most foundational to the modern world.  It was a process which drastically marked the beginning of the end for feudalism in Europe.  It was a popular revolt which heralded the beginning of the great dialectic of class struggle that would mark all bourgeois society and history.

She looks through a schoolbook account, doubtless a safe and sanitised version, the way such books usually are.  She, one of those unpredictable and scary 'teenager' things that they have nowadays, one of those people who is puzzlingly neither child nor adult, one of those unearthly children, one of those youngsters listening to the Common Men, a member of a generation who would soon lead a worldwide political and cultural revolt... she reads a book about revolution that her teachers have given her, and she says to herself, in a whisper of surprised outrage...

"That's not right!"

Fifty years later, it still isn't right.  But, for better or worse, the show goes on.


*

Finally, an invitation to speculate.  Given that Doctor Who was so much better under social democracy than under neoliberalism, imagine how wonderful Doctor Who would be under socialism.

Admittedly, it would have to find new things to talk about...

Jack watches 'The Reign of Terror', Part 1

You can probably already guess where this one is going, Constant Reader.

Oh look, there's a guillotine on the cover.  It's a story about the French Revolution.  Hence, a guillotine.  I mean, of course.

The blurb on the back informs me that the French Revolution was "a time of great upheaval, bloodshed and terror".  Technically true, of course... if slanted.  The inside blurb informs me that the Revolution was "bloodthirsty".  Inside the box, we have clearly abandoned all pretence of objectivity.  Which is just as well, because any pretence of objectivity would be utterly hypocritical when talking about the Doctor Who story called 'The Reign of Terror'.

Okay, onto the programme itself.  As noted, the story is called 'The Reign of Terror'.  Just to hammer the point home, the first episde is called 'A Land of Fear'.  Because everyone in France was afraid. 

There's some rather charming interaction between the regulars at the start.  The Doctor is in a huff and, convinced that he has finally brought Ian and Barbara home, attempts to haul them unceremoniously off his ship.  They manage to charm him into coming outside to check that they really are in England circa 1963 before he zips off and leaves them.  Ian flatters him and Barbara hangs on his shoulder, brushing imaginary spots of dust from his jacket. 

They encounter a dirty-faced urchin out in the countryside.  He is terrified of them, saying "I haven't done anything wrong!".  It was a land of fear, you see.  Fear.  Got that?

The travellers soon realise that they're actually in France of the past... which is confirmed when they almost immediately stumble into a safe house being used by the Royalist counter-revolutionaries.  Upon Ian's realisation that they're in the time of the French Revolution, Barbara immediately responds with "yes, the Reign of Terror" because that's all the French Revolution was.  There was nothing else to it at all.  That 11 month period sums up the whole thing.

The Royalists point guns at the travellers to begin with, but the leader, Rouvray (whose very name sounds a bit like the French word for 'truth'), makes a little speech about trust and faith.  It's handy that he immediately decides to trust Ian, Barbara and Susan (the Doctor is lying unconscious upstairs) because the house is immediately surrounded by a bunch of Revolutionary soldiers, lead by a glowering Lieutenant and composed of rough, crude, vicious, sniggering, toothless, dirty thugs in Revolutionary uniforms.  Rouvray attempts to outface them and, for a moment, it works.  "You can put them in uniforms Lieuitenant," he declares, "but they remain peasants underneath!"  Yes, he actually says that.  Heroically.  This, presumably, is his explanation for both their viciousness and their natural inclination to obey any man of breeding who shouts at them loudly enough.  The peasants overcome their inborn servility, however, and shoot him dead.  They are practically drooling at the prospect of shooting Ian, Barbara and Susan too... until their Lieutenant reminds them that 'Le Maistre' (who sounds like the kind of guy who might tie James Bond to a chair and beat him on the balls with a tennis racket) might give them a reward for prisoners.  Being lower class, they all immediately (sorry but 'immediately' is a very necessary word when describing the plot of this story) begin salivating with venal delight at the idea of getting some money in return for supplying Madame Guillotine with fresh victims.  They drag our heroes away and, before they leave, set the house on fire.  For no reason at all... except, perhaps, a desire to stare at the results of their own wanton destructiveness, their mouths open in gap-toothed leers, relishing the beautiful purity of sweet, sweet chaos.  The Doctor, you'll recall, is still in the house.  Boooo!  The flames consume the building and the camera follows them up into the sky as the end credits roll.  It was a land of fear, and the enduring image of episode one is of a house in flames.  It's all burning down, you see.  The revolution will consume us all like the indiscriminate conflagration that it is.

So, what do we learn from this?  The revolution was an indiscriminate blaze, started by ignorant savages who had conquered their natural desire to obey respectable royalists by obeying other drives, i.e. their own venality and their desire to kill and destroy.  The revolution was a time when everybody in France (apart from the revolutionaries) was terrified of being arrested and guillotined... and they were right to fear, since roaming parties of revolutionaries were likely to arrest you for just existing.  These gangs would round up anybody they happened to bump into and send them back to be guillotined for no reason, with the government in Paris happy to hand out monetary payments in return for fresh victims.  B'wah ha ha ha haaaaa!

I wonder if we dare hope that the following episodes will provide any context.  I wonder if, for instance, anyone will mention that, at the time of the Terror, France had already chased away counter-revolutionary armies from its borders and was still surrounded by forces intent upon reconquering the country.  A coalition - comprising the Prussians, Austrians, British, Spanish and Italians - was arming for war, with the declared aim of restablishing the monarchy and slaughtering anyone who defended the country against them.  Meanwhile there were very real internal conspiracies to aid the foreign enemies.  France in 1793 was a 'land of fear'... but it might've had a fair bit to do with the likelihood that the country would soon be overrun by foreign troops aiming to reinstall an absolute monarchy (I suppose these days we'd call it humanitarian intervention).  I consider the bombing of Dresden to have been an act of wanton terrorism and mass murder... but I'd consider it very dishonest and distorting if a TV drama depicted it without even mentioning the wider context.

I wonder if it'll be mentioned that the Terror began as, in part, a response to a call from the sans culottes of the Paris Commune (not the later one) to outlaw hoarding of grain by farmers, as the population of Paris was in very real danger of starving to death?  Will it be mentioned that the Constitution of 1793, ratified by public referendum, introduced universal male suffrage and guaranteed many rights, such as freedom of association, the right to education, assistance, a job, and popular sovereignty?  (The implementation of this consitution had to be delayed because of the exigencies of war.)  Will it be mentioned that the French Revolution inspired the slave revolt on San Domingue lead by Toussaint L'ouverture, and that consequently the revolutionary Convention in Paris abolished slavery? 

These are, of course, rhetorical questions.  I already know that, like Simon Schama in his 900 page book Citizens, Dennis Spooner will find himself too pressed for space trashing the revolution to even mention a little thing like the abolition of slavery.

Of course, the Terror got out of hand and claimed thousands of lives.  The Revolution as a whole went badly wrong, judging it by its own early standards.  I'm not invested in trying to prove that the French Revolution was perfect.  Far, far from it.  But I can't help noticing that it was acceptable to do a Doctor Who story depicting the extremely long, varied, complex, contingent and in-many-ways-inspiring phenomenon that we call the French Revolution - an event which has helped spawn democracy as we know it - as nothing but an outbreak of mindless savagery.

I may blog about the other episodes.  I'll see how it goes.