Knock Knock

Spoilers.

So, my pre-ordered copy of the much-critically-fawned-upon 'horror' film The Babadook arrived this morning.  And I've just watched it.

What a load of crap.

Look, I get what was being attempted here.  And it was attempted with a lot of sincerity, and some excellent acting.  But, really, what was the point?  Depression is a terrible thing.  Yes, we know.  We all bloody know.  Even those of us lucky enough to have escaped direct experience of depression know that we have escaped something terrible.  Grief is a terrible thing too.  Likewise.  It's better to connect with and love your kids than to not.  Yes.  I don't have kids and I know that.  These are trite morals.

Of course, there's no reason why you couldn't make a film carefully exploring these issues, delineating the experience of suffering from grief and depression so bad that it paralyses even your ability to love your own child.  But if that's what you want to talk about, do so.  Make a film about depression.  Make a film about mental illness.  Make a film about a nervous breakdown.  Make it with sensitivity, and with the space and attention these issues deserve.  The Babadook isn't that film, though it seems to be under the impression that it kind-of might be.

If, on the other hand, you want to make a ghost story, then make a ghost story.  But don't make a film which uses the aesthetics of the ghost story as obvious and simplistic metaphors for depression and mental illness, especially if you're going to spend the entire runtime of the film essentially screaming "THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR DEPRESSION!!!!" at the audience, as if you blatantly don't trust them to twig.

It's possible that someone who has actually suffered from depression may disagree with me here, and I shall respect that disagreement from my lucky positionality, but it seems to me that all we get in The Babadook are trite morals dressed up in dark cloaks.  'DON'T LET HIM IN' says the book about the monster that will creep into your life through looks and words, attack you in bed, and get under your skin.  Well thanks.  I'm sure people suffering from debilitating depression never thought of that.  The story seems to also imply that, once in, depression is almost certain to lead to murder-suicide if left unchecked... which seems a dubious message to be sending out about the plight of millions of perfectly normal, innocent, non-dangerous people who are suffering from a disease.  Also, depression would appear to be a monster that attacks without much in the way of a social origin.  The monster sneaks into your life because of loss and boredom and family difficulties, not because of wider social problems.  Moreover, the monster must be slain by the lone individual deciding to belt up.  Apparently, according to this film, all you have to do to defeat the monster of depression is to pull yourself together.  Even at the point where you are a slavering, knife-wielding homicidal maniac who is breaking the necks of pets (a cheap, obvious and predictable shot that one, by the way) and attempting to strangle your own kid, all you have to do is summon up the will-power to shout down your inner demons.  Presumably, those people who don't manage to summon up the last-minute grit to simply intimidate the Babadook and lock him in a closet are themselves to blame for the catastrophes that follow.  Your own fault.  Should've been stronger.  This is the most simplistic and offensive metaphorical statement on depression since Paul Cornell had a go for Big Finish.

Aside from how dodgy the film's implications are when it comes to serious, real world issues, there is also the question of how the film disrespects the uncanny and the hauntological.  It repeatedly hammers home that we are seeing a mental breakdown rather than an actual haunting.  This is why, despite the hyperbole of reviewers which is larded all over the DVD case, the film isn't remotely scary.  It never takes the monster seriously on his own terms.  It never pays enough respect to the monstrous.  It refuses to be even faintly mysterious.  It puts little ironic clips of classic shockers on the TV that the protagonist stares at in a depressed fug, thus showing us the raw material from which she fashions her dark illusions.  It insists on explaining everything.  Every creepy glimpse or sound is clearly contextualised as a dream or a hallucination, or as a metaphorical depiction of a mental state.  The Babadook attacks a car and causes a car crash... but we are left in no doubt (through heavy implication) that what we have just seen is an accident caused by a woman's depressed and wandering mind.  The little boy in the film believes in the Babadook as an outside force, but the way he talks about it is clearly meant to imply an unconscious perception on his part that his mother is haunted by the demon of depression.  This leads, as the film progresses, to the boy's utterances becoming increasingly gnomic, as it becomes crucial for him to produce dialogue which furthers the metaphor.  This shows a contempt for the thought-world of children, which becomes nothing more than a kind of cargo-cult-style attempt to comprehend the doings of adults.  Speaking of which... even the origin of the spooky book (the best thing in the film, aside from the acting) is explained in a line about the protagonist once having been a children's author.

As with The Innocents - another wildly overrated 'horror' movie that everyone seems to think is a masterpiece except me - the aimed-for ambiguity fails in a way that smells of the film-makers' contempt for anything actually uncanny, resolving downwards into a crashingly literal co-optation of hauntological aesthetics in the service of an ostensibly more serious message.  (At least The Babadook manages to ultimately treat the psychological problems of the protagonist with sympathy, unlike The Innocents, which takes a patronising and misogynistic tone about a character who is, when all is said and done, depicted as nothing more than a prudish, repressed hysteric.)  In both films, the hauntological is disrespected, denied its own integrity and narrative reality, denied its own power to both mean and to defy meaning, denied its own power to be inexplicable or horrifying for the sake of it.  It is denied these things because it is being used for the purposes of inaccurately and simplistically expressing a psychological state.  It is clearly being put in a subordinate position, mined for usable material while its own potential is ignored.

The fundamental problem with using the horrific in such a specific and sceptical way is that it neutralises the power of the horrific to tug at threads deeper than those we know about, and thus to suggest the deep unknowability of ourselves and the world we live in.  Horror often tries to say stuff about the real world, or promote a salutary moral, via a depiction of the return of the repressed.  But it ultimately relies upon the repressed returning in a way that represents a fundamental rupture with what we like to think of as the real world.  The haunting in The Shining has political valences which refer to actual social issues and/or historical horrors, but because it is the story of a literal haunting rather than self-consciously a visualisation of 'just' a mental breakdown, it also insists upon the idea that there is a 'real' faultline in reality that we might fall into.  I don't believe in the literal supernatural, but I find uncanny fiction a far more powerful reflection of my experience of the world than 'realism', especially realism which cannot tolerate symbols and metaphors unless they be clearly announced as such.  The uncanny vision is of a reality riven by cracks, cracks that we all might suddenly tumble into without any understanding of what is happening to us, and with no potential for understanding it.  That's the experience of modernity, for me.  I'm not saying 'realism' has nothing to say to us.  I just generally think it fails to get at the experience of modernity in quite the way managed by the uncanny.  And it should say its own stuff without misusing the uncanny in the capacity of a disrespected servant.

When the boy is being thrown around by the evil force near the end of The Babadook, the way it happens directly in front of his mother's outstretched arms clearly informs us that we are seeing her dissociative perception of her own violence.  She sees what she herself is doing, and inserts gaps of empty space between her hands and the violence they produce.  This is a perfect summation of the film.  In conception and execution, it is very clever... but the ultimate effect is banal, limited and boring.

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.

Skulltopus

In his fascinating essay 'M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire' (the link is to a PDF), the author and theorist China Miéville wrote:

The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.

Miéville charts the way that the cephalopodic suddenly erupts into late 19th-early 20th century "teratology" (monsterology), with conflicted foreshadowings and pre-disavowals (Verne, for example, and Victor Hugo) leading up to a story called 'The Sea Raiders' by H. G. Wells, in which previously unknown squidular monsters suddenly surface and go on an inexplicable rampage off the British coast, and on to the "haute Weird" of William Hope Hodgson and, especially, H. P. Lovecraft.

In this Weird tentacular, Miéville sees much significance.  His argument, as I've gathered from the essay mentioned above (and from listening to various talks he's given), is that the squidular, tentacular and cephalopodic, but especially the octopoidal, arises as a teratological metaphor to supply a need felt by those writers travelling through the crises of modernity at the turn of the 19th-20th century and after.  In their formless and protean nature - many octopuses and squid have developed natural camouflage abilities, making them capable of astonishing feats of transformation - the octopoda seemed to be the shape to use in order to convey shapelessness.  Moreover, the very "novum" or newness of the tentacular (in the West) as a symbol was attractive to those seeking to convey something that had not been conveyed before, that perhaps cannot be coherently conveyed at all.

The octopus - as I've mentioned on this blog and in Panic Moon, following my reading of Miéville - suddenly appears in and conquers the 20th century political propaganda poster (you can see an amazing array of such political octopus propaganda at this blog... to which I have contributed myself).  I've suggested (rather obviously and, I'm sure, unoriginally) that the many arms of the octopus, radiating outwards from the central hub of the body, make it a perfect graphic figure for representing the putative multifarious global reach and manipulative ability of centralised power, whether that power is military, commercial, ideological, whatever.  Exactly the kind of centralised but increasingly global power that was arising in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The octopus poster tends to show the creature reaching to many places at once.  Miéville himself has spoken of the octopus as suggesting manipulation.  He has noted how, in these propaganda representations, the octopus is used to signify just about everything from "perfidious Jews" and "perfidious Bolsheviks" to "capitalists", "unrestrained railroad building" and "landlords".  In other words, it means everything... hence it means nothing.  The octopus became immensely "symbolically fecund" in the early decades of the 20th century, but with no set cultural consensus about what it probably meant (unlike vampires and werewolves, say, which had - and still have - very well established, longstanding semiotic baggage).  It was the consequent ability of the tentacular to, so to speak, mean the meaningless, that made it enormously attractive to that wave of writers known as 'the Weird' (i.e. Hodgson and Lovecraft).  According to Miéville, even Weird writers who did not employ the tentacle tried out other such strategies, seeking new symbols to convey impenetrable and morally neutral meaninglessness.  Miéville notes (in the essay to which I linked) that the gap between the various pre-Weird 'try-outs' (i.e. Verne and Hugo) and Wells' story 

saw the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, the so-called ‘Long Depression’ of 1873-1896, the rise of ‘new unionism’, and the ‘new imperialism’ and murderous ‘scramble for Africa’.  Increasingly visible, especially in the last, the crisis tendencies of capitalism would ultimately lead to World War I (to the representation of which traditional bogeys were quite inadequate). It is the growing proximity of this total crisis – kata-culmination of modernity, ultimate rebuke to nostrums of bourgeois progress – that is expressed in the shift to the morally opaque tentacular and proto-Lovecraftian radical Weird of ‘The Sea Raiders'.

The First World War represents the moment when all the certainties of modernity - rationality, progress, enlightenment - seemed to collapse in upon themselves, to become untenable, to become inadequate as descriptions of a world that had suddenly become indescribable, a world that had become a slaughterhouse... or a revolutionary experiment, in the wave of revolutions and near revolutions that spread out from Bolshevik Russia in the wake of the war.  Miéville has noted the way that, for Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness, the indescribably frightening revelation takes the form of... [SPOILER ALERT]... a slave revolt by the Shoggoths.  Lovecraft, an Anglo-Saxon chauvinist who was horrified by 'race-mixing', was quite typical of the early 20th century 'high Weird' wave, in that he was a reactionary (despite, incidentally, being a self-identified "socialist" who supported FDR's New Deal!).  Miéville identifies the Weird (not the 'new Weird', by the way, of which Miéville himself is an exemplar) as a kind of "reactionary ecstasy".  Lovecraft was also a materialist, but an ecstatic one who longed for the numinous.  Miéville once described him, memorably, as "Julian of Norwich plus race hatred and materialism".

It's well worth reading Miéville's essay (linked to above) because it develops these ideas in greater detail, while also looking at the paradoxically relevant figures of various 'ghost story writers' (if you read it, you'll see why I put that phrase into cautionary inverted commas) like Le Fanu and, particularly, M. R. James.  Miéville's concern there is to compare the Weird, in all its tentacular glory (and much of it is glorious stuff) with the spectral... what has come to be broadly called (included in?  analysed as?  obscured by?) the hauntological.  (For a quick intro to the genesis of the interesting, amusing, poetic but ultimately unconvincing wrinkle in the fabric of trendy theory that is hauntology, see here... I especially like the bit about Tintin).  (The best, most persuasive writer I know of on this subject is K-Punk.  For instance.)

Miéville identifies M. R. James as a figure who, in some ways, straddles the hauntological and the Weird, going beyond the tired and routine observation that most of James' ghosts are not ghosts, to note that "the adversaries of James’s stories are disproportionately and emphatically Weird" because they tend to be physical and touchable, to be hairy or chitinous or slimey or amphibious or made of cloth... and even, on two occasions, to be tentacular.  Miéville writes that James'

use of more traditional ghosts and/or occasional folk-ish figures is repeated alongside Weird figures that in shortly forthcoming work would be repudiations of them. James’s corpus represents an under-one-roof co-existence – that would be all but unsustainable at any but that unique fulcrum moment – of what will later be seen to be hauntology and the Weird, the oppositional dyad.

In this context, the key James story is without question ‘Count Magnus’. Here, the ‘strange form’ from whose hood projects ‘the tentacle of a devil-fish’ – a Weird, inhuman, Cthulhoid figure who sucks faces from bones – is the servant of ‘a man in a long black cloak and broad hat’, a malevolent human ghost. This is an astounding crossover, its categoric transgression eclipsing any Marvel-DC or Cerebus-meets-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle shenanigans. James creates the ultimate tag-team: Hauntology deploys Weird as its sidekick.

This crossover/transgression is the exception to the rule, possible only at the moment just before the Weird-proper emerges.  Miéville suggests that the hauntological and the Weird are two distinct and incompatible ways of thinking about certain aspects/problems of modernity.

The Weird, then, is starkly opposed to the hauntological. Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint’, a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised uncanny – ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’ – rather than a hallucinatory/nihilist novum. The Great Old Ones (Outer Monstrosities, in Hodgson’s formulation) neither haunt nor linger. The Weird is not the return of any repressed: though always described as ancient, and halfrecalled by characters from spurious texts, this recruitment to invented cultural memory does not avail Weird monsters of Gothic’s strategy of revenance, but back-projects their radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself.

Weird writers were explicit about their anti-Gothic sensibility: Blackwood’s camper in ‘The Willows’ experiences ‘no ordinary ghostly fear’; Lovecraft stresses that the ‘true weird tale’ is characterised by ‘unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces’ rather than by ‘bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’. The Weird entities have waited in their catacombs, sunken cities and outer circles of space since aeons before humanity. If they remain it is from a pre-ancestral time. In its very unprecedentedness, paradoxically, Cthulhu is less a ghost than the arche-fossil-as-predator. The Weird is if anything ab-, not un-, canny.

The hauntological uses the spectre or phantom or revenant as a signifier for the forgotten, the unspoken, the buried, the hidden, the covered-up, the guilty secret.  The Weird, by contrast, is not about what we don't want to know, it's about what we can't know.  It is, as its literary practitioners constantly insisted, about the unnameable, the indescribable, the both previously unimagined and presently unimaginable, the hitherto unexpected and currently incomprehensible.

Hauntology and Weird are two iterations of the same problematic – that of crisis-blasted modernity showing its contradictory face, utterly new and traced with remnants, chaotic and nihilist and stained with human rebukes.

Miéville suggests that the incompatibility between these two modes is heavily suggested and/or confirmed by the fact (rather startling, on reflection) that, despite our species' apparent obsession with and ingenuity about the creation of monsters, there are hardly any examples to be found, in literature or art, of the skulltopus, the merging of the octopus (Weird) and the skull (Gothic, hauntological).  He announces the creation of a skulltopus as something like a manifesto objective, in order to sublate the unsublateable.  He even draws a skulltopus for us - the picture is to be found near the end of the essay... and strangely compelling it is too.  I understand he now has a skulltopus tattoo.

I find Miéville's ideas both fascinating and highly seductive (which is near enough to 'persuasive' to be going on with for now).  With all this in mind, and remembering this blog's USP, I'm going to be looking at various Doctor Who stories which seem to touch... even if sometimes only very tentatively and tangentially... upon some of these issues.

I can't promise that any of this will happen soon... but you never know.

Gods and Monsters

Happy Hallowe'en.

I was watching The Bride of Frankenstein yesterday; appreciating the fact that James Whale invented the self-analysing comic horror film decades before Wes Craven thought it would be tremendously cute to have characters in a slasher film talk about the narrative rules of slasher films.

At one point, the insane, camp, gin-swigging Dr Pretorius (played by the ridiculously watchable Ernest Thesiger) shows Frankenstein (Colin Clive) his collection of creations: tiny people that Pretorius grew from cultures and... well, it's pretty much indescribable.  Watch it for yourself.  If you've never seen it, you need to.

Pretorius' Little People - Funny home videos are a click away

It isn't explicitly said, but clearly both Pretorius and Frankenstein anticipate (the former with relish and the latter with fear) the breeding of a new race.  Pretorius, for all his campness and his disdain for every human female he meets, seems interested in the breeding potential of these creations of science.

Meanwhile, Frankenstein's monster turns out to have survived the first film and, having learned to talk, expresses his demand for a "friend"... by which he is taken to mean a woman with whom he can mate, though he doesn't express this desire himself. What the children of Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester would have looked like is odd enough to contemplate by itself, without imagining babies with cuboid heads and electrified, badger-striped hairdos.

It got me thinking about the origins of the novel Frankenstein.  I don't mean all that stuff that's supposed to have gone down at the Villa Diodati, which is depicted at the opening of Bride of Frankenstein as an arch costume drama, rather than the hazy blur of bullshitting and indolence and copping off that it probably was.  I mean the work and influence of Luigi Galvani, who suggested in 1791 that electricity was an innate property of animal life, and that it might even be the "vital force"... supposedly after noticing the legs of a dead frog kicking when he touched the nerves with his scapel during a lightning storm.  (I'm told he was searching for the testicles, having formed the theory that frogs kept them in their legs.)  Galvani's conclusions about animal electricity were flawed and were superceded by Volta, but 'galvanism' caught on as an idea.  And as morbid, gothic entertainment.  Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini became something of a hit, giving demonstrations of how dead bodies could be made to react to electrical charges.

In one famous incident in 1803, Aldini had the corpse of a just-hanged murderer, George Foster, brought from Newgate to the Royal College of Surgeons, where he electocuted the body, causing its jaw to twitch and one of its eyes to open.  When Aldini probed its rectum, the body is said to have arched and kicked and raised its fist as though in fury.  Well, you would, wouldn't you?  This was one of many such experiments carried out by many scientists at the time.  There was another guy who claimed to have briefly reanimated some decapitated kittens.  Awwwww.

According to Mary (writing well afterwards) these experiments were one topic of discussion amongst the bright young things - Byron, Shelley, Mary herself, et al - at the Villa Diodati, alongside the experiments of Dr Erasmus Darwin.  Erasmus Darwin - the grandfather of Charles - was supposed to have bestowed life on pasta, much to the fascination of many people.  Mary claimed that this story, combined with the experiments in galvanism, inspired her to think that a creature might be constructed from parts and then be brought to life.

Erasmus Darwin - who had known Mary's father, the radical philosopher William Godwin - was, interestingly enough, a proto-evolutionary thinker.  In Zoonomia and some of his poems, Erasmus put forward (sometimes obliquely) notions of life developing and changing.  His last poem traces life from primordial soup (presumably minestrone with sentient noodles in it) to modern society.  It was a hit with Romantics like Wordsworth.

The later Darwin would agonise over publishing his findings, knowing that he would be subject to fierce attacks by those who saw natural selection as dethroning God.  Which is what Mary's story is supposed by many to be about: a scientist who challenges God.  The idea that Frankenstein has 'played God' has far more life outside of the novel than inside.  It isn't a central concern of the book.  By contrast, the first theatrical adaptation was called Presumption! or The Fate of Frankenstein, and in James Whale's films people harp on at length about how Frankenstein has meddled in things that man should leave to God.  Of course, in Whale's movies, this is surface patter, lying on top of the deeper concerns.

Whale himself was both irreligious and openly gay.

Many film critics have suggested that the films, especially Bride, can be subject to a gay reading.  They point to the way the camp Pretorius separates Frankenstein from his future wife (his bride, you might say) and propositions him, suggesting that they collaborate in creating new life from seed, as though Pretorius is attempting some kind of gay biological procreation.  Meanwhile, the Monster (who is a despised and hunted outsider) uses one word for all prospective relationships, be they with men or women: "friend".  His friendship with a blind pauper is interpreted as a potential marriage, interrupted by ignorant and intolerant yokels.  Ultimately, he is incompatible with the "bride" that Frankenstein and Pretorius create for him.

The other way that this film is often read is as a Christian allegory.  The Monster is put into Christlike poses several times, especially when captured, tied to a pole and raised in the air, his hands tied above his head.  Crosses abound (though most of these are in the film because several scenes take place in a graveyard).  And so on.

I can't pretend to be sufficiently familiar with the critical literature to evaluate these claims.  Apparently, a lot of people who knew James Whale consider them bullshit - but then they don't need to have been intentional in order to be present in the texts.

There's an interesting (if flowery) article about this stuff here.

Anyway, it's impossible to deny that a story about a creator who makes a man, gives him free will, turns him out into the world and then comes into conflict with him has to be, in some way, a reiteration of 'Genesis'.

In light of this, it's interesting to look at the first ever depiction of the Monster, an engraving created for the 1831 publication by the truly great and shamefully undervalued artist Theodor von Holst.

 

And to compare it to another famous image of a newly created man...

There's more than a slight resemblance.  Adam, of course, doesn't have to take in the sight of his creator's eyes wide with horror as they look upon him... not just yet anyways.

There's no reason to think von Holst didn't take direct inspiration from Michaelangelo.  Holst was a Romantic with a love of the gothic and the supernatural, but it would be a mistake to think of Romanticism and the gothic as a repudiation of the classical, just as it would be wrong to think of Modernism as a repudiation of Expressionism (which horror films like The Bride of Frankenstein illustrate well enough). 

Holst studied under Fuseli, who painted Mary Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist and author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who died a little more than a week after giving birth to the future author of Frankenstein.  

Holst was also the great uncle of the composer Gustav Holst, who wrote The Planets suite, which includes a movement entitled 'Mars, the Bringer of War', routinely used directly in sci-fi (Quatermass) or as inspiration for sci-fi music, including Peter Howell's music for 'The Leisure Hive'.  This is perfectly fitting because The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells is (like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) one of the foundational texts of science-fiction, thus trading on the percieved connection between Mars and war and translating this into the context of the nascent 'alien invasion' sub-genre.  (As everyone knows, War of the Worlds was dramatised for the radio by Howard Koch and performed by Orson Welles' and John Houseman's Mercury Theatre of the Air, causing widespread panic in America upon the eve of Hallowe'en in 1938.)  It's also fitting because The Planets is a synthesis of astrological notions and musical modernism, which strikes me as pleasingly analagous to my idea that sci-fi is a reiteration of myth and legend in the idioms of the technological age.

The Mercury Theatre broadcast (which featured George Colouris, who would later be cast by Welles as Mr Thatcher in Citizen Kane... and would later go on to even greater achievements, playing Arbitan in 'The Keys of Marinus') is supposed to have had such an amazing effect partly because the American people were skittishly aware that they were on the brink of entering World War II.  Holst's 'Mars, The Bringer of War' takes something of its terrific and stentorian power from the fact that it was written during World War I, during the period when people gradually became aware that the 'Great War' was a horrifying scrabble for muddy and blood-soaked land, with bodies ploughed under barbed wire by great, rolling, implacable, metal monsters called tanks.

Tanks looked like the machines of the future.  They were.  They were the final death knell of the pre-capitalist society.  Bayonets gave way to steel behemoths.  Industry and technology could now make things like that: inhuman, unstoppable, alien, seemingly out of human control.  The trauma of them still echoes through Western culture, with the Daleks themselves partly confected from the memory of these utterly inhuman, bolted, riveted, armour plated, gun-sprouting war monsters. 

Of course, part of the peculiar power of Frankenstein lies in the fact that the Monster is something man made.  He is a product.  An artifact of human creativity and labour.  The Universal version even has dirty great bolts sticking out of his neck, just to emphasize his status as a cyborg (like a Cyberman or a Dalek), as a thing made of bits and pieces, like a car made from parts on a production line.  Frankenstein's monster is the first great monster of Western culture that is made, that is something that humans have fabricated and constructed ourselves.  Instead of encountering it as a hostile part of the landscape, like a predator, we place it in the landscape, and our treatment of it makes it our enemy.  The book expresses a moment in Europe when science was on the rise, when Enlightenment and Reason had become both causes and dogmas.  It was all to do with the slow, lingering death of feudalism and the slow, inexorable rise of capitalism.  It's a big topic, but thinkers from Rousseau to Mary's own father had confronted the old order (Things as They Are, to use the alternative title of Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a bitter and radical condemnation of the power of aristocracy) with what they conceived of as Reason.  Mary's book is also partly a rebuke to this.  The child of Reason, the product of the new and scientific and sacriligious man, the product of the age of bourgeois production, is a monster that becomes the victim of the flaws in the creator's project and then comes back for revenge.  And breeds.  Tanks breed.  Bombs breed.  Cars breed.  Toys breed.  We have to make them, but they hardly seem like ours at all.  We don't control them.  Or our control becomes more and more remote.  The product of the new age ultimately gives the lie to the ideals of liberty and justice.  Like the tank that is created by capitalism to fight wars for freedom and peace... by bulldozing the bullet-riddled corpses of kids into the mud.

(The solution to this riddle is to be found in the work of Mary's husband Percy, who - in his unsure and unreliable way - was a radical who understood that the people are the ones who have to enforce change, and that that change can be a monster itself rather than a graceful victory for Reason.  In Prometheus Unbound - those Romantics loved Prometheus... Frankenstein's alt title was The Modern Prometheus - Shelley writes of Demogorgon, the monster that can be invoked to destroy tyranny.  Demogorgon.  The Peoplemonster.)

But back to the problem, as identified.  The products that turn.  Marx called capital (the product of human labour appropriated and confronting us as hostile and alien) a vampire.  Mary Shelley had the product of the work of the scientist become a murderous reproach to him.  We still routinely invoke the word "monster" when talking about such products.  We need the language of monsters.

And this just may be a central concern of sci-fi, including Doctor Who.  Voc Robots are created things that turn against us, products that kill.  Xoanon.  The Oracle.  B.O.S.S.  The Peking Homunculus.  WOTAN and his War Machines.  Autons.  Daleks and Cybermen are created things too, half organism and half machine.  Killing machines with people trapped inside somewhere.  Many Doctor Who monsters (more than you'd think) turn out to be created things, or partly created things.  The Ice Warriors have visors and guns integrated in their shells; the Sontarans are clones; the Zygons live on the milk of a cyborg monster.  They're all, partly, the deformed and disowned children of Frankenstein.

Of course, there's a more direct child.  Morbius.  Solon is the mad scientist, living in the castle with the deformed servant, listening to the thunder as he plots to reanimate a criminal (by probing the rectum?), scheming to make a monster from scavanged bits and pieces, ultimately turned upon by his creation, hunted down by torch-weilding locals, etc.  But that's got much more to do with the movies - Universal and Hammer - than it has to do with Mary Shelley.  Even the Sisterhood come from Rider Haggard via Hammer.   

Doctor Who is itself Frankenstein's monster, made of scavanged and second-hand bits and pieces.

That's why its amusing to think of the Character Options toys that so many of us Who fans collect (no doubt made with oil that has to be controlled through invasions of which many of us disapprove).  We're like Dr Pretorius, playing with his little people in jars.  Gods playing with our monsters.  Just make sure you keep the lid on the jar with Cpt. Harkness in it... unless you want your little people to breed.

Anyway, I'm tired of all this brainstorming.  Hallowe'en is over.

Good night.  If you can.