There's a play called Sir Thomas More. It is never performed, despite having bits in it written by Shakespeare. Every Shakespeare play is performed. Even the rubbish ones. Except Sir Thomas More. Sir Thomas More is never performed, ever. Not any more.
Why?
Actually, in academia and the theatre world, it is well known how the play spread like an infectious disease, from
city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated
there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced
of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in its wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It
could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was
acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in Sir Thomas More,
all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on
words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality
and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward
with more awful effect.
Basically, anyone who has ever seen Sir Thomas More performed has gone insane. (I'm not sure how the actors managed to stage it, but there you go. Perhaps actors are immune for some reason.)
But it's worse than that. Anyone who has even read the whole thing in its entirety has gone insane.
There are asylums stuffed with academics, Shakespeare scholars, students of Early Modern drama... all slavering and gibbering and banging their heads against their rubber-padded walls, chewing off their own fingers, sitting in their own faeces and happily eating it, because of this play. There are multiple known cases of people slaughtered (usually with screwdrivers for some unfathomable reason) by people who have seen or read Sir Thomas More and immediately gone on wild-eyed killing sprees.
Most people, of course, have only read the Shakespeare bits. Because no other dramatist of his time was any good at all. But even reading a part of this play can drive one partially insane. For instance, there are many who will attempt to claim that Shakespeare's scenes in the play constitute a message of humanistic tolerance for refugees. In the scene, More attempts to reason with a xenophobic crowd who are hellbent on driving back some asylum seekers. More asks the crowd to imagine themselves in the position of the refugees and... shit I nearly did it myself there. This insanity in insidious. The mere iteration of the intact Shakespearean contribution integrated into the play instantly insinuates itself into my interiority and instigates incipient irrationality which instantiates itself into the imagination and iii iiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.......
Sorry. I'm back now.
Yeah, as I was saying. Otherwise sensible people will i-i-imagine that Shakespeare is making a humanistic plea for tolerance of strangers, which can then be adopted sentimentally by modern liberals. Actually, what he's doing is demonstrating the shit ignorance and fuck selfishness of ordinary people, the mob, who need to be lectured on basic Christian morals by Sir Thomas fucking More... who was, in the real world, a religious bigot and fanatic who persecuted and tortured people he disagreed with. But no, to Shakespeare, mindless hate is the province of the poor. The point More makes to the baying crowd of vicious, swinish, hateful and hate-filled Tudor Daily Mail readers is that they, by assembling and protesting and speaking their minds, are themselves doing evil by rebelling against the sacred law and rule of the king. Imagine, he says to them, if the king banished you for your treacherous disobedience - as well he might justly do. Then you'd be in the same position as the refugees. Ah-ha! Gotcha, you oiks!
This isn't a modern liberal plea for tolerance. This is sanctimonious propaganda for an absolute monarchy based on utter contempt for ordinary working people.
I say this as a fan: STFU Shakespeare.
Just thinking about it makes me mad. But madder still do I get when I think about little snatches of it - which sound terribly humane when consciously and cynically ripped out of context - being embossed on tatty notebooks for sale as part of the Shakespeare industry, all part of the bullshit attempt to sell Shakespeare as sage and saint and precursor of everything that we today egotistically think of as our advanced widsom. Of course, the irony is that, when we flatter ourselves that Shakespeare was just like us because he foresaw so much of our liberal tolerance, we're actually getting something right for the wrong reasons. We are very much like Shakespeare. We're still producing drama that reflects the dominant ideology of our age, the ideology of the ruling class, just as he did.
I personally think that most dementias associated with Shakespeare - and there are so many specifically Shakespeare-related forms of mental illness that there really should be more serious psychiatric work done on the subject - stem, fundamentally, from the play Sir Thomas More. It would be easy to blame Shakespeare - the fountainhead of so many psychotic delusions - for adding the insanity to Sir Thomas More via his contribution. I think it's the other way round. I think Shakespeare is infected with contagious insanity via his association with that play. Even his early plays are retroactively infected with the virus. (This, incidentally, is also the root cause of both anti-Stratfordianism and the Ricardian Society.)
This peculiar effect is key to understanding why and how Sir Thomas More came to be written in the way it was. It is a collaboration between various dramatists. This was extremely unusual for the time. Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle appear to be the main authors but, in addition to Shakespeare, the play was also partially written by Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker. Remember that Monty Python sketch about the world's funniest joke? It killed anyone who heard it? So in order to translate it into German and thus turn it into a weapon usable against the Third Reich, the British Army had to break it up into bits and get it translated in fragments? Even seeing more than one word would land you, screaming and suffocating on your own guffaws, in the field hospital? That's actually an encoded secret clue - given to us by Terry Jones, who is a direct descendant of Thomas Dekker, probably - about what happened with Sir Thomas More. They tried to write a play about More and it gradually became apparent to them that doing so would drive them insane, so they split the play up into bits and asked different writers to tackle a bit each. Even so, the overall effect was still enough to make them think they could get the play past the Tudor censors. (I believe it came back to them with "Thou hast gotteth to beeth fucking kiddingeth, thou naughty knaves!" scrawled on it in the Master of the Revels' handwriting.)
Even today, anybody who tries to write anything about Thomas More goes mad. Peter Ackroyd went mad after he wrote a biography of More. (I mean, have you read Thames - Sacred River??? That could only have been written by a mad person.) Even Hilary Mantel went mad simply as a result of including More as a character in the Wolf Hall novels. (Then she went sane again, admittedly.) Robert Bolt went mad too, I expect. I can't be bothered to look it up and check. But I know that the people who made the movie of A Man For All Seasons went mad. They must've done because they later came to think it would be a worthwhile thing to do to remake it with Charlton Heston instead of Paul Scofield.
So, yeah.
Also, it's a shit play.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Monday, 3 August 2015
Wednesday, 8 July 2015
Is this a Shabcast which I see before me? (Shabcast 8)
What bloody man
is that? It's bloody Jack Graham. Again.
The curtain rises on Shabcast 8. Listen and/or download here.
Another Shabcast so soon? Yes, but don't get used to this kind of schedule. It's only happening because time is out of joint.
This time, myself and my actorly buddy Elliot Chapman (returning guest from the Macra shabcast, and Big Finish's new Ben Jackson) discuss Shakespeare's great tragedy 'Macbeth' (we only shabcast about things that begin with 'mac'), and Shakespeare generally. We even say the word 'Macbeth' occasionally... hopefully without bringing too much theatrical ill-luck down upon ourselves. We chat as we watch the TV film of Trevor Nunn's legendary production from 1978, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, and produced by Verity Lambert. The second most profound material she ever televised.
Elliot will be appearing in a production of 'Macbeth' soon to run in Redcliffe Caves in Bristol, produced by Insane Root as part of the Bristol Shakespeare Festival. Jack will be appearing in the kitchen soon to make himself an evil sandwich as part of a obscene, perverse ritual. Root for us insanely, and download our shabcast.
When shall we two meet again? Probably to discuss macaroni cheese.
Exeunt.
The curtain rises on Shabcast 8. Listen and/or download here.
Another Shabcast so soon? Yes, but don't get used to this kind of schedule. It's only happening because time is out of joint.
This time, myself and my actorly buddy Elliot Chapman (returning guest from the Macra shabcast, and Big Finish's new Ben Jackson) discuss Shakespeare's great tragedy 'Macbeth' (we only shabcast about things that begin with 'mac'), and Shakespeare generally. We even say the word 'Macbeth' occasionally... hopefully without bringing too much theatrical ill-luck down upon ourselves. We chat as we watch the TV film of Trevor Nunn's legendary production from 1978, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, and produced by Verity Lambert. The second most profound material she ever televised.
Elliot will be appearing in a production of 'Macbeth' soon to run in Redcliffe Caves in Bristol, produced by Insane Root as part of the Bristol Shakespeare Festival. Jack will be appearing in the kitchen soon to make himself an evil sandwich as part of a obscene, perverse ritual. Root for us insanely, and download our shabcast.
When shall we two meet again? Probably to discuss macaroni cheese.
Exeunt.
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
No Question
I wrote this for somebody as a favour, to fill some space. I thought I might as well post it here. It isn't really a Shabgraff piece, but it exists.
William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. It wasn’t the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or any of the other candidates sometimes suggested. But how can we be so sure?
We have the accounts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. His rivals, detractors, friends and colleagues had no doubt. Ben Jonson wrote in his published diaries about his criticisms of the plays - right alongside his love and admiration for his friend Shakespeare, their author. Nobody questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his own work for centuries. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that a brilliant but eccentric woman called Delia Bacon wrote a book in which she heavily hinted that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon. She convinced a few people – including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud (who never believed anything silly, of course). The early-to-mid 19th century was an age still influenced by the Romantics, who had invented the idea of the Artist as a lone creator, driven by the spirit, scribbling away in a garret, listening to the Muse whispering in his ear and writing for the sake of Art itself. William Shakespeare – a professional actor, jobbing hack, and sharer in the going concern that was the Globe Theatre – didn’t fit this Romantic ideal. Delia Bacon preferred her more upper-class, better-educated, self-consciously intellectual namesake. Trouble is, aside from the total lack of any evidence at all connecting Bacon to any of the plays or poems, we also know Sir Francis Bacon’s writing style, his range, his concerns, and his opinions. They don’t fit the plays. At all. The same is true of the current most-favoured candidate, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the shy bard depicted in the recent (and very silly) movie Anonymous. We have extant examples of de Vere’s poetry. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t compare to the style and quality of even Shakespeare’s earliest and worst sonnets. The Earl also wrote a few comedy plays. None of them survive, but they are mentioned by a contemporary critic, Francis Meres. Meres also mentions Shakespeare. The context makes it perfectly clear that Meres thinks of them as different people. (This also rubbishes the notion that deVere would be precluded from writing plays by his social position – the excuse often used to explain the Earl’s theorised decision to use an actor as a front man.)
It’s often said by ‘Anti-Statfordians’ that Shakespeare lacked the education he would have needed to write the plays. But Shakespeare, as the son of a local alderman, would have been entitled to attend Stratford’s King Edward VI grammar school. Shakespeare’s plays are recognisably the work of someone with an Elizabethan grammar school education – a grounding that would look more like a Classics degree from Oxbridge today. Anti-Stratfordians often point out that, unlike other playwrights (Christopher Marlow, for instance) Shakespeare didn’t attend University. But neither did Ben Jonson, the most ostentatiously learned playwright of Shakespeare’s time. Anti-Stratfordians are fond of saying Shakespeare owned no books. What they mean is that we have no record of his library. But we have no record of the contents of his wardrobe either. Does that mean he owned no shoes?
Shakespeare’s plays are stuffed with idiomatic Warrickshire words, spellings, local names and local knowledge. Shakespeare puts in jokes which refer to his father’s profession and status – glove-maker and alderman – and conducts elaborate wordplay on his own name: ‘Will’. It’s difficult to imagine how or why Francis Bacon or Edward deVere, Earl of Oxford, would do any of that… unless they were covering themselves with pathological consistency. Meanwhile, the wackier fringes of Anti-Stratfordianism have ransacked Shakespeare looking for secret codes that reveal the names of the true authors, and never found anything that can’t be explained better as coincidence and/or wishful thinking.
Quite apart from anything else, about twelve of the plays Shakespeare authored or co-authored were definitely written after Oxford was in his grave. Amazingly, Anti-Stratfordians don’t let this stop them. They ignore the scholarship which dates the plays, or they claim byzantine conspiracies in which accomplices secretly added topical references to plays which Oxford left for posthumous performance. For some reason. And all without a shred of evidence. Even more extreme are the manoeuvres gone through to prove Marlowe wrote the plays. Marlowe was killed in 1593, before thirty-four of Shakespeare’s plays were written. The death of Marlowe is certainly mysterious, and may have been an assassination linked to his near-certain role as a part-time spy, but there’s no evidence that he faked his own death. And again, we can analyze the differences between Marlowe’s work and Shakespeare’s. Marlowe is the only candidate talented enough to be remotely plausible, but his style is still quite distinct. Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe, and borrowed from him. That’s sufficient explanation of their occasional similarities – which we notice all the more because of their many differences.
Anti-Stratfordians say that mainstream academics and scholars don’t want to admit the truth because it would spoil their lucrative Shakespeare industry… but Anti-Stratfordianism itself is a lucrative industry! However, the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare seems to owe more to snobbery than profit. The son of a glover is not good enough to satisfy some people. (By the way: Jonson was the son of a bricklayer, yet, as far as I know, nobody claims he didn’t write his own plays.) Some people simply find it hard to believe that some of the greatest works in the English language were written by a lower middle-class nobody from the rural midlands whose father was a tradesman, who never went to university, and who also seems to have liked money and been something of a social climber. People want Shakespeare to be a tortured visionary, or a suffering artist, or a glamorous aristocrat, or a questing intellectual, or some combination of all these. But the bankruptcy of this becomes apparent when you consider that Bacon was involved in witch trials which included torture, and Oxford was a murderer who got away with it because his victim was a mere servant. It’s odd that such men should be considered preferable to a man who, at worst, lacked a diploma, had a bit of a brummie accent, avoided taxes where possible, and could have been nicer to his wife. But that’s who wrote the plays. The factual record admits of no other reasonable conclusion.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of the evidence for Shakespeare, or the inanities of the Anti-Stratfordians. For further reading: The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate, Contested Will by James Shapiro, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, and The Shakespeare Authorship Page.
ADDITIONAL 14/04/15: See also Shakespeare, In Fact by the late Irvin Leigh Matus. This book takes the trouble to engage with actual Anti-Strat arguments and check their facts... and shows, in the process, that they're not just factually wrong but actively distort their sources. Indispensible if you care about this issue and enjoy (as I do) the guilty pleasure of reading Anti-Strats being debunked.
William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. It wasn’t the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or any of the other candidates sometimes suggested. But how can we be so sure?
We have the accounts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. His rivals, detractors, friends and colleagues had no doubt. Ben Jonson wrote in his published diaries about his criticisms of the plays - right alongside his love and admiration for his friend Shakespeare, their author. Nobody questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his own work for centuries. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that a brilliant but eccentric woman called Delia Bacon wrote a book in which she heavily hinted that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon. She convinced a few people – including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud (who never believed anything silly, of course). The early-to-mid 19th century was an age still influenced by the Romantics, who had invented the idea of the Artist as a lone creator, driven by the spirit, scribbling away in a garret, listening to the Muse whispering in his ear and writing for the sake of Art itself. William Shakespeare – a professional actor, jobbing hack, and sharer in the going concern that was the Globe Theatre – didn’t fit this Romantic ideal. Delia Bacon preferred her more upper-class, better-educated, self-consciously intellectual namesake. Trouble is, aside from the total lack of any evidence at all connecting Bacon to any of the plays or poems, we also know Sir Francis Bacon’s writing style, his range, his concerns, and his opinions. They don’t fit the plays. At all. The same is true of the current most-favoured candidate, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the shy bard depicted in the recent (and very silly) movie Anonymous. We have extant examples of de Vere’s poetry. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t compare to the style and quality of even Shakespeare’s earliest and worst sonnets. The Earl also wrote a few comedy plays. None of them survive, but they are mentioned by a contemporary critic, Francis Meres. Meres also mentions Shakespeare. The context makes it perfectly clear that Meres thinks of them as different people. (This also rubbishes the notion that deVere would be precluded from writing plays by his social position – the excuse often used to explain the Earl’s theorised decision to use an actor as a front man.)
It’s often said by ‘Anti-Statfordians’ that Shakespeare lacked the education he would have needed to write the plays. But Shakespeare, as the son of a local alderman, would have been entitled to attend Stratford’s King Edward VI grammar school. Shakespeare’s plays are recognisably the work of someone with an Elizabethan grammar school education – a grounding that would look more like a Classics degree from Oxbridge today. Anti-Stratfordians often point out that, unlike other playwrights (Christopher Marlow, for instance) Shakespeare didn’t attend University. But neither did Ben Jonson, the most ostentatiously learned playwright of Shakespeare’s time. Anti-Stratfordians are fond of saying Shakespeare owned no books. What they mean is that we have no record of his library. But we have no record of the contents of his wardrobe either. Does that mean he owned no shoes?
Shakespeare’s plays are stuffed with idiomatic Warrickshire words, spellings, local names and local knowledge. Shakespeare puts in jokes which refer to his father’s profession and status – glove-maker and alderman – and conducts elaborate wordplay on his own name: ‘Will’. It’s difficult to imagine how or why Francis Bacon or Edward deVere, Earl of Oxford, would do any of that… unless they were covering themselves with pathological consistency. Meanwhile, the wackier fringes of Anti-Stratfordianism have ransacked Shakespeare looking for secret codes that reveal the names of the true authors, and never found anything that can’t be explained better as coincidence and/or wishful thinking.
Quite apart from anything else, about twelve of the plays Shakespeare authored or co-authored were definitely written after Oxford was in his grave. Amazingly, Anti-Stratfordians don’t let this stop them. They ignore the scholarship which dates the plays, or they claim byzantine conspiracies in which accomplices secretly added topical references to plays which Oxford left for posthumous performance. For some reason. And all without a shred of evidence. Even more extreme are the manoeuvres gone through to prove Marlowe wrote the plays. Marlowe was killed in 1593, before thirty-four of Shakespeare’s plays were written. The death of Marlowe is certainly mysterious, and may have been an assassination linked to his near-certain role as a part-time spy, but there’s no evidence that he faked his own death. And again, we can analyze the differences between Marlowe’s work and Shakespeare’s. Marlowe is the only candidate talented enough to be remotely plausible, but his style is still quite distinct. Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe, and borrowed from him. That’s sufficient explanation of their occasional similarities – which we notice all the more because of their many differences.
Anti-Stratfordians say that mainstream academics and scholars don’t want to admit the truth because it would spoil their lucrative Shakespeare industry… but Anti-Stratfordianism itself is a lucrative industry! However, the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare seems to owe more to snobbery than profit. The son of a glover is not good enough to satisfy some people. (By the way: Jonson was the son of a bricklayer, yet, as far as I know, nobody claims he didn’t write his own plays.) Some people simply find it hard to believe that some of the greatest works in the English language were written by a lower middle-class nobody from the rural midlands whose father was a tradesman, who never went to university, and who also seems to have liked money and been something of a social climber. People want Shakespeare to be a tortured visionary, or a suffering artist, or a glamorous aristocrat, or a questing intellectual, or some combination of all these. But the bankruptcy of this becomes apparent when you consider that Bacon was involved in witch trials which included torture, and Oxford was a murderer who got away with it because his victim was a mere servant. It’s odd that such men should be considered preferable to a man who, at worst, lacked a diploma, had a bit of a brummie accent, avoided taxes where possible, and could have been nicer to his wife. But that’s who wrote the plays. The factual record admits of no other reasonable conclusion.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of the evidence for Shakespeare, or the inanities of the Anti-Stratfordians. For further reading: The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate, Contested Will by James Shapiro, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, and The Shakespeare Authorship Page.
ADDITIONAL 14/04/15: See also Shakespeare, In Fact by the late Irvin Leigh Matus. This book takes the trouble to engage with actual Anti-Strat arguments and check their facts... and shows, in the process, that they're not just factually wrong but actively distort their sources. Indispensible if you care about this issue and enjoy (as I do) the guilty pleasure of reading Anti-Strats being debunked.
Friday, 29 August 2014
Random Thing #1
This got cut from something else I was writing. I'm putting it here because I'd rather put it somewhere than just delete it.
At first sight, Flint and Rayna in the Star Trek episode 'Requiem for Methuselah' look like a fairly standard sci-fi reiteration of Propsero and Miranda. That’s been done a fair few times, of course. Most famously in Forbidden Planet. (The reiteration of Shakespeare is apt enough, given that Flint owns a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. He never claims to have been Shakespeare, but probably would if prompted.) Oddly though, the more ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ progresses, the more it looks like Othello rather than The Tempest.
Because ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ seems – rather astonishingly - to have a ‘double time’ scheme to it, very much like Othello. The play is famous for having two apparently separate and irreconcilable chronologies mapped onto each other within it. As many critics have observed, judging by the events we witness, there seems to be a space of about twenty-four hours between Othello and Desdemona’s marriage and Desdemona’s murder by Othello, and yet multiple other indications with the play – including flat statements by characters – imply that at least a week passes. A casual reader or viewer is quite likely to imagine that the sojourn in Cyprus lasts several weeks before culminating in tragedy. The two time schemes simply don’t match. Apart from anything else, there simply isn’t enough time for Desdemona to have committed “the act of shame” with Cassio “a thousand times”, as Othello comes to believe. But the play does work. To quote A. C. Bradley: “[Shakespeare] wanted the spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable.”
Something noticeably similar occurs in ‘Requiem for Methuselah’. The episode has a strict time span imposed upon it, from the start, by the vicissitudes of what we might call the ‘A Plot’, the one about Kirk et al needing to get their hands on the (amusingly named) substance Ryetalyn, refine it so that it can be used to cure the Rigellian Fever and take said cure back to the Enterprise to save all the other regular characters. The point is repeatedly made that time is of the essence. Yet, despite the fact that they succeed in doing this, the episode feels like it takes much longer. The episode manages to give the impression of massively compressing the events of, perhaps, several days. First and foremost, Kirk falls for Rayna so heavily that it defies credibility that it could happen in the space of a few hours. The episode really stresses this too, leaving Kirk devastated by Rayna’s death, so much so that Spock erases his memory of her at the end, to spare Kirk debilitating emotional pain. In other ways too, Kirk, McCoy and Spock’s stay with Flint feels like a prolonged one. There is time for everyone to relax and lounge around, playing the harpsichord or dancing. Minerals and collected and refined – twice! – with Flint explicitly delaying the process. This is what we might call the ‘B Plot’, the business with Flint trying to use Kirk to arouse Rayna’s emotions. The requirements of Flint’s plan seem impossible to squeeze into a few hours. He’s trying to foster a mutual attraction which will arouse latent emotions. If Kirk really falls head over heels for Rayna, and manages to draw an emotional response from her despite her never having been capable of emotions before, all in a few hours, Flint really has been lucky in a way he could scarcely have foreseen. This isn’t really a problem in plot terms because there is a huge sense, conveyed on screen, that we are watching the edited highlights of a very long stay. A few days at the very least. The episode successfully pulls off something like Othello’s ‘double time’ scheme. It makes the viewer feel “a passionate and vehement haste in the action” while also making it seem “fairly probable.”
This monkeying around with time is quite appropriate in a story that concerns itself with an immortal man of colossal age who seems to have lived through every epoch in human history. Flint himself is a temporal contradiction. A man unimaginably older than he looks. An immortal who stands outside of time. Flint has lived a lifetime, but his lifetime encompasses the entirety of human history. He is one man but has been many others. His whole self is a ‘double time’ scheme.
At first sight, Flint and Rayna in the Star Trek episode 'Requiem for Methuselah' look like a fairly standard sci-fi reiteration of Propsero and Miranda. That’s been done a fair few times, of course. Most famously in Forbidden Planet. (The reiteration of Shakespeare is apt enough, given that Flint owns a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. He never claims to have been Shakespeare, but probably would if prompted.) Oddly though, the more ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ progresses, the more it looks like Othello rather than The Tempest.
Because ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ seems – rather astonishingly - to have a ‘double time’ scheme to it, very much like Othello. The play is famous for having two apparently separate and irreconcilable chronologies mapped onto each other within it. As many critics have observed, judging by the events we witness, there seems to be a space of about twenty-four hours between Othello and Desdemona’s marriage and Desdemona’s murder by Othello, and yet multiple other indications with the play – including flat statements by characters – imply that at least a week passes. A casual reader or viewer is quite likely to imagine that the sojourn in Cyprus lasts several weeks before culminating in tragedy. The two time schemes simply don’t match. Apart from anything else, there simply isn’t enough time for Desdemona to have committed “the act of shame” with Cassio “a thousand times”, as Othello comes to believe. But the play does work. To quote A. C. Bradley: “[Shakespeare] wanted the spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable.”
Something noticeably similar occurs in ‘Requiem for Methuselah’. The episode has a strict time span imposed upon it, from the start, by the vicissitudes of what we might call the ‘A Plot’, the one about Kirk et al needing to get their hands on the (amusingly named) substance Ryetalyn, refine it so that it can be used to cure the Rigellian Fever and take said cure back to the Enterprise to save all the other regular characters. The point is repeatedly made that time is of the essence. Yet, despite the fact that they succeed in doing this, the episode feels like it takes much longer. The episode manages to give the impression of massively compressing the events of, perhaps, several days. First and foremost, Kirk falls for Rayna so heavily that it defies credibility that it could happen in the space of a few hours. The episode really stresses this too, leaving Kirk devastated by Rayna’s death, so much so that Spock erases his memory of her at the end, to spare Kirk debilitating emotional pain. In other ways too, Kirk, McCoy and Spock’s stay with Flint feels like a prolonged one. There is time for everyone to relax and lounge around, playing the harpsichord or dancing. Minerals and collected and refined – twice! – with Flint explicitly delaying the process. This is what we might call the ‘B Plot’, the business with Flint trying to use Kirk to arouse Rayna’s emotions. The requirements of Flint’s plan seem impossible to squeeze into a few hours. He’s trying to foster a mutual attraction which will arouse latent emotions. If Kirk really falls head over heels for Rayna, and manages to draw an emotional response from her despite her never having been capable of emotions before, all in a few hours, Flint really has been lucky in a way he could scarcely have foreseen. This isn’t really a problem in plot terms because there is a huge sense, conveyed on screen, that we are watching the edited highlights of a very long stay. A few days at the very least. The episode successfully pulls off something like Othello’s ‘double time’ scheme. It makes the viewer feel “a passionate and vehement haste in the action” while also making it seem “fairly probable.”
This monkeying around with time is quite appropriate in a story that concerns itself with an immortal man of colossal age who seems to have lived through every epoch in human history. Flint himself is a temporal contradiction. A man unimaginably older than he looks. An immortal who stands outside of time. Flint has lived a lifetime, but his lifetime encompasses the entirety of human history. He is one man but has been many others. His whole self is a ‘double time’ scheme.
Thursday, 4 April 2013
That Isn't Right
It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at 'The Reign of Terror' for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should've been called 'That Isn't Right'. So I've given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.
I wasn't going out on much a limb dissing 'The Reign of Terror' (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it. 'The Aztecs', by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good. It isn't that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it's Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.
I'm not actually going to say that it's bad, as such. On the whole, it's very well made. But....
Black and White and Red All Over
Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people. It's not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are 'darked-up' (what would you call it... bronzeface?). It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they've been reddened. But even if they weren't actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another. Costume, ostensibly 'native' mannerisms and speech patterns, etc. It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar. Remember, not all blackface involves actual 'darking-up'. These days,
many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant
culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having
someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group,
whether in overtly parodic form or not. As China Miéville has observed,
the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once
upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal "modern blackface" by putting
speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they're not
black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech)
into the mouths of 'the Few', thus implicitly comparing today's
supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, 'entitled' youngsters with
the generation of the "finest hour". Miéville points out that such
juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys 'putting on' verbal
fancy dress such as "innit") are the standard obsession of Radio
4 comedy panel shows. The more overtly sinister version of these same
assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence
by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.
While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of 'darking-up' was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when 'The Aztecs' (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made. Even so, it's far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice. It was common practice, but that isn't an excuse. Lots of things are common practice. Excluding young women from important jobs was common practice when Sydney Newman hired Verity Lambert. Admittedly, when early Doctor Who puts actors in dark make-up, it's usually as part of an attempt to represent other cultures with a degree of integrity rather than to outright parody them. The educational remit was (at least to start with) a kind of guaranteur that other cultures were to be represented more-or-less 'factually' rather than in parodic terms. Lucarotti is clearly trying to 'play it straight' in both 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs', as is David Whitaker in 'The Crusade'. It's fair to say that people at the time may have genuinely perceived a gulf between 'appropriate' make-up conventions in drama about 'foreign' cultures and what went on in The Black & White Minstrel Show. They were fundamentally different projects. Still, the implicit assumption of 'The Aztecs' is that Aztec culture is 'ours' (i.e. white Europe's) to represent as we will. This is the implicit assumption underlying all variants of blackface. It is an inherently imperialistic assumption.
It has recently been suggested to me that criticising old episodes on this basis is like criticising them for not having CGI effects: it is anachronistic. This is, of course, partly true, in that the idea of this being a criticism would not have occured to many people at the time... but it obscures more than it reveals. Firstly, it's actually just a restatement of the problem. Secondly, the analogy fails because the concept of CGI was not only impossible but actually inconceivable in 1963. There were no similarly ontological reasons why the idea of casting Mexican actors to play Mexicans was impossible and inconcievable. CGI hadn't been invented then; Mexicans had. (We must, I suppose, add the rider that modern Mexicans - Mestizos - are, unlike the Aztecs, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.) The fact that the idea probably didn't occur to anybody isn't an alibi for the series; it is, in and of itself, an indictment of the society of which the series was a product. In short, it doesn't neutralise the criticism but rather widens it. It takes us beyond aesthetic nitpicking, moralistic fingerpointing or identity politics, into the realms of broad social critique.
But am I really having a go at such a treasured old episode on these grounds? Is that okay, even with the alibi that it serves as a 'way in' to wider social issues? Well, yeah, I think so. As I say, I'm not moralising (that doesn't interest me) but I am putting forward the 'bronzeface' issue - and its wider implications of appropriation - as a reason to criticise the story. I think it's altogether too easy and casual the way we tend to toss off phrases like "oh, well, it was of it's time" as though that answers everything and makes it all unproblematic. I'm sorry, but we're talking about a culture that was genocidally destroyed by Europeans. Should we really be so sanguine about such sanguinary history? Isn't there room for a qualm or two about the fact that Europeans are still merrily dressing up as people that Europeans annihilated? (Yes, yes, I know the Aztecs were themselves conquerors, and Cortés had help from other indigenous Mexicans... that's not the point. Every imperialist army finds local support and many conquered cultures had their own crimes to answer for... none of that effaces the issue of imperialism itself. There is a fundamental, quantitative, qualitative difference between, say, the forms of slavery once practiced within Africa and the genocide stemming from the modern European slave trade. To not see this is to be morally blind.)
There might be a case for saying 'let it go' if we weren't still plagued by blackface and its variants, as well as the social causes which make it seem entirely unproblematic for the dominant (white) culture to represent certain groups as it pleases, without their views being taken into account. But. Johnny Depp is soon to appear in redface as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie. Ben Affleck played a hispanic-American character in Argo (which also assumed the right to use Iran as a foil for American moral superiority). Look up how they celebrate Christmas in Holland, and have a look at Sinterklaas and his little helper Zwarte Piet, a comedy golliwog (played by white Dutch people in black make-up and wigs) who follows Sinterklaas around on a lead, performing menial chores, begging for scraps and generally being comedically stupid. Even the Telegraph doesn't think it's acceptable. Relatedly, anybody who wants to know about 'cripping up' in theatre, films and TV (i.e. 'able bodied' or 'full size' people playing the wheelchair bound or dwarves, thus taking work away from disabled and/or dwarf actors) only needs to mention it to Nabil Shaban on Facebook.
The Aztecs may be gone, but there are still millions of oppressed people in the world who have to watch as dominant media culture appropriates their appearance and culture as it pleases, representing them in ways which range from the excluding to the patronising to the dehumanising. Does it help anybody if I snipe at an old episode of Doctor Who? No. But nor does it help to allow oneself to become innured to the cultural evidence of oppression, to the point where one doesn't notice it enough to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is sometimes a duty. It's just far too easy to be comfortable with the representation of others, especially for someone like me whose own group is never going to be patronisingly represented by someone else. There's an argument you hear about, say, the casting of John Bennett as Chang in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'. It goes something like 'well, they just cast him because he was a good actor who suited the role'. Well, that way of doing things might arguably be fair enough in a post-racist society. But we don't live in a post-racist society. Not by a loooooooooong chalk. Not by white-cliffs-of-Dover-levels of chalkiness. At the moment, the privilege of behaving and thinking as if we do belongs to the people unaffected by racism.
A Clash of Civilisations
Even if the actors in 'The Aztecs' weren't darkened with make-up (on the whole, I think they were but, as I said, it's hard to be entirely sure from the visual evidence) they were still part of a production which goes out of its way to excuse Europeans of responsibility for the genocide of the Aztecs. Barbara, supposedly an expert, makes it very clear, though she doesn't say it explicitly: Cortés destroys the Aztecs because he is horrified by their practice of human sacrifice. If she can talk the Aztecs out of their barbarism, she can save them. This is couched in terms or salvaging everything good about their culture... yet we see very little of this. There is little in the story to support the (in itself patronising) idea that the Aztecs, as a whole, were as good as they were bad. Even their splendid artefacts are only really shown in Yetaxa's tomb... with the emphasis firmly on a sinister, gothic, skull-like face.
The story does not even gesture towards the idea that Cortés and his men may have set about the violent subjugation of the Aztecs - leading to their effective extermination - for imperialistic reasons; for gold, conquest, power and the imperatives of religious bigotry. Instead the story aligns itself with an excuse seized upon by the conquerors: that the Aztecs essentially doomed their own culture by dint of their backwardness. The Spanish demanded conversion and obedience. In this way, the Aztecs would be 'saved'. Similarly, Barbara's project is to socially re-engineer Aztec society (from the top down, naturally) so that it loses those aspects supposedly most repellent to the Europeans, i.e. the civilised people. That is how the Aztecs can be delivered. The Spanish told themselves they were fighting the Devil. Barbara is fighting History. But the logic is the same.
Barbara's struggle is underwritten by the implicit assumption that European civilisation doesn't practice barbarism like human sacrifice. With reference to the Conquistadors, this is so wrong it's almost funny. Spain, and other European powers, slaughtered and tortured and enslaved their way through the 'New World' with unrelenting ferocity. Even if we take this to be some kind of aberration, we need only look at what was going on in Europe itself at the time. When Cortés arrived in Mexico, it was barely thirty years since the Alhambra Decree, by which Castille and Aragon had formally expelled all Jews unwilling to convert on pain of death. (A clue that this didn't stem from barbaric practices, that Barbara might have tried to make the Jews renounce, lies in the fact that the expelled Jews weren't permitted to take any of their gold or silver with them. Go figure.) This genocidal cleansing was part of the Spanish Inquisition. It was well underway when Cortés found himself shocked by the Aztecs. The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to myth, was actually far more careful, sparing and legalistic with torture than most European courts of the time... they only used torture rarely, unlike just about every other legal system in Europe. Also, the Spanish Church itself never executed anybody. With Christian piety, they'd hand you over to the state for public burning (or garotting then burning, if you confessed and repented).
Let's imagine a Doctor Who story that never really happened. 'The Spaniards' by Johnvid Whitcarotti (broadcast 32nd Octember 1963½). Hartnell, Hill, Ford and Russell arrive in 16th century Spain. Torquemada is played by Dickie Henderson (thus doing Torquemada a disservice, to be honest). Would the story have been about Barbara trying to convince the Spaniards to change their ways so that Napoleon wouldn't be so shocked by their backwardness and feel the need to invade and spread the Enlightenment by force? Or would the story have been about the need for the heretics to change their evil ways and thus not incur the righteous wrath of the inquisitors? I somehow doubt the fuck out of it. It's usually fairly predictable which victims will be blamed and which will not.
Going back to the supposed binary character of Aztec culture, the dichotomy between their noble side and their savage side remarked upon by all the white, 20th century European characters and the aliens that look and act like white, 20th century Europeans... Look, I'm sorry, but what culture in human history since the rise of settled civilisation hasn't been capable of both immense goodness and immense cruelty? It reminds of 'The Visitation', in which the Doctor claims to be baffled that the Terileptils love both art and war... as though this is something unusual. The unspoken assumption there is that there are cultures which, in distinction to the culture of England in 1666, get their moral priorities mixed up to the point where they can't tell the difference between civilisation and savagery. To his immense credit, Saward subverts this rather crass implicit assumption by having the debate then swing back and forth, with the Terileptil pointing out that the humans also consider war honourable, whereupon the Doctor retorts that they (unlike Terileptils) have the excuse of not being from a technologically advanced culture. It turns out that the Doctor's puzzlement stemmed from seeing a highly advanced civilisation still fixated on the 'honour' of war. Now, the characterisation of any group as "primitive" is troubling, but at least Saward is talking about Europeans, not a culture decimated by Europeans. Lucarotti, on the other hand, is dragging imperialist baggage along in his brain... and even in a text that bears hallmarks of being a 'labour of love', it shows.
Terror of the Autlocs
Even with some gestures towards Aztec spirituality, history, teaching and law, human sacrifice is still depicted as the central fact of their culture, the keystone to it. It's hard to see how this stems from anything other than the European obsession with it. It was undoubtedly a very important aspect of the Aztec worldview... and the story deserves a lot of credit for trying to show their cultural priorities. However, sacrifice seems as unintegrated as it is dominant. Its social hegemony doesn't seem to apply to everyone. Meanwhile, we are given clear guidance as to with whom our sympathies should and shouldn't lie. Autloc and Cameca are the Nice-But-Then characters (see here) in implied sympathy with the detached, modern observer in front of the TV. They supposedly stand for us in their moral qualms. Autloc in particular, in that he tells Tlotoxl that "the rains will come even without sacrifice". He is something of a proto-sceptic and empiricist. He accepts Barbara's assertion that people shouldn't be punished for breaking laws with which they're unfamiliar (a doctrine that even today we will not implement). He regrets the violent punishments faced by Susan and Ian. He is Barbara's champion and friend precisely because he is humane and rational, unlike his fellow Aztecs. As Ian says "Autloc is the extraordinary man here", the civilised man, the man who can be saved. The others are write-offs, utterly resistant to the reasonable words and moral teachings of European conscience. Barbara's project of humanitarian intervention fails because she meets only one Autloc.
By the way... am I the only person uncomfortable with how much lying Our Heroes do to Autloc and Cameca in this story? The Doctor manipulates Cameca's love for him and only her own perspicacity brings her to realise that he's going to jilt her. Autloc, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of making himself a pariah by standing alongside Barbara when she forbids sacrifice, movingly pleads that she not prove false... and she lets him go on believing that she's the reincarnation of Yetaxa so that she can count on his support. In the end, the Doctor asserts that Barbara has "saved one man" and helped him find "a better" faith. Well, Barbara's own bad faith is itself a minor illustration of the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of this. Her absolution of the Conquistadors and her victim-blaming of the Aztecs are the major illustration... with their impending extermination always lurking in the background, undermining any valid way in which superior European morality can possibly stand up as a notion. Autloc, meanwhile, has lost his friends, his wealth, his position, his house and his religion, and ends up wandering alone, a social outcast. I hope Barbara never helps me, that's all I can say.
This leads me to consider what is, I think, the biggest aesthetic flaw in 'The Aztecs', the flaw that either spoils it or comes pretty close (I fluctuate on this point). Tlotoxl. Everything else I've been moaning about in this post can be put aside, at least for a while, for the pleasure of watching the story. I do that sort of thing all the time. Indeed, the vast majority of capitalist cultural production is so multifariously offensive and repellent that, if I weren't capable of just pushing political qualms aside in order to simply enjoy things, I'd probably never be able to switch on the TV, log on to the internet, open a book or go outside. No, no. The thing I have most trouble with in 'The Aztecs' is the portrayal of Tlotoxl.
Tlotoxl is the High Priest of Sacrifice and is supposed to be the representative of Aztec barbarism, opposed to Autloc who is the High Priest of Knowledge. Well, okay, there's a problematic notion right there: that Aztec 'knowledge' was in some way distinct from, and contradictory to, Aztec religious practices. I think part of the point is that they weren't antithetical. But, we'll let that pass. The point here isn't to critique the episode's inbuilt assumptions (that's what the rest of this post is for) but to track its internal, dramatic consistency... what makes it or breaks it as a coherent and enjoyable story. So, Autloc and Tlotoxl are set up as antithetical. Well... that's a problem dramatically. Isn't part of the whole point of the story that sacrifice cannot be easily detached from the rest of Aztec culture, the 'good bits' so to speak? If the place of sacrifice in Aztec culture were so separate, so totally bound up with one individual and his prejudices and power base, then wouldn't it be much easier for Barbara to combat? Just as Tlotoxl tries to discredit her isolated ideas by impugning her and her friends, so she could attack his dogma by isolating him. She cannot do this. She doesn't even try. The episode seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it. Sacrifice is at once an integral and indivisible aspect of Aztec culture and the pathological ideology of one man and a few loyalists. (Part of the problem, as ever, is that we're getting history from above, as something that occurs within the minds and maneuvers of the ruling class, without 'the people' being involved, or even much represented.)
There's a rather pleasant irony in the way Tlotoxl becomes a sceptic towards an apparent manifestation of the gods. Autloc, the man of knowledge, the proto-empiricist, credulously assumes Yetaxa's reincarnation, while Tlotoxl, the man of faith, becomes a sceptic about it. The man who charges others with heresy becomes a heretic. The man who questions divine intervention becomes a villain in a story which revolves around the idea that people should be sceptical of apparent divine influence in the natural world. We are meant to boo him for being a religious zealot and an opponent of Barbara's truth... yet he spends the entire story trying to prove her a liar (which she is) for pretending to be a god when she isn't! These ironies, by themselves, aren't the problem. The problem lies in the way Tlotoxl is depicted. Tlotoxl is machiavellian.
John Ringham plays Tlotoxl in full Richard III-mode. Tlotoxl is hunched, insinuating, greasy, snide, etc. He even adopts a clipped, sneering manner of speech that seems reminiscent of Olivier's movie performance as Richard. This is something we're all so familiar with that the randomness of it seldom gets remarked upon. Why? What possible need is there for a Richard III-esque villain in a story about the Aztecs? Of course, it isn't really Ringham's fault. He takes his cues from his costume (he gets that sinister line of make-up across his mouth, messy dark hair, darkened eyes, etc) and from the rest of the production, including the script. When first seen, Tlotoxl is loping around in a corner like a crookback. He is made visibly different from the other Aztecs, to the point where Ian and the Doctor can immediately tell - just by looking at him - that he's "the local butcher" (that one-man pathology again). This, in itself, isn't much like Richard III (most people in Shakespeare's plays tend to initially find Richard quite plausible) but Tlotoxl as scripted recalls Richard in other ways, especially in his villainy, his manipulativeness, his plotting, his promises of advancement to allies, and his theatricality. He distorts others around him with his showish puppeteering. Tonila and Ixta both get drawn in and set on sneaky courses that otherwise they'd probably have avoided. (It should be added that, though drawn from Richard, Tlotoxl is considerably different in that Richard is a kind of just punishment upon a set of people who have devoutly deserved him... something often not realised by people unfamiliar with the earlier plays in the tetralogy.)
Let's be clear: this is rubbish. It does great damage to the whole narrative thrust of the story, which is supposed to be about a people inextricably both noble and cruel. Whatever we might think of that characterisation, or the project of characterising an annihilated culture that way, that's still what the story is supposed to be about. Instead, we get a culture that looks like it would probably be pretty much okay if only it could be rid of the evil, sneaky, oily, crafty, religious fundamentalist limping around the margins. Just think how much more powerful 'The Aztecs' would have been if Tlotoxl had been a character of integrity, of dignity, of honest faith. The tragedy here is that, dramatically, Autloc and Tlotoxl should be different aspects of one man. At the very least they should be close friends who like and respect each other, more similar than different. That would not only resolved a deeply jarring dramatic problem, it would also have resolved some of the thematic problems with the story, taking away the idea that Aztec 'knowledge' was antithetical to Aztec belief, taking away the easy Nice-But-Then character, etc.
On the whole, however, even a 'good' High Priest of Sacrifice would still leave us with the problem of Autloc as the one "extraordinary man". Indeed, it might even exacerbate it. At least Tlotoxl of Gloucester, the emblem of sacrifice as a lone villain, might be seen as undermining the idea that Autloc is unusual. Tlotoxl looks like the extraordinary man instead... extraordinarily evil. But, in that case, why did Barbara fail?
You see, much as I'm not in favour of human sacrifice (no more than anybody else anyway), I'm kind-of on Tlotoxl's side. Who precisely is this person claiming to be a goddess, lying, cheating, undermining the law, foisting her alien values upon his society, endangering (as Tlotoxl and most others would see it) the continued favour of the gods and, thereby, the survival of the people? Why does she know better than him and the rest of his society? Of course, Barbara doesn't articulate why she assumes her greater wisdom. But the story has its implicit assumptions about this (see above) and I don't like that the one guy who stands against them is depicted as a villain. (Of course, from another angle, Tlotoxl is a member of the Aztec ruling class and, as such, I'm against him. Historical materialism... which is one way of describing my outlook... requires this kind of flexibility all the time.)
Resistance was Futile
In the end, it's History that dooms the Aztecs. All historicals are inherently conservative because they all have the immutable writtenness of History lurking in the background. Even when the story doesn't tilt on the axis of changing or preserving history, there is always a shape to events that cannot be changed. Owing to its educational remit and supposedly rationalist stance, the show cannot (Inglourious Basterds-style) change the pre-written plot and go against what Teacher Says at School. In historicals, The Way It Happened (or at least The Way We Think It Happened) is always a limiting factor. It patrols the boundaries. It limits the perimeter of the possible, must as capitalist realism limits the range of the thinkable within the mainstream media. This may be the reason why the psuedo-historical was invented. Dennis Spooner chose the classic example of school history (1066 and all that) and stuck a time meddler into it, threatening to erase all the books. But 'The Time Meddler' is the story that proves the rule. No matter how cheeky or satirical it is about the whole concept of representing History (knowingly showing us the TV strategy of cliche, employed even in the 'straight' mode) it cannot escape the overriding imperative to stick to the established arc. There is literally no escape from this innately conservative impulse within the bounds of the historical... and the inevitability of aligning with the history books creates a dramatic effect whereby those doomed by History come over as inevitably doomed, inescapably trapped. They were always doomed. Coupled with the implication of progress (to which all those Nice-But-Then characters implicitly attest) and the imperialistic appropriation involved in representing non-European cultures, you get an effect whereby There Is No Alternative but for the conquered to be conquered, the exterminated to be exterminated. You can't have the Saxons beat back the Normans. You can't have the French Revolution succeed against reaction and counter-revolution, thus becoming able to fulfill its promises. You can't have the Aztecs escape the swords of the Conquistadors. As the exhausted cliche goes: history is written by the victors... so you end up with an acceptance that you can't rewrite the judgements of the powerful, of the conquerors, of the imperial culture.
Not one line.
I know I complain a lot... but I don't think I've ever gotten over just how much wasted promise there is in the fact that one of the very first things the series did was have a young person reading a school textbook about the French Revolution and declaring "That isn't right!".
I wasn't going out on much a limb dissing 'The Reign of Terror' (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it. 'The Aztecs', by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good. It isn't that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it's Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.
I'm not actually going to say that it's bad, as such. On the whole, it's very well made. But....
Black and White and Red All Over
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| "Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa... do you approve of interracial marriage?" |
While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of 'darking-up' was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when 'The Aztecs' (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made. Even so, it's far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice. It was common practice, but that isn't an excuse. Lots of things are common practice. Excluding young women from important jobs was common practice when Sydney Newman hired Verity Lambert. Admittedly, when early Doctor Who puts actors in dark make-up, it's usually as part of an attempt to represent other cultures with a degree of integrity rather than to outright parody them. The educational remit was (at least to start with) a kind of guaranteur that other cultures were to be represented more-or-less 'factually' rather than in parodic terms. Lucarotti is clearly trying to 'play it straight' in both 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs', as is David Whitaker in 'The Crusade'. It's fair to say that people at the time may have genuinely perceived a gulf between 'appropriate' make-up conventions in drama about 'foreign' cultures and what went on in The Black & White Minstrel Show. They were fundamentally different projects. Still, the implicit assumption of 'The Aztecs' is that Aztec culture is 'ours' (i.e. white Europe's) to represent as we will. This is the implicit assumption underlying all variants of blackface. It is an inherently imperialistic assumption.
It has recently been suggested to me that criticising old episodes on this basis is like criticising them for not having CGI effects: it is anachronistic. This is, of course, partly true, in that the idea of this being a criticism would not have occured to many people at the time... but it obscures more than it reveals. Firstly, it's actually just a restatement of the problem. Secondly, the analogy fails because the concept of CGI was not only impossible but actually inconceivable in 1963. There were no similarly ontological reasons why the idea of casting Mexican actors to play Mexicans was impossible and inconcievable. CGI hadn't been invented then; Mexicans had. (We must, I suppose, add the rider that modern Mexicans - Mestizos - are, unlike the Aztecs, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.) The fact that the idea probably didn't occur to anybody isn't an alibi for the series; it is, in and of itself, an indictment of the society of which the series was a product. In short, it doesn't neutralise the criticism but rather widens it. It takes us beyond aesthetic nitpicking, moralistic fingerpointing or identity politics, into the realms of broad social critique.
But am I really having a go at such a treasured old episode on these grounds? Is that okay, even with the alibi that it serves as a 'way in' to wider social issues? Well, yeah, I think so. As I say, I'm not moralising (that doesn't interest me) but I am putting forward the 'bronzeface' issue - and its wider implications of appropriation - as a reason to criticise the story. I think it's altogether too easy and casual the way we tend to toss off phrases like "oh, well, it was of it's time" as though that answers everything and makes it all unproblematic. I'm sorry, but we're talking about a culture that was genocidally destroyed by Europeans. Should we really be so sanguine about such sanguinary history? Isn't there room for a qualm or two about the fact that Europeans are still merrily dressing up as people that Europeans annihilated? (Yes, yes, I know the Aztecs were themselves conquerors, and Cortés had help from other indigenous Mexicans... that's not the point. Every imperialist army finds local support and many conquered cultures had their own crimes to answer for... none of that effaces the issue of imperialism itself. There is a fundamental, quantitative, qualitative difference between, say, the forms of slavery once practiced within Africa and the genocide stemming from the modern European slave trade. To not see this is to be morally blind.)
There might be a case for saying 'let it go' if we weren't still plagued by blackface and its variants, as well as the social causes which make it seem entirely unproblematic for the dominant (white) culture to represent certain groups as it pleases, without their views being taken into account. But. Johnny Depp is soon to appear in redface as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie. Ben Affleck played a hispanic-American character in Argo (which also assumed the right to use Iran as a foil for American moral superiority). Look up how they celebrate Christmas in Holland, and have a look at Sinterklaas and his little helper Zwarte Piet, a comedy golliwog (played by white Dutch people in black make-up and wigs) who follows Sinterklaas around on a lead, performing menial chores, begging for scraps and generally being comedically stupid. Even the Telegraph doesn't think it's acceptable. Relatedly, anybody who wants to know about 'cripping up' in theatre, films and TV (i.e. 'able bodied' or 'full size' people playing the wheelchair bound or dwarves, thus taking work away from disabled and/or dwarf actors) only needs to mention it to Nabil Shaban on Facebook.
The Aztecs may be gone, but there are still millions of oppressed people in the world who have to watch as dominant media culture appropriates their appearance and culture as it pleases, representing them in ways which range from the excluding to the patronising to the dehumanising. Does it help anybody if I snipe at an old episode of Doctor Who? No. But nor does it help to allow oneself to become innured to the cultural evidence of oppression, to the point where one doesn't notice it enough to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is sometimes a duty. It's just far too easy to be comfortable with the representation of others, especially for someone like me whose own group is never going to be patronisingly represented by someone else. There's an argument you hear about, say, the casting of John Bennett as Chang in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'. It goes something like 'well, they just cast him because he was a good actor who suited the role'. Well, that way of doing things might arguably be fair enough in a post-racist society. But we don't live in a post-racist society. Not by a loooooooooong chalk. Not by white-cliffs-of-Dover-levels of chalkiness. At the moment, the privilege of behaving and thinking as if we do belongs to the people unaffected by racism.
A Clash of Civilisations
Even if the actors in 'The Aztecs' weren't darkened with make-up (on the whole, I think they were but, as I said, it's hard to be entirely sure from the visual evidence) they were still part of a production which goes out of its way to excuse Europeans of responsibility for the genocide of the Aztecs. Barbara, supposedly an expert, makes it very clear, though she doesn't say it explicitly: Cortés destroys the Aztecs because he is horrified by their practice of human sacrifice. If she can talk the Aztecs out of their barbarism, she can save them. This is couched in terms or salvaging everything good about their culture... yet we see very little of this. There is little in the story to support the (in itself patronising) idea that the Aztecs, as a whole, were as good as they were bad. Even their splendid artefacts are only really shown in Yetaxa's tomb... with the emphasis firmly on a sinister, gothic, skull-like face.
 |
| So... a fairly clear stance being elaborated there, I'd say. |
The story does not even gesture towards the idea that Cortés and his men may have set about the violent subjugation of the Aztecs - leading to their effective extermination - for imperialistic reasons; for gold, conquest, power and the imperatives of religious bigotry. Instead the story aligns itself with an excuse seized upon by the conquerors: that the Aztecs essentially doomed their own culture by dint of their backwardness. The Spanish demanded conversion and obedience. In this way, the Aztecs would be 'saved'. Similarly, Barbara's project is to socially re-engineer Aztec society (from the top down, naturally) so that it loses those aspects supposedly most repellent to the Europeans, i.e. the civilised people. That is how the Aztecs can be delivered. The Spanish told themselves they were fighting the Devil. Barbara is fighting History. But the logic is the same.
Barbara's struggle is underwritten by the implicit assumption that European civilisation doesn't practice barbarism like human sacrifice. With reference to the Conquistadors, this is so wrong it's almost funny. Spain, and other European powers, slaughtered and tortured and enslaved their way through the 'New World' with unrelenting ferocity. Even if we take this to be some kind of aberration, we need only look at what was going on in Europe itself at the time. When Cortés arrived in Mexico, it was barely thirty years since the Alhambra Decree, by which Castille and Aragon had formally expelled all Jews unwilling to convert on pain of death. (A clue that this didn't stem from barbaric practices, that Barbara might have tried to make the Jews renounce, lies in the fact that the expelled Jews weren't permitted to take any of their gold or silver with them. Go figure.) This genocidal cleansing was part of the Spanish Inquisition. It was well underway when Cortés found himself shocked by the Aztecs. The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to myth, was actually far more careful, sparing and legalistic with torture than most European courts of the time... they only used torture rarely, unlike just about every other legal system in Europe. Also, the Spanish Church itself never executed anybody. With Christian piety, they'd hand you over to the state for public burning (or garotting then burning, if you confessed and repented).
Let's imagine a Doctor Who story that never really happened. 'The Spaniards' by Johnvid Whitcarotti (broadcast 32nd Octember 1963½). Hartnell, Hill, Ford and Russell arrive in 16th century Spain. Torquemada is played by Dickie Henderson (thus doing Torquemada a disservice, to be honest). Would the story have been about Barbara trying to convince the Spaniards to change their ways so that Napoleon wouldn't be so shocked by their backwardness and feel the need to invade and spread the Enlightenment by force? Or would the story have been about the need for the heretics to change their evil ways and thus not incur the righteous wrath of the inquisitors? I somehow doubt the fuck out of it. It's usually fairly predictable which victims will be blamed and which will not.
Going back to the supposed binary character of Aztec culture, the dichotomy between their noble side and their savage side remarked upon by all the white, 20th century European characters and the aliens that look and act like white, 20th century Europeans... Look, I'm sorry, but what culture in human history since the rise of settled civilisation hasn't been capable of both immense goodness and immense cruelty? It reminds of 'The Visitation', in which the Doctor claims to be baffled that the Terileptils love both art and war... as though this is something unusual. The unspoken assumption there is that there are cultures which, in distinction to the culture of England in 1666, get their moral priorities mixed up to the point where they can't tell the difference between civilisation and savagery. To his immense credit, Saward subverts this rather crass implicit assumption by having the debate then swing back and forth, with the Terileptil pointing out that the humans also consider war honourable, whereupon the Doctor retorts that they (unlike Terileptils) have the excuse of not being from a technologically advanced culture. It turns out that the Doctor's puzzlement stemmed from seeing a highly advanced civilisation still fixated on the 'honour' of war. Now, the characterisation of any group as "primitive" is troubling, but at least Saward is talking about Europeans, not a culture decimated by Europeans. Lucarotti, on the other hand, is dragging imperialist baggage along in his brain... and even in a text that bears hallmarks of being a 'labour of love', it shows.
Terror of the Autlocs
By the way... am I the only person uncomfortable with how much lying Our Heroes do to Autloc and Cameca in this story? The Doctor manipulates Cameca's love for him and only her own perspicacity brings her to realise that he's going to jilt her. Autloc, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of making himself a pariah by standing alongside Barbara when she forbids sacrifice, movingly pleads that she not prove false... and she lets him go on believing that she's the reincarnation of Yetaxa so that she can count on his support. In the end, the Doctor asserts that Barbara has "saved one man" and helped him find "a better" faith. Well, Barbara's own bad faith is itself a minor illustration of the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of this. Her absolution of the Conquistadors and her victim-blaming of the Aztecs are the major illustration... with their impending extermination always lurking in the background, undermining any valid way in which superior European morality can possibly stand up as a notion. Autloc, meanwhile, has lost his friends, his wealth, his position, his house and his religion, and ends up wandering alone, a social outcast. I hope Barbara never helps me, that's all I can say.
This leads me to consider what is, I think, the biggest aesthetic flaw in 'The Aztecs', the flaw that either spoils it or comes pretty close (I fluctuate on this point). Tlotoxl. Everything else I've been moaning about in this post can be put aside, at least for a while, for the pleasure of watching the story. I do that sort of thing all the time. Indeed, the vast majority of capitalist cultural production is so multifariously offensive and repellent that, if I weren't capable of just pushing political qualms aside in order to simply enjoy things, I'd probably never be able to switch on the TV, log on to the internet, open a book or go outside. No, no. The thing I have most trouble with in 'The Aztecs' is the portrayal of Tlotoxl.
Tlotoxl is the High Priest of Sacrifice and is supposed to be the representative of Aztec barbarism, opposed to Autloc who is the High Priest of Knowledge. Well, okay, there's a problematic notion right there: that Aztec 'knowledge' was in some way distinct from, and contradictory to, Aztec religious practices. I think part of the point is that they weren't antithetical. But, we'll let that pass. The point here isn't to critique the episode's inbuilt assumptions (that's what the rest of this post is for) but to track its internal, dramatic consistency... what makes it or breaks it as a coherent and enjoyable story. So, Autloc and Tlotoxl are set up as antithetical. Well... that's a problem dramatically. Isn't part of the whole point of the story that sacrifice cannot be easily detached from the rest of Aztec culture, the 'good bits' so to speak? If the place of sacrifice in Aztec culture were so separate, so totally bound up with one individual and his prejudices and power base, then wouldn't it be much easier for Barbara to combat? Just as Tlotoxl tries to discredit her isolated ideas by impugning her and her friends, so she could attack his dogma by isolating him. She cannot do this. She doesn't even try. The episode seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it. Sacrifice is at once an integral and indivisible aspect of Aztec culture and the pathological ideology of one man and a few loyalists. (Part of the problem, as ever, is that we're getting history from above, as something that occurs within the minds and maneuvers of the ruling class, without 'the people' being involved, or even much represented.)
There's a rather pleasant irony in the way Tlotoxl becomes a sceptic towards an apparent manifestation of the gods. Autloc, the man of knowledge, the proto-empiricist, credulously assumes Yetaxa's reincarnation, while Tlotoxl, the man of faith, becomes a sceptic about it. The man who charges others with heresy becomes a heretic. The man who questions divine intervention becomes a villain in a story which revolves around the idea that people should be sceptical of apparent divine influence in the natural world. We are meant to boo him for being a religious zealot and an opponent of Barbara's truth... yet he spends the entire story trying to prove her a liar (which she is) for pretending to be a god when she isn't! These ironies, by themselves, aren't the problem. The problem lies in the way Tlotoxl is depicted. Tlotoxl is machiavellian.
 |
| "I've got a hunch you're not really a god." |
John Ringham plays Tlotoxl in full Richard III-mode. Tlotoxl is hunched, insinuating, greasy, snide, etc. He even adopts a clipped, sneering manner of speech that seems reminiscent of Olivier's movie performance as Richard. This is something we're all so familiar with that the randomness of it seldom gets remarked upon. Why? What possible need is there for a Richard III-esque villain in a story about the Aztecs? Of course, it isn't really Ringham's fault. He takes his cues from his costume (he gets that sinister line of make-up across his mouth, messy dark hair, darkened eyes, etc) and from the rest of the production, including the script. When first seen, Tlotoxl is loping around in a corner like a crookback. He is made visibly different from the other Aztecs, to the point where Ian and the Doctor can immediately tell - just by looking at him - that he's "the local butcher" (that one-man pathology again). This, in itself, isn't much like Richard III (most people in Shakespeare's plays tend to initially find Richard quite plausible) but Tlotoxl as scripted recalls Richard in other ways, especially in his villainy, his manipulativeness, his plotting, his promises of advancement to allies, and his theatricality. He distorts others around him with his showish puppeteering. Tonila and Ixta both get drawn in and set on sneaky courses that otherwise they'd probably have avoided. (It should be added that, though drawn from Richard, Tlotoxl is considerably different in that Richard is a kind of just punishment upon a set of people who have devoutly deserved him... something often not realised by people unfamiliar with the earlier plays in the tetralogy.)
Let's be clear: this is rubbish. It does great damage to the whole narrative thrust of the story, which is supposed to be about a people inextricably both noble and cruel. Whatever we might think of that characterisation, or the project of characterising an annihilated culture that way, that's still what the story is supposed to be about. Instead, we get a culture that looks like it would probably be pretty much okay if only it could be rid of the evil, sneaky, oily, crafty, religious fundamentalist limping around the margins. Just think how much more powerful 'The Aztecs' would have been if Tlotoxl had been a character of integrity, of dignity, of honest faith. The tragedy here is that, dramatically, Autloc and Tlotoxl should be different aspects of one man. At the very least they should be close friends who like and respect each other, more similar than different. That would not only resolved a deeply jarring dramatic problem, it would also have resolved some of the thematic problems with the story, taking away the idea that Aztec 'knowledge' was antithetical to Aztec belief, taking away the easy Nice-But-Then character, etc.
On the whole, however, even a 'good' High Priest of Sacrifice would still leave us with the problem of Autloc as the one "extraordinary man". Indeed, it might even exacerbate it. At least Tlotoxl of Gloucester, the emblem of sacrifice as a lone villain, might be seen as undermining the idea that Autloc is unusual. Tlotoxl looks like the extraordinary man instead... extraordinarily evil. But, in that case, why did Barbara fail?
You see, much as I'm not in favour of human sacrifice (no more than anybody else anyway), I'm kind-of on Tlotoxl's side. Who precisely is this person claiming to be a goddess, lying, cheating, undermining the law, foisting her alien values upon his society, endangering (as Tlotoxl and most others would see it) the continued favour of the gods and, thereby, the survival of the people? Why does she know better than him and the rest of his society? Of course, Barbara doesn't articulate why she assumes her greater wisdom. But the story has its implicit assumptions about this (see above) and I don't like that the one guy who stands against them is depicted as a villain. (Of course, from another angle, Tlotoxl is a member of the Aztec ruling class and, as such, I'm against him. Historical materialism... which is one way of describing my outlook... requires this kind of flexibility all the time.)
Resistance was Futile
In the end, it's History that dooms the Aztecs. All historicals are inherently conservative because they all have the immutable writtenness of History lurking in the background. Even when the story doesn't tilt on the axis of changing or preserving history, there is always a shape to events that cannot be changed. Owing to its educational remit and supposedly rationalist stance, the show cannot (Inglourious Basterds-style) change the pre-written plot and go against what Teacher Says at School. In historicals, The Way It Happened (or at least The Way We Think It Happened) is always a limiting factor. It patrols the boundaries. It limits the perimeter of the possible, must as capitalist realism limits the range of the thinkable within the mainstream media. This may be the reason why the psuedo-historical was invented. Dennis Spooner chose the classic example of school history (1066 and all that) and stuck a time meddler into it, threatening to erase all the books. But 'The Time Meddler' is the story that proves the rule. No matter how cheeky or satirical it is about the whole concept of representing History (knowingly showing us the TV strategy of cliche, employed even in the 'straight' mode) it cannot escape the overriding imperative to stick to the established arc. There is literally no escape from this innately conservative impulse within the bounds of the historical... and the inevitability of aligning with the history books creates a dramatic effect whereby those doomed by History come over as inevitably doomed, inescapably trapped. They were always doomed. Coupled with the implication of progress (to which all those Nice-But-Then characters implicitly attest) and the imperialistic appropriation involved in representing non-European cultures, you get an effect whereby There Is No Alternative but for the conquered to be conquered, the exterminated to be exterminated. You can't have the Saxons beat back the Normans. You can't have the French Revolution succeed against reaction and counter-revolution, thus becoming able to fulfill its promises. You can't have the Aztecs escape the swords of the Conquistadors. As the exhausted cliche goes: history is written by the victors... so you end up with an acceptance that you can't rewrite the judgements of the powerful, of the conquerors, of the imperial culture.
Not one line.
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| Apparently they were also noble and artistic. |
I know I complain a lot... but I don't think I've ever gotten over just how much wasted promise there is in the fact that one of the very first things the series did was have a young person reading a school textbook about the French Revolution and declaring "That isn't right!".
Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Fall and Rise
There was a fair amount of media chin-scratching last year about a supposed glumness and seriousness creeping into popular movies. The real trend, I think, is not towards the 'serious' but towards the reactionary.
For one thing, there's recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a 'nuanced' form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots. The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran. Always handy, being able to demonise Iran. (Modern Iran's origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present 'the West' in a good light... which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.) The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers. It misrepresents 'enhanced interrogation' as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers. To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture. The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt - the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality - and very normalising.
These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world. Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium's cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring. This isn't anything new. The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the 'War on Terror' and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of 'painful self-examination' and 'angst' about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium. The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects.
The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery. Spielberg's Lincoln and Tarantino's Django Unchained. Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices. It's not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.) Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington. The reality is that Lincoln's emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening 'on the ground' as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. The film depicts Thaddeus Stevens as a radical who needed to rein himself in so that the real work could be done by the moderate compromiser Lincoln. Spielberg and his writer have both spoken of the film as a paen to political compromise. The subtext is one of support for a moderate, compromising liberal president in time of war. It is, in short, an exhortation to give Obama space to win at home and abroad through his moderate use of drones and kill lists, and his compromise with capital (which involves letting capital off the hook while making the American people pay). Django's racial politics are also hugely problematic, with the rebellious black man depicted as a one-in-a-million phenomenon, with the dynamics of the story defined by white people, with Django freed by a white man instead of through his own struggle. Django is not really about a black rebellion against racism or slavery. It essentially depicts a white man using a black man as a revenge weapon against other white men. Both movies fall into the same category as Avatar, in that they have been painstakingly crafted to appear 'on side' with an oppressed and enslaved ethnic group, while also objectifying them and stripping them of real agency, making their struggle seem like it has been shaped and won by Whitey. Interestingly, Spielberg did exactly the same kind of thing in Schindler's List. His movie about the Judeocide is not a story of Jewish resistance in the midst of one of the most catastrophic moral failures in human history. It's a success story about how some Jews were saved by a gentile capitalist. This is the American movie business for you, which has the heroic white gentile saviour (often exemplifying bourgeois values even if he's not an actual businessman) as one of its most enduring and central narratives. This is one reason why Ayn Rand felt so much at home in Hollywood.
On the subject of the heroic, white, gentile, rich, businessman saviour... we should consider the latest mega-successful iteration of Batman. Bruce Wayne may not disdain conscience and altruism, but in shape and style he is, in many ways, a Randian hero. He takes it all upon himself, becoming the fountainhead of goodness and the Atlas upon which Gotham rests. Tim Burton's movies downplayed Wayne's role as a wealthy businessman (though he gets to play the 'good' capitalist vs Christopher Walken's 'bad' capitalist in Batman Returns). Schumacher gives Wayne Enterprises a profit sharing scheme. These techniques slightly reduce the volume of the pro-capitalist blare inherent in the Batman myth, though without neutralising or forgetting it. Nolan's trilogy, however, turns up the volume to 11. Wayne Enterprises is a force for moral and material good in society. There are 'bad capitalists' and 'good capitalists'. Bruce's father is of the 'good' variety. He prefers to be a doctor, but has his company build monorails to (somehow) help the poor, becoming an example to the rest of Gotham's wealthocracy. The economic crisis in Gotham depicted in Batman Begins is an external event, artificially created and inflicted upon Gotham's capitalism by the fanaticism of the baddies. The social conscience of the domestic rich is all that can save the city from being destroyed by the unleashed evil of the poor. Bruce follows in his father's footsteps in that he offers an example. He becomes - forgive my degrading weakness for puns - the Dark Knight Exemplar. His violent, authoritarian project to beat law and order into people is the stick to his father's carrot - both imbued with the same moral sense. That Bruce has a nauseating line in speechifying about the 'good in people' shouldn't distract us from the quintessentially Randian idea in his heart: capitalism is heroic. Okay, there is bad capitalism (usually illegal) but ultimately the system is synonymous with social wellbeing, steered correctly through the efforts of a kevlar-coated Atlas. In case there's any danger of us missing the point, Nolan gives us panoramas of glittering corporate skyscrapers, lush boardrooms, gorgeous secretaries, morally-minded executives, bad CEOs who ultimately get their comeuppance, etc.
Looking back a bit... Recently, Charlie Brooker (for whom I still have some time despite that embarassing hair and stubble he has now) wrote that The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall were, essentially, the same film. In both, the hero of a big franchise is stripped of all his power and has to claw his way back up onto his feet. Batman starts his movie a miserable recluse, blamed for things that aren't his fault, unshaven, hobbled and limping on crutches. Later, he gets pulverised in a fight and is left to rot at the bottom of a pit. Bond falls, literally and metaphorically, at the start of his film. Assumed dead, he is in fact in the Bahamas, drinking Heineken, letting himself get unshaven (that motif again) and out of shape. Both films focus on their hero's quest to get himself back in trim and then to defeat the baddie who has made hay in his absence. This seems, to me, an obvious and not-so-subtle metaphor for the state of capitalism. The heroic, formerly all-conquering hero laid low by circumstances beyond his control and needing to climb back up into the light... well, this is essentially the mainstream narrative about where capital is at these days. The same essential formulation holds in many sectors of what we might, for want of a better word, want to call the modern 'left'. Huge swathes of what was Occupy etc held 'the bankers' to blame for the crisis, as though banking and bankers were something extrinsic to capitalism, and as though capitalism was a victim of the bankers and their free-floating, contextless 'greed'... which, as a description of what happened, is an example of accuracy becoming inaccuracy through incompleteness. A bit like saying that a rifle killed JFK and leaving it at that.
It'd be easy to discount my reading were it not for the fact that The Dark Knight Rises goes out of its way to support the established hierarchy of capitalism, and to lay the woes of Gotham at the door of the rabblement. The police and government, whatever their failings, represent order, stability, safety and noble sacrifice. Even the partial repudiation of the lies told to the public (for their own good) by Gordon and Batman is couched in terms of a noble mistake. Meanwhile, the envious unwashed ransack their way ruthlessly through the mansions of the rich, and the revolution is immediately tyrannical, setting up showtrials in a perverse people's court. Gordon, brought to trial, gets to make a speech defending the establishment's virtuous conception of law against the arbitrary and malicious revolutionary justice of Crane. Bane takes on the leadership of the angrily and inarticulately disaffected and, like all leaders of revolts against an established order, he is revealed to be an insincere opportunist, a self-seeking demagogue, simultaneously nihilist and fanatic. The Randian-with-a-conscience-and-bat-ears, meanwhile, has been dumped in a deep hole, from which you can only escape by climbing on on your own, and without a safety harness... which, as Stavvers observed, is a metaphor for reactionary ideas about poverty and welfare dependancy.
Skyfall, meanwhile, also cast its hero as recuperating from a a fall (really, note the falling and rising metaphor here!) and was noticeably reactionary even by the standards of Bond films. Whereas the almost-universally-loathed-but-actually-quite-good Quantum of Solace strayed as close to a 'realistic' picture of the world as a Bond film could ever get without ceasing to be a Bond film, Skyfall ventured back into the zone of camp jingoism that is Bond's traditonal territory. There is a certain accidental subversion in the depiction of M (Judi Dench) and her agents (Bond included) as ludicrous incompetents - really, they fuck everything up from start to finish, which is quite accurate as a depiction of the British 'security services' - but, overall, the film is a near-grotesque exercise in flag-waving. M gets to smack down the sneering bitchqueen MP at the inquiry (who has the temerity to accurately point out what a clusterfuck M's reign has been and suggest that she ought to be held accountable to the taxpayer) with stirring words about the dangerous world in which we live now (all those evil swarthy people who've been killing British moles) and the need for MI6 to protect the Realm (some hope) and Tennyson and stuff and whatnot and blah. The villain, Silva, attacks the British anti-terrorism effort, and the palaces of the establishment, using his skills as a cyber-hacker. He's al-Qaeda and Anonymous rolled into one. There is not a hint of queasiness over the grotesque way that Bond and M end up, on an isolated farm, menaced by heavily armed men in helicopter gunships, even as the film champions a national state currently doing similar things to people in Afghanistan. Yes, Bardem's character is a shadowy reflection of Bond, but like all such shadowy reflections he is there to emphasize the difference between himself and his heroic mirror image. (Honestly, the Evil Reflection character is almost never there to undermine the good guy's moral status. Belloq is there to show us that Indy is a good treasure-hunter. The Master shows us that the Doctor is a good renegade Time Lord.) The film mirrors its reactionary reassertion of British imperial values in the fractured world of today by being reactionary in terms of the aesthetics of the Bond series itself. QoS took Bond as far as he could go from his political and aesthetic homebases (not that far really, but everything's relative); the post-recession Skyfall brings Bond back both politically and aesthetically. It's very retrograde in every way, ending up with the mantle of sentimental/jingoistic/imperialist Britainishnesshood passed symbolically to Bond in the form of a Union Jack-clad bulldog, and then with Bond slinking back into his trad aesthetics, putting Moneypenny back in her place, recreating the old days of the patrician male M, now played by Ralph Fiennes. This isn't the 'new seriousness'. This is the old crap, still clinging to the bowl.
On the subject of Ralph Fiennes... I was rather startled by the forthright way he makes a small group of swarthy, cynical, disingenuous, manipulative agitators into the main cause of trouble in his film version of Coriolanus. I mention this to indicate that the resurgence of outright reaction in recent cultural production isn't limited to the popcorn-shifting blockbusters. Fiennes' film tries to position itself as an action-film and/or political thriller worked up from the basis of a Shakespeare text - and obviously aimed to be popular, albeit in a smaller-scale way than many of the movies in which Fiennes has recently had big supporting roles (i.e. Skyfall, and the Harry Potter films). But take another recent Shakespeare production - the muched fawned-upon National Theatre revival of Timon of Athens with Simon Russell Beale. Timon is a startlingly strange and subversive play about... well, it's about a huge number of things, but a central concern is the nature of money, both as a metaphor for other things and as itself... indeed, one of the most startling things about the play is that Shakespeare appears to have realised that, in the bourgeois culture emergent when he was writing, money essentially is a metaphor. (This is something that Marx noticed when he quoted Timon's coruscating and corrosive speeches about money at length in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844... but I digress outrageously.) One of the fascinating things about the NT staging was the way it strove to relate Timon's fall - from splurge-happy wealth to utter destitution - to the recession and its political aftershocks. Tramp-Timon finds himself surrounded by protestors with tents and placards, becoming briefly a hero to an Occupy-style rebellion of the unwashed. Alcibiades, a disaffected general in the text, becomes the leader of Occupy Ancient Athens (there must always, of course, be a single Leader in these bourgeois conceptions of protest and revolution), and his march upon the city becomes an uprising of the tent and placard brigade. What makes this relevant to this essay is the trajectory of the Occupyesque rebellion in the NT staging. It very quickly - automatically - betrays its rhetoric and becomes a cynical exercise, with Alcibiades making a dirty deal in dumbshow with the corrupt Athenian senators, and presenting himself at the head of a new coalition... smartly dressed in the trappings of respectable power.
This is an old, old set of assumptions being utilised... but see how it rides in, as though by magic, on any attempt by even this corner of the culture industry to engage with Occupy and all that it entails. We've already seen how Hollywood responded to the Arab Spring and the demands of Obama's imperial project. The top-level of the artsy British theatrical establishment reacted in essentially the same way to the recession and the Occupy movement. It's no surprise to see poor old Shakespeare being pressed into service as part of an effort to reassert reactionary certainties in time of social strife. This is a time honoured tactic of British cultural and social hegemony. TV is getting in on the act too, with the glossy series The Hollow Crown, which turned the Second Tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V) into something resembling a cheap version of Game of Thrones, crossed with a self-consciously 'straight' and 'trad' iteration of plays that have usually been presented steeped in heraldry and nationalistic bling. Simon Russell Beale turned up again as Falstaff, leading into a version of Henry V that retreats from the politically ambiguous, grimey, bloody version put forward by Branagh in the late 80s, back to something more akin to Olivier's patriotic version. The Hollow Crown has the guts to leave in the scene where Henry orders the murder of French prisoners (something which even Branagh wimped out on) but also cuts much of the cynical political wrangling at the start, as well as dumping the "upon the King" speech, during which an attentive audience might become squirmingly aware of Henry's disingenuous self-justifications. This Henry V is slanted towards presenting the king as a justified imperialist who will do the dirty work if needs be. It approaches becoming the Zero Dark Thirty version of this deeply ambiguous and ambivalent play.
Of course, none of this is anything new in and of itself. During the trial scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, I was strongly reminded of - of all things - 'Encounter at Farpoint', the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The scene in TDKR that I'm thinking of is the bit where Crane (AKA Scarecrow) conducts rigged show trials of establishment figures in front of a baying mob. It made me think of the scene where Q, dressed up as a judge, puts Picard and his crew on trial in a phantom version of a court from the "post-Atomic horror". (I'd mention the offensively highlighted interracial make-up of both mobs... but that's pretty much par for the course. At least TDKR didn't have an evil oriental dwarf banging a gong). Commissioner Gordon gets his little self-righteous whinge about "due process" (forgetting the wonderful Dent's Law he's been using for years to lock people up without possibility of parole) just as Picard gets to quote Shakespeare (him again!) at Q. The line "kill all the lawyers" comes, of course, from Henry VI Part 2... in which Jack Cade is a cynical, machiavellian revolutionary who is fooling the idiotic mob into following his revolution and subjecting establishment figures to rigged show trials... just like the Judge/Q, and just like Crane, and just like Bane, and not entirely unlike Silva, or the NT version of Alcibiades, or the swarthy revolutionaries who stir the people up against Coriolanus, etc, etc, etc.
As I say, it's nothing new. Coriolanus - on balance, a play that discounts the 'rabble' - was written partly as a response to grain riots. Jack Cade is an Elizabethan cultural warning against the false promises of those, going right back to John Ball and Watt Tyler, who said that "all things shall be held in common". Such techniques are then, obviously, at least as old as the beginnings of Modern drama. They may be highly, even startlingly, consistent... but they are not constant. There are periodic lacunae in their predominance. The timbre and tenor of culture ebbs and flows with the times, with the level of struggle. 1968 penetrated the consciousness of even Terrance Dicks to the point where he co-wrote The War Games. By contrast, the great recession, the Arab Spring and Occupy appear not to have made a dent in Moffat's solipsism... though this is perhaps unfair given that, although the worldwide tide of struggle is great, we (especially we in Britain) don't appear to be experiencing it culturally as anything akin to 1968.
Maybe that's partly why Doctor Who is playing it's part in this upswing in the reactionary content of narrative media culture. The heroes of capitalist media culture - both fictional and real - have been wheeled out onto the battlefield. Bond is defending the empire (what's left of it as an ideal) and Batman is defending private property. Shakespeare is once again defending hierarchy against the placard-wavers, and a feminist CIA officer is torturing Arabs for freedom. Lincoln is showing us all how great things can be when one moral man is in charge. And all of them are enacting a wish-fulfillment fantasy of capitalism once fallen, now rising again. Meanwhile, the Doctor is doing his bit. He's hugging Churchill, palling up with Nixon (and, via his disingenuous rhetoric about slave revolts, effectively confusing him with Spartacus), championing the heteronormative at every turn and teaching clueless workers in high rise blocks how to solve all social problems by being better parents.
Unless it's all just my imagination.
For one thing, there's recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a 'nuanced' form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots. The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran. Always handy, being able to demonise Iran. (Modern Iran's origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present 'the West' in a good light... which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.) The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers. It misrepresents 'enhanced interrogation' as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers. To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture. The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt - the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality - and very normalising.
These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world. Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium's cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring. This isn't anything new. The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the 'War on Terror' and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of 'painful self-examination' and 'angst' about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium. The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects.
The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery. Spielberg's Lincoln and Tarantino's Django Unchained. Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices. It's not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.) Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington. The reality is that Lincoln's emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening 'on the ground' as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. The film depicts Thaddeus Stevens as a radical who needed to rein himself in so that the real work could be done by the moderate compromiser Lincoln. Spielberg and his writer have both spoken of the film as a paen to political compromise. The subtext is one of support for a moderate, compromising liberal president in time of war. It is, in short, an exhortation to give Obama space to win at home and abroad through his moderate use of drones and kill lists, and his compromise with capital (which involves letting capital off the hook while making the American people pay). Django's racial politics are also hugely problematic, with the rebellious black man depicted as a one-in-a-million phenomenon, with the dynamics of the story defined by white people, with Django freed by a white man instead of through his own struggle. Django is not really about a black rebellion against racism or slavery. It essentially depicts a white man using a black man as a revenge weapon against other white men. Both movies fall into the same category as Avatar, in that they have been painstakingly crafted to appear 'on side' with an oppressed and enslaved ethnic group, while also objectifying them and stripping them of real agency, making their struggle seem like it has been shaped and won by Whitey. Interestingly, Spielberg did exactly the same kind of thing in Schindler's List. His movie about the Judeocide is not a story of Jewish resistance in the midst of one of the most catastrophic moral failures in human history. It's a success story about how some Jews were saved by a gentile capitalist. This is the American movie business for you, which has the heroic white gentile saviour (often exemplifying bourgeois values even if he's not an actual businessman) as one of its most enduring and central narratives. This is one reason why Ayn Rand felt so much at home in Hollywood.
On the subject of the heroic, white, gentile, rich, businessman saviour... we should consider the latest mega-successful iteration of Batman. Bruce Wayne may not disdain conscience and altruism, but in shape and style he is, in many ways, a Randian hero. He takes it all upon himself, becoming the fountainhead of goodness and the Atlas upon which Gotham rests. Tim Burton's movies downplayed Wayne's role as a wealthy businessman (though he gets to play the 'good' capitalist vs Christopher Walken's 'bad' capitalist in Batman Returns). Schumacher gives Wayne Enterprises a profit sharing scheme. These techniques slightly reduce the volume of the pro-capitalist blare inherent in the Batman myth, though without neutralising or forgetting it. Nolan's trilogy, however, turns up the volume to 11. Wayne Enterprises is a force for moral and material good in society. There are 'bad capitalists' and 'good capitalists'. Bruce's father is of the 'good' variety. He prefers to be a doctor, but has his company build monorails to (somehow) help the poor, becoming an example to the rest of Gotham's wealthocracy. The economic crisis in Gotham depicted in Batman Begins is an external event, artificially created and inflicted upon Gotham's capitalism by the fanaticism of the baddies. The social conscience of the domestic rich is all that can save the city from being destroyed by the unleashed evil of the poor. Bruce follows in his father's footsteps in that he offers an example. He becomes - forgive my degrading weakness for puns - the Dark Knight Exemplar. His violent, authoritarian project to beat law and order into people is the stick to his father's carrot - both imbued with the same moral sense. That Bruce has a nauseating line in speechifying about the 'good in people' shouldn't distract us from the quintessentially Randian idea in his heart: capitalism is heroic. Okay, there is bad capitalism (usually illegal) but ultimately the system is synonymous with social wellbeing, steered correctly through the efforts of a kevlar-coated Atlas. In case there's any danger of us missing the point, Nolan gives us panoramas of glittering corporate skyscrapers, lush boardrooms, gorgeous secretaries, morally-minded executives, bad CEOs who ultimately get their comeuppance, etc.
Looking back a bit... Recently, Charlie Brooker (for whom I still have some time despite that embarassing hair and stubble he has now) wrote that The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall were, essentially, the same film. In both, the hero of a big franchise is stripped of all his power and has to claw his way back up onto his feet. Batman starts his movie a miserable recluse, blamed for things that aren't his fault, unshaven, hobbled and limping on crutches. Later, he gets pulverised in a fight and is left to rot at the bottom of a pit. Bond falls, literally and metaphorically, at the start of his film. Assumed dead, he is in fact in the Bahamas, drinking Heineken, letting himself get unshaven (that motif again) and out of shape. Both films focus on their hero's quest to get himself back in trim and then to defeat the baddie who has made hay in his absence. This seems, to me, an obvious and not-so-subtle metaphor for the state of capitalism. The heroic, formerly all-conquering hero laid low by circumstances beyond his control and needing to climb back up into the light... well, this is essentially the mainstream narrative about where capital is at these days. The same essential formulation holds in many sectors of what we might, for want of a better word, want to call the modern 'left'. Huge swathes of what was Occupy etc held 'the bankers' to blame for the crisis, as though banking and bankers were something extrinsic to capitalism, and as though capitalism was a victim of the bankers and their free-floating, contextless 'greed'... which, as a description of what happened, is an example of accuracy becoming inaccuracy through incompleteness. A bit like saying that a rifle killed JFK and leaving it at that.
It'd be easy to discount my reading were it not for the fact that The Dark Knight Rises goes out of its way to support the established hierarchy of capitalism, and to lay the woes of Gotham at the door of the rabblement. The police and government, whatever their failings, represent order, stability, safety and noble sacrifice. Even the partial repudiation of the lies told to the public (for their own good) by Gordon and Batman is couched in terms of a noble mistake. Meanwhile, the envious unwashed ransack their way ruthlessly through the mansions of the rich, and the revolution is immediately tyrannical, setting up showtrials in a perverse people's court. Gordon, brought to trial, gets to make a speech defending the establishment's virtuous conception of law against the arbitrary and malicious revolutionary justice of Crane. Bane takes on the leadership of the angrily and inarticulately disaffected and, like all leaders of revolts against an established order, he is revealed to be an insincere opportunist, a self-seeking demagogue, simultaneously nihilist and fanatic. The Randian-with-a-conscience-and-bat-ears, meanwhile, has been dumped in a deep hole, from which you can only escape by climbing on on your own, and without a safety harness... which, as Stavvers observed, is a metaphor for reactionary ideas about poverty and welfare dependancy.
 | |
| British Bullshit. |
On the subject of Ralph Fiennes... I was rather startled by the forthright way he makes a small group of swarthy, cynical, disingenuous, manipulative agitators into the main cause of trouble in his film version of Coriolanus. I mention this to indicate that the resurgence of outright reaction in recent cultural production isn't limited to the popcorn-shifting blockbusters. Fiennes' film tries to position itself as an action-film and/or political thriller worked up from the basis of a Shakespeare text - and obviously aimed to be popular, albeit in a smaller-scale way than many of the movies in which Fiennes has recently had big supporting roles (i.e. Skyfall, and the Harry Potter films). But take another recent Shakespeare production - the muched fawned-upon National Theatre revival of Timon of Athens with Simon Russell Beale. Timon is a startlingly strange and subversive play about... well, it's about a huge number of things, but a central concern is the nature of money, both as a metaphor for other things and as itself... indeed, one of the most startling things about the play is that Shakespeare appears to have realised that, in the bourgeois culture emergent when he was writing, money essentially is a metaphor. (This is something that Marx noticed when he quoted Timon's coruscating and corrosive speeches about money at length in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844... but I digress outrageously.) One of the fascinating things about the NT staging was the way it strove to relate Timon's fall - from splurge-happy wealth to utter destitution - to the recession and its political aftershocks. Tramp-Timon finds himself surrounded by protestors with tents and placards, becoming briefly a hero to an Occupy-style rebellion of the unwashed. Alcibiades, a disaffected general in the text, becomes the leader of Occupy Ancient Athens (there must always, of course, be a single Leader in these bourgeois conceptions of protest and revolution), and his march upon the city becomes an uprising of the tent and placard brigade. What makes this relevant to this essay is the trajectory of the Occupyesque rebellion in the NT staging. It very quickly - automatically - betrays its rhetoric and becomes a cynical exercise, with Alcibiades making a dirty deal in dumbshow with the corrupt Athenian senators, and presenting himself at the head of a new coalition... smartly dressed in the trappings of respectable power.
This is an old, old set of assumptions being utilised... but see how it rides in, as though by magic, on any attempt by even this corner of the culture industry to engage with Occupy and all that it entails. We've already seen how Hollywood responded to the Arab Spring and the demands of Obama's imperial project. The top-level of the artsy British theatrical establishment reacted in essentially the same way to the recession and the Occupy movement. It's no surprise to see poor old Shakespeare being pressed into service as part of an effort to reassert reactionary certainties in time of social strife. This is a time honoured tactic of British cultural and social hegemony. TV is getting in on the act too, with the glossy series The Hollow Crown, which turned the Second Tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V) into something resembling a cheap version of Game of Thrones, crossed with a self-consciously 'straight' and 'trad' iteration of plays that have usually been presented steeped in heraldry and nationalistic bling. Simon Russell Beale turned up again as Falstaff, leading into a version of Henry V that retreats from the politically ambiguous, grimey, bloody version put forward by Branagh in the late 80s, back to something more akin to Olivier's patriotic version. The Hollow Crown has the guts to leave in the scene where Henry orders the murder of French prisoners (something which even Branagh wimped out on) but also cuts much of the cynical political wrangling at the start, as well as dumping the "upon the King" speech, during which an attentive audience might become squirmingly aware of Henry's disingenuous self-justifications. This Henry V is slanted towards presenting the king as a justified imperialist who will do the dirty work if needs be. It approaches becoming the Zero Dark Thirty version of this deeply ambiguous and ambivalent play.
Of course, none of this is anything new in and of itself. During the trial scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, I was strongly reminded of - of all things - 'Encounter at Farpoint', the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The scene in TDKR that I'm thinking of is the bit where Crane (AKA Scarecrow) conducts rigged show trials of establishment figures in front of a baying mob. It made me think of the scene where Q, dressed up as a judge, puts Picard and his crew on trial in a phantom version of a court from the "post-Atomic horror". (I'd mention the offensively highlighted interracial make-up of both mobs... but that's pretty much par for the course. At least TDKR didn't have an evil oriental dwarf banging a gong). Commissioner Gordon gets his little self-righteous whinge about "due process" (forgetting the wonderful Dent's Law he's been using for years to lock people up without possibility of parole) just as Picard gets to quote Shakespeare (him again!) at Q. The line "kill all the lawyers" comes, of course, from Henry VI Part 2... in which Jack Cade is a cynical, machiavellian revolutionary who is fooling the idiotic mob into following his revolution and subjecting establishment figures to rigged show trials... just like the Judge/Q, and just like Crane, and just like Bane, and not entirely unlike Silva, or the NT version of Alcibiades, or the swarthy revolutionaries who stir the people up against Coriolanus, etc, etc, etc.
As I say, it's nothing new. Coriolanus - on balance, a play that discounts the 'rabble' - was written partly as a response to grain riots. Jack Cade is an Elizabethan cultural warning against the false promises of those, going right back to John Ball and Watt Tyler, who said that "all things shall be held in common". Such techniques are then, obviously, at least as old as the beginnings of Modern drama. They may be highly, even startlingly, consistent... but they are not constant. There are periodic lacunae in their predominance. The timbre and tenor of culture ebbs and flows with the times, with the level of struggle. 1968 penetrated the consciousness of even Terrance Dicks to the point where he co-wrote The War Games. By contrast, the great recession, the Arab Spring and Occupy appear not to have made a dent in Moffat's solipsism... though this is perhaps unfair given that, although the worldwide tide of struggle is great, we (especially we in Britain) don't appear to be experiencing it culturally as anything akin to 1968.
Maybe that's partly why Doctor Who is playing it's part in this upswing in the reactionary content of narrative media culture. The heroes of capitalist media culture - both fictional and real - have been wheeled out onto the battlefield. Bond is defending the empire (what's left of it as an ideal) and Batman is defending private property. Shakespeare is once again defending hierarchy against the placard-wavers, and a feminist CIA officer is torturing Arabs for freedom. Lincoln is showing us all how great things can be when one moral man is in charge. And all of them are enacting a wish-fulfillment fantasy of capitalism once fallen, now rising again. Meanwhile, the Doctor is doing his bit. He's hugging Churchill, palling up with Nixon (and, via his disingenuous rhetoric about slave revolts, effectively confusing him with Spartacus), championing the heteronormative at every turn and teaching clueless workers in high rise blocks how to solve all social problems by being better parents.
Unless it's all just my imagination.
Sunday, 20 May 2012
Beyond Redemption
I think there is something inherently dodgy about the notion of 'redemptive readings'. It seems to imply a determination to look at a text in a positive way that is at odds with what could be called 'proper scepticism'. This objection is itself open to the objection that it's silly to approach a piece of entertainment product with 'scepticism', especially when it is part of a series of which one is supposedly a fan. But, this loses sight of context and agency. There are various ways of choosing to watch the same thing. When you sit down to enjoy an episode of a show you like, for fun, you're a bit odd if you're not expecting, hoping and trying to like it. When you're watching it with the express intention of analysing it and then writing about what it means, proper scepticism becomes appropriate. Trying to like what you're watching becomes a somewhat iffy strategy in that context. Besides, doesn't the necessity of trying to find ways of praising what you're analysing tell us something in itself? This muddle also loses sight of the distinctions that are always to be found within the concept of enjoyment, distinctions that are all too often spuriously aggregated. You don't have to think something is politically or morally correct in order to like it (though, in practice...). No more do you need to think that something is aesthetically sophisticated or beautiful in order to relish its aesthetic. Conversely, you may dislike a beautifully made piece of art which offers praiseworthy political or moral analyses. Or you may take enjoyment from the act of hostile reading itself. I, for instance, very much enjoy hating and criticising certain things, and I don't see anything wrong with this.
This is by way of a preamble to talking about 'The Two Doctors', which has been subject to an attempted rehabilitation from the charge of being reactionary on the issue of race. The re-evaluation of the story has been pioneered and best expressed by Robert Shearman in About Time 6. The essence of his argument is that the Androgums are a comment on the concept of the monster as employed by Doctor Who. They are characterised as generic monsters but it is disarming when people treat them as such because they do not look like monsters. They are treated the same way as the Sontarans - all of them racially evil and hateful - but, because they do not have potato-heads or eye-stalks, this poses a problem. We notice the inappropriateness, even tastelessness, of generalising about the evil of an entire race when they look like us. We don't blink when the Doctor describes the entire Jagaroth race as vicious and callous but it bothers us when the same racial villainy is implied about aliens who look human. Philip Sandifer recently summarized and expanded the case admirably, here.
I'm enormously tempted by this reading... and, maybe, if I'd approached 'The Two Doctors' with the express intention of finding a 'redemptive reading', I would've happily seized upon it. Apart from allowing me to enjoy 'The Two Doctors' (a story that, in many respects, I rather like) with a lighter heart, it would also address an issue that I have criticised in Who in the past. The issue is best demonstrated in 'Resurrection of the Daleks', in which the Doctor appears blithe about slaughtering Daleks using biological weapons but cannot make himself gun down Davros because he's a humanoid (just about).
However, with all due respect to Shearman (which is a lot of respect), I think the 'redemptive' argument for 'Two Doctors' misses something very important: the Androgums are - in a way - made-up and costumed as monsters.
They are the jumbled ethnic 'other' as monster.
They are clothed in garb that is inflected with the 'ethnic' and/or 'exotic' and are given physical characteristics - red hair, heavy features, florid complexion, warts, etc - that directly connect with very old stereotypes that have been used against several groups to indicate lowness from birth (in very much the same way that David Lynch's movie version of Dune had recently used similiar characteristics to represent the Harkonnen kinship group as biologically evil).
To be sure, the Androgums are not consistently reminiscent of any particular group of stereotypes. To a certain extent they chime with stereotypes about Scottish people (think, for instance, of the roughly contemporaneous MacAdder from Blackadder the Third... a violent, lecherous, orange-faced, ginger-haired lunatic).
Similar stereotypes - red hair, violence, dissoluteness, primitiveness - have long been used in the representation of the Irish and Irish culture. There is also something reminiscent of the Arab in the Shockeye mix. He seems to be wearing a hat that is somewhere between a turban and a 'Tam O'Shanter'. He wears harem pants under a decoration hanging from his belt that is halfway between a plaid (it's hard not to see an echo in Jamie's tartans) and a rug. He has a curved, scimitar-like blade.
It will be noticed that all these stereotypes suggested by Shockeye represent groups - the Scots, the Irish, Arabs, etc - who have historically been victims of English/British imperialism. As usual, the imperial culture derides, demonizes, vilifies and appropriates the culture of its victims.
Above all, however, if the Androgums recall any set of stereotypes, it is stereotypes about Jews... very, very old ones at that.
It's hard for us to imagine now but, when depicted on the Renaissance stage, Jewish villains like Shylock and Barabas would probably have worn ginger fright-wigs and huge comedy noses (which is disconcerting in the light of so much effort by more modern actors and producers to emphasize the complex and sympathetic aspects of Shylock). Here is some background, courtesy of Peter Ackroyd in his book Shakespeare - The Biography:
Shakespeare refers somewhere to Judas as red-headed, something often found in Italian and Spanish art. Judas was always painted as 'more Jewish' than the other apostles, for obvious reasons. As Michaelangelo asks the Pope in that Monty Python sketch: "Are they too Jewish? I made Judas the most Jewish."
Even hundreds of years after Shylock, Dickens was obsessing over "red-headed and red-whiskered Jews" in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers. Here he is in Oliver Twist, likening Fagin to the Devil by emphasizing his red beard and toasting fork:
Interesting that Fagin is cooking meat the first time we see him. Also interesting that Shockeye too has a fondness for silk.
Shockeye - which, I can't help notice, doesn't exactly sound unlike Shylock - is greedy, gluttonous and cannibalistic, recalling many anti-Semitic stereotypes including the ancient blood libel, which asserted that Jews would use the blood of murdered Christian children to make their unleavened bread. (It might be objected that since Shockeye and his victims are supposedly of different races, he cannot be called a cannibal, but this concentrates too much on the sci-fi rationales of the text and ignores the visual impact of a person preparing another person for butchery and consumption.) Shockeye menaces Peri in a way that is half cannibalistic and half lecherous, hardly a million miles away from endless anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish men preying upon young gentile girls.
It's also worth noting that, in the story, the Androgums are shown to be playing both the Sontarans and the Third Zoners off against each other in an attempt to seize power themselves... exactly the kind of triangulating conspiratorial machiavellianism imagined by the forger of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the Nazis, who fantasized that 'the Jews' were behind both capitalism and communism.
In light of all this, it is deeply unfortunate - to say the least! - that the Doctor should end up killing Shockeye with, of all things, cyanide gas.
I'm not saying that Bob Holmes, or the make-up designer, or anybody involved was being deliberately anti-Semitic (or, for that matter, anti-Scots, anti-Irish, anti-Arab, etc). I don't believe that. But the visual references got in there anyway. These stereotypes - the red hair, the coarse features, the 'ethnic' trappings, the scimitar, the libels of blood lust and cannibalism, etc. - are so well established as signifiers for primitivism and inferiority in the cultural discourse of Western imperialist societies that they get rehearsed unconsciously, unthinkingly, naturally, as a matter of course.
Mind you, I do sometimes wonder if Holmes was deliberately drawing on the Jewish villains of the Renaissance stage. Shockeye seems to have been meant to work rather like Shylock or Barabas, i.e. in the way Shakespeare and Marlowe were starting to re-use the old theatrical character known as the Vice. They both recoded the Vice - the stage embodiment of a vice or vices - in the figure of a villainous Jew... who nonetheless acted as a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the often less than pure moral condition of the gentiles around him. Shylock conforms to stereotypes, but his plight also shows up the materialism, hypocrisy and prejudice of the Venetians. Barabas is less complex, but even his outrageous villainy can be read as a satire of the emergent capitalist culture of the Christians around him. Something similar is at work in Shockeye and, to this extent, I think Shearman and others have a point when they identify the Androgums as an attempt to interrogate some of the implicit values of Doctor Who. Shockeye's behaviour seems - at least, at first - to show up the hypocrisy of the Third Zoners, the Sontarans, the Time Lords... not to mention the prejudice of the Doctor. Holmes really does seem to be doing this deliberately. Otherwise why go to all the trouble of having a scene where the Doctor is upbraided for not being progressive in his attitudes, right after he makes an odious remark comparing a minority to monkeys!
The Androgums seem to have been deliberately crafted as an exaggerated reflection of those they satirise. They are considered primitive yet consider humans primitives. They are power-hungry, as are the Sontarans. They assume the right to travel in time, as do the Time Lords. They are very much like Shylock and Barabas. They satirise a culture that despises them by sharing its values and turning them against those who have oppressed them.
Thing is... the production fumbles it. And fumbles it badly. The scene where Chessene can't help lapping up the gore shows that she's inherently, biologically, inescapably low and savage... thus justifying all the prejudice shown against the Androgums, removing any chance that they might represent a condemnation of slavery as lowering and degrading the slaves, announcing (in the, so to speak, authorial voice) that they deserve to be enslaved and/or killed, and so disspating any satire of the Third Zoners, Sontarans, Time Lords, etc. So the Androgums end up working very much like Barabas (we're never meant to be in any doubt that he's worse than the Christians) and less like Shylock (who remains, until the end, irresolvably ambiguous). After all, in 'The Two Doctors' even those 'generic' Sontarans are shown to be concerned with honour and to seethe at accusations of cowardice... noble attributes entirely lacking in the crude, philistine Androgums.
The story even compromises its own deliberate aim to poke at the meat industry. If the Androgums are meant to represent that aspect of humanity that is callous about farming and killing animals for food (which they clearly are - just look at the scene where Shockeye is 'tenderising' Jamie and saying that "primitive creatures don't feel pain the way we do") then this also is compromised by Dastari's specific comparison, when he says "and he calls humans primitives!" So even we heartless, meat-munching, human carnivores are better than Shockeye.
Moreover, the idea that, as generic monsters in human shape, the Androgums represent a rebuke to the assumptions of the programme is simply untenable. The more one compares them to such generic monsters, the less of a fit they appear. They are not generic monsters in their behaviour or outlook any more than they are in appearance.
Okay, since Grendel (no, the other one) many monsters have wanted to eat people... but this has hardly been a major preoccupation of monsters in Doctor Who, which has largely drawn its quintessential ideas of the monstrous from the nightmares of modernity (fascism, biological racism, industrial genocide, technological warfare, nukes, the autonomous product, etc). And the Androgums are not just carnivores that prey on humans like, say, sirens or werewolves or zombies. They are gourmands (their very species name is an anagram of this word), obsessed with food generally. Since when has an obsession with culinary pleasure been a trait of the 'generic' monster?
Moreover, the Androgums are more even than just amoral gourmands. They are ideologically devoted to the maxim that "the gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action". They are remorseless nihilists; parodic hedonists. They cleave to the definition of the ethics of Satanism offered by Aleister Crowley: "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". They are, in a sense, Satanists.
Added to this is their status as slaves. Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been a slave? Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been generally considered, by all other characters, to be inherently inferior and in need of genetic enhancement? On the contrary, the more usual strategy in Who is for the villainous monsters to be the ones that think that way about everybody else... which, as noted above, would mean that 'Two Doctors' pulls off a nice bit of satire by ultimately painting the Third Zoners and the Doctor as akin to Daleks, were it not for the fact that the text backs them in their assumptions about the Androgums! It'd be like if the Thals turned out to be evil at the end of 'The Daleks', or all Silurians were shown to conform to Miss Dawson's prejudices, or the Mutts in 'The Mutants' really were mindless and infectious brutes.
Jews, on the other hand, were a bullied, subjected, exploited and constrained people for centuries in Christian Europe. And, at the same time, centuries of official Christian church-sanctioned anti-Semitism in Europe equated the Jews, either directly or as allies, with the Devil - as did Dickens (see above). The Androgums are far from a perfect fit with anti-Semitic stereotypes... but they fit them much better than they fit the behaviour patterns of the standard Doctor Who monster.
In order to interpret the Androgums as a satire on the concept of the monstrous in Who, one must also - for instance - see the Celestial Toymaker the same way. One must be able to see him simply as a humanoid who displays the villainy of a monster, thus satirising the usual assumption that a monster looks monstrous. However, as has been irrefutably argued by Philip Sandifer (here), the Celestial Toymaker carries unavoidable connotations of China and the Chinese. I don't think you can argue that he is the racial 'other' construed as monstrous without also having to concede the same about the Androgums (with the caveat that they are far less straightforwardly about one specific group).
Most damaging to the Shearman/Sandifer reading is the scene where, upon her death, Chessene reverts back to her 'true' form, the original self from which she was unable to escape even with those genetic upgrades. Her racial biology trapped her into villainy. This is not only the crudest kind of biological determinism, it also destroys the idea that the Androgum's human appearance makes their status and treatment into a mordant comment on Doctor Who's usual way of demarcating the evil by way of alien ugliness. Chessene's 'true' and underlying alien ugliness reasserts itself at the end. Her evil inner core is thus represented by the red eyebrows, the heavy features, the warts... just as it was earlier represented by her inability to resist tasting the sacrificial blood of someone outside her own race. Even if you don't buy the connections I've drawn between these features and anti-Semitic stereotypes, it remains impossible to argue that the Androgums are not visually represented as monstrous. If anything, their monstrousness is more clearly and deliberately visually represented than that of the 'generic' monsters they fail to resemble. Chessene is the test case. When she looks more or less exactly the same as Dastari, she is treated more or less exactly the same. Her false 'human' appearance (apparently good) is explicitly contrasted with her 'true' Androgum appearance (bad). The moment of her reversion from the former to the latter is also the moment when her irredeemable monstrosity is finally revealed.
In this moment, her racial 'otherness' is her evil.
This is by way of a preamble to talking about 'The Two Doctors', which has been subject to an attempted rehabilitation from the charge of being reactionary on the issue of race. The re-evaluation of the story has been pioneered and best expressed by Robert Shearman in About Time 6. The essence of his argument is that the Androgums are a comment on the concept of the monster as employed by Doctor Who. They are characterised as generic monsters but it is disarming when people treat them as such because they do not look like monsters. They are treated the same way as the Sontarans - all of them racially evil and hateful - but, because they do not have potato-heads or eye-stalks, this poses a problem. We notice the inappropriateness, even tastelessness, of generalising about the evil of an entire race when they look like us. We don't blink when the Doctor describes the entire Jagaroth race as vicious and callous but it bothers us when the same racial villainy is implied about aliens who look human. Philip Sandifer recently summarized and expanded the case admirably, here.
I'm enormously tempted by this reading... and, maybe, if I'd approached 'The Two Doctors' with the express intention of finding a 'redemptive reading', I would've happily seized upon it. Apart from allowing me to enjoy 'The Two Doctors' (a story that, in many respects, I rather like) with a lighter heart, it would also address an issue that I have criticised in Who in the past. The issue is best demonstrated in 'Resurrection of the Daleks', in which the Doctor appears blithe about slaughtering Daleks using biological weapons but cannot make himself gun down Davros because he's a humanoid (just about).
However, with all due respect to Shearman (which is a lot of respect), I think the 'redemptive' argument for 'Two Doctors' misses something very important: the Androgums are - in a way - made-up and costumed as monsters.
They are the jumbled ethnic 'other' as monster.
They are clothed in garb that is inflected with the 'ethnic' and/or 'exotic' and are given physical characteristics - red hair, heavy features, florid complexion, warts, etc - that directly connect with very old stereotypes that have been used against several groups to indicate lowness from birth (in very much the same way that David Lynch's movie version of Dune had recently used similiar characteristics to represent the Harkonnen kinship group as biologically evil).
To be sure, the Androgums are not consistently reminiscent of any particular group of stereotypes. To a certain extent they chime with stereotypes about Scottish people (think, for instance, of the roughly contemporaneous MacAdder from Blackadder the Third... a violent, lecherous, orange-faced, ginger-haired lunatic).
Similar stereotypes - red hair, violence, dissoluteness, primitiveness - have long been used in the representation of the Irish and Irish culture. There is also something reminiscent of the Arab in the Shockeye mix. He seems to be wearing a hat that is somewhere between a turban and a 'Tam O'Shanter'. He wears harem pants under a decoration hanging from his belt that is halfway between a plaid (it's hard not to see an echo in Jamie's tartans) and a rug. He has a curved, scimitar-like blade.
It will be noticed that all these stereotypes suggested by Shockeye represent groups - the Scots, the Irish, Arabs, etc - who have historically been victims of English/British imperialism. As usual, the imperial culture derides, demonizes, vilifies and appropriates the culture of its victims.
Above all, however, if the Androgums recall any set of stereotypes, it is stereotypes about Jews... very, very old ones at that.
It's hard for us to imagine now but, when depicted on the Renaissance stage, Jewish villains like Shylock and Barabas would probably have worn ginger fright-wigs and huge comedy noses (which is disconcerting in the light of so much effort by more modern actors and producers to emphasize the complex and sympathetic aspects of Shylock). Here is some background, courtesy of Peter Ackroyd in his book Shakespeare - The Biography:
...we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre. Shylock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose. The play is, after all, entitled the 'comicall History'.
...
...the stage image of Jews essentially came from the mystery plays, where they were pilloried as the tormentors of Jesus. In the dramatic cycle Herod was played in a red wig, for example; it represents the origin of the clown in pantomime. It was the costume of Barabas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. It is, in effect, the image with which Shakespeare was obliged to work.
Shakespeare refers somewhere to Judas as red-headed, something often found in Italian and Spanish art. Judas was always painted as 'more Jewish' than the other apostles, for obvious reasons. As Michaelangelo asks the Pope in that Monty Python sketch: "Are they too Jewish? I made Judas the most Jewish."
Even hundreds of years after Shylock, Dickens was obsessing over "red-headed and red-whiskered Jews" in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers. Here he is in Oliver Twist, likening Fagin to the Devil by emphasizing his red beard and toasting fork:
In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villanous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging.
Interesting that Fagin is cooking meat the first time we see him. Also interesting that Shockeye too has a fondness for silk.
Shockeye - which, I can't help notice, doesn't exactly sound unlike Shylock - is greedy, gluttonous and cannibalistic, recalling many anti-Semitic stereotypes including the ancient blood libel, which asserted that Jews would use the blood of murdered Christian children to make their unleavened bread. (It might be objected that since Shockeye and his victims are supposedly of different races, he cannot be called a cannibal, but this concentrates too much on the sci-fi rationales of the text and ignores the visual impact of a person preparing another person for butchery and consumption.) Shockeye menaces Peri in a way that is half cannibalistic and half lecherous, hardly a million miles away from endless anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish men preying upon young gentile girls.
It's also worth noting that, in the story, the Androgums are shown to be playing both the Sontarans and the Third Zoners off against each other in an attempt to seize power themselves... exactly the kind of triangulating conspiratorial machiavellianism imagined by the forger of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the Nazis, who fantasized that 'the Jews' were behind both capitalism and communism.
In light of all this, it is deeply unfortunate - to say the least! - that the Doctor should end up killing Shockeye with, of all things, cyanide gas.
I'm not saying that Bob Holmes, or the make-up designer, or anybody involved was being deliberately anti-Semitic (or, for that matter, anti-Scots, anti-Irish, anti-Arab, etc). I don't believe that. But the visual references got in there anyway. These stereotypes - the red hair, the coarse features, the 'ethnic' trappings, the scimitar, the libels of blood lust and cannibalism, etc. - are so well established as signifiers for primitivism and inferiority in the cultural discourse of Western imperialist societies that they get rehearsed unconsciously, unthinkingly, naturally, as a matter of course.
Mind you, I do sometimes wonder if Holmes was deliberately drawing on the Jewish villains of the Renaissance stage. Shockeye seems to have been meant to work rather like Shylock or Barabas, i.e. in the way Shakespeare and Marlowe were starting to re-use the old theatrical character known as the Vice. They both recoded the Vice - the stage embodiment of a vice or vices - in the figure of a villainous Jew... who nonetheless acted as a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the often less than pure moral condition of the gentiles around him. Shylock conforms to stereotypes, but his plight also shows up the materialism, hypocrisy and prejudice of the Venetians. Barabas is less complex, but even his outrageous villainy can be read as a satire of the emergent capitalist culture of the Christians around him. Something similar is at work in Shockeye and, to this extent, I think Shearman and others have a point when they identify the Androgums as an attempt to interrogate some of the implicit values of Doctor Who. Shockeye's behaviour seems - at least, at first - to show up the hypocrisy of the Third Zoners, the Sontarans, the Time Lords... not to mention the prejudice of the Doctor. Holmes really does seem to be doing this deliberately. Otherwise why go to all the trouble of having a scene where the Doctor is upbraided for not being progressive in his attitudes, right after he makes an odious remark comparing a minority to monkeys!
The Androgums seem to have been deliberately crafted as an exaggerated reflection of those they satirise. They are considered primitive yet consider humans primitives. They are power-hungry, as are the Sontarans. They assume the right to travel in time, as do the Time Lords. They are very much like Shylock and Barabas. They satirise a culture that despises them by sharing its values and turning them against those who have oppressed them.
Thing is... the production fumbles it. And fumbles it badly. The scene where Chessene can't help lapping up the gore shows that she's inherently, biologically, inescapably low and savage... thus justifying all the prejudice shown against the Androgums, removing any chance that they might represent a condemnation of slavery as lowering and degrading the slaves, announcing (in the, so to speak, authorial voice) that they deserve to be enslaved and/or killed, and so disspating any satire of the Third Zoners, Sontarans, Time Lords, etc. So the Androgums end up working very much like Barabas (we're never meant to be in any doubt that he's worse than the Christians) and less like Shylock (who remains, until the end, irresolvably ambiguous). After all, in 'The Two Doctors' even those 'generic' Sontarans are shown to be concerned with honour and to seethe at accusations of cowardice... noble attributes entirely lacking in the crude, philistine Androgums.
The story even compromises its own deliberate aim to poke at the meat industry. If the Androgums are meant to represent that aspect of humanity that is callous about farming and killing animals for food (which they clearly are - just look at the scene where Shockeye is 'tenderising' Jamie and saying that "primitive creatures don't feel pain the way we do") then this also is compromised by Dastari's specific comparison, when he says "and he calls humans primitives!" So even we heartless, meat-munching, human carnivores are better than Shockeye.
Moreover, the idea that, as generic monsters in human shape, the Androgums represent a rebuke to the assumptions of the programme is simply untenable. The more one compares them to such generic monsters, the less of a fit they appear. They are not generic monsters in their behaviour or outlook any more than they are in appearance.
Okay, since Grendel (no, the other one) many monsters have wanted to eat people... but this has hardly been a major preoccupation of monsters in Doctor Who, which has largely drawn its quintessential ideas of the monstrous from the nightmares of modernity (fascism, biological racism, industrial genocide, technological warfare, nukes, the autonomous product, etc). And the Androgums are not just carnivores that prey on humans like, say, sirens or werewolves or zombies. They are gourmands (their very species name is an anagram of this word), obsessed with food generally. Since when has an obsession with culinary pleasure been a trait of the 'generic' monster?
Moreover, the Androgums are more even than just amoral gourmands. They are ideologically devoted to the maxim that "the gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action". They are remorseless nihilists; parodic hedonists. They cleave to the definition of the ethics of Satanism offered by Aleister Crowley: "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". They are, in a sense, Satanists.
Added to this is their status as slaves. Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been a slave? Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been generally considered, by all other characters, to be inherently inferior and in need of genetic enhancement? On the contrary, the more usual strategy in Who is for the villainous monsters to be the ones that think that way about everybody else... which, as noted above, would mean that 'Two Doctors' pulls off a nice bit of satire by ultimately painting the Third Zoners and the Doctor as akin to Daleks, were it not for the fact that the text backs them in their assumptions about the Androgums! It'd be like if the Thals turned out to be evil at the end of 'The Daleks', or all Silurians were shown to conform to Miss Dawson's prejudices, or the Mutts in 'The Mutants' really were mindless and infectious brutes.
Jews, on the other hand, were a bullied, subjected, exploited and constrained people for centuries in Christian Europe. And, at the same time, centuries of official Christian church-sanctioned anti-Semitism in Europe equated the Jews, either directly or as allies, with the Devil - as did Dickens (see above). The Androgums are far from a perfect fit with anti-Semitic stereotypes... but they fit them much better than they fit the behaviour patterns of the standard Doctor Who monster.
In order to interpret the Androgums as a satire on the concept of the monstrous in Who, one must also - for instance - see the Celestial Toymaker the same way. One must be able to see him simply as a humanoid who displays the villainy of a monster, thus satirising the usual assumption that a monster looks monstrous. However, as has been irrefutably argued by Philip Sandifer (here), the Celestial Toymaker carries unavoidable connotations of China and the Chinese. I don't think you can argue that he is the racial 'other' construed as monstrous without also having to concede the same about the Androgums (with the caveat that they are far less straightforwardly about one specific group).
Most damaging to the Shearman/Sandifer reading is the scene where, upon her death, Chessene reverts back to her 'true' form, the original self from which she was unable to escape even with those genetic upgrades. Her racial biology trapped her into villainy. This is not only the crudest kind of biological determinism, it also destroys the idea that the Androgum's human appearance makes their status and treatment into a mordant comment on Doctor Who's usual way of demarcating the evil by way of alien ugliness. Chessene's 'true' and underlying alien ugliness reasserts itself at the end. Her evil inner core is thus represented by the red eyebrows, the heavy features, the warts... just as it was earlier represented by her inability to resist tasting the sacrificial blood of someone outside her own race. Even if you don't buy the connections I've drawn between these features and anti-Semitic stereotypes, it remains impossible to argue that the Androgums are not visually represented as monstrous. If anything, their monstrousness is more clearly and deliberately visually represented than that of the 'generic' monsters they fail to resemble. Chessene is the test case. When she looks more or less exactly the same as Dastari, she is treated more or less exactly the same. Her false 'human' appearance (apparently good) is explicitly contrasted with her 'true' Androgum appearance (bad). The moment of her reversion from the former to the latter is also the moment when her irredeemable monstrosity is finally revealed.
In this moment, her racial 'otherness' is her evil.
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