41

Early morning in Britain.

Shop-window dummies twitch, stand up and smash their way out into the high street.  They stalk past the shop logos and brand names and adverts.  Price tags dangle from their fashionable clothes.

Their hands are not like human hands.  They're not organs of manipulation, to be used for work.  They flip open to reveal weapons.

The dummies encounter shoppers, or people waiting for the bus to work.  They gun them down.  People fall and die next to the shop fronts.

The dummies are plastic effigies of people.  Products, manufactured things, fashioned in the human image.  They alienate the human image from humans.  They were made in a factory, on a production line, by workers.  Sold to shops.  They are hostile commodities, made for a capitalist concern; made by people working for a wage, yet out of human control, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external, dominating, fierce, blank, gothic, inhuman power. 

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

By the way Karl, the people who made these dummies were women.  The dummies, by contrast, are all male.  The dummies are all white too, because that's what the default, 'vanilla' human is to capitalist culture: male and white.  Several of the women we see working in Auto Plastics are not white.

Talk about alienation.

Skulltopus 8: Society of the Tentacle

The quasi-tentacular returns in 'The Claws of Axos'.  Big time.

What's more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh... to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Now, if my idea is right - that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique - then this really, really should show up in 'The Claws of Axos'.

Not to keep you in suspense: it does.


Taking it on the Chinn

Now don't get me wrong.  I'd hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that 'Claws' is 'subversive' or anything.  I'm not.  It isn't.  As political critique goes, objectively, 'Claws' is feeble.  Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn't amount to subversion.  After all, Clear and Present Danger  (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America - but Clear and Present Danger isn't remotely subversive... indeed, it is a highly reactionary film that entirely supports the specious ideological assumptions of the American empire.  This is slightly unfair to 'Claws', since it has, well, sharper claws than Tom Clancy via Hollywood ('Claws' is cynical about establishment power, while CaPD depicts the cynicism of powerful people as a danger to a fundamentally well-meaning establishment), but it does illustrate the point that simply depicting the wrongdoing of the state does not necessarily or automatically amount to a radical critique.

With its bourgeois patrician hero, its stiff-upper-lipped and self-sacrificing scientist/peer, its bog-standard sexist representation of Jo as dollybird-in-need-of-saving, its depiction of the American lawman (FBI?  CIA?  ...something like that) as a square-jawed straight-arrow, the comic neutralisation of the issue of poverty, the implication that people starve because there is a lack of food rather than a lack of profit in feeding them, and many other such representations, 'Claws' is as well integrated into capitalist ideology, and as likely to 'manufacture consent', as any other Doctor Who story, the vast majority of which are straightforwardly and entirely unthreatening to the status quo.  What political critique there is consists, for the most part, of moralistic liberal finger-wagging about greed, nationalism and xenophobia, which is itself compromised by the Axons turning out to be evil, shifty, bogus asylum seekers (that sort of thing didn't start with Gatiss, sadly).  Such moralistic liberal finger-wagging is inherently non-subversive and non-radical because it is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, i.e. vote out the reactionaries, and get the common herd to be less materialistic, and capitalism will be fine and dandy.

However, everything is relative and context changes things.

The fact is, 'Claws' has probably the most straightforwardly, explicitly, non-metaphorical depiction of the British state as cynical and machiavellian of all Pertwee stories (though the impact is softened by Chinn's comic incompetence).  In 'Claws', the problem isn't one slimey bureaucrat, one idiotic authority figure, one cowardly warmongering parliamentary private secretary... the problem is Chinn and his boss and the government they work for.  They're not just arse-covering or being unimaginative or showing prejudice.  They're actively and covertly colluding in what is described (by Jo, the character that we - the audience - are meant to identify with most directly) as a "contemptible, underhanded deal".  Only the bias in the Cabinet Room in favour of Global Chemicals in 'Green Death' comes close to the level of systemic cynicism shown by Chinn and his Minister.  It's impossible to imagine that Chinn's Minister is acting without the sanction of the rest of the government, or at least the expectation of approval.  Indeed, his worry seems to be about public, worldwide perception.

Whatever Ministry Chinn represents (nominally he's MoD, but the very lack of specificity about his job gives it a general character that suggests a systemic problem), the nature of the "contemptible, underhanded deal" that he's trying to cut is clearly implied to be aimed at cornering economic and military power.  Chinn's behaviour is very deliberately linked to xenophobia and nationalism, via his (offscreen) remark about "England for the English".  The lack of any genuine commitment to isolationism is shown by his willingness to snuggle up to the Axons when he thinks there's advantage to be had from them.  However true to life this may or may not be, the British government is shown to be at loggerheads with the U.N., with the British state depicted as self-serving while the U.N. is implied to be universalist in its desire to spread Axonite around the world... free.  This last detail is raised so briefly that its easy to miss, but it clearly implies that the British government's plan was to capture the sole right to sell Axonite.

This may be liberal moralism (isolationism? profiteering? tut tut!), and it may be unrealistic (the U.N. isn't generally prone to demanding free, worldwide distribution of valuable substances)... but it at least raises the issue of nation states trying to corner and capture resources, and of control over global supplies of such resources conferring economic power.  And it doesn't depict the British state as either morally impeccable or morally neutral in the face of such opportunities.  On the contrary, it depicts the British state as cynically (if shambolically) conspiratorial in its efforts to seize and hold such an opportunity.  The aim of the state is to exploit the commercial advantages and economic power conferred by a valuable commodity (a commodity, moreover, that seems to represent capital itself - see below).  Edge of Darkness, this ain't... but it may actually be the most overtly negative portrayal of the British state in Doctor Who until 'Turn Left'.

This, by itself, is nowhere near enough to invoke the tentacles.  But there's more.


Get on Your Bike and Find Work

'Claws' raises the issue of poverty, by implication and explicitly.  Famine is mentioned several times.  The idea mooted by some of the characters is that Axonite will help to feed the starving millions by vastly increasing food stocks.  Of course, it's also strongly implied that this will come at a price - if it happens at all - if Chinn and his bunch manage to grab Axonite for the exclusive control of the British state.  When Chinn gives the Axons his assurance that Axonite will spread around the globe, he's betting that the globe will pay to get it.  (We'll come back to this.)  This all bubbles along beneath the surface of the story, but there is a shot in Episode One that threatens - albeit very faintly - to raise it to the surface along with some very awkward questions.  It's this one:

Let's take stock of this image.  A homeless man, clearly implied to be mentally ill, who has just been seen rummaging around in a rubbish dump, is out in the cold... next to a nuclear power station.  Winser's reactor alone is later said to have cost £50 Million.  So, the British state can afford to spend that kind of money on nuclear power, but it can't stop the kind of poverty that puts someone like Josh outside, without shelter, in freezing "freak weather conditions".  Ah, but the reactor is supplying energy to vast swathes of Britain!  Yeah... but if you haven't got a home, you haven't got any way of enjoying any of that energy, have you?  Josh has to create his own energy with his own generator: pedals.  But even his bike is useless.  The problem with Josh is that he is worth nothing to anyone powerful.  He's unprofitable.  Axos doesn't even get much sustenance out of consuming him.  The Axons say it themselves when they analyse him: "this specimen is valueless".

Later, of course, Axonite meshes itself with the reactor to the point where they seem to merge.  It is a miracle power-source that hides the deadly potential for mass destruction.  Later still, the Nuton Power Complex explodes.  There is clearly some queasiness about nuclear power submerged in Axonite.

Once again, don't misunderstand me.  I'm not saying any of this constitutes angry political comment.  It does not.

The lead characters casually saunter back - unprotected - into the wreckage of the reactor plant after it has exploded, which takes the edge off any anxieties the story might seem to have about nuclear power, even nullifying the effect of the Master's dry remarks about "sticky tape on the windows", which parody the farcical advice people used to get given about What to Do in the Event of a Nuclear Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Josh is depicted as a comedy character.  He jabbers unintelligible 'yokel' gibberish and puts up his fists at Axos.  He's a comedy nutter, backed by cutesy Steptoe & Son-esque music.  We're evidently supposed to find him funny.  (Oh yeah, homelessness - what a giggle.)  He's a parodic figure.  He serves to neutralise and naturalize poverty, to make it seem like something amusing that only happens to crazy old drunks.  Such people (whisper it) have brought it on themselves and (whisper it) prefer being homeless, which is a kind of freedom.  And all that bollocks.

However, the only thing that makes Josh so 'safe' is the tone the story takes with him.  Changing the incidental music alone could easily transform him from a figure of fun to one of pathos.  Then, the sight of him freezing his nuts off in an icy lake, a few miles away from a colossally expensive nuclear power plant (which later explodes), while the British government connives to gain exclusive control and profits from an even more deadly source of power, would have an altogether different effect.  We might even be tempted to connect Josh's condition with that of all those hungry people who haunt this story at the extreme edges.


Planet of Gold

At his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer identifies 'Claws' as utilising... well... the horror of Glam rock (as someone else once put it).

Glam rock... is in part about taking the opulence of conspicuous consumption and rearranging it into the wrong aesthetic. It's all the over the top excess of the luxury associated with power and authority, except it's all put together pointlessly and haphazardly. It revels in decadence and consumption while denying the systems that ostensibly justify that behavior in society.

Does The Claws of Axos follow this approach? Largely, yes. On the one level, the pleasure of The Claws of Axos is a revelry in spectacle and glitz. We are meant to enjoy its images for their own sake. On the other hand, look at its ostensible plot, which is a straightforward anti-consumerist parable. The Axons are beautiful creatures of gold who offer untold wealth and then drain the world of its resources. But look, these two things don't go together at all. The story is simultaneously reveling in superficial images and warning of their malign influence.

But this isn't a contradiction or a case of sloppy and incoherent execution. This is what concern about the rise of a purely image-based culture of spectacle (which was one of the major concerns of the Situationalist International in France in '68) looked like in 1971. The critique of images was phrased in an image-based, superficial form. The Claws of Axos is designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable about the pleasure they are taking in the object. It's constantly reveling in images that are not fun but rather lurid and unnerving - images that are over the top and unlike what things should look like - while simultaneously cautioning us about the very pleasure it is taking.

He goes on to say other interesting things about Pertwee as playing a Hero, a fundamentally consumerist role where the male lead is commodified for the audience's enjoyment... except that, in 'Claws', he is a grotesque amidst a cast of unchanging and functional stock characters who always react the same way.  Thus Pertwee ends up unwittingly playing a joke version of this Hero.  His Doctor becomes a kind of Glam subversion, revelling in outrageous behaviour, flouncy togs and bourgeois ostentation while simultaneously losing the legitimacy that makes such things work they way they're superficially supposed to.

But the bit I'm interested in is Sandifer's reference to Guy Debord's idea about the Society of the Spectacle.  I wont linger over this here (how it relates to Doctor Who - and film/TV SF/fantasy generally - is a whole separate series of posts in itself).  Here's the book itself; here's [PDF] the best intro to it I've ever read.

However, I think Debord can lead us to something fundamental about what Axonite/Axos is.

Early on in Society of the Spectacle, Debord delivers this crucial disclaimer: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people, mediated by images."  Debord locates the spectacle in commodity fetishism.  The spectacle is "the main production of present-day society" and "is the image of the ruling economy".  It "subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them."  It is "the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers."  Just as Marx wrote that capital is the material expression of social relationships of production, so Debord says that the spectacle is the expression in images of material relationships of production.  For Debord, the spectacle is the way modern society expresses the concentration of capital.

Now, Sandifer's interest is in how the story itself uses spectacle strategically.  I'm more interested in how, within the frame of the story, Axos uses/is spectacle.  When the Axons offer the humans their most tempting aspect, they personate as images that embody various seductive elements of Western heritage and capitalist ideology.  They represent themselves as a patriarchal nuclear family (post-nuclear, more like... as someone once said).  According to Miles and Wood, the script described the Axons who greet the humans as looking like "the adman's dream Coca-Cola family".  They are commodifying themselves and their image for the humans' consumption, drawing on ideals of consumer culture.  These ideals are themselves drawn from older - sometimes classic or neoclassical - tropes about beauty, health, normalcy, etc.  The Axons actively employ classical motifs: their slender bodies, sculpted hair and blank eyes make them look like Greek or Roman statues.  They use the spectacle to dazzle the humans.  Most of all, they appear - spectacularly - to be made of gold.

Gold is the ultimate symbol of wealth.  Even with the days of the Gold Standard long gone, gold prices still have a great effect upon the world economy, heavily influencing currency rates, especially in Asia and Australasia.  Its symbolic weight is enormous.  It is associated with plenty, wealth, power, pleasure, conspicuous consumption, health, purity... but it is also tarnished with the dirt of history, of the Gold Rush and other such examples of acquisitiveness which devastated native peoples and raised cities full of miners and brothels and gambling houses, etc.  It speaks of unreasoning temptation, of a rush to gain.

Gold also stands for money, the 'universal equivalent', the commodity that stands for and realises the respective values of all others.  Gold is not money, not anymore... but it does imply money like little else.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, aside from deliberately using glam and glitter to ensare humans, Axos is also expressing something true about itself.  Axonite is offered as, "a gift, a payment" (in accordance with our customs).  Note that "gift" and "payment" are incompatible, even mutually exclusive terms.  It's as though the Axons do not fully understand the meaning of the word "gift", even as they go on to ask for and suggest charity.  But they are clearly offering Axonite as a payment, in return for shelter (as they claim).  Actually, they are buying human cooperation.  The spectacle of the glittering golden people expresses the fact that their entire nature is essentially monetary, commodified, capitalistic.

Axonite is inherently spectacular.  It transforms things, engorges things, shrinks things, foams, blasts, crackles and seethes.  Given that Axonite, the Axons and the Axon ship are all, essentially, the same thing, that means that everything we see inside Axos (see the pictures above) is also Axonite.  That unnerving glam rock orgy of strange flesh is all performance, spectacle... all of it, Axonite in change and motion.

In the world of Axos, everything is spectacular and everything is a commodity.  After encountering Axonite as a payment (exchange value), we are immediately shown its qualities (use value).  It can "absorb, convert, transmit and program all forms of energy".  Essentially, it can do anything.  It is omniuseful.  It is, say the Axons, "the source of all our growth technology".  Well, that sounds a helluva lot like the commodity form to me.

In our world too, everything is commodified.  Commodities can be anything and everything.  The commodity can take any form.  It can be huge or small; it can be a single bolt or an entire warship.  Commodities can absorb each other's value.  The value in the automated machinery of the production line (itself a commodity - made to be sold and bought) transfers value into the commodities produced on the production line.  (I'll have mercy on you and skip any further discussion of 'the organic constituion of capital'... except to note how interesting it is, in respect to this story, that Marx speaks of capital as being 'organic' and 'variable'.)  Commodities can transfer value.  They can be used to ship other commodities from place to place.  Commodities can transmit value.  The cable or satellite (themselves commodities) can transmit the drama (commodity) and/or the advert (the commodity that sells commodities) to the television (a commodity).  Watching the television is a person who sells their labour (commodity), gets a wage (which she uses to buy commodities) and forms part of a market based on her personal details (these markets being sold to advertisers in the form of ad space between appropriate programmes).  And so on and so on.  In a system like ours, one of generalised commodity production, the commodity can do all the things Axonite can do.  It can even engorge frogs, if you want.  Even before genetic engineering (itself heavily commodified, with patented genes, etc), the market would have found a way to breed monstrously large frogs if there'd been a way of selling them.

The humans immediately see the possible applications... which is understandable.  The Axons have offered something that humans in capitalist society understand very well.  They call Axonite "growth technology"... they mean it literally, but the humans see another kind of growth.  Economic growth.  Axonite is a new development of the productive forces, waiting to be applied to the system of commodity production.  "Unlimited food!" says Hardiman.  Now, putting aside the child-logic that assumes people starve because there's a world shortage of food, what is Hardiman really saying?  He's saying that Axonite can increase human capacity to produce... and what do humans produce in capitalism?  Commodities.  Axonite will mean that humans will produce more, bigger, better, faster, with less outlay, etc.  Even if Hardiman doesn't see this, the Doctor and Chinn certainly do... at least, in their different ways.  The Doctor doesn't usually talk about economics, so he sees the issue as one of Axonite conferring "unlimited power" of a kind he doesn't specify.  Chinn, however, immediately reacts acquisitively, nationalistically and in terms of the British state.  "We must have it," says he.  By "we" he means 'Britain'... which, of course, to him, means the British state.  Economic power is implicitly what he's thinking about.  He immediately begins trying to cut a deal for "sole distribution rights to all Axonite materials" to be "vested in the British government".  By "materials" he probably means literal materials, i.e. the stuff itself... but that doesn't stop his words sounding, nowadays, like part of an intellectual property rights contract.

Am I not overstating?  Isn't Axonite just another of those fantasy materials, like zyton-7, trisilicate, duralinium, argonite, spectrox...  well, yes and no.  You see, they are all examples of a commodity and some of them are shown to cause people and/or companies to do terrible things because they are commodities... but, with the possible exception of spectrox, none of them seem to stand for the commodity, for the commodity form itself. Axonite, however, does this through its omniusefulness, its ultra-utility, through its apparently protean nature, through its ability to be and to copy anything, through its hyper-desirability, through its resistance to analysis, and through its nature as spectacle. Like Nestene plastic (which is also spectacular and also stands for the commodity, for capital... hence the tentacles) it is autonomous, it can mass produce and re-produce, it attacks.  In one sense, it is less sharp a signifier than Auton plastic because it is not made by humans, but on the other hand there is the matter of its cyclical nature.  Auton Plastic does not circulate; Axonite does.  The Nutrition Cycle sounds very much like the circulation of capital.  The commodity dazzles, it is distributed in return for payment, it moves from hand to hand, it is shipped, it reaches every corner of the globe, increases yields and develops production, confers power and growth, achieves saturation and monopoly... and the end result is a massive collection of energy (profit) at the centre, achieved through the absorption of resources, with all the profit feeding back into the system, engorging it, enabling it to reproduce itself and start the cycle again.  Not for nothing do the Axons refer to the Nutrition Cycle also as a cycle of reproduction.  Axonite is like the commodity in that it is one aspect of an all-encompassing system, an aspect that circulates globally and 'returns with' the profit, reproducing the system in the process.

Nestene plastic is capital: labour alienated from humans, commodified and fetishized to the point of hostile autonomy.  Inside the Autons there lurk the Nestenes... i.e. within the alien/ated human images, 'Spearhead' finds capital, which manifests as incoherent tentacles.  Axos too is constituted of alien/ated human images within which there hide masses of tentacles.  Axos takes up the clues in 'Spearhead' and uses the incoherent tentacular as a spectacle in itself, but a spectacle that behaves like the commodity synthesized to the point of abstraction, which is what the commodity form is anyway: an abstraction.

Axos is capital.


Nice Tentacles, Shame About the Skull

Axos is described and depicted in many ways during this story, many of them incompatible and incoherent.  Their 'ship' (which is, of course, not actually a vessel for occupants so much as a bag of skin around a single entity) looks like a leech or a tapeworm, its opening resembling a scolex.  The thing that reaches out to grab Josh and Filer is partly a tentacle, partly a tongue, partly a stamen, with a spider on the end of it.  The interior has tendrils, eyes, fronds, membranes, claws, mouths, hard dribbles that look like scabs or dried pus, ganglions, foreskins, you name it.  Axos is an incoherent chimera.  It's a bag of bits and pieces, randomly stuck together and constantly reshuffling.  It's an obscene body landscape.  Being inside it is like being a morsel of food being digested through the internal organs of a monstrous, scrambled creature.

However, according to Miles and Wood, the original idea for the story was about "a giant skull landing in Hyde Park and offering to fulfill people's desires, for a price, by making its human-sized nerve-cells become whatever anybody wanted".

Now, I've never read that first script, but surely, inevitably, somebody would ask the Skull to use one of those "human-sized" cells to recreate a dead loved one.  Which probably wouldn't work out, I'm guessing.

This sounds like a straightforward gothic parable about the return of the repressed.  The wishes that are granted and which then prove undesirable, as in the ghost story 'The Monkey's Paw' by W. W. Jacobs.

We all know that, right up to the last minute, the story was called 'The Vampire from Space'.  The vampire being a thoroughly gothic monster.  Barry Letts changed it at the eleventh hour... apparently feeling it necessary to insert the dialogue likening Axos to a vulture in order to justify the new title.

This is almost too good to be true, from my point of view.

I've been working with China Miéville's fascinating and original thesis (see my account, here, which links to his essay) about the tentacle and skull being in "non-dialectical superposition".  They represent two conflicting ways of expressing the horrors of modernity, the gothic (hauntological) and the Weird.  The gothic is about that knowledge which haunts us even as we try to deny it; the Weird is about the lack of comprehension, the terrifyingly unknowable.  These modes do not interpenetrate, rather they oscillate back and forth.  As a result, you never get monsters that merge the skull and the octopus - skulltopuses... a combination that would otherwise seem quite obvious, given that octopuses have central bodies that are almost skull-like in shape.

In the production history of 'The Claws of Axos' we can almost see this very process of oscillation at work!

The skull is pushed out by the incoherent tentacular.

But... this isn't quite what's happening.  In his thesis, Miéville is talking about large-scale oscillations which take place across Western culture, graphics, political art and, most especially, literature.  He's talking, for the most part, about fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Moreover, 'Claws' is not a case of hauntology being outright rejected in favour of Weird opacity.  In its broadcast form, 'Claws' retains a hauntological charge.  Putting aside any possible Freudian interpretations (off the top of my head... the death wish, anybody?), Axos clearly haunts us (in that material way Who has of doing hauntology) with repressed social/political/cultural anxieties about greed, materialism, acquisitiveness, hunger, starvation, foreigners and refugees, our own prosperity, etc.  Axos even becomes semi-spectral at times, i.e. the floating disembodied heads.

While it may be a very strange, almost unprecedented creature - it really is quite hard to think where any TV viewers in 1971 would've seen anything quite like it before - Axos is still, in many ways, a vampire.  Vampire is actually a much more apposite description than Letts' implied carrion bird.  Vampires drain the life from the living.  Axos wouldn't be about to feed on a "carcass".  Axos is gothic to that extent.  It even chimes with a brilliant Marxist reading of Dracula by a guy called Moretti, who saw the fanged Count as a monster of monopoly capital, trying to takeover the world and integrate all humanity into his dominating system, opposed by the British middle classes and a professor from Holland (the home of free trade).  Marx himself was fond of comparing capital to a vampire.  Axos is also, as I've suggested above, capital.  It is a single system that wishes to circulate units of itself, in commodity form, around the world, in search of a total, global monopoly of all power and profit.

This, I think, is the key.  'Claws of Axos' uses Doctor Who's materialist method of doing the gothic and the hauntological to create a gothic monster... but finds its intended critique of greed and consumerism sliding inexorably into a gothic-style critique of capitalism... of capitalism as a destructive and vampiric system (the unitary nature of Axos makes it systemic, all its parts being aspects of itself) of commodity circulation, aided by a cynical British state.

Doctor Who, under the right-on stewardship of Barry Letts, is happier with this idea than ever before... such things were hardly even dreamt of in the 60s show until the last few seasons... but still can't fully commit to a systemic critique on this level, what with its place in the capitalist culture industry, tasked with educating the nation's goggle-eyed chidlers in the virtues of mainstream Enlightenment values and liberal bourgeois morality.  As this conflict - between ideological position and implied critique - develops, the most overt trappings of the gothic are shed and, in their place, comes a processed, stylistic, creatively misunderstood version of the Weird.  Out goes the skull that offers the barbed wishes... in come the tentacles, the claws and the strange flesh.  As with 'The Macra Terror' and 'Spearhead from Space', the themes of the story have been converging upon a point that needs to be obscured, scrambled, covered, Weirdified into incoherence... so in comes the radically incoherent monster, purloined from the Weird, the apparent opposite and antithesis of the gothic.

The connection between these two modes is never entirely severed, however.  This is not the process described by Miéville in its full sense but rather an echo if it.  The remaining connection between the gothic and the Weird is most visible in the look of the Axon 'ship'.  It looks like a leech.  It looks like a bloodsucker.  The story has found its resting point at the place where the gothic and the Weird almost meet before they repel.

The Empire of Vanilla

Some things I've noticed about 'Spearhead from Space'

There's a lot of wood in this story.

                             

                                                        

This suggests a contrast, a conflict even, between older forms of production - the appearance of the hospital, and the Seeleys' cottage, suggest artisanship - and newer industrial technology and mass production, represented by the factory and the evil plastic which creeps out of it.

There are lots of workers in this story.  There's a Nurse.

There's Mullins.

Mullins, one of the many wage labourers in this story...
seen here in the act of labouring for his wage.  

There's a workman in the street, talking to the copper before he investigates the (off-screen) breaking of shop windows (implying the role of the police as protectors of private property and business).  There's the guard at the front gate of UNIT HQ.  There's the guide at Madame Tussauds.

There are the workers in the plastics factory.

I don't know, but I'd guess that these women - together with the male worker
seen earlier in the episode, operating heavy machinery - are actual workers
in the factory where these scenes were filmed.  One of the women is Asian,
which is a pretty big clue that she's a 'real person' rather than an extra.

Some of the workers are 'fake'.  There are Auton Porters who help kidnap the Doctor.  There's an Auton secretary at the factory.  Note how the Nestenes still employ a young woman in a short skirt as a secretary, even if she is made of plastic... but then such women are usually treated like mannequins in practice anyway.

These waxen-faced, blank, zombified workers strongly suggest an extreme form of alienation: line hypnosis, a psychological condition where people are lulled into passive, unresponsive fugue states by constant repetition of the same mechanical tasks - found most famously in people who perform extremely simple tasks at conveyor belts.  More broadly, it suggests the deadened, flattened affect of people who find their Fordist jobs dull beyond belief.

Think this is a stretch?  But the story makes a point of commenting upon automation.  The monsters are called Autons.  We see, as noted above, faceless factory workers at their tedious, repetitive, assembly-line jobs.  And General Scobie, the swaggering old reactionary establishment figure par excellence, upon hearing that the plastics factory has become largely automated (which means a load of people have lost their jobs), makes a crack about automation being a splendid idea because "you don't find machines going on strike!"  In other words, workers should be treated like and behave like machines.... and replacing them with machines is the next best thing.

There is much literal commodification - often of people - in this story.  Ransome is paid off... even his name suggests a payment for a person.  Seeley tries to sell his "thunderball" and nearly gets his wife killed.  Mullins sells the Doctor to the journos.

"I understand you pay for stories?"

But 'Spearhead' really harps on about life being commodified... most particularly by its concentration upon production.  The factory is where human-shaped commodities are produced.  We know why the Autons are so threatening, so uncanny... Ransome helpfully tells us.  It's because they walk and chase and attack, despite having been "made in the factory".  They are the product, the commodity - after us.  As with much SF, including - perhaps especially - Doctor Who, they are evil conceptualised as/through the autonomous product.  They are the unit that shifts itself.

                         

 In the July issue of Panic Moon fanzine, I sketched the outlines of a Marxist reading of 'Spearhead from Space'.  The gist of it was that the Autons are an expression of alienation and commodity fetishism.  Please bear with me while I reiterate some basic principles.  We'll get back to Autons eventually, I promise.


Alienation and Commodity Fetishism

Human beings have always made things.  Productive labour is perhaps the most important aspect of what the young Marx called human 'species being'.  How we make things changes over time.  The rise of capitalism brought the factory system.  The division of labour.  Specialisation without expertise.  Organisation of time.  The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers.  Mass production.  Heavy industry.  Conveyor belts.  Fordism.  Mechanisation.  Computer-run facilities.  Humans started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating.  When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it's hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The things we made became increasingly wondrous.  The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful.  They allowed man to fly.  And to drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds.  Products are double-edged things, to put it mildly.

The things we make... the engines... the artefacts... they behave like this because they are the products of capitalism.  They are commodities.  Made to be sold.  The system demands continued production and circulation of commodities, so products seem to breed and teem and change and mutate and multiply like bacteria.  Increasingly, they seem to have minds of their own.  They move without us, they talk without us, they do things and say things we don't understand, they assail us with cryptic error messages, they catch viruses.  They fly without pilots and destroy villages in Pakistan.  Those last ones we call "drones", naming them after living things (with irony as mordant as it is unconscious, we call them after the mindless worker bees in the rigid insectile hierarchy).  It's amazing, when you stop to think about it, just how CONSTANTLY we think and talk about inanimate stuff, about products, about commodities, as though they are alive... and powerful.  The stock market is a product.  Yet we report upon its twitches and tremours and undulations and ululations and sneezes and farts as though we are reporting the natural bodly processes and moods of some great beast, to who's whims we are subject.  This is an expression of what Marx called commodity fetishism.

Meanwhile, humans are made into commodities.  Capitalism created and depended upon the modern slave trade... and even 'free' labour (which is better than slave labour) is bought and sold on a job market.

The stuff breeds and teems as people die in swathes.  From hunger, from AIDS, from despair, from by-products, from environmental backlash, from sheer grinding poverty.  This happens because the ruling principle is profit rather than need, and because the people who make everything do not do so under conditions of their own choosing.  They are on the job market, so they end up making stuff for the stuff market.  We make what we're told, as many as we're told, for purposes we don't choose.  Indeed, there is no purpose beyond the creation of commodities.  Things are made to be sold.  The iPad is not made in order to express human creativity.  The iPad is made by people whose creative lives have been yoked to the creation of iPads by people who think they can sell iPads in order to make profit that will keep their iPad-making racket going.

Stuff is made in order to be saleable in order to fund the making of saleable stuff.  Marx contrasted this kind of labour - the forced labour of those who must work to eat - to the labour that we undertake because it is part of our humanity.  "Milton" Marx wrote, "produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature."  The waged labourer who works in the mass production of copies of Paradise Lost produces only capital - and capital is not hers.  Her human productiveness is redirected into work for the production of something that does not express her nature, that she does not own, that does not enrich her, that she produces only in order to put food on the table.

That is human creativity slaved to a system of general commodity production.  This is alienation.

At least the dolls seem happy.

Not only is human creativity subverted into the production of commodities, human creativity is also subverted into the production of the materiel of the system of commodity production.  We are all glowered-over and dominated by the stuff we and previous generations have made but which confronts us as enemy force. This is old labour, petrified into threatening and ruling facts.  The machines that drive people out of work, or make their work excrutiatingly dull, or make their work dangerous... everything that is owned by the capitalist, or which goes into the capitalist system of production, which enables the system to expropriate the surplus created by the alienated worker... all capital, in other words... was made by workers, by their past labour.  This is 'dead labour', lording it over the living.

The power relationship is omnipresent yet hidden.  Consumerism offers spurious control of and through products.  We in the rich world splurge at the shops, investing in things as though they are charms and icons and totems.  Sexuality is branded, packaged and commodified too.

We expect the sexy things to change how we look, how we are perceived, how we feel, how we think, how we eat, how we have sex.  Our bodies are translated into fake, airbrushed, inhuman objects and then sold back to us as icons of unreachable perfection that we must strive (and pay) to attain.

"They're flexible, that's why we've captured the market"

The Autons look, to me, like the product, the stuff, the commodity, (all of which is capital by means of its expropriation from the worker and its entry into the system of accumulation, circulation and profit)... come alive and attacking.  They are labour that has been expropriated, made alien to the labourer.  They are the automation that is made by workers and then squeezes workers out of the production system.  The dead labour that dominates living labour.  They are the manufactured thing, the thing that is "made in the factory", confronting us (as Marx put it) as something "hostile and alien".  They are perfect emblems of the way that capitalism (and, distinctly, consumerism) turns the human image and human needs into commodities, of humans themselves commodified through the sale and purchase of their labour power.

Note that they attack in the consumerist high street,
surrounded by shops and advertising and brand logos.
Note that they have price tags on them.

House of Cards, House of Wax

There is something uneasy about the modern world as 'Spearhead' presents it to us: it is filled with displays of hierarchy, deference and contempt. 

The military hierarchy is much in evidence, as are the attitudes of ranks to inferiors and superiors.  Munro snaps at the UNIT soldiers who shoot at the Doctor, despite their having orders to keep anyone away from the police box at all costs.  The Brigadier creeps round General Scobie and even Liz - who has been drafted unwillingly into UNIT - makes nice to him.

This is something that we see a great deal in the Pertwee era's representation of life in Britain, though it will soon prove to be found mostly in government projects and naval bases, the contempt usually displayed by a succession of easy hate-figures... bureaucrats, men from the Ministry, etc.  In 'Spearhead' we see (as already noted) a great many ordinary people, often workers in ordinary workplaces, with the hierarchy, deference and contempt ingrained in the everyday functioning of life.

Dr Henderson is contemptuous towards Mullins (gesturing at him impatiently to stop hoovering the corridor), snaps at his Nurse and snarks at lab technicians whom he supposes to have faked an x-ray... but he's creepily ingratiating towards his bluff, posh, arrogant superior.

Everybody's at it.  The journalists curtly address Mullins as "Porter".  Even the Doctor is extraordinarily rude to the guard at the entrance to UNIT HQ.

Seeley is treated as beneath contempt by everybody in a uniform, even lowly grunts.  He is detained - by people who have no stated right to detain him - against his will, patronised, interrogated, threatened, etc.

He is a poacher, of course.  But this raises the issue of private property again, and of the power of the law to punish those who dare to trespass upon the privileges of the propertied.  Whigs & Hunters, and all that.

Seeley, of course, attempts to assert male authority over his wife.  Wonderfully, she tells him to mind his manners.

But hierarchy appears in a more explicitly political way, reflecting something about the wider society... yet it does so in a way that is hardly noticed.  It appears as an almost incidental, background detail.

In 'Spearhead', Madame Tussauds has a room full of leaders and rulers.  Statesmen, presidents, politicians, bishops and pontiffs.  We see Lincoln, Washington, LBJ, Kennedy, Nixon.

The Nestenes have chosen to hide amidst these people.  They have substituted their replicas for all the "top civil servants, government types" and hidden the real oligarchs in a museum.

This may be the most telling detail in the story, yet it masquerades as background colour, as a gimmick, as a setting and nothing more.

It reminds me of how the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's The Shining is absolutely draped in Navajo designs, thus turning the film into one of the most disturbing meditations I know of on the conquest of the West and the genocide of the Native Americans - all the more disturbing for being almost entirely silent about it.  Torrance and his family trek out West and camp on the site of an "old Indian burial ground"... and the place is haunted, not by the Indians but by the malignant memory of the decadent highpoint of the society that displaced and slaughtered the Indians, that built its imperialist prosperity on their ransacked graves.

Note the Navajo designs around the elevator doors.

Note the gallons of blood.

Torrance is driven mad by his weak and self-serving sympathy with a temple of luxury and consumption (and, in a related way, of male power and mysoginy), constructed on a lake of blood.

In the same way, though less overtly hauntologically, 'Spearhead' smuggles in - silently, unconsciously - a diagnosis with what's wrong at the top of capitalism, to put alongside its diagnosis of the fetishized commodity which confronts the worker as an alien threat.  It notices that we live in a society that is ruled, that this power is both fake and immensely powerful.  It shows us the rulers of the world, in a line from the great bourgeois revolutionary Washington right up to the political administrators of Britain (mirroring the Atlanticist nature of post-war Britain's alignment with America).  It presents the rulers as a grand spectacle for paying tourists to gawp at, but also shows them as fake things, hollow dummies, tatty replicas and, potentially, as stalking killers waiting to awake.  Power becomes a collection of unreal images, potentially zombified tools (weapons) in the hands of something that is "hostile and alien", that manifests as walking products, as the human form commodified, as work alienated from workers, as evil animated parodies of the human image and human labour, as autonomous manufactoids with hands that - far from performing work - flip open to reveal annihilating weapons.

As if all this weren't unsettling enough, the story goes on to hint - silently, unconsciously, as before - at white power, at the racial hierarchy which exists within Western capitalism, at the link with imperialism and colonialism.

You doubt me?  Watch the scene where we see the dummy bigwigs are waiting in Madame Tussauds to take their places at the apex of capitalist society and rule on behalf of the evil commodities.  You'll notice that, alongside all the generals, politicians and presidents, there are dummies of Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

We've already seen Washington hovering over the other presidents.  Washington was a slave owner.  We've already seen the British generals and politicians.  Capitalist Britain ruled India through military force.

And what are the Nestenes?  Channing tells us.  "We have been colonising other planets for a thousand million years," he says.  They are, self-confessedly, imperialists.  Invaders, enslavers, colonial masters. 

And all the Autons, without exception, are pink.  Pink is their default colour scheme.  Pink is what they think is the colour of human.  The pink Auton is the vanilla model.

They are this way because of the inherent racist hegemony of white faces on British TV (and the Western capitalist culture industries more generally) in the early 70s.... but that doesn't undermine the point.  If anything, it underlines it.  The episode comes quietly, furtively, unconsciously, inadvertantly, dangerously close to a critique of the values embedded in its own implicit aesthetic.


Coming over here, taking our jobs...

In light of this, let's go back and have another look at the Auto Plastics factory.

This may be the single most politically
charged image Doctor Who ever created.

In a story that seems unconsciously preoccupied with capitalist alienation, that depicts the system as profoundly white, that associates the system with conquest and imperialism, these images are 'ground zero'.

This is getting dangerously close (without any conscious intent, I've no doubt) to expressing a joined-up, radical unease about capitalism as alienating, exploitative, racist and imperialistic.

This story situates the 'alien' threat within a very visible depiction of a system in which people are arranged in hierarchies based on their relations of production.

The main monsters are emblems of workers commodified, and of the commodity itself - the product of human labour - as an alienated and hostile force.

It depicts human production - via a capitalist factory - materialised in a form that dominates and attacks people.

It depicts people attacked by walking media images that smash their way out of shop windows and go on the rampage in the consumerist high street, still wearing the (once) fashionable clothes they were supposed to be advertising and covered in price tags.

This all smells strongly of an implicit critique of how people are alienated from their own labour by working for others, and from their very human image via consumerism.

Also, the story hints that, at the apex of all this, there sits a powerful bunch of people who are fundamentally fake and fundamentally white.  By putting Washington, Lincoln, King, Gandhi and a bunch of ruling-class Brits in the same room - not to mention adding LBJ and Nixon, during the era of Vietnam and only a few years after worldwide anti-war protests had peaked - the story gets very, very close to openly and implicitly critiqueing racism, imperialism and colonialism as parts of the same system.

And the presence of the near-invisible non-white working class, busily producing units of white capitalist culture for the profit of a white man who runs a white company, threatens to openly notice how non-whites have been gobbled up as cheap labour by this system.

The potential conclusion is that if you're a non-white worker within this system, you are subject not only the same alienation awaiting the white worker but also to another kind: the kind that sets the basic image of humanity as white and then contrasts you with it.... and sets you to work in the factory, maintaining - via the production of the commodity, i.e. capital - the very system that creates all these layers of oppression.

The presence of the emblems of racism and imperialism (masters and opponents) within the museum, and the imperialist nature of the Nestenes (who tessellate and merge so perfectly with the human system of which they are planning a 'hostile takeover'), nearly takes this story into the realms of outright, but sub-textual, subversion.

One casual mention of the East India Company would be all it would take to bring these threads together openly.

The Nestene entity itself is where all this might have met in some kind of coherent form.  Instead we get something - and this is surprising- almost unprecedented in Doctor Who up to this point: something tentacular, something drawn from the relatively new Western literary style/affect/trend known as 'the Weird'.  We get something radically incoherent.

It's almost as if terror of the themes being played with in this story - themes that so nearly converge to become a joined-up and radical critique of capitalism as systemically exploitative, imperialistic and racist... and, moreover, to do this in the context of modern Britain - has caused Doctor Who itself to flee for comfort and disguise in the realms of the undefined, shapeless and incomprehensible.

When the monster that sits on your Tooting Bec loo is so freighted with things that kids' telly isn't supposed to notice, let alone mention... the realm of the Weird tentacular could be a place to hide.

But that's another essay.



ADDITIONAL

There is also the question of gender. 

In 'Spearhead' the Autons are all male, including all the shop window warrior Autons.  The replicas are all male.  Almost all the powerful people represented in Madame Tussauds are male. 

Explicitly sexist relationships are demonstrated.  There is Seeley.  There is the female nurse in the hospital, patronised by the doctors.  There is Liz Shaw, dragged away from her work at Cambridge against her will and judged for her looks by a male authority figure.  There are the male executives at Auto Plastics, playing with female dolls.  Ransome hoped to profit by further commodifying the female form.  In the novelisation, Ransome's doll wanders around saying "Mama", further showing the way consumer culture markets female roles. 

And, as noted, there are the female workers in the factory.  They work to reproduce capitalist culture's commodification of women, of its characterisation of them as children, of its socialisation of little girls to think of themselves as mothers-in-waiting, etc.  They are shot in such a way as to leave them faceless, as nothing but pairs of hands... which is, of course, a way that working people are described.  "We need more hands," etc., as in Dickens' Hard Times.  There is the waxen-faced female secretary in the short dress who subserviently leads Ransome to her male boss's office.

In addition to the many threads of potential radical comment that I've already listed, 'Spearhead' also contains the worrying potential to notice female commodification and marginalisation in Western capitalist society, and to link this (as it might link racism and imperialism) to the locus of capitalist production and reproduction: the factory, the assembly line, the point of alienated labour.

Camp Onion

It's coming up to Panic Moon time again. 

The July issue of the estimable print fanzine is now available for pre-order, here.

This time, Yours Truly has provided a piece on 'Frontios', in which I explain why I like it despite reading it as a reactionary parable, and a short sketch of a Marxist interpretation of 'Spearhead from Space', in which I attempt to tenuously connect the concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism to a story about killer shop-window dummies lead by an alien octopus.

This is what is known as 'a waste of a mediocre education'. 

But we have some laughs, don't we?

No?

Oh well.