Okay, first a quick (well... relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications... because we've come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.
The Story So Far...
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| If only 'Pirates of the Caribbean II' had looked this good. |
According to China Miéville, the
tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as 'the Weird'. Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc. They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a 'novum', unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis. (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and 'ghost story' writer M.R. James.) Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic. The gothic - or hauntological - is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return. The Weird is what we don't - and perhaps cannot - know, erupting without precedent and confronting us with our own incomprehension. Consequently, the gothic and the Weird exist in "non-dialectical superposition", oscillating back and forth... something which shows in the almost total absence in Western monsterology of the skulltopus, a fusion of skull (gothic) and octopus (Weird) which, on the face of it, would seem to be quite an obvious synthesis, especially given that the central hub of an octopus's body is decidedly skull-like in shape.
Much later, long after the process in Western literary and graphic
monsterology that Miéville describes, and long after tentacles had been
thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western Horror and SF,
tentacles begin to make their presence felt in
Doctor Who. In
the early days, most of the tentacles that appeared in the show did so
courtesy of Terry Nation. For instance, he adroitly selected an
octopus as a meaningless
plot-device monster
in 'The Chase'. He may have done this because the octopoidal carried a
residual charge of blankness or meaninglessness. Also, Nation seems
to have repeatedly associated a tentacular or Weirdesque monster with
economic exploitation. The Brains of Morphoton have stubby tentacles
and run an entire economy on hypnotism, making scarcity seem like
material abundance; the Slyther turns up when the Daleks are forcing
people to mine for them and black-marketeers are taking advantage of the
situation. This may be a co-optation of the 'blankness' of the
tentacular inherited from the Weird. It may also be that, because the
modernity that filled the Weird writers with such nebulous horror was
capitalist modernity, there is something in their pre-eminent
monster-type that naturally lends itself to expressing horror at
economic exploitation. (They themselves would probably have rejected
this, most of them being reactionaries... though, interestingly,
Lovecraft - who was a disgusting racist, living in dread of
'miscegenation' - once identified himself as a supporter of FDR and the
New Deal, even calling himself a 'socialist'.) In any case,
surprising as it seems - and I find this as unexpected as you probably
do - Nation seems to have laid the groundwork for a semiotic connection
within
Doctor Who between tentacles and capitalism that later appeared, fully-fledged, at the start of the 70s.
Chiming with Miéville's ideas, while also working differently to the process he describes, there is a peculiar dialectic that gets started in the show between the gothic and this half-remembered version of the Weird. '
The Macra Terror' is the harbinger of what is to come. It uses a recalled version of the Weird by using monsters that are crabs (the Weird is very maritime; Hodgson employs giant crabs a lot in his stories) and yet also undefined and/or overdescribed to the point of incoherence (this is also a trait of Weird monsters). At the same time, however, the same monsters are deeply hauntological in that they literally haunt the Colony, representing repressed fears, their very existence denied by even those who have seen them lurking in the shadows. This happens, I think, because 'The Macra Terror' is the first major attempt by
Doctor Who - up to that point - to engage with some of the radical ideas of the 60s. Like
The Prisoner, which it anticipates in some respects, it frets over an apparent
convergence between the underlying political structures of the 'democratic' West and the 'totalitarian' East. The Colony is a political tyranny with capitalist features. There is brainwashing, surveillance, a secret police force... co-existing with a Holiday Camp style atmosphere, leisure time, makeovers, beauty contests and an ideology of cheerful team-spirit. This is a very 60s anxiety and ties in with currents of radical thought of the time. Haunted by this idea, which cannot be openly acknowledged, the text resorts to radically obscuring its hauntological monsters by co-opting aspects of the Weird.
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| The most politically loaded image in 'Doctor Who'. |
Not long after this, at the start of the 70s, Robert Holmes wrote a story with various elements that seemed to converge upon capitalism as a source of exploitation, alienation and hierarchy... and even to connect capitalism with imperialism, racism and sexism. (I know, you think I've gone mad... well, click the following link to see my reasoning...) '
Spearhead from Space' contains this potential because it concentrates on a capitalist factory, upon the process of production, upon wage labour, upon products and commodities alienated and fetishized to the point of hostile autonomy. Its monsters - the Autons - work as emblems of alienation and commodity fetishism as described by Marx. They are hostile commodities, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external and dominating power. They alienate the human image from humans. They are made in the capitalist factory, by workers, several of whom are Asian women working for a white man making white dolls. The Autons themselves are white - whiteness seems to be the Nestene idea of the typical human, the 'vanilla' human if you will. The Autons are expressions of Nestene imperialism; the Nestenes explicitly describe themselves as colonialists. The Nestenes merge their Autons with the human shopping centre and with a pantheon of white Western political oligarchs displayed in Madame Tussauds (with some non-white opponents of white imperialism - Ghandi, MLK - also on display, for counterpoint). The plastic replicas of the ruling class stalk out of Tussauds to take over the country. Meanwhile, the Autons attack in the high street, wearing price tags, gunning people down amidst adverts and logos and shop signs. It's well understood that George A. Romero's
Dawn of the Dead (1978) is a 'satire of consumerism' because it features zombies staggering mindlessly around a shopping mall. Indeed, it's pretty much a cliché to mention the fact. It's time people realised that, once again,
Doctor Who got there first - only more acutely. However, at the figurative centre of 'Spearhead from Space', at the heart of the factory where the Nestene entity itself is being
produced, Holmes seems to evade the convergence of these themes by the sudden introduction of radically incoherent tentacles. The threat was that the themes and signs of the story would converge lucidly upon the capitalist system as a generator of modern nightmares. The tentacles - harking back to their original Weird blankness - are a redaction, a scrambling, an obfuscation.
Doctor Who relentlessly concentrates upon the modern nightmares that are generated by capitalism - industrialised warfare and imperialism, biological racism, fascism, etc. - but cannot openly acknowledge capitalism as the hub from which they emanate, owing to its status - the children's own programme that adults adore - within the established culture industry.
The ironic thing is that this semiotic evasion almost instantly became a semiotic association. This may express an inherent instability within any sign that is pressed into the service of the inscrutable or inexpressible. Evasion of meaning is fundamentally not what signs are supposed to do. Evasion of truth, sure, but not of settled significance itself. Such a sign hunts around for a meaning, so to speak. It must find a telos, even if the one it finds is the very telos it was supposed to be evading. (This is not idealism, by the way. When I talk about the sign 'doing' things, I'm actually talking about the people using it... just as one might say that a car 'cruises' when in fact it is the driver
doing the cruising.)
In 70s
Who, the tentacular sign is employed to evade capitalism, and instantly starts to signify capitalism. It would be easy to see this connection between the tentacular and capitalism as a mere empty recapitulation of continuity when it reappears in Holmes' sequel, '
Terror of the Autons'... if it weren't for almost immediate appearance of '
The Claws of Axos', which is a development and intensification of the connection, written by different writers. Echoing the process described by Miéville - and that's what this is: an echo - the tentacular in
Doctor Who is, almost from the first, enmeshed in an antagonistic dialectic with the gothic, the show's better-established mode. For instance, in 'Claws of Axos' the
tentacular elbows out the gothic (while taking on a hauntological
charge). The story was originally about a space 'vampire' in the shape
of a giant skull; it became instead about a huge bag of strange,
spectacular, writhing, incoherent flesh.
Later, the tentacular is so
integrated into the internal sign system of 70s
Who
that it just rides in on an association with capitalism, even when
there's nothing that needs obscuring because free trade-style capitalism
is being presented as implicitly good. But even at this point -
roughly speaking, 'The Curse of Peladon' - it still continues dancing
with the gothic. In 'The Curse of Peladon', Arcturus is very nearly a
skulltopus because he's both capitalist (a representative of the
Federation with all its trade and progress, counterposed to Pel
feudalism) but also a protectionist reactionary who wants Peladon to
stay a feudal backwater. (This, it need hardly be said, reflects the
arguments about free trade vs. protectionism which flurried around the
UK's entry into the 'Common Market' roundabout the time 'Curse' was
made, i.e. the dawn of neoliberalism.)
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Astonishingly enough, this character...
[SPOILER WARNING!!!]
...turns out to be evil. |
This skulltopusization can occur because 'Curse of Peladon' is a
distant echo of the process described by Miéville; a televisual atavism
in the 1970s of a process originally found in literature and graphics
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The gothic/Weird dance
continues, with tentacles always erupting whenever capitalism appears
in the show as a systemic presence, throughout the rest of the Pertwee
era. In '
The Green Death'
- the last Pertweean gasp of the Weird - there is a tentacle which
appears at the start, almost as an obligatory afterthought, and there
are the Weird-esque maggots. Still, the gothic clings on alongside this
recycled, processed version of the Weird. The gothic keeps trying to
reintegrate. 'Green Death' works like an M.R. James ghost story, with
its material 'hauntings', linked to technological modernity. It will
be recalled that Miéville identified James as one of the precursors of
the Weird. Reading James, one usually encounters not spectral ghosts
but slimey, hairy, icky, chitinous things, or things that seem oddly to
emerge from modernity - haunted prints, designs or train tickets, for
example. This sort of thing is very apt to happen in
Doctor Who because its version of the gothic has always been
very material
and materialist. 'The Green Death' is a perfect example, with its
Jamesean 'ghosts': slimey, hairy, icky, chitinous monsters that emerge
from a chemical factory. As James prefigured the Weird even as he wrote
in the gothic, so 'Green Death' partially integrates the Weird and the
gothic. It joins the
Whoish 'material gothic' to its new habit
of using the Weird as a way of evading/signifying capitalism. Even
its title illustrates this dialectic, with the slimey, gooey 'Green'
grafted onto the gothic 'Death'.
And so, we arrive at the Tom Baker years - always spoken of as quintessentially gothic.
Broton's Zygotic Mynci
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"Go away. You're always hovering. It makes me nervous."
"I just want to be near you."
"I've told you - not at work!" |
The first appearance in the Baker era of anything even faintly Weird or Weird-esque (and it
is faint) arrives (as already hinted) in 'Terror of the Zygons'. The Zygons are covered in suckers. They live underwater and control a sea monster. So they're well maritime (as mentioned above, the Weird is frequently maritime in its concerns). The Doctor even refers to them at one point as having tentacles, which is a bit of a stretch on his part, but still... Moreover, they are shape-shifters. This is another of those things which is actually rarer in
Doctor Who than one might immediately think. Apologies for the tautology, but the essence of the shape-shifter is
indeterminacy of form. Here, once again, we have incoherence and the
tentacular. I don't want to overstate. The Zygons are hardly
inscrutable. They state their plans very clearly. They are most
obliging with their freely-offered exposition when they capture Harry.
There is little to misunderstand about them. They are a terroristic
advance-guard of a fleet of imperialistic nomads. But they
are tentacular (just about) and they
are
unstuck from a fixed physical form. Most especially, the inside of
their ship is organic in a way not even hinted-at in the show since
'Axos'. With their great, domed foreheads, their name (which sounds so
much like 'zygotes'), their ability to 'become' adult humans and their
apparent loathing of doing so, their dependence upon the "lactic fluid"
of a much-larger organism and their warm, snug, pulsing, fleshy,
veined base of operations, it's hard not to notice that they are
disquietingly infantile. Monstrous babies were much in vogue in Horror
in the late 60s / early 70s.
Rosemary's Baby, It's Alive, Eraserhead, The Omen... the original idea of the writers of
Alien
was that the monster should be like a "monstrous, deformed baby".
This is a digression (gee, how unusual here!) but the point is that
their ship recalls Axos, though in a much less wild and spectacular
form.
The semiotic connection between the tentacular and capitalism is being
continued, albeit it in a faint, garbled and undeveloped form. 'Terror
of the Zygons' features rigs owned and run by an American oil company
which is traumatically bringing on the collapse of an old, feudal way
of life in favour of new capitalist development. Seven centuries of
'service' seem not to count "these days". All Forgill's servants leave
to work for the rigs. Huckle's men trespass upon Forgill's lands,
showing no respect for feudal land ownership in their pursuit of
capitalist accumulation of a fossil fuel that will power modern
technology. As in 'Green Death', the eruption of the Weirdish occurs
in something of a gothic manner - the hidden erupts from beneath - as a
result of the intrusion of modern, explicitly capitalist technology.
It's tempting to say that the Zygons are associated more with the 'old
ways', the feudal aristocracy. Broton disguises himself as the Duke of
Forgill and the Zygon ship is linked to the land by a tunnel that
leads up into the dusty old library of Forgill Castle. Speaking in his
Forgill persona, Broton seems convincingly to voice the resentment of
the obsolete aristocrat in the time of the oil corporation. But this
is to impose a clear-cut distinction where in fact there are complex
interrelationships. The real Duke's ancestors would probably have been
among those making 'improvements' to the land, i.e. enclosing it and
evicting people from their homes to make way for sheep. This actually
happened to land around Loch Ness. These were among the first steps in
the rise of modern capitalism in Scotland. Huge tracts of private land
used for bourgeois farming and/or rents, leading to the filling-up of
industrial towns with displaced new proletarians and/or the expansion
of the 'New World' colonies, vital because of their roles in the slave
trade and production of commodities like cotton, or coal - the oil of
its day.
Similarly, the Zygons plan a massive exercise in invasion and
colonialism... chiming with the invasion and annexation of Scotland by
England (re-enacted in a miniaturized, comic mode through UNIT's
invasion and takeover of Angus's inn... a process he resists by loudly
playing the bagpipes at the occupying, armed Sassenachs). But we can't
straightforwardly associate Zygon colonialism with English colonialism.
The Zygons are also refugees, driven away from their home and seeking
a new one. They plan to colonize Earth using the slave labour of the
humans. A great many of the Scottish Highlanders driven out of their
homes by the Clearances ended up in the Carolinas in America. The
Carolinas were, of course, slave states. If the Zygons work as the
echoes of English domination of Scotland, they also work as an echo of
the forced migrants who ended up dominating the New World. (Meanwhile,
we can't straightforwardly assume a connection between Forgill's
old-fashioned Scots aristocratic posture and Scottish nationalism. A
lot of those dukedoms were created by the English crown.)
Recycling Experiment
Interestingly, some of these same dynamics - the interrelationship of
feudal wealth and modern capitalism, the complex conception of colonial
conquest - reappear in Robert Banks Stewart's other script for
Hinchliffe and Holmes, 'The Seeds of Doom'.
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| The National Trust will have something to say about this. |
In that story, Harrison Chase is a modern millionaire with a private
lab and salaried employees, including a personal botanist and an
enforcer with a gaggle of naff private thugs. Chase is entirely
immersed in modernity. He is surrounded by modern technology - his
private lab, his private plane, his huge climate-controlled greenhouse,
his peculiar electronic organ (ooo-er missus), etc. He is also
immersed in commodification. He buys officials, information, loyalty,
etc. He owns people "body and soul". He owns and buys things
constantly. He haggles over and buys a painting on screen during the
story. He effectively buys the rights to the pod and everything that
comes from it. That's how he sees it anyway. But he is also a relic
of feudalism. His is evidently an old family, and his money is
evidently old money. His house dates from the time of the Wars of the
Roses ("charmingly named") and is haunted by Sir Bothwell Chase. There
doesn't appear to be a contradiction here. The one form of power
seems to bleed seamlessly into the other. Indeed, it might even go
back farther than that. As the lord and master of cultivated grounds,
as the Abbot of a "green cathedral", as a landowner and employer of a
private army, Chase is almost like an echo of the earliest ruling
classes that arose with the coming of agriculture. He's like one of
the administrators or priests who came into existence when a new way of
making a living - settled growing and reaping - brought surplus and,
with it, social hierarchies... along with organised war, which suddenly
became worthwhile once there were settled civilisations whose crops
and plants you could seize. Chase and Scorby are like the descendants
of these first lords and warriors, still fighting over ownership of the
greenery all these centuries later. Feudalism and capitalism both
seem to have carried this same violent and piratical hierarchy, in
turn, down to the present. Chase is like a palimpsest of all these
rulers. He's the Abbot, the lordly landowner, the modern businessman -
all in one.
Also, there is much talk of 'revolution' in the story, and the
inversion of power relationships... caused by an invasion and
colonisation. Chase conceives of plants and flowers as being an
oppressed group, as though they stand in a colonial relationship to
animals. Even from the first, long before he seems to be 'possessed'
by the Krynoid (not that he ever really is, if you ask me), he whinges
to Dunbar about the "mutilation and torture" of plants in the practice
of Bonsai, the favouritism allegedly shown towards animals by the World
Ecology Bureau and the unnatural criminality of creating hybrids.
Later, he talks of animals like a tyrannical ruling elite, about to be
conquered and enslaved by the coming of the Krynoid, which he appears
to see as a huge, plant-version of Che Guevara. The invasion and
colonialism of the Krynoid is like the ousting of a native ruling
class. He almost anticipates the doctrine of 'humanitarian
intervention' - invade and conquer to (supposedly) free the oppressed -
but for the fact that it isn't the humans he wants to save.
It's open to doubt whether 'Zygons' and 'Seeds' work this way because
the show is still trying to evade noticing capitalism as a generator of
modern nightmares. It feels more like the recapitulation of a settled
sign, almost as a matter of habit. It also feels as though the
studiedly gothic atmosphere of the Hinchcliffe / Holmes era is squeezing
the Weird tentacles into an increasingly small corner. First there
are tentacles that are not really tentacles (arms and legs with
decorative suckers), then there are tentacles that are actually vines
and creepers and roots. Capitalism still tags alongside these
almost-tentacles (or is it the other way round) but in a decidedly
muted, faint and compromised form. It appears mixed up with feudalism,
in a very tangled way.
There is very little else in the Hinchcliffe years which qualifies as
Weird or quasi-Weird or even almost-Weird. The tentacular returns with
a vengeance, however, in the more political Williams era... just in
time to notice that the world is changing, neoliberalism is flowering,
class struggle is waning, Thatcher is rising and capitalism no longer
anything to be worried about - at least not officially. Consequently,
by the
near-end of the Williams years,
it no longer feels right to wrap capitalism in tentacles. But, as I
say, this only happens after the tentacular/capitalist semiotic
connection re-erupts... in ways that range from the furtive to the
ambiguous to the angrily and hugely explicit.
CORRECTION, 28/09/12:
In the text above, I say that "A lot of those [Scottish] dukedoms
were created by the English crown." That's just plain wrong.
Factually inaccurate. Sorry. Thanks to Jennings for pointing this
out.
