ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label walter benjamin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label walter benjamin. Show all posts
Friday, 29 August 2014
Random Thing #3
And one more. Please bear in mind, this is a fragment.
Marx saw creativity as essential to human nature. He famously once said that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”. The difference is that Marx saw such creativity as a potential in all people, and believed that class society stunted such potentials in the majority by forcing them to do work that was alien to their natures.
Yet there is some truth to the idea of progress in the history of class society. Marx is quite comfortable – sometimes a little too comfortable – with the idea that the accumulation of capital can also be the accumulation of progress, that even the imperialistic development of class society can push people ‘forwards’. It’s just that he also sees horror in the process, eventually calling the ‘progress’ that British imperialism and capitalism brought to India as resembling a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” This is far from an unproblematic way of putting it, but the point stands.
It is a point later taken up by Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History, in which he describes history as both a triumphal procession and a great piling up of wreckage and horror.
Moral progress is only found when the increase of power and knowledge is used to make life fairer or better for common people (i.e. the majority), and this is the exception rather than the rule. And when it does happen, it isn’t a trickle-down effect. It is the result of struggle from below. And even the accumulation of power and knowledge in the hands of the rulers can only come from the unrequited labour of the masses. Even when a genius makes an individual discovery, he usually sits on top of a great pyramid of unacknowledged workers. Charles Darwin was only able to spend years in his study working and thinking and writing because he had servants, inherited wealth, and a wife who was related to the Wedgewoods. And that’s the history of class society at its prettiest. At other times it looks like Alexander, invading and slaughtering. Alexander was one of those potentates who poured the fruits of human labour into makewaste vanity projects like wars and great opulent buildings for the top people. Contrary to the assertions of classicists (who tend to assume that they would be reincarnated in the past as fellow aristocrats) Alexander achieved little to better mankind, even if he was taught by Aristotle, one of the undoubted ‘great men’ of history. But then Aristotle himself defended slavery in his Politics, as he had to, given that his leisure to sit around all day thinking depended on it.
Terry Eagleton has frequently pointed out that the Marxist view of history as simultaneously progressive and barbaric is a Tragic one, as Tragic (with a capital T) as Othello. He asks (rhetorically) if even communism (as Marx envisaged it) would justify the necessary slog through class society. Would it all have been worth it, to get us there?
Monday, 18 November 2013
15
"What if there's no one out there?" asks the Doctor. He's inside the Brannigans' floating car, stuck in gridlock.
What if the world ended when you weren't looking?
"Someone's got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it's there in your eyes. What if the traffic jam never stops?"
"There's a whole city above us," says Brannigan, "The mighty city state of New New York. They wouldn't just leave us."
"In that case, where are they?" counters the Doctor. "What if there's no help coming, not ever? What if there's nothing? Just the motorway, with the cars going round and round and round and round, never stopping. Forever."
What if the whole system is an utterly insane roundalay, going nowhere, getting noplace, just leaving everyone stranded, doing nothing but belching out endless clouds of toxic smoke? What if the crisis is permanent. What if normality is the crisis? What if everyday life is the end of the world?
Walter Benjamin said that history was a train crash, and revolution was when the passengers pulled the communication cord. The people of New New York left it too late to pull the cord. Capitalism crashed around them, shattering as one of their products ran out of control (a bit like, say, a stock market or a credit system). In the story, the product was a patch that managed mood. It was a palliative against the horror, which only intensified the horror. The Heaven of the state was depopulated, leaving lofty council chambers full of skeletons. The Hell of the lower levels filled up with fumes, and monsters of the repressed started to breed within them. And Limbo filled up with the survivors.
"Shut up! Just shut up!" cries Valerie, Brannigan's wife.
Sally Calypso appears on the screen. "This is Sally Calypso, and it's that time again. The sun is blazing high in the sky over the New Atlantic, the perfect setting for the daily contemplation."
"You think you know us so well, Doctor," says Brannigan, "But we're not abandoned. Not while we have each other."
Contrary to what most pop-culture will tell you, ordinary people are generally pretty damned good to each other in the aftermaths of disasters.
There's a sense in which the amazing co-operation to be found, for the most part, in Tahrir Square and Occupy, was something akin to mutual aid in the aftermath of a disaster. Under capitalism as it stands (or tries to stand) every single day is the aftermath of a disaster. Prescient in so many ways, this episode.
The people of the gridlock are all locked away from each other in their seperate boxes, the way capitalism locks us away... but in the aftermath of the ongoing disaster of modernity, they're also making lives and friendships and networks of support.
"This is for all of you out there on the roads," says Sally, "We're so sorry. Drive safe."
And everyone in gridlock starts to sing in unison. This may be another patch, another mood stabiliser... but it is also a real and material act, an act of solidarity. The BLISS patches were just commodities. The songs are communal, social acts.
Marx wrote that religion was "at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering."
One thing we can't do is think of religion, in some abstract and ahistorical way, as The Problem. You end up like Dawkins or Hitchens, sniping at a symptom while tolerating and enabling the illness. 'Gridlock' was broadcast during the heydey of 'New Atheism'. In his blustering attack on religion, God is Not Great, published the same year 'Gridlock' aired, Christopher Hitchens decorated his prose with erudition ransacked from a dictionary of quotations, but never once mentioned Shelley, co-author of the very first atheist pamphlet published in English. You'd think that'd warrant a mention in a book that finds space to blither on about Mel Gibson and make tasteless jokes about child abuse. But Shelley wasn't just an atheist, he was a leveller too. He criticised religion, as Marx would one day put it, "not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." Hitchens, by contrast, wanted religion to fall so that the offices of Vanity Fair were never likely to be bombed by Islamists, no matter how many Arab children the US government slaughtered.
What is noticeable about the hymns sung by the gridlockers is that the comfort comes not from the songs themselves, but rather from the unity found in singing them. The congregation does not exist to sing the hymns, the hymns exist to unite the congregation. The congregation comforts itself and it protests against the need for comfort.
These people accidentally created a post-hierarchy world without realising it. They survived the fall of capitalism, and now live in its ruins.
If they can just think their way out of their boxes.
If they can just clear the smoke...
"What if there's no one out there?" the Doctor asked. But there is. Probably not God, as far as I can tell. Probably not the government, not when the crunch comes anyway. But there are lots of people out there. You are not alone.
What if the world ended when you weren't looking?
"Someone's got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it's there in your eyes. What if the traffic jam never stops?"
"There's a whole city above us," says Brannigan, "The mighty city state of New New York. They wouldn't just leave us."
"In that case, where are they?" counters the Doctor. "What if there's no help coming, not ever? What if there's nothing? Just the motorway, with the cars going round and round and round and round, never stopping. Forever."
What if the whole system is an utterly insane roundalay, going nowhere, getting noplace, just leaving everyone stranded, doing nothing but belching out endless clouds of toxic smoke? What if the crisis is permanent. What if normality is the crisis? What if everyday life is the end of the world?
Walter Benjamin said that history was a train crash, and revolution was when the passengers pulled the communication cord. The people of New New York left it too late to pull the cord. Capitalism crashed around them, shattering as one of their products ran out of control (a bit like, say, a stock market or a credit system). In the story, the product was a patch that managed mood. It was a palliative against the horror, which only intensified the horror. The Heaven of the state was depopulated, leaving lofty council chambers full of skeletons. The Hell of the lower levels filled up with fumes, and monsters of the repressed started to breed within them. And Limbo filled up with the survivors.
"Shut up! Just shut up!" cries Valerie, Brannigan's wife.
Sally Calypso appears on the screen. "This is Sally Calypso, and it's that time again. The sun is blazing high in the sky over the New Atlantic, the perfect setting for the daily contemplation."
"You think you know us so well, Doctor," says Brannigan, "But we're not abandoned. Not while we have each other."
Contrary to what most pop-culture will tell you, ordinary people are generally pretty damned good to each other in the aftermaths of disasters.
There's a sense in which the amazing co-operation to be found, for the most part, in Tahrir Square and Occupy, was something akin to mutual aid in the aftermath of a disaster. Under capitalism as it stands (or tries to stand) every single day is the aftermath of a disaster. Prescient in so many ways, this episode.
The people of the gridlock are all locked away from each other in their seperate boxes, the way capitalism locks us away... but in the aftermath of the ongoing disaster of modernity, they're also making lives and friendships and networks of support.
"This is for all of you out there on the roads," says Sally, "We're so sorry. Drive safe."
And everyone in gridlock starts to sing in unison. This may be another patch, another mood stabiliser... but it is also a real and material act, an act of solidarity. The BLISS patches were just commodities. The songs are communal, social acts.
Marx wrote that religion was "at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering."
One thing we can't do is think of religion, in some abstract and ahistorical way, as The Problem. You end up like Dawkins or Hitchens, sniping at a symptom while tolerating and enabling the illness. 'Gridlock' was broadcast during the heydey of 'New Atheism'. In his blustering attack on religion, God is Not Great, published the same year 'Gridlock' aired, Christopher Hitchens decorated his prose with erudition ransacked from a dictionary of quotations, but never once mentioned Shelley, co-author of the very first atheist pamphlet published in English. You'd think that'd warrant a mention in a book that finds space to blither on about Mel Gibson and make tasteless jokes about child abuse. But Shelley wasn't just an atheist, he was a leveller too. He criticised religion, as Marx would one day put it, "not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." Hitchens, by contrast, wanted religion to fall so that the offices of Vanity Fair were never likely to be bombed by Islamists, no matter how many Arab children the US government slaughtered.
What is noticeable about the hymns sung by the gridlockers is that the comfort comes not from the songs themselves, but rather from the unity found in singing them. The congregation does not exist to sing the hymns, the hymns exist to unite the congregation. The congregation comforts itself and it protests against the need for comfort.
These people accidentally created a post-hierarchy world without realising it. They survived the fall of capitalism, and now live in its ruins.
If they can just think their way out of their boxes.
If they can just clear the smoke...
"What if there's no one out there?" the Doctor asked. But there is. Probably not God, as far as I can tell. Probably not the government, not when the crunch comes anyway. But there are lots of people out there. You are not alone.
Friday, 15 November 2013
22
The Doctor, Romana and Duggan have found a painting hidden behind a panel in the basement of Count Scarlioni's house in Paris.
"It's the Mona Lisa!" says the Doctor.
"Must be a fake," replies Duggan.
The Doctor says he doesn't know what's currently hanging in the Louvre, "but this is the genuine article".
Duggan's astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa. And another. And another. Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.
"They must be fakes," says Duggan again.
"The brushwork's Leonardo's," the Doctor asserts, "It's as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too."
"What," blithers Duggan, "on all of them?"
"What I don't understand is why a man who's got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh." (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)
This is Duggan's area. "Come on, Doctor, I've just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody's going to buy the Mona Lisa when it's hanging in the Louvre!"
"Of course," says Romana, "They'd each have to think they were buying the stolen one."
Because only 'the original' is valuable. These collectors wouldn't even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display... they'd want it for - to use Duggan's phrase - the "expensive gloat".
But where does the value of the work of art lie? In its 'authenticity'? Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the 'authenticity' of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins. Experts compete over the 'authenticity' of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the 'real' one. Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their 'authenticity', and hence their 'value'. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)
In the modern age, the 'age of mechanical reproduction' as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way. The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator. The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter's role as portrayer of the patron's property and ideology. Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the "aura" of a work of art (Benjamin's word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context. The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world. It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre. It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists' photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels. All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness.
This very proliferation of copies is what makes the 'authenticity' of 'originals' so valuable as a commodity. The original is now just that: an original. It is something it never was before: the source of the millions of copies. As John Berger puts it: "the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction."
Scarlioni is really Scaroth: a ruthless and callous and self-involved warlord who found himself splintered into fragments across human history, manifesting in many different ruling classes over the centuries, as we see during his moments of trans-temporal communion. He is himself a system of copies, mass-reproduced, distributed across time and space, his uniqueness destroyed, each copy identical, none truly the 'original' because the 'original' Scaroth was destroyed... and all by technology.
He is a thoroughly modern man in some of his iterations, a man of power and property. He's a rich, titled, bourgeois art-thief in 1970s Paris, selling foundational objects of Western civilisation such as Gutenberg Bibles to fund his capers. He is one of the Borgias, or at least part of their coterie, acting as patron (i.e. employer and paymaster) to Leonardo, getting him to paint multiple copies of his portrait of Lisa Gheradini; copies which can then be hidden, so that his future self can unearth them. "A very nice piece of capital investment" as the Doctor puts it... a view that Scaroth can only take because he is part of modernity, from the Early Modern period which saw the rise of banking and commerce, to Late Capitalism which sees the commercialisation of absolutely everything. The irony which unites these eras along a single trajectory is the joke that, in this case, it was Leonardo himself who was payed/forced to begin the process of endless copying, reproduction and proliferation. All the copies are 'real', sharing an aura, made valuable by the same labour power of the same man... yet this wouldn't cut any ice with the collectors of the 1970s.
Scaroth's plan to reunite himself depends upon raising enough money to fund time experiments... and he plans to do this by selling the Mona Lisa seven times over, each to a buyer who thinks he's getting 'the original' (which, in a way, they would be!). But his scheme depends upon his ability to push humanity towards modernity - i.e. capitalism - because it is modernity that brings not only the necessary level of scientific and technical skill to make time travel possible, but also the rise of mass-reproduction, and thus the destruction of aura and the commodification of authenticity. Scaroth thinks of himself as pushing mankind on the path of progress... but his planned terminus of this progress is his reintegration at the cost of our annihilation.
Scaroth is a concentrated bundle of the nightmares of history. Borgia and bourgeois. Ruler, inscribing himself in the friezes telling the stories of the pharaohs. Warlord. "Insanely wealthy man." User and abuser of science via his ability to fund it. User and abuser of a wife who never really knew who he was underneath. Bringer of technological doom. Owner and destroyer of aura. A suave, handsome shell; a staring eye and a mass of writhing worms beneath.
He recalls another of Walter Benjamin's works: 'On the Concept of History', which is all about how the 'cultural heritage' is formed from the spoils of rulers who march onwards towards a future strewn with broken wreckage.
"It's the Mona Lisa!" says the Doctor.
"Must be a fake," replies Duggan.
The Doctor says he doesn't know what's currently hanging in the Louvre, "but this is the genuine article".
Duggan's astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa. And another. And another. Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.
"They must be fakes," says Duggan again.
"The brushwork's Leonardo's," the Doctor asserts, "It's as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too."
"What," blithers Duggan, "on all of them?"
"What I don't understand is why a man who's got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh." (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)
This is Duggan's area. "Come on, Doctor, I've just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody's going to buy the Mona Lisa when it's hanging in the Louvre!"
"Of course," says Romana, "They'd each have to think they were buying the stolen one."
Because only 'the original' is valuable. These collectors wouldn't even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display... they'd want it for - to use Duggan's phrase - the "expensive gloat".
But where does the value of the work of art lie? In its 'authenticity'? Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the 'authenticity' of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins. Experts compete over the 'authenticity' of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the 'real' one. Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their 'authenticity', and hence their 'value'. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)
In the modern age, the 'age of mechanical reproduction' as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way. The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator. The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter's role as portrayer of the patron's property and ideology. Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the "aura" of a work of art (Benjamin's word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context. The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world. It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre. It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists' photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels. All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness.
This very proliferation of copies is what makes the 'authenticity' of 'originals' so valuable as a commodity. The original is now just that: an original. It is something it never was before: the source of the millions of copies. As John Berger puts it: "the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction."
Scarlioni is really Scaroth: a ruthless and callous and self-involved warlord who found himself splintered into fragments across human history, manifesting in many different ruling classes over the centuries, as we see during his moments of trans-temporal communion. He is himself a system of copies, mass-reproduced, distributed across time and space, his uniqueness destroyed, each copy identical, none truly the 'original' because the 'original' Scaroth was destroyed... and all by technology.
He is a thoroughly modern man in some of his iterations, a man of power and property. He's a rich, titled, bourgeois art-thief in 1970s Paris, selling foundational objects of Western civilisation such as Gutenberg Bibles to fund his capers. He is one of the Borgias, or at least part of their coterie, acting as patron (i.e. employer and paymaster) to Leonardo, getting him to paint multiple copies of his portrait of Lisa Gheradini; copies which can then be hidden, so that his future self can unearth them. "A very nice piece of capital investment" as the Doctor puts it... a view that Scaroth can only take because he is part of modernity, from the Early Modern period which saw the rise of banking and commerce, to Late Capitalism which sees the commercialisation of absolutely everything. The irony which unites these eras along a single trajectory is the joke that, in this case, it was Leonardo himself who was payed/forced to begin the process of endless copying, reproduction and proliferation. All the copies are 'real', sharing an aura, made valuable by the same labour power of the same man... yet this wouldn't cut any ice with the collectors of the 1970s.
Scaroth's plan to reunite himself depends upon raising enough money to fund time experiments... and he plans to do this by selling the Mona Lisa seven times over, each to a buyer who thinks he's getting 'the original' (which, in a way, they would be!). But his scheme depends upon his ability to push humanity towards modernity - i.e. capitalism - because it is modernity that brings not only the necessary level of scientific and technical skill to make time travel possible, but also the rise of mass-reproduction, and thus the destruction of aura and the commodification of authenticity. Scaroth thinks of himself as pushing mankind on the path of progress... but his planned terminus of this progress is his reintegration at the cost of our annihilation.
Scaroth is a concentrated bundle of the nightmares of history. Borgia and bourgeois. Ruler, inscribing himself in the friezes telling the stories of the pharaohs. Warlord. "Insanely wealthy man." User and abuser of science via his ability to fund it. User and abuser of a wife who never really knew who he was underneath. Bringer of technological doom. Owner and destroyer of aura. A suave, handsome shell; a staring eye and a mass of writhing worms beneath.
He recalls another of Walter Benjamin's works: 'On the Concept of History', which is all about how the 'cultural heritage' is formed from the spoils of rulers who march onwards towards a future strewn with broken wreckage.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
30
"My goodness..." says the Doctor as yet more fine fare is brought to the Tharils already-laden table, "You live like kings."
"We are kings," says Biroc impassively. He merely states it as a fact. He is both part of this feast and an observer of it. He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline. He can travel along his own trajectory. He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat. He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either. His tone is neutral. Truthful.
Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men - who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use - are sitting down for their lunch break. They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.
Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is. He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them.
Back in the 'past', back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils' luxury and variety comes from.
"The universe is our garden," says Biroc simply. Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.
"Ah. So this is what it was all like."
"At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men."
The mention of slaves turns the Doctor's mind instantly to the servants moving around the table. He responds to Biroc's barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.
"I notice you don't do too badly for staff," says the Doctor. "This garden of yours, the universe... how do you manage it"
"We use our power. For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle." The Tharils have the power to travel where they will - the basic requirement of any imperial project. "Everything is ours."
The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet. The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly. The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.
"Including her?" he asks.
"They're only people." Again, Biroc's tone is flat. He does not endorse or condemn... except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation. He simply recites the truth of how this system operated. To the Tharils, their slaves were only people... just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils. But there is no self-justification from Biroc. He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses. Rorvik is losing control of his present. Biroc owns his past.
"So you're the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?"
"The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that." It would be a callous statement if it were intended straightforwardly... but how can it be intended that way by a former slaver who is now himself a slave?
All the same, the Doctor is disgusted by the aspect of the statement which reflects the ideas of a slaveocracy, the aspect that blames the slaves for their weakness.
"Yes," he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "yes..."
And then he picks up the servant girl's pitcher and fills the Tharil's goblet to the brim and beyond until the red wine flows across the table like blood. Surfeit. Surplus. Gluttony. Greed. Waste. The fruit of the garden, guzzled by the masters. Haemoglobin spilt in torrents.
"This is no way to run an empire."
Sadly, this implies that there is a good way to run an empire... but we know what he means.
But, as Rorvik says later: "Everything breaks eventually." Biroc hasn't brought the Doctor to the feast to gloat or boast. He's showing him the moment when the Tharil Empire broke. The Gundan robots storm into the feasting hall. The Only People built them to face the time winds that they couldn't traverse. They are History itself, coming for the Tharils.
The Tharils are feudal things. They are King's Beasts. They dwell in castles, eat in feasting halls and are served by serfs. They are of the old world.
Rorvik is a thoroughly modern man. He's a privateer in a "bulk freighter". A pirate, but a businessman too. His world is a mercantile, technological world. The slavery he practices is one of shipping and trade. His ship carries a bulk cargo of living beings, wracked and stacked in storage bays in the hold.
The analogy isn't perfect. In reality, the old kings didn't become tomorrow's chained commodities. But the trajectory of European history is right. The feudal world fell to revolution and crisis and the rise of new machines, and out of it arose the capitalist world with promises of freedom while building itself on different kinds of slavery. The warriors' gate (which was bad enough) became the trader's waystation, with the new system built on the ruins and wreckage of the old. And the new system, like all 'progress', creates only more and greater horror, more and worse wreckage.
"We are kings," says Biroc impassively. He merely states it as a fact. He is both part of this feast and an observer of it. He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline. He can travel along his own trajectory. He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat. He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either. His tone is neutral. Truthful.
Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men - who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use - are sitting down for their lunch break. They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.
Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is. He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them.
Back in the 'past', back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils' luxury and variety comes from.
"The universe is our garden," says Biroc simply. Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.
"Ah. So this is what it was all like."
"At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men."
The mention of slaves turns the Doctor's mind instantly to the servants moving around the table. He responds to Biroc's barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.
"I notice you don't do too badly for staff," says the Doctor. "This garden of yours, the universe... how do you manage it"
"We use our power. For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle." The Tharils have the power to travel where they will - the basic requirement of any imperial project. "Everything is ours."
The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet. The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly. The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.
"Including her?" he asks.
"They're only people." Again, Biroc's tone is flat. He does not endorse or condemn... except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation. He simply recites the truth of how this system operated. To the Tharils, their slaves were only people... just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils. But there is no self-justification from Biroc. He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses. Rorvik is losing control of his present. Biroc owns his past.
"So you're the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?"
"The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that." It would be a callous statement if it were intended straightforwardly... but how can it be intended that way by a former slaver who is now himself a slave?
All the same, the Doctor is disgusted by the aspect of the statement which reflects the ideas of a slaveocracy, the aspect that blames the slaves for their weakness.
"Yes," he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "yes..."
And then he picks up the servant girl's pitcher and fills the Tharil's goblet to the brim and beyond until the red wine flows across the table like blood. Surfeit. Surplus. Gluttony. Greed. Waste. The fruit of the garden, guzzled by the masters. Haemoglobin spilt in torrents.
"This is no way to run an empire."
Sadly, this implies that there is a good way to run an empire... but we know what he means.
But, as Rorvik says later: "Everything breaks eventually." Biroc hasn't brought the Doctor to the feast to gloat or boast. He's showing him the moment when the Tharil Empire broke. The Gundan robots storm into the feasting hall. The Only People built them to face the time winds that they couldn't traverse. They are History itself, coming for the Tharils.
The Tharils are feudal things. They are King's Beasts. They dwell in castles, eat in feasting halls and are served by serfs. They are of the old world.
Rorvik is a thoroughly modern man. He's a privateer in a "bulk freighter". A pirate, but a businessman too. His world is a mercantile, technological world. The slavery he practices is one of shipping and trade. His ship carries a bulk cargo of living beings, wracked and stacked in storage bays in the hold.
The analogy isn't perfect. In reality, the old kings didn't become tomorrow's chained commodities. But the trajectory of European history is right. The feudal world fell to revolution and crisis and the rise of new machines, and out of it arose the capitalist world with promises of freedom while building itself on different kinds of slavery. The warriors' gate (which was bad enough) became the trader's waystation, with the new system built on the ruins and wreckage of the old. And the new system, like all 'progress', creates only more and greater horror, more and worse wreckage.
Tuesday, 30 July 2013
A Found Object
"A close equivalent to Brutalism's avant-garde quotidian is in the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Banham makes a more than punning connection between the techniques of concrete brutalism and those of musique concrete, in that both are based on the use of manipulated found objects, both have a disdain for harmony but not for structure. The Workshop applied musique concrete to TV jingles, soundtracks, mundane everyday sound. What made both so valuable is that they were so totally immersed in everyday life. Switch on the radio or walk out of the door to find yourself in a new world."
- Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Abide With Me 2.0
This is an edited and partly-rewritten version of something I posted at the old site.
In a world in which 99% of all TV is 99% predictable 99% of the time, ‘Gridlock’ seems like an impertinent rejoinder to everything else on the screen, as though the Doctor Who production team are blowing contemptuous raspberries at the people who churn out all the beige wallpaper that constitutes most modern telly. ‘Gridlock' hammers every bit of mass-produced, by-the-numbers, formulaic drama that clogs up the channels. Then, just for good measure, it laughingly refuses to play by the rules of Doctor Who, old or new.
There is no invasion and no tyranny to topple; there are no corridors and no captures (well, there’s one… sort of) and no escapes; there are no fascist guards, no rebels, no evil masterminds; there is no ticking time-bomb, no race against time, no evil plot for the Doctor to foil. Other writers might have made the story about the Doctor trying to stop everyone dying because of the BLISS patches. In ‘Gridlock’, RTD has the Doctor arrive when this is all over and almost everyone is long dead. Imagine what ‘The Ark in Space’ would’ve been like if the Doctor had arrived years after the Wirrn had already eaten almost the whole of the human race… mind you, even then there could’ve been a Doctor-and-rebels-fight-monsters tale. In ‘Gridlock’, there are no monsters in the proper sense. The cat people are both nice, the Face of Boe is without malice. Even the Macra are not allowed to take over the script or be this week’s baddies. Their fate is not even alluded to at the end. The Doctor’s priority is to clear the gridlock. The death of the Macra that feed on the exhaust fumes is a by-product of his main aim (one assumes that some of the unscrupulous entrepreneurs of the undercity are going to get rich selling lots of crab meat). Some fans have criticised what they perceive as the way the Macra were underused… but really, did we need another story about the Macra running a colony of slaves? I know the original Macra tale is sadly missing, but a story that was all about CGI Macra being naughty wouldn’t have brought it back. Besides, ‘The Macra Terror’ is a tale of its time, expressing the anxieties of the 60s generation about brainwashing, conformity and consumer culture. Putting the Macra at the centre of ‘Gridlock’ would’ve made ‘Gridlock’ a story about the Macra, yet another bad old monster stomping about.
‘Gridlock’ is almost unrelentingly surprising, even to people me who, let’s face it, watch far too much telly. Not only is ‘Gridlock’ unpredictable, it’s tricky too. It deliberately leads you down blind alleys and then presents you with a basket of kittens. Just when you think it’s going to be about urban guerrillas kidnapping Martha, the urban guerrillas turn out to be a nice guy and his pregnant girlfriend who just needed an extra passenger. Just when you think it’s going to be about a dystopian tyranny in which the nasty old government is deliberately keeping people in a jam, the government turns out to be long dead. Just when you think it’s going to be about the Doctor leading the oppressed to revolt, the oppressed tell the Doctor they’re not going to help him because they’ve got the kids in the back. Just when you think it’s going to be about Novice Hame getting her revenge, it turns out that she has found redemption. Just when you’re sure that the fast lane is reserved for cars with three passengers so that the Macra can be sure of getting enough meat per can… it turns out that the three passengers rule is just an archaic leftover of when the motorway actually worked and the Macra are just getting lucky. Just when you think it’s going to be about the Macra setting up a system and manipulating their human slaves (yawn, just like last time), it turns out that the Macra are parasitic upon a situation not of their making. The script keeps setting you up for some revelation of structured conspiracy and instead produces another layer of morbidly absurd accident… which is, in case we hadn’t paused to notice and appreciate this, the exact antithesis of almost all TV and movie sci-fi since The X Files made paranoia the dominant fantasy mode.
‘Gridlock’ not only has a narrative texture like little else seen before but also a visual texture to match. Even its antecedents ‘The End of the World’ and ‘New Earth’ look tame by comparison. Moreover, the episode’s riotous visuals are coherent in that they stem from and complement the story being told on both literal and metaphorical levels. For once, the whole thing looks multicoloured and multitextured for a reason. The reason is that this twofold. Firstly, the episode wants to portray the epilogue to the end of civilisation, so it uses the visual style of the pastiche associated with what's called 'postmodernism'. Secondly, the episode is an extended celebration of human variety and multiplicity, contrasted with the nightmares of a cityscape gone wrong: dilapidation, drabness, and congestion. “Change and decay in all around I see” as the lyrics of ‘Abide with Me’ put it.
The only glimpses of the outside world we see (until we’re two thirds through the episode) are of the “undercity” and the subterranean motorway. The undercity is a rotting urban wasteland which seems to service the travellers when they can briefly disembark at a layby (this is, presumably, when they pick up food, fuel and other essentials; the mood sellers in the back alley imply a whole underground economy parasitic upon the gridlock in very much the same way as the Macra). The denizens of the undercity are personified by the smock-wearing pharmacists and their black-robed customer/victim. People don’t want to live in this shithole, that’s why they’re prepared to live for years in a traffic jam instead. They’re hoping for something better, all hoping for a better life somewhere else. They’re not on the motorway for fun. They’re escapees, pilgrims hoping to make it to Sugarcandy Mountain. Their occasional foraging/shopping trips in the undercity must only strengthen their resolve to keep going and get away, to make it all the way to the better life that they half know is impossible to reach. The rest of their lives are spent inching forward in their aircars inside a tunnel of poisonous smoke... but when they think about the undercity, it must seem worth it. Escape must seem so good. Of course, like drugs and religion (two other temptations in which they dabble), their escape is fake. But, all the same, it must just feel good to be going somewhere, to be moving, to be heading away from the bad stuff, to be making plans for the kids to have a better life. Years spent in a car would be a tiresome life, but preferable to eking out an existence in the City of Last Things.
And they can always buy some moods for when they weaken. The city itself is the only advert for their wares that the pharmacists need; a familiar syndrome to anyone who knows anything about the link between drug abuse and urban poverty. The black robed girl is content to buy some complacency from an unscrupulous mini-capitalist on a street corner. Those little patches are symbolic of booze and junk and TV, of all the things we pay for to help numb the boredom and the pain instead of doing something about them. Interestingly, the pharmacists don't just sell pleasant moods, they sell ANGER too. Any emotion is preferable to numbness, emptiness and boredom. Within the jam, inside the cars, things are different. The drabness of the undercity is left behind. A whole panoply of human social existence is thrown at us. The different colours and styles and shapes, the different takes on life, the sheer strangeness that we can encounter just by dropping into somebody else’s personal space.
Also, ‘Gridlock’ revels in the sexual diversity of humanity. We have a straight couple but we also have an elderly lesbian couple (one of whom is yet another of RTD’s affectionately drawn geeks) and a woman who’s had a litter of kittens by a cat/man. To talk about a “gay agenda” seems redundant when confronted by ideas like this. It's a human agenda. In this story, even animals aren't off-limits, as long as they’re old enough, sapient and bipedal. The lesbian couple in ‘Gridlock’ are extremely important because the portrayal is utterly free of the exploitative muck that usually clogs up representations of girl-girl relationships. They’re not young and glam, a turn-on for the lads. Nor are they miserable and stunted, a comfort to the bigots. Positive images of human sexuality in many variations.
The production design employs pastiche (or blank parody, to use Frederic Jameson's phrase) to further emphasise the cultural post-apocalypse and the paradoxical diversity of human social life. The people have only the fragmentary ruins of culture left, but - and this is crucial - they've either decided to trust the ruins or turn them to use. Source after source is ransacked and jammed crazily into Russell T. Davies’ postulated future, a future of scrambled history and recontextualised images. Brannigan’s flying jacket, the police shield, Sally Calypso’s hairdo, the old ladies’ china tea set, the towering cityscape and the posters inside the car owned by the two Asian girls (which recall Blade Runner, another film that used pastiche to create an image-soaked, post-apocalyptic, po-mo future of bunched-up history and decaying consumerism… with techno-blimps booming “a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies…”). This represents the condition of moderntiy in decline and fall, but also opens a field of opportunity for the refugees.
Grant Wood’s American Gothic is pulled into service, providing us with the couple at the start, instantly conjuring up ideas of a society built by hardy settlers. Wood’s famous and much parodied image is a lightly-ironic but affectionate paen to the descendants of those Americans who travelled (sometimes for years, stuck in little caravans that they made into moving homes) to make a new start in the wilderness. New New York is a rebuilt and reimagined version of old New York, the city we know, that was created by waves of settlers and immigrants. Like settlers, immigrants always think that things are better and more free somewhere else, somewhere over the horizon. Let’s not forget that New Earth itself is the place where humanity made its new home after the destruction of the old. It’s a new world, built by settlers, colonists, people who (presumably) trekked through the wilderness of space and carved out a recreation of home… very much like the antecedents of the people in Wood’s famous painting.
(I used to think the guy in the suit was a reference to Magritte. I don't read 2000AD, you see.)
The concentration in image and representation is significant. In a way, the gridlockers are trapped in a giant representation. Motorways lead somewhere, this keeps you circling. You’re not on a journey, just in a picture of a journey. You’re not in a city but in a pretence of a city. You’re not in a society, you’re on someone’s Friends List.
Ah, is that what ‘Gridlock’ is about? The internet? Maybe the apocalypse that decimated New New York came from computers rather than drugs, or some strange mixture of the two. Perhaps it was software patches and a computer virus. The language is ambiguous. And the gridlock seems worryingly familiar to any internet junkie. Like the motorway, the internet is a fake escape... an 'e-scape', if you like. All of us shut up in our private boxes on the “information superhighway”, all sat at control consoles, looking at screens, communicating via technology with the people on our Friends Lists and shutting ourselves away from the daylight… while beneath us, the monsters of the repressed stir in the waste (technological, cultural, material) that we create. There are, as we all know, monsters lurking within the internet, feeding off it; predators who claw for the straying sheep. Is that the significance of the black wolfwoman and her two chained female captives?
Which leads us to the monsters. The monstrousness in ‘Gridlock’ is the monstrousness of the by-product. This whole story is full of monstrous by-products. The virus is a by-product of the patches and the patches are a by-product of the rampant apocalyptic unease. The gridlock is a by-product of the virus. The toxic smoke is a by-product of the gridlock, as are the creatures that live within it. As soon as the Macra appear we assume that they created the gridlock for their own purposes… but like the society of New New York, the Macra have devolved from the highpoint of their civilization. They’re there because of the gridlock, not the other way round. The monsters (both of the literal and figurative variety) aren’t at the centre of this tale, they’re at the edges, emergent properties of the malfunctioning, dying society of New Earth. Is it any wonder that the Macra live in the filthy smoke belched out by the motor city? Carbon fumes are the ultimate by-product of our civilization, a by-product that is destroying our world.
If you view ‘Gridlock’ on its own, the Macra are inessential; make them giant slugs and call them the Zargoids and it wouldn’t matter. However, if you remember their first story they suddenly become thematically perfect for ‘Gridlock’. Even in their first appearance they were bacteria as much as crabs or insects, germs breeding in the body politic, infections in the social wound. They’re our antithesis (they breathe what poisons us) but they depend upon us, upon our industrialisation. In ‘The Macra Terror’, they lived on the fossil fuels mined by a smiling, happy, consumerist totalitarian state that played the community card and then sent its citizens to the loony bin if they uttered unorthodox thoughts. A very 60s nightmare. A nightmare that reflected a Britain of holiday camps, of commercialised rebellion, of North Sea oil, of politicians invoking the Dunkirk spirit. In ‘Gridlock’, a very 2007 nightmare, the Macra are living on the noxious fumes of a motor society that now exists to keep people alive by stranding them in a futile and absurd merry-go-round. They’re living on the lead and carbon monoxide. But, as ever, this isn’t about the future. It’s about us. It’s about the hidden killers that live in the exhaust fumes (literal and metaphorical; gaseous and psychological) of our absurd society.
However you look at them – as the dark side of the digital information age, as the toxic by-products of industrial civilization, as the harbingers of killer climate change - the Macra in ‘Gridlock’ are the monsters of the repressed, waiting to devour us if we face them. They're the hidden things at the back of our minds that we don’t want to think about; unpalatable facts that we dismiss as “air vents”. This, by the way, makes 'Gridlock' very gothic. The gothic is all about being confronted by that which has been repressed.
Thatcher said “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families”. Separated from society, staying as individuals or families, staying safe in gridlock, we can cheat the monsters and pretend they’re not there. But get three people in a car and suddenly that’s not a couple, that’s beginning to look like a society. The temptation of the fast lane is too much. And then they get us. And then we see what our world has really become, a breeding ground for monstrosities that breathe our pollution.
The Doctor guesses that the people in the traffic jam know (on some level) that their civilization has vanished, that they are alone and going nowhere, that the places they were trying to reach are as gone as the places they left. Why else would they be so discomforted by his questions? If they didn’t know they were trapped in a representation, they wouldn’t have to stop off to buy mood patches. They’re stuck in a quest for a better life over the horizon, a quest that they all know is doomed to failure. Their only option is to stop, but they can’t because they’re committed to the journey. In a sense, since the jam was their only possible destination, they’ve already arrived but can’t disembark. They can’t stop. They can’t go up. That just leaves down, into the fast lane where they meet the things they were trying to blot out with hope, hymns, drugs, isolation and wilful complacency. Down in the fast lane, they meet the by-products of the jam: the smoke from the exhaust-pipes and the deadly, snapping, carapaced truths that lie within it.
Is ‘Gridlock’ a religious allegory? It is possible to read New New York as a picture of some kind of crude religious cosmology. A gleaming Heaven above, Purgatory in the middle and a Hell full of monsters below. But, if you read it that way, you soon notice that 'heaven' is empty. No God to be seen. There may be a religious theme here but there's no mysticism. The Face of Boe might sacrifice himself to save the gridlocked people but he isn't then resurrected. He doesn't convince as a Christ figure. Besides, you can just as easily decide to read 'Gridlock' as a Freudian picture of the mind by substituting Heaven, Purgatory and Hell with superego, ego and id.
Some people have suggested that 'Gridlock' is a religious allegory because the people in the jam sing hymns. But that’s a bit like saying that because of the mood patches, the episode is a drugs allegory. Okay, the patches clearly denote drugs (legal mood stabilisers and anti-depressants as much illegal stuff) but they’re just one part of the picture. In a way, the religion on display is a drug too. An occasional fix of hope and camaraderie.
This story is more about alienation. It approaches this via a depiction of faith as a social product and a social expression. Startlingly, it fits directly into the classical Marxist view of religion. Marx called religion “the opium of the people”, everybody knows that, but he wasn’t just sneering. He also said, before the bit about opium, that religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.” Religion is subjectivity constructed to express and fend off alienation. Alienation, for Marx, is the syndrome whereby people are robbed of their subjectivity in a society that takes their labour - and the products of their labour - away from them and then uses it to dominate them in the form of capital (i.e. technology that is not used for the satisfaction of real human needs, etc.) This is absolutely implicit in 'Gridlock'. The people of New New York are tyrannised by the effects of the technological product, communicate via technological products, live in technological products... technological products have destroyed their society, destroyed even its capacity to produce anything but waste products and/or monstrous by-products. Capitalism has eaten itself alive... the only remnants being the petit bourgeois mood traders. Even the upper reaches of the system, the government, has been desolated by the maximum socia/technological entropy generated by the system. Marx once ironically described "the heaven of the state" where all must appear just and fair and right and good, so as to disguise the squalid reality of a system based on exploitation. Well, in 'Gridlock', the council chamber is a ruined heaven, decimated by the runaway processes that it once presided over.
But Limbo is still there and people are making the best of it. Inside their little cars, the people have created colour, texture, comfort and meaning. Domesticity on the move, family life within a small space, prayers of communal determination, hymns to the eventual salvation, a pilgrimage to the promised land. Their pseudo-journey has taken on religion as the heart of their heartless world, a construction of meaning from meaninglessness. Escape is their real religion and their real drug. Like both religion and drugs, their escape is an illusion. But their lives are not illusions, their children and relationships and friendships are real. Domesticity may be an escape, and a compromised one, but it also has value in itself. E. M. Forster wrote novels about this sort of theme… though, admittedly, none of them had giant crabs in them.
No, ‘Gridlock’ isn’t Doctor Who’s answer to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress... but it does show people trying to use religious ideas as a guide and map, just as in Bunyan. But crucially, in ‘Gridlock’, the pilgrims don’t make any progress, at least not on the pilgrimage road. They have mistaken the map for the territory.
‘Gridlock’ is a humanist allegory because human social life, in its successes and failures, is depicted as the source of all meaning. ‘Gridlock’ features hymns as human social defences against despair, not messages to a mystical God. The story isn’t starry-eyed about people. It depicts them as sometimes unscrupulous, predatory, complacent, self-deluding and lonely… yet what hardy and stubborn determination they have to find colour, life and meaning in their relationships and in their own selves. Even locked away from each other in little boxes, people refuse to be squashed and isolated entirely. Even when trapped inside an absurd system, people find ways to make sense out of senselessness.
There is a reason that this episode features hymns so prominently, desides the depiction of alienation and solace. What are hymns but attempts to unite a congregation in communal meaning. And ‘Abide with me’ is well chosen. To “abide” means to live, dwell, endure. Live with me. It isn’t a hymn of praise but rather a plea for God’s companionship. In this context, ‘Abide with Me’ signifies not only the human instinct to construct meaning, but also our desire to live in community and communality, to dwell together, to comfort and be comforted. Hymns might be expressions of delusion, alienation, protest... but they’re also an expression of togetherness. ‘Gridlock’ itself is an agnostic hymn to the social, to the manifold follies and possibilities of human communal existence.
Walter Benjamin once wrote that perhaps Marx was wrong about revolutions being the locomotive of history. Perhaps revolutions are what happens when the passengers on the train pull the emergency cord in order to stop the train careening towards a disaster. He saw the system as rushing onwards to catastrophe. To escape the catastrophe, you have to stop the onward rush. Well, the people in 'Gridlock' didn't manage to pull the cord in time (neither are we managing this, so far) but they did manage to escape the crash. The next thing for them to do is to break out of their limbo, to break out of the continuum in which they are stuck (to use another of Benjamin's favourite metaphors). They do this, with a little help from the Doctor.
This is, of course, the Doctor’s journey too. The Doctor is stuck in gridlock, running away from a dead home, running on escape and bliss and forgetfulness, travelling in absurd circles inside a box, always moving but never getting anywhere permanent. Now that Rose has gone he’s reverted back to the lonely man he was when we met him again in ‘Rose’. He doesn’t want to talk to Martha, to tell her the truth, to properly engage with her as a person, to take her on more than one trip, to do anything more than just show off to her. And there’s no wonder he finds New Earth so attractive. It’s a recreation of a destroyed world, recreated by the survivors. He’d like something like that for himself. He’s attracted to the idea of surviving and rebuilding, as anybody from a destroyed home and a dead race would be. It’s very apt that as he rescues the gridlocked people from their absurd and accidental apocalypse, as he makes social life possible for them again, the Face of Boe finally tells him that he is not alone.
After all, isn’t that what ‘Gridlock’ tells all of us? That we are not alone.
In a world in which 99% of all TV is 99% predictable 99% of the time, ‘Gridlock’ seems like an impertinent rejoinder to everything else on the screen, as though the Doctor Who production team are blowing contemptuous raspberries at the people who churn out all the beige wallpaper that constitutes most modern telly. ‘Gridlock' hammers every bit of mass-produced, by-the-numbers, formulaic drama that clogs up the channels. Then, just for good measure, it laughingly refuses to play by the rules of Doctor Who, old or new.
There is no invasion and no tyranny to topple; there are no corridors and no captures (well, there’s one… sort of) and no escapes; there are no fascist guards, no rebels, no evil masterminds; there is no ticking time-bomb, no race against time, no evil plot for the Doctor to foil. Other writers might have made the story about the Doctor trying to stop everyone dying because of the BLISS patches. In ‘Gridlock’, RTD has the Doctor arrive when this is all over and almost everyone is long dead. Imagine what ‘The Ark in Space’ would’ve been like if the Doctor had arrived years after the Wirrn had already eaten almost the whole of the human race… mind you, even then there could’ve been a Doctor-and-rebels-fight-monsters tale. In ‘Gridlock’, there are no monsters in the proper sense. The cat people are both nice, the Face of Boe is without malice. Even the Macra are not allowed to take over the script or be this week’s baddies. Their fate is not even alluded to at the end. The Doctor’s priority is to clear the gridlock. The death of the Macra that feed on the exhaust fumes is a by-product of his main aim (one assumes that some of the unscrupulous entrepreneurs of the undercity are going to get rich selling lots of crab meat). Some fans have criticised what they perceive as the way the Macra were underused… but really, did we need another story about the Macra running a colony of slaves? I know the original Macra tale is sadly missing, but a story that was all about CGI Macra being naughty wouldn’t have brought it back. Besides, ‘The Macra Terror’ is a tale of its time, expressing the anxieties of the 60s generation about brainwashing, conformity and consumer culture. Putting the Macra at the centre of ‘Gridlock’ would’ve made ‘Gridlock’ a story about the Macra, yet another bad old monster stomping about.
‘Gridlock’ is almost unrelentingly surprising, even to people me who, let’s face it, watch far too much telly. Not only is ‘Gridlock’ unpredictable, it’s tricky too. It deliberately leads you down blind alleys and then presents you with a basket of kittens. Just when you think it’s going to be about urban guerrillas kidnapping Martha, the urban guerrillas turn out to be a nice guy and his pregnant girlfriend who just needed an extra passenger. Just when you think it’s going to be about a dystopian tyranny in which the nasty old government is deliberately keeping people in a jam, the government turns out to be long dead. Just when you think it’s going to be about the Doctor leading the oppressed to revolt, the oppressed tell the Doctor they’re not going to help him because they’ve got the kids in the back. Just when you think it’s going to be about Novice Hame getting her revenge, it turns out that she has found redemption. Just when you’re sure that the fast lane is reserved for cars with three passengers so that the Macra can be sure of getting enough meat per can… it turns out that the three passengers rule is just an archaic leftover of when the motorway actually worked and the Macra are just getting lucky. Just when you think it’s going to be about the Macra setting up a system and manipulating their human slaves (yawn, just like last time), it turns out that the Macra are parasitic upon a situation not of their making. The script keeps setting you up for some revelation of structured conspiracy and instead produces another layer of morbidly absurd accident… which is, in case we hadn’t paused to notice and appreciate this, the exact antithesis of almost all TV and movie sci-fi since The X Files made paranoia the dominant fantasy mode.
‘Gridlock’ not only has a narrative texture like little else seen before but also a visual texture to match. Even its antecedents ‘The End of the World’ and ‘New Earth’ look tame by comparison. Moreover, the episode’s riotous visuals are coherent in that they stem from and complement the story being told on both literal and metaphorical levels. For once, the whole thing looks multicoloured and multitextured for a reason. The reason is that this twofold. Firstly, the episode wants to portray the epilogue to the end of civilisation, so it uses the visual style of the pastiche associated with what's called 'postmodernism'. Secondly, the episode is an extended celebration of human variety and multiplicity, contrasted with the nightmares of a cityscape gone wrong: dilapidation, drabness, and congestion. “Change and decay in all around I see” as the lyrics of ‘Abide with Me’ put it.
The only glimpses of the outside world we see (until we’re two thirds through the episode) are of the “undercity” and the subterranean motorway. The undercity is a rotting urban wasteland which seems to service the travellers when they can briefly disembark at a layby (this is, presumably, when they pick up food, fuel and other essentials; the mood sellers in the back alley imply a whole underground economy parasitic upon the gridlock in very much the same way as the Macra). The denizens of the undercity are personified by the smock-wearing pharmacists and their black-robed customer/victim. People don’t want to live in this shithole, that’s why they’re prepared to live for years in a traffic jam instead. They’re hoping for something better, all hoping for a better life somewhere else. They’re not on the motorway for fun. They’re escapees, pilgrims hoping to make it to Sugarcandy Mountain. Their occasional foraging/shopping trips in the undercity must only strengthen their resolve to keep going and get away, to make it all the way to the better life that they half know is impossible to reach. The rest of their lives are spent inching forward in their aircars inside a tunnel of poisonous smoke... but when they think about the undercity, it must seem worth it. Escape must seem so good. Of course, like drugs and religion (two other temptations in which they dabble), their escape is fake. But, all the same, it must just feel good to be going somewhere, to be moving, to be heading away from the bad stuff, to be making plans for the kids to have a better life. Years spent in a car would be a tiresome life, but preferable to eking out an existence in the City of Last Things.
And they can always buy some moods for when they weaken. The city itself is the only advert for their wares that the pharmacists need; a familiar syndrome to anyone who knows anything about the link between drug abuse and urban poverty. The black robed girl is content to buy some complacency from an unscrupulous mini-capitalist on a street corner. Those little patches are symbolic of booze and junk and TV, of all the things we pay for to help numb the boredom and the pain instead of doing something about them. Interestingly, the pharmacists don't just sell pleasant moods, they sell ANGER too. Any emotion is preferable to numbness, emptiness and boredom. Within the jam, inside the cars, things are different. The drabness of the undercity is left behind. A whole panoply of human social existence is thrown at us. The different colours and styles and shapes, the different takes on life, the sheer strangeness that we can encounter just by dropping into somebody else’s personal space.
Also, ‘Gridlock’ revels in the sexual diversity of humanity. We have a straight couple but we also have an elderly lesbian couple (one of whom is yet another of RTD’s affectionately drawn geeks) and a woman who’s had a litter of kittens by a cat/man. To talk about a “gay agenda” seems redundant when confronted by ideas like this. It's a human agenda. In this story, even animals aren't off-limits, as long as they’re old enough, sapient and bipedal. The lesbian couple in ‘Gridlock’ are extremely important because the portrayal is utterly free of the exploitative muck that usually clogs up representations of girl-girl relationships. They’re not young and glam, a turn-on for the lads. Nor are they miserable and stunted, a comfort to the bigots. Positive images of human sexuality in many variations.
The production design employs pastiche (or blank parody, to use Frederic Jameson's phrase) to further emphasise the cultural post-apocalypse and the paradoxical diversity of human social life. The people have only the fragmentary ruins of culture left, but - and this is crucial - they've either decided to trust the ruins or turn them to use. Source after source is ransacked and jammed crazily into Russell T. Davies’ postulated future, a future of scrambled history and recontextualised images. Brannigan’s flying jacket, the police shield, Sally Calypso’s hairdo, the old ladies’ china tea set, the towering cityscape and the posters inside the car owned by the two Asian girls (which recall Blade Runner, another film that used pastiche to create an image-soaked, post-apocalyptic, po-mo future of bunched-up history and decaying consumerism… with techno-blimps booming “a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies…”). This represents the condition of moderntiy in decline and fall, but also opens a field of opportunity for the refugees.
Grant Wood’s American Gothic is pulled into service, providing us with the couple at the start, instantly conjuring up ideas of a society built by hardy settlers. Wood’s famous and much parodied image is a lightly-ironic but affectionate paen to the descendants of those Americans who travelled (sometimes for years, stuck in little caravans that they made into moving homes) to make a new start in the wilderness. New New York is a rebuilt and reimagined version of old New York, the city we know, that was created by waves of settlers and immigrants. Like settlers, immigrants always think that things are better and more free somewhere else, somewhere over the horizon. Let’s not forget that New Earth itself is the place where humanity made its new home after the destruction of the old. It’s a new world, built by settlers, colonists, people who (presumably) trekked through the wilderness of space and carved out a recreation of home… very much like the antecedents of the people in Wood’s famous painting.
(I used to think the guy in the suit was a reference to Magritte. I don't read 2000AD, you see.)
The concentration in image and representation is significant. In a way, the gridlockers are trapped in a giant representation. Motorways lead somewhere, this keeps you circling. You’re not on a journey, just in a picture of a journey. You’re not in a city but in a pretence of a city. You’re not in a society, you’re on someone’s Friends List.
Ah, is that what ‘Gridlock’ is about? The internet? Maybe the apocalypse that decimated New New York came from computers rather than drugs, or some strange mixture of the two. Perhaps it was software patches and a computer virus. The language is ambiguous. And the gridlock seems worryingly familiar to any internet junkie. Like the motorway, the internet is a fake escape... an 'e-scape', if you like. All of us shut up in our private boxes on the “information superhighway”, all sat at control consoles, looking at screens, communicating via technology with the people on our Friends Lists and shutting ourselves away from the daylight… while beneath us, the monsters of the repressed stir in the waste (technological, cultural, material) that we create. There are, as we all know, monsters lurking within the internet, feeding off it; predators who claw for the straying sheep. Is that the significance of the black wolfwoman and her two chained female captives?
Which leads us to the monsters. The monstrousness in ‘Gridlock’ is the monstrousness of the by-product. This whole story is full of monstrous by-products. The virus is a by-product of the patches and the patches are a by-product of the rampant apocalyptic unease. The gridlock is a by-product of the virus. The toxic smoke is a by-product of the gridlock, as are the creatures that live within it. As soon as the Macra appear we assume that they created the gridlock for their own purposes… but like the society of New New York, the Macra have devolved from the highpoint of their civilization. They’re there because of the gridlock, not the other way round. The monsters (both of the literal and figurative variety) aren’t at the centre of this tale, they’re at the edges, emergent properties of the malfunctioning, dying society of New Earth. Is it any wonder that the Macra live in the filthy smoke belched out by the motor city? Carbon fumes are the ultimate by-product of our civilization, a by-product that is destroying our world.
If you view ‘Gridlock’ on its own, the Macra are inessential; make them giant slugs and call them the Zargoids and it wouldn’t matter. However, if you remember their first story they suddenly become thematically perfect for ‘Gridlock’. Even in their first appearance they were bacteria as much as crabs or insects, germs breeding in the body politic, infections in the social wound. They’re our antithesis (they breathe what poisons us) but they depend upon us, upon our industrialisation. In ‘The Macra Terror’, they lived on the fossil fuels mined by a smiling, happy, consumerist totalitarian state that played the community card and then sent its citizens to the loony bin if they uttered unorthodox thoughts. A very 60s nightmare. A nightmare that reflected a Britain of holiday camps, of commercialised rebellion, of North Sea oil, of politicians invoking the Dunkirk spirit. In ‘Gridlock’, a very 2007 nightmare, the Macra are living on the noxious fumes of a motor society that now exists to keep people alive by stranding them in a futile and absurd merry-go-round. They’re living on the lead and carbon monoxide. But, as ever, this isn’t about the future. It’s about us. It’s about the hidden killers that live in the exhaust fumes (literal and metaphorical; gaseous and psychological) of our absurd society.
However you look at them – as the dark side of the digital information age, as the toxic by-products of industrial civilization, as the harbingers of killer climate change - the Macra in ‘Gridlock’ are the monsters of the repressed, waiting to devour us if we face them. They're the hidden things at the back of our minds that we don’t want to think about; unpalatable facts that we dismiss as “air vents”. This, by the way, makes 'Gridlock' very gothic. The gothic is all about being confronted by that which has been repressed.
Thatcher said “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families”. Separated from society, staying as individuals or families, staying safe in gridlock, we can cheat the monsters and pretend they’re not there. But get three people in a car and suddenly that’s not a couple, that’s beginning to look like a society. The temptation of the fast lane is too much. And then they get us. And then we see what our world has really become, a breeding ground for monstrosities that breathe our pollution.
The Doctor guesses that the people in the traffic jam know (on some level) that their civilization has vanished, that they are alone and going nowhere, that the places they were trying to reach are as gone as the places they left. Why else would they be so discomforted by his questions? If they didn’t know they were trapped in a representation, they wouldn’t have to stop off to buy mood patches. They’re stuck in a quest for a better life over the horizon, a quest that they all know is doomed to failure. Their only option is to stop, but they can’t because they’re committed to the journey. In a sense, since the jam was their only possible destination, they’ve already arrived but can’t disembark. They can’t stop. They can’t go up. That just leaves down, into the fast lane where they meet the things they were trying to blot out with hope, hymns, drugs, isolation and wilful complacency. Down in the fast lane, they meet the by-products of the jam: the smoke from the exhaust-pipes and the deadly, snapping, carapaced truths that lie within it.
Is ‘Gridlock’ a religious allegory? It is possible to read New New York as a picture of some kind of crude religious cosmology. A gleaming Heaven above, Purgatory in the middle and a Hell full of monsters below. But, if you read it that way, you soon notice that 'heaven' is empty. No God to be seen. There may be a religious theme here but there's no mysticism. The Face of Boe might sacrifice himself to save the gridlocked people but he isn't then resurrected. He doesn't convince as a Christ figure. Besides, you can just as easily decide to read 'Gridlock' as a Freudian picture of the mind by substituting Heaven, Purgatory and Hell with superego, ego and id.
Some people have suggested that 'Gridlock' is a religious allegory because the people in the jam sing hymns. But that’s a bit like saying that because of the mood patches, the episode is a drugs allegory. Okay, the patches clearly denote drugs (legal mood stabilisers and anti-depressants as much illegal stuff) but they’re just one part of the picture. In a way, the religion on display is a drug too. An occasional fix of hope and camaraderie.
This story is more about alienation. It approaches this via a depiction of faith as a social product and a social expression. Startlingly, it fits directly into the classical Marxist view of religion. Marx called religion “the opium of the people”, everybody knows that, but he wasn’t just sneering. He also said, before the bit about opium, that religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.” Religion is subjectivity constructed to express and fend off alienation. Alienation, for Marx, is the syndrome whereby people are robbed of their subjectivity in a society that takes their labour - and the products of their labour - away from them and then uses it to dominate them in the form of capital (i.e. technology that is not used for the satisfaction of real human needs, etc.) This is absolutely implicit in 'Gridlock'. The people of New New York are tyrannised by the effects of the technological product, communicate via technological products, live in technological products... technological products have destroyed their society, destroyed even its capacity to produce anything but waste products and/or monstrous by-products. Capitalism has eaten itself alive... the only remnants being the petit bourgeois mood traders. Even the upper reaches of the system, the government, has been desolated by the maximum socia/technological entropy generated by the system. Marx once ironically described "the heaven of the state" where all must appear just and fair and right and good, so as to disguise the squalid reality of a system based on exploitation. Well, in 'Gridlock', the council chamber is a ruined heaven, decimated by the runaway processes that it once presided over.
But Limbo is still there and people are making the best of it. Inside their little cars, the people have created colour, texture, comfort and meaning. Domesticity on the move, family life within a small space, prayers of communal determination, hymns to the eventual salvation, a pilgrimage to the promised land. Their pseudo-journey has taken on religion as the heart of their heartless world, a construction of meaning from meaninglessness. Escape is their real religion and their real drug. Like both religion and drugs, their escape is an illusion. But their lives are not illusions, their children and relationships and friendships are real. Domesticity may be an escape, and a compromised one, but it also has value in itself. E. M. Forster wrote novels about this sort of theme… though, admittedly, none of them had giant crabs in them.
No, ‘Gridlock’ isn’t Doctor Who’s answer to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress... but it does show people trying to use religious ideas as a guide and map, just as in Bunyan. But crucially, in ‘Gridlock’, the pilgrims don’t make any progress, at least not on the pilgrimage road. They have mistaken the map for the territory.
‘Gridlock’ is a humanist allegory because human social life, in its successes and failures, is depicted as the source of all meaning. ‘Gridlock’ features hymns as human social defences against despair, not messages to a mystical God. The story isn’t starry-eyed about people. It depicts them as sometimes unscrupulous, predatory, complacent, self-deluding and lonely… yet what hardy and stubborn determination they have to find colour, life and meaning in their relationships and in their own selves. Even locked away from each other in little boxes, people refuse to be squashed and isolated entirely. Even when trapped inside an absurd system, people find ways to make sense out of senselessness.
There is a reason that this episode features hymns so prominently, desides the depiction of alienation and solace. What are hymns but attempts to unite a congregation in communal meaning. And ‘Abide with me’ is well chosen. To “abide” means to live, dwell, endure. Live with me. It isn’t a hymn of praise but rather a plea for God’s companionship. In this context, ‘Abide with Me’ signifies not only the human instinct to construct meaning, but also our desire to live in community and communality, to dwell together, to comfort and be comforted. Hymns might be expressions of delusion, alienation, protest... but they’re also an expression of togetherness. ‘Gridlock’ itself is an agnostic hymn to the social, to the manifold follies and possibilities of human communal existence.
Walter Benjamin once wrote that perhaps Marx was wrong about revolutions being the locomotive of history. Perhaps revolutions are what happens when the passengers on the train pull the emergency cord in order to stop the train careening towards a disaster. He saw the system as rushing onwards to catastrophe. To escape the catastrophe, you have to stop the onward rush. Well, the people in 'Gridlock' didn't manage to pull the cord in time (neither are we managing this, so far) but they did manage to escape the crash. The next thing for them to do is to break out of their limbo, to break out of the continuum in which they are stuck (to use another of Benjamin's favourite metaphors). They do this, with a little help from the Doctor.
This is, of course, the Doctor’s journey too. The Doctor is stuck in gridlock, running away from a dead home, running on escape and bliss and forgetfulness, travelling in absurd circles inside a box, always moving but never getting anywhere permanent. Now that Rose has gone he’s reverted back to the lonely man he was when we met him again in ‘Rose’. He doesn’t want to talk to Martha, to tell her the truth, to properly engage with her as a person, to take her on more than one trip, to do anything more than just show off to her. And there’s no wonder he finds New Earth so attractive. It’s a recreation of a destroyed world, recreated by the survivors. He’d like something like that for himself. He’s attracted to the idea of surviving and rebuilding, as anybody from a destroyed home and a dead race would be. It’s very apt that as he rescues the gridlocked people from their absurd and accidental apocalypse, as he makes social life possible for them again, the Face of Boe finally tells him that he is not alone.
After all, isn’t that what ‘Gridlock’ tells all of us? That we are not alone.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Rise Like Lions
Even as I type this, protestors are clambering over the stone lions at the base of Nelson's Column, waving anti-cuts placards while sat astride the petrified leonine relics of an imperial age that is still decaying... and trying to take us all with it.
'Warrior's Gate' came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today. It seems almost ridiculously appropriate. Well, it does to me anyway.
Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:
Benjamin's exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee... but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc. To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in - the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.
The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.
The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago. It’s never stated that Rorvik and his gang are the descendants of the slaves who built the Gundans… but even if they’re not, it hardly matters. They represent the high-technological interplanetary trading society that replaces the empires of castles and banqueting halls and leonine heraldry. In the history of our world, the international slave traders were essential to the rise of capitalism, helping to supersede the world of feudalism and aristocracy.
Biroc is the noble warrior who knows his world is gone - and that it deserves to be gone - forced to represent his people who are now the wracked and stacked and bought and sold merchandise of a philistine capitalist culture, a culture that gives opportunities to cretinous, narcissistic but enterprising bigots who can pay enough bonus-hunters to help them ship the slaves through the gateway, the eye of the needle.
(Rorvik, by the way, is every inch the swaggering Thatcherite of the early-80s... and of today. He's self-righteous about his own supposed leadership qualities and initiative. He's all hubristic bibble about "lily-livered deadweights". He doesn't even understand the Doctor's reference to the Tharil slaves as "poor creatures", interpreting it as impugning their monetary value. The sublime merely irritates him. Everything that doesn't serve him, he tries to break. "Everything breaks eventually" could be the motto of Tory socio-economic policy.)
But Biroc, with a little unnecessary help from the Doctor & Co… who don’t realise that all they have to do is sit back and watch the gears and cogs of history tick by as Biroc and his friends wind them… manages to blast open the trap. And Romana goes with him because she doesn’t want to go back to a static and petty and reactionary world that would never understand a temporal, striving, regretful, angry thing like Biroc in a million years. The words the Doctor uses to say goodbye to her are a cheeky appropriation of Shakespeare, from a story about men who tried to swim against the ruthless tide of history.
The weak enslave themselves. The slaves who do not revolt consent to their condition. The imperialists, lords and slavers all create the conditions for their own dethronement and indenture… in fact, just being a slaver is a kind of indenture, an enslavement to boredom and decadence and banality and routine cruelty. But, if you are sensitive to time, if you understand history, if you can see the pattern of the whole in the behaviour of the tiny random chances, then you can visualise a different possible future and jump for it… and break out of the loop even as it shrinks around you. In other words: if you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way.
Go, protestors! You'll be superb. You're the Tharils now. Rise like lions.
'Warrior's Gate' came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today. It seems almost ridiculously appropriate. Well, it does to me anyway.
Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:
The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Benjamin's exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee... but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc. To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in - the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.
The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.
The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago. It’s never stated that Rorvik and his gang are the descendants of the slaves who built the Gundans… but even if they’re not, it hardly matters. They represent the high-technological interplanetary trading society that replaces the empires of castles and banqueting halls and leonine heraldry. In the history of our world, the international slave traders were essential to the rise of capitalism, helping to supersede the world of feudalism and aristocracy.
Biroc is the noble warrior who knows his world is gone - and that it deserves to be gone - forced to represent his people who are now the wracked and stacked and bought and sold merchandise of a philistine capitalist culture, a culture that gives opportunities to cretinous, narcissistic but enterprising bigots who can pay enough bonus-hunters to help them ship the slaves through the gateway, the eye of the needle.
(Rorvik, by the way, is every inch the swaggering Thatcherite of the early-80s... and of today. He's self-righteous about his own supposed leadership qualities and initiative. He's all hubristic bibble about "lily-livered deadweights". He doesn't even understand the Doctor's reference to the Tharil slaves as "poor creatures", interpreting it as impugning their monetary value. The sublime merely irritates him. Everything that doesn't serve him, he tries to break. "Everything breaks eventually" could be the motto of Tory socio-economic policy.)
But Biroc, with a little unnecessary help from the Doctor & Co… who don’t realise that all they have to do is sit back and watch the gears and cogs of history tick by as Biroc and his friends wind them… manages to blast open the trap. And Romana goes with him because she doesn’t want to go back to a static and petty and reactionary world that would never understand a temporal, striving, regretful, angry thing like Biroc in a million years. The words the Doctor uses to say goodbye to her are a cheeky appropriation of Shakespeare, from a story about men who tried to swim against the ruthless tide of history.
The weak enslave themselves. The slaves who do not revolt consent to their condition. The imperialists, lords and slavers all create the conditions for their own dethronement and indenture… in fact, just being a slaver is a kind of indenture, an enslavement to boredom and decadence and banality and routine cruelty. But, if you are sensitive to time, if you understand history, if you can see the pattern of the whole in the behaviour of the tiny random chances, then you can visualise a different possible future and jump for it… and break out of the loop even as it shrinks around you. In other words: if you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way.
Go, protestors! You'll be superb. You're the Tharils now. Rise like lions.
Tharil Graffiti
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