Blink and you'll miss your chance to get a man

Someone I respect a lot has recently said that Moffat's Who stories don't really display much in the way of viewpoints.  With all due respect to Gallibase forum poster Affirmation (and that's one heck of a lot of respect), I actually think Moffat's stories do tell us a lot about what he thinks. I think they tell us quite a bit about what he thinks about women, for instance.

'Blink', for example, tells us that following a woman you've just met is an acceptable (even whimsically amusing) way of wooing her. It tells us that geeky internety guys are amusingly tragic pratts... but that women exist to redeem them by accepting them. Ultimately, the gorgeous young girl misses her opportunity to 'get' the hot cool copper (she automatically imagines marrying him once she's automatically attracted to him) and has to settle for the nerd. Settling for the nerd (i.e. finally getting herself a man of some description) is the sign that she's grown up, settled her issues, is ready to move on with life, etc. Living with her mate and having a laugh were the preludes to Real Life, the start of which (for both female characters) is naturally signfied by becoming a wife or permanent girlfriend to the nearest man ready to accept her.

And 'Blink', I should add, is one of Moffat's better stories (in my 'umble). Compared to other of his episodes, 'Blink' actually does seem (to me) to have some things to say. It rather amusingly takes bad sitcom characters and subjects then to a very non-sitcom plot (which is more than Gareth Roberts could manage). Of course, they're still just bad sitcom characters... but the episode does say something about the passing of time and the achievement of emotional maturity.

Of course, the sentiments expressed are somewhat sexist (see above) and are not particularly original or shattering. Life passes quicker than you think it will, you don't always get what you want or expect in life... well, unless you're the steadfastly and creepily loyal nerd who eventually 'wins' his 'out-of-his-league' girlfriend once she realises what a loyal puppydog he is.

One doesn't have to be Freud, does one?

Facebooking

Stark Contrasts

Here is the logic:

We live in a society that touts the pursuit of self interest.  That tells people they should look out for themselves.  And yet we also tell people pretty tales about community and cooperation and mutual respect.

Enterprise and initiative... but we're all in this together.

The former ethic is for those who succeed to live by.  The latter ethic is for those who have to budge in together in crowded conditions because, for whatever reason, they have not acquired enough material success to allow them to live the separated, isolated, private, individualistic life of the rich.  The former ethic is for those with a private drive, detached dwellings, grounds, boundary walls and closable gates.  The latter ethic is for those in terraces and flats with cardboard walls and laundry racks on their small balconies.

In short, if you live in a tenement or a housing estate, you must be public spirited.  You must behave.  You must get on with your neighbours.  Your lack of wealth is your own fault; it is itself evidence that you do not have the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement... ergo, you must embrace community spirit because you are so inadequate that you must live in a community.  Those with the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement can leave the graffiti-daubed, dog-shit-smeared romper room of community, and so need not attempt the cooperativeness that their very success shows to be against their nature in any case.

This is, in a roundabout way, a reiteration of the myth of innate and inborn destiny.  It is the same myth that class societies have always told themselves, filtered through the hypocritical bad faith of modern liberalism.

It is not a scripted conspiracy, it is manufactured ideology.  As such, it has all the chaos and contradiction of delusion.  It is believed, even if it is a convenient piece of bunk.  It is applied in a scattershot way, in all sorts of mixed-up and contradictory forms.

The apartheid inherent in it is not seen, is not admitted to, is often sincerely repudiated.  And yet its persistence is tolerated, its expansion promoted.  Nobody, after all, is 'in favour' of divisions between rich and poor.  It's one of those things that everybody formally disapproves of and yet continue.

When the people living in the cramped and dirty corners decide that they will no longer behave themselves, then we see the skull of class society beneath the moisturised, botoxed skin of liberal democratic discourse.

When the poor tear up their hovels, they are ticked-off for damaging their own 'communities' - as though this might not have occured to them, as though they might suddenly realise that they are trashing places that they actually find congenial, as though their behaviour speaks only to their own self-destructive madness and does not suggest that they actually find these 'communities' to be frustrating, grim, tedious, miserable, degraded places in which to be confined.

It is the same as the witless consolation that is offered to the suicidal.  Do not hurt yourself, say people to those who hate themselves.  Do not end your life, say people to those whose lives are miserable.

When the poor steal, they find themselves at the recieving end of the wagging fingers of the liberal moralisers.  Do not do what society constantly exhorts you to do, they are told.  Do not obey the lifelong conditioning of adverts and media images.  Do not consider material goods to be signs of success and status and worth.  Do not long for distraction.  Do not fetishize stuff.  Do not consider consumption to be a palliative.  Not if you can't or won't pay for the privilege.  Do not, in short, be a consumer without feeding your subsistence back into the system of capital circulation.  Do not, says the moralising columnist, obey the instructions that are encoded in every page of this newspaper, in every advert that surrounds my column, in every billboard and commercial and brand logo in the marketplace where this newspaper is sold, unless you can stump up the cash.

Here the two ethics meet in the concept of law.  Be a ruthless acquirer, but be law-abiding.  But the law is written so that 'Community' may be disregarded by those who don't have to live in communities (this being, as often as not, a code word for ghettos, slums and rundown, decaying urban battery farms).  The law is written so that the grand theft of exploitation through the employment of wage labourers is legal, so that tax-dodging is legal, so that obscene wealth is legal, so that the fraud of electoral manifestoing is legal, so that the exercise of influence through wealth over the state is legal, so that the waging of war by the state upon the domestic and foreign poor is legal.  The law is written so that the comparatively minor thefts and cruelties and invasions and abuses of the small fry is its target, its main proccupation.  In short, wealth and power - with all their attendant large-scale vices - are legal.  Poverty - with all its comparatively minor misdemeanours - is illegal... that is to say, it is not illegal to make people or allow people to be poor, but it is practically illegal to be poor.

None of this is to say that poor people don't do terrible things.  They do.  They rob and rape and murder and torture and abuse.  But none of them own media empires that have systematically befouled public discourse, degraded journalistic standards, engaged in wholesale political corruption, stoked racism and homophobia, degraded women, centralised monopoly power over the flow of information to the point of self-satirising absurdity, broken unions, driven down wages, and extracted billions of pounds and dollars of surplus from the labour of workers.  None of them have taken the decision to carpet bomb civillian population centres.  None of them have organised the ethnic cleansing, brutalisation, immiseration, systematic humiliation, mass-murder and apartheid-style tyrannizing of the Palestinians.

In short, poor people are not the problem, any more than black people (or black 'culture') is the problem.  Most of the misery of the world is down to rich white blokes.

The comparison is beyond comparison, especially when you take into account the fact that the obscene pinnacles of wealth in the world - wealth which allows and propels some to commit such incomparably worse crimes - are created by the vampiric extraction which creates swathes of poverty, alienation and frustration in the first place.

The system creates poverty and needs poverty and fosters poverty.  Where would the system be without a reserve army of unemployed to act as a disciplining factor upon those allowed to work?  In any case, most poor people are not unemployed.  Where would the system be without labour that it can use for the creation of profits and then requite at a bare minimum much lower than the profits the labour has created?  Where would the system be without the entirely unrequited domestic labour of mothers who raise the next generations of workers?  This is the extraction of surplus from those at the bottom and its redistribution upwards.  This is the trickle-up effect.  This is capitalism, and it made the sinkholes and urban warzones that now erupt in protest, anger, alienation and opportunistic consumption.

David Harvey:

...the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone’s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world. 

A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day. Does anyone believe it is possible to find an honest capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper or an honest police commisioner any more? Yes, they do exist. But only as a minority that everyone else regards as stupid. Get smart. Get Easy Profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of corporate malfeasance.

What I say may sound shocking. Most of us don’t see it because we don’t want to. Certainly no politician dare say it and the press would only print it to heap scorn upon the sayer. But my guess is that every street rioter knows exactly what I mean. They are only doing what everyone else is doing, though in a different way – more blatently and visibly in the streets. Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entreprenuer they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.

This is the new normal in which we live. This is what the next grand commission of enquiry should address. Everyone, not just the rioters, should be held to account. Feral capitalism should be put on trial for crimes against humanity as well as for crimes against nature.
Sadly, this is what these mindless rioters cannot see or demand. Everything conspires to prevent us from seeing and demanding it also. This is why political power so hastily dons the robes of superior morality and unctuous reason so that no one might see it as so nakedly corrupt and stupidly irrational.

How can the system condemn those who have the enterprise and initiative to go out and take what they want?  How can it frown upon their opportunistic consumption?  After all, these are the values that the system claims to praise.  Who is a more self-reliant, self-helping, enterprising, utility-maximising rational actor than the looter?

Here, again, the concept of law steps in to discriminate between the laudable ruthless and selfish violence of the wealthy and the powerful (their very success being their own alibi) and the sometimes ruthless and selfish violence of the poor, which must be condemned, which must also be decontextualised, the misery and frustration and alienation of poverty being no excuse, no alibi, not even any legitimate context.

Oh, and David Starkey is a racist cretin.

Beasts of England

In 'The Beast Below', you - as a subject of Liz 10 and a citizen of Starship UK - get to vote.  You get a choice of buttons.  You can 'Protest' or 'Forget'.

This is evidently an attempt to express something about electoral democracy.

Every time we are exposed to some unpleasant and uncomfortable fact about our society or our world, or even to a suspicion of some such thing, we are presented with an implicit option to protest or forget. Beyond voting booths, we have a set of these buttons inside our heads. When you hear, for instance, that thousands of dirt poor South Africans were forcibly evicted from their shanty towns and moved to settlements of corrugated iron shacks to get them away from the new $450 million World Cup football stadium, you have the option to kick up a stink or to sigh, mumble some platitude like "tsch, how awful" and then put it out of your head so you can comfortably sit back and enjoy watching teams of overpaid jocks play amidst the McDonalds adverts.

By the way, don't think I'm being holier-than-thou. I'm just as guilty of this kind of thing as anybody. God knows how many times I've found myself scrunching up a Kit-Kat wrapper and only at that point remembering that Nestlé are evil. This is normal human frailty at work, the understandable instinct to flee from guilt, as 'The Beast Below' indicates by showing Amy's reflexive, horrified pressing of the 'Forget' button and her subsequent remorse.

So, we are clearly banked upon the sharp and shaley shores of satire.

'The Beast Below' presents a picture of Britain as an island in space, a star-traversing city (after James Blish's fascinating 'Okie' novels, collected as Cities in Flight), with tower blocks representing counties... ah, we're already in trouble. So, everyone from Essex lives in the same tower block? Rich and poor side by side? Maybe there are luxury apartments up at the top, opulent penthouses above floor after floor of pokey little prole cupboards... but we don't see anything like that, unless we count the private apartments of Liz 10, but she's a problematic figure anyway (which I'll get to). You might argue that, in a lifeboat, rich and poor would have to budge in together... but a look at the stats for Titanic survivors might be salutary at this point:

Number of 1st class passengers: 325. Of whom survived: 202.
Number of 2nd class passengers: 285. Of whom survived: 118.
Number of 3rd class (steerage) passengers: 706. Of whom survived: 178.

Much as I hate to give Ben Elton any credit, I tend to suspect that, if the world were threatened with imminent destruction, something along the lines of the scenario described in his novel Stark would be nearer to what happened than what we see in 'The Beast Below', i.e. the rich would set up their own escape into space and fuck the rest of us nobodies. Mind you, that would be very shortsighted of them, not simply as they'd be left with only each other to talk to (a grim fate, as Elton's novel implies) but also because they need us: they live off our labour. Their new world would be a world without a viable economy, incapable of progressing and supporting future generations. They would just have to live on the support systems and luxuries they'd provided for themselves, until those support systems ran down and the luxuries ran out. As soon as they needed anything fixed or produced, they'd need grease monkeys, all of whom they'd have left to die.

This is not the version of things that we see in 'The Beast Below'. Indeed, it seems essential (if Moffat is going to achieve what appears to be his goal, i.e. a political satire of Britain as a notional totality) that Starship UK should have taken everyone along.  The enclosed social spaces that we see appear very communal, a bit like the deck of a cruise liner.  Social normality seems exemplified by shopping and cafe society.  We don't see any homeless people slumped in corners.  Nobody is poor.  Nobody appears to be producing anything.  This is Britain as a matrix of complacent consumers.  This is the social optimum that the space whale is tortured to preserve.

Now.  In order for this to be a satire or a polemic or anything like that, the episode needs to be (so to speak) conscious of the fact that it has depicted Britain as a nostalgiac, consumerist blandnessdrome that only limps along because it is parasitic upon suffering.

Does it notice this?  Really, does it?

Does it bollocks.

The retro production design amounts to nothing more than decoration; it connects to nothing in the story that might suggest an indictment of the reality of Britain's 'good old days'.  The shopping is explicitly celebrated by the Doctor and, beyond suggesting that the pleasures of the mall might be an escape for us from our collective guilt, there is no critique of economic relationships.  The visual quotes from the past suggest only a strained attempt to hammer home a kind of quintessential Britishness.  The indoor high street is just there to represent the 'normality' beneath which there lurk dark secrets... when, in fact, the modern high street is a physical compendium of dark but open secrets about capitalism.

The episode fails to sort out exactly what kind of society Starship UK really is.  There's a great ballyhoo made of the fact that it's a "police state"... and yet, it seems to be one on the basis of the consent of the voters (but we'll get back to that).  Also, it isn't really clear why it needs to be a police state at all.  Why do the Smilers and half-human-half-Smilers bother to send children to be slowly digested for minor offences?  Particularly when they know full well that such naughty children will be rejected by the whale anyway.  Why would it be necessary for the police to terrify the population into fearing to display curiosity about sobbing children?  Why do the supposedly quelled and repressed populace look so entirely sanguine as they hang around in cafes?

The business with the buttons could have been used to express the way that electoral democracy limits our influence over the Powers That Be to a regular opportunity to push one of a few pre-set levers. Our choices are decided upon, circumscribed and laid out for us by others, by a state that - in practice - is largely impermeable to change stemming from ballot boxes.  You may be able to change the governmental management team so that it passes back and forth between the wings of a political class, all of whom are more-or-less open about the fact that they represent Property. Meanwhile, you don't get to elect the police, the army, the diplomats, the civil service, the intelligence officers, the judges, the royalty, the lords...  You get a say in one sphere, once every few years; the rest of the time, butt out. We all know the kind of contempt that the media reserve for ordinary people who try to influence their society outside the approved avenues of an occasional vote, support for a mainstream political party or charity. They get called pressure groups (as opposed to the more neutral term 'lobbyists', reserved for rich and powerful people when they try to influence politicians), eccentrics, extremists, zealots, conspiracy theorists, politically correct wackos, bleeding hearts, rent-a-mobs, tree huggers, feminazis, etc.

The nearest 'The Beast Below' comes to noticing the existence and efforts of dissidents and activists is in the person of Liz 10... and she's the fucking Queen.  So, royalty has usurped the role of the dissident and the activist.  Dissidence and activism has become the lone purview of courageous individuals.  And Liz 10 is eventually shown to be implicated in the abuse of the space whale, further emphasizing the liberal "we're all to blame" bleat at the heart of the story's half-hearted anger.

The story takes for granted such ideological chimeras as the national community, with communal interests, communal guilts and a state that exists to protect these communalities. Everyone budges in together.  The population is subdivided by county not class.  Beyond the existence of a mockney Queen and a caste of monk/dummy guards, there is no class in evidence at all.  Power seems to exist everywhere and nowhere.  It is at once localised in the form of the Smilers and diffused throughout the entire population of voters.  Even the Queen gets to forget and become a powerless citizen.  In the end, the regrettable excesses of this willow-the-wisp power structure are depicted as misguided attempts to safeguard the common good, with all the people (via their contemptible moral cowardice) equally implicated.  The police caste must shoulder the unpleasant but necessary tasks for the plebs so that they may go about their little lives untroubled by the dirty work that makes those lives possible.  The most conscious, snide and cynical ruling class mouthpiece could hardly have expressed this bourgeois ideology better than Moffat, who appears to have done so entirely unconsciously.

The crux of the problem is back in the voting booths.  The voter gets full disclosure.  The state explains its crime to the voter.

Yeah.  Right.  Because the state is constantly confessing to us that we live in a society that is based on ruthless and cruel exploitation, asking us whether we consent and then abiding by our decision.

The way the episode presents the issue of the relationship of the citizenry to the crimes of the state (and/or the exploitative base of society, depending on how you read the metaphor) distorts the way it really works, in my opinion, to the point of blaming the populace and excusing the state.

I've made this criticism before and been upbraided for taking the episode too literally.  Trouble is, it's the episode itself which is too literal.

The issue at stake is a contingent, complex one: i.e. how structures of power are able to secure widespread public consent - tacit or explicit - for brutal and/or undemocratic policies and actions, while also presenting themselves to that public as democratic, peaceful, diplomatic, communitarian, an 'honest broker', etc.

By representing what goes on as a literal choice made by a fully informed electorate, the story actively distorts the truth of society, which is subject to massive systems of state secrecy, ideological conditioning, doctrinal systems in the media, reproduction of ideology in schools, systemic buffers in the structure of 'democracy' to keep the electorate out of most zones of policy decision-making.

Representing the state in the story as labouring for the common good, and as abiding by the morally culpable decisions of the majority who make their decisions in full awareness of all the facts and ramifications, only adds huge insult to grievous injury.

The episode confusedly shows the state as tyrannical but also seeks to spuriously dissolve the divide between state and populace by showing the state as honestly seeking the best ends for the population, offering voters access to the darkest secrets, etc.

To put it in inflammatory language, the episode tries to implicate the ruled in the crimes of the rulers... which, in some ways, is valid... but not without enormous qualification and contextualisation, if any form of honesty is to be preserved.  Yes, 'we' need to take responsibility for what 'our' state does... but the state as it exists (and as it is poorly reflected in 'Beast') is not, in my view, 'ours' in any meaningful sense. Moreover, it exists precisely to protect those it really does represent (the miniscule minority of those who own the vast majority of the wealth and property) from 'us'.  It is this very elision of a whole range of antagonistic relationships within the spuriously inclusive 'us', 'we' and 'our' of 'Britain' that makes it impossible to take 'Beast' seriously as offering anything like an accurate appraisal of what's wrong with our society.

For all that, the story does place Britain as a parasitic growth upon pain and suffering.  But in order for this to mean anything, we need to have some idea whose suffering is being lamented.  For that, we need to know what the 'beast' of the title represents (remember that I'm not just imposing this necessity; the episode touts itself as a satire).

Alexander Hamilton (whose vision of America as a militarily-strong quasi-aristocracy run for the benefit of the propertied classes has turned out to be the operative one) once told Jefferson that 'the people' was "a great beast".  Burke called them "the swinish multitude".  Shakespeare's Coriolanus uses lots of animal epithets for the Roman plebs he holds in such contempt.  Walter Lippman called the public "the bewildered herd".  Animal metaphors for the common people have been very prevalent from reactionary and even liberal thinkers down the centuries.  It's tempting to read the whale as representing 'the people'.  But, in 'The Beast Below', the people (assuming we accept that classless category in the first place) are sitting at outdoor cafes and shopping happily, forgetting the tough choices they've had to make to preserve their way of life because they have a functionalist state that bravely shoulders the blame for them.

Could the whale be the conquered and colonised peoples whose suffering underwrites the profits of imperialism?  If so, the text of the episode is being very coy about it.

I'm not sure that the whale represents anything.  I think it just sits there, looking a lot like a symbol or a metaphor without actually managing to be one.

Moreover, if it does represent any particular set of victimised and oppressed people then it hardly does them any favours.  The putative referents to which the whale refers would thus be represented as noble victims, upon whom rests the duty to save their oppressor via a superhuman excess of generosity towards them.  And, when it comes down to it, there is no doubt, even in the mind of the Doctor, that the lives of the parasitic shoppers trump those of the tortured oppressed.

Mind you, I'd hate anybody to think I'm singling out this story as something unusual. Doctor Who, like most media culture in hierarchical societies, is inherently prone to reproducing the... well, what would be a good phrase... how about "the manufacture of consent"?

Who just has a better rep than most shows when it comes to bucking such tendencies.

At least, it used to.

Going Native

Avatar is progressive in many ways.  It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism.  It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way.  It shows an 'economy' in which spines can be repaired, but only if you have the dosh.  It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America - and any such settler colonial state - in a forthrightly disapproving way.  It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Americans are doing the conquering.

Fair enough.

However, it is also deeply patronising towards native people.  To quote David Brooks' article in the New York Times:

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

And, even better, here's Annalee Newitz at io9.com, on the subject of Avatar and movies like it:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.

All true, if old news.

My interest here is in the fact that 'The Power of Kroll', a Doctor Who serial from 1978-9 that could only have dreamt of having a hundredth of the budget of Avatar (and that not even many Doctor Who fans like) did much, much better.

It covers much of the same ground as Avatar politically.  It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism.  It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way.  It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America - and any such settler colonial state - in a forthrightly disapproving way.  It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Brits are doing the conquering.

However, it is much better than Avatar - and many such stories - on the matter of native people.

The Swampies - the alien natives in 'Kroll' - are not innocent.  Their existence in a 'state of nature' does not translate into either moral or intellectual purity.  Some of them exhibit dishonesty, self-deception, political bluffing, cowardice, cruelty, callousness, paranoia, etc.  Some are merciful, shrewd, etc.  In other words, they are not cyphers, mere noble victims or symbols of lost innocence.  They are people.  It is their similarity to the humans that is stressed by the characterisation.  The Swampie leader and his second-in-command in many ways mirror their opposite numbers amongst the human colonists.

The Swampies are not wise or mystically enlightened.  They have no access to higher spiritual truths than Whitey.  They are not mysteriously connected to their environment in a sentimentalised, Gaia-hypothesis-sorta-way.  Their conceptions of the numinous are explicitly shown to be wrong; something that some of them realise through observation and reasoning.  Their beliefs are just that: beliefs.  Moreover, those beliefs have a historical context that both predates their oppression and is then effected by it.  In short, they have a history and a culture that stems from their social existence rather than purely from nature via some mystical link.

The Swampies are not untouched.  They have bound books, windows, etc.  Some of them are servants for the humans.  They deal with a gun-runner for human weapons.  There are no glamourous Swampie women (there are no women at all - a serious flaw) for a white hero to shag... but the Swampies have had social intercourse with Whitey.  This might not seem like much, but it bucks the trend of portraying natives as unreachable or undefiled by contact with white civilisation, which is just an expression of cultural condescension of the kind that sees natives as prelapsarian children, while Whitey (for all his faults) is the bringer of adult knowledge.

The Swampies don't acquire a human (i.e. white) leader.  In countless stories about native people, whether they're encoded as aliens or not, the white hero becomes one of them and, very often, becomes their leader, or at least a trusted member of the tribe.  This is all about Whitey's desire to recast himself as a friend of the natives, to assuage the liberal guilt of being from a civilisation that has decimated native peoples again and again.  It is the desire for the victim to smile and say "that's okay, we forgive you".  It is still, however, an expression of the colonizing mission and attitude.  Whitey infiltrates, assimilates some lessons and then succeeds within the tribe, often then going on to lead and save it.  Avatar is possibly the most extreme example of this kind of thing ever made, more so even than Dune.  The Swampies are saved by the Doctor's defusing of the final orbit shot, sure (as is one of the humans)... but neither he nor any other human becomes part of the tribe and leads it to victory.  The Swampies reject the false friend Rohm-Dutt and lead their own attack, killing Thawn all on their little old ownsomes.

The Swampies do not 'win' in a way that relieves the white guilt trip by way of a pleasing fantasy.  Sure, the Refinery will close down because Kroll vanishes, so the Swampies'll probably be able to stay where they are... but they don't particularly want to stay on their 'reservation'.  They're only there at all because they've already been displaced from their home.  Staying there unmolested is their minimum requirement.  What they really want is to return home, but it plainly ain't gonna happen.  The Na'vi get their native world back, in full.  The Swampies never will, anymore than will the Nez Perce.

Sadly, both stories put the onus of responsibility - at least for events within the narrative - onto one villain, who is shown to act conspiratorially rather than as an agent of an imperialist state.

For sure, 'Power of Kroll' is not perfect... but it manages to be at least as angry as Avatar, without also sentimentalising or patronising native peoples, or coming off like a white guilt-relief fantasy.  In Avatar, the sole remaining human on the colonized world ends up physically becoming one of the natives and being welcomed permanently into the tribe as a hero.  In 'Kroll', the sole remaining human on the colonized world ends up encircled by hostile natives who hate his guts, while the Doctor saunters off, leaving the natives to decide for themselves what to do with their unwelcome final guest.  He offers them no advice, no sermon.  He evidently thinks its their business, not his.

That is why Avatar feels like a liberal complaint but 'Kroll' feels more like a radical snarl.

Potterless

I can scarcely believe I'm doing this...



Saw the Potterocalypse.  Well crafted.  I've had worse afternoons in the cinema.

One of the most interesting things about the films is how much better they are than the books.  That goes for all of them.  This last is no exception.

Rowling is a poor novelist but Kloves is an excellent adaptor.  It's quite amazing how he streamlines the windy, pompous, digression-ridden plots so that audiences can follow them without flowcharts. 

Also, the films have always made Harry easier to like than the books, partly because Radcliffe is naturally likeable and partly because cinema can't give us what Rowling insists on foisting upon readers: unfettered access to Harry's every self-obsessed, uncharitable, weak-willed, petulant thought.  Again, in this latest film, Kloves helps mightily by snipping out acres of Potterian sulking and obsessing over irrelevancies, like the ancient and brief moral failures of mentors, etc.. 

Harry's wobbles over loyalty to his dead headmaster go on for faaaaaar toooooo loooooong in the book... and yet, in the film, even after all the set-up from the last film, we get only the briefest hint of Aberforth's resentments before Harry states that he trusted Dumbledore And That's All There Is To It.  Harry doesn't even ask the spectral Dumbledore about it in the dream/afterlife bit (which is filmed in a pleasingly 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish way).  I'm not complaining about this, but it's odd how breezy is the treatment of the whole Dark Dumbledore Backstory in Deathly Hallows Part 2, given how much attention the set-up stuff (i.e. conversations at the wedding, Rita Skeeter's book) gets in Deathly Hallows Part 1.  This is an odd but ultimately minor stumble, largely because this subplot is fundamentally uninteresting and they are quite right to sideline it. 

One of the worst of Rowling's many, many, many flaws as a novelist is that she doesn't understand her own characters.  She knows who she wants them to be... no, hang on... a better way of putting it would be that she knows how she wants her readers to view them, but this often fails to jive with how they actually behave.  For example, she damn-nigh instructs the reader to love Harry because he's kind and brave and heroic and full of love, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum, but actually depicts him (especially in the final book) as a thoughtless, selfish, grumpy, maudlin, indecisive, clueless little irritant.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having a flawed hero - especially if that hero is a teenage boy, since they're usually pretty damn flawed - but it becomes a problem when the authorial voice fails to percieve the flaws, and has the embodiment of moral authority in the books (Dumbledore) treat Harry as though he's a ruthlessly efficient intellectual humanitarian.

But then the embodiment of moral authority is deeply flawed too.  His actions make him - to any disinterested observer - a cynical, calculating manipulator with a revolting streak of sentimentality and an outrageously brazen habit of indulgent and permissive favouritism towards certain of his pupils.  Again, the author fails to notice this... to the point where, when she suddenly wants to introduce some fatuous 'darkness' into the character for the last book, she doesn't just ask us to ponder the manipulativeness that the character already gives off in waves, but instead invents a baroquely overcomplicated backstory, of tenuous necessity to the main plot, in which she implies that Dumbledore was once briefly tempted by world domination because of a (to add insult to injury) youthful gay crush.

Kloves and Yates (and their actors) are more perceptive about Rowling's characters than Rowling. 

We see this in the movie of Half Blood Prince, which allows us to occasionally see Dumbledore as a manipulator, makes the Slughorn subplot work by subtly shifting him so that he becomes a fundamentally decent but lonely old man instead of a crass and venal twerp, and borderline-miraculously makes the Harry/Ginny romance seem credible by making Ginny resemble a human being with an independent moral identity which guides Harry back from the brink.

In Deathly Hallows Part 2, Kloves and Yates try to do something similar with Snape... however, for me, it doesn't quite work.  Or rather, it works... but it's not particularly interesting.

In the final novel, Rowling pulls her usual trick of depicting the character one way through his actions but then implying ('commanding' might be more accurate) that the reader should judge him in a way that is inconsistent with them.  We already know - from Half Blood Prince (the novel) that Snape informed Voldemort about Sybil Trelawney's prophecy... which led Old Voldy (in a rare moment of proactivity) to hunt the Potters, believing that their infant son was a possible future nemesis.  In Deathly Hallows (the novel), we learn that Snape is distraught by this because he loves Lily Potter.  (In Rowlingworld, you meet the love of your life when you are both pre-pubescents and never waver from this.  According to her, I should still be in love with a girl called Angharad who lived across from me when I was 7.)

But the thing is... Snape is bothered only by the danger to his beloved Lily.  He doesn't care about her husband or infant son getting killed.  It's clear that he wouldn't care at all if Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy differently and gone after, say, the Longbottoms and baby Neville.  In other words, he's a selfish and callous shit.  Rowling, however, seems to believe that a doglike devotion to one particular person redeems you, even if that person is dead and you care nothing for anyone living.

Now, Deathly Hallows Part 2 does not refer to the fact that it was Snape who told Voldemort about the prophecy.  This strikes me as very important.  The film goes all out to make the Snape story into a heartrending tragedy, so it has to whitewash him.  It is impossible to go for the same intended effect of the book (i.e. poor Snape, he was a sad case really, he saw the light and bravely became... etc., etc.) while retaining one of the most crucial aspects of the book's story.  Snape's culpability is actually first revealed in Half Blood Prince (novel), but the film version of HBP doesn't mention it either.  It has to be suppressed so that the films can carry off their avowed intent of making Snape a tragic hero. 

The trouble is that whitewashing Snape's worst crime and the selfish character of his subsequent regret, thus allowing audiences to percieve him as a tragic hero, actually squanders an opportunity to yank something genuinely interesting, possibly even challenging, from the rubble of Rowling's mediocrity.  Well-crafted as this final Potter movie undoubtedly is, most especially in the affecting and nuanced performance given by Rickman, it contents itself with being a mere tearjerker. 

What if Kloves and Yates had shown us Snape's full culpability, and refused to flinch from depicting the purely selfish nature of his regret?  What if they had also refrained from mustering all the rhetoric of cinema to instruct the audience to feel sad for him?  They could have avoided Rowling's confused take on the character, offered a gargantuan audience something other than cliche and said something very unRowlingy on the subject of love. 

You see, to Rowling, love - in the most simplistic form imaginable - conquers and excuses all.  But for Snape - although Rowling seemingly never realised it - love was a selfish ravening monster and a form of moral myopia that paradoxically lead him to betray the leader who, in all other respects, was his perfect master.

Welcome Matt

Timelash II.  Series 5.  You know the drill.  Thank goodness this tiresome, needless, self-imposed task is now almost over.


The Eleventh Hour

How interesting that, whereas RTD usually got public figures to play themselves in contexts that took the piss out of them (even if they didn't realise it), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore and casts him as a prestigious and influential expert with a naughty twinkle in his eye, rather than as a sexist, right-wing old pratt.


I'll post seperately on The Beast Below.  I've looked at the heavily biased and ideological representation of Churchill in Victory of the Daleks here.  The only other thing to note about that wretched story is the cynicism with which the Daleks have been redesigned in order to launch a new range of toys. 


The Angels Two-Parter

I like the bit with the angel on the screen.  Nice bit of appropriation from J-horror.

Otherwise... well, I'll once again quote my friend vgrattidge-1, who captures it concisely:

Just what 'Who' needed - another straight-to-video style 'Aliens' rip-off that undermines a brilliant (one-off!) monster and makes them behave in illogical ways for plot expediency, plus the smug and annoying River Song (I just can't bring myself to care what relationship she has with the Doctor) and well, not much else. It's hollow stuff with the Doc making another tough-guy speech before firing a gun...Yawn

One interesting thing about this story is the matter of the Church Soldiers (related to the Church Police perhaps... will they be investigating dead Bishops on the landing and rat tart?). I remember Paul Cornell saying he was grateful to Moffat for his generosity in portraying relgious people in a positive light. So... Paul sees it as positive when monks are shown going around in fatigues, obeying orders within a military hierarchy and carrying machine guns? How telling.


Vampires of Venice was too boring to write about.  Here is my (positive) look at Amy's Choice.


The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called

The Silurians become dull, generic reptile aliens... and, as I recall, such reptile aliens featured in one of the very few half-decent episodes of ST: Voyager, which actually tried to intelligently investigate some of the cultural ramifications of 'common descent', etc. It comes to something when Who can't even do reptile aliens better than Voyager.

The less likeable side of Star Trek actually provides the inspiration for story. It resembles the worst excesses of Trek when it's in liberal-moralising-allegory mode. There is the fatuous treatment of racial suspicion, the vapid semi-allusions to Israel/Palestine (lets get round the table and sort out a deal... all we need is a reasonable negotiating partner!), etc.

Worse, it wants to have its cake an eat it. On the one hand there is the morally myopic liberal fingerwagging at nasty old inherently-xenophobic humans... but this contradicts the half-assed (bordering on offensive) subtext about Guantanamo Bay / Abu Ghraib, where the mother who tortures a recalcitrant and inherently hostile Arab terrorist... sorry, I mean a Silurian... for information is shown to be acting from understandable necessity. It's the televisual equivalent of Sam Harris and Alan Dershowitz advocating torture.

The Doctor's moral compass is symptomatically skewiff too. He declares his love for a Silurian liberal scientist... who was until just then conducting scientific experiments on living human subjects.

Also, as Charles Daniels has pointed out, the story suggests that the way to tackle problems like racial prejudice is to do nothing, sit back and wait for the human race to 'progress' all by itself.


Vincent and the Doctor

I'd been very disappointed with most of the celeb historicals up to this point. I think there's something inherently flawed in the notion of gawping at historical figures like modern celebrities. And I'm not - to put this mildly - a fan of Richard Curtis. So I approached 'Vincent and the Doctor' with a high degree of wariness.

I ended up gushing about it. I might be a bit less ardent now that I've calmed down, gotten over the sheer relief of seeing something watchable after the Chibnall/Silurians atrocity and rewatched 'Vincent' a couple of times in a more balanced frame of mind... but I still like this a lot.

Mind you, I have some whinges (you'll all be stunned to learn). Even as the episode tries to stress the artistic value of his work, it skirts close to 'Unicorn and Wasp' territory by repeatedly contrasting the billions that the paintings are worth today with their original neglect. It's hard not to detect an obsession with the posthumous monetary value of the paintings in all the scenes where people refuse to trade a glass of wine for a self-portrait, or in the bits where the Doctor flinches as Vincent leaves mug rings on a canvas.

Gallibase forum regular Affirmation almost immediately reminded me of some Curtisian tweeisms in the script... but he agreed with me that the story was absolutely beautiful to look at. The recreations of Vincent's pictures were done with just the right degree of similarity to the famous images that we knew what we were looking at, but were not so slavishly similar as to detract from the great leaps of visual imagination that Vincent put into his representations of these scenes. After all, if the real scenes had looked exactly like the paintings, wherein lies the interpretive genius of the artist?

The skeletal plotette about the monster was just substantial enough to provide a framework. The idea of making the monster visible only to Vincent was a simple and direct way of expressing both his talent and his isolation. The nature of the beast - as a blind, lonely figure abandoned by a "brutal race" that leaves the weak behind - chimed with Vincent's isolation in terms that skirted pretty close to being sledgehammer obvious... but just got away with it. All in all, I appreciate the willingness of the story to allow in some poetic metaphors... particularly in the discussion of the simultaneous beauty and morbidity of sunflowers. Sadly, there is also a tendency for the characters to explain the metaphors to us...

For once we get a depiction of the historical celeb as a weak individual. He is also shown being obsessive, sullen, violent in his passions, irritable, sentimental, lustful... perhaps more of his dark sides should and could have been looked at, but it isn't the same as giving Churchill a free ride. Van Gogh, after all, never bombed anyone. He was not powerful... except as an artist. This may be the single biggest plus point in the episode's favour... for once, the celeb in the historical isn't an icon of the establishment, isn't powerful or rich, isn't a success or a star in his own lifetime, isn't a swanky well-to-do type... And, although the Doctor is horrified by the idea of getting Vincent prematurely killed, the episode also remembers that non-artistic-heroes have valuable lives that deserve respect, hence the scene with the village girl's funeral procession.

Van Gogh is a painter who is sometimes downplayed nowadays, ironically enough because of his immense popularity... but he was undoubtedly a great painter and a fitting subject for a fulsome tribute. Actually, the tribute probably is too fulsome. I think it's going too far to state, as though it's an objective fact, that Vincent was "the greatest artist who ever lived". Apart from anything else, it's not a contest.

It's also a bit of a shame that the episode feels the need to validate Vincent to us (and himself) by relying on the (admittedly sincere and nicely acted) praise of an art expert... especially since the episode captures Vincent's enormous posthumous popularity with the people, but fails to capture one of the most powerful essences of his work: the sheer, empathic democracy of it. He was a great painter of ordinary people... one of the greatest, arguably. From The Potato Eaters, through his paintings of his postman, of prisoners circling in a jailhouse yard, of sowers of seeds... Vincent was an artist who had immense respect for ordinary people and their labour, expressing their individuality and dignity. I'm far from an expert, but I suspect overstatement in the scenes where he is all but pursued by as-good-as pitchfork-wielding villagers who think he's a sort-of walking curse.

The story perhaps overstates the effect of the depression on Vincent's work. Lots of critics will say that the late, great paintings are so superbly wrought on a technical level that they can only be the work of a man in control of himself.

Still, points must go out for showing museums and art to the viewing kids without snobbery or psuedo-populist sneering. I loved that Amy should turn out to be a fan of Vincent, should view a trip to the gallery as a treat. Amy is at her sweetest in this episode. She's a character I have serious issues with, but here I can like her. Karen Gillan (who has never been the problem) excels... even, at times, stealing the show from the superb Tony Curran.

I could've lived without the bloody pop song, but the sentimentality was kept at a just-about-bearable level. Maybe it seems less aggravating in this story because the obligatory attempt to make us mist-up actually has an emotionally meaningful referent, for once. Perhaps the fact that the episode had to have an unhappy (or at least complicatedly happy) ending acted as a vital disciplining factor upon the evil rom-com writer that has taken over Curtis' brain since he co-wrote Blackadder II.

The final image of the sunflowers with "for Amy" added was gooey sentiment, sure... but it also expresses the way the Doctor and his friends seem to leave their mark on time. It was a little bit of time graffiti, left by Amy through her friend Vincent, through the brief but sweet connection she made with him. Amy showed her childlike side with her expectation that they'd saved Vincent from his demons. I dreaded seeing loads of fake "new" Van Gogh's in the gallery (in the end, we get one in the season finale... and proper ghastly it is too). But they had the basic guts to leave the ending of the episode bittersweet, to not trivialise Vincent's problems by magicking them away after one adventure with the Doctor.

The Doctor plainly never expects that his 'gift' to Vincent will change anything, precisely because he realises something that Amy hasn't quite caught: that Vincent's deepest problems remain unsolved, that he is still on course to his self-imposed quietus.

The Doctor's act is charity and is just as unsatisfactory as all charity. But the episode doesn't dodge this (oddly enough, considering who wrote it). That's the brutal truth about depression: sometimes all you can do is try your best to palliate. It's better than simply abandoning people to their lonely fate, the way those nomadic turkey aliens do.

This is a serious issue, treated fairly well... with even witty moments that mock the possibility of a more earnest approach, especially in the lovely little bit when the Doctor starts talking solemnly and awkwardly about the complexity of depression, only to be shushed by an uninterested Vincent who is trying to work.


The Lodger

An attempt to redo 'Love & Monsters' with just the cute bits... all the sharp edges sand-papered smooth, all the dark corners brightly lit and all the creepy, mordant undercurrents drowned in gallons of puréed rom-com.

Even Gareth Roberts can usually do better than just reworking the usual will-they-or-wont-they? (yes, of course they will) subplot from a thousand tedious sitcoms. It doesn't make the cliché any less clichéd if you cast people who are overweight or have slightly-less-than-model-looks in the roles: it's still those same shiny, happy, cutesy tedium-engines from Friends, just in self-consciously unglamorous Brit disguises.

Meanwhile, call centres look like quite nice places to work.

The sci-fi subplot is pure Moffat, oddly enough. Malfunctioning runaway tech, little girl, etc. And, naturally, the day can only be saved by Craig declaring his love for Sophie. Funny how these things turn out, ain't it?

Mind you, this isn't actively offensive... which is relatively good going for an episode of Series 5.

It starts quite well, with the Doctor's lovely self-description: "not a young professional... more an ancient amateur". Sadly, the Doctor's eccentricity and quirky wisdom are overplayed and overstated to the point where he becomes a totally characterless blur on the screen.

Oh, and it's nice to see James Corden (a man of no discernible talent whatever)... because, y'know, that guy really wasn't on TV enough in 2010.


I've whinged about the closing two-parter, here.


A Christmas Carol

This is beyond bad. This is borderline sinister.

If anything bit the Doctor on the bum in the last story, it failed to bring him down a peg. On the contrary, his hubris, high-handedness, offhand self-appointed puppetmastery and unaccountable meddling know no bounds here.

He actually goes back into a man's life and fiddles with it - as the man watches!

Ebeneezer Scrooge was made to think. He was asked to contemplate his past, present and future. He was persuaded.

Sardick, by contrast, is simply rewritten. His past is invaded. Essentially, his innermost self is violated.

Yes, he was a bastard... but that isn't the issue.  The issue is one of choice.  Offer a person your influence or even opposition and you open up future choices.  Meddle in a person's past (against their wishes!) and you not only ignore their free will in the present but also obviate their self-creation in their own past!

Aside from real ethical considerations, this is the exact opposite of the Doctor's often-stated creed. From 'The Mind Robber' to 'Masque of Mandragora' to 'New Earth', he has championed the freedom to choose and self-create. One cannot alter one's past but one can always choose one's future, within external limitations... and one's past is the history of one's previous acts of self-creation.

You could argue, I suppose, that young Sardick has as much freedom with the Doctor as he had without. He's free to accept or reject the influence of the time traveller. But, at the risk of sounding tautological, the issue of time travel itself (specifically: foreknowledge) is what makes the Doctor's meddling different to, say, the contemporary influence of a parent or teacher. It puts the Doctor in the god spot. He gets to know the possible objectives and results, like someone peeking at the answers page in a quiz book as they do the crossword. He has a 'desired version' of Sardick that he can aim at as he shapes the man's life. The Doctor has become the controller of Sardick's existence and identity. "Hey Kazran", he effectively says, "you are free to choose... to be who and what I design you to be!"

I realise that the story lends support to the idea that we're products of our upbringing and experiences, so there's no intimation that people can be 'born bad' in any simple way.  Which is good.  But the script substitutes its own determinism in the form of the Doctor's enforced moral hegemony.

And as for Abigail... her freedom of choice doesn't appear to occur to anybody as worth considering!  As Gallibase poster LucasS put it:

What offends me here - and I am rarely offended by Who - is the treatment of Abigail. She is given no real character of her own but is treated like a glorified sex doll, dragged out of her cupboard whenever the boys want some fun. She has no say in which of her remaining days she would like to spend. She is used, if not abused, throughout. And this is apparently a heartwarming triumph.

Sardick gets to have an angry moment where he bitterly condemns the Doctor for changing his life and thus breaking his heart.  But the interesting thing about the ending - which shows Sardick flying off into the sky next to his blondcicle plaything, gloriously happy despite the fact that she's got a day to live - completely proves the Doctor's point about "better a broken heart than no heart at all", thus explicitly undercutting Sardick's objections and criticisms, vindicating the Doctor's actions and endorsing his manipulation of the man's life.

And then there's the question of all the other frozen people. I suppose the New Improved Sardick Mk II (© The Doctor) will free them. But maybe he wont, for all the Doctor knows or appears to care.  It never even occurs to the Doctor that it might be a priority to free loads of people who are being held captive as literal collateral in the vault of a rich bastard.  Who is this man?  I don't recognise him, even with his two-faced little speech about never having met an unimportant person. It's clear that the important people are the rich or the pretty. As in 'Voyage of the Damned', there is an attempt to cover this up by making the special little buttercup at the centre of the story into someone lowly... which is undermined by casting a glamorous star.

Aside from the dubious ethics and hypocrisy, what about the level of hubris on display? And we're meant to find it cute, funny and inspiring?

Moreover, this is a demonstration of how Moffat views plot. Just rewrite it as you go along. As long as you can dress it up in a time paradox and garnish it with a vulnerable child...

Lets ignore the fact that the Doctor's actions create a paradox (because if we go down that road we'll end up arguing about how Scaroth could possibly expect his plan to work)... the problem here is that they undermine the whole notion of story itself. In 'Smith and Jones', the Doctor's tie trick ties the story in a bow, illustrates a concept, allows the episode to do something unexpected and makes a character point. In 'A Christmas Carol', the Doctor obviates narrative itself.  And not in the constructive way that narrative is interrogated and deconstructed by, say, modernist literature or surrealist film.

And the episode inherits and exacerbates a problem within its source book. Reform the nasty rich bastard and everything will be okay. Mind you, in just about every other way, this libels Dickens. In Dickens, Scrooge gets reformed partly by seeing the parties of his youth when he was an apprentice at Mr Fezziwig's. They were great social occasions, levelling occasions even. Everyone was invited and everyone had fun. In Moffat, the parties that help to reform Sardick are debauched celeb bashes where the Doctor flirts with Marilyn Monroe (who is, incidentally, talked about as though she actually was nothing but the man-crazy bimbo she sometimes played).

And then we have Amy and Rory indulging in oddly clashing cosplay, for no reason but to titilate the audience.

And flying sharks? How lazy and dull is that? We're supposed to thrill to the imagination on display, yet its meagreness would be demonstrated by just about any of the kids watching as soon as they get given a piece of paper, some felt tips and the freedom to draw anything that comes into their heads.

Worthless, verging on nasty.