That Isn't Right

It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at 'The Reign of Terror' for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should've been called 'That Isn't Right'. So I've given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.

I wasn't going out on much a limb dissing 'The Reign of Terror' (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it.  'The Aztecs', by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good.  It isn't that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it's Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.

I'm not actually going to say that it's bad, as such.  On the whole, it's very well made.  But....


Black and White and Red All Over

"Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa...
do you approve of interracial marriage?"

Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people.  It's not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are 'darked-up' (what would you call it... bronzeface?).  It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they've been reddened.  But even if they weren't actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another.  Costume, ostensibly 'native' mannerisms and speech patterns, etc.  It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar.  Remember, not all blackface involves actual 'darking-up'.  These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not.  As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal "modern blackface" by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they're not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of 'the Few', thus implicitly comparing today's supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, 'entitled' youngsters with the generation of the "finest hour".  Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys 'putting on' verbal fancy dress such as "innit") are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows.  The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.

While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of 'darking-up' was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when 'The Aztecs' (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made.  Even so, it's far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice.  It was common practice, but that isn't an excuse.  Lots of things are common practice.  Excluding young women from important jobs was common practice when Sydney Newman hired Verity Lambert.  Admittedly, when early Doctor Who puts actors in dark make-up, it's usually as part of an attempt to represent other cultures with a degree of integrity rather than to outright parody them.  The educational remit was (at least to start with) a kind of guaranteur that other cultures were to be represented more-or-less 'factually' rather than in parodic terms.  Lucarotti is clearly trying to 'play it straight' in both 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs', as is David Whitaker in 'The Crusade'.  It's fair to say that people at the time may have genuinely perceived a gulf between 'appropriate' make-up conventions in drama about 'foreign' cultures and what went on in The Black & White Minstrel Show.  They were fundamentally different projects.  Still, the implicit assumption of 'The Aztecs' is that Aztec culture is 'ours' (i.e. white Europe's) to represent as we will.  This is the implicit assumption underlying all variants of blackface. It is an inherently imperialistic assumption.

It has recently been suggested to me that criticising old episodes on this basis is like criticising them for not having CGI effects: it is anachronistic.  This is, of course, partly true, in that the idea of this being a criticism would not have occured to many people at the time... but it obscures more than it reveals.  Firstly, it's actually just a restatement of the problem.  Secondly, the analogy fails because the concept of CGI was not only impossible but actually inconceivable in 1963.  There were no similarly ontological reasons why the idea of casting Mexican actors to play Mexicans was impossible and inconcievable.  CGI hadn't been invented then; Mexicans had.  (We must, I suppose, add the rider that modern Mexicans - Mestizos - are, unlike the Aztecs, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.)  The fact that the idea probably didn't occur to anybody isn't an alibi for the series; it is, in and of itself, an indictment of the society of which the series was a product.  In short, it doesn't neutralise the criticism but rather widens it.  It takes us beyond aesthetic nitpicking, moralistic fingerpointing or identity politics, into the realms of broad social critique.

But am I really having a go at such a treasured old episode on these grounds?  Is that okay, even with the alibi that it serves as a 'way in' to wider social issues?  Well, yeah, I think so.  As I say, I'm not moralising (that doesn't interest me) but I am putting forward the 'bronzeface' issue - and its wider implications of appropriation - as a reason to criticise the story.  I think it's altogether too easy and casual the way we tend to toss off phrases like "oh, well, it was of it's time" as though that answers everything and makes it all unproblematic.  I'm sorry, but we're talking about a culture that was genocidally destroyed by Europeans.  Should we really be so sanguine about such sanguinary history?  Isn't there room for a qualm or two about the fact that Europeans are still merrily dressing up as people that Europeans annihilated?  (Yes, yes, I know the Aztecs were themselves conquerors, and Cortés had help from other indigenous Mexicans... that's not the point.  Every imperialist army finds local support and many conquered cultures had their own crimes to answer for... none of that effaces the issue of imperialism itself.  There is a fundamental, quantitative, qualitative difference between, say, the forms of slavery once practiced within Africa and the genocide stemming from the modern European slave trade.  To not see this is to be morally blind.)

There might be a case for saying 'let it go' if we weren't still plagued by blackface and its variants, as well as the social causes which make it seem entirely unproblematic for the dominant (white) culture to represent certain groups as it pleases, without their views being taken into account.  But.  Johnny Depp is soon to appear in redface as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie.  Ben Affleck played a hispanic-American character in Argo (which also assumed the right to use Iran as a foil for American moral superiority).  Look up how they celebrate Christmas in Holland, and have a look at Sinterklaas and his little helper Zwarte Piet, a comedy golliwog (played by white Dutch people in black make-up and wigs) who follows Sinterklaas around on a lead, performing menial chores, begging for scraps and generally being comedically stupid.  Even the Telegraph doesn't think it's acceptable.  Relatedly, anybody who wants to know about 'cripping up' in theatre, films and TV (i.e. 'able bodied' or 'full size' people playing the wheelchair bound or dwarves, thus taking work away from disabled and/or dwarf actors) only needs to mention it to Nabil Shaban on Facebook. 

The Aztecs may be gone, but there are still millions of oppressed people in the world who have to watch as dominant media culture appropriates their appearance and culture as it pleases, representing them in ways which range from the excluding to the patronising to the dehumanising. Does it help anybody if I snipe at an old episode of Doctor Who?  No.  But nor does it help to allow oneself to become innured to the cultural evidence of oppression, to the point where one doesn't notice it enough to be uncomfortable.  Discomfort is sometimes a duty.  It's just far too easy to be comfortable with the representation of others, especially for someone like me whose own group is never going to be patronisingly represented by someone else.  There's an argument you hear about, say, the casting of John Bennett as Chang in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  It goes something like 'well, they just cast him because he was a good actor who suited the role'.  Well, that way of doing things might arguably be fair enough in a post-racist society.  But we don't live in a post-racist society.  Not by a loooooooooong chalk.  Not by white-cliffs-of-Dover-levels of chalkiness.  At the moment, the privilege of behaving and thinking as if we do belongs to the people unaffected by racism. 


A Clash of Civilisations

Even if the actors in 'The Aztecs' weren't darkened with make-up (on the whole, I think they were but, as I said, it's hard to be entirely sure from the visual evidence) they were still part of a production which goes out of its way to excuse Europeans of responsibility for the genocide of the Aztecs.  Barbara, supposedly an expert, makes it very clear, though she doesn't say it explicitly: Cortés destroys the Aztecs because he is horrified by their practice of human sacrifice. If she can talk the Aztecs out of their barbarism, she can save them.  This is couched in terms or salvaging everything good about their culture... yet we see very little of this.  There is little in the story to support the (in itself patronising) idea that the Aztecs, as a whole, were as good as they were bad.  Even their splendid artefacts are only really shown in Yetaxa's tomb... with the emphasis firmly on a sinister, gothic, skull-like face. 

So... a fairly clear stance being elaborated there, I'd say. 

The story does not even gesture towards the idea that Cortés and his men may have set about the violent subjugation of the Aztecs - leading to their effective extermination - for imperialistic reasons; for gold, conquest, power and the imperatives of religious bigotry.  Instead the story aligns itself with an excuse seized upon by the conquerors: that the Aztecs essentially doomed their own culture by dint of their backwardness.  The Spanish demanded conversion and obedience.  In this way, the Aztecs would be 'saved'.  Similarly, Barbara's project is to socially re-engineer Aztec society (from the top down, naturally) so that it loses those aspects supposedly most repellent to the Europeans, i.e. the civilised people.  That is how the Aztecs can be delivered.  The Spanish told themselves they were fighting the Devil.  Barbara is fighting History.  But the logic is the same.

Barbara's struggle is underwritten by the implicit assumption that European civilisation doesn't practice barbarism like human sacrifice.  With reference to the Conquistadors, this is so wrong it's almost funny.  Spain, and other European powers, slaughtered and tortured and enslaved their way through the 'New World' with unrelenting ferocity.  Even if we take this to be some kind of aberration, we need only look at what was going on in Europe itself at the time.  When Cortés arrived in Mexico, it was barely thirty years since the Alhambra Decree, by which Castille and Aragon had formally expelled all Jews unwilling to convert on pain of death.  (A clue that this didn't stem from barbaric practices, that Barbara might have tried to make the Jews renounce, lies in the fact that the expelled Jews weren't permitted to take any of their gold or silver with them.  Go figure.)  This genocidal cleansing was part of the Spanish Inquisition.  It was well underway when Cortés found himself shocked by the Aztecs.  The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to myth, was actually far more careful, sparing and legalistic with torture than most European courts of the time... they only used torture rarely, unlike just about every other legal system in Europe.  Also, the Spanish Church itself never executed anybody.  With Christian piety, they'd hand you over to the state for public burning (or garotting then burning, if you confessed and repented).

Let's imagine a Doctor Who story that never really happened.  'The Spaniards' by Johnvid Whitcarotti (broadcast 32nd Octember 1963½).  Hartnell, Hill, Ford and Russell arrive in 16th century Spain.  Torquemada is played by Dickie Henderson (thus doing Torquemada a disservice, to be honest).  Would the story have been about Barbara trying to convince the Spaniards to change their ways so that Napoleon wouldn't be so shocked by their backwardness and feel the need to invade and spread the Enlightenment by force?  Or would the story have been about the need for the heretics to change their evil ways and thus not incur the righteous wrath of the inquisitors?  I somehow doubt the fuck out of it.  It's usually fairly predictable which victims will be blamed and which will not.

Going back to the supposed binary character of Aztec culture, the dichotomy between their noble side and their savage side remarked upon by all the white, 20th century European characters and the aliens that look and act like white, 20th century Europeans...  Look, I'm sorry, but what culture in human history since the rise of settled civilisation hasn't been capable of both immense goodness and immense cruelty?  It reminds of 'The Visitation', in which the Doctor claims to be baffled that the Terileptils love both art and war... as though this is something unusual.  The unspoken assumption there is that there are cultures which, in distinction to the culture of England in 1666, get their moral priorities mixed up to the point where they can't tell the difference between civilisation and savagery.  To his immense credit, Saward subverts this rather crass implicit assumption by having the debate then swing back and forth, with the Terileptil pointing out that the humans also consider war honourable, whereupon the Doctor retorts that they (unlike Terileptils) have the excuse of not being from a technologically advanced culture.  It turns out that the Doctor's puzzlement stemmed from seeing a highly advanced civilisation still fixated on the 'honour' of war.  Now, the characterisation of any group as "primitive" is troubling, but at least Saward is talking about Europeans, not a culture decimated by Europeans.  Lucarotti, on the other hand, is dragging imperialist baggage along in his brain... and even in a text that bears hallmarks of being a 'labour of love', it shows.


Terror of the Autlocs

Even with some gestures towards Aztec spirituality, history, teaching and law, human sacrifice is still depicted as the central fact of their culture, the keystone to it.  It's hard to see how this stems from anything other than the European obsession with it.  It was undoubtedly a very important aspect of the Aztec worldview... and the story deserves a lot of credit for trying to show their cultural priorities.  However, sacrifice seems as unintegrated as it is dominant.  Its social hegemony doesn't seem to apply to everyone.  Meanwhile, we are given clear guidance as to with whom our sympathies should and shouldn't lie.  Autloc and Cameca are the Nice-But-Then characters (see here) in implied sympathy with the detached, modern observer in front of the TV.  They supposedly stand for us in their moral qualms.  Autloc in particular, in that he tells Tlotoxl that "the rains will come even without sacrifice".  He is something of a proto-sceptic and empiricist.  He accepts Barbara's assertion that people shouldn't be punished for breaking laws with which they're unfamiliar (a doctrine that even today we will not implement).  He regrets the violent punishments faced by Susan and Ian.  He is Barbara's champion and friend precisely because he is humane and rational, unlike his fellow Aztecs.  As Ian says "Autloc is the extraordinary man here", the civilised man, the man who can be saved.  The others are write-offs, utterly resistant to the reasonable words and moral teachings of European conscience.  Barbara's project of humanitarian intervention fails because she meets only one Autloc.

By the way... am I the only person uncomfortable with how much lying Our Heroes do to Autloc and Cameca in this story?  The Doctor manipulates Cameca's love for him and only her own perspicacity brings her to realise that he's going to jilt her.  Autloc, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of making himself a pariah by standing alongside Barbara when she forbids sacrifice, movingly pleads that she not prove false... and she lets him go on believing that she's the reincarnation of Yetaxa so that she can count on his support.  In the end, the Doctor asserts that Barbara has "saved one man" and helped him find "a better" faith.  Well, Barbara's own bad faith is itself a minor illustration of the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of this.  Her absolution of the Conquistadors and her victim-blaming of the Aztecs are the major illustration... with their impending extermination always lurking in the background, undermining any valid way in which superior European morality can possibly stand up as a notion.  Autloc, meanwhile, has lost his friends, his wealth, his position, his house and his religion, and ends up wandering alone, a social outcast.  I hope Barbara never helps me, that's all I can say.

This leads me to consider what is, I think, the biggest aesthetic flaw in 'The Aztecs', the flaw that either spoils it or comes pretty close (I fluctuate on this point).  Tlotoxl.  Everything else I've been moaning about in this post can be put aside, at least for a while, for the pleasure of watching the story.  I do that sort of thing all the time.  Indeed, the vast majority of capitalist cultural production is so multifariously offensive and repellent that, if I weren't capable of just pushing political qualms aside in order to simply enjoy things, I'd probably never be able to switch on the TV, log on to the internet, open a book or go outside.  No, no.  The thing I have most trouble with in 'The Aztecs' is the portrayal of Tlotoxl. 

Tlotoxl is the High Priest of Sacrifice and is supposed to be the representative of Aztec barbarism, opposed to Autloc who is the High Priest of Knowledge.  Well, okay, there's a problematic notion right there: that Aztec 'knowledge' was in some way distinct from, and contradictory to, Aztec religious practices.  I think part of the point is that they weren't antithetical.  But, we'll let that pass.  The point here isn't to critique the episode's inbuilt assumptions (that's what the rest of this post is for) but to track its internal, dramatic consistency... what makes it or breaks it as a coherent and enjoyable story.  So, Autloc and Tlotoxl are set up as antithetical.  Well... that's a problem dramatically.  Isn't part of the whole point of the story that sacrifice cannot be easily detached from the rest of Aztec culture, the 'good bits' so to speak?   If the place of sacrifice in Aztec culture were so separate, so totally bound up with one individual and his prejudices and power base, then wouldn't it be much easier for Barbara to combat?  Just as Tlotoxl tries to discredit her isolated ideas by impugning her and her friends, so she could attack his dogma by isolating him.  She cannot do this.  She doesn't even try.  The episode seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it.  Sacrifice is at once an integral and indivisible aspect of Aztec culture and the pathological ideology of one man and a few loyalists.  (Part of the problem, as ever, is that we're getting history from above, as something that occurs within the minds and maneuvers of the ruling class, without 'the people' being involved, or even much represented.)

There's a rather pleasant irony in the way Tlotoxl becomes a sceptic towards an apparent manifestation of the gods.  Autloc, the man of knowledge, the proto-empiricist, credulously assumes Yetaxa's reincarnation, while Tlotoxl, the man of faith, becomes a sceptic about it.  The man who charges others with heresy becomes a heretic.  The man who questions divine intervention becomes a villain in a story which revolves around the idea that people should be sceptical of apparent divine influence in the natural world.  We are meant to boo him for being a religious zealot and an opponent of Barbara's truth... yet he spends the entire story trying to prove her a liar (which she is) for pretending to be a god when she isn't!  These ironies, by themselves, aren't the problem.  The problem lies in the way Tlotoxl is depicted.  Tlotoxl is machiavellian.  

"I've got a hunch you're not really a god."

John Ringham plays Tlotoxl in full Richard III-mode.  Tlotoxl is hunched, insinuating, greasy, snide, etc.  He even adopts a clipped, sneering manner of speech that seems reminiscent of Olivier's movie performance as Richard.  This is something we're all so familiar with that the randomness of it seldom gets remarked upon.  Why?  What possible need is there for a Richard III-esque villain in a story about the Aztecs?  Of course, it isn't really Ringham's fault.  He takes his cues from his costume (he gets that sinister line of make-up across his mouth, messy dark hair, darkened eyes, etc) and from the rest of the production, including the script.  When first seen, Tlotoxl is loping around in a corner like a crookback.  He is made visibly different from the other Aztecs, to the point where Ian and the Doctor can immediately tell - just by looking at him - that he's "the local butcher" (that one-man pathology again).  This, in itself, isn't much like Richard III (most people in Shakespeare's plays tend to initially find Richard quite plausible) but Tlotoxl as scripted recalls Richard in other ways, especially in his villainy, his manipulativeness, his plotting, his promises of advancement to allies, and his theatricality.  He distorts others around him with his showish puppeteering.  Tonila and Ixta both get drawn in and set on sneaky courses that otherwise they'd probably have avoided. (It should be added that, though drawn from Richard, Tlotoxl is considerably different in that Richard is a kind of just punishment upon a set of people who have devoutly deserved him... something often not realised by people unfamiliar with the earlier plays in the tetralogy.)

Let's be clear: this is rubbish.  It does great damage to the whole narrative thrust of the story, which is supposed to be about a people inextricably both noble and cruel.  Whatever we might think of that characterisation, or the project of characterising an annihilated culture that way, that's still what the story is supposed to be about.  Instead, we get a culture that looks like it would probably be pretty much okay if only it could be rid of the evil, sneaky, oily, crafty, religious fundamentalist limping around the margins.  Just think how much more powerful 'The Aztecs' would have been if Tlotoxl had been a character of integrity, of dignity, of honest faith.  The tragedy here is that, dramatically, Autloc and Tlotoxl should be different aspects of one man.  At the very least they should be close friends who like and respect each other, more similar than different.  That would not only resolved a deeply jarring dramatic problem, it would also have resolved some of the thematic problems with the story, taking away the idea that Aztec 'knowledge' was antithetical to Aztec belief, taking away the easy Nice-But-Then character, etc.

On the whole, however, even a 'good' High Priest of Sacrifice would still leave us with the problem of Autloc as the one "extraordinary man".  Indeed, it might even exacerbate it.  At least Tlotoxl of Gloucester, the emblem of sacrifice as a lone villain, might be seen as undermining the idea that Autloc is unusual.  Tlotoxl looks like the extraordinary man instead... extraordinarily evil.  But, in that case, why did Barbara fail?

You see, much as I'm not in favour of human sacrifice (no more than anybody else anyway), I'm kind-of on Tlotoxl's side.  Who precisely is this person claiming to be a goddess, lying, cheating, undermining the law, foisting her alien values upon his society, endangering (as Tlotoxl and most others would see it) the continued favour of the gods and, thereby, the survival of the people?  Why does she know better than him and the rest of his society?  Of course, Barbara doesn't articulate why she assumes her greater wisdom.  But the story has its implicit assumptions about this (see above) and I don't like that the one guy who stands against them is depicted as a villain.  (Of course, from another angle, Tlotoxl is a member of the Aztec ruling class and, as such, I'm against him.  Historical materialism... which is one way of describing my outlook... requires this kind of flexibility all the time.)


Resistance was Futile

In the end, it's History that dooms the Aztecs.  All historicals are inherently conservative because they all have the immutable writtenness of History lurking in the background.  Even when the story doesn't tilt on the axis of changing or preserving history, there is always a shape to events that cannot be changed.  Owing to its educational remit and supposedly rationalist stance, the show cannot (Inglourious Basterds-style) change the pre-written plot and go against what Teacher Says at School.  In historicals, The Way It Happened (or at least The Way We Think It Happened) is always a limiting factor.  It patrols the boundaries.  It limits the perimeter of the possible, must as capitalist realism limits the range of the thinkable within the mainstream media.  This may be the reason why the psuedo-historical was invented.  Dennis Spooner chose the classic example of school history (1066 and all that) and stuck a time meddler into it, threatening to erase all the books.  But 'The Time Meddler' is the story that proves the rule.  No matter how cheeky or satirical it is about the whole concept of representing History (knowingly showing us the TV strategy of cliche, employed even in the 'straight' mode) it cannot escape the overriding imperative to stick to the established arc.  There is literally no escape from this innately conservative impulse within the bounds of the historical... and the inevitability of aligning with the history books creates a dramatic effect whereby those doomed by History come over as inevitably doomed, inescapably trapped.  They were always doomed.  Coupled with the implication of progress (to which all those Nice-But-Then characters implicitly attest) and the imperialistic appropriation involved in representing non-European cultures, you get an effect whereby There Is No Alternative but for the conquered to be conquered, the exterminated to be exterminated.  You can't have the Saxons beat back the Normans.  You can't have the French Revolution succeed against reaction and counter-revolution, thus becoming able to fulfill its promises.  You can't have the Aztecs escape the swords of the Conquistadors.  As the exhausted cliche goes: history is written by the victors... so you end up with an acceptance that you can't rewrite the judgements of the powerful, of the conquerors, of the imperial culture.

Not one line.

Apparently they were also noble and artistic.

I know I complain a lot... but I don't think I've ever gotten over just how much wasted promise there is in the fact that one of the very first things the series did was have a young person reading a school textbook about the French Revolution and declaring "That isn't right!". 

Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.

You'll Go Blind

I just rewatched a Channel 4 documentary series I originally saw first time round back in 1999.  Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation.  I remembered it as fascinating, and it certainly was... but not for the reasons I remembered.  Watched now, it's fascinating for its intense and suffocating provincialism.  I refer to a provincialism of time and cultural moment.  To be cruder: the series reeks of the stale atmopshere of the 90s.  I don't just mean that it's dated.

After two decent episodes dealing with the Victorian creation of the concept of pornography (i.e. as a closed-off anteroom of culture, only to be studied... and perhaps enjoyed... by responsible, educated males) in the wake of the unearthing of Pompeii, and the revolutionary porn writing of the Enlightenment, the series starts dwelling on 20th century visual forms, from the photograph to the internet.

The last episodes are particularly mired in the stagnant and repellent atmosphere of their era.  All the hallmarks of the late-90s intellectual milieu (during which I endured acres of trendy theory at University) are there.  The social and political cynicism masquerading as consumerist utopianism.  Utopianism itself stripped of all noble and liberationist inflections and fused with a kind of gleeful dystopianism, reflecting the way that the post-Cold War intellectual landscape, with its End of History vibe, saw the future horrors and joys of unfettered capitalism as being equally inevitable... and then celebrated this with a knowingly sick grin of elitest contempt.  The countdown to an apocalypse of banality and boredom that was supposedly hiding just around the millenium.  The dyspeptic, misanthropic celebration of supposedly new and bleeding edge trends that are (perpetually) said to be just about to change/destroy social life irrevocably.  The putative change to a post-industrial economy, the putative unravelling of social life and the rise of the ubiquitous selfish individual (phenomena that, in as much as they were real, were not actually new).

The series is stuffed with comment from entrepreneurs or capitalists (without the word or topic 'capitalism' ever being properly mentioned), or from 'social critics' who generalise about what 'we' are becoming (with 'we' implicitly standing for all humanity while actually referring to a tiny sliver of the urban upper middle classes in the developed West).  It's enormously telling that, in the midst of scads and scads of pontificating about the meaning of things from the P.O.V of the producer or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the P.O.V of the worker, of the... if you'll pardon me... working stiffs getting screwed.  Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser's excellent Reefer Madness will know what this TV series left out.  At one point, a theorist is talking about how internet porn (which is solitary, private and interactive) takes the 'imposition' out of the equation... even as the camera shows a semi-naked woman gyrating around on a bed, being given orders by paying customers who are watching her on their monitors.  Nobody's 'imposing' on her then.  I guess she's economically independent but does that job purely for the lulz.  Who knows?  Admittedly, they interview her later, but she talks about what she does, not why she has to do it.

The oppression of women, the objectification of female bodies, patriarchy, sexism... these do not pop up.  (This is actually a tad surprising... though feminist theory at that time was often comfortable forgetting about such things too.)  Despite a female voiceover, and some interviews with quirky 70s porn actresses, this series is resolutely and unselfconsciously focused on the male experience of enjoying his sexual dominance.  Rape culture is hardly a glint in the script writer's eye.

This kind of comatose, complacent apoliticism is rampant throughout the series.  There is nothing about the inequalities of internet access (or access to media more generally) in any of the discussion of porn consumption, videocameras and cybersex.  In the midst of all the profound thinkerizing about porn's journey into 'the mainstream' there is precious little time left for wondering who sets the agenda of the mainstream.  Media ownership is not a topic, except for the times when a handful of porntrepreneurs (presented as pioneers and farseeing cultural trendsetters) get to gibber their self-seeking spin.

Far from being a 'secret history of civilisation', this is a celebration of an open secret... couched in the fashionable idiocies of vulgarised late-90s po-mo posturing.  It's telling that several of the 'social critics' in the series make predictions about what will have come to pass 10 to 15 years in the future (i.e. now) all of which are resolutely wrong.  Porn isn't as mainstream as microwaves (it is still cordoned off by very, very old power structures), nor is it democratized by public 'gonzo' participation (it's still a massive corporate business, intensely undemocratic and still based on mass exploitation), nor is it the pervasive preserve of an entire planet-ful of lonely, isolated, selfish, hedonistic individuals who live in the ruins of a social polity decimated by new media, finding ultimate nirvana in disconnected masturbation (this is still but a fragment of a truth, restricted to a narrow band of the relatively privileged).  Still, it's not surprising that they guessed wrong, given that their guesses about the future were just extrapolations of what they thought was going on in 1999, most of which was based on the rhetorical exaggeration of half-truths.

This is a rant, not an attempt to provide an alternative analysis... I know for a fact that I'm not needed (or qualified) to provide one of those.  I will just say this: you can't understand the commodification of fetish without understanding the fetishizing of commodities.  Indeed, if there was ever a 'proof' (whatever that might mean in the social sciences) of the theory of commodity fetishism, it's the porn business.  Not that you'd know that from watching Channel 4's best attempts at analysis.

As we all know, history didn't end in the 90s.  Despite the lingering 'mainstream' idea (who sets these agendas? ...be nice to know, wouldn't it?) that There Is No Alternative, capitalism triumphant was nevertheless undermined by its own blowback (9/11, the environment, the crash, etc).  It's telling that, though wrong, Fukuyama looks insightful compared to the throngs who followed in what they took to be a cultural variant of the same 'sense of an ending'.  The idea that history, culture, society etc were all grinding to a halting death/mutation in the chilly-yet-glorious dawn of 'postmodern' hyper-techno-consumerism was the bugbear/fantasy of a layer of intellectuals who read too much Baudrillard and were given too many opportunities to pontificate on TV.

Is it any better now?  Well, I've not been around academia for a good long while now (I do not miss it) but I'm guessing that much of the same balls is still being talked, albeit in a less confidently millenarian manner.  But that's got to be some improvement, hasn't it?

I liked being 23.  Otherwise, I really don't miss 1999. 

RIP Hugo Chávez

Chávez is dead.

 La lucha continua Compañero.



UPDATE; LINKS:

Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb, here and here.

Greg Grandin in The Nation.

Derrick O'Feefe at Rabble.ca.

Media Lens on Chavez as seen by British and American journalism.

Owen Jones in the Independent.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - documentary about the 2002 US-backed coup.


NEW UPDATE; MORE LINKS 7/3/13:

Tariq Ali in The Guardian.

FAIR on the US media's demonization project.

Roobin at Through the Scary Door - a critical assessment.


NEW UPDATE, LINK 13/3/13:

Media Lens on The Death of a Bogeyman 


MORE, 14/3/13:

Hugo Chavez and the Great Global Poverty Conspiracy, Greg Palast.  (Don't let the word 'conspiracy' put you off.)

Skulltopus 13: Return to Fang Rock

My monomaniacal focus on the quasi-Weird(ish/esque) in Doctor Who resumes (after a bit of a hiatus... during which I just couldn't be arsed) and reaches the Graham Williams years, the heyday of the tentacular in the Baker era.  See here for links to all previous Skulltopus posts and here for the last one (which includes a summary of the whole thing so far).

I started the whole Skulltopus thing with 'Horror of Fang Rock', but that was ages ago (and before I really knew where I was going with this topic) so I feel the need to go back to it, if comparatively briefly.

Okay, so 'Fang Rock'.  Hmm.  Well, it's a Terrance Dicks script, isn't it?  Uncle Tel is, as we all know, well dodgy on politics.  He writes about how the working classes are happy being poor, and aristocrats are dandy, and the empire was kind of okay.  His baseline assumption is one of contented 'capitalist realism', of unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.  Plus he's rubbish on the question of women and sexism.  He's so bad on issues of sexual exploitation that he actually seems to be rather too keen on bringing up the subject of rape.

Right?

Weeeeell... however true the above charges may or may not be with regard to his spin-off novels, the funny thing is that, in practice, his actual TV scripts don't show much evidence of these traits.  For instance, 'Fang Rock' is obsessed with class, hierarchy, status, property and money... and not in an obviously reactionary, or smugly-liberal way.  In fact, it's kind of edgy (as these things go).  It's one of those relatively few Who stories outside the early Pertwee years which portrays people performing waged labour, let alone showing the working people of twentieth century Britain.  And, generally speaking, the story is greatly and openly more sympathetic to the working stiffs, and what they have to put up with, than it is to the gentry.  The world the Rutan comes to and fits into is a world of deep economic and social divisions between classes based on work, finance, empire and gender.  The workers have to work for a living, and do.  They are explicitly below the gentlefolk in a very visible social hierarchy that is painted in unmistakably negative terms, to the point where their lives are shown to be implicitly considered of less value.  The business of who does and who doesn't get a lifeboat when Palmerdale's yacht goes down foreshadows the sinking of the Titanic, probably the most famous example of 'gilded age' social injustice in popular consciousness.  We are evidently invited and expected to be angry about this, to side with Harker.  Indeed, in his rush to indicate his line on this, Dicks makes Lord Palmerdale just a tad too obviously despicable.  Palmerdale's wealth is evidently based on financial speculation.  Skinsale's position comes from his status as an M.P., as an old imperial soldier and (presumably) his respectable birth (i.e. he's a son of an old propertied family).  Adelaide is subordinate to these two because of her position as an employee and a woman (she entirely accepts her lower status and behaves according to cultural norms associated with her gender, presumably having been brought up a 'lady') but she's still above Vince, Reuben and Harker.  Vince is evidently taken with her but, to her, he's an instrumentum vocale (a tool that talks), not a young man.  Meanwhile, it's heavily hinted that she's also Palmerdale's mistress, which seems almost like one of her tasks as his secretary!  Thus sex is hinted to have been commodified, with the woman as commodity... something which is picked up on by various little details in the story, i.e. the commercially printed porn the Doctor finds under Reuben's bed. 

It'd be easy to mistake the portrayal of Adelaide (who is annoyingly snooty and then annoyingly wimpy) as misogynistic... but for the fact that Dicks writes Leela brilliantly, giving her guts, brains, determination, initiative and plenty of her own ideas about things.  When Adelaide gets hysterical and 'needs' a slap, Dicks gives the job to Leela.  The strong woman (Leela is a genuinely strong woman here - compare and contrast with Moffat's ersatz models) is impatient with the woman who has allowed herself to be infantilised by male rule.  (The slap is still an uncomfortable moment... it's like Leela has internalised male attitudes to 'the weaker sex' and has become an 'honorary man'.  Ewww.)

The story also strongly hints at an awareness of imperialist competition as a major force in the Europe of the new 20th century, linking this to the rise of new technologies.  The Rutan is an imperialist, speaks in a tone of snobbish and racist and militarist arrogance, has a peculiarly technological interior nature (it speaks of its shape-shifting as a "new technique"), has an affinity with electricity, adapts the electrical generator and leaves communications tech around the place.   Reuben's grumblings about the newfangled meshes with his anxieties about foreign spies.  He even names various competing imperialist nations who will be involved in the forthcoming 'Great War'.  Meanwhile, Palmerdale (the arriviste "money grubber") and Skinsale (the politician and old imperialist) are squabbling over financial dealings and clashing conceptions of social priorities (profit versus 'honour')... and their conflict comes to pivot on control of a wireless telegraph.

Class, snobbery, militarism, imperialism, new technology, new communications.  The Rutan is like the twentieth century itself, crashing in upon the stranded Edwardians like a lethal, inundating, incomprehensible "cold wave".  So recently they were Victorians, Britannia ruled the waves unrivalled, the balance of power in Europe (between "the French, the Russkies," etc.) was relatively stable and everyone (workers and women, for instance) knew their place, etc.  But here comes trouble.  The Rutan embodies this trouble, and the repressed fears of the Edwardian characters about this trouble.  We, the audience, relate to this via a sort of thematic dramatic irony.  We know what the Edwardian characters don't.  We know what awaits them just round the corner of history.

'Fang Rock' even gets closer than most stories to noticing that inequality, xenophobic nationalism, imperialism and modern war are things generated by capitalism.  The lighthouse is a workplace, staffed by people who've been "fisherfolk for generations" but who are now evidently proletarians.  The toffs embody empire, parliament, wealth, finance, speculation, sexual oppression and blatant disregard for even the lives of the workers.  The lighthouse showcases the twentieth century arriving, in the form of electricity, modern communication and the suspicious guarding of European coastlines... and because the setting is, above all else, a modern workplace, the story gets so close to noticing capitalism as a connective skein.  There have, of course, been lighthouses since ancient times... but the modern lighthouse - a technological workplace staffed by waged labourers - is explicitly counterposed with the ancient lighthouse powered by slaves.

Dicks was, of course, the script editor during much of the Pertwee era, when the evasive semiotic link within Doctor Who between capitalism and the tentacular was first developed.  He seems to carry the connection with him into the Williams years.  And so the monster - the locus where all this might have gelled (sorry) into coherent critique - becomes something gelatinous, protean and unpindownable, both in its physical form and in its metaphorical valences.  Part of the strategy whereby this is achieved is the utilisation of the Weird maritime, the tentacular. The radical incoherence of the tentacular is again resorted to as an escape route, as in 'Spearhead' and 'Claws of Axos'.  Once again the tentacles are linked to a fudging, an obscuring, a clouding at the central point at the story where these modern nightmares meet, where they threaten to join up.  The crux of the story, of its meaning - namely, the Rutan - becomes irresolveably fuzzy.  I'm not sure if the tentacular nature of the Rutan is what achieves this fudging, or whether the fudging leads to the choice of the tentacular form.  (Being a Marxist, I can simply wheel out my big cheat button and call it 'dialectical'.)  Either way, while we can still discern the contours of some kind of critique of imperialism in the Rutan, we cannot make a coherent and convincing case for it as representing either a critique of British imperialism generated by a system of class exploitation (which the rest of the story generally leans towards) or a defence of British inter-class national unity against foreign imperialist threats.  (I've gone into all this in greater detail here.)  And, of course, while the Rutan suggests many things - snobbery, militarism, new technology, modern communications - it pointedly fails/refuses to suggest capitalism in any way.  It's uninterested in commodities or profit.  Skinsale gets himself killed ducking back for Palmerdale's diamonds; the Rutan shows no interest in them at all.  At the place where the diagnosis might have been, we find instead an amorphous mass of phenomena.  This is the early-Pertweean mode of the tentacular repeating itself in the join between Hinchcliffe and Williams, thanks to Dicks (that relic of Pertwee, returning for the first time since 'The Brain of Morbius' got savagely rewritten).

Maybe Dicks' reinsertion of the old Pertwee-era tentacular mode is what sets the scene for the frequent recurrence of tentacles (and other Weirdish/esque things) throughout the next few years.

Next... 'Image of the Fendahl'.  That's a BIG one.

The Moment Has (Almost Certainly) Been Prepared For...

It's the end of an era.  He's quit and they'll have to find a replacement. 

Of course, the show will go on.  Eras end.  New ones begin.  The way they can just change the guy in the role every few years is key to the long-running success of the whole thing. 

Shame it's always a white guy.  Why not try a woman or a black person next?  Just once. 

I know some people have a problem with that notion, saying they'd be unable to relate to the character if he changed gender or skin colour... but I think that's just sexism or racism in disguise. 

If the role can be played by a completely different guy every few years - with a different height, different accent, etc. - then why can't he also have different naughty bits or epidermal pigmentation?  This last guy was much younger than the last one, for instance! 

I think it's silly to insist on such arbitrary notions of continuity when all the underlying notions are so fantastical and absurd.  Part of the appeal of the thing is that it's pure fantasy!  You can do whatever you want!

It's bad to let the hardline fanatics insist on a 'correct' version of how things should work.  It stifles creativity.  Makes the whole thing boring.  Inaccessible.  Off-putting.  Unappealing to outsiders.  It'll cause the crucial 'numbers' to go down.

Still, that's cults for you.

Fearful Symmetry

There are several answers to the question "who originally created the Daleks?"  You could say "Davros" with geeky fidelity.  You could say "Terry Nation", as many people have (Trivial Pursuit used to also credit him with creating Doctor Who itself).  One could even start listing the people who actually constructed the props (wasn't the job outsourced to a company called Shawcross or something?).  As is usually the case, the most accurate answer is probably the most complex and contingent, i.e. "A consortium of people including, most prominently but to various degrees of importance, Terry Nation, Verity Lambert, David Whitaker, Raymond Cusick, Peter Hawkins, David Graham..." etc.  Without a doubt, however, the individual who did more than any other to make them a huge success was an in-house designer employed by the BBC called Raymond Cusick.  Cusick died a little while ago, widely recognised for his role by fans.

I'm a great advocate of 'ignoring the rat' or, as I prefer to put it, 'seeing past the bubblewrap', i.e. of giving weak aesthetics a pass if the story beneath them is interesting enough.  You shouldn't let the rubbishness of the big snakes detract from 'Kinda' and 'Snakedance', etc.  Indeed, those very stories are examples of when aesthetic 'failures' can actually make things more interesting.  However, there are times when aesthetic 'success' is absolutely crucial, when the way things sound and look really matters... and, for a show so widely considered to be cheap and shonky, aesthetics played a surprisingly big part in getting Doctor Who off and running.  The original opening titles, the TARDIS interior, etc.

Undoubtedly, the single biggest aesthetic factor in the early success of Doctor Who was Ray Cusick's designs for the Daleks.  Lots of people played a part in making the Daleks' first story such a big aesthetic success.  Tristram Carey's music, Christopher Barry's direction, etc., all made that story impressive, a strange and new kind of televisual experience.  But it was the Daleks that were the icing on the cake.

Oddly enough, the first bit of a Dalek we ever see, the bit which had the BBC switchboard jammed after the cliffhanger, was the bit most widely derided: the plunger.  It isn't until the next episode that we see the Daleks fully.  Their tanklike bulkiness, their strange mixture of sharp angles and curves, the obscure functionalism that makes them look almost like pieces of kinetic art, their shortness and wideness and sheer non-humanoidiness... and yet with enough that is intelligible about their shape (they have a eye which is part of something vaguely head-like) that they can be understood as sentient, intelligent, alive.

They are, undoubtedly, one of the design classics of the 20th century.  Distinctly 'of their time' and yet sufficiently detached from anything recognisably particular that they will translate.  Unlike the Cybermen or the Silurians, the Daleks remained the same - albeit with a few new little details - upon their return.  They didn't need changing.

If Cusick had done a bad job, if he'd bungled it (as, let's be honest, so many other designers would bungle in subsequent stories), not only would Doctor Who never have taken off the way it did (leading us all here, for better or worse) but Terry Nation would probably never have become the kind of person that Alan Whicker would want to interview.

The immediate success of the Daleks shows that, from the first, Doctor Who's success was built upon an aesthetic factor.  In this case, that factor was almost immediately translated into mass-produced merchandising.  The Daleks sold.  Big time.

Like all robotic monsters, the Daleks partly stem from anxieties about the autonomous product, which is what the fetishised commodity looks like to SF.  The Daleks are designed to look both inhuman and alive, mechanical and sentient.  They are, partly, one visual expression of anxieties about industrial production.  That's also why their appearance recalls the tank, a manufactured monster that, after two world wars, had probably become the quintessential image of the dangerous industrial product, overtaking even the steam train (which, in its early days, was likened to Frankenstein - the first fictional product monster).

There's a way in which the Dalek is a connective image between the anxiety about the product which centres upon its dangerousness (i.e. the tank), and the anxiety which centres upon its autonomy, the anxiety which centres upon its capacity to merge with us and contain us.  The Dalek is a war machine, a killing machine out of control that also threatens to be our eventual post-atomic shell... but by its very enigmatic attractiveness (all that suggestive-but-obscure symmetry, slightly disrupted by the clashing 'arms' which are obviously 'for' something even if its hard to guess quite what) also makes itself into a top-selling product.  This is commonplace now, with endless representations of film/TV monsters sold as toys or models.  At the time, however, the Dalek was quite new in this respect too.  (In some ways, they set the stage for the coming of the Kenner Star Wars toys and other such model/toys based on fantastic narratives.)  Those anxieties about the product already mentioned get immediately connected to the nature of the Dalek (in the real world that is, rather than in-story) as a commodity.  And, while this isn't conscious, it seems more liminal than the same set of connections implicit in, say, toy tanks or cap guns.  The Daleks were, after all, written to be a commentary on one trajectory of mankind, leading to eliminationist chauvinism and industrial/technological barbarism.  When you play with a Dalek, you're playing with something consciously created as a signifier for various political nightmares.  I don't say that this is terribly socially significant.  It's just another one of those interesting ironies of consumerism and its relationship with the wider culture.  I certainly don't think it's 'subversive' when embedded anxieties about capitalist modernity help to sell a product.  It's too commonplace.

There are all kinds of problems with Nation's original script (for instance, it's peculiar that his anti-Nazi parable has blonde, athletic, volkisch farmers as a physical and ethical ideal) but he deserves credit for providing a context against which Cusick's design can take on potent associations.  I'm quite happy to say that Cusick did more to 'create' the Daleks as we know them (their visual impact being so crucial to their success) but, on the other hand, Nation did (albeit using lots of cliches) give Cusick an idea with more potential resonance than just 'big, bad evil robot' to play with.  Cusick's acuteness (in making the Daleks both strange and familiar, robotic and alive) works with Nation's selection of certain tropes (the mutant, the cyborg, the post-Atomic, the Nazi) to create something that still seems to 'work' fifty years later.

Plus, when we were kids... we all wanted to get inside a Dalek and exterminate the kids at school we didn't like.

Or was that just me?

Changing Times, Nice Guys and 'Strong Female Characters'

I've gone on the record saying I think Moffat's version of Doctor Who is sexist and heteronormative.  A challenge I often hear - and it's a serious point - is the idea that Moffat's Who is, at least, no worse than previous eras on issues like depictions of gay relationships, and is frequently better.  There are positive depictions of gay characters, quite unlike anything in, say, the Hartnell era.  Well, firstly, let me say that I don't want to claim that things are 'worse' now (in any absolute way) than in the Hartnell years, when homosexuality essentially didn't exist at all in-story in the Who universe. And sure, many old episodes have displayed all sorts of heteronormative stuff, and also outright homophobic stuff (albeit usually by implication).  Harrison Chase is, in many ways, implied to be an evil gay man (it's not that I think gay people are like him, but rather that he is constructed partly of tropes that connote gayness in pop culture).

It isn't that there's a scale that pertains to culture now just as it pertained in 1963 and 73 and 83 etc, with Who scoring 3.7 points on the heteronormativity scale (or the racist, or sexist, or whatever, scale) in 1963 but now scoring 9.1 under Moffat. That's not how I see it (which isn’t to say that comparisons across the decades are meaningless). Normative assumptions shift and fluctuate with all sorts of social and economic changes (this is part of what I was getting at in my previous post with regards to upswings and downswings in the reactionary content of culture). There are ideas now that simply weren't widely accepted (or even much known about) in, say, 1963... but which are now widely understood and championed by large numbers of people.

Awareness of homophobia, discrimination against LGBT people, heteronormativity, etc, are all examples of issues where people’s widespread views have changed drastically. And this isn't the ‘condescension of posterity’, because I acknowledge that people's ideas have been changed by people, particularly as a result of the great breakthrough struggles of the mid 60s through to the early 70s. That's partly why Moffat's Who looks extraordinarily liberal and right-on by the standards of much of the old show... if we look at them with the same constant, reductive scale of measurement... which we can't do because it’s more complex than that, with struggles and changing ideas altering the normative assumptions against which we make judgements. 

To be crude about it, even today's crusading reactionaries in the Tory party talk the talk of respect for gender equality, racial equality, etc.  They have to... even as their actual policies reinforce division, discrimination, inequality and attacks upon the living standards of ordinary people that Thatcher could only fondly dream of getting away with.  But there are swings and roundabouts in people's consciousness.  Poeple today would be (and are) very unwilling to tolerate open racial prejudice from their politicians, yet there is widespread anxiety about immigration and asylum, carefull inculcated by the media.  People still, by and large, frown on the idea of privatising the NHS, yet they have (like the frog placed in a pot brought gradually to the boil) been slowly trained to tolerate economic assaults that would once have seemed outrageous.

I think the (speaking broadly) liberalisation of views on cultural matters is partly what people are getting at when they say that some old bit of sexism or racism (Toberman for instance) is "of its time" - and to an extent that's a reasonable thing to point out. The trouble is that it forgets that there were plenty of people in the world at the time 'Tomb' was made who would've recognised it as racist, and who were fighting to change things. That's how things shift. To leave that out is to end up assuming a sort of inevitable, whiggish upward march of progress that doesn't have much to do with people (a widespread assumption actually, especially in much media that tells stories about the past, cf Downton Abbey, 'Human Nature' etc).

I would actually argue that Moffat's Who is noticeably sexist and heteronormative even when measured (in that reductive and simple way) by the standards even of much old Who...  Amy seems a noticeably retrograde depiction even by the standards of, say, Jo Grant, who is at least not defined by her looks and her romantic/sexual relationships with men… though she ends up that way in ‘Green Death’, sadly.  But yeah, Moff-Who has overt and sympathetic gay/lesbian characters, which is definitely ‘progress’ (I take the concept of progress seriously, even as I see it as one side of one coin alongside barbarism). But it exists alongside all sorts of really quite outrageous gender essentialism, if not outright sexism. I mean, just look at ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, which pretends to have loads of ‘strong female characters’… but which is actually about women slavishly obsessed with men, defined by their heterosexual relationships, and prone to obsessing over clothes, hair and their weight.  It remains to be properly analysed, but there is a definite unhealthiness (verging on the abusive) about the Doctor's treatment of River.  Note the number of times when, in a crunch, he aggressively shouts her down and she instantly starts obeying him.  She's not a dishrag peril-monkey like some of the various versions of Victoria.  Nor is she a kind of rape culture dolly like Peri so often was.  But that doesn't mean she's an acceptable representation.  She, I think, is a reactionary, sexist depiction for our times, not previous times.  She's how a certain kind of male privilege envisions a certain kind of woman now.  As with River, so with Amy.  She's not the kind of sexist depiction who twists her ankle and makes tea for the men.  She's the kind that starts out with a 'nice guy' admirer who is stuck in the 'friend zone', pining for the girl he think he deserves because of his longstanding puppyish devotion, while simultaneously wanting her for her looks not her personality.  She's the kind that represents the terrified longing of men who feel they have a right to the devotion of glamourous girls, who interpret gender equality and 'strong women' as entailing a relationship in which they are (pardon me) 'pussywhipped'... while still being grovellingly grateful for permission to stare up their partner's skirt.  This becomes the basis of a romantic relationship we're all supposed to cheer on, our 'shipper-hearts all aflutter.

There's loads more to be said on this subject alone.

To elaborate on shifting scales.  Our present awareness of 'Trans' issues is much better than it was fifty years ago (precisely because of the social struggles of people, as noted)... and yet we still get astonishing bigotry, like that article recently written by Julie Burchill and published by The Observer. By the standards of the 'old days' the whole debate looks insane because it takes place within a drastically shifted set of assumptions about what constitutes normality, acceptable lifestyles, etc. Suzanne Moore writes an article rightly pointing much sexist pressure on women today (ideas that wouldn’t have been considered acceptable, or even intelligible, public discourse at many times in the past) and, in the process, makes a transphobic remark. Called on it by and politicised people on twitter, she goes into defensive mode and her mate Burchill swings to her defence with an article that is a really repellent exercise in excluding language, patronising comments, condescension, stereotyping and victim-blaming. The whole debate takes place within a shifted culture, where it is nominally agreed that trans people shouldn’t be the victims of discrimination, but there is still the possibility of people at a liberal paper okaying something that is utterly vile in its discriminatory language. By the standards of fifty years ago, Burchill is a progressive, maybe even in that nasty article. By the standards of today, she makes any decent person lose their lunch.

It’s the same sort of thing with Moffat. Yeah, the guy’s more liberal and progressive and ‘tolerant’ than that old racist homophobe William Hartnell. Yet his version of the show continually reinforces heteronormativity and gender essentialism in the context of a culture that has greater scope than ever to engage with the idea that there really isn’t any such thing as a sexual or gender ‘norm’, and that the idea that there is (and that it consists of white, hetero, cis-gendered people getting married and having babies) is a discourse of privilege at best, cynical power at worst. Yet this knowledge doesn’t get in, besides some gay/lesbian bit-characters whom the Doctor ‘tolerates’ chummily. And, lets be honest here, it’s obvious that the lesbian couple are there at least partly so Moffat can make sniggery jokes about girl-on-girl cunnilingus.

Up to what I’ve seen, the Moffat era seems to have been one long carnival of reaction… or, at best, sheer disinterested apoliticism in places where apoliticism is effectively a tolerance of established power (i.e. Nixon). This is a key point. At times, disinterest becomes reaction. At his worst, Moffat’s Nixon is dubious in his cultural views. He doesn’t like the idea of Canton marrying a black guy.  This is a problem; that he ordered the genocidal carpet bombing of peasant countries isn't. Beneath the sneering at Dicky the Intolerant, there is heteronormativity (we don’t like him because he doesn’t tolerate our good gay guest character the way we right-on people do) and beneath that there is a tendency to side with power by default. By silence.

Of course, quite a lot of viewers will share Moffat’s normative assumptions about heterosexuality, gender essentialism, blindness to the genocide of ‘our’ politicians, etc… but that’s precisely why and how normative assumptions in media culture work, because they pander to some people’s… well… assumptions. The assumptions pandered to are likely be the assumptions shared by a privileged group in society, precisely because people with that kind of power and platform in the media are, by definition, privileged. It’s a circle, with the assumptions partly produced by, and then picked up by, and then reproduced by, the culture industries. And assumptions like that are retrograde in a society being increasingly challenged by people who are marginalised and patronised by the supposed ‘norm’. 

Part of my point was that so many of the great pop-culture icons of capitalist mass culture are now openly peddling very explicit, comforting, reassuring, aggressively defensive versions of just such normative assumptions. More than usual, I sense. And largely unhindered by any influence from struggle movements like Occupy or the Arab Spring... if not actively in negative response to them. There is a mobilisation of capitalist culture against the anxiety caused by its own crisis, and against challenges from below/‘outside’. And we are, socially and politically and economically, in such shit nowadays that this is actually really insidious. And one reason why I think the spurious gender/sexual certainties in Moffat’s Who are so worrying is precisely because it’s a hugely influential bit of mass culture that is widely identified with ‘Britishness’ and ‘our’ culture and society (like Bond and Shakespeare… and Sherlock Holmes, for that matter!). You only have to look at how the London Olympics summed up Britain to see how such icons were pressed into national ideological service… yet that’s actually a really good example of retrograde assumptions continuingly promulgated within a shifted discourse. The Olympics ceremony also had loads of left/liberal stuff about how great the NHS is, mixed up with genuflection before the Queen, the flag etc… not to mention the overpowering corporate sponsorship and cynical social cleansing beneath the whole event.