Wow, letters in the title. That feels so last month.
But, this being Doctor-Who-Boxing-Day, normal service has been resumed. So, until I do my threatened anti-50, in which I count Doctor Who's political fails in minus numbers, we're back to titles which utilise the alphabet.
I'm only half joking about the anti-50. I had my doubts and worries all along about the whole concept of the anniversary countdown. It seemed churlish to include bits of Doctor Who that I hate, of which there are plenty. I mean, if you can't be positive on the big birthday... Besides, the whole concept of the Jubilee originates as an apocalyptic and insurrectionary notion in ancient Jewish resistance to Roman power, a carnival of the oppressed... so it's supposed to be a radical celebration. On the other hand, relentless positivity just isn't what this blog does (as you'll have noticed). There's plenty of writing out there (some of it very good) focusing solely on what's great about the show. From the standpoint of 'social justice Who fandom' (which, I'm delighted to learn from tumblr, is a thing), it makes no honest sense to just be panglossian about the series. Anyone who has trudged through my whole countdown will have noticed that I increasingly allowed criticism to creep into the posts, as context. But, ultimately, I came to praise the Doctor not to bury him. And, while I stand by that, it always worried me a bit.
Another thing I regret about the 50 is the amount of stuff I had to leave out. At several points during the project, I felt lost for ideas... then I would immediately find that I had too many ideas to fit into my diminishing numbers. I ended up quite surprised by what I covered and what I didn't cover. I was totally going to do an entry for 'The Krotons', 'Kinda' and 'Snakedance', 'Inferno', 'The Mutants', 'The Savages', 'Turn Left', 'The Next Doctor', 'The Ark in Space', 'The Face of Evil', 'The Brain of Morbius', 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', etc., etc., etc. Somehow, they didn't get in. Somehow, I ended up talking about 'The Underwater Menace' rather than, say, 'Genesis of the Daleks'. Weird. But I suppose that's what happens when you commit yourself to a tight schedule in which you must, essentially, make up some (hopefully) passably coherent stuff, totally on the fly, two or three times a day.
This leads me to a clarification I desperately want to make: the countdown may be a list, but it definitely isn't a 'Top 50'. It's not a list of what I consider to be 'the best'. There is no hierarchy intended here at all, though I do consider some of the stories I wrote about to be superior to others. Indeed, I repeatedly found myself writing about episodes that, on the whole, I don't like, over episodes that I adore but which I had to sideline. I'm broadly in sympathy with Lawrence Miles' opinion, expressed in this much-misunderstood post, that 'ranking' lists are just not a worthwhile thing to do, and that Doctor Who really only makes sense in historical context. I think Miles goes a bit too far, seeming to dismiss any chance that the episodes can be enjoyed on a purely aesthetic level. That's not something I'd want to sign up to, though I do think aesthetics have to be historicised. Being a Marxist (or rather, someone who tries to do Marxism), I believe that it's pretty much impossible to truly understand or interpret any cultural product in isolation from the circumstances of its production, which should entail an understanding of the historical moment it comes from... though an overconcentration upon production (at the expense of the other nodes of the circuit of capital) has long been a symptom of vulgar Marxism. But there is something inherently nonsensical in the whole concept of the list, particularly in the list of Doctor Who episodes. It treats incredibly varied texts, made in incredibly varied social conditions, for incredibly varied reasons, as all part of one unified thing... which is very questionable, except from the standpoint of being tyrannised by the logo on the front, which (as I'm sure you'll be unsurprised to learn) strikes me as a form of commodity fetishism. All the same, the contention of this group of commodities (so to speak) that they are 'all of a piece' is a vital part of their cultural context. You can't understand 'World War Three' without reference to the politics of the day... but neither can you understand it without reference to the fact that the man who wrote it believed it to be, in some sense, a sequel to 'The Ambassadors of Death'. Also, I wouldn't want to issue a blanket condemnation of the inherently nonsensical.
If anything connects these two points - the absence of hierarchy in my countdown and the unexpected nature of some of the stories that made it in - then it's (I hope) that my list/countdown didn't concern itself with 'quality' or my personal preferences (though I think it did concern itself with aesthetics). I hope I historicised the stories to an extent, remembering where they came from as I thought about them. I certainly tried to do that more as the countdown went on, and the entries got longer, and the project morphed and mutated in front of my astonished face. I suppose I slipped in some of my disdain for Now while appreciating Then. But I hope I historicised that too, trying to take into account why things are different now. And I tried to include some appreciation of Now too, for vital balance. That was, in many ways, the hardest thing (owing to my personal prejudices, no doubt) so I was lucky that I had help.
On that subject, I want to say thanks (hopefully without starting to sound like I'm accepting a self-awarded Oscar) to all the people who supported my silly project; everyone who engaged with it, took the time to read it, commented here, shared it around, talked about it, clicked Like on Facebook, Favourited and Retweeted me on Twitter, etc. It sounds very naff, but it meant (and means) a lot to me. I especially want to thank Phil Sandifer, who has gone out of his way to be encouraging and to give invaluable assistance.
While I'm thanking people, I must give a shout out to Chrissie's Transcripts Site and the Doctor Who Reference Guide, incredibly detailed and accurate sites without which the 50 would've been an immensely more arduous task for me. And, of course, I have to thank all the people who wrote the stories that I wrote about. And all the people who originated the perspectives that I wrote with.
ideas are icepickproof
Sunday, 24 November 2013
Saturday, 23 November 2013
1
What can I do but cheat?
Three moments, not in chronological order.
1
Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She's in a large, brightly lit control room.
This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have "discovered television". We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids - the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces - can be made visual.
Doctor Who's very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d'etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I've said elsewhere, 'The Space Museum' pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking... and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show - which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production - crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.
This is analogous (I'll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It's fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from 'historicals' and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children's literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.
2
The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.
Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about 'cavemen' who are dying out because they've forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.
The use of tools played a crucial role in the evolution of humanity, making us the creature with a 'species-being' bound up with conscious labour. Fear played a crucial role too. 'An Unearthly Child' is obsessed with fear, both as a poison and as a source of solidarity. "Fear makes companions of us all," says the Doctor when he comes to Barbara's aid. Fear melds society together.
In a talk I linked to here, China Mieville spoke about octopuses that have been observed picking up weapons just in case they need to use them later. That looks like the beginnings of conscious foresight. Maybe something like that happened to our ancient ancestors. Maybe the avoidable 'dreaded outcome' sparked the dialectic that began the transformation of the hand and brain. This is a vital part of a Marxist defence of the value of scaring kids. (That's irony on the square, by the way.)
This is particularly ironic in terms of 'An Unearthly Child' if you suspect, as I do, that the bickering and jockeying cavemen are not our ancestors, but the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust that people in 1963 expected at any time.
The tool helped bring us into being... but it was always both map and club. Its progress was always towards television and nukes. It isn't a popular insight, but that tragic doubleness is just what progress is.
3
Susan looks through a book about the French Revoution.
This revolution was probably the event most foundational to the modern world. It was a process which drastically marked the beginning of the end for feudalism in Europe. It was a popular revolt which heralded the beginning of the great dialectic of class struggle that would mark all bourgeois society and history.
She looks through a schoolbook account, doubtless a safe and sanitised version, the way such books usually are. She, one of those unpredictable and scary 'teenager' things that they have nowadays, one of those people who is puzzlingly neither child nor adult, one of those unearthly children, one of those youngsters listening to the Common Men, a member of a generation who would soon lead a worldwide political and cultural revolt... she reads a book about revolution that her teachers have given her, and she says to herself, in a whisper of surprised outrage...
"That's not right!"
Fifty years later, it still isn't right. But, for better or worse, the show goes on.
*
Finally, an invitation to speculate. Given that Doctor Who was so much better under social democracy than under neoliberalism, imagine how wonderful Doctor Who would be under socialism.
Admittedly, it would have to find new things to talk about...
Three moments, not in chronological order.
1
Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She's in a large, brightly lit control room.
This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have "discovered television". We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids - the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces - can be made visual.
Doctor Who's very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d'etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I've said elsewhere, 'The Space Museum' pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking... and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show - which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production - crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.
This is analogous (I'll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It's fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from 'historicals' and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children's literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.
2
The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.
Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about 'cavemen' who are dying out because they've forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.
The use of tools played a crucial role in the evolution of humanity, making us the creature with a 'species-being' bound up with conscious labour. Fear played a crucial role too. 'An Unearthly Child' is obsessed with fear, both as a poison and as a source of solidarity. "Fear makes companions of us all," says the Doctor when he comes to Barbara's aid. Fear melds society together.
In a talk I linked to here, China Mieville spoke about octopuses that have been observed picking up weapons just in case they need to use them later. That looks like the beginnings of conscious foresight. Maybe something like that happened to our ancient ancestors. Maybe the avoidable 'dreaded outcome' sparked the dialectic that began the transformation of the hand and brain. This is a vital part of a Marxist defence of the value of scaring kids. (That's irony on the square, by the way.)
This is particularly ironic in terms of 'An Unearthly Child' if you suspect, as I do, that the bickering and jockeying cavemen are not our ancestors, but the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust that people in 1963 expected at any time.
The tool helped bring us into being... but it was always both map and club. Its progress was always towards television and nukes. It isn't a popular insight, but that tragic doubleness is just what progress is.
3
Susan looks through a book about the French Revoution.
This revolution was probably the event most foundational to the modern world. It was a process which drastically marked the beginning of the end for feudalism in Europe. It was a popular revolt which heralded the beginning of the great dialectic of class struggle that would mark all bourgeois society and history.
She looks through a schoolbook account, doubtless a safe and sanitised version, the way such books usually are. She, one of those unpredictable and scary 'teenager' things that they have nowadays, one of those people who is puzzlingly neither child nor adult, one of those unearthly children, one of those youngsters listening to the Common Men, a member of a generation who would soon lead a worldwide political and cultural revolt... she reads a book about revolution that her teachers have given her, and she says to herself, in a whisper of surprised outrage...
"That's not right!"
Fifty years later, it still isn't right. But, for better or worse, the show goes on.
*
Finally, an invitation to speculate. Given that Doctor Who was so much better under social democracy than under neoliberalism, imagine how wonderful Doctor Who would be under socialism.
Admittedly, it would have to find new things to talk about...
2
"Go on, tell them," says Jacko to Sean.
"Tell them what? I'll tell them nothing. They're not people like us, they're just a bunch of sardines."
The fish people in the water below do not like this.
"You heard me," jeers Sean, "Cold-blooded fishes. You haven't got a drop of good red blood in your body."
They don't like that either. They've been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it's implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis). He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs. (They just don't make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)
"A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!" Sean continues. Oh yeah, I forgot to say... Sean's Irish, hence his "gift of the gab" (sigh).
The fish people start throwing things at him.
"All right, all right, all right," laughs Sean, "Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?"
The fish people decide to hear him out. Presumably because he's like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff's regime. He hasn't been surgically mutilated, but he's been put to work in the Atlantean mines. (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and... oh look, I'm reiterating.)
"Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?" asks Sean rhetorically, "It can't be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That's why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You're men, aren't you? Well, start the blockade right now!"
Again, this is workplace agitation. The jokes at the fish people's expense are clearly rhetoric. Sean whips them up. But the power is theirs.
I won't attempt to describe what comes next. The fish people's underwater strike is indescribable. And that's good. It must be seen to be believed... and by that I don't mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis. I mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast. To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet. Again, that's good. The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.
It's a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially. These days, there is no struggle, no contestation... or rather, the struggle has been effectively muffled and edited out of the mainstream media continuum, mirroring the way it has been materially suppressed. These days, you beat the baddies by monologuing about how wonderful you are while the orchestral music goes insane, CGI roars at you, a pretty (white) child cries and the audience cries too (cry damn you, cry!). Back when 'The Underwater Menace' was made, it was possible for slaves to beat the baddies with collective action, with agitation and unionisation and strikes and blockades, by the class struggle, by the revolt of the oppressed... and it was expressed (in the middle of a kids' tea-time adventure show!) as a weird and wonderful ballet, overlaid with sine waves and defamiliarising dots of electronic sound from the Radiophonic Workshop. It was expressed as something that broke the boundaries of the everyday, both in narrative terms of workers disrupting the quotidian routine of exploitation, and in aesthetic terms as an explosion of the genuinely, unashamedly, discomfortingly strange and unfamiliar. The gothic and the surreal and the just plain silly, self-consciously bizarre yet steeped in real history and work and politics, joining the picket line alongside the militant and the collective and the pissed-off. That really is how its supposed to be. That really is, ultimately, what is supposed to make Doctor Who good (when it is good) and more than just another cult franchise: its ability to express the struggle in terms of the strange.
Yes, you could see the strings holding the fish people up as they 'swam'. Yes, you could see they were just actors in silly suits and masks. Yes, you could see that the bubbles were a light show. But that in itself was part of a connection to the materially real, to actual history, to the spontaneity of human action... ultimately, to labour, and thus to the essence of humanity. Now, everything is far more 'convincing' while simultaneously being far more obviously false. The fish people are evidently not fish people, but they evidently are solid, material, alive. They are there. In the plastic, flat, dead, synthetic world of CGI, everything looks more 'real' while also being evidently phantasmic, unreal, unpresent, immaterial. The gleaming commodity has completely pushed the human hand out of view.
Just as the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the underwater strike ballet (d'ya see what I did there?) is a perfect representation of the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the collective resistance to power that it depicts, so is the smooth and depthless world of CGI a perfect representation of a world slumping into eternal neoliberal lassitude. It is the visual expression of the glossy, shiny, expensive patina of capitalist realism and neoliberal hegemony. It is a pretty picture that pretends, apparently with a straight face and an expectation of being believed, to be reality.
Give me the irony, the materiality and the anger of the 'hand-made' anytime.
"Tell them what? I'll tell them nothing. They're not people like us, they're just a bunch of sardines."
The fish people in the water below do not like this.
"You heard me," jeers Sean, "Cold-blooded fishes. You haven't got a drop of good red blood in your body."
They don't like that either. They've been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it's implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis). He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs. (They just don't make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)
"A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!" Sean continues. Oh yeah, I forgot to say... Sean's Irish, hence his "gift of the gab" (sigh).
The fish people start throwing things at him.
"All right, all right, all right," laughs Sean, "Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?"
The fish people decide to hear him out. Presumably because he's like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff's regime. He hasn't been surgically mutilated, but he's been put to work in the Atlantean mines. (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and... oh look, I'm reiterating.)
"Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?" asks Sean rhetorically, "It can't be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That's why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You're men, aren't you? Well, start the blockade right now!"
Again, this is workplace agitation. The jokes at the fish people's expense are clearly rhetoric. Sean whips them up. But the power is theirs.
I won't attempt to describe what comes next. The fish people's underwater strike is indescribable. And that's good. It must be seen to be believed... and by that I don't mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis. I mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast. To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet. Again, that's good. The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.
It's a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially. These days, there is no struggle, no contestation... or rather, the struggle has been effectively muffled and edited out of the mainstream media continuum, mirroring the way it has been materially suppressed. These days, you beat the baddies by monologuing about how wonderful you are while the orchestral music goes insane, CGI roars at you, a pretty (white) child cries and the audience cries too (cry damn you, cry!). Back when 'The Underwater Menace' was made, it was possible for slaves to beat the baddies with collective action, with agitation and unionisation and strikes and blockades, by the class struggle, by the revolt of the oppressed... and it was expressed (in the middle of a kids' tea-time adventure show!) as a weird and wonderful ballet, overlaid with sine waves and defamiliarising dots of electronic sound from the Radiophonic Workshop. It was expressed as something that broke the boundaries of the everyday, both in narrative terms of workers disrupting the quotidian routine of exploitation, and in aesthetic terms as an explosion of the genuinely, unashamedly, discomfortingly strange and unfamiliar. The gothic and the surreal and the just plain silly, self-consciously bizarre yet steeped in real history and work and politics, joining the picket line alongside the militant and the collective and the pissed-off. That really is how its supposed to be. That really is, ultimately, what is supposed to make Doctor Who good (when it is good) and more than just another cult franchise: its ability to express the struggle in terms of the strange.
Yes, you could see the strings holding the fish people up as they 'swam'. Yes, you could see they were just actors in silly suits and masks. Yes, you could see that the bubbles were a light show. But that in itself was part of a connection to the materially real, to actual history, to the spontaneity of human action... ultimately, to labour, and thus to the essence of humanity. Now, everything is far more 'convincing' while simultaneously being far more obviously false. The fish people are evidently not fish people, but they evidently are solid, material, alive. They are there. In the plastic, flat, dead, synthetic world of CGI, everything looks more 'real' while also being evidently phantasmic, unreal, unpresent, immaterial. The gleaming commodity has completely pushed the human hand out of view.
Just as the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the underwater strike ballet (d'ya see what I did there?) is a perfect representation of the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the collective resistance to power that it depicts, so is the smooth and depthless world of CGI a perfect representation of a world slumping into eternal neoliberal lassitude. It is the visual expression of the glossy, shiny, expensive patina of capitalist realism and neoliberal hegemony. It is a pretty picture that pretends, apparently with a straight face and an expectation of being believed, to be reality.
Give me the irony, the materiality and the anger of the 'hand-made' anytime.
3
"Not so much of that oatmeal, girl," says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, "It's only pikemen we're feeding, not horses."
They're in Irongron's castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest. Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron's stew.
"Don't the guards on the gate get stew?" she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor's knock-out potion.
"What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They'll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet."
So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.
"I'm not afraid of men. They don't own the world."
Well, they kind-of do... but Sarah isn't discussing actual property relations. She's talking about the way the world should work, with no one group 'owning' it.
"Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?" she demands.
"What else should we do?" asks Meg.
"Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you're tired of working for them like slaves."
"We are slaves," says Meg.
Wow. No mincing words there.
"Then you should set yourselves free," says Sarah.
None there either.
"Oh? And how should we do that?"
That's a trickier question. It always is. But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.
"Don't you want to be free?" she demands. Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.
"Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl," says Meg, "We have our place."
You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.
"What subservient poppycock! You're still living in the Middle Ages!"
Yeah. We are, in many ways. We're meant to laugh at this outburst, but there's no question in my mind that we're also meant to be on Sarah's side.
There are all sorts of problems with this story. Sarah is - at least in conception - a stereotypical 'wimmin's libber', all touchiness and naivety. The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we're meant to think this is funny. She's made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement. For instance, there's the bit quoted above about the "lusty" guards... it's obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy. And so on. Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism? I'm not going to argue.
But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves - and aware of the fact that she's a slave - by saying "set yourselves free".
It shines out amidst the crap.
They're in Irongron's castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest. Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron's stew.
"Don't the guards on the gate get stew?" she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor's knock-out potion.
"What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They'll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet."
So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.
"I'm not afraid of men. They don't own the world."
Well, they kind-of do... but Sarah isn't discussing actual property relations. She's talking about the way the world should work, with no one group 'owning' it.
"Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?" she demands.
"What else should we do?" asks Meg.
"Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you're tired of working for them like slaves."
"We are slaves," says Meg.
Wow. No mincing words there.
"Then you should set yourselves free," says Sarah.
None there either.
"Oh? And how should we do that?"
That's a trickier question. It always is. But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.
"Don't you want to be free?" she demands. Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.
"Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl," says Meg, "We have our place."
You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.
"What subservient poppycock! You're still living in the Middle Ages!"
Yeah. We are, in many ways. We're meant to laugh at this outburst, but there's no question in my mind that we're also meant to be on Sarah's side.
There are all sorts of problems with this story. Sarah is - at least in conception - a stereotypical 'wimmin's libber', all touchiness and naivety. The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we're meant to think this is funny. She's made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement. For instance, there's the bit quoted above about the "lusty" guards... it's obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy. And so on. Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism? I'm not going to argue.
But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves - and aware of the fact that she's a slave - by saying "set yourselves free".
It shines out amidst the crap.
Friday, 22 November 2013
4
"Don't get any ambitious ideas," says Castellan Spandrell to his prisoner.
"I just wanted to check it was the same staser," says the Doctor, examing the weapon used to assassinate the President of the High Council of Time Lords. "You see that symbol at the end of the corridor?"
The Doctor indicates a huge Seal of Rassilon.
"What about it?" asks Spandrell.
"You try and hit it," says the Doctor, handing Spandrell the staser.
"That's the kind of vandalism we're always running the Shabogans in for," grumbles Spandrell.
Spandrell is, basically, the Chief of Police in the Time Lord Capitol. As such, the Doctor is his prisoner, having been caught holding a rifle in a gallery near the spot where the President was gunned down.
We never see any Shabogans. The reference is never explained. It just seems to be part of a Gallifreyan policeman's job to arrest people called 'Shabogans' for vandalism. But let's not pass over this too quickly. There is regular crime here? There are hooligans running around the corridors of the Capitol of the Time Lords of Gallifrey?
Well, yes, of course.
The Time Lords are not just 'aliens'. They're explicitly potrayed as the ruling class. They have sycophantic TV presenters who interview them creepily (about process and personalities... just like Andrew Marr outside Number 10) when they congregate at elaborate government ceremonies. They wear traditional robes and ornate, arcane bling at these state events. They have the poshest of posh accents, like a great club of old Etonians and Oxbridge alumni... or like Oxbridge dons. They have Academies and Colleges in the Capitol, populated by fussy, blithering, crusty old farts who reminisce about how many of these ceremones they've attended over the centuries. They have Chancellors. They have Cardinals and Chapters too. One of them creates a nightmarescape for the Doctor which references Western colonialism (there is a khaki-wearing hunter who goes on safari and tracks the Doctor like big game) and the First World War. They have a 'Panopticon', named after the surveillance-heavy prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of Liberalism. They have a kind of police force, run by the Castellan, whose uniforms make them vaguely reminiscent of Swiss Guards. They also have a President. Their Presidents have names like kings or popes (Pandak III, for instance) and are chosen by a tiny electorate (just the other Time Lords, presumably) from a tiny pool of thoroughly respectable establishment types. They also have a shadowy government organisation, complete with secret agents, called the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency - yuk yuk).
Police. Media commentators, edcuated at the same Academy as the other Time Lords, taught by the people they end up talking about on TV. Great White Hunters. Popes. Kings. Presidents. Colleges. Chapters. Cardinals. Chancellors. The Time Lords are a concentrated synthesis of various Western power structures. Oxbridge. The Vatican. Prisons. Liberalism. Conservatism. The House of Lords. The CIA. Washington.
So, of course there are 'Shabogans'. There must be 'Proles' so that the rulers have someone to rule, so that the dirty jobs get done, so that the Time Toilets get cleaned.
By the way... the origin of the word 'shabogan' is obscure to me. The nearest thing I can find is a reference in V. Gordon Childe to 'Shub-lugals', cadres of labourers who were not slaves but who were paid with subsistence rations by the kings of early urban Mesopotamia. Proto-proletarians from the dawn of civilisation. Gallifrey is elsewhere (but by the same writer) said to be "the oldest civilisation". Which is partly why I choose to believe that the Shabogans of Gallifrey are not the posh drop-outs we see in a later story, or drunken students, but rather an invisible group of workers who do everything for the Time Lords... but who sometimes get pissed off and riot, and then get arrested by Spandrell's Time Police. I'd hate to think there were no rowdy Time Proles to give the Time Lords a bloody nose from time to time. If the Time Lords are a trans-historical ruling class, an accretion of Western power principles - oligarchy, gerontocracy, white power (they're all white), patriarchy (they are all men), established religion, police, media, public school, Oxbridge, British government, US government - then I like the idea that their unseen drudges are related to one of the earliest forms of urban worker in the history of civilisation.
Spandrell takes his shot.
"Miles away," he says ruefully.
"The sights," says the Doctor, nodding at the weapon, "So you see, I couldn't have shot the President if I tried. And equally, I couldn't hit the assassin. That's why they were fixed."
"The assassin, according to you, being one of the High Council," observes Spandrell sceptically.
"Yes, he was in the party surrounding the President. I saw him draw a staser and step forward. I aimed a bolt at him, but at that time I didn't know the sights had been fixed."
"One of the High Council. It's getting better and better."
"What is?"
"Your story. But still a story. Where's the evidence, Doctor?"
"I'll tell you where the evidence is... in the Public Register camera. I was standing right beside it."
This is all so 70s it hurts. The era of paranoia about government conspiracies in pop-culture (well, one of the eras of that... there was another one in the 90s). This story is riffing on familiar motifs from the conspiratorial account of the Kennedy assassination. The supposed lone assassin is actually a patsy. He was a CIA agent. His supposed weapon couldn't have performed the feat attributed to it. The assassination was captured on film, and analysis of this recording will reveal the truth. The real assassin comes from the highest circle of power and is engaged in a cover-up.
It doesn't really matter if Robert Holmes, the writer of this story, believed that the CIA (the American CIA, that is) killed Kennedy. In the real world, there doesn't seem to be much reason to think so, though it's the kind of thing one gets from people like Holmes, who might be best described, at least as far as we can judge him from his work, as a 'romantic anti-establishment libertarian'. He's often called 'cynical', but he's cynical about power.
(Parenthetically... I don't find it implausible that governments conspire to kill people. On the contrary, that's almost a definition of government. Nor do I find it implausible that the US government would conspire to assassinate a world leader. We know, for instance, that Kennedy himself was deeply involved in several covert conspiracies to assassinate world leaders. That's pretty much business as usual for American presidents... except that Kennedy had to keep quiet about his 'kill list' whereas Obama boasts about his. I don't even find it all that implausible (in basic principle) that the US government might conspire to kill the US president... but he'd have to be a whole lot more threatening to them than Kennedy was (which was not at all). It's actually difficult to see how anyone potentially dangerous enough to need rubbing out could possibly make it through the immense number of filters and baffles which stand between the Oval Office and anyone who wants to get into it. The really interesting thing about the endless 'debate' about the Kennedy assassination is that it almost totally obscures - at least in mainstream culture - any discussion of what the man was actually like as a politcian. It obscures his reckless belligerence that helped bring on the Cuban Missile Crisis about a year before 'An Unearthly Child' aired, a confrontation that nearly destroyed the entire world. It obscures his vital role in kicking off the Vietnam war, an imperialist attack upon a practically defenceless country that ultimately claimed the lives of something like two million people. There's a case to be made that Kennedy helped conspire to bring about the assassination of an entire society. Compared to that, the question of who, if anyone, was on the Grassy Knoll somewhat recedes, at least as far as I'm concerned.)
Relatedly, it doesn't really matter who killed the President of the Time Lords. What matters is that Holmes puts that kind of paranoid unease - about arcane, decadent, self-involved, self-perpetuating structures that seethe with an undertow of secrecy and violence - into a fictional space synthesised from just about every signifier he could come up with for the established centres of Western power... and which he also signified as being a representation of ruling classes throughout history.
It's a sign of the times (those conspiratorial 70s) that the obsession is with occult government structures rather than with business or capital.
*
NOTE 4/12/13:
Dunno why I said the Cuban Missile Crisis was "a few weeks" prior to 'An Unearthly Child'. I've amended that above.
"I just wanted to check it was the same staser," says the Doctor, examing the weapon used to assassinate the President of the High Council of Time Lords. "You see that symbol at the end of the corridor?"
The Doctor indicates a huge Seal of Rassilon.
"What about it?" asks Spandrell.
"You try and hit it," says the Doctor, handing Spandrell the staser.
"That's the kind of vandalism we're always running the Shabogans in for," grumbles Spandrell.
Spandrell is, basically, the Chief of Police in the Time Lord Capitol. As such, the Doctor is his prisoner, having been caught holding a rifle in a gallery near the spot where the President was gunned down.
We never see any Shabogans. The reference is never explained. It just seems to be part of a Gallifreyan policeman's job to arrest people called 'Shabogans' for vandalism. But let's not pass over this too quickly. There is regular crime here? There are hooligans running around the corridors of the Capitol of the Time Lords of Gallifrey?
Well, yes, of course.
The Time Lords are not just 'aliens'. They're explicitly potrayed as the ruling class. They have sycophantic TV presenters who interview them creepily (about process and personalities... just like Andrew Marr outside Number 10) when they congregate at elaborate government ceremonies. They wear traditional robes and ornate, arcane bling at these state events. They have the poshest of posh accents, like a great club of old Etonians and Oxbridge alumni... or like Oxbridge dons. They have Academies and Colleges in the Capitol, populated by fussy, blithering, crusty old farts who reminisce about how many of these ceremones they've attended over the centuries. They have Chancellors. They have Cardinals and Chapters too. One of them creates a nightmarescape for the Doctor which references Western colonialism (there is a khaki-wearing hunter who goes on safari and tracks the Doctor like big game) and the First World War. They have a 'Panopticon', named after the surveillance-heavy prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of Liberalism. They have a kind of police force, run by the Castellan, whose uniforms make them vaguely reminiscent of Swiss Guards. They also have a President. Their Presidents have names like kings or popes (Pandak III, for instance) and are chosen by a tiny electorate (just the other Time Lords, presumably) from a tiny pool of thoroughly respectable establishment types. They also have a shadowy government organisation, complete with secret agents, called the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency - yuk yuk).
Police. Media commentators, edcuated at the same Academy as the other Time Lords, taught by the people they end up talking about on TV. Great White Hunters. Popes. Kings. Presidents. Colleges. Chapters. Cardinals. Chancellors. The Time Lords are a concentrated synthesis of various Western power structures. Oxbridge. The Vatican. Prisons. Liberalism. Conservatism. The House of Lords. The CIA. Washington.
So, of course there are 'Shabogans'. There must be 'Proles' so that the rulers have someone to rule, so that the dirty jobs get done, so that the Time Toilets get cleaned.
By the way... the origin of the word 'shabogan' is obscure to me. The nearest thing I can find is a reference in V. Gordon Childe to 'Shub-lugals', cadres of labourers who were not slaves but who were paid with subsistence rations by the kings of early urban Mesopotamia. Proto-proletarians from the dawn of civilisation. Gallifrey is elsewhere (but by the same writer) said to be "the oldest civilisation". Which is partly why I choose to believe that the Shabogans of Gallifrey are not the posh drop-outs we see in a later story, or drunken students, but rather an invisible group of workers who do everything for the Time Lords... but who sometimes get pissed off and riot, and then get arrested by Spandrell's Time Police. I'd hate to think there were no rowdy Time Proles to give the Time Lords a bloody nose from time to time. If the Time Lords are a trans-historical ruling class, an accretion of Western power principles - oligarchy, gerontocracy, white power (they're all white), patriarchy (they are all men), established religion, police, media, public school, Oxbridge, British government, US government - then I like the idea that their unseen drudges are related to one of the earliest forms of urban worker in the history of civilisation.
Spandrell takes his shot.
"Miles away," he says ruefully.
"The sights," says the Doctor, nodding at the weapon, "So you see, I couldn't have shot the President if I tried. And equally, I couldn't hit the assassin. That's why they were fixed."
"The assassin, according to you, being one of the High Council," observes Spandrell sceptically.
"Yes, he was in the party surrounding the President. I saw him draw a staser and step forward. I aimed a bolt at him, but at that time I didn't know the sights had been fixed."
"One of the High Council. It's getting better and better."
"What is?"
"Your story. But still a story. Where's the evidence, Doctor?"
"I'll tell you where the evidence is... in the Public Register camera. I was standing right beside it."
This is all so 70s it hurts. The era of paranoia about government conspiracies in pop-culture (well, one of the eras of that... there was another one in the 90s). This story is riffing on familiar motifs from the conspiratorial account of the Kennedy assassination. The supposed lone assassin is actually a patsy. He was a CIA agent. His supposed weapon couldn't have performed the feat attributed to it. The assassination was captured on film, and analysis of this recording will reveal the truth. The real assassin comes from the highest circle of power and is engaged in a cover-up.
It doesn't really matter if Robert Holmes, the writer of this story, believed that the CIA (the American CIA, that is) killed Kennedy. In the real world, there doesn't seem to be much reason to think so, though it's the kind of thing one gets from people like Holmes, who might be best described, at least as far as we can judge him from his work, as a 'romantic anti-establishment libertarian'. He's often called 'cynical', but he's cynical about power.
(Parenthetically... I don't find it implausible that governments conspire to kill people. On the contrary, that's almost a definition of government. Nor do I find it implausible that the US government would conspire to assassinate a world leader. We know, for instance, that Kennedy himself was deeply involved in several covert conspiracies to assassinate world leaders. That's pretty much business as usual for American presidents... except that Kennedy had to keep quiet about his 'kill list' whereas Obama boasts about his. I don't even find it all that implausible (in basic principle) that the US government might conspire to kill the US president... but he'd have to be a whole lot more threatening to them than Kennedy was (which was not at all). It's actually difficult to see how anyone potentially dangerous enough to need rubbing out could possibly make it through the immense number of filters and baffles which stand between the Oval Office and anyone who wants to get into it. The really interesting thing about the endless 'debate' about the Kennedy assassination is that it almost totally obscures - at least in mainstream culture - any discussion of what the man was actually like as a politcian. It obscures his reckless belligerence that helped bring on the Cuban Missile Crisis about a year before 'An Unearthly Child' aired, a confrontation that nearly destroyed the entire world. It obscures his vital role in kicking off the Vietnam war, an imperialist attack upon a practically defenceless country that ultimately claimed the lives of something like two million people. There's a case to be made that Kennedy helped conspire to bring about the assassination of an entire society. Compared to that, the question of who, if anyone, was on the Grassy Knoll somewhat recedes, at least as far as I'm concerned.)
Relatedly, it doesn't really matter who killed the President of the Time Lords. What matters is that Holmes puts that kind of paranoid unease - about arcane, decadent, self-involved, self-perpetuating structures that seethe with an undertow of secrecy and violence - into a fictional space synthesised from just about every signifier he could come up with for the established centres of Western power... and which he also signified as being a representation of ruling classes throughout history.
It's a sign of the times (those conspiratorial 70s) that the obsession is with occult government structures rather than with business or capital.
*
NOTE 4/12/13:
Dunno why I said the Cuban Missile Crisis was "a few weeks" prior to 'An Unearthly Child'. I've amended that above.
Thursday, 21 November 2013
5
"I know it sounds mad," says Martha, "but when the Doctor became human, he took the
alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It's not
really a watch, it just looks like a watch."
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
6
"I have in my hand a piece of paper," says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, "which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!"
The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.
"When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year..." Stevens begins.
"It were a shame, that was!" heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.
"No, my friends," says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, "we must not be bitter. We must face the facts."
Note the 'we'; the most abused word in political discourse. As in 'we're all in this together'.
"Coal is a dying industry," asserts Stevens.
The miners shout "Rubbish! Rubbish!"
When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish. Mining was always subsidised.
"Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!" So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people's jobs. "I have it here in black and white!"
There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots. The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob - a trope that goes back a long way.
"Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!" The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.
In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene. Miners were powerful and militant in 1973. They were unionised and they were winning. They weren't sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.
In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient. By the late-90s, British mining - together with so much manufacturing industry - had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in '74 (the year after this story was broadcast). Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives. Working class communities were wrecked in the process. In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.
And when Stevens says "oil is the future" he's only telling part of the truth. The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure. Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc. This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism... which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973. The theory of post-industrialism is pretty specious, to be honest, but a lot of people believe in it, interpreting neoliberalism as a reorganisation of capital along lines of services and pure information, production being relegated to a quaint relic. This is largely bullshit, but it expresses something that a lot of people - some of them people like Stevens - believe: that capitalism can dispense with old-style workers, and all the dangers inherent in them, in favour of economies based on the shunting around of pure information. That this is Stevens' dream is expressed by the fact that his company is secretly run by an insane computer that is also his alter ego... or should that be, his 'alter id'. It's aim is to create "total efficiency" in society (which is explicitly stated to be equivalent to the business dominance of Global Chemicals) by sacking all workers, abandoning coal (i.e. production), turning industry into a 'post-industrial' wasteland, brainwashing all corporate executives and linking all computers in the world into itself, thus unifying all information.
Trouble is, Stevens and his 'B.O.S.S.' have reckoned without the gothic, that eternal bad conscience. The gothic brings ghosts out of the disused mine... in the form of giant maggots. They are definitely ghosts. Ghosts - in the sense of the ghost story as we know it - are modern things. Gothic Marxism (perhaps most especially in the insights of Christopher Caudwell) has identified the ghost story as a quintessentially modern phenomenon. It is the worm in the apple of modern rationalism. And it is a very material genre. The 'ghosts' of M.R. James - effective founder of what we call the 'ghost story' - are gothic in that they represent the return of the repressed, but also material in that they emerge from modernity (manufactured things like prints and sheets and train tickets and mass-reproduced patterns) and that the tend to be icky and hairy and chitinous.
Giant maggots which signify the repressed dark secrets of capitalist production, erupting out of a closed mine, are ghosts in this sense. In this story, oddly, they're the ghosts of the future.
The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.
"When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year..." Stevens begins.
"It were a shame, that was!" heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.
"No, my friends," says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, "we must not be bitter. We must face the facts."
Note the 'we'; the most abused word in political discourse. As in 'we're all in this together'.
"Coal is a dying industry," asserts Stevens.
The miners shout "Rubbish! Rubbish!"
When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish. Mining was always subsidised.
"Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!" So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people's jobs. "I have it here in black and white!"
There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots. The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob - a trope that goes back a long way.
"Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!" The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.
In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene. Miners were powerful and militant in 1973. They were unionised and they were winning. They weren't sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.
In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient. By the late-90s, British mining - together with so much manufacturing industry - had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in '74 (the year after this story was broadcast). Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives. Working class communities were wrecked in the process. In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.
And when Stevens says "oil is the future" he's only telling part of the truth. The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure. Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc. This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism... which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973. The theory of post-industrialism is pretty specious, to be honest, but a lot of people believe in it, interpreting neoliberalism as a reorganisation of capital along lines of services and pure information, production being relegated to a quaint relic. This is largely bullshit, but it expresses something that a lot of people - some of them people like Stevens - believe: that capitalism can dispense with old-style workers, and all the dangers inherent in them, in favour of economies based on the shunting around of pure information. That this is Stevens' dream is expressed by the fact that his company is secretly run by an insane computer that is also his alter ego... or should that be, his 'alter id'. It's aim is to create "total efficiency" in society (which is explicitly stated to be equivalent to the business dominance of Global Chemicals) by sacking all workers, abandoning coal (i.e. production), turning industry into a 'post-industrial' wasteland, brainwashing all corporate executives and linking all computers in the world into itself, thus unifying all information.
Trouble is, Stevens and his 'B.O.S.S.' have reckoned without the gothic, that eternal bad conscience. The gothic brings ghosts out of the disused mine... in the form of giant maggots. They are definitely ghosts. Ghosts - in the sense of the ghost story as we know it - are modern things. Gothic Marxism (perhaps most especially in the insights of Christopher Caudwell) has identified the ghost story as a quintessentially modern phenomenon. It is the worm in the apple of modern rationalism. And it is a very material genre. The 'ghosts' of M.R. James - effective founder of what we call the 'ghost story' - are gothic in that they represent the return of the repressed, but also material in that they emerge from modernity (manufactured things like prints and sheets and train tickets and mass-reproduced patterns) and that the tend to be icky and hairy and chitinous.
Giant maggots which signify the repressed dark secrets of capitalist production, erupting out of a closed mine, are ghosts in this sense. In this story, oddly, they're the ghosts of the future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)