The main headlines today.
THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.
In other news...
UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.
The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.
"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."
Finally...
BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.
Andrew Marr is 412 years old.
ideas are icepickproof
Friday, 23 May 2014
Saturday, 17 May 2014
X
On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties. Six if you include the Conservatives. Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats. I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party. So that's seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right - none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus - and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour... which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers. Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.
That's democracy for you. That's apparently the best we can do. That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate. What a barren wasteland of horror. What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise. This is politics, supposedly. This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice. This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.
But, I'm going to vote. Not because I want to. Not because I like any of the 'options'. I don't want to. I don't like any of the 'options'. I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me. I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper. I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill. But it has to be done.
I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine. I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc. I don't expect my vote against them will change anything. Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda. Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements. Roll on the day. But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.
I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories.
If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour. My hand might wither and drop off. Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for. So I'll do that.
If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so. But it won't. I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote. Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.
I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
That's democracy for you. That's apparently the best we can do. That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate. What a barren wasteland of horror. What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise. This is politics, supposedly. This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice. This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.
But, I'm going to vote. Not because I want to. Not because I like any of the 'options'. I don't want to. I don't like any of the 'options'. I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me. I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper. I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill. But it has to be done.
I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine. I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc. I don't expect my vote against them will change anything. Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda. Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements. Roll on the day. But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.
I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories.
If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour. My hand might wither and drop off. Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for. So I'll do that.
If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so. But it won't. I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote. Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.
I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
The Pit
I want to take a moment to tell you all about some music I love. I am a devotee of movie soundtracks. I am particularly fond of two movie scores by Eliot Goldenthal.
Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)
and
Titus
Amazing scores. Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start. The rest of the score is equally good.
I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.
I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil. I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.
By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie). Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly. In fact, I love them. And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).
My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.
I am about to have a baked potato.
I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough. No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey. So far, it's fun.
Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world". Bye.
Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.
Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)
and
Titus
Amazing scores. Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start. The rest of the score is equally good.
I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.
I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil. I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.
By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie). Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly. In fact, I love them. And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).
My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.
I am about to have a baked potato.
I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough. No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey. So far, it's fun.
Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world". Bye.
Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.
Friday, 2 May 2014
Sarcasm and Chips
Every time I read The Prince I become more convinced that it is
a work of sarcasm. Not conscious sarcasm perhaps, but sarcasm
nonetheless.
It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion. This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings. He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici... and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable.
It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves. In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince. The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia's most implacable enemies.
Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying. They just didn't talk about it. In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets. If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible. Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets.
The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book's implicit recognition of this. Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips. Money. To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested. The market is the basis of Medici power. They make society a market in which people are the tokens.
Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don't think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of 'realpolitik' people often take from the book. On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo's Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel - a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.
It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion. This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings. He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici... and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable.
It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves. In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince. The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia's most implacable enemies.
Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying. They just didn't talk about it. In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets. If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible. Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets.
The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book's implicit recognition of this. Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips. Money. To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested. The market is the basis of Medici power. They make society a market in which people are the tokens.
Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don't think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of 'realpolitik' people often take from the book. On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo's Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel - a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.
Wednesday, 30 April 2014
Plain Ketchup
I've been playing catch-up on SF/Fantasy films/TV that passed me by. (Here be spoilers.)
Enders' Game
Did you ever see a movie so bad you genuinely start to think you licked a toad at some point? If not, look no further. Not quite as offensive as the book, but only because it seems to have been drained of any ideas at all... in the same way that you drain butchered farm animals of their blood. Which is a fate you start to long for after more than half an hour of looking at Asa Butterfield's sullen, gormless face. Harrison Ford makes it worth watching for his open, blatant boredom. One empathises.
Pacific Rim
The level of disregard shown for plot logic - even their own heavily-established plot points - is so brazen as to be almost admirable. Beautifully made. But making this story beautifully is a bit like taking ages to weave a tapestry for your grandma out of the finest silks with a message on the front that gets her name wrong. The little girl who plays young-Mako is a better actor than most of the main adult cast.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(Yes, I know it's ancient. There were reasons for me seeing it now. In fact, I think it goes to my credibility that I can honestly say I never watched it at the time.) I see one of the guys who ended up doing Game of Thrones co-wrote this. So he never needed George R. R. Martin's influence to get him interested in heavy-duty misogynistic woman-fridging and needless rapeyness.
The Wolverine
(Okay, so I kind of like the Wolverine.) I should've mentioned the weepy Asian woman stereotype under Pacific Rim. So I'll mention it here instead. There's a fight scene on top of a bullet train that is exactly the sort of thing that the character of Wolverine should be doing. It's the sort of thing that he, and only he, could do. Trouble is, there has to be someone on top of the train with him... someone who, in this case, isn't a guy with an adamantium skeleton, the reflexes of a wild animal, and claws that can help him defy gravity and inertia... so... umm...
The Machine
Seriously? An 'is the A.I. alive' storyline? A naked fembot? Again? In 2014? By the way... the main character has a little girl who is sick, and he puts her brainwaves in his fembot, who speaks in little-girl-voice, and who walks around naked, and with whom he has obvious sexual tension. So, creepy much?
Believe
Psychic/telekinetic little girl and her Dad on the run from sinister government types. Just go and watch Firestarter instead. The story is essentially the same, and even if you don't like it, at least it'll be over quicker.
Gravity
A bravura exercise in saying absolutely nothing. Virtuoso silence. Like space itself, spectacular nothingness.
By the way, Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity is in mourning for a dead little girl. Hey, SF writers... could we just leave the little girls alone for a bit? This is getting worrying.
Enders' Game
Did you ever see a movie so bad you genuinely start to think you licked a toad at some point? If not, look no further. Not quite as offensive as the book, but only because it seems to have been drained of any ideas at all... in the same way that you drain butchered farm animals of their blood. Which is a fate you start to long for after more than half an hour of looking at Asa Butterfield's sullen, gormless face. Harrison Ford makes it worth watching for his open, blatant boredom. One empathises.
Pacific Rim
The level of disregard shown for plot logic - even their own heavily-established plot points - is so brazen as to be almost admirable. Beautifully made. But making this story beautifully is a bit like taking ages to weave a tapestry for your grandma out of the finest silks with a message on the front that gets her name wrong. The little girl who plays young-Mako is a better actor than most of the main adult cast.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(Yes, I know it's ancient. There were reasons for me seeing it now. In fact, I think it goes to my credibility that I can honestly say I never watched it at the time.) I see one of the guys who ended up doing Game of Thrones co-wrote this. So he never needed George R. R. Martin's influence to get him interested in heavy-duty misogynistic woman-fridging and needless rapeyness.
The Wolverine
(Okay, so I kind of like the Wolverine.) I should've mentioned the weepy Asian woman stereotype under Pacific Rim. So I'll mention it here instead. There's a fight scene on top of a bullet train that is exactly the sort of thing that the character of Wolverine should be doing. It's the sort of thing that he, and only he, could do. Trouble is, there has to be someone on top of the train with him... someone who, in this case, isn't a guy with an adamantium skeleton, the reflexes of a wild animal, and claws that can help him defy gravity and inertia... so... umm...
The Machine
Seriously? An 'is the A.I. alive' storyline? A naked fembot? Again? In 2014? By the way... the main character has a little girl who is sick, and he puts her brainwaves in his fembot, who speaks in little-girl-voice, and who walks around naked, and with whom he has obvious sexual tension. So, creepy much?
Believe
Psychic/telekinetic little girl and her Dad on the run from sinister government types. Just go and watch Firestarter instead. The story is essentially the same, and even if you don't like it, at least it'll be over quicker.
Gravity
A bravura exercise in saying absolutely nothing. Virtuoso silence. Like space itself, spectacular nothingness.
By the way, Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity is in mourning for a dead little girl. Hey, SF writers... could we just leave the little girls alone for a bit? This is getting worrying.
Tuesday, 22 April 2014
Unredeemed
Spoilers for Game of Thrones... if the writers haven't already spoiled it enough.
Aside from being just horribly and needlessly misogynistic (Moffat has nothing on this. Nothing.) and basically relying on the assumption that Jaime can be redeemed despite being a rapist (presumably because Cersei is such a b*tch that its okay to rape her), it also perfectly illustrates something I was banging on about in a post about The Borgias a few years back.
It illustrates what happens when you purposefully remove consistent moral thinking from narrative texts just for the show-offy hell of it.
Now, I'm not a moralising finger-wagger (at least, I try not to be because it's a deeply unattractive and narcissistic trait) but I do believe that morality is a vital part of fiction. Not in the sense that all stories should contain clear moral messages, or avowedly support a certain moral position, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that they should be aware that questions of justice and injustice are built into storytelling, at least in the Western tradition, and that it is literally impossible to tell a story in that tradition without raising moral questions, whether one wants to or not.
Such narratives depend, for their interest, on our moral engagement. (Would I do that? How would I respond to someone who did? That happened to me, I know how I felt. Would I react the way he did? Have I ever done anything that bad/good? Would I have the courage to intervene? Does anyone I know think like that? Etc.)
The adaptors of GoT have committed to the Jaime-gets-redeemed arc that is in the books. This clashes with their increasingly evident intent to make the GoT universe as brazenly nasty and cruel and violent and hateful and abusive as possible. I realise that its pretty nasty as GRRM wrote it, but the TV has repeatedly added to his nastiness quotient. The Jaime-redemption arc has now clashed with their rather adolescent - but also, sadly, rather widespread - intent to make the show into one without much of a moral compass, to show everyone as radically morally inconsistent.
Now, on one level - fine. People are not morally consistent. People all do bad things, even broadly good people. And shitty people sometimes do good things, etc etc etc. This is all obvious, or should be. And nobody wants simplistic, moralistic storylines which give us clear goodies and baddies and reassuringly makes the goodies perfect and the baddies irredeemable, and comfortingly has the goodies resoundingly and unambiguously triumphant. That sort of thing just makes for bad stories, at any level.
But. But but butty but butty but but but. Butsworth. Buttington Buttarama.
There is still such a thing as a yardstick to judge people by. It may be fuzzy and subjective, but its there. Even in stories. Perhaps especially in stories. It's easier to judge people in stories, and it always will be, and you can't deny or efface that, any more than you can deny that stories inherently raise questions of justice and injustice. Jaime is in the process of being 'redeemed'. That's the whole point of him at this stage. Despite being an awful person in many respects, he has better traits which are in the process of being awoken and fostered. Where does the rape fit into this? Nowhere. It obliviates it. It's in there simply to shock - not in the simplictic sense (ie here's a horrible scene of sexual violence - yeurch) but in the sense of showily undermining our sense of the morality of the character, and thus of the entire universe we're watching. It makes for great telly according to the logic being employed (ie the war of all against all, conducted by people who are all utter shits) but rubbishes the story. The great shame about this lapse into moral illiteracy is that it makes the story less effective.
Well no, the great shame is that it once again puts loathsome misogyny on screen and bolsters rape culture, for no reason at all. But the damage done to the story is a part of it.
Aside from being just horribly and needlessly misogynistic (Moffat has nothing on this. Nothing.) and basically relying on the assumption that Jaime can be redeemed despite being a rapist (presumably because Cersei is such a b*tch that its okay to rape her), it also perfectly illustrates something I was banging on about in a post about The Borgias a few years back.
It illustrates what happens when you purposefully remove consistent moral thinking from narrative texts just for the show-offy hell of it.
Now, I'm not a moralising finger-wagger (at least, I try not to be because it's a deeply unattractive and narcissistic trait) but I do believe that morality is a vital part of fiction. Not in the sense that all stories should contain clear moral messages, or avowedly support a certain moral position, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that they should be aware that questions of justice and injustice are built into storytelling, at least in the Western tradition, and that it is literally impossible to tell a story in that tradition without raising moral questions, whether one wants to or not.
Such narratives depend, for their interest, on our moral engagement. (Would I do that? How would I respond to someone who did? That happened to me, I know how I felt. Would I react the way he did? Have I ever done anything that bad/good? Would I have the courage to intervene? Does anyone I know think like that? Etc.)
The adaptors of GoT have committed to the Jaime-gets-redeemed arc that is in the books. This clashes with their increasingly evident intent to make the GoT universe as brazenly nasty and cruel and violent and hateful and abusive as possible. I realise that its pretty nasty as GRRM wrote it, but the TV has repeatedly added to his nastiness quotient. The Jaime-redemption arc has now clashed with their rather adolescent - but also, sadly, rather widespread - intent to make the show into one without much of a moral compass, to show everyone as radically morally inconsistent.
Now, on one level - fine. People are not morally consistent. People all do bad things, even broadly good people. And shitty people sometimes do good things, etc etc etc. This is all obvious, or should be. And nobody wants simplistic, moralistic storylines which give us clear goodies and baddies and reassuringly makes the goodies perfect and the baddies irredeemable, and comfortingly has the goodies resoundingly and unambiguously triumphant. That sort of thing just makes for bad stories, at any level.
But. But but butty but butty but but but. Butsworth. Buttington Buttarama.
There is still such a thing as a yardstick to judge people by. It may be fuzzy and subjective, but its there. Even in stories. Perhaps especially in stories. It's easier to judge people in stories, and it always will be, and you can't deny or efface that, any more than you can deny that stories inherently raise questions of justice and injustice. Jaime is in the process of being 'redeemed'. That's the whole point of him at this stage. Despite being an awful person in many respects, he has better traits which are in the process of being awoken and fostered. Where does the rape fit into this? Nowhere. It obliviates it. It's in there simply to shock - not in the simplictic sense (ie here's a horrible scene of sexual violence - yeurch) but in the sense of showily undermining our sense of the morality of the character, and thus of the entire universe we're watching. It makes for great telly according to the logic being employed (ie the war of all against all, conducted by people who are all utter shits) but rubbishes the story. The great shame about this lapse into moral illiteracy is that it makes the story less effective.
Well no, the great shame is that it once again puts loathsome misogyny on screen and bolsters rape culture, for no reason at all. But the damage done to the story is a part of it.
Friday, 28 March 2014
The Perfect Companion
Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong,
capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.
But this is just the job of the companion. Even the worst of the classic series companions - Victoria, Dodo, etc - gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required. They don't tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them. It's a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully. That's not something that's entirely untroubling, but - for good or ill - it's how this works. In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions. It's actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha. But the point is that they all step up because that's what they're in the text to do. The ones that don't, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).
You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion. Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor. Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment). Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem. Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor. The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be. It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc. But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.
The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their 'duties' as a companion, right the way through.
Amy's character - i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of 'companion duties' - is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc. The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines. Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll. House. Car. Marriage. Etc.
River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor. Far from dragging her out of domesticity into social action, the Doctor saves her by dragging her the other way...and she does the same to him.
Clara, it must be admitted, is a little different. She's got hardly any personal life at all, and has her duties on top of this absence. They are initially employment duties which seem to meld strangely with her companion duties (i.e. the kids in 'Nightmare in Silver').
She's interesting actually, because she's an inflection of the true neoliberal ideal of the female as both domestic provider and multi-tasking worker. Her work is domestic. But she also plays whatever role is required of her by whatever episode she's in. She is fractured into multiple selves, all of whom perform necessary tasks. She's even shown to literally moonlight between two jobs in 'The Snowmen'.
The objection that she doesn't revolve around the Doctor because she chooses to enter his timelines and save him, and that she is therefore her own woman and the solution to her own riddle, flounders on the realisation that she has, essentially, accepted a job or a duty and the fracturing of self that this entails.
Admittedly, Clara is not depicted without a certain occasional ambivalence towards the idea of absorbtion into the workforce as a multi-tasking, multi-skilled drone with multiple jobs. In her debut proper, 'The Bells of Saint John', she is caught in a vast corporate machinery of soul-sucking employment. However, ultimately, the inescapability of neoliberalism is arrived at, once again, as she enters a similar kind of self-fracturing machinery of work by her own choice. The 'good' machinery rather than the bad. The ultimate irony here may be that the self-fracturing machinery of work in question, the supposedly good machinery, her ultimate destination, turns out to be the Doctor himself.
No, actually, that's not quite an irony... because this has always been latent in the companions, to a greater or lesser extent, almost since day one. Remember above, when I said that it wasn't entirely untroubling that companions had to fulfill certain demands and do certain jobs simply in order to remain functional within the texts as companions? Clara may be the final and open acceptance, on the part of the show, of one version of what the companion is: a precariously employed worker with great and various demands made upon them because of their (usually) voluntary decision to serve the Doctor. She is the moment when that troubling, duty-laden, ideologically market-based conception, triumphs over the others.
Does this mean, then, that the pre-Clara Moffat companions are actually the most liberated from this syndrome, given the emphasis placed on their private lives aside from their 'duties'? Well no, I don't think so. They are still dragged away from the role of social actor - the potential positive flipside of the 'Doctor's happy worker' model - by their entanglement within extremely gendered conceptions of personal/emotional life. They are dragged away from being either workers or social actors by also being women.
The better course to have taken would have been to trump RTD's failed (self-betrayed) project to fully embrace the companion as transitioning from the truncation of personal life under neoliberalism into independant - sometimes emancipatory - social action. Instead, one way or another, Moffat does the exact opposite.
But this is just the job of the companion. Even the worst of the classic series companions - Victoria, Dodo, etc - gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required. They don't tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them. It's a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully. That's not something that's entirely untroubling, but - for good or ill - it's how this works. In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions. It's actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha. But the point is that they all step up because that's what they're in the text to do. The ones that don't, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).
You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion. Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor. Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment). Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem. Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor. The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be. It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc. But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.
The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their 'duties' as a companion, right the way through.
Amy's character - i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of 'companion duties' - is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc. The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines. Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll. House. Car. Marriage. Etc.
River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor. Far from dragging her out of domesticity into social action, the Doctor saves her by dragging her the other way...and she does the same to him.
Clara, it must be admitted, is a little different. She's got hardly any personal life at all, and has her duties on top of this absence. They are initially employment duties which seem to meld strangely with her companion duties (i.e. the kids in 'Nightmare in Silver').
She's interesting actually, because she's an inflection of the true neoliberal ideal of the female as both domestic provider and multi-tasking worker. Her work is domestic. But she also plays whatever role is required of her by whatever episode she's in. She is fractured into multiple selves, all of whom perform necessary tasks. She's even shown to literally moonlight between two jobs in 'The Snowmen'.
The objection that she doesn't revolve around the Doctor because she chooses to enter his timelines and save him, and that she is therefore her own woman and the solution to her own riddle, flounders on the realisation that she has, essentially, accepted a job or a duty and the fracturing of self that this entails.
Admittedly, Clara is not depicted without a certain occasional ambivalence towards the idea of absorbtion into the workforce as a multi-tasking, multi-skilled drone with multiple jobs. In her debut proper, 'The Bells of Saint John', she is caught in a vast corporate machinery of soul-sucking employment. However, ultimately, the inescapability of neoliberalism is arrived at, once again, as she enters a similar kind of self-fracturing machinery of work by her own choice. The 'good' machinery rather than the bad. The ultimate irony here may be that the self-fracturing machinery of work in question, the supposedly good machinery, her ultimate destination, turns out to be the Doctor himself.
No, actually, that's not quite an irony... because this has always been latent in the companions, to a greater or lesser extent, almost since day one. Remember above, when I said that it wasn't entirely untroubling that companions had to fulfill certain demands and do certain jobs simply in order to remain functional within the texts as companions? Clara may be the final and open acceptance, on the part of the show, of one version of what the companion is: a precariously employed worker with great and various demands made upon them because of their (usually) voluntary decision to serve the Doctor. She is the moment when that troubling, duty-laden, ideologically market-based conception, triumphs over the others.
Does this mean, then, that the pre-Clara Moffat companions are actually the most liberated from this syndrome, given the emphasis placed on their private lives aside from their 'duties'? Well no, I don't think so. They are still dragged away from the role of social actor - the potential positive flipside of the 'Doctor's happy worker' model - by their entanglement within extremely gendered conceptions of personal/emotional life. They are dragged away from being either workers or social actors by also being women.
The better course to have taken would have been to trump RTD's failed (self-betrayed) project to fully embrace the companion as transitioning from the truncation of personal life under neoliberalism into independant - sometimes emancipatory - social action. Instead, one way or another, Moffat does the exact opposite.
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