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body horror

Review: The Substance

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As Demi Moore awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, she found herself transformed on her bathroom floor into Margaret Qualley.

The Substance touches on a frequently quoted bit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about how men look at women while women watch themselves being looked at. In the first act of The Substance, we accompany (Demi Moore in perhaps her most meta role) through her decaying world. Elisabeth’s world is one where her body is commodified, where she is forced to look at herself as a spectacle everywhere she goes. Like all spectacles, she wears down; she’s treated as disposable, ephemeral, like a piece of chicken rotting in her apartment.

When Elisabeth’s double Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, we first see her from her own perspective: we see her through her eyes, as the object she was created to be. Sue and Elisabeth’s connection is symbiotic-turned-parasitic-turned-symbiotic-again. Elisabeth’s curse is to see herself as the world sees her: something to be used, enjoyed, and disposed of. It’s body horror, but equally, it’s economic horror, depicting a Hollywood where women are a prized commodity — a world that enlightened, post-#MeToo Hollywood pretends not to be anymore.

Imagine Cinderella meets The Metamorphosis crossed with Sunset Boulevard via Videodrome mixed with Twin Peaks: The Return, and you’d have something almost but not entirely unlike The Substance. It’s bizarre, disgusting, and one of the only intelligent statements about Hollywood this side of the turn of the century. Watching this movie slowly turn into a grosser Carrie is delicious. I giggled at some of the nastiest bits — always a sign that a movie is really effectively horrific. What a beautiful year for horror.…

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Lytton and Griffiths are wandering across a quarry.  It actually is a quarry.  Something is being dug up or mined there, by slaves watched over by Cybermen.

Lytton has a device that detects Cybermen.

“There are two very close,” he says.

“That’s right!” shouts a very human voice from behind him.

Bates and Stratton – two escapees from the Cybermen’s labour gangs – disarm and frisk Lytton and Griffiths.

Lytton has been looking for them, and they’ve been looking for him.

“Are they Cybermen?” asks the perplexed Griffiths.

“Almost,” says Lytton, amused.

“This is what the Cybermen do to you…” sneers Bates, removing his glove and sleeve to reveal a cybernetic arm, a chilly construct of steel and pulleys.  His metal hand closes on Griffiths’ fleshy one and squeezes.  Bates watched Griffiths’ pain with dead eyes.

“How much of you?”

“Arms and legs.”

Bates and Stratton are rejects from the Cyber-conversion process.  The Cybermen turn their rejects – the ones that cannot be entirely consumed – into labourers in their quarry.

So… the Cybermen start with the arms and legs.  The legs that give locomotion.  The arms and hands that lift and move and dig and manipulate.  The organs of physical work.

When the Cybermen catch Lytton and subject him to conversion, they start with his arms.

The original Cybermen had human hands.

The severed hand is a recurring motif of the gothic.

The gothic is about dead labour, the living death of alienated work, the physical invasion and evisceration wrought by capital upon the working body, and the occult process whereby wealth is created from labour.

The Cybermen – with their skull-faces – are gothic things.  Zombies, in the old fashioned sense.  People reduced to pure labour power.…

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The Lords Temporal

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This is an edited and tweaked version of something I wrote for the old site.


If ‘The Deadly Assassin’ has a central thesis, it might be this: power is no guaranteur of responsibility. Or even sensibleness. This tale shows us beings like us. Godlike in their technology, they are also childlike in their small-mindedness.

In ‘The Deadly Assassin’, the Time Lords are senile gerontocrats living on ossified priviledge. They natter, bumble and scheme. The less shot-away amongst them spend their time snapping at each other with haughty contempt or scheming over appearances and expediency. Robert Holmes deliberately strips Power of its outward signs of dignity and virtue and superiority.

They are locked in a rigid class system. They fail to understand their own technology, their own power, their own myths. They “adjust the truth” to suit their agendas. Their outwardly civilised society begins to crumble into anarchy when two of their renegades return and start fighting out their neuroses. The sit on a massive computer lake of information in which nestles a surreal and nightmarish dreamscape filled with elemental terrors. Their Panopticon (literally: place where all can be seen) hides secrets. The biggest secret is a singularity, a piece of cosmic anarchy that they’ve slaved to their technology and then forgotten about. This is a picture of denial. Like the lies that are “good for public morale” overlaying the sordid truth, their society pretends to be controlled and calm but rests on hidden and deadly knowledge.

As a satire, it isn’t subtle. Robert Holmes chucks in random signifiers from various power elites of Western culture: British public schools, Washington DC, the Vatican, Oxbridge, etc. Gallifrey seems to be his scathing picture of an oligarchial and decadent world, run by liars or killers or the senile, reported by snobbish and fautous twitterers content to reel off the official-view of the upper echelons. Trials are manipulated for convenience. Elections are devoid of real democracy. Behind the specious words about “our traditions of fairness and justice”, the system’s Swiss Guard-style private police use torture and assumption. Hildred is a brutal bungler; Spandrell’s intelligence and independence only highlights how unusual he is in his world.

 “Aren’t you worried Wikileaks might find out about this?”

Most outragously, the story seems to riff on the Kennedy assassination. ‘The Deadly Assassin’ isn’t an allegory of Dealey Plaza, but it does play with our collective (often confabulated) consciousness of that political slaying. The Doctor is a “patsy”, his alleged weapon has misaligned scopes, the real killer is from within the top circle of power, the truth is changed by Borusa’s cover-up.

We even have the cheekily named Celestial Intervention Agency, of which the Doctor is assumed to be a member… and, indeed, the Doctor has been involved in Time Lord-sanctioned interventions. Is he a C.I.A. agent? This one throwaway reference muddies the waters (or rather stirs waters that are already muddy). The Time Lords speak of their policy of neutral observation of the universe (Gallifrey is the place where all can be seen) and of their strict non-interventionism… but, like the Western ‘democracies’ that speak of international law and then organise coups d’etat in places where they feel their interests are threatened, they can always ask their “C.I.A.”…

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Sex, Death & Rock ‘n’ Roll

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The Curious Orange, before he got the Lee & Herring gig.

In the mid-1980s, Doctor Who (perhaps influenced by a cultural context in which a strict matriarchal figure was punishing the British people for their own submerged desires) developed a habit of delving into surprisingly murky and morbid corners… and no story has corners quite as murky and morbid as ‘Revelation of the Daleks’. The undercurrents in this strange tale include unrequited love, lust, suicide, alcoholism, putrefaction, mutilation, cannibalism and even – obliquely – necrophilia. This is a story that has a perverse, sexless, destructive, sado-masochistic anti-romance at its core, relegating all the stuff about galactic conquest to the sidelines.

Naturally, displaying obtuseness that is almost customary, most commentators have missed this and worried volubly about the least of the story’s delectable sins: the onscreen violence, which is only startling when judged against the largely implicit jeopardy of the Davison era and hardly compares to the extremes of, say, ‘The Brain of Morbius’. But ‘Revelation’ looked tame even then, even by the standards of material made for kids. Have you seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? It’s torture porn for finger-painters.

THE DORIAN MODE

The literary novel that we’re *supposed* to talk about in connection with ‘Revelation’ is, of course, Waugh’s The Loved One… but, while I don’t dispute the Waugh connection, the book that I always find myself thinking of when I watch ‘Revelation’ is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is a novel that seriously worried some people at the time of its publication, not just because of its determinedly ambiguous morality and gay undercurrents, but because of its sheer, unbridled (and supposedly un-British) sensuality; its focus upon physical details, upon heady emotions and upon lavish descriptions of colours, fabrics, flowers and, most especially, aromas. The eponymous Dorian even spends some of his long life dedicated to the study and enjoyment of perfumes.

We encounter smells in many Saward scripts. In ‘The Visitation’, the TARDIS crew encounters the smell of sulpher and then of the alien gas soliton. In ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’, the bacteriological weapon used against the staff of the prison ship causes the infected to stink even as their skin bubbles and drips off. In ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, the defrosting Telosian tombs give off the smell of bad meat. In ‘The Two Doctors’, which Saward script-edited, the Doctor launches into a little soliloquy about the evocativeness of smell as he and Peri stand in the kitchen of the deserted space station, sniffing the rotting food and – it is implied – the corpses that the Sontarans left in their wake. In ‘Revelation’ we have Bostock who stinks “like rotting flesh” because his personal philosophy forbids him to wash. The smell of the butcher’s shop window is heavily implied by Stengos’ appearance.

Also, as in Dorian Gray, there is a noticeable emphasis on flowers. The Doctor and Peri walk through banks of them on their way to Tranquil Repose; Jobel and his staff are first seen amidst floral decorations; Tasambeker is offered a flower in a cruel parody of a compliment.…

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