series 5

October 4, 2011

The Logic of the Work

Jack Graham adorno, capitalism, consumerism, culture industry, horkheimer, media, series 5 0

“Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

***

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals.…

September 5, 2011

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

Jack Graham blink, series 5, sexism, steven moffat, two doctors 4

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

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

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

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

One doesn’t have to be Freud, does one?…

July 29, 2011

Beasts of England

Jack Graham beast below, class, democracy, exploitation, lodger, series 5, steven moffat 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much as I hate to give Ben Elton any credit, I tend to suspect that, if the world were threatened with imminent destruction, something along the lines of the scenario described in his novel Stark would be nearer to what happened than what we see in ‘The Beast Below’, i.e. the rich would set up their own escape into space and fuck the rest of us nobodies. Mind you, that would be very shortsighted of them, not simply as they’d be left with only each other to talk to (a grim fate, as Elton’s novel implies) but also because they need us: they live off our labour.…

July 13, 2011

Welcome Matt

Jack Graham asylum seekers, christmas carol, donna, eleventh hour, gareth roberts, hungry earth, lodger, matt smith, paul cornell, river song, series 5, silurians, steven moffat, time of angels, turn left, vincent and the doctor, weeping angels 8

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

The Eleventh Hour

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

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

The Angels Two-Parter

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

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

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

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

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

The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called

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

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

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

May 29, 2011

Village People

Jack Graham amy pond, amy's choice, Black Guardian, dream lord, entropy, father ted, immortality, Mawdryn Undead, series 5, simon nye, Terminus 0

A (positive) review of ‘Amy’s Choice’. Because not even I can complain all the time.

Okay, that’s better. The best episode for quite some time. The first really good one since ‘Turn Left’. Nothing major… but genuinely clever and verbally playful, with nice imagery and a texture of ideas, hints and suggestions.

Simon Kinnear called this, with his customary acuity, a “Freudian farce”. The Dream Lord is the truth of the Doctor as an older man, lusting after a young redhead… or at least, lusting after her attention and loyalty and esteem. He and Rory compete over her as though she’s territory. The Doctor wants Amy’s bump to disappear so that the bumpless reality will prove to be real. Meanwhile, the ancient beings inside the elderly Ledworth residents annihilate the village’s children. The aliens are even ‘oral’. “They’re not going to be peeping out of anywhere else are they?” asks Rory pertinently.

This is all played for laughs and, refreshingly, it’s actually funny. (Thinking back, I remember quite liking How Do You Want Me? whereas Chalk just made me want to kick things.)

The unreal tweeness of Ledworth, which was such a bore in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, here becomes the perfect figurative backdrop to a story about people who are negotiating and renegotiating (with themselves as much as with each other) their emotional priorities and allegiances, their desires, etc. In this story, Ledworth manages to be less the unironic cutesy St. Mary Mead / Avengers setting and becomes a bit more… well, it’s funny but here they manage to make it both more real (with the snobbery of “Upper Ledworth” for example) and more genuinely dreamlike. All the more dreamlike for being sparing with the wanton surrealism.

There’s a witty aesthetic connectedness about it, even down to the way the shifts in reality (which seem like multiple awakenings from dazed unconsciousness) are heralded by the sound of birds tweeting, which recalls the cartoon way of signifying concussion as much it reminds us of Ledworth’s rural pleasures. The first instance of this sort of thing even has a neat verbal pun. The Doctor slips into and then wakes from oblivion as he tries to say the phrase “good old days”… or should that be “daze”?

There’s something smart about the way the three characters compare their different interpretations of the same dream. The differences in emphasis are telling. Amy’s “little village” becomes Rory’s “sweet little village”. The Doctor’s “nightmare” becomes, for reasons of tact, “a really good… mare”. These are gags, but also failures to communicate. For once, the constant quipping seems to actually be playful with language rather than just showoffish… and actually serves plot, concept and characterisation (at least some of the time). And then, just as the puns are about to get tiresome, the episode realises this and starts playing them self-consciously, with the Dream Lord complaining that they’re lost on the Doctor (and us).

Toby Jones is excellent… and his character is effective, not least because he seems more like the old Doctor (I mean the old, prehistoric, C20th Doctor) than any of the new fellas, least of all the latest incumbent (who is good, by the way, given something interesting and not-entirely-glib to do). …