Viewing posts tagged society of the spectacle
Posted by:
Jack Graham
6 years, 11 months ago
"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 ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
6 years, 11 months ago
"We waited here in the dark space," booms the Dalek Emperor, "damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured."
So, In Russell's rewrite of 'Revelation of the Daleks' (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward's script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite. Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the 'dregs'... which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows. The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale. Because the Daleks have become TV producers. They've become the people who run
Big Brother and
Trinny & Susannah and
The Weakest Link. They've become the bosses of reality TV. They've become Simon Cowell. (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)
Big Brother, in our ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
8 years, 8 months ago
The quasi-tentacular returns in 'The Claws of Axos'. Big time.
What's more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh... to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter's
The Thing.
Now, if my idea is right - that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique - then this really, really should show up in 'The Claws of Axos'.Not to keep you in suspense: it does.
Taking it on the ChinnNow don't get me wrong. I'd hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that 'Claws' is 'subversive' or anything. I'm not. It isn't. As political critique goes, objectively, 'Claws' is feeble. Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn't amount to subversion. After all,
Clear and Present Danger (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America - but
Clear and Present Danger isn't ...
