Daniel Harper

This week in the world of Oi! Spaceman Shana and I actually did a Classic Doctor Who story without a guest. Since she’s been itching to get some more Liz Shaw love in her life, I showed her Doctor Who and the Silurians, to which she had a somewhat mixed reaction, due mostly to the Third-Doctor-era pacing of the thing. In addition to the pacing problems, we chatted about the general interpretation of this story as fundamentally a political narrative about genocide, in which the militaristic humans are acting imperialistically towards an indigenous population, and found that interpretation a bit wanting. I may work some of that into an essay down the line, but then again virtually all of our podcast episodes are becoming sort of scratch pads for essays we might write. So it goes. 

Lee and I also recorded a new They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, continuing on our sex comedy series (which will run another three weeks or so before we move on into spaghetti Westerns for a bit). This week we did 1984’s Hardbodies and 1986’s Perfect Timing, the first of which is well-known but the second is an almost completely lost gem.* Eighties’ sex comedies are an almost irredemably sexist genre, but there’s quite a bit of feminist justification you can pull out of these two once you account for the terribleness of the source material, especially Perfect Timing, which is sort of a combination sitcom/French farce/independent film progenitor that works as a lowbrow character study while still containing a handful of Skinemax-style nude scenes. Pex Lives’ own James Murphy has said in public that he liked this episode, so go give it a listen if you trust what that guy has to say.

*(Future programming note: in the next TMBDOS episode released I provide some background on Perfect Timing that I didn’t have access to in this episode, so if you enjoy this week’s make sure to check out the next as well.)…

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(Content Note: The following contains descriptions of racial injustice and violence, discussions of the author’s own personal history with racism, and some use of the N-word. It is also written by a white man from the American South, and is an attempt to dicuss these issues with a presumed-majority-white audience, and as such is in no way intended to displace black voices on these issues. If you’re looking for black authors on these topics, may I recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s “Dallas is a tragedy for all of us – and shouldn’t shut down calls for justice,” Bianka Bell’s “How Pseudo-Allies Enable the Killing of Black Bodies,” and Messiah Rhodes’s “Scary Negroes With Guns.”)

“I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car any more. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.

[…]

“…he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. […] He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running. When he does that, his left hand goes in a fist and goes to his side, his right one goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me. […] At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

— From Darren Wilson’s testimony on the shooting of Michael Brown.

No Way Out (1950) is a strange bird of a film by modern eyes: approximately equal parts despairing film noir, Tennessee-Williams-style social realist drama, and Hollywood harrangue about the evils of racism. Sidney Poitier (in his first-ever major motion picture role) is Luther Brooks, a young medical doctor working in a prison ward who pretty much sets the mold for the character Poitier would spend a career portraying: well-scrubbed, morally forthright men of impeccable ethical standards who abhor violence and serve not as the Magic Negro, but the Good Negro. If Luther Brooks or Vigil Tibbs had been murdered in the street by Darren Wilson, not even the Bill O’Reillys of the world would be able to find much cause for claiming the “no angel” defense.

Opposite Poitier is Richard Widmark’s Ray Biddle, a horrifying snake of a man who finds himself being healed by Brooks after he and his brother are shot fleeing from the scene of a robbery they have committed. When Biddle’s brother dies, he doesn’t buy Brooks’ diagnosis of a long-resident brain tumor but blames “the nigger doctor” for intentionally murdering a white man.…

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I was supposed to produce an essay today. I had a whole plan and everything, which would have involved writing the first of no-doubt many essays discussing the intersection of polyamorous perspective and large-scale political movements. Then two black men were murdered on camera in less than twenty-four hours and that post felt, shall we say, less than perfectly empathetic. I have a very different post, looking at racialized violence and systemic racism coming up for Sunday, but instead of doing something serious today I figured I’d do the weekly Oi! Spaceman podcast post. I promise, we don’t deal with any kind of serious or political issues on any of the Oi! Spaceman family. Honest.

Anyway, the big news is that Pex Lives’ own James Murphy came onto Searching For Fuchal to chat about the fifth episode of Series One, “Confidence and Paranoia.” James has been watching Red Dwarf about as long as he could talk, so this was a very fun (albeit relaxed) episode. Go check it out. 

Over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, we’re even less on any kind of overt poltical move, chatting about sleazy sex comedies. We covered The Cheerleaders and the ulta-obscure One Night Only this week and had a really nice time doing so. The Cheerleaders is kind of an accidental art film (with lots of female nudity and Skinemax-style sex scenes) and One Night Only includes an extended sequence involving The Scary Cave, a vaguely sexual act which really must be seen to be believed. If you’re interested in listening to two increasingly-drunken men chat about titty flicks, it’s probably not an entire waste of your time. …

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(Title given to this post with apologies to Jane and Lee, who to my knowledge are not in a relationship as would be implied by the inherent parallelism.)

This week over on Oi! Spaceman, Shana and I were joined by the wonderful Jane Campbell and chatted about The Time Monster in an episode called “Esoterica, Power, and Dick Jokes,” and in which all three of that triptych make an appearance. Jane has already shared that with the Eruditorum Press audience in the link above (and had a brief digression about hooting owls in the process), so I’m assuming most of you have already seen it, but if not you the link above will send you right there.

Title and header image are actually from this week’s They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, in which Lee and I kick off this year’s sex comedy series with a look at the 1969 counterculture/open relationship classic Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. (Link goes to the podcast episode page.) Lee is monogamous (while, if you hadn’t heard already, I am polyamorous), so there was an interesting back and forth on the different character interactions and the overall meaning of the film as a whole. Some of the material I cover in this podcast is liable to make it into a future essay, so if you want an advance look at some of my thoughts on the way the sixties counterculture fed into the cultural malaise of the seventies, go give it a listen.…

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Sorry for the slightly belated update, but this week has been busy. This week in Oi! Spaceman, we put out the next episode of Searching For Fuchal, discussing Series One, Episode 4: “Waiting For God.” The episode is very much about the search for meaning in a vast and uncaring universe, and our podcast attempts to connect Lister’s rejection of his own godhood with his essential goodness, and Rimmer’s finding patterns that aren’t there with the Quagaars with the Cats coming to worship Lister’s laundry list. “Waiting For God” is probably the most on-point to the central message of Red Dwarf we’ve seen yet, and it was actually a joy to revisit for the podcast. Download it here. 

Over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, we welcomed the triumphant (half) return of our old co-host Paul by discussing two sci-fi action films from 1990: Robocop 2 and Predator 2. Highbrow choices, I know. We had a great time chatting about the plundering of public resources by private enterprises, the birth of the neoliberal agenda, and the terribly racist idea of what drug cartels actually did. Also: why Robocop should really be the perfect negotiator. Check it out here.…

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(Content Note: This piece contains descriptions of fictionalized violence against women of a possibly sexual nature and descriptions of bodily objectification through male gaze. It also contains some mention of foot fetishism and uses an extended metaphor around piss play. Consider yourself warned.)

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is generally considered to be the least impressive of his filmography, even by Tarantino himself. It’s a film obviously constructed around a car chase sequence and as the second half of a double bill whose lead-in is a mildly diverting action-horror-comedy; it’s none-too-surprising that few critics were all that kind upon release. I haven’t seen anyone on Eruditorum Press beat up on the Guardian lately, so let’s let Peter Bradshaw stand in for the critical consensus:

…Tarantino has had to pad this film with stuff that would hardly make the DVD’s “deleted scenes” section: long, long, long stretches of bizarrely inconsequential conversation between the babe avengers which are a big comedown from the glorious riffs from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino appears himself in a wooden acting role (a real downer) and awards an unlovely cameo to his friend Eli Roth. But check out that head-on collision.

In defense of the commentariat of 2007, Tarantino has crafted a film that seems like just that kind of mindless fluff on the schedule of a week-by-week major-release movie reviewer. Few great films can be fully understood on a first viewing (unless you’re Pauline Kael I suppose). Then again (if I must take the opportunity to shit on the Guardian), the words “Zoe Bell” appear nowhere in Bradshaw’s review, meaning he entirely missed the greatest pleasures of even the surface level.

Nine years later, we need take no such excuse. Tarantino is a consummate filmmaker, hugely controversial, thoroughly aware of the controversy his films create, and in interviews manages to simultaneously talk incessantly and refuse to reveal anything of importance as to the intended meaning of his work. His persona and body of work are expressly designed to provoke a reaction, and even if Death Proof is the least of his films, it’s worth a second look. What are those interminable dialogue scenes doing, and why isn’t anyone talking about Royales with Cheese?

Looking again at the surface first, the conversations in this film are almost entirely among women. Young women to be precise, traditionally attractive party girls interested in booze, drugs, and hard cock. And in trying not to be judged, either by the other girls or by larger society, by how they like to enjoy that cock. And, over and over again, the omnipresent threat of aggressive men using their size, their social influence, their presence to dominate these young women sexually, to control female flesh for their own purposes.

Butterfly makes out with her nebbish boyfriend, clothes on, and makes him leave with a hard-on, and her friends laugh in disbelief, judging her for not just fucking him. Later, she’ll be pressured by social convention and by an aggressive masculine charmer in Stuntman Mike to perform a lap dance in the middle of a crowded bar.…

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First, the Orlando shooting massacre happened. Then we had some issues with an Oi! Spaceman recording. Then some personal issues kept us away from the microphones for a few days. Long story short, I don’t have a lot of new content for you this week. The only new episode anywhere in the Oi! Spaceman family was this intermission episode I did by myself over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, discussing three of the Westerns that James and Kevin have chatted about in their last two episodes, all of which I’d seen for the first time: The Hanging Tree, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. 

The Western genre is very much about the limnal space between the ideals of “civilization,” (as problemmatic as the term can be in any context) and those of “open range.” Namely: how do we as a society deal with bad actors in our midst, with violence committed by those in our communities. Should we respond to violence with more violence, or are there other (more “civilized”) ways of responding? These ideas were very much on my mind when I recorded the episode, as I recorded it the evening after the murder of fifty queer people during Pride week, and I definitely referenced the news when discussing the films. It’s a quiet episode; I was emotionally raw (partly from arguing with alt-right kiddy-Nazis on Twitter) and more than a little numb. Go give it a listen; I’m sure some of the questions of masculinity and femininity in classic Westerns will come up again in a future essay I write in this space. 

Given that Oi! Spaceman is new to this site, I thought I’d take the opportunity of a light programming week to show off a few episodes I’m particularly proud of. Phil has basically brought us on to talk about sex and gender, so I should probably point out our most sex-heavy episodes. The first is our Series 8 recap, called “An Abusive Polyamorous Triad,” in which we examine the Doctor/Clara/Danny dynamic through the lens of polyamory. (That’s also the episode where we officially “came out” and so we talk a bit about polyamory in general there for the curious.) More recently, we discussed the 2015 Christmas Special in “Genocide and Polyamory,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. That’s the one where I briefly discuss my vision of the sexual prowess of the various New Who Doctors, by the way, while Shana very audibly rolls her eyes. 

Away from the sexy talk, I’m quite proud of our Daleks’ Master Plan discussion, which I called “Missing Episodes and Moral Culpability,” and borrows heavily from Phil’s old Tardis Eruditorum entry on DMP. Our chat about The Ribos Operation, “One Day, Even Here…” is also one I like a lot, and since that one both references criticisms Jack made of our discussion of The Invasion of Time and references his excellent piece on The Ribos Operation quite heavily, fans of Jack may want to give that one a whirl. …

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Those of you who aren’t already listening to Oi! Spaceman, despite Jack’s constant prodding, may not know that while we started out as a weekly Doctor Who podcast, we’ve recently gone dynamic, with various threads representing different podcasts pitched at different audiences. Did I just outright steal the idea from Pex Lives? Maybe….

Anyway, Phil has asked me to take the Saturday spot and promote the stuff we’ve produced in a given week. These will vary a bit as we’re not on a specific schedule, but we produce at least two podcasts of roughly ninety minutes each week, and often more than that, so you should have plenty of time-wasting audio in your life going forward. 

Over on Oi! Spaceman proper, or The Mothership as I sometimes think of it from the old Law & Order Usenet groups I frequented in years past, Shana and I discussed Horror of Fang Rock with recent Pex Lives guest Kit Gonzo, and as you can tell from the podcast title, things got pretty violent pretty fast. The prospect of Richard Dawkins being brutally murdered by Leela and the connection between Skinsale and Bill O’Reilly are discussed. Also lots of conversation about Leela’s racial encoding, and hints of what I’d end up writing about in my recent post about Four/Leela D/s. 

Shana and I also ended up doing a bonus episode looking at Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained, which ended up spending less time looking at the film itself than pop culture icons, subverting narratives, and the ugly legacy of slavery in America. This episode will no-doubt be controversial, as it’s fairly aggressive in terms of language and depressing content than even our fans (few as they may be) might expect. 

Another member of the Oi! Spaceman family is They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, a weekly movie podcast I do with my buddy Lee that often ends up being half drunken-hangout and half in-depth film discussion. Jack showed up a couple of months ago to help chat about Blood Simple and Blue Velvet, and much amusement was had by all. Also a vigorous rant from yours truly about the use of BDSM in Lynch’s film, with specific examination of Rossellini’s performance. 

This week on TMBDOS, Lee and I looked at James Gunn’s 2006 film Slither, in particular its use of horror/comedy tropes and compared it with the works of Kevin Anderson from the late nineties. We also discussed a long piece of internet analysis about 2001, which we covered recently. 

All in all, a very bloody week for the Oi! Spaceman family. I hope we continue to live up to the high expectations the Eruditorum Press audience will undoubtedly bring. By which I mean, we’ll keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing until Phil decides he doesn’t want us around anymore. 

Next week we’re planning to do a Season Five Troughton story (whose identity I will leave for everyone to guess), and hopefully pick back up on the Red Dwarf thread with Waiting for God.…

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(Content Note: This post contains discussions of the psychology of dominant/submissive relationships and their representation onscreen, but is not itself in any way sexually explicit.)

Those of us who either identify as a Gender/Sexual Minority (GSM), or just participate in what might be euphemistically called alternative lifestyle communities, (or some combination of the above) often find ourselves panning through a great deal of heteronormative/amatonormative, relationship-escalator, milquetoast/middle-class/Establishment Julia Roberts silt in order to find those tiny nuggets of gold that we actually feel represents us in mainstream media. Tiny moments, often unnoticed by the mainstream, become hugely portentious when viewed through the proper set of eyes. Consider Samwise touching Frodo’s hand in Rivendell, or the endless puerile humor of Batman and Robin, or the incredibly passionate fandom that’s arisen around Five/Turlough shipping (or Tegan/Nyssa, or… well, can we just say the whole of Doctor Who from 1981-1984 is just one big pile of queer shippery and get it over with?)

As a culture we’re very used to discussing gay subtext in media (who still remembers The Ambiguously Gay Duo?), and increasingly that comfort is being extended to lesbian and bisexual subtext, but outside of those fairly strict categories I see little discussion of representation of other GSM-types, except within the communities where individuals are seeking media representation. Asexual/aromantic persons, for instance, or those who do not define according to a gender binary (although this is improving now that the filmmakers formerly known as the Wachowski Brothers have revealed themselves to be the Wachowski siblings), or those who simply don’t have a problem with a casual threesome a few times a year tend to find themselves either 1) not represented at all or 2) represented in ways that are at best inaccurate and at worst actively harmful. (Buffalo Bill, anyone?)

The upshot of all of this is that a lot of us therefore tend to grasp onto whatever scrap of representation we can find of our identities or proclivities in media, and sometimes will accept a hugely problematic representation as being, well, better than nothing. And if you happen to be a person interested in BDSM, power exchange, and other D/s relationship types presented in any kind of sympathetic way, rather than as either a portrait of hugely damaged people feeding a sexual fix the way they’d feed a heroin habit or as the serial-killer-of-the-week in your average network procedural, the pickings get incredibly slim indeed.

Which perhaps explains why I find the Four/Leela relationship compelling not just on an abstract character level, but in the kind of fucked-up headcanony shippy way that is almost embarassingly uncomfortable to write about for this kind of audience. The erotic is almost by definition deeply personal, idiosyncratic, and weird. Why we like what we like in the bedroom or out of it is intimate and strange and can almost sound like nonsense syllables to those not in the know. I did some drafts of this trying to keep these ideas abstract, general, explaining things in this oh-so-distant way that kept my hands clean… and it was the kind of dryly academic bullshit writing that should never even be in the same room as something as electrifying, edifying, and communicative as good sex.…

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