Elizabeth Sandifer
About Elizabeth Sandifer
Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:
This Dread World and the Rolling of Wheels (The Last War in Albion Part 3: William S. Burroughs, Michael Moorcock)
“This dread world and the rolling of wheels” -William Blake, The Book of Urizen, 1794
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| Figure 17: The working class neighborhood of Northampton Alan Moore grew up in was called The Boroughs |
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| Figure 18: Heroin |
When You’ve Seen The Ages That I’ve Seen (The Idiot’s Lantern)
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| In the original version the Wire was to steadily move up Maslow’s Hierarchy until, in the climax, it shouted “lacking in opportunities to express my creativity” instead of just “hungry.” |
It’s May 27th, 2006. Oh look. Gnarls Barkley. What a shock. Busta Rhymes, Rihanna, Red Hot Chili Peppers, LL Cool J, and Shayne Ward also chart. In news, Montenegro has voted for independence from Serbia, and scientists have confirmed that HIV originated among Cameroonian chimpanzees.
Anyone hoping to be enlivened from a slow week by a fresh episode of Doctor Who would have found themselves at least somewhat perplexed by The Idiot’s Lantern. As has been noticed by more people than I care to count, The Idiot’s Lantern does not quite work. This is mostly not interesting – it tends to go loud when it should go quiet and vice versa. Eddie Connolly is portrayed as a straight villain from the get-go when too much of the plot revolves on sympathy for him – there needed to be scenes where he’s given an underlying dignity as a man struggling to keep a family going. Gatiss’s decision to avoid the title “The One-Eyed Monster” is, of course, as unforgivable as it is completely understandable. And if we’re being perfectly honest, it is ever so slightly possible David Tennant does not wear a bouffant well. But these are small reasons and uninteresting to anyone not heavily invested in writing as a craft. Which is to say that I could go on about them for ages, but that I don’t want to unless they say something substantive about the evolution of the show as well.
So let’s move on to the interesting way that The Idiot’s Lantern fails – the fact that the script is actually harmed by David Tennant, or, more accurately, by the fact that it’s not written for him. There’s a very fundamental difference in how Tennant and Eccleston play the part, and this difference requires some attention in writing. In short, Tennant plays the role with a narrower range of tones that he can take, but with a lot of very deliberate turns and reversals within those tones, whereas Eccleston tends to flit about manically and respond in ways that are very slightly off from the expected tone. And in this script that causes two problems.
The first is in what I already noted – the story’s poor decisions on when to go loud or quiet. Tennant’s Doctor is, from the start, designed to not have a lot of gradiations in angry. No second chances and all. But even as an actor, this is true – Tennant does shouty and angry the way he does shouty and angry. He doesn’t have a setting for “kinda shouty and angry.” So where Eccleston finds new ways for the Doctor to be angry, Tennant continually goes back to one terribly effective way of doing the Doctor incandescent with rage. This is fine, but it means that the Doctor’s anger has to be deployed much more carefully than with his predecessor.…
Man of Steel: A Redemptive Reading
I’ll put my premise in the first sentence: Man of Steel is a scathing deconstruction of Superman and particularly of Grant Morrison. The second sentence will warn about spoilers for Man of Steel and, for that matter, for Sucker Punch.
Let’s start with the Watchmen movie, since it wasn’t very good. Because the thing is, as many bad things as there are about it, it at least tried very, very hard to be a Watchmen movie. It’s clear Zach Snyder wanted to film the movie version of Watchmen, and just failed, largely because you can’t make a movie version of Watchmen.
Notably, he moved on to Sucker Punch, a film that is about pretending to offer one kind of pleasure only to suddenly turn on a dime and become a blisteringly angry critique of that pleasure. It starts by being about sexualizing badass women who are horribly scarred, and then ends by being about the importance of giving survivors the agency to tell their own stories. It’s a glorious inversion of the male gaze. After all, the act of gazing that the film is most focused on is the one the film repeatedly elides. Whenever the narrative comes to a moment where Babydoll begins her erotic dance it switches realities to an over the top action sequence. We’re repeatedly given the wrong kind of pornography, and then we cut back to close-ups of the post-orgasmic bliss on the faces of the men who have seen what our pornography of violence was standing in for. So the male gaze is being complicated and critiqued from the get-go.
Similarly, I think it’s telling that the final sequence openly admits that Babydoll is not designed to function like a real person. Everything in the film is working towards that voiceover and its call for allowing survivors to tell their own stories. That’s the eponymous sucker punch.
If the movie fails – and I’m at least willing to grant that a movie that spectacularly misread has failed in part – it is because we are too trained to take pleasure in the violence-as-sex pornography that the film attacks such that the point when it turns ugly simply isn’t upsetting enough. Though I think the scene where Blondie and Amber are killed is quite upsetting, and consciously so – it’s the scene where Blue really becomes properly unhinged, and he’s genuinely scary in it. And the violence is allowed to be shocking and fast, in marked contrast to the excessive slow-motion used for the pornographic violence. But it perhaps doesn’t go quite far enough in turning on the audience and making them suffer for having enjoyed the film. (And note that there’s no more “fun” violence after that.)
Still, this is clearly what the film is trying to do the entire time. It is carefully constructed to turn ugly and then, finally, show a viable alternative to what it critiques. The worst that I think you can say about it is that the turn could have been crueler and more effective.…
You Were Expecting Someone Else 24 (I Am A Dalek)
The Quickreads initiative was one of those feelgood things New Labour was great at. Taking off from Wold Book Day, an earlier New Labour creation in which kids were given coupons to take a pound off the price of any book alongside the launch of books conveniently priced at just that, Quickreads was ostensibly focused on adult illiteracy and low literacy. The idea that was that major writers would write short, accessible books that would sell for cheap to adults who might not ordinarily read.
Doctor Who’s inclusion in this is thus a bit odd. The basic shape of the Quickreads format, after all, has ample precedent in Doctor Who: 128 pages, accessible, we’re basically just talking about Target novelizations here. But those are not exactly what you’d call aimed at adults. That the next two Quickreads releases hired Terrance Dicks at least seems to speak volumes about where they’re going, but at the start of the series you instead have a textbook case of Doctor Who striking an odd tone as it attempts to compromise among several audiences and goals.
It makes sense that the Quickreads books, for Doctor Who, would settle efficiently into being children’s literature with an adult audience a la the Harry Potter books or Philip Pullman’s work. The problem is that it makes sense in a large part because that’s what Doctor Who has already done. Not only in its previous book series – this is, after all, exactly what the New Series Adventures have been doing with their bizarre decision to up the price and lower the grade level of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. And more to the point, it’s what the new series itself has been doing.
This is something we talked about with both Aliens of London/World War III and Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel – that every Davies season does a similar story as its first two-parter, and perhaps more to the point every Davies season’s first two-parter is harshly criticized by a large chunk of fandom. There is an extent to which this can simply be described as missing the point: these two-part stories are the entries in the seasons most overtly geared towards children. They exist to be big romps full of action set pieces aimed, roughly speaking, at ten year olds. They’re the price we pay for Father’s Day and The Girl in the Fireplace – stories that are equally unapologetically targeted at the sort of mature adult audience who obsessively watches a children’s show and writes a blog about it.
What constitutes children’s television? We’ve talked about a lot of children’s television over the years in this blog, some of it very good. The best ones we’ve talked about have typically sparkled because they push things just a little too far, presenting a world just a bit darker and more menacing than it feels like children’s television should. Children of the Stones is probably the iconic example out of things we’ve talked about, although Knights of God or, for that matter, Dark Season would do just fine.…
Saturday Waffling (June 29th, 2013)
Hello all.
Jill and I just got back from Man of Steel, which we both enjoyed, making us seemingly the only people to have done so. That said, there was dinner, and there may have been some wine with dinner, and I may or may not be seeing more Blogger windows right now than is entirely appropriate for the number I have open on my screen. So let’s keep this brief.
I’ll probably write up some detailed thoughts on Man of Steel this weekend, and if it comes out at all well run it on Tuesday. In the meantime, what movies and television over the next few months are you looking forward to? Or art in general. Yes. Let’s go with that this week. What coming attractions in the world of art excite you, and why are you so eager for them?…
Corners of the Universe (Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel)
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| The sofa is, in fact, of reasonable comfort. |
It’s May 13th, 2006. Yep. Gnarls Barkley. Whole story. Beatfreakz, with a cover of “Somebody’s Watching Me,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shayne Ward, Pet Shop Boys, and Snow Patrol also chart. In news, a bus driver in Dublin snaps and begins driving his bus through the streets in a rampage that kills one and injures thirteen more, including five police officers. Arsenal F.C. play their final game at Highbury, Apple Computer wins a trademark suit against Apple Corps, and Ruth Kelley, Minister for local Government and Opus Dei member, declines to elaborate on whether she considers homosexuality a sin. Sony unveils the PS3, the NSA is reported as operating a massive phone surveillance operation, the President talks about how he wants to close Guantanamo Bay and pursue immigration reform… wait, am I still in historical news? Liverpool win something. (Yep. Still in historical news.) Oh! And Lordi win Eurovision!
This latter event is actually worth discussing. One of the primary themes of this blog has been the peculiarities of the relationship between the mainstream and the marginal in British culture. The Eurovision Song Contest illustrates a peculiar special feature of this, albeit on a scale larger than just the UK. Eurovision is aggressively mainstream. Yet somehow its embrace of the aggressive mainstream ends up being the weirdest thing imaginable. Or, at least, usually. Eurovision is infamously a bunch of terribly trashy and over the top performances bookended by a couple smaller ones in which a terribly earnest singer sings a terribly earnest song. And usually one of those wins. Usually.
But in 2006, somewhat improbably, a Finnish hard rock band that does all of their performances in elaborate monster makeup won with “Hard Rock Hallelujah,” their lead singer wearing a gloriously ill-advised cheap plastic hat with the Finnish flag on it. It was one of the most charmingly offbeat moments of mass popularity ever achieved – something that visibly comes from miles outside of anything that would conventionally be called the mainstream, and yet winning a massive pan-European popular vote competition. The television of acceptance, as Richard put it back in the Big Brother post.
As we’ve noted, Doctor Who has itself become the television of acceptance, with the previously marginal backwater of anorak cult television becoming, very abruptly, the most popular thing on television – so abruptly, in fact, that it hadn’t even finished being anorak cult television by the time it had reinvented itself again. Its somewhat checkered past was almost instantly rehabilitated as the idiosyncratic history of a beloved cultural icon. And so a structure that everybody recognized implicitly was imposed on the series – so much so that it didn’t need to be announced as such. The Cybermen would return in Series Two, the Master in Series Three. Everyone knew in their bones this was how it played out, and the return of the Cybermen was announced in Doctor Who Magazine #357, the same issue that ran the previews for the last three episodes of Series One to no surprise whatsoever.…
Mary Sticks to the Alleyways, Where the Light and Noise of the City is Screened Out A Little (The Last War in Albion Part 2: Near Myths, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs)
“Mary sticks to the alleyways, where the light and noise of the city is screened out a little”
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| Figure 12: “The Checkmate Man” features more marital strife than high-concept assassination antics – Near Myths #5, 1980 (Click to enlarge) |
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| Figure 13: Gideon Stargrave makes a surprise return in The Invisibles #17, 1996 |
One Day, I Shall Come Back (The Girl in the Fireplace)
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| In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as a candle. |
It’s May 6th, 2006. Gnarls Barkley remains at number one, with Dirty Pretty Things, Snow Patrol, and Rihanna also charting. And that Mary J Blige/U2 thing is still about too. Albums include Bruce Springsteen’s album of Pete Seeger covers and a Massive Attack greatest hits. In the last week one of those remarkably half-assed steps to maybe sort of do something about the genocide in Darfur took place, accomplishing, as you’d expect, nothing. The government of China claimed to have perfected weather control and got into a row with the Catholic Church, though not about the weather. And the Labour Party under Tony Blair lost more than 200 council seats, coming in behind both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in local elections, resulting in a heavy cabinet reshuffle.
This latter thing is actually seemingly just a thing that happens when Moffat is around, as four years later he’ll see Gordon Brown brought down in the 2010 elections just weeks after his run on Doctor Who starts. So there’s a proper reason for everyone to hate Moffat: he makes Tories win things. Actually, hating Moffat for the future is a bit of an issue with this story, as so many tropes familiar from his later Doctor Who career make their first appearances here. What’s interesting, then, is that this once again doesn’t seem to have originally been conceived as a Moffat story in the sense that we now understand that phrase.
The brief given to Moffat was apparently one of Davies’s kitchen sink ones – he wanted clockwork aliens after reading about the mechanical Turk, and he wanted the Madame du Pompadour after encountering the character researching Casanova. So it went to Moffat. This makes sense – he’d had good luck with gas masks last time, so clocks seemed up his alley. And Madame du Pompadour was set up for more sex comedy, which was, after all, the brief he’d originally been given with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.
For the second time, however, Moffat defied expectations. Impressed with what Davies had done in the first season, Moffat apparently decided he wanted to do something like that and, instead of writing a sex comedy, wrote a fairy tale romance. Note how outside of the cold open the story is framed by the shot of the spaceship, winding silently in the night, the chimes of the music box whose key it physically resembles echoing through the silence as the final bit of the story’s riddle is revealed. Even the cold open starts with a variation of this shot – a matching shot of stars accompanied by a jaunty harpsichord that pans down to Versailles instead of up to the space station, making the boxy palace of Versailles just another magic box in a story jam-packed with them.
This is in many ways the story’s most vaultedly ambitious aspect: the way in which the story is structured like a puzzle box and contains so many such structures within it, but how all of this puzzle box contains what is, at its heart, a fairy story.…
This is Still Not a Review Blog
But GallifreyBase finished off its Troughton stories and it’s a day off. Last War in Albion is back Thursday. For those just tuning in, TARDIS Eruditorum is not a review blog and what it says about a story is at times only obliquely related to its quality. It’s telling a story, and sometimes good stories have to have their flaws emphasized or bad ones have to be polished up a bit in order to make the story flow right. Which is to say that I’m often taking one of several critically defensible positions, and it may or may not be my favorite.
If I were to review Doctor Who stories, I’d say things like this:
Power of the Daleks: A story that is actually perfect. You could film this now and it would be gripping, which is probably why Rob Shearman did with Dalek. Everything – the writing, the characterization, the sheer unnervingness of the new Doctor – is absolutely on target and brilliant here. If you call this the greatest Doctor Who story ever then nobody is really in any place to argue with you. Track down a reconstruction – it’s good enough not to need images. But my God, how lovely would it be if we had this. 10/10.
The Highlanders: A strange little story that doesn’t work, but that pushes itself so far that this observation only barely matters. A demonstration that history and Troughton don’t quite mesh, or, at least, that history and the over the top Troughton they started with don’t quite mesh. And yet so much fun that it’s hard to complain. 5/10
The Underwater Menace: My God, fandom was in a u-turn once they had another part of this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story rise in reputation quite like this. And rightly so – what we had always assumed was a terribly naff runaround turns out to be the last gasp of Doctor Who as a portal to strangeness. The attention on Professor Zaroff has always distracted from how utterly weird the world of Atlantis is, and the end harkens back to the darkness of The Gunfighters or The Myth Makers, only more fittingly for this post-Power of the Daleks Doctor. Meanwhile, Troughton finds his legs when he learns to act Zaroff off the screen by underplaying the part instead of trying to ham it up opposite him, and in doing so finally cements the Doctor we all know. Not a masterpiece, but so much more than people thought. (Me, I always loved it for exactly what the second episode showed.) 7/10.
The Moonbase: It’s not that bases under siege are bad so much as that this is an attempt to redo The Tenth Planet, only in getting rid of that story’s obvious flaws it also gets rid of its manic genius and leaves something dreadfully banal. The Doctor’s speech about corners of the universe is great for clip shows, but paints a moral simplicity that’s contrary to everything that worked about the character in the past three stories.…