Christmas and Easter nihilists
Very quick and somewhat late, as this has been up for a bit and I just forgot to post it cause I’m dumb, but there’s a new episode of Pex Lives out in which Kevin and James talk about Power of the Daleks, celebrity deaths, and The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Wandering in open country is naturally depressing
A Field in England is a precise antipode to High-Rise, a fact acknowledged by Ben Wheatley, who has spoken about the way in which he is inclined to make one project a reaction against the previous one. But the thing about the alchemical union of opposites is that it works largely because of the similarities. Just as “up” and “down” presuppose movement in three-dimensional space and “left” and “right” presuppose neoliberal democracy, High-Rise and A Field in England presuppose a director doing sci-fi/fantasy inflected period pieces rooted in the psychogeographies of English spaces. In some understandings of conceptual space this is how the hypercubic prison works – through the systematic construction of axes bounded by opposites that, when multiplied sufficiently, create a territory that is at once infinite and contained.
This is in essence the problem that faces Whitehead, who winds his way through a recurrent series of at best gradual enlightenments in pursuit of no obvious goal or trajectory for escape. More to the point, his problem is heavily location-dependent, in both spatial and temporal senses. Spatially he is confined to the eponymous field, a setting we’ll unpick momentarily. Temporally, however, he is bound by the English Civil War. It has often been suggested that this event serves as the origin for the contemporary socio-political system, an argument that’s generally based on reading it as a transition between the established aristocracy of Charles I and the revolutionary fervor of the Puritans. This is an oversimplification in countless regards, not least that it misunderstands history as something with an origin as opposed to as a series of debts inherited and bloodily paid off from era to era. The English Civil War is certainly an instance of this, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that what emerged from it is somehow a sui generis origin as opposed to an if not inevitable at least entirely sensible consequence of what came before.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Whitehead straddles both sides of this transition, or perhaps more accurately, is stepping over the divide himself. His status as an alchemist clearly situates him in the world that is receding. But the arc of his slow ascension is clearly towards a measure of individual liberty and away from the crass and domineering tyranny offered by O’Neil, which affiliates him more with the Puritans. Like us, he’s trapped on the inexorable slide down history’s birth canal – just from a substantively different angle. Or, if you prefer something in keeping with ascension, headed up the chimney, an identity gone up in smoke.
This leaves location: a field in England. Central to this is its raw genericness. There are a lot of fields in England, another consequence of the way in which the whole of the island is the product of human development and intervention. And there were a lot of them in the Civil War; Alan Moore is fond of claiming one near Northampton as the place where it was won, although that was merely the first of three, and dialogue about Pembroke places this one during the second, a few years later.…
Well, this was certainly better than The Six Thatchers, though a season of Sherlock (or indeed anything) in which the Moffat episode is not better than the Gatiss episode is difficult to imagine. In comparison with the three other straight Moffat scripts for Sherlock, which is to say to the three best episodes of the series this is… possibly not actually in fourth place overall for the show. Nah, I’ll go with definitely not – I’m comfortable putting The Sign of Three ahead of it.
Let’s start with Mary, since she’s certainly the biggest issue inherited from last week. First the good: we’re not done with Amanda Abbington yet! In fact, she’s credibly the best thing going for much of the episode, with her snarky side-comments routinely being the best gags in it. On the other hand, the narrative reasons for her death are by and large still inscrutable. The most obvious choice – that Moffat wanted to tell a story about grief and fatherhood – is clearly not where things are going, what with Rosamund not actually appearing in this episode. Nor does anything particularly follow from Mary’s death, or at least, nothing that couldn’t have been done anyway. Sure, the specific resolution of Sherlock getting into it with Culverton Smith to get John to save him is a product of Mary’s death, but save for that one emotional beat, this was a story that could have been done anywhere and at any point in Sherlock.
Indeed, for all that they rightly hyped Toby Jones’s portrayal of Culverton Smith, as a villain he is something of a step down at this point. The two most obvious comparisons, Magnussen and Moriarty, were both elevated by their actors, but were well-written and compelling ideas in their own right. Smith, on the other hand, would be a nothing without Toby Jones to leer and cackle his way through the episode. Sure, Sherlock vs. Jimmy Savile as serial killer is a decent hook, but the hook is all there is to Smith. There’s no potential for him to be elevated above baddie-of-the-week status, which isn’t really a status that a show that does three episodes every couple of years should be using. And more to the point, it’s basically one the show has rightly avoided since The Blind Banker. Much of what made Series Three so strong was that all three of its episodes were big, weighty events in their own right. This just… isn’t. And while the Jimmy Savile angle is clever, it’s also obvious, leaving nowhere for Moffat to get his teeth in and push it somewhere meaty.
As a result, this episode ends up being… fine. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but there’s nothing particularly right either. Its biggest idea is Sherlock’s addiction, which isn’t strictly speaking a topic that plays to Moffat’s strengths. He can’t really muster anything on it that he didn’t already do with His Last Vow, acknowledging the compelling and nebulous space between decision and compulsion.…
a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration
Within the biotemporal omnipresence of the hypercube escape must be understood as an exit wound. In practice, this would manifest itself as an area towards which the natural flows towards annihilation congregate – the eddies along the surface where narrative tracks converge, scar tissue forming anticipatorily around the site of injury. Counterintuitively, then, a weak point is going to appear as the thickest part of the skin.
Crash, then – first of Ballard’s three attempts at sci-fi without futurity, the book is a famously scandalous meditation on the eroticism of the car crash. Its film adaptation, in 1996, is suspended neatly at the halfway point between the twin towers of the Ballard and Wheatley/Jump High-Rises, and circles neatly around other touchstones. It’s directed by David Cronenberg, for instance, whose 1975 film Shivers saw him independently arriving at the concept of a modernist apartment complex descending into madness, albeit because of genetically engineered parasites who drive their hosts mad with lust as opposed to because of some inherent property of modernity. Its opening sequence – a slow tracking shot through an aircraft hanger, across the sleek bodies of airplanes, fragmented like a female body beneath the male gaze, until finally, in the middle distance, a woman undressing enters the frame and, as we move to close-up, exposes her nipple and lays it seductively upon the body of the aircraft, which she proceeds to relate to more closely and intimately than the lover who subsequently takes her from behind – draws a crucial link between the sexuality of cars and one of Le Corbusier’s other defining aesthetic obsessions, the airplane.
This connection is more subdued in the novel, but still present: Ballard’s wife (the main character is named after himself) is sleeping with a pilot and taking flying lessons, and Ballard has occasional descriptions like “even the giant aircraft taking off from the airport were systems of excitement and eroticism, punishment and desire waiting to be inflicted on my body.” The connection between cars and planes is hardly an unexpected one requiring reference to Le Corbusier, but the link is nevertheless generative. Le Corubusier’s aestheticization of mechanical functionality creates a tightly wound feedback loop that Ballard efficiently short-circuits. As Le Corbusier puts it, talking about cars, “through the relentless competition of the countless firms that build them, each has found itself under obligation to dominate the competition, and, on top of the standard for realized practical things, there has intervened a search for perfection and harmony outside of brute practical fact, a manifestation not only of perfection and harmony, but of beauty.” In other words, the mechanistic efficiency of cars naturally leads to the emergence of beauty, to which Ballard, quite sensibly, sets about trying to fuck.
The cold detachment that characterizes Laing is obviously a big part of this, but what Crash foregrounds that High-Rise does not is the eroticization of this clinicism, as evidenced by his description of a fantasy of “the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbreake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered forever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.”…
Not sure these will always be on Sundays – they might migrate to Tuesdays, which this week will be Build High for Happiness 5. Anyway, Sherlock‘s back as the Year of Moffat continues, albeit, you know, with Gatiss. Speaking of whom, and in a rare concession to spoilerphobes, let’s start by saying has written what’s almost certainly the best script of his career here, a position admittedly previously held by The Empty Hearse and The Hounds of Baskerville. It’s not labyrinthine; Gatiss has never done that, and that, as opposed to his usual problem of stultifying unoriginality, has generally been his weakness on Sherlock. But it moves in unexpected ways. The substitution of Mary for the expected Moriarty plot is in many regards just the same trolling as “eh, we’re not going to tell you how he actually survived,” but the last twenty minutes felt extraordinarily inventive, moving in genuinely unexpected directions. The revelation of John’s near-affair is unlike anything Gatiss has ever done, small and human and actually like a writer who exists in a post-Russell T Davies world. The end, particularly with the injunction to save John, is unmistakably also the season-plotting influence of Moffat, but the small, moment to moment decisions of how it’s structured are chosen with a care and weight that’s as much of a leap forward for Gatiss’s writing as Scandal in Belgravia was for Moffat’s. On the back of this, I’m actually curious what he’ll do for what you’ve got to figure could well be his last ever Doctor Who script this year.
More broadly, it’s an interesting place to put the season. Past seasons have had fairly self-contained first episodes that end in some vague tease of future weight – twice Moriarty, once Magnussen. But it’s never felt as though there was too much to clear up in the next three hours. This time, with the fractured Sherlock/John relationship, the strange musings about death, Sherrinford, Moriarty, and a trailer that’s focused on a character with no obvious relationship to any of this, it feels like a show that’s going for something it’s never done before, trying to push itself into a new shape. It’s a good feeling at the start of 2017; what it seems like we want from the return of Sherlock. More of this thrilling, exciting sense of possibility please.
And, of course, less of this “we fridged Mary” crap. This is, simply put, a fucking awful decision. Maybe – maybe – there’s some way to justify it that we’ll see over the next two weeks. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Steven Moffat to turn a decision this awful around. But the fact remains that Mary Watson was one of the best things Sherlock had going for it. The Abominable Bride rightly celebrated the female characters that the show’s modernized approach let it have. Now they’ve taken the best one out in a cheap and arbitrary way that offers nothing save for an opportunity for Martin Freeman to get to show off his dramatic range.…
I realized I didn’t mention the end-date for the Boxing Day sale on ebooks. That’s January 2nd, so you’ve got two more days if you’re interested in picking up any of our books for cheap.
I posted something to this effect on Twitter a few weeks ago, but didn’t get that many responses, so figured I’d make it a New Year’s Eve waffling topic, as I’m genuinely interested in how people respond to it. My suggestion was answering these two questions in lieu of New Year’s resolutions. Certainly I think they’re important questions to have answers to right now.
1) What would your government have to do to lose its legitimacy in your eyes? (Define roughly as “you would consider its overthrow outside the normal democratic procceses to be a good thing.”)
2) At what point does violence become an acceptable tactic for resistance? (Please note that unless you are an outright pacifist the answer “never” is cowardice.)
Happy New Year, everybody. This isn’t going to be easy, but we’re all in it together.…
Fluff, but in a generally “good Christmas fun” way. Those looking for any sorts of tea leaves regarding Series 10 are essentially out of luck save for the trailer, but those interested in having an entertaining hour of television watching on Christmas were well served, and are surely the more important audience.
Obviously the tagline is “Doctor Who does superheroes,” which is an enticing approach that the series really hadn’t tackled before. And yet there’s something strangely out of sync about it. You’d expect something in which the show riffs on the Marvel movie formula. Instead we get Superman. And (unsurprisingly, really) not the cynical Snyder Superman, but an utterly unreconstructed Superman rooted in old-fashioned sentiments like “the real hero is Clark Kent” that would never pass muster at today’s DC.
In hindsight, strange as this ends up coming off, it’s hardly unexpected. Of course Moffat, who hasn’t exactly done anything that signals him as a big comics guy, was going to go for a straight-up Clark Kent-Lois Lane-Superman love triangle. And all things being equal, he does a pretty good job with it. This isn’t exactly a surprise, given how squarely up his alley it is, and he doesn’t do a particularly surprising or innovative job with it, but again, the goals for a Christmas episode are different, and an entertaining and amusing formula well-executed is what the job calls for. And it’s not as though there aren’t small pleasures. Grant’s status as a nanny and Lucy’s interrogation are enough to give this its own distinct flavor, and are charming touches in their own right. On the whole, it’s sweet – a take on superheroes that’s not particularly fresh, but is still out of pace with the rest of the badly oversignified genre that it’s still refreshing.
The biggest problem is simply lack of space. Everything goes fairly well until the Doctor and Grant’s storylines diverge, and even the dinner scene is good farcy fun, but once the story starts working its way towards resolution it becomes obvious how poorly it fits into its hour-long container. It’s safe to say the plot isn’t really the focus here, and that’s fine, but equally, everything after the Doctor makes it to the spaceship hits that weird note where so much is happening that it feels like nothing is.
It’s also a structure that ends up reducing the Doctor to something of a bystander in his own show. This is firmly an episode about Grant and Lucy. The Doctor gets some fun larking about in the cold open, and there are some decent lines scattered throughout (the Pokemon one, most notably), but this is Doctor Who in its “excuse to do something else” mode, which when the show’s been off the air for a year, is more than slightly frustrating.
Which makes it, in the end, all the more puzzling that the episode opts to end on the note of “the Doctor’s been gone for a long time being with River Song and now he’s very sad.”…
EDIT: Now with an added sale on Vaka Rangi Volume 1.
Do people still get e-readers for Christmas? Well whether or not they do, it’s time for Eruditorum Press’s annual post-Christmas sale, in which I merrily slash prices on a bunch of books for a week. As always, sale books are distributed via Smashwords – just click the links below and use the coupon codes provided at checkout to get the books at the listed prices.
First we’ve got the marquee sale – a 20% discount on Eruditorum Press’s brand new release, The Last War in Albion Volume 1 to take the price down to $3.99. That’s available with the coupon FV43Q, and has a download link at the end to get the version with added images free of charge.
Second of all, we’ve taken $4 off on both Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, my collection on science fiction and fascism in 2015, and A Golden Thread, my history of Wonder Woman.
Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: $2.99, coupon code HB53S
A Golden Thread: $3.99, coupon code JU28D
Finally, we’ve got all six volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at $2.99 each.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1 (William Hartnell): Coupon code ER93J
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2 (Patrick Troughton): Coupon code CH66F
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3 (Jon Pertwee): Coupon code WD76X
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4 (Tom Baker Part 1): Coupon code BX77K
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5 (Tom Baker Part 2): Coupon code KP89K
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6 (Peter Davison & Colin Baker): Coupon code HX33W
Enjoy, and thanks again for another year of support. Eruditorum Press wouldn’t be what it is without you. Which, arguably, you should feel bad about. But I certainly don’t.
Should have a Doctor Mysterio review up some time tomorrow.
EDIT: Josh has also kindly thrown Vaka Rangi Volume 1 up for sale at 33% off, via the coupon code RT65R.…
Happy Boxing Day to all. Hope your hangovers aren’t too bad. I’ll have the annual ebook sale up around noon.
Andrew Morton: I very much enjoyed A Golden Thread. Is there any other superhero you think you could do a similar book for?
I’m sure there’s loads of superheroes you could do a survey history of. Anyone who’s been around for 50+ years ought to work at this point. But I don’t think I’d find much interest in ones who don’t have a sort of broken utopianism at their heart. And I’d probably want to do Marvel instead of DC if I were to ever do it again, just so I don’t have to retrace much.
The obvious place this all points is the X-Men, and there were moments when I considered that project, but I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the world does not actually need X-Men criticism above and beyond Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. Which I haven’t actually listened to because I don’t really listen to podcasts, but which I just sort of assume is as awesome and comprehensive as everyone says. Which is fine – I’m pretty unlikely to take on a second big comics project while still writing Last War in Albion, and that’s clearly not ending any time soon.
Artur Nowrot: Reading TARDIS Eruditorum, I unexpectedly found out that we both studied abroad at the University of East Anglia, so: what did you think of Norwich? (and UEA’s brutalist campus?)
UEA was my first real experience to brutalism, entirely outside any sort of cultural context for why anyone would do that, so I remember finding the buildings very striking, and being intrigued by the way you could cross campus entirely on elevated cement walkways, but also finding something distinctly depressing about the entire place. Norwich wasn’t much better – I spent a lot of time going to the movies and generally resenting the difficulty of doing anything other than eating out when you had to take a mildly lengthy bus journey to and from the grocery store. Although I have fond memories of wandering out around the campus fields at night. There’s probably some early foundational experiences of my magical life in there.
Evan Forman: You tweeted recently that your leftism will be full of gothic horrors or it will be bullshit. Leftism and Weird horrors?
The weird and hauntological/gothic are, of course, if not interchangeable at least substitutable with effort, as China Mieville points out. So yes, leftist weird horrors are absolutely a thing. But I feel like the hauntological is more on point at the current moment. The weird apocalypse is self-evident, emerging naturally out of any serious thought about climate change. So I don’t think we need weird horrors per se. Whereas gothic horrors seem currently underserved. On a very basic level, one of the things Trumpism is about is repression. It seeks to repress specific, easily identified perspectives and narratives. As a matter of basic, inevitable reality, these perspectives are going to reassert themselves.…
Not sure when I’ll get to watching this, as I’m traveling on Christmas, little yet getting a review done – could well take until Tuesday or so. So here’s an open thread to discuss the 14th from last episode of the Moffat era.
Sol Invictus.…
