Eruditorum Press

None more Chancellor Goth.

Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

Posts by Jack Graham:

Good Soldiers (Into the Dalek)

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‘Into the Dalek’ is about good soldiers vs bad soldiers.

The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.

But, of course, what do we mean by terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’?

For the army, a ‘good’ soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn’t let themselves be haunted.

A ‘bad’ soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior… perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.

In a soldier, morality is a malfunction.  A good soldier is a ‘bad’ soldier.  Because good people can’t do a soldier’s job, which is to fight and kill.

At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way.  The Doctor doesn’t like soldiers.  As in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’ he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course.  He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she’s a soldier.

But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels.  They are specifically described as rebels.  Rebels against the Daleks.  The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil.  This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type.  He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die.  Because he’s a Dalek, and that’s how Daleks think.  So, contrary to the Doctor’s hopes, there’s no saving the Daleks… which makes Rusty pretty much right: they’re beyond saving, so they must be fought.  Which is what the rebels are doing.  So Rusty kills all the Daleks… which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor’s defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn’t happened escapes me).

So, once again, as in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’, we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another.  Soldiers are scary and irredeemable… umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.

See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle.  They’re rebelling against the imperialists of the universe.  I’m supposed to think they’re wrong or suspect for shooting to kill?  When you’re in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you’d better obey orders and shoot to kill.  That’s what the soldiers of the International Brigades did.  That’s what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites.  If the Whites, or Franco’s troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that’s ‘good’ at what it does to come and fight them.

Of course, Danny is a former soldier… and Clara doesn’t reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey.  She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.…

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Essential Problems and Dialectical Solutions (‘Deep Breath’ 5)

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Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara’s character in ‘Deep Breath’.  I think there’s something to this… in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she’s been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc.  Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still… she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik’s Cube with a face drawn on it.  There’s no denying, she looked better in ‘Deep Breath’.  It’s possible that, as with so much else that seems better about ‘Deep Breath’, I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me.  But then, such things do make a difference.  One performance in an ‘actually existing’ production of a written text can change the meaning.

Clara’s monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement… though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up.  Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor!  I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people.  Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don’t reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures.  To be painstakingly fair, I’m sure this is not what was intended.  It’s one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does.  Which happens.  Sometimes writers can’t win.  Sometimes they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  It’s not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write.  That’s not an excuse, but it is a thing.  The solution to this, as I’ve said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don’t keep setting off these little textual mines.  Sounds like I’m demanding a lot, doesn’t it?  Well, I am.  Deal with it.  That’s just how I roll.  Etcetera.

At first, the whole business with Clara’s difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards ‘fangirls’ that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi’s casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly.  Just another manifestation of the ‘fake geekgirl’, a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in ‘their’ fandom. …

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Bits and Bobs (‘Deep Breath’ 4)

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It ends with another mysterious woman, another predatory dominatrix older female.  She represents another story arc which we, the viewers, have no possibility of guessing or understanding until the inevitable ‘twist’ becomes self-evident just before being served up to you on a plate several episodes later than it could’ve been.

She speaks as if she is one of the audience and saw what we saw.  Like us, she couldn’t see if the Doctor persuaded Half-Face to commit suicide or if he pushed him to his death.  Again, a metatextual trick is used as a signifier of the enemy.

Another physical endurance test or test of skill becomes part of the nature of the monster-of-the-week.  The Weeping Angels were based on how long you could go without blinking.  The Sredni Vashtar (or whatever they were called) were based on how long you could go without touching a shadow with your own shadow.  The droids in ‘Deep Breath’ were based on how long you can hold your breath (a slightly dodgy thing to encourage in the playground possibly).

How much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

I said:  how much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

(To be fair, RTD was hardly unrepetitious – how many eleventh episodes ended with robotic things swarming in the sky and swooping down to shoot milling people?  Quite a few, as I recall.)

The business with the droids stealing bodies hooks into the corpse economy of Victorian London, but strips it of class significance.  Rich and poor alike get predated upon.  It’s not like in ‘Bad Wolf’ in which the Daleks harvest the tramps and the sick and the outcasts… and then start feeding on the TV audience which tunes in to watch bodies punished.

The episode has lots to say about faces, and how we acquire them.  The Doctor chooses (unconsciously, presumably) his new face as a way of being honest with Clara and trusting her.  He initially finds it hard to recognise as himself.  Vastra’s face is also the key to understanding and accepting her.  You perceive a veil if you are unprepared to see and accept who she is.  The droid has half a face (why couldn’t he have become a Springheel Jack-style urban legend called Jack Half-a-Face? – that would’ve been awesome) because he unconsciously recognises that it is not his own.  He is contrasted with the Doctor and Vastra in that his face is a lie that he essentially rejects despite his attempts to accept it, whereas they performatively reject their own faces as a way of making others accept their honesty.

Vastra’s larder mirrors the larder of the droids, their store cupboard of human bits and bobs.  It also mirrors the remark the Doctor makes to Clara about all restaurants being slaughterhouses, and his not remembering her becoming a vegetarian.  (As a longstanding veggie myself, I liked that bit – though his attitude was condescending… but then, let’s face it, the Doctor is often morally condescending, and so are vegetarians.) …

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Random Thing #3

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And one more.  Please bear in mind, this is a fragment.

Marx saw creativity as essential to human nature.  He famously once said that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”.  The difference is that Marx saw such creativity as a potential in all people, and believed that class society stunted such potentials in the majority by forcing them to do work that was alien to their natures. 

Yet there is some truth to the idea of progress in the history of class society.  Marx is quite comfortable – sometimes a little too comfortable – with the idea that the accumulation of capital can also be the accumulation of progress, that even the imperialistic development of class society can push people ‘forwards’.  It’s just that he also sees horror in the process, eventually calling the ‘progress’ that British imperialism and capitalism brought to India as resembling a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”  This is far from an unproblematic way of putting it, but the point stands. 

It is a point later taken up by Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History, in which he describes history as both a triumphal procession and a great piling up of wreckage and horror. 

Moral progress is only found when the increase of power and knowledge is used to make life fairer or better for common people (i.e. the majority), and this is the exception rather than the rule.  And when it does happen, it isn’t a trickle-down effect.  It is the result of struggle from below.  And even the accumulation of power and knowledge in the hands of the rulers can only come from the unrequited labour of the masses.  Even when a genius makes an individual discovery, he usually sits on top of a great pyramid of unacknowledged workers.  Charles Darwin was only able to spend years in his study working and thinking and writing because he had servants, inherited wealth, and a wife who was related to the Wedgewoods.  And that’s the history of class society at its prettiest.  At other times it looks like Alexander, invading and slaughtering.  Alexander was one of those potentates who poured the fruits of human labour into makewaste vanity projects like wars and great opulent buildings for the top people.  Contrary to the assertions of classicists (who tend to assume that they would be reincarnated in the past as fellow aristocrats) Alexander achieved little to better mankind, even if he was taught by Aristotle, one of the undoubted ‘great men’ of history.  But then Aristotle himself defended slavery in his Politics, as he had to, given that his leisure to sit around all day thinking depended on it.

Terry Eagleton has frequently pointed out that the Marxist view of history as simultaneously progressive and barbaric is a Tragic one, as Tragic (with a capital T) as Othello.  He asks (rhetorically) if even communism (as Marx envisaged it) would justify the necessary slog through class society. …

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Random Thing #2

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Another snippet looking for a home…

The fembot is an expression of a patriarchal and misogynistic power fantasy.  The woman who is your creation but not your daughter (and thus sexually available).  The woman who is programmable, controllable, designable to your own specifications and customisable to your wishes.  The woman who is literally a commodity (or at least a product) rather than a living being who has been reduced to one, and who it is therefore possible to own without guilt.  The woman who serves your needs unquestioningly, as her reason for existing.  The woman who never resents anything, or at least is designed not to.  The woman who is rightfully doomed to the subordinate position of servant, and who accepts it as a given and a duty, because of her innate inferiority and subhumanity.  The fembot isn’t so much a new idea as a modern reification of age-old ideological constructs of patriarchy.  The one specifically modern thing about her is her convenient inability to get pregnant – something that would have seemed a disadvantage to pre-modern patriarchs but which now, in post-sexual revolution Western capitalist culture, strikes many men as a bonus.…

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Random Thing #1

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This got cut from something else I was writing.  I’m putting it here because I’d rather put it somewhere than just delete it.

At first sight, Flint and Rayna in the Star Trek episode ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ look like a fairly standard sci-fi reiteration of Propsero and Miranda.  That’s been done a fair few times, of course.  Most famously in Forbidden Planet.  (The reiteration of Shakespeare is apt enough, given that Flint owns a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.  He never claims to have been Shakespeare, but probably would if prompted.)  Oddly though, the more ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ progresses, the more it looks like Othello rather than The Tempest.

Because ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ seems – rather astonishingly – to have a ‘double time’ scheme to it, very much like Othello.  The play is famous for having two apparently separate and irreconcilable chronologies mapped onto each other within it.  As many critics have observed, judging by the events we witness, there seems to be a space of about twenty-four hours between Othello and Desdemona’s marriage and Desdemona’s murder by Othello, and yet multiple other indications with the play – including flat statements by characters – imply that at least a week passes.   A casual reader or viewer is quite likely to imagine that the sojourn in Cyprus lasts several weeks before culminating in tragedy.  The two time schemes simply don’t match.  Apart from anything else, there simply isn’t enough time for Desdemona to have committed “the act of shame” with Cassio “a thousand times”, as Othello comes to believe.  But the play does work.  To quote A. C. Bradley:  “[Shakespeare] wanted the spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable.”

Something noticeably similar occurs in ‘Requiem for Methuselah’.  The episode has a strict time span imposed upon it, from the start, by the vicissitudes of what we might call the ‘A Plot’, the one about Kirk et al needing to get their hands on the (amusingly named) substance Ryetalyn, refine it so that it can be used to cure the Rigellian Fever and take said cure back to the Enterprise to save all the other regular characters.  The point is repeatedly made that time is of the essence.  Yet, despite the fact that they succeed in doing this, the episode feels like it takes much longer.  The episode manages to give the impression of massively compressing the events of, perhaps, several days.  First and foremost, Kirk falls for Rayna so heavily that it defies credibility that it could happen in the space of a few hours.  The episode really stresses this too, leaving Kirk devastated by Rayna’s death, so much so that Spock erases his memory of her at the end, to spare Kirk debilitating emotional pain.  In other ways too, Kirk, McCoy and Spock’s stay with Flint feels like a prolonged one.  There is time for everyone to relax and lounge around, playing the harpsichord or dancing. …

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The Veil (‘Deep Breath’ 3)

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The veil.  A politically loaded symbol.  It carries all sorts of old semiotic baggage, of course.  Weddings.  Widowhood.  Ladies in Conan Doyle who want to hide their identities (thus it has a trajectory into the figure of Madame Vastra via Victoriana).  In genre TV these days, a woman wearing a veil is likely to be a tragic or vengeful figure, hiding a facial scar of some kind.  (See ‘Silence in the Library’ / ‘Forest of the Dead’.)

The veil is thus something that implies a particular set of social situations for women.  The connection appears to be the concept of separation.  The veil is a boundary between the woman and society.  It creates a space in which she can hide her unsightliness, either disfiguring grief or grievous disfigurement, from those who don’t want to have to see it.  The wedding veil is lifted as the woman is taken possession of in the marriage ceremony; thus it is there to emphasize her acceptability by temporarily putting it in doubt.  It is, of course, the symbolic tearing of the hymen.  The man takes possession and breaks through the barrier.  All very nasty. Not to mention anatomically inaccurate.

Vastra’s veil takes on enormous significance in ‘Deep Breath’.  Indeed, the whole episode is full of talk about faces, with them being stolen, exchanged, worn, hidden, changed… with them contemplated in mirrors.

Vastra is married to Jenny (by Silurian law perhaps?), and yet this marriage hardly seems to have anything to do with Vastra’s veil (unsurprising, given that it is black rather than white), since Vastra and Jenny’s relationship fails to fit easily into any patriarchal schema.  There is no sense in which Jenny owns Vastra.  Indeed, the power relationship appears to go the other way (with implied consent).

There is a sense in which Vastra could be said to be mourning.  She is an isolated figure in some ways, cut off from her lost people.  But this is hardly emphasised at all.  She doesn’t seem tragic, and her complete lack of vengefulness is so complete as to be worrying (to me anyway).

As mentioned, she reiterates – in some ways – the figure of the veiled lady from Victorian popular fiction, via her place in the regurgitated Victoria trope pyramid.  But she inverts this, to some degree, by being the detective.  Her veil isn’t to hide her secrets from the investigator, rather it is to hide the secrets of the investigator from the client – as long as is necessary.

There is another significance to the veil in our culture at this time: the immensely freighted issue of the hijab… or perhaps I should say, the immensely freighted issue of Western ideas about the hijab.  I’ve likened the Silurians to the Palestinians before now, which would obviously chime… especially when you remember that Vastra has plonked herself down at the hub of the British Empire as a kind of refugee, and the British Empire was mucking around with the area that became Palestine from the 1830s onwards (though Victoriana places Vastra well before the disastrous British interventions of the early 20th century).  …

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Das Kapaldi (‘Deep Breath’ 2)

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Okay, so, Capaldi.  Well, he’s great, of course.  He’s one of the best actors around – I’ve loved him ever since I saw him as Uncle Rory in The Crow Road.  (Yes, I know, most of you don’t even know what I’m talking about.  I may as well mention, at this point, that I’ve never seen an episode of Skins or Children of Earth.  I’ve never even seen In The Thick of It, which surprises even me, given that its written by another of my favourite Scotsmen with an Italian surname.  I do, however, have Capaldi reading an audiobook of A Song of Stone.)  So he’s a predictably good Doctor… though it is possible that I’m just perceiving him to be so good because…

A LARGE SECTION OF THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS POST HAS BEEN REMOVED BY THE AUTHOR, PRIOR TO PUBLICATION, FOR REASONS OF POLITENESS

…of course, Capaldi gets plenty of typically groanworthy and arrogant stuff to say and do.  His Doctor calls Clara “the asking questions one” and an “egomaniac needy gameplayer”, plays that horrific trick on her where he pretends to abandon her (the much-trumpeted ‘darkness’ of the new Doctor seems to consist of his bouts of callous selfishness being even more egregious, if shorter in length), etc.

But he also gets some good dialogue to play with, and he pounces on it.  Some of the mad stuff at the start is well written.  It has a genuine edge of mania.  The stuff about misunderstanding the concept of the bedroom, and the business with the mirror being furious… this has a really dangerous edge to it, as anyone who has heard genuine delirium will recognise.  It isn’t ‘realistic’, but it feels like an indication of real disorientation.  It has that funny, disorganised, slightly menacing sound that someone’s words have when they’re halfway out of a nightmare.  And I liked the bit where he interprets the words – or perhaps we should say the feelings – of the lonely dinosaur. 

(I liked the dinosaur generally, by the way.  I liked that it was played as a victim, a tragic figure, misused and betrayed.  Of course, the juxtaposition of the dinosaur with Victorian London has something of that same “I’m mad me!” self-conscious faux-zaniness that creeps into so many Moffat scripts… but it turned out better than that in the end.  We didn’t even get much in the way of the Doctor being compared to it – the lonely, last survivor, etc – except as a comparatively quiet implication.  Based on past excesses, that could’ve turned far more maudlin and sentimental.)

The best bit is probably the bit with the broom.  That felt like something the Doctor would say.  I struggle to think of anything Matt Smith was ever given to say that faintly resembles it… so I suppose I should give Moffat credit for changing his style (eventually) to suit a different actor… though I also have to admit the possibility that Smith did get some dialogue that good and I simply don’t remember it, or didn’t notice it at the time.…

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Pyramids of London (‘Deep Breath’ 1)

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I’ve realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from ‘Allo ‘Allo.  But not as good.  That’s a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax’s misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of ‘Deep Breath’ for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he’s already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from ‘Allo ‘Allo – he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded – upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase – from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out ‘Allo ‘Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner – with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it – is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can’t be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can’t really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn’t as good as the policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo… because the policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words – it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they’ll get it… because English is the only proper language, and people who don’t speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don’t mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn’t overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He’s supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance. …

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Koba the Ape

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Post-Spoilerocalyptic.

I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Banalities first:  A well-crafted film.  Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as “Maurice”).  Nicely acted by the principles. 

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the ‘good’ ape leader is Caesar and the ‘bad’ ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans.  Koba is the nasty one who can’t let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn’t trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome.  Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don’t help him up and dust him down.  No.  You stand on his neck.

Here’s Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse.  Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand.  She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind… which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or – horror of horrors – winning.  You’re allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure.  That’s why Rosa Luxemburg – through no fault of her own, may I stress – is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There’s been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well.  Bollocks.  Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy.  He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard.  You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar’s benevolent dictatorship.  As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil.  The radical is, by definition, an ‘extremist’, and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn’t the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history. …

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