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Jane Campbell

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Clara Who: The Impossible Narrator

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I was not as entranced with Series Nine as I’d hoped, but that may well be due to events in my own life and the kind of work that’s been on my plate this fall. I realize I haven’t written nearly as much about the show as I have in years past. So, this is to kind of rectify that, somewhat, and to encapsulate my thoughts on the series as a whole, and particularly in the context of Clara’s overall arc in the show.

This is in large part inspired by a conversation on Tumblr the last day or two, where Caitlin (abossycontrolfreak) properly tore apart the problematic Claudia Boleyn’s objections to Clara in Series 7. Mind you, there are other dynamics in this interchange involving Claudia’s style of critique, which erases or belittles countering views, and this is really the least of my concerns; both Caitlin and Julia (tillthenexttimedoctor) have effectively addressed this already, imho. At the heart of the mistake, though, was the belief that Clara wasn’t properly characterized in Series 7.  But I’ve seen this a lot.  It has more to do with the storytelling than the stories themselves. And even more than that, it has to do with how we read stories.

So what I really want to talk about is the role Clara plays as a storyteller, as a narrator, and how that intersects with the narration of the show as a whole. It is no secret, of course, that the nature of storytelling is one of Moffat’s main themes in his tenure of running Doctor Who, made plain in the “We’re all stories in the end” speech at the end of The Big Bang. But as we’ll see, this is also something that occurs in RTD’s handling of the series; furthermore, Clara marks a significant departure from other “narrators” as far as Companions are concerned.

 

A Bit of Theory

Before I get into that, I do want to briefly discuss the kind of background I’m coming from when it comes to narratology. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge, really, from deconstruction, death of the author, close reading, and all that, but I always find myself returning to Story and Discourse by Seymour Chatman, who’s a fairly significant Structuralist. Not that I fully subscribe to his theories, just that I find them a useful framework to start with.

Like many structuralists, Chatman begins along the lines of Russian Formalism by distinguishing two aspects of narrative. The Russians used the terms “fabula” (the actual events of a narrative) and “syuzhet” (the organization of those events); Chatman uses “story” and “discourse,” but in a much broader sense, with “story” encompassing events, character, dialogue, setting (the “stuff” or “contents” of a narrative) and “discourse” including all the different ways the narrative is “told” – not just the organization of the text, but the narration of it as well. Cinematically, “discourse” would also include camera angles, cuts, lighting cues, the soundtrack, and things of that nature.

I actually find certain Impressionist paintings a really useful way to illustrate this difference.…

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Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 2

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Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Alice in Wonderland

Next up in the Intermission is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, and directly referred to in the dialogue and as well as being referenced by the episode’s title. Before we examine the manner of the title’s use, let’s take a brief look at Alice. Her adventures cover two books (the other being Through the Looking Glass) and are often issued as a twinset. LOST will certainly play with the Alice story in future episodes – the Season Three finale is titled after the second book, and Jack will read from the “Pool of Tears” chapter in Season Four.

Alice is ostensibly a children’s fairy tale ruled primarily an aesthetic, one that’s largely surreal and operates according to dream logic, what with all the talking animals and such. But the aesthetic is not completely arbitrary – rather, it relies primarily on finding new and strange meaning within the familiar, and in teasing out and secondary meanings for words that it can muster. The famous Jabberwocky poem, for example, is loaded with new portmanteau words, but they’re not meaningless words – rather, they are hybrids, and only sound unfamiliar until you examine the constituent components. There’s likewise a good deal of wordplay – “lessons” become “lessens” which means each teaching gets shorter – while other concepts presented are simply reversals of what we’d expect, like remembering the future instead of the past. And yet the Alice stories aren’t bereft of social commentary. Especially the first book, which presents all manner of British cultural institutions as being faintly ridiculous, albeit heavily disguised in certain aesthetic codes.

And not only does Alice function as cultural commentary, it’s become a part of western culture itself. In his introduction to the year 2000 reprinting, science writer Martin Gardner says that he would not “consider a person educated” who has never read the books. Indeed, that a phrase like “the White Rabbit” can be part and parcel of our regular lexicon attests to that.

So this is where we get the title to this episode, which is directly invoked by John Locke: Jack is chasing his “white rabbit” just like Alice chased a white rabbit into a strange and magical place. Which, of course, suggests that the Island is a kind of “wonderland” and that it operates by different rules than the mundane world. This usage, however, has definitely become mundane in SF/F culture. In the Star Trek episode “Shore Leave,” for example, Dr. McCoy sees a White Rabbit (crafted much like the original illustration of John Tenniel in Carroll’s book) passing by shortly after transporting down to a new planet, which turns out to be an elaborate amusement park. The interactions that the various crewmembers have on the planet are derived from their subconscious, and that is likely a clue to understanding the nature of the Island.

Or perhaps we should consider The Matrix, where Neo follows “the White Rabbit” (this time a tattoo on one of his clients) to meet Trinity, and eventually Morpheus, who describes the experience of leaving the Matrix in Wonderland terms.…

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Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 1

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White Rabbit really does represent a rabbit hole for the series. The Pilot was, well, the pilot, the story to get you hooked. Tabula Rasa was what an ordinary episode of Lost television might look like, and Walkabout showed off all kinds of technical and emotional chops. And all of them played with certain intriguing aesthetics. This episode plays off each of the previous ones, demonstrating a certain structural and thematic continuity, while continuing to broaden the chasm gaping open upon the show’s Mysteries.

We should start with the Flashbacks and the Mirrors. Two episodes in a row now, we’ve begun with an Opening Eye in the focal character’s Flashback. This is an example of continuity, a way of visually juxtaposing two characters, in this case Jack to Locke. It also makes three of five episodes opening with the same image – this is now a part of the show’s overall language, a language that is largely symbolic or at least unspoken (which we’ll get to, I promise).

We’ll get to the Locke/Jack stuff in a bit, but first let’s take a longer look at these Flashbacks. Jack’s first is when he’s sitting on the beach, presumably meditating on the time when Mark Silverman got “jumped” by a couple of bullies. Jack tries to change what’s happening, but his efforts are useless – he gets punched in the eye, and the screen goes blank, filled in with the cries of what’s happening now on the Island, which is Charlie shouting Jack’s name while someone drowns at sea. Jack tries to save the drowning woman, but only comes back with Boone.

So there’s an obvious parallel here about the futility of Jack’s actions. Given the iconography in the other Flashbacks, though, one thing that might go unnoticed in this mirroring is what’s actually in the dialogue – the boy Jack tried to save when he was just a kid was named “Silverman.” A reflective surface, a mirror, and entirely symbolic. Which we only learn in the next Flashback, in what’s quite possibly the most important scene in Jack’s character development, the talking to he gets from his father.

FATHER: I had a boy on my table today. I don’t know, maybe a year younger than you. He had a bad heart. It got real hairy, real fast. And everybody’s looking at your old man to make decisions. And I was able to make those decisions because at the end of the day, after the boy died, I was able to wash my hands and come home to dinner. You know, watch a little Carol Burnett, laugh till my sides hurt. And how can I do that, hmm? And even when I fail, how do I do that, Jack? Because I have what it takes. Don’t choose, Jack, don’t decide. You don’t want to be a hero, you don’t try and save everyone because when you fail… you just don’t have what it takes.

Jack’s father tells a tale of failure – and failing is just what we’ve seen Jack experience twice in a row.…

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The Spectacle of the American Ritual Cycle

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“…the existence of a conventional order is contingent upon its acceptance; in fact a rule or understanding cannot be said to be a convention unless it is accepted. In ritual, however, acceptance and existence entail each other, for a liturgical order is perforce accepted in its realization, in, that is to say, the performance which gives it substance. Since obligation is entailed by acceptance, and the breaking of obligation is per se immoral, the existence, acceptance and morality of conventions are joined together indissoluably in rituals; they are, in fact, virtually on and the same.” — Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity

“When a more complex society finally becomes conscious of time, it tries to negate it, for it views time not as something that passes, but as something that returns. This static type of society organizes time in a cyclical manner, in accordance with its own direct experience of nature.” — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

I was already thinking about an essay on the US ritual cycle, what with our recent Thanksgiving holiday and all. Then I got Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle for Black Friday (thanks, Phil!) and a mythological story of cyclical time from Doctor Who on Saturday. So, yeah, time to get this one out here.

With Spectacle and Doctor Who already posted or written about here at Eruditorum Press, I will start with ritual. My favorite definition of ritual comes from the late Roy Rappaport, who put it as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers,” with the “entirely” being a late addition. It encompasses both secular and religious practice; today we’ll be concerned primarily with the former. Anyways, what’s notable about ritual is that it is performed, not just spectated; and it is cyclical, even when it varies wildly—not only does it transmit certain information about the larger social system in which it occurs, it orders and structures that very system. It also, in so doing, inherently creates a number of dialectics.

But it’s the distinction of performativity that distinguishes ritual from spectacle. Spectacle is a one-way transmission. Ritual, on the other hand, is self-indexical. For the participants aren’t just recipients of messages, they are also the transmitters, and indeed the message themselves. And because of this, the intersection of ritual and spectacle, kind of like a genre-competition, yields some very interesting results.

With all this in mind, let’s start with America’s “spring rituals” and work our way to the end of the year, which is where (when) we’re at here at the beginning of December.

 

Valentine’s Day

“Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.”
…

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Jessica Jones

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* trigger warnings: rape, child abuse, post-traumatic stress, suicide, controlling asshole fuckheads, and, you know, if you have triggers, they’re probably here, sorry *

I could probably add more to the list. A spoiler alert is warranted, but painfully banal. No, this isn’t an easy essay to write. But maybe it’s time, time to at least start a conversation about all the myriad ways that our lives are enmeshed in systems of control and abuse, in desperately inequitable power relations. And what that really fucking means.

Because that’s what Jessica Jones is ultimately all about. Now, to be plain, I highly recommend this show. It’s one of the most strikingly feminist works of art around, and it’s certainly the most feminist work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The wonderful diversity of the cast and roles, the plethora of female interactions, and the subversion of certain hyper-masculine tropes, this is all window dressing. It’s credentials. They’re not perfect, but they’re still excellent. That out of the way, let’s get to the nitty gritty. At its core, Jessica Jones metaphorically examines the dynamics of controlling relationships, primarily personal relationships. Which is just a starting point of the conversation, a way to contextualize issues of control that permeate all facets of “modern” life. And that isn’t an easy conversation to have. It’s a depressing and complex conversation to have.

Fuck it.

 

Rebellion

At the center we have Jessica, a woman with superpowered strength, pitted against a serial rapist whose superpower is mind control, an ultimate Ubermensh. She kills him. Very satisfying. How she gets there, though, is more the point. She is, in herself, a very interesting character. Jessica Jones is a private investigator firmly in the mold of the noir anti-hero, which extends not just to her character traits (hard-drinking, tough-speaking, sarcastic, cynical, wears a lot of black) but to the discourse of the show around her – be it certain grimy set designs, stark lighting, moody music, voice-over narration, what have you. Now sure, the noir anti-hero isn’t anything new, but it’s still an awful lot of fun to see Krysten Ritter playing the part. Especially because anytime we get a woman playing a stereotypically “male” role it helps to undercut the claim to masculinity of such roles. Just her presence helps to untangle the tropes of “anti-hero” from an aspect of masculinity to a response against systems and people of power and control.

Her superpower certainly plays into the tropes of hypermasculinity. She’s super-strong. Brute strength. Lethal. Interestingly, though, it’s a power borne of trauma. Sure, it’s handwaved away as an intervention on the part of a mysterious corporation (more on this later), but narratively speaking the birth of Jessica’s power is rooted in the loss of her family and ending up in a new family environment defined by a controlling mother. Brute strength, we should note, is a significant tactic of rapists, not to mention certain social institutions. It’s also the primary tactic of rebellion. But the problem that rebels face is that exercising brute strength alone will never suffice against entrenched systems of power; they are better armed, they have more resources, and the deck is stacked against you.…

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Lost Exegesis (Walkabout)

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So I guess we were right, back in the Tabula Rasa entry, about Locke’s first name being John, an invocation of the historical John Locke. We must be, like, psychic or something.

A brief history, then. John Locke was a very privileged white man, born in 1632, England. He went to Oxford, studied with such famous scientists as Newton and Boyle, and determined to become a doctor. By 1666, Locke had teamed up with Dr. David Thomas to run a laboratory, probably a pharmacy. Through Thomas, Locke met Lord Anthony Cooper (one of the richest men in England and later the Earl of Shaftesbury) and became his personal physician. Lord Ashley also helped secure a government job for Locke, and for the next ten years or so Locke lived at Lord Ashley’s estate. Locke eventually went back to Oxford and received a Bachelor of Medicine and a license to practice.

But Locke isn’t primarily known as a physician so much as a philosopher, indeed a founder of liberalism. Mind you, we’re talking about the 17th Century. Locke isn’t a “leftist” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, his philosophy forms part of the bedrock of capitalism, from his early theories on prices, money, unlimited accumulation, and a theory of government oriented around the protection of private property versus one that is motivated by, say, compassion. Much of this philosophy is rooted in his conception of our “state of nature”:

“To understand political power right, and derive it from the original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”
— John Locke, Second Treatise

So it’s amazingly prescient, given the state of pigfuckery today that LOST’s Locke ends up bringing home a boar. But on the Island, John Locke is not presented as a literal embodiment of the historical figure, despite his constant admonishment, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” On the contrast, he’s a frustrated man who has experienced a kind of rebirth, a literal “ascension” given the miraculous restoration of his legs.

Hence the Opening Eye motif at the beginning of the episode.

As mentioned in the exegesis of Pilot Part 1, the Opening Eye is fraught with symbolism. An awakening, becoming aware of an inner truth, a spiritual revelation. Even a resurrection. But Locke’s eye isn’t meant to be “read” in the same way as Jack’s. Locke’s right eye (or, rather, “eye”) is bifurcated by a scar running vertically down “across” is center. His insight, then is “crossed” with Jack’s.

In one sense, we could say Locke’s resurrection is exteriorized as opposed to interiorized. His body has been reborn. He can walk. But is just as angry and self-oriented as before the crash, as evidenced by his casual dismissal of Michael’s injury in favor of his own self-aggrandizement in pursuing the boar.…

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Who Are You? (The Star Wars Trailer)

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So, yes, my ears perked right up when the first words of the trailer asked, “Who are you?” (Thank you, Carrie Fisher.) And as the trailer unfolded, I got very excited for this movie. And, perhaps, a bit reticent.

Trailers tell stories, of course, mini-condensed stories that act as hooks to get us to actually fork over time and money to watch them. This one (the American release) promises, by virtue of its structure and focus, a certain kind of story. It has to be a story that answers the Question, the oldest Question in the Universe, hidden in plain sight. Who are you?

The trailer doesn’t actually begin by asking the question, though. Not aurally. Visually, though, yes. We see a masked figure. Alone. In a world that’s post-apocalyptic, what with all the broken architecture, dead technology, dust and sand. And when the figure is most alone, most distant, it’s the most natural question in the world. Who are you?

“I’m no one,” comes the reply to the older woman’s question. Which is actually a poignant answer, alchemically speaking. It can come from two different places. One place (the more likely, given this is the first movie of a trilogy) is that of the beaten ego. Someone who doesn’t believe in herself, who doesn’t give herself intrinsic value, who has given up. Let us remember, though, that “giving up” or “letting go” is a precursor to Grace. For the second place such an answer can come from is from someone who has transcended ego. Who has left it behind, who has found a certain kind of emptiness inside such that space has been made to let something else in (i.e., “grace.”)

This promises, then, to be a story about Identity. How to find it. And from there, presumably, how to place it in service to something greater than one’s self. A story of grace.

The structure of the trailer reinforces this reading. It begins by strongly focusing on three individuals. First there’s Rey, the young woman we’ve briefly discussed. Next up is Finn, who’s on an entirely different spiritual journey. “I was raised to do one thing,” he says. “I’ve got nothing to fight for.” We see him crash land on a desert planet, presumably Rey’s. And it’s an interesting twist, in that what’s been a minor stock character – the Stormtrooper – is now made into a full-fledged character. Here’s the redemption story.

Next we focus on the villain, Kylo Ren. We never see his face, it being hidden by a cross between a gas mask and Darth Vader’s helmet. But what’s interesting here is that this is still a character study. He isn’t just menacing. He’s motivated. “I will finish what you started,” he says to the destroyed remnant of Vader’s mask. So, a revenge story.

It’s only halfway through the trailer that we start getting what’s usually taken to be typical Star Wars fare – a chase scene between spaceships. But even this is given a twist, because it’s not just any sort of chase scene, it’s a nostalgic one, for this chase scene features the Millenium Falcon.…

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Genre Competition (Kill the Moon)

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…and Zygons.

First, Kill the Moon. No, wait, first, what do I mean by “genre competition” and why in the world would anything like that matter? So let’s go back and review what’s already been established via TARDIS Eruditorum. Most readers here should be familiar with the term “narrative substitution,” which is what happens when we’re toodling along, all genre-savvy and boned up on TV Tropes, and suddenly the rug is pulled out from under us and the story we think we’re watching turns into something else.

Phil coined the phrase in his review of A Good Man Goes to War, where the “male revenge for his hurt woman” story trope is rejected for something quite different – instead, it turns into a story of Grace, which is delivered not by the Doctor, but by River Song. Or we might look at the “epic season finale” of The Pandorica Opens and how the fulfilled narrative collapse is supplanted by a small, intimate story of one family.

What we get in Kill the Moon is something similar, but it is structurally different, not to mention ramped up to 11. Rather than giving us one story, and then substituting it with something else, Kill the Moon cycles through a variety of genre tropes – especially genre tropes familiar to Doctor Who – and then puts them in competition against each other to see which will prevail. Which ultimately ends up being a statement of values, or perhaps a hierarchy of values, for the genres themselves have certain values implicitly coded into them from the beginning. To top it all off, the story then comments on this.

We should have seen coming from the cold open, which features Clara talking to us through our TV monitors. Of course within the story itself she’s talking to our fictional counterparts on Earth, but for our purposes that doesn’t matter – simply addressing the camera directly suffices in this day and age to imply a metafictional component. And metafiction, we should point out, as is the case with every kind of genre, carries with it certain assumptions and values. Which we’ll get to later. I would like to point out, though, that there’s another layer to this convention within Doctor Who itself, namely that it’s an invocation of the Second Doctor, who was often peering out of television monitors, always on the verge of breaching the veil between fiction and reality.

So let’s go through Kill the Moon’s various genre invocations, and what those imply both in terms of themselves and within Doctor Who.

After the credits we begin at Coal Hill (love the alchemical implication of the nigredo stage of the Great Work in the name of that school) where Clara talks to the Doctor about Courtney. Courtney, who’s already in the TARDIS, ready to go on an adventure, armed with motion-sickness wristbands and a bottle of disinfectant in case she still gets sick. In these opening moments, then, we have an invocation of Children’s Television.…

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Lost Exegesis (Tabula Rasa)

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One of the problems with Pilot episodes is that they’re made specifically in order to hook people (almost like fish) not just into watching a TV show, but to actually sign off on it being produced. As such, they tend not to be as representative of the series as a whole. So what a TV show has to do after its pilot is to kind of hit the reset button and start playing its cards, showing us what we might expect on a weekly basis going forward. As such, Tabula Rasa is a rather aptly named episode, given that it’s a fresh start for LOST, employing a number of techniques that we did not see previously.

For starters, we get a “Previously, on LOST” segment. It’s the sort of thing we’re all familiar with, nothing new under the sun in terms of TV, but just its very presence indicates what kind of show we’re dealing with, namely something that’s serialized. The vignettes in this segment briefly depict: the plane crash; the man wounded by shrapnel in his gut and Kate’s apparent interest in him; the fact no one has come yet to the Losties’ rescue; and a recapitulation of Locke’s explanation of backgammon to Walt (“Two players, two sides, one is light, one is dark”), that ends with Locke’s question to Walt, “Do you want to know a secret?”

The thing about a “previously” is that it’s supposed to remind us of what’s actually relevant in the previous episodes in terms of understanding what occurs in this one. Notably, then, we do not get anything about the Monster that tears down trees, or the Frenchwoman’s transmission, even though a significant portion of the character interactions in Tabula Rasa have to do with these big mythology questions. Furthermore, that bit with Walt and Locke is relatively long given that both characters are only part of a rather minor secondary plot thread in this episode. On the other hand, it certainly plays into the final shot of the episode, a shot full of foreboding, so it’s not like it’s pointless or anything.

Another new element is the use of a “cold open” before the show’s title card. It’s actually here that the two major mysteries established in the pilot episodes are recapitulated, as well as establishing the focus of the episode, namely the discovery of Kate’s mug shot by Jack and Hurley.

So it should not be too surprising that the episode ends up being Kate-centric. And that’s a term I use very specifically, given the third major conceit introduced by Tabula Rasa – the episode features five Flashbacks, all of them about Kate. The Flashbacks themselves end up serving as the B-plot of the episode, detailing Kate’s time in Australia: a drifter, she ends up getting work at Ray Mullen’s farm, but he betrays her for a $23,000 rewards, setting up her capture by the Marshal. So not only do we see how she ended up on the plane, we also get a hefty amount of characterization – Kate would do almost anything to escape, like crashing Ray’s truck, but when the truck catches fire she pulls him to safety, at the cost of her own freedom.…

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I’ll See You in Hell (Alan Tudyk’s “Con Man”)

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Alan Tudyk’s crowdsourced Con Man just finished releasing on Vimeo OnDemand. The web series comedy (comprised of 13 ten-minute episodes) tracks the ne’re-do-well sci-fi actor Wray Nerely, who was part of the critically acclaimed TV show Spectrum (cancelled after a half season), and who now makes his living on the sci-fi convention circuit. He’s a “convention man,” or “con man” for short. And he’s in hell.

His hell, mind you, is not mine. I’ve been to a few science fiction conventions. It’s not like I’m a die-hard regular on the con circuit, but they’re fun, and perhaps a bit more than that. My first was a Doctor Who convention in Detroit in the mid-Eighties. I just went for the day. Cosplayed the Fifth Doctor, because it was easier to get a beige trenchcoat on the cheap at a thrift shop than Romana’s pink one. Borrowed one of my Dad’s panama hats, used a twistie-tie to affix a sprig of celery to the lapel, and I was all set. Cosplaying wasn’t so big back then, but quite a few people had long multi-colored scarves. Sadly, I had to ditch the costume pretty quick, because I was roasting in it.

Anyways, at the convention I felt both weird and “at home” at the same time. At home, because I’d finally found other people who were as wild about Doctor Who as I was. Weird, because a lot of people at cons are really quite strange, so what did that make me? But it was fun. Sarah Sutton was there, told the obligatory story about Matthew Waterhouse showing up hungover for the final scene of Castrovalva. I bought a couple brooches. Some Target novelizations. Saw my first proper Troughton story, The Krotons.

San Diego Comic Con in 2008 was the last con I went to. It was huge and intense and overwhelming. It was then I realized that cons are actually alternate realities. They are not, however, governed by the mythologies of the science-fiction shows which ostensibly bring people together. They’re governed by an entirely different set of interlocking ritual concerns. Sure, some of that is simply the enactment of capitalistic consumerism, like the collecting of autographs and memorabilia. More importantly, though, is that conventions are a place where the marginalized “weird” people of geekdom can come together and have a place where their cultural concerns become “normal.” It’s perfectly normal to walk around in a Darth Vader outfit and geek out over your favorite shows. It’s perfectly normal to be geeky; if anything, the geekier you are, the more social status you are accorded. As such, conventions are kind of like Carnival, an inversion of the social order.

Well, except for the fawning over of celebrities. The actors and writers of SF shows are still at the top of the food chain at conventions… with a caveat. Because that caveat includes an implicit promise to hold up the values of science fiction and establish a marginalized geekdom in a temporary social center – which is to say, to embrace an alternate reality, and with it, to embrace the characters that one has brought to life – or, perhaps preferably, to embrace one’s place as a “celebrity.”…

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