arc of infinity

November 10, 2011

Amnesia Day

Jack Grahamarc of infinity, capitalism, first world war, holocaust, imperialism, nazis, poppies, remembrance day, revolution, russian revolution, second world war, wwii2

I don’t wear a poppy. Laurie Penny has written a very good article, expressing many views that I agree with, here. I don’t engage in the silence at 11 o’clock either. I know that most ordinary people who do observe the silence and wear the poppy do so for sincere reasons. But I myself cannot stomach it. I think my reasons are less intellectual and more to do with the sheer, physical revulsion I feel at the hypocrisy on display in images like this:

What’s the collective noun for warmongers? A troop? A collateral? Well, whatever. There they stand, doing their best sincere and sombre faces. All guilty of sending people off to fight and kill and die and maim and be maimed in order to protect the interests of the American empire and neoliberalism’s access to markets. And wrapping it all up in the rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘freedom’. The poppy, the cenotaph, the silence, the ‘Ode to Remembrance’… I can’t help but see it all as cynical and calculated. As ideology. As an attempt by a warmongering, imperialist state to normalise the idea of war, to appropriate our memories of loved ones lost or ruined in wars fought for the interests of others, to associate the wars that ‘our’ country is currently fighting with wars from the past that we’ve been carefully taught to perceive as ‘moral’ and ‘necessary’, to control our responses to the latest news from Iraq and Af-Pak.

Mind you, it’s more than just a straightforward bit of reactionary spin; these days people are more anti-war (at least in broad terms) than just about ever before, so the old rhetoric of patriotism is, while not dead, certainly less user-friendly than it used to be. Remembrance Day still carries jingoistic connotations for many, but for many more there is a need for a different perspective. There are several different social and political perpectives overlaid upon each other in our cultural understanding of Remembrance Day. A common variety of liberal spin on it is to remember the ‘pointlessness’ of, say, World War I. To tut and shake one’s head at a war now culturally understood by many to be a kind of outbreak of mass insanity (see the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), or an illustration of how bad our system used to be, or a bleak but romantic tragedy about sensitive poets. It’s the great noble failure… perhaps with some cynical, port-swilling, incompetent generals to sneer at and blame for the whole thing. (It’s been packaged and sold to us in this way, as has Vietnam to Americans.) And, of course, there’s the redeeming moral clarity of the ‘good war’ that followed it, the anti-Nazi war, the war that stopped the holocaust, etc.

What’s lost in all this is real history.

Both wars were brutal squabbles between rival imperialisms, competing for territory and markets. WWI wasn’t a failure by the criteria of the British ruling class at the time; it was a success. The British empire ended up with more territory than ever before. …

November 10, 2011

Nice Guy, Nasty Cosmos

Jack Grahamarc of infinity, black orchid, castrovalva, caves of androzani, five doctors, four to doomsday, frontios, king's demons, logopolis, resurrection of the daleks, snakedance, twin dilemma, warriors of the deep0

The great Timelash II rehash finally hobbles to a close. Here’s the last roundup. Seasons 19-21.

Castrovalva

This is a story, like ‘Logopolis’, that achieves greatness despite its many flaws. Flaws first:

“Take your hands off me – this is an official uniform!” and “We’re perfectly harmless, unfortunately!”

Seriously… who the hell talks like that? I can forgive “I know so little about telebiogenesis” because Nyssa is an alien scientist child prodigy aristocrat. But Tegan is supposed to be a down-to-earth working woman. And, on that subject, it becomes abundantly clear during this story that the programme makers aren’t going to exploit the contrast between the two characters’ backgrounds and attitudes for interesting dramatic conflict. Nor are they going to milk the business of the Master inhabiting Nyssa’s father’s body for dramatic potential either… though, to her great credit, Sarah Sutton is still trying to use her face to express anguish at the Master’s appearance.

Ainley, it need hardly be said, excels as the delightful Portreeve (channelling Olivier to the point that it becomes beside-the-point that it’s always obvious who he is) but suddenly goes crap when called upon to play an obtuse, snarling Dick Dastardly. At times, when playing the Master at the end, Ainley moves and looks like no-one other than Groucho Marx (my second favourite Marx, as it happens… but there’s a time and place for everything). As in ‘Logopolis’, we needed a better villain. It seems hardly credible that a dunce like this Master could devise a trap of such subtlety and beauty as Castrovalva, let alone characters like Ruther and Mergrave. (One can only assume that they come as much from Adric as from his captor.) Ironically enough, we’re meant to be wrong-footed into suspecting Shardovan of villainy… because he’s a villain stereotype in black clothes and a black moustache.

The first two episodes are a bit of a trudge. There are lots of good bits, but they could easily be condensed into one episode. Again, Bidmead makes the TARDIS into an almost metaphysical space, a peculiar and vaguely-sinister labyrinth with healing rooms that smell of roses, rooms that can be ‘deleted’ as though the whole structure exists as data on a hard drive, rooms that seem to have been placed in the Doctor’s way by the TARDIS itself (to help provide him with a new identity) and medicine chests with Alice in Wonderland-style bottles inside marked ‘The Potion’, ‘The Ointment’ and ‘The Solution’. “Ah my little friend… if only you were!” Gorgeous.

Sadly, the business with the TARDIS being sent back to the hydrogen inrush is a bit of a mcguffin… and, again, as in ‘Logopolis’, Bidmead feels the need to have characters naming and explaining this story’s Big Theme to each other… just in case we miss it when it pops up. Having said that, the business with the Index File being listed in the Index File under Index File is very clever, both conceptually and linguistically. But the second half of Episode Two, featuring Tegan and Nyssa slowly carrying a box through a (admittedly beautiful) forest, is possibly the most boring thing ever committed to film.…