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autons

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Early morning in Britain.

Shop-window dummies twitch, stand up and smash their way out into the high street.  They stalk past the shop logos and brand names and adverts.  Price tags dangle from their fashionable clothes.

Their hands are not like human hands.  They’re not organs of manipulation, to be used for work.  They flip open to reveal weapons.

The dummies encounter shoppers, or people waiting for the bus to work.  They gun them down.  People fall and die next to the shop fronts.

The dummies are plastic effigies of people.  Products, manufactured things, fashioned in the human image.  They alienate the human image from humans.  They were made in a factory, on a production line, by workers.  Sold to shops.  They are hostile commodities, made for a capitalist concern; made by people working for a wage, yet out of human control, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external, dominating, fierce, blank, gothic, inhuman power. 

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

– Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

By the way Karl, the people who made these dummies were women.  The dummies, by contrast, are all male.  The dummies are all white too, because that’s what the default, ‘vanilla’ human is to capitalist culture: male and white.  Several of the women we see working in Auto Plastics are not white.

Talk about alienation.…

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Skulltopus 12: Come Out onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle

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Okay, first a quick (well… relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications… because we’ve come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.

The Story So Far…

If only ‘Pirates of the Caribbean II’ had looked this good.

According to China Miéville, the tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as ‘the Weird’.  Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc.  They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a ‘novum’, unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis.  (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and ‘ghost story’ writer M.R. James.)  Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic.  The gothic – or hauntological – is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return.  The Weird is what we don’t – and perhaps cannot – know, erupting without precedent and confronting us with our own incomprehension.  Consequently, the gothic and the Weird exist in “non-dialectical superposition”, oscillating back and forth… something which shows in the almost total absence in Western monsterology of the skulltopus, a fusion of skull (gothic) and octopus (Weird) which, on the face of it, would seem to be quite an obvious synthesis, especially given that the central hub of an octopus’s body is decidedly skull-like in shape.

Much later, long after the process in Western literary and graphic monsterology that Miéville describes, and long after tentacles had been thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western Horror and SF, tentacles begin to make their presence felt in Doctor Who. In the early days, most of the tentacles that appeared in the show did so courtesy of Terry Nation. For instance, he adroitly selected an octopus as a meaningless plot-device monster in ‘The Chase’. He may have done this because the octopoidal carried a residual charge of blankness or meaninglessness. Also, Nation seems to have repeatedly associated a tentacular or Weirdesque monster with economic exploitation. The Brains of Morphoton have stubby tentacles and run an entire economy on hypnotism, making scarcity seem like material abundance; the Slyther turns up when the Daleks are forcing people to mine for them and black-marketeers are taking advantage of the situation. This may be a co-optation of the ‘blankness’ of the tentacular inherited from the Weird. It may also be that, because the modernity that filled the Weird writers with such nebulous horror was capitalist modernity, there is something in their pre-eminent monster-type that naturally lends itself to expressing horror at economic exploitation. (They themselves would probably have rejected this, most of them being reactionaries… though, interestingly, Lovecraft – who was a disgusting racist, living in dread of ‘miscegenation’ – once identified himself as a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, even calling himself a ‘socialist’.)…

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Skulltopus 8: Society of the Tentacle

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The quasi-tentacular returns in ‘The Claws of Axos’.  Big time.

What’s more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh… to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter’s The Thing.


Now, if my idea is right – that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique – then this really, really should show up in ‘The Claws of Axos’.

Not to keep you in suspense: it does.

Taking it on the Chinn

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’d hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that ‘Claws’ is ‘subversive’ or anything.  I’m not.  It isn’t.  As political critique goes, objectively, ‘Claws’ is feeble.  Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn’t amount to subversion.  After all, Clear and Present Danger  (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America – but Clear and Present Danger isn’t remotely subversive… indeed, it is a highly reactionary film that entirely supports the specious ideological assumptions of the American empire.  This is slightly unfair to ‘Claws’, since it has, well, sharper claws than Tom Clancy via Hollywood (‘Claws’ is cynical about establishment power, while CaPD depicts the cynicism of powerful people as a danger to a fundamentally well-meaning establishment), but it does illustrate the point that simply depicting the wrongdoing of the state does not necessarily or automatically amount to a radical critique.

With its bourgeois patrician hero, its stiff-upper-lipped and self-sacrificing scientist/peer, its bog-standard sexist representation of Jo as dollybird-in-need-of-saving, its depiction of the American lawman (FBI?  CIA?  …something like that) as a square-jawed straight-arrow, the comic neutralisation of the issue of poverty, the implication that people starve because there is a lack of food rather than a lack of profit in feeding them, and many other such representations, ‘Claws’ is as well integrated into capitalist ideology, and as likely to ‘manufacture consent’, as any other Doctor Who story, the vast majority of which are straightforwardly and entirely unthreatening to the status quo.  What political critique there is consists, for the most part, of moralistic liberal finger-wagging about greed, nationalism and xenophobia, which is itself compromised by the Axons turning out to be evil, shifty, bogus asylum seekers (that sort of thing didn’t start with Gatiss, sadly).  Such moralistic liberal finger-wagging is inherently non-subversive and non-radical because it is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, i.e. vote out the reactionaries, and get the common herd to be less materialistic, and capitalism will be fine and dandy.

However, everything is relative and context changes things.

The fact is, ‘Claws’ has probably the most straightforwardly, explicitly, non-metaphorical depiction of the British state as cynical and machiavellian of all Pertwee stories (though the impact is softened by Chinn’s comic incompetence).  In ‘Claws’, the problem isn’t one slimey bureaucrat, one idiotic authority figure, one cowardly warmongering parliamentary private secretary… the problem is Chinn and his boss and the government they work for. …

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Skulltopus 7: Tentacle, Plastic and Bone

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The first fully-fledged tentacular monster in Doctor Who – in the senses of being both properly cephalopodic and of being a central monstrous antagonist of the Doctor’s – is the Nestene entity at the end of ‘Spearhead from Space’.  That’s seven years in before the show does a proper tentacular monster with real plot significance.

Apart from ‘Image of the Fendahl’ (which we’ll get to one day) and the Cyber-head in ‘The Pandorica Opens’, ‘Spearhead from Space’ is also the closest Doctor Who has ever come to merging or (horrid word coming up, but needs must…) juxtaposing the skull and the tentacle.  If you don’t know why I think that’s significant, please go back and read my other Skulltopus posts, starting here.

The Nestenes manifest as a tank full of tentacles…

Yes Jon, pull a comedy face and go cross-eyed.
That’s the perfect way to express mortal terror.

…inside which we can see a pulsing, vaguely obscene-looking anus/oesophagus/lung thing.  Meanwhile, the same story’s main images of the monstrous are unfinished-looking plastic replicas of human beings.  There is something faintly but definitely skull-like about their faces, especially when they’re not wearing wigs.

Note especially the empty eye-holes,
a detail lost in subsequent appearances.

If I were writing an Auton story now, my first priority would be the creation of a way for the tentacles and the plastic to co-reside in the same entity.  This never happens in ‘Spearhead’, but the Autons do stand and wait in the room where the Nestene tentacled thing hides.  At the end of the story, Channing reverts to a cruder Auton-form (once again making the Auton face skull-like, in that its appearance is linked to death in the more sophisticated Nestene replicas).  A line of green matter is spattered on the dead and reverted Channing’s plastic face.

Bless you.

This is the closest that the plastic gets to merging with the alien flesh.  The proximity of the plastic skull and the green organic squidgy creature is tantalising.

It Adds Up

Doctor Who – because of its (spurious) materialist/empiricist/educational remit – has a set of internal rules that generally make the explicitly supernatural off-limits.  The show tends to have been made with the intention of at least outwardly championing the Enlightenment values and certainties.  As I argued here, this self-imposed attempt to foreclose upon the supernatural guides the show towards material (and materialist) monsters.

However, owing to the converging influences of children’s fiction, mythological narrative (to which both SF and kid’s adventure fiction are much indebted) and the gothic (usually mediated through 20th century popular horror, most especially Universal and Hammer monster flicks), the show simultaneously inherits an underlying magical conception of reality and a tendency to make its monsters metaphorical and hauntological (if not usually spectral in the full sense), i.e. haunting us with the ‘repressed’.

Add the influence of ‘soft’ social SF literature, the prevailing ‘lefty liberal’ ethos among BBC creative types (which Barry Letts has spoken about) and the social context of pre-Thatcher Britain (in which there prevailed a broad ‘liberal’ socio-economic consensus), and you get a show that ends up representing this or that material nightmare of modernity in a great, mostly-liberal, allegorical morality play for kids.…

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The Empire of Vanilla

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Some things I’ve noticed about ‘Spearhead from Space’

There’s a lot of wood in this story.

                             
                                                        

This suggests a contrast, a conflict even, between older forms of production – the appearance of the hospital, and the Seeleys’ cottage, suggest artisanship – and newer industrial technology and mass production, represented by the factory and the evil plastic which creeps out of it.

There are lots of workers in this story.  There’s a Nurse.
There’s Mullins.
Mullins, one of the many wage labourers in this story…
seen here in the act of labouring for his wage.  

There’s a workman in the street, talking to the copper before he investigates the (off-screen) breaking of shop windows (implying the role of the police as protectors of private property and business).  There’s the guard at the front gate of UNIT HQ.  There’s the guide at Madame Tussauds.

There are the workers in the plastics factory.

I don’t know, but I’d guess that these women – together with the male worker
seen earlier in the episode, operating heavy machinery – are actual workers
in the factory where these scenes were filmed.  One of the women is Asian,
which is a pretty big clue that she’s a ‘real person’ rather than an extra.

Some of the workers are ‘fake’.  There are Auton Porters who help kidnap the Doctor.  There’s an Auton secretary at the factory.  Note how the Nestenes still employ a young woman in a short skirt as a secretary, even if she is made of plastic… but then such women are usually treated like mannequins in practice anyway.

These waxen-faced, blank, zombified workers strongly suggest an extreme form of alienation: line hypnosis, a psychological condition where people are lulled into passive, unresponsive fugue states by constant repetition of the same mechanical tasks – found most famously in people who perform extremely simple tasks at conveyor belts.  More broadly, it suggests the deadened, flattened affect of people who find their Fordist jobs dull beyond belief.

Think this is a stretch?  But the story makes a point of commenting upon automation.  The monsters are called Autons.  We see, as noted above, faceless factory workers at their tedious, repetitive, assembly-line jobs.  And General Scobie, the swaggering old reactionary establishment figure par excellence, upon hearing that the plastics factory has become largely automated (which means a load of people have lost their jobs), makes a crack about automation being a splendid idea because “you don’t find machines going on strike!”  In other words, workers should be treated like and behave like machines…. and replacing them with machines is the next best thing.

There is much literal commodification – often of people – in this story.  Ransome is paid off… even his name suggests a payment for a person.  Seeley tries to sell his “thunderball” and nearly gets his wife killed.  Mullins sells the Doctor to the journos.

“I understand you pay for stories?”

But ‘Spearhead’ really harps on about life being commodified… most particularly by its concentration upon production.…

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Camp Onion

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It’s coming up to Panic Moon time again. 

The July issue of the estimable print fanzine is now available for pre-order, here.

This time, Yours Truly has provided a piece on ‘Frontios’, in which I explain why I like it despite reading it as a reactionary parable, and a short sketch of a Marxist interpretation of ‘Spearhead from Space’, in which I attempt to tenuously connect the concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism to a story about killer shop-window dummies lead by an alien octopus.

This is what is known as ‘a waste of a mediocre education’. 

But we have some laughs, don’t we?

No?

Oh well.…

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The Big Squib

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Acres of irrelevant grumbling about the Series 5 finale.

Oh great.  River’s back.  Again.  Un-yippee and un-hurrah.  Still, Moffat must have his opportunity to present female characters as self-involved, smug enigmas who lead men around by their noses, put them through hell for the sake of hapless devotion, boss them about and remain pretty little puzzleboxes that men have to try and solve.  In these episodes, he does this with no less than two man/woman couples.

The first episode is just loads of portentous narrative procrastination, albeit to a less egregious extent than ‘End of Time’ Part 1.  There is some pleasure to be taken in the cobwebby, Indiana Jones-film look of the underground chamber, and River’s pleasantly spooky trip to Amy’s empty house… but, really, how generic is all this?  A secret chamber under Stonehenge?  An ancient artefact that has something scary inside it? 

Mind you, they could’ve turned it around if the contents/purpose of the Pandorica hadn’t been so obvious right from the start.  I can honestly say that I knew, ages before we were told, that the Pandorica would either have the Doctor inside it, or would be empty and waiting for him (especially since this story seems to owe so much to Alien Bodies).  The only thing worse than what we got would’ve been a gateway into another universe (a universe of evil, natch), which lets loose unspeakable ‘Old Ones’ or some other ‘horror from before time’ when opened.  So it could’ve been worse.  But could also have been much better.

Sadly, we are soon confronted with a huge alliance of returning monsters who, in line with Moffat’s usual disinterest in evil, are trying to save the universe… by locking the Doctor up in a box rather than just killing him.  For some reason.

The Doctor indulges in his now customary bit of ludicrous, embarassing and deeply inappropriate macho posturing.  What a bad-ass I am, he essentially shouts to a sky full of heavily armed battle cruisers.  Laughably, they bottle it rather than just zapping him.  This is so dumb it defies description.  I mean, I know the Doctor always wins… but surely they don’t need to be scared of him when he’s standing in plain view under their laser beams, waggling his weaponless hands?  Just zap the silly sod!  You don’t even have to go anywhere near him!

On the subject of that speech… really, when did the character turn into this kind of person?  When did this become the point of him?  I hate this depiction of the Doctor as a bumptious, boastful, mouthy, showoff incredibly aware of himself as a Hero. I realise the scene in question is meant to show him bluffing, but still…

The Doctor always used to occasionally be a bit big headed (i.e. “he’s almost as clever as I am” etc) but it always seemed like self-mockery or good humour. These days the Doctor seems to seek out opportunities to talk like a lame-ass ‘tough cop’ cypher (i.e.…

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Alien Nation

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“The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”

– Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

…

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