class

July 29, 2011

Beasts of England

Jack Graham beast below, class, democracy, exploitation, lodger, series 5, steven moffat 4

In ‘The Beast Below’, you – as a subject of Liz 10 and a citizen of Starship UK – get to vote. You get a choice of buttons. You can ‘Protest’ or ‘Forget’.

This is evidently an attempt to express something about electoral democracy.

Every time we are exposed to some unpleasant and uncomfortable fact about our society or our world, or even to a suspicion of some such thing, we are presented with an implicit option to protest or forget. Beyond voting booths, we have a set of these buttons inside our heads. When you hear, for instance, that thousands of dirt poor South Africans were forcibly evicted from their shanty towns and moved to settlements of corrugated iron shacks to get them away from the new $450 million World Cup football stadium, you have the option to kick up a stink or to sigh, mumble some platitude like “tsch, how awful” and then put it out of your head so you can comfortably sit back and enjoy watching teams of overpaid jocks play amidst the McDonalds adverts.

By the way, don’t think I’m being holier-than-thou. I’m just as guilty of this kind of thing as anybody. God knows how many times I’ve found myself scrunching up a Kit-Kat wrapper and only at that point remembering that Nestlé are evil. This is normal human frailty at work, the understandable instinct to flee from guilt, as ‘The Beast Below’ indicates by showing Amy’s reflexive, horrified pressing of the ‘Forget’ button and her subsequent remorse.

So, we are clearly banked upon the sharp and shaley shores of satire.

‘The Beast Below’ presents a picture of Britain as an island in space, a star-traversing city (after James Blish’s fascinating ‘Okie’ novels, collected as Cities in Flight), with tower blocks representing counties… ah, we’re already in trouble. So, everyone from Essex lives in the same tower block? Rich and poor side by side? Maybe there are luxury apartments up at the top, opulent penthouses above floor after floor of pokey little prole cupboards… but we don’t see anything like that, unless we count the private apartments of Liz 10, but she’s a problematic figure anyway (which I’ll get to). You might argue that, in a lifeboat, rich and poor would have to budge in together… but a look at the stats for Titanic survivors might be salutary at this point:

Number of 1st class passengers: 325. Of whom survived: 202.
Number of 2nd class passengers: 285. Of whom survived: 118.
Number of 3rd class (steerage) passengers: 706. Of whom survived: 178.

Much as I hate to give Ben Elton any credit, I tend to suspect that, if the world were threatened with imminent destruction, something along the lines of the scenario described in his novel Stark would be nearer to what happened than what we see in ‘The Beast Below’, i.e. the rich would set up their own escape into space and fuck the rest of us nobodies. Mind you, that would be very shortsighted of them, not simply as they’d be left with only each other to talk to (a grim fate, as Elton’s novel implies) but also because they need us: they live off our labour.…

June 18, 2011

Gonzo Marx

Jack Graham alienation, bible, capitalism, christianity, clash of civilisations, class, commodity fetishism, culturalism, evolution, genesis, historical materialism, history, language, marxism, myth, renaissance 0

Ruminations on alienation, commodity fetishism, myth, etc. Don’t mind me.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Human beings have always made stuff. Broadly, that’s what humans are: the apes that make stuff. Even before Darwin, Benjamin Franklin called man “the tool-making animal”, a description apparently vindicated by our discoveries about early humanity, which seem to show the rise of the ‘big brain’ driven by the needs of the hand.

The flint tools and decorative beads of the hunter-gatherers. The pyramids and ziggurats of the great slave empires. The water wheels and ploughs of medieval Europe.

But the rise of capitalism brought the factory system. The division of labour. Specialisation without expertise. Organisation of time. The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers. Mass production. Heavy industry. Conveyor belts. Fordism. Mechanisation. Computer-run facilities.

The ape that makes things started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating. When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it’s hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The rise of science and technology. This was also part of the rise of capitalism. Galileo, who pretty much invented what we would call modern science during the Renaissance (or the ‘Early Modern Period’, the period during which feudalism began to give way to the rise of mercantile trade, finance, private industry, markets, etc.), sold his inventions, made in his own workshop, to the Venetians who protected him. His first telescope, based on Flemish spyglasses, were made to be sold to the traders on the Rialto (the Venetian stock market: centre and powerhouse of the thrusting, ultra-modern city republic), so that they could identify at long range which merchant’s ships were returning safely, laden with goods. Only later did it occur to Galileo that he could train his telescopes upon the moon and the stars and the planets. When he did so, he published his explosive findings on the market and had a bestseller on his hands.

Later, but still as part of the same process of the rise of the new system, the concept of entropy, and with it pretty much the whole of modern applied physics, came from the need to better understand (and thus improve) how engines work, engines that powered the industrial revolution.

The things that the thing-making-ape made became increasingly wondrous. The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful. They took us all across the world (usually to pillage and enslave). They created wars that devastated vast swathes of the globe. They ferried people to industrial murder factories. They allowed man to fly. To drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds. They put apes on the moon.

And they transformed inner space too. “You’ve discovered television, haven’t you?” And here we are, on the glorious interweb.…

May 22, 2011

Rolling the Boulder

Jack Graham 80s, binro, Black Guardian, class, day of the moon, Enlightenment, fiona cumming, history, immortality, JN-T Day, John Nathan-Turner, Mawdryn Undead, nixon, peter grimwade, sam harris, steve gallagher, Terminus, the x files, uneven and combined development 4

It’s JN-T Day! In honour of the late and much-maligned Mr Nathan-Turner – who rescued Who from the stylistic doldrums, produced a slew of stone classics and stuck around longer than he wanted to because he knew his departure would mean the end of the show – here is my Timelash II stuff on the stories usually called the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’. Much undervalued, all three of them.

For John Nathan-Turner.

‘Mawdryn Undead’

Once you get past the Billy Bunter bibble of the opening (and even that is pleasingly unexpected) this develops into a highly satisfactory bit of concept-driven sci-fi, cleverly using time travel (never a major concern of the old-style show) as part of a complex but admirably clear plot, aware of itself as myth-reiteration (immortality as curse, the Flying Dutchman, etc.) and with a submerged political sense in its depiction of crime, power, unscrupulousness and luxury.

It engages with the Who mythos without being enslaved to it, using concepts from the show’s backstory to create a genuinely dramatic conflict situation in the characters’ here and now.

You can see everyone’s point of view here, even if you don’t like the way they’re behaving. There are no clear goodies or baddies except for the jarringly satanic Black Guardian, but even he works as a figure on the sidelines trying to manipulate and influence events through his conflicted avatar Turlough, who constitutes a bravura bit of experimentation: the companion who is unsure whether he’s bad or not!

The production design is superlative… with the mutants’ ship, the obelisk, the transmat capsule, the crystal, the stolen gallifreyan machine, the hall of portraits, etc., all impressing and lingering in the memory.

The acting is very good, with David Collings giving it the full RSC and Nick Courtney very carefully and skillfully delineating the differences between the alternate versions of the Brig. Davison is never better than when called upon to play the Doctor as thinking through events and figuring out his situation… and this story plays to that strength… also allowing him to bring an almost suave air of intelligence, particularly when he tosses the crystal back to Turlough with a look of sardonic calculation.

And you have to admire the sheer off-the-wall combinations. A public school comedy that develops into a story about time travelling mutants on a luxury cruise liner, featuring an alien teenager (though obviously played by a grown man) and one of his teachers being split into two personas… well, we’ve come a long way from stomping monsters invading Southern England every week.

It may not be as spectacular as some of the other stories from this era, but if this is the 80s show chugging along as normal then they’re obviously doing something very right.

I make no apologies; I love ‘Terminus’.

It’s almost relentlessly cold, austere, alienating, unsympathetic, brutal and nihilistic, set in an explicitly godless universe which is depicted as teeming with sickness, decay, cowardice, failure, pettiness, selfishness and great crashing waves of existential boredom.…

December 7, 2010

Fang Rock, Class and the Tentacular Revolution

Jack Graham china mieville, class, first world war, horror of fang rock, louise jameson, morbius, octopus, propaganda, rutan, sex, tentacular revolution, terrance dicks, tom baker 0

If you ask me, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’ is one of the best ever; a thriller that focuses on characters who really interact while they’re trapped together, featuring Tom and Louise at their acme.

It investigates the nature of belief in an age of rising science and technology: Adelaide’s astrology fetish compares to the superstition of Vince and Reuben, with Vince’s terror as real as hers, and Reuben’s fear of monsters more a manifestation of melancholy stubbornness at the rise of unsympathetic forces he doesn’t understand (like electricity… which is also the weapon of the monster that kills and impersonates him). Meanwhile, Leela lectures Adelaide that consulting her “shaman” (despite Adelaide’s denial, that is the right word for people like Miss Nethercote) is a “waste of time”… but, with relishable irony, the semi-educated Leela simply believes in science because her mentor has told her to.

‘Fang Rock’ has a quiet undercurrent about sex too. Adelaide is understood by Harker to be Palmerdale’s “fancy woman” and Skinsale obviously envies this (though god knows why)… but he’s also clearly very taken with Leela. Paddy Russell gives us a whole shot simply to establish how much Skinsale digs Leela on sight. Vince is very flustered by Leela’s impromptu striptease (which she completely fails to understand) and pays attentions to Adelaide, which she simply treats with a patronising indulgence (to her he’s an instrumentum vocale, not a young man). And then we have the porn under Reuben’s bed. Mind you, I’m not a Freudian so I’m not saying anything about phallic symbolism. Sometimes, a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

‘Fang Rock’ is also very interested in class and the way it was changing in the early 20th century. Palmerdale is loaded and is therefore a scumbag, obviously. Crude but very Whoish… and true enough in general terms. He seems dead posh to the keepers… but to Skinsale (a wonderfully apt name, considering the manner of his death) Palmerdale is a nouveu riche, arriviste, vulgar little money-grubber… and such things obviously matter to Palmerdale since he has evidently purchased his lordly title. He tries to buy everything. He even seems to be paying his mistress (albeit for being a secretary rather than a concubine). Skinsale, meanwhile, considers himself Palmerdale’s social superior, despite obviously being skint (old money, obviously… and with a reputation built on enforcing empire in India). Palmerdale gets loads of his sailors killed but makes sure that he escapes (there are lifeboats enough for the gentry, as with the Titanic disaster, but not for the commoners) after causing the crash because he’s anxious to use insider info to fleece the markets… and then views Harker’s recriminations as irrelevant impertinence, and the keepers as more servants.

It’s worth noticing that the Doctor treats the workers (other than the cloddish and xenophobic Reuben) with respect. He starts off calling Vince “Mr Hawkins” while the poshos automatically talk to him like he’s a footman.

Vince, upon realising that Palmerdale is dead, burns the cash that His Lordship gave him, instinctively understanding that if he’s found in possession of it, the society he lives in will simply assume that he murdered the venal, titled git for the money.…

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