companions

March 27, 2014

The Perfect Companion

Jack Graham amy pond, clara, companions, neoliberalism, river song, steven moffat 12

Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong, capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.

But this is just the job of the companion. Even the worst of the classic series companions – Victoria, Dodo, etc – gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required. They don’t tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them. It’s a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully. That’s not something that’s entirely untroubling, but – for good or ill – it’s how this works. In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions. It’s actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha. But the point is that they all step up because that’s what they’re in the text to do. The ones that don’t, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).

You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion. Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor. Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment). Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem. Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor. The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be. It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc. But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.

The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their ‘duties’ as a companion, right the way through.

Amy’s character – i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of ‘companion duties’ – is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc. The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines. Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll. House. Car. Marriage. Etc.

River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor. …

February 5, 2014

The aliens… They’re just so… alien

Jack Graham companions, Fantasy, harry potter, j k rowling, lovecraft, race, racism, river song, SF 5

J.K. Rowling recently reignited the Potterite shipping-wars by saying that she should never have coupled Ron with Hermione.

Among the things she apparently doesn’t regret putting into the world’s most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:

Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect ‘human’ notions of private property.

A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and ‘pickaninny’ speech patterns.

Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in ‘primitive’ tribes.

Lest it be thought that I’m singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately. The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology. Race pervades these genres as a category. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is full of different ‘races’. The world of Star Trek is full of different ‘races’. The world of Doctor Who is full of different ‘races’. Just think how often we are assailed with ‘races’ in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics. The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth “a vicious, callous, warlike race” (my emphasis). A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin. And the ones I’ve mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream.

Let’s look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931.

This is particularly interesting because the story is about ‘race-mixing’, expressing Lovecraft’s bigoted horror of ‘miscegenation’. But he wasn’t writing in a vacuum. He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries… and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.

The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and ‘races’ as a social category (which is what ‘race’ is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it’s essentially meaningless). To quote Richard Seymour:

Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines.

…