Temporarily embarrassed proletarians
In an age when the suffocating omnipresence of the imperatives of neoliberalism has penetrated every single corner of culture – aggressively colonizing even the formely overlooked, underpoliced nooks and crannies where eccentricity and offbeatitude used to be free to spring up like hardy weed – and even the supposedly nerdy heroes have to be marketably thin, sexy and dressed in geek chic, it might do us all good to remember…
My. Fucking. Hero.…
It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at ‘The Reign of Terror’ for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should’ve been called ‘That Isn’t Right’. So I’ve given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.
I wasn’t going out on much a limb dissing ‘The Reign of Terror’ (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it. ‘The Aztecs’, by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good. It isn’t that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it’s Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.
I’m not actually going to say that it’s bad, as such. On the whole, it’s very well made. But….
Black and White and Red All Over
 |
|
| “Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa… do you approve of interracial marriage?” |
Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people. It’s not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are ‘darked-up’ (what would you call it… bronzeface?). It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they’ve been reddened. But even if they weren’t actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another. Costume, ostensibly ‘native’ mannerisms and speech patterns, etc. It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar. Remember, not all blackface involves actual ‘darking-up’. These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not. As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal “modern blackface” by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they’re not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of ‘the Few’, thus implicitly comparing today’s supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, ‘entitled’ youngsters with the generation of the “finest hour”. Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys ‘putting on’ verbal fancy dress such as “innit”) are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows. The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.
While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of ‘darking-up’ was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when ‘The Aztecs’ (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made. Even so, it’s far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice. …
I’ve gone on the record saying I think Moffat’s version of Doctor Who is sexist and heteronormative. A challenge I often hear – and it’s a serious point – is the idea that Moffat’s Who is, at least, no worse than previous eras on issues like depictions of gay relationships, and is frequently better. There are positive depictions of gay characters, quite unlike anything in, say, the Hartnell era. Well, firstly, let me say that I don’t want to claim that things are ‘worse’ now (in any absolute way) than in the Hartnell years, when homosexuality essentially didn’t exist at all in-story in the Who universe. And sure, many old episodes have displayed all sorts of heteronormative stuff, and also outright homophobic stuff (albeit usually by implication). Harrison Chase is, in many ways, implied to be an evil gay man (it’s not that I think gay people are like him, but rather that he is constructed partly of tropes that connote gayness in pop culture).
It isn’t that there’s a scale that pertains to culture now just as it pertained in 1963 and 73 and 83 etc, with Who scoring 3.7 points on the heteronormativity scale (or the racist, or sexist, or whatever, scale) in 1963 but now scoring 9.1 under Moffat. That’s not how I see it (which isn’t to say that comparisons across the decades are meaningless). Normative assumptions shift and fluctuate with all sorts of social and economic changes (this is part of what I was getting at in my previous post with regards to upswings and downswings in the reactionary content of culture). There are ideas now that simply weren’t widely accepted (or even much known about) in, say, 1963… but which are now widely understood and championed by large numbers of people.
Awareness of homophobia, discrimination against LGBT people, heteronormativity, etc, are all examples of issues where people’s widespread views have changed drastically. And this isn’t the ‘condescension of posterity’, because I acknowledge that people’s ideas have been changed by people, particularly as a result of the great breakthrough struggles of the mid 60s through to the early 70s. That’s partly why Moffat’s Who looks extraordinarily liberal and right-on by the standards of much of the old show… if we look at them with the same constant, reductive scale of measurement… which we can’t do because it’s more complex than that, with struggles and changing ideas altering the normative assumptions against which we make judgements.
To be crude about it, even today’s crusading reactionaries in the Tory party talk the talk of respect for gender equality, racial equality, etc. They have to… even as their actual policies reinforce division, discrimination, inequality and attacks upon the living standards of ordinary people that Thatcher could only fondly dream of getting away with. But there are swings and roundabouts in people’s consciousness. Poeple today would be (and are) very unwilling to tolerate open racial prejudice from their politicians, yet there is widespread anxiety about immigration and asylum, carefull inculcated by the media. …
There was a fair amount of media chin-scratching last year about a supposed glumness and seriousness creeping into popular movies. The real trend, I think, is not towards the ‘serious’ but towards the reactionary.
For one thing, there’s recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a ‘nuanced’ form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots. The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran. Always handy, being able to demonise Iran. (Modern Iran’s origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present ‘the West’ in a good light… which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.) The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers. It misrepresents ‘enhanced interrogation’ as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers. To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture. The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt – the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality – and very normalising.
These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world. Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium’s cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring. This isn’t anything new. The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the ‘War on Terror’ and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of ‘painful self-examination’ and ‘angst’ about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium. The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects.
The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery. Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices. It’s not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.) Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington. The reality is that Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening ‘on the ground’ as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. …
We get nowhere by pretending to ourselves that we can ever break out of culture and view it, as it were, from the outside. We’re in it. And we’re there to stay. By loving something and criticising it too, you kind of efface the nature of the all-embracing grip. But how can you not? You shouldn’t pretend you can.
The solution (for me anyway) lies in using and abusing what you love, forcing it – and your talk about it – to become a way of criticising the society that created it. You don’t break out of culture but you do turn an aspect of it into a weapon of sorts, even if you just use the weapon to recarve the inside of your own head. This, of course, comes from my personal ideological perspective.
More. For me, the approach to culture can always be both for itself, for its own sake, for the sheer hell of it, *and* as a way into social criticism. You can love it because you love it and also because you hate it, because of what your hatred for aspects of it allows you to do. Assault everything. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can enjoy the ‘use value’ of the commodity (TV show, film, book, whatever) while also analysing it. Where does my enjoyment come from, what does it mean, how to others enjoy it, why is it created the way it is, what does it do culturally and politically, etc. I think any other approach ends up with you thinking you shouldn’t enjoy stuff you find politically dodgy and then pretending you don’t (which leads to strange neuroses that are actually pretty common on the left).
Of course, that model assumes that there can never be any positive critique in mass culture. I’m not one to think mass culture can ever really be ‘subversive’… but I do think it can (and does) sometimes provide uncompromised critique that can be used positively rather than negatively, i.e. you can supportively adopt aspects of what it ‘says’ as well as using some of what it ‘says’ against it. …
This article – from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian – is really great. It’s about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism… and all that kind of stuff. Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty – all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes. Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies… just in a way acceptable to liberals.
Here’s a snippet:
The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal ‘humanitarian intervention’. I’m all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn… but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can’t help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here‘s blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the ‘nuanced’ Zero Dark Thirty. Like this ‘nuanced’ response, for instance:
Nothing like ‘nuance’ is there?
(Actually, I’ve blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama’s aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects – here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she’s not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people’s opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a ‘philosopher’, but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
“This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.”…
Why do some monsters have names while others don’t?
The best place to start may be with the Cybermen. After all, they went from having names to not having names. Moreover, they did it more or less within one particular story, ‘The Moonbase’ (if I remember rightly, they had names in the script but these were not mentioned on screen).
The first thing to mention is that this is the story in which they went from being threatening because they are emotionless and logical to being threatening because they’re one of those “terrible things” bred in those “corners of the universe” that “we” have to fight, when they were no longer fighting to save their planet but to steal ours, when they lost their human hands, when they started (so early!) saying things like “Clever, clever, clever!”, i.e. when they became overtly and deliberately evil. But there has to be more to it than that. After all, vampires keep their names. Loss of humanity and the acquisition of evil intent are not enough to strip them of their names.
Moreover, the Cybermen are not the only Doctor Who monsters to lose their names. There’s also the Daleks, who lost their names when they stopped being Kaleds (or Dals).
This loss of name is very important. In the ‘Moonbase’ Cybermen, it seems more like the final stripping away of individual identity. It works similarly for the Daleks as for the Cybermen, and has similar wider connotations when it comes to both these races.
(Notice, by the way, how blithely one talks about ‘races’ in this sci-fi context… a way of putting things that would be wholly unacceptable in Western liberal discourse nowadays if applied to, say, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians… which isn’t to say that the racialist patterns of thought don’t still pertain in the attitudes of many, just that they are not usually openly stateable anymore. This is an example of an entire cultural discourse – in this case, that of racialism – taking refuge in a ‘pocket universe’ within culture once the wider culture has largely rejected and banished it, or at least talk of it. The discourse of racialism hides out, in disguise, in the SF ‘Recycle Bin’ once it has been guiltily deleted from the cultural ‘Desktop’. Sometimes such things even get deleted from the Recycle Bin but, as we know, they remain on the hard drive, waiting to be forensically recovered.)
Veering back to the point… notice how the conversion of Lytton or Stengos into Cyberman or Dalek involves the loss of identity, thus the loss of name. When Stengos sees his daughter, his first word is her name. He remembers her name, and hence his own, which is what launches his psychological struggle against his Dalek conditioning.
The named/nameless distinction maps roughly onto the biological/robot-or-cyborg distinction, and both are really about individuality vs. the loss of individuality. The Daleks and Cybermen act far more on a kind of groupthink than, say, the Silurians. …
Trigger Warning.
So, Jimmy Savile and all that. The hidden well of suppurating pus beneath the now-picked scab of BBC light entertainment.
It would seem that vast amounts of Doctor Who were made by an organisation that, in its widespread branches and ascending echelons, actively colluded in facilitating and covering-up the abuse and rape of children. Lots of children.
By itself, this observation is irrelevant to the wider scandal, and to dwell on it from the fan standpoint would surely amount to morally myopic solipsism of the first degree. What matters isn’t how we feel about it, or how it changes our viewing of contemporaneous episodes. On the list of things that matter, that’s so far down that it’s in an appendix, in small print. Yet it surely demands some thought from those of us steeped in the show, in the history of it and the watching of it.
Most of us fans have – via the videos and DVDs and toys and… ahem… websites – given unreasonable amounts of our time and loyalty and extra money to the BBC. The same organisation that cosetted and enabled a man who, beyond being a routine right-wing shitsmear of a type all-too-common in the entertainment world, was also a known child rapist. The BBC, the makers and marketers of the children’s own show that the adults adore, instititionally sat on the knowledge and did nothing.
We shouldn’t, of course, be shocked out of any illusions about the BBC being a beneveolent, lovable old auntie or any such mindless, sentimental bollocks. I’m now past the point where I’d be happy to take part in any ‘Proud of the BBC’ campaigns. I guess even Mitch Benn would probably not write the same lyrics, were he writing today.
No, no. The BBC News helps naturalise and peddle and thus facilitate wars, invasions, corruption, hard-right government policies, police brutality, neo-liberal assumptions galore, and a thoroughly establishment view of reality. This is it’s notion of balance and objectivity. Andrew Marr and Jeremy Vine and other such clueless parrots of capitalist realism, spewing endless reiterations of hegemonic ideology. BBC drama and comedy and entertainment shows – Doctor Who included – generally promulgate deference, hierarchy, cultural racism, heterodoxy and conformity, heteronormativity, contempt for the working class and bourgeois values. The BBC, as a force in the culture industries, instinctively advocates respect for authority and royalty and capitalism and established power.
That it is loathed and hated poisonously by the Murdoch press and the rest of Britain’s reactionary print media is testament only to the fact that, being publically owned, it doesn’t earn profit for the capitalist class directly, and even cuts into a wedge of the market. Being nominally accountable to the public, it is occasionally capable of mild deviations from the ideological ultra-lunacy of the press, red-top or ‘quality’. From the standpoint of Melanie Phillips and persons of her loathsome ilk, it’s communism to even affect neutrality over, say, Israel/Palestine, even if the real effect of your coverage is to perpetuate all the reactionary lies peddled about the conflict. …
“Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.
But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.
We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.
In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals.…