deep breath

September 4, 2014

Essential Problems and Dialectical Solutions (‘Deep Breath’ 5)

Jack Grahamdeep breath, gender, gender essentialism, sexism, sitcoms, steven moffat3

Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara’s character in ‘Deep Breath’. I think there’s something to this… in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she’s been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc. Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still… she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik’s Cube with a face drawn on it. There’s no denying, she looked better in ‘Deep Breath’. It’s possible that, as with so much else that seems better about ‘Deep Breath’, I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me. But then, such things do make a difference. One performance in an ‘actually existing’ production of a written text can change the meaning.

Clara’s monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement… though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up. Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor! I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people. Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don’t reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures. To be painstakingly fair, I’m sure this is not what was intended. It’s one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does. Which happens. Sometimes writers can’t win. Sometimes they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It’s not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write. That’s not an excuse, but it is a thing. The solution to this, as I’ve said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don’t keep setting off these little textual mines. Sounds like I’m demanding a lot, doesn’t it? Well, I am. Deal with it. That’s just how I roll. Etcetera.

At first, the whole business with Clara’s difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards ‘fangirls’ that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi’s casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly. Just another manifestation of the ‘fake geekgirl’, a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in ‘their’ fandom. …

August 30, 2014

Bits and Bobs (‘Deep Breath’ 4)

Jack Grahamcorpse economy, deep breath, steven moffat, victoriana3

It ends with another mysterious woman, another predatory dominatrix older female. She represents another story arc which we, the viewers, have no possibility of guessing or understanding until the inevitable ‘twist’ becomes self-evident just before being served up to you on a plate several episodes later than it could’ve been.

She speaks as if she is one of the audience and saw what we saw. Like us, she couldn’t see if the Doctor persuaded Half-Face to commit suicide or if he pushed him to his death. Again, a metatextual trick is used as a signifier of the enemy.

Another physical endurance test or test of skill becomes part of the nature of the monster-of-the-week. The Weeping Angels were based on how long you could go without blinking. The Sredni Vashtar (or whatever they were called) were based on how long you could go without touching a shadow with your own shadow. The droids in ‘Deep Breath’ were based on how long you can hold your breath (a slightly dodgy thing to encourage in the playground possibly).

How much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

I said: how much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

(To be fair, RTD was hardly unrepetitious – how many eleventh episodes ended with robotic things swarming in the sky and swooping down to shoot milling people? Quite a few, as I recall.)

The business with the droids stealing bodies hooks into the corpse economy of Victorian London, but strips it of class significance. Rich and poor alike get predated upon. It’s not like in ‘Bad Wolf’ in which the Daleks harvest the tramps and the sick and the outcasts… and then start feeding on the TV audience which tunes in to watch bodies punished.

The episode has lots to say about faces, and how we acquire them. The Doctor chooses (unconsciously, presumably) his new face as a way of being honest with Clara and trusting her. He initially finds it hard to recognise as himself. Vastra’s face is also the key to understanding and accepting her. You perceive a veil if you are unprepared to see and accept who she is. The droid has half a face (why couldn’t he have become a Springheel Jack-style urban legend called Jack Half-a-Face? – that would’ve been awesome) because he unconsciously recognises that it is not his own. He is contrasted with the Doctor and Vastra in that his face is a lie that he essentially rejects despite his attempts to accept it, whereas they performatively reject their own faces as a way of making others accept their honesty.

Vastra’s larder mirrors the larder of the droids, their store cupboard of human bits and bobs. It also mirrors the remark the Doctor makes to Clara about all restaurants being slaughterhouses, and his not remembering her becoming a vegetarian. (As a longstanding veggie myself, I liked that bit – though his attitude was condescending… but then, let’s face it, the Doctor is often morally condescending, and so are vegetarians.) …

August 26, 2014

The Veil (‘Deep Breath’ 3)

Jack Grahamclara, deep breath, hijab, jenny and vastra, patriarchy, steven moffat, veil, victoriana3

The veil. A politically loaded symbol. It carries all sorts of old semiotic baggage, of course. Weddings. Widowhood. Ladies in Conan Doyle who want to hide their identities (thus it has a trajectory into the figure of Madame Vastra via Victoriana). In genre TV these days, a woman wearing a veil is likely to be a tragic or vengeful figure, hiding a facial scar of some kind. (See ‘Silence in the Library’ / ‘Forest of the Dead’.)

The veil is thus something that implies a particular set of social situations for women. The connection appears to be the concept of separation. The veil is a boundary between the woman and society. It creates a space in which she can hide her unsightliness, either disfiguring grief or grievous disfigurement, from those who don’t want to have to see it. The wedding veil is lifted as the woman is taken possession of in the marriage ceremony; thus it is there to emphasize her acceptability by temporarily putting it in doubt. It is, of course, the symbolic tearing of the hymen. The man takes possession and breaks through the barrier. All very nasty. Not to mention anatomically inaccurate.

Vastra’s veil takes on enormous significance in ‘Deep Breath’. Indeed, the whole episode is full of talk about faces, with them being stolen, exchanged, worn, hidden, changed… with them contemplated in mirrors.

Vastra is married to Jenny (by Silurian law perhaps?), and yet this marriage hardly seems to have anything to do with Vastra’s veil (unsurprising, given that it is black rather than white), since Vastra and Jenny’s relationship fails to fit easily into any patriarchal schema. There is no sense in which Jenny owns Vastra. Indeed, the power relationship appears to go the other way (with implied consent).

There is a sense in which Vastra could be said to be mourning. She is an isolated figure in some ways, cut off from her lost people. But this is hardly emphasised at all. She doesn’t seem tragic, and her complete lack of vengefulness is so complete as to be worrying (to me anyway).

As mentioned, she reiterates – in some ways – the figure of the veiled lady from Victorian popular fiction, via her place in the regurgitated Victoria trope pyramid. But she inverts this, to some degree, by being the detective. Her veil isn’t to hide her secrets from the investigator, rather it is to hide the secrets of the investigator from the client – as long as is necessary.

There is another significance to the veil in our culture at this time: the immensely freighted issue of the hijab… or perhaps I should say, the immensely freighted issue of Western ideas about the hijab. I’ve likened the Silurians to the Palestinians before now, which would obviously chime… especially when you remember that Vastra has plonked herself down at the hub of the British Empire as a kind of refugee, and the British Empire was mucking around with the area that became Palestine from the 1830s onwards (though Victoriana places Vastra well before the disastrous British interventions of the early 20th century). …