fang rock

March 2, 2013

Skulltopus 13: Return to Fang Rock

Jack Grahamcapitalism, fang rock, imperialism, sexism, skulltopus, tentacles, terrance dicks, weird18

My monomaniacal focus on the quasi-Weird(ish/esque) in Doctor Who resumes (after a bit of a hiatus… during which I just couldn’t be arsed) and reaches the Graham Williams years, the heyday of the tentacular in the Baker era. See here for links to all previous Skulltopus posts and here for the last one (which includes a summary of the whole thing so far).

I started the whole Skulltopus thing with ‘Horror of Fang Rock’, but that was ages ago (and before I really knew where I was going with this topic) so I feel the need to go back to it, if comparatively briefly.

Okay, so ‘Fang Rock’. Hmm. Well, it’s a Terrance Dicks script, isn’t it? Uncle Tel is, as we all know, well dodgy on politics. He writes about how the working classes are happy being poor, and aristocrats are dandy, and the empire was kind of okay. His baseline assumption is one of contented ‘capitalist realism’, of unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. Plus he’s rubbish on the question of women and sexism. He’s so bad on issues of sexual exploitation that he actually seems to be rather too keen on bringing up the subject of rape.

Right?

Weeeeell… however true the above charges may or may not be with regard to his spin-off novels, the funny thing is that, in practice, his actual TV scripts don’t show much evidence of these traits. For instance, ‘Fang Rock’ is obsessed with class, hierarchy, status, property and money… and not in an obviously reactionary, or smugly-liberal way. In fact, it’s kind of edgy (as these things go). It’s one of those relatively few Who stories outside the early Pertwee years which portrays people performing waged labour, let alone showing the working people of twentieth century Britain. And, generally speaking, the story is greatly and openly more sympathetic to the working stiffs, and what they have to put up with, than it is to the gentry. The world the Rutan comes to and fits into is a world of deep economic and social divisions between classes based on work, finance, empire and gender. The workers have to work for a living, and do. They are explicitly below the gentlefolk in a very visible social hierarchy that is painted in unmistakably negative terms, to the point where their lives are shown to be implicitly considered of less value. The business of who does and who doesn’t get a lifeboat when Palmerdale’s yacht goes down foreshadows the sinking of the Titanic, probably the most famous example of ‘gilded age’ social injustice in popular consciousness. We are evidently invited and expected to be angry about this, to side with Harker. Indeed, in his rush to indicate his line on this, Dicks makes Lord Palmerdale just a tad too obviously despicable. Palmerdale’s wealth is evidently based on financial speculation. Skinsale’s position comes from his status as an M.P., as an old imperial soldier and (presumably) his respectable birth (i.e.…

November 16, 2011

Skulltopus 2: Bad Night at Fang Rock

Jack Grahamalien, china mieville, fang rock, first world war, hauntology, hodgson, horror, horror of fang rock, imperialism, lovecraft, modernity, rutan, skulltopus, tentacular revolution, the thing, weird, wwii3

Further to this post, in which I sketched out the ideas of the author China Miéville concerning the relationship between the tentacular and the Weird, and the superpositioning of the Weird and the hauntological in monsterology (please read that before you read anything below), here’s my first attempt to look at Doctor Who through that lens.

‘Horror of Fang Rock’ (1977) seems like an obvious first port of call. Set just before the First World War (in other words, in the years of the rise of the semiotic octopus, just before the explosion of the Weird), the Rutan is a tentacular monster, though the tentacles are rarely seen and, on the whole, the creature seems more like a jellyfish (even down to its “affinity with electricity”).

It seems to be a manifestation of the nebulous electrified military modernity that the character Reuben so resents and fears. It seems permeated with technology through its affinity with electricity. It uses the generator, speaks of its ability to shape-shift as a “technique” and leaves bits of its own alien tech all over the place, including a “signal modulator” that chimes thematically with all the concentration on the lighthouse’s wireless telegraph. It also espouses an ideology of empire and militarism, and uses an arrogant tone of snobbery with regards to the Sontarans, which is entirely fitting with the story’s intense focus on class.

(So, there’s an obvious connection here which I’ve made before. ‘Fang Rock’ is set in the early 20th century and features a tentacular monster which seems to carry metaphorical weight to do with imperialism, technology, militarism, global conquest… just the kinds of things that tentacles were being used to signify in the early 20th century political propaganda posters mentioned by Miéville and in my first Skulltopus post. Obviously, this connection is complicated by the fact that the story I’m talking about was written, made and broadcast in 1977, not 1907 or 1917… but the connection is tempting all the same, as a possible example of semiotic drift, of the cultural bric-a-brac of one age hitching a ride into another via that previous age’s representation as a period.)

The story, as a whole, seems more sympathetic to the working class characters than the ‘upper class’ ones. However, the various strands of the drama which explicitly deal with class only arrive at an open and easily comprehensible liberal critique of snobbery, privilege and inequality, albeit a barbed one. The nature of the Rutan threatens to sharpen the critique, though it is ultimately far too contradictory a figure to function as a straightforward metaphor, of either a reactionary or radical nature. The Rutan personifies the oncoming dangers of the twentieth century in a form that associates itself with militarism, military technology, class and imperialism. However, beyond this core of metaphorical specificity, there is a difficulty in pinning down the Rutan.

It cannot be said to metaphorically embody British imperialism, specifically. True, it appears in a story in which British imperialism is referenced… but then so is the imperialism of other nations, albeit via the xenophobia of Reuben, who mentions various nationalities engaged in imperialism at this point, saying that none of them can be trusted.…