Eruditorum Press

Crash log of the Singularity

green death

6

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“I have in my hand a piece of paper,” says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, “which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!”

The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.

“When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year…” Stevens begins.

“It were a shame, that was!” heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.

“No, my friends,” says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, “we must not be bitter. We must face the facts.”

Note the ‘we’; the most abused word in political discourse.  As in ‘we’re all in this together’.

“Coal is a dying industry,” asserts Stevens.

The miners shout “Rubbish! Rubbish!”

When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish.  Mining was always subsidised.  

“Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!”  So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people’s jobs.  “I have it here in black and white!”

There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots.  The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob – a trope that goes back a long way.

“Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!”  The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.

In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene.  Miners were powerful and militant in 1973.  They were unionised and they were winning.  They weren’t sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.

In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient.  By the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in ’74 (the year after this story was broadcast).  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.

And when Stevens says “oil is the future” he’s only telling part of the truth.  The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure.  Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc.  This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism… which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973.…

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Skulltopus 12: Come Out onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle

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Okay, first a quick (well… relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications… because we’ve come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.

The Story So Far…

If only ‘Pirates of the Caribbean II’ had looked this good.

According to China Miéville, the tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as ‘the Weird’.  Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc.  They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a ‘novum’, unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis.  (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and ‘ghost story’ writer M.R. James.)  Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic.  The gothic – or hauntological – is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return.  The Weird is what we don’t – and perhaps cannot – know, erupting without precedent and confronting us with our own incomprehension.  Consequently, the gothic and the Weird exist in “non-dialectical superposition”, oscillating back and forth… something which shows in the almost total absence in Western monsterology of the skulltopus, a fusion of skull (gothic) and octopus (Weird) which, on the face of it, would seem to be quite an obvious synthesis, especially given that the central hub of an octopus’s body is decidedly skull-like in shape.

Much later, long after the process in Western literary and graphic monsterology that Miéville describes, and long after tentacles had been thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western Horror and SF, tentacles begin to make their presence felt in Doctor Who. In the early days, most of the tentacles that appeared in the show did so courtesy of Terry Nation. For instance, he adroitly selected an octopus as a meaningless plot-device monster in ‘The Chase’. He may have done this because the octopoidal carried a residual charge of blankness or meaninglessness. Also, Nation seems to have repeatedly associated a tentacular or Weirdesque monster with economic exploitation. The Brains of Morphoton have stubby tentacles and run an entire economy on hypnotism, making scarcity seem like material abundance; the Slyther turns up when the Daleks are forcing people to mine for them and black-marketeers are taking advantage of the situation. This may be a co-optation of the ‘blankness’ of the tentacular inherited from the Weird. It may also be that, because the modernity that filled the Weird writers with such nebulous horror was capitalist modernity, there is something in their pre-eminent monster-type that naturally lends itself to expressing horror at economic exploitation. (They themselves would probably have rejected this, most of them being reactionaries… though, interestingly, Lovecraft – who was a disgusting racist, living in dread of ‘miscegenation’ – once identified himself as a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, even calling himself a ‘socialist’.)…

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Cottage Industry vs. the Spectacular Tentacular Draculas

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According to Miles and Wood, Barry Letts’ eco views were very much influnced (as were many people’s) by a text called Blueprint for Survival, co-written by Edward Goldsmith (now deceased) and published in the magazine he founded, The Ecologist, in 1972.  It was supported by many scientists and was subsequently released in book form to became a best-seller.  Miles and Wood identify it as the real-world model for Sir Charles Grover’s Last Chance for Man in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’.  There is indeed something of Goldsmith’s politics (small-c conservative; anti-industrial society) in the fictional Grover, who is simultaneously an eco-radical and an establishment elitist who wishes to turn the clock back (literally) to a kind of enlightened feudalism.  George Monbiot has described Goldsmith’s politics as “a curious mixture of radical and reactionary”, saying that he “has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute ‘distinct ethnic groups’ and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation”.  According to Monbiot, Goldsmith

assumes that culture is a rigid, immutable thing: that different communities can live only within the boxes nature has assigned to them. Confusing, for example, Protestantism and unionism, he fails to understand the political forces which cause splits within communities and associations between them. He fails too to see the external manipulation which first defines ethnicity inflexibly, then drives the newly separated peoples to fight.

Now, I’m not attributing similar views to Barry Letts or Robert Sloman.  However, there is something of Goldsmith’s hankerings for the regional and the anti-industrial in ‘The Green Death’.  The very separateness of Wales and the Welsh tells us something.  The resolutely English characters – even the Doctor is English really, and this has never been plainer than in ‘Green Death’ – become strangers in a strange land.

Making the workers Welsh seems like a way of quaintifying them, since quaintness was the deadly stigma that mainstream British (i.e. metropolitan English) media culture foisted upon Wales… at least before substituting constant nasty jokes about shagging sheep and Splott (i.e. standard jokes based on stereotypes about rural people and working class communities).  Welshness is a way of ‘othering’ them, of segregating them, of making them a separate community.  The Welsh working class is depicted as a subculture within British society, rather than, say, one of the most significant layers of the majority class in the country… which Welsh mineworkers certainly were at the time.

There’s no reason for ‘The Green Death’ to take place in Wales but that Letts and Sloman want the story to centre on a mine (and going to Wales is cheaper than going further north).  But why do they want the story to centre on a mine?  They’re not interested in miners.  It seems as though they feel the need to situate industry and industrial disputes somewhere regional, somewhere definitely apart from the ‘middle England’ that aliens are always invading in the Letts version of the late 20th century… but why give the story a backdrop of industry and industrial disputes anyway? …

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Skulltopus 10: How Green Was My Death?

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‘The Green Death’ is a ghost story.  Doctor Who itself may actually be best described, from one standpoint, as an anthology of ghost stories.

Okay, let’s go back a bit.

Firstly, let me defend my notion about 70s Doctor Who sprouting Weird tentacles when it notices (and thus needs to evade and/or signify) capitalism.  ‘The Green Death’ is clearly aware of capitalism and, sure enough, shows signs of Weird inflection.  (I’m aware, by the way, that I keep talking about the show as though its alive… a form of commodity fetishism that I’ll address some day.)

Apart from anything else, there’s a dirty great tentacle in ‘The Green Death’.  It’s only in it for a few seconds, during the Doctor’s abortive trip to Metebelis III, but still…

As in ‘Curse of Peladon‘, this is the tentacular riding in on past associations… however, it can’t be said to work quite the same way as previous tentacles in the Pertwee era.  This tentacle is clearly not obscuring any potential thematic convergence upon the subject of capitalism, as in ‘Spearhead from Space‘ and ‘Claws of Axos‘.  Nor is it standing in for implied capitalism, as in ‘Curse of Peladon’.  Capitalism is something that ‘The Green Death’ is aware of openly.  It doesn’t need to be either obscured or implied… especially since the ‘critique’ of capitalism the story offers is actually quite diffident, to the extent of dehumanizing the working class.  And this tentacle is only a momentarily glimpsed feature of a side-trip, taking place literally light years away from Global Chemicals.  However, it’s in ‘The Green Death’ rather than, say, ‘The Time Warrior’.  It’s in a story about an evil corporation rather than one about a feudal warlord.  So, the association is still evident and active.

There is also a distinct Weird inflection to the maggots.  Their multiplicitous tubular wriggliness is hardly a million miles from being tentacular.  They have some of that quintessentially Weird incoherence.  

However, like ‘Spearhead from Space’, ‘The Claws of Axos’ and ‘Curse of Peladon’ before it, ‘Green Death’ retains a hauntological charge.  

The maggots themselves are steeped in gothic, in associations to do with death.  Real maggots breed in corpses or bad meat.  They are of putrefaction.  This suggests skulls and bones and graveyards, and it suggests them in the gothic mode: as signalling extremes and transgressions, and the haunting presence of that which has been denied and repressed.  Biological corruption is here aesthetically linked with the corruption of the environment by big business.  The maggots appear in the mine because they are generated by the toxic waste from the Stevens Process, which is secretly dumped underground.  Eventually, they erupt out of the mine into the world above, like zombies out of graves.  They make a typical gothic move.  They do it almost too literally.  They have been repressed and then they return.  They have been buried out of sight but wriggle out of their subterranean hiding-place.  Moreover, this is gothic very much in the Who mode.…

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BBC Wales

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The patronizing use of Welsh stereotypes in ‘The Green Death’ is evidence of the employment of centuries-old imperial condecenscion.  However, Welshness alone does not straightforwardly equal idiocy in this story.  Rather, it is the conjunction of Welshness with membership of the proletariat which produces characters who don’t really have a clue what’s going and need everything explained to them.

Clifford Jones and ‘Nancy’ (note how she doesn’t need a surname) are allowed to be efficient and useful only because their Welshness (which entails them using cute provincialisms galore) is offset by their educated, middle-class boffinity and right-onitude.  Meanwhile, Jo marvels openly at her own foolishness in caring so much about the death of a “funny little Welshman” (who kept her alive).  The difference between these Welsh characters – i.e. between the ones who qualify as people and those who don’t – is down to class.

The workers in this story are belittled, peripheral figures.  They are profoundly out of touch and their Welshness is but a conduit by which they can be further quaintified.  They miss the big picture, even when the hippy scientists try to explain everything to them. They side with Stevens when he tries to bribe them with promises of the trickle-down effect… indeed, the validity of Stevens’s claims that profits for Global will also mean prosperity for the workers is never challenged, only qualified by the criticism that pollution will be a side-effect.  There is hardly a hint of class struggle here, besides the opening scene… and even here the struggle is portrayed as over.  The mine is closed, the miners all but absent.  Their status seems unclear… some of them seem to still have access to the mine despite its apparent closure.  The mine itself seems not to be owned by the government but by Global Chemicals.

Now, in its haphazard and accidental way, some of this is actually prescient.  The UNIT stories were supposed to be ‘five minutes into the future’ (we’re not getting into UNIT dating controversies – I couldn’t care less) and, of course, by the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories.  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs had been annihilated.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism (which, of course, had already begun under Heath, albeit in a less aggressive form).

Thing is, viewed in the context of the times in which it was made, this is as puzzlingly skewiff as it is prescient.  ‘Anachronistic’ is the only way to properly describe it.

You see… miners were powerful in 1973, having struck in 1972 for the first time since the 20s – and won!  Miners all over the country came out over piffling proposed pay rises, proposed by the Tory government in the midst of declining living standards and working conditions.…

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Missing Codec

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Old Who was not fundamentally about characters or characterisation.

At its best, it used characterisation as a way of expressing its actual concerns, which were narrative or semiotic or conceptual or thematic or mythic or political or satirical… or any combination thereof.

We know everything we need to know about who Kalik, Orum and Pletrac are, how they think, etc. for the pastiche/satire/parable/joke to work.

It simply isn’t interested in how Kalik feels about his mother.

It certainly isn’t interested in how the Doctor feels. Or hardly ever. Even when the Doctor goes home for the first time, we don’t see him soulfully staring at his childhood haunts or standing in the rain over the grave of his deserted Mum. Instead, he gets caught up in a satirical political thriller that turns into a surreal duel and then an apocalyptic techno-melodrama.

Of course, there’s plenty of characterisation in ‘The Deadly Assassin’. Even minor characters have ways of thinking and speaking. Hildred is a brutal bungler. Borusa is principled in some ways, cynical in others, and has a sneaking admiration for his wayward ex-pupil, etc.

Worldbuilding, in the service of conceptual or historical or political ideas, needs this kind of characterisation.  The more charged the concepts or history or ideas being explored, the more charged the emotion. New Who has never done anything as moving (to me) as “Binro was right.”  Meanwhile, Romana isn’t pregnant or anything. 

Yes, the Doctor looks sad when Jo decides to marry Jones.  At the very end of a story about an evil chemical company befouling an environment full of unemployed people as part of a world domination plot by a mad computer.

When people criticise old Who for not paying enough attention to characterisation, they are often talking about  the portrayal of reactive personal emotions, i.e. the kind that make people cry when they lose somebody they love.

This is to forget that drama can be equally compelling when characterisation consists of political or intellectual emotions.

The little sad sting at the end of ‘Green Death’ is effective, but the meat of the story is a conflict (albeit very broadly sketched) of viewpoints about ecology, technology and the limits of private power.

None of this means, by the way, that old Who didn’t sometimes explore reactive personal emotions or neglect political and intellectual emotions. Because it did both, sometimes to egregious degrees.

Nor do I mean to suggest that new Whoalways neglects the political and intellectual emotions, because it doesn’t. Well, it didn’t used to anyway… before it came under the control of a man who can suggest visiting Marie Antoinette as an example of a nice day out, akin to a visit to the beach for any decent man, without even realising that he’s just said something political.

Fundamentally, however, to criticse old Who for not paying enough attention to characterisation, motivation, emotion etc. is a bit like criticising a lasagne for not playing DIVX files. That isn’t what its for.…

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Twee… but Pertinent

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Yep, here’s the best of my Pertwee stuff from Timelash II.  Thrill to my confusion as I struggle to get to grips with an era that itself struggled to get to grips with fuel controversies, miners’ strikes, feminism and loads of funny stuff like that.  Lots of new material in amongst the stuff I posted at Gallibase. 

‘Inferno’

I remember the first time I saw ‘Inferno’. I was at university. I popped into town and bought the VHS release with pretty much the last scrapings from the bottom of my overdraught. I took it back to my digs and watched it in one sitting, surrounded by half-read Penguin classics, half-written essays and empty beer cans.

I remember, somewhere towards the middle of the story, practically praying to Someone Or Other (the gods of TV probably) that the writer would have the balls to refuse to reveal what the green slime was and/or what the Primords were.

I remember being well pleased when I got to the end without having had some clumsy sci-fi “explanation” foisted on me.

The Primords are just there. They represent the animal in man, unleashed. The are the externalised form of the snarling beast inside the Brigade Leader that makes him enjoy his fascistic work so much, of the apes inside Sutton and Stahlman that make them tear and snap at each other.

Luckily, the story also has some intelligent things to say about the way people are shaped by the societies in which they live. That fine fellow Mr Benton, when raised in a fascist world (or possibly just employed by one), becomes a brutal sadist… so it’s not about our bestial original sin but about our choices within society as we find it and as it shapes us.

UNIT guards make their own lives but not in circumstances of their own choosing.

I know the evil-version-of-regular-character-in-alt-world thing is hardly original… but ‘Inferno’ does it better and smarter than any other take on the same idea that I’ve seen.

Also, as The Discontinuity Guide says, the “so free will is not an illusion after all!” scene elicits a cheer (or should do) from the viewer.

It’s a powerful piece of work because of the ideas, even if they’re not stunningly profound or original, and because of the strength of the direction. The constant background thrumming of machinery, the hazy heat of the outside world, the bleak industrial wasteland in which the project seems to nestle, the use of brilliant ‘stock’ music by Delia Derbyshire, the incrementally jacked-up claustrophobia, the sweating actors, the performances that ratchet up the tension, the nightmarish apocalypse in Episode Six with blistered zombies catatonic as the air fills with hot ash, the well-integrated stock footage of lava explosions, the stunningly tight and tense cliffhanger to Episode Four with the countdown reaching zero as the Doctor and Stahlmann face each other over a gun… it goes on and on.

Also, the open question of whether the alt-world is a fascist or communist tyranny leads to all sorts of interesting (to me anyway) avenues of thought, including the observation that, either way, it’s more similar than it is different to the democratic world of the Brigadier and UNIT.…

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