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We are the Borgias. You will be Excommunicated. Renaissance is Futile.

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It’s good that TV dramas have become more complex and ambiguous, particularly with regards to morality.  But there is a tendency for them to lose any moral compass in their eagerness to show us the dark sides of the characters with whom they want us to empathize and to care about.

The Borgias wants us to follow Cesare’s career with sympathy, but also shows him having people tortured into madness.  What is the show’s position on this?  Oddly, it tries to whitewash him even as it revels in his dark side.  It makes his victims into rapists and murderers.  It depicts him as personally involved in tormenting Savonarola, but makes Savonarola a fanatic (of course) and a vicious homophobe.  Now, it’s true that Savonarola instituted strictly puritanical laws in Florence, including against sodomy… but that was applicable to hetero sex as well as homo.  Of course, I wouldn’t want to defend Savonarola’s views in their entirety.  He was not a modern democrat.  But he and people akin to him – Munzer, Cromwell, the Levellers, the Diggers… the p/Protestant revolutionaries of the era of transition from feudalism to capitalism – were more than just foaming fanatics.  They meant more than that.  Of course, revolutionary ideals are always depicted as fanatical and dangerous in mainstream culture, more horrible by definition than any status quo they may challenge.  c.f. anybody in Gotham City who doesn’t like draconian laws and huge imbalances of wealth.

On the subject of Savonarola, we of course get a depiction of the revolution he led in Florence against the Medicis as an irrational explosion of fanaticism and lunacy.  We get no hint of the scale of corruption and oppression committed by the Medicis, no real hint of the horror of poverty in Florence alongside the amazing cultural flowering and explosion of wealth.  We get nothing about the popular support for Savonarola, the support of artists like Michaelangelo and Botticelli (we even get Machiavelli and Cesare tutting over the burning of a Botticelli on one of the Bonfires of the Vanities).  The Florentine republic created after the people kicked out the Medici was astonishing for its time.  The franchise was extended, public office was opened to lower ranks, the use of capital punishment was limited, etc.  None of that.  Natch.

And, to loop back to what I was saying earlier, we get no sense of the scale of corruption in the Catholic Church that Savonarola and people like him were rebelling against.  Pope Alexander VI, played (ludicrously, with stuck out chin and silly gruff voice) by Jeremy Irons, is shown to be a libertine, a spendthrift, a buyer and seller of offices, etc… but we’re evidently meant to relish him as a morally ambiguous figure whose passions are enjoyable to witness.  He is also shown giving a shit about the poor of Rome, going out at night in secret to investigate why the orphans don’t got no clean water.  He even gets to deliver John Ball’s line “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”…

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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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Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited

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According to China Miéville, the classic, early 20th century haute Weird of Lovecraft and Hodgson is the nebulous, meaningless, reactionary scream of incomprehension that greets the onrushing horror of modernity.

I think that, for 70s Doctor Who, a resurrected and processed form of the Weird is what the show draws upon when it finds itself haunted by repressed knowledge that it cannot face: the knowledge that the modern nightmares upon which it dwells are generated by capitalism.  When the themes of a 70s Doctor Who story suggest the possibility that capitalism could be noticed and indicted in systemic terms – particularly in terms of the exploitation of the worker, race and/or imperialism – the show tries to jettison the hauntological (realising that it is itself being haunted… nay, stalked) in favour of the Weird.

I intend to justify these outrageous claims in a forthcoming post.

In my last post – here – I casually asserted that the Weirdish ab-crabs in ‘The Macra Terror’ are a “prelude” to the connection the show will make in the 70s between the tentacle and capitalism.  It occurs to me that I need to expand a bit on my Skulltopus post about the Macra – here – in order to make myself clear on this point.

I think that the Colony in ‘The Macra Terror’ is a picture of mainstream Britain in denial during the radical late 60s, of a prosperous capitalist world that runs on repression, oppression, obedience, media conditioning, hierarchy.  The Colony strongly hints at being capitalist in various ways, not least the Butlins vibe that everyone talks about, the Pilot’s sitcom businessman manner, Barney’s salon and spa, etc.

Most explicitly, the story concentrates on the mining of gas… and Britain in 1967 was right in the middle of switching over to North Sea Gas.  In the story, the gas (a toxic substance that humans don’t need and which actively endangers workers) is mined for the benefit of other, hidden, possibly insane reasons/persons – in this case, the Macra.

The Macra, as I noted elsewhere, are extremely hauntological (in that material/pseudo-materialist way that things are hauntological in Who) in that they actively and literally haunt the Colony while clearly representing something that the characters all know must be denied.  In the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon, I hint that this repressed knowledge is the knowledge that they are exploited – specifically and explicitly as workers – by an irrational tyranny, and that this ties into the way that the radical currents in the late 60s were popularizing a critique of Western consumerist capitalism as tyrannical and alienating.

And so, whether it be cause or effect, we get Weirdish monsters.

They are giant crabs, as in some classic Weird fiction… except that, when you listen to the story (especially since you have to listen to it) they are also categorically indeterminate, big/small, crab/non-crab, insect/spider/bacteria things that people have trouble perceiving clearly, even – especially – when they see them.

Moreover, the Macra’s own mentalities are extremely contradictory, incoherent, self-denying… to the point of bordering on psychosis.…

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Skulltopus 3: Yes, We Have No Macra

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If any monster in the history of Who was ever a gothic, hauntological thing embodying the ‘return of the repressed’, it was the Macra.

All the ostentatious happiness of the Colony is there to cover unease.  They know there’s something wrong, otherwise why deny it so desperately?  Why would the Colony go to such lengths to contain and silence Medok unless he was speaking the unspeakable truth that everybody else wants to deny?  The Macra haunt the Colony, scuttling around at night, hiding in the shadows, unseen then glimpsed and then disappearing.  They haunt the people, who all know about them (even down to having a name for them) but claim to disbelieve in them.  They represent repressed knowledge that is insisting upon being remembered.  This is pure gothic.

But… they’re also a bit Weird, in the sense of the ‘Weird fiction’ of early 20th century horror (something I’ve discussed in previous Skulltopusposts).  William Hope Hodgson, one of the greatest Weird writers, used giant crabs a lot in his peculiar and deeply unsettling maritime tales.  As previous noted, the author China Miéville has written that the Weird (at least classic, ‘haute Weird’ of the late 19th-early 20th century) was an attempt to express the meaningless and unrecognisable, and that it thus stands in “non-dialectical superposition” to the gothic (or  the ‘hauntological’), which is about the buried secret, the thing we recognise but refuse, that which we know but wish (need) to deny.  The tentacled thing is the quintessential Weird monster type… a type unprecedented in Western fantastic fiction before the Weird.  But Hodgson’s tentacled things co-exist with giant crabs.  I’m not sure how precedented giant crabs were in the Western uncanny.  Certainly, people in the West had seen crabs before… but then, as Miéville acknowledges, they’d seen tentacled things too.  It’s not about unfamiliarity so much as literary unprecedentedness, as an absence of semiotic baggage and any tradition of previous meanings.  In any case, whereas the haunting thing is frightening because we recognise it, and recognise that it means something, the Weird thing is frightening because it is something meaningless and incomprehensible, stalking us for no reason that we can ken.

The Macra are TV monsters from 1967… and this is very different to literary monsters in 1917… but that’s a minefield I’ll try to traverse in another post.  But, shunting that massive problem to one side just for now, the Macra genuinely do seem to me to be Weird, but also to be hauntological.  They haunt because, as noted, they are recognised and not recognised, seen and denied, fled from because of the repressed knowledge that they represent.  On the other hand, they are not spectral or phantasmic, for all their elusiveness.  They’re giant crabs for heaven’s sake.  Or are they?

Because here’s the really strange thing: the Macra don’t really seem to be giant crabs at all!  The original titles of this story were ‘The Spidermen’ and ‘The Insect-Men’.  The characters in the story are uncertain what the Macra are, even – especially – when they see them. …

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Skulltopus 2: Bad Night at Fang Rock

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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.…

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