into the dalek

November 8, 2014

Reverse Racism (‘Into the Dalek’ 2)

The Doctor learns that he is bigoted because he refused to accept the idea that a Dalek could be good. Indeed, he hates Daleks so much that the one time he is prepared to even countenance the idea of a good Dalek is when he meets a Dalek which says all Daleks are evil and should die. So he hates genocidal racists so much that the only member of that race he can think of as good is the one who says that it would be a good idea to exterminate an entire race. But, of course, that isn’t good. That’s bad. That makes you as bad as a Dalek. Indeed, that’s Dalek-thinking.

Ironic, fairly interesting, and doubtless intentional.

But there’s another interesting irony here, which probably wasn’t intended.

As has been frequently pointed out, SF often falls into the trap of a race essentialism. Alien races in SF all have the same characteristics. The same sort of thing is true in Fantasy, and in other forms of storytelling featuring sapient non-humans. All Vulcans are logical, all Sontarans are militaristic, all House Elves are servile, all Orc are psychopaths, etc. The problems with this are obvious. It rests upon a reductionist view of race, society and sentience… not to mention a set of assumptions directly related to biological racism. But that’s all obvious, and well covered elsewhere.

Back to the unintended little irony in ‘Into the Dalek’… which, to be fair, is more an irony about the Daleks themselves. No, not the irony of creatures which metaphorically express the evil of racism themselves being based on race essentialism. I’m not really talking about race here. I’m talking about politics.

Because, as is also well understood, the Daleks are metaphors for the Nazis. Actually they hardly even bother being metaphors.

So we wind up in a peculiar situation politcally when we question the idea that there is something wrong with assuming that all Daleks are evil (an assumption that ‘Into the Dalek’ more or less explicitly questions). We wind up essentialy questioning the idea that all Nazis, all fascists, are bad. But you see… they are. By definition. The DWM review of Timewyrm: Exodus said that Hermann Goering was the closest thing to a nice Nazi (a pretty startling remark if you know anything about the man). But you can’t have nice Nazis. You can’t even approach that. It’s like talking about dry water – if it’s dry, it ain’t water.

We have bumped up against a standard misunderstanding about discrimination. It isn’t something that can happen to anyone or everyone. There’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism’, or ‘misandry’ (at least as the term is meant by the crybabies who object to feminism on the basis of their bruised manfeels). There certainly isn’t any such thing as unfair discrimination against fascists. That’s why they shouldn’t be allowed on Question Time, no matter how many people vote for them. You can’t have democratic fascists. Obviously, therefore, you can’t extend them the boons of democracy. …

September 6, 2014

Good Soldiers (Into the Dalek)

Jack Graham ethics, imperialism, into the dalek, war 10

‘Into the Dalek’ is about good soldiers vs bad soldiers.

The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.

But, of course, what do we mean by terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’?

For the army, a ‘good’ soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn’t let themselves be haunted.

A ‘bad’ soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior… perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.

In a soldier, morality is a malfunction. A good soldier is a ‘bad’ soldier. Because good people can’t do a soldier’s job, which is to fight and kill.

At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way. The Doctor doesn’t like soldiers. As in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’ he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course. He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she’s a soldier.

But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels. They are specifically described as rebels. Rebels against the Daleks. The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil. This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type. He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die. Because he’s a Dalek, and that’s how Daleks think. So, contrary to the Doctor’s hopes, there’s no saving the Daleks… which makes Rusty pretty much right: they’re beyond saving, so they must be fought. Which is what the rebels are doing. So Rusty kills all the Daleks… which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor’s defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn’t happened escapes me).

So, once again, as in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’, we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another. Soldiers are scary and irredeemable… umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.

See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle. They’re rebelling against the imperialists of the universe. I’m supposed to think they’re wrong or suspect for shooting to kill? When you’re in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you’d better obey orders and shoot to kill. That’s what the soldiers of the International Brigades did. That’s what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites. If the Whites, or Franco’s troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that’s ‘good’ at what it does to come and fight them.

Of course, Danny is a former soldier… and Clara doesn’t reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey. She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.…

November 22, 2013

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Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 60s, apartheid, dialectics, evolution, french revolution, historical materialism, history, into the dalek, liberalism, machiavelli, naomi klein, nelson mandela, production, reaganism, revolution, SF, south africa, syriza, teenagers, tool use, TV, twitterverse, unearthly child 6

What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She’s in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have “discovered television”. We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids – the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces – can be made visual.

Doctor Who‘s very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d’etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘The Space Museum’ pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking… and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show – which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production – crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I’ll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It’s fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from ‘historicals’ and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children’s literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.

The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about ‘cavemen’ who are dying out because they’ve forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.…