macra terror

June 17, 2013

Happy Workers

Jack Graham 60s, capitalism, colonialism, macra terror, panic moon, totalitarianism, USSR 2

From the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon. Slightly expanded.

Some people say that ‘The Macra Terror’ is about holiday camps, but I think there’s more to it than that. The Colony is obsessed with work. It organises communal entertainment, but this seems to consist of revues about how great it is to be worker. The aim is to make people “happy to work”. These people are not on holiday.

The surveillance and brainwashing suggests totalitarianism, but the area where Barney provides makeovers looks less like Russia and more like a health spa or a salon on a Western high street. Polly is told she’ll win a competition that sounds like Miss World (which the U.S.S.R. disdained until 1989). The Pilot sits at a desk attended by a secretary, looking like a sitcom businessman. Ola’s guards look like the kind of American or British riot police who were, by this time, often being seen on the news, clashing with demonstrators.

.The key to understanding this strange tale is the fact that, by 1967, a lot of people saw tyranny on both sides of the iron curtain. In the 60s, Western society was largely prosperous but also lived in the shadow of the bomb, of Vietnam, of racial and sexual discrimination. There was inequality, protest and repression. In 1967, the turbulence was just about to peak. The media might have presented Western culture as happy, free, even ‘swinging’, but the counter-culture began to critique mass advertising and P.R. as methods of thought control. Trendy theorists like Herbert Marcuse identified totalitarian currents within capitalism and saw consumerism as creating alienation. (It’s interesting, in light of this, how often Doctor Who – a product of the 60s after all – combines its strongest hints at a critique of capitalism with the aesthetics of totalitarianism, i.e. ‘The Sun Makers’, ‘The Happiness Patrol’. This is also interesting in light of the analysis of Stalinism which sees it as a bureaucratic form of state capitalism.)

‘The Macra Terror’ is perhaps Doctor Who’s earliest attempt to engage with the radical 60s. The Colony is mainstream Britain in denial. The Colony media seems very ‘ITV matey’ but also quite ‘BBC formal’. Both the commercial and state style conspire to keep the drones chirpy. The main work is gas mining. In 1967, Britain was switching over to North Sea gas. It was all part of Britain’s prosperous future, if everyone would just pull together, work hard and keep smiling. The protestors and hippies were just spoiling things.

The big problem with Medok is that he isn’t happy. He talks about the Macra. They represent the repressed knowledge that something is very wrong with society. They’re everywhere but are unseen. Nobody believes in them but everyone knows their name. People who talk about them are silenced with telling desperation. When the Colonists do see them, they remain uncertain whether they are insects or bacteria… interestingly, the only suggestion nobody makes is that they are crabs. The Doctor calls them germs in the brain of society.…

July 21, 2012

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

Jack Graham 70s, autons, axos, capitalism, china mieville, colonialism, darwin, gothic, green death, hodgson, lovecraft, m r james, macra terror, marc platt, peladon, prometheus, science, seeds of doom, skulltopus, spencer, tentacles, terror of the zygons, terry nation, weird 3

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’.)…

January 24, 2012

Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited

Jack Graham 60s, capitalism, china mieville, gothic, hauntology, herbert marcuse, hodgson, lovecraft, macra terror, nineteen eighty four, panic moon, skulltopus, tentacles, the prisoner, totalitarianism, weird 0

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.…

January 1, 2012

Panic on the Streets of London…

Jack Graham 60s, fanzine, invasion of the dinosaurs, macra terror, panic moon, war games 0

The January 2012 issue of the extremely good, fetchingly illustrated, conveniently pocket-sized and infeasibly cheap print fanzine Panic Moon will be released soon and is now available for pre-order. Click here.

This month the Editor has taken the existence of the publication very much into his hands and granted me even more space than usual. I have no less than three pieces in this forthcoming issue, looking at ‘The Macra Terror’, ‘The War Games’ and ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’.

I see all these stories as milestones in Doctor Who‘s engagement with the radical movements and ideas of the 60s. ‘The Macra Terror’ is a much-misunderstood starting point which came just before the protest movements peaked, ‘The War Games’ a subversive high point which came just after the ferment of 1968 and ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ marks the ambivalence and disillusion brought by the subsequent downturn in struggle.

There’s loads of other stuff in the fanzine besides me, so don’t be put off.…

December 7, 2011

Skulltopus 3: Yes, We Have No Macra

Jack Graham china mieville, gothic, hauntology, hodgson, lovecraft, macra terror, skulltopus, weird 3

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 20^th century horror (something I’ve discussed in previous Skulltopus posts). 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. …

March 8, 2011

Abide With Me 2.0

Jack Graham alienation, christopher bailey, entropy, gothic, gridlock, macra terror, marx, religion, russel t davies, walter benjamin 7

This is an edited and partly-rewritten version of something I posted at the old site.

In a world in which 99% of all TV is 99% predictable 99% of the time, ‘Gridlock’ seems like an impertinent rejoinder to everything else on the screen, as though the Doctor Who production team are blowing contemptuous raspberries at the people who churn out all the beige wallpaper that constitutes most modern telly. ‘Gridlock’ hammers every bit of mass-produced, by-the-numbers, formulaic drama that clogs up the channels. Then, just for good measure, it laughingly refuses to play by the rules of Doctor Who, old or new.

There is no invasion and no tyranny to topple; there are no corridors and no captures (well, there’s one… sort of) and no escapes; there are no fascist guards, no rebels, no evil masterminds; there is no ticking time-bomb, no race against time, no evil plot for the Doctor to foil. Other writers might have made the story about the Doctor trying to stop everyone dying because of the BLISS patches. In ‘Gridlock’, RTD has the Doctor arrive when this is all over and almost everyone is long dead. Imagine what ‘The Ark in Space’ would’ve been like if the Doctor had arrived years after the Wirrn had already eaten almost the whole of the human race… mind you, even then there could’ve been a Doctor-and-rebels-fight-monsters tale. In ‘Gridlock’, there are no monsters in the proper sense. The cat people are both nice, the Face of Boe is without malice. Even the Macra are not allowed to take over the script or be this week’s baddies. Their fate is not even alluded to at the end. The Doctor’s priority is to clear the gridlock. The death of the Macra that feed on the exhaust fumes is a by-product of his main aim (one assumes that some of the unscrupulous entrepreneurs of the undercity are going to get rich selling lots of crab meat). Some fans have criticised what they perceive as the way the Macra were underused… but really, did we need another story about the Macra running a colony of slaves? I know the original Macra tale is sadly missing, but a story that was all about CGI Macra being naughty wouldn’t have brought it back. Besides, ‘The Macra Terror’ is a tale of its time, expressing the anxieties of the 60s generation about brainwashing, conformity and consumer culture. Putting the Macra at the centre of ‘Gridlock’ would’ve made ‘Gridlock’ a story about the Macra, yet another bad old monster stomping about.

‘Gridlock’ is almost unrelentingly surprising, even to people me who, let’s face it, watch far too much telly. Not only is ‘Gridlock’ unpredictable, it’s tricky too. It deliberately leads you down blind alleys and then presents you with a basket of kittens. Just when you think it’s going to be about urban guerrillas kidnapping Martha, the urban guerrillas turn out to be a nice guy and his pregnant girlfriend who just needed an extra passenger.…

September 27, 2010

Troughtonite Revisionism

Jack Graham dominators, genes, invasion, krotons, macra terror, marx, mickey the idiot, mind robber, reviews, space pirates, tomb of the cybermen, troughton, underwater menace, war games 0

I reposted my Hartnell stuff from Timelash II pretty much as it originally appeared. I’ve rejigged the following Troughton stuff a fair bit, however, so you’d better read it all over again very carefully, in case you miss a syllable of my searing insight and sage wisdom.

‘The Underwater Menace’

I could easily tear this story to pieces, yes? And feed the pieces to my pet octopus, yes??? But this story has sense of humour! I too have sense of humour!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!

Look, if you think this story is any more silly than any other Doctor Who story… well, it isn’t.

Look at the amount of thought that went into the costumes and sets. Polly spends a lot of the story with a detail from a doric column on her head! Look at the detail in which Atlantean society is depicted. There’s a throne room, a temple, a lab, a hospital, a market… there are priests and acolytes, beggers and traders, slaves and workers, guards and orderlies… there are intimations of popular dislike for the forces of the state… Look at the variations in the personalities. Look at the way people change – from the king to the sadistic doctor to the disillusioned priest… And our heroes team up with two marooned sailors and a brave servant girl to form a little multi-ethnic band of rebels who instill industrial action… a strike that wins! And helps to bring down the government!

Yeah, I know… it’s daft. But it’s no dafter, fundamentally, than ‘The Caves of Androzani’. Yes, ‘Caves’ is infinitely better in many ways… but that’s not the point.

This has been called the Doctor Who version of Plan 9 From Outer Space… which is wrong, wrong, wrongarama. We laugh at Ed Wood movies because they’re badly made. This isn’t badly made. Actually – if you look at the verve and pace of Episode Three, the detailing of the designs and costumes, the wit of the dialogue, and the technical achievements – it’s rather superbly made!

The great underwater strike ballot ballet is amazing for the time, given that they probably made it in the cupboard at Lime Grove in 14 minutes on a budget of 2 shillings and fourpence. Yeah, you can see the strings a couple of times… but so what? Would you’ve thought it was all real but for those glimpses of wire? Is it really – I’m saying REALLY – any more fake looking than the CGI in most Hollywood blockbusters? Does that really – I’m saying REALLY – look REAL? Nope, of course not. And in addition to looking unreal it looks plastic, computery, synthetic… whereas the fish people’s underwater stuff looks physical, looks touchable, looks human. It’s like Ray Harryhausen animation. It’s obviously fake, but it has a beauty and a reality that goes beyond mere realism. It looks like its happening underwater! There are even bubbles! Yeah, they’re some form of obvious effect – but they look fantastic anyway!…