mind of evil

June 26, 2013

Punishing Viewing

Jack Graham 70s, bourgeois ideology, cold war, communism, crime, imperialism, mind of evil, pertwee era, racism, sexism, sociobiology 1

Something I wrote a while ago, somewhat rewritten. I’m re-posting it to mark the release of ‘The Mind of Evil’ on DVD. In brief, being in colour doesn’t make it any better.

There is a very old idea about ‘human nature’, that we are born with certain social characteristics already implanted or programmed in our brains, usually inherited from our parents and ancestors. You will find this idea laced throughout the whole of modern Western culture. Ruffians and villains in Conan Doyle are often said to have “vile antecedents”. Oliver Twist is incapable of being a pickpocket because, despite being raised in a pauper’s orphanage, he is a middle class child displaced amongst the scum classes. Similarly (because J.K. Rowling is nothing if not studiedly unoriginal) Harry Potter is filled with love just like his late mum, despite being systematically emotionally and psychologically abused up to the age of 11. I could go on at great length.

This conception of human nature (please take the quote marks as read whenever I use that phrase) is directly and inextricably linked to class, and to questions of social role, crime, etc. It is still claimed today that people end up in prison because they have inborn tendencies which lead them there. These days we use the language of genetics. Before genes, people used the language of blood. Before that, people used the language of the Bible. The medieval church claimed that drastic and dreadful social divisions were justified because people were born into one category or the other, based on their bloodline. They were the descendents of Cain or Seth, and thus carried the blood of a vile murderer or a goody-two-shoes. Of course, the idea that the peasants were peasants because they had murderer’s blood doesn’t account for the massive amount of warmongering and killing and torturing and executing done by the supposed descendents of Seth (i.e the Kings and Dukes and whathaveyou). Of course, even today a great deal of chin-scratching cogitation goes into deciding what genetic factors might be causing black urban gun crime… while nobody wonders if the carpet-bombing Prime Minister must have killer genes. And, as John Ball pointed out, if we’re all descended from Cain or Seth, that also means we’re all descended from (non-murdering) Adam and Eve… so how does that work?

As many thinkers have pointed out, being in prison isn’t necessarily a mark of violence or evil (or even, in many cases, actual criminality) so much as a mark of refusing to play your assigned social role. It starts in childhood, with kids medicated for personality disorders for such heinous sins as “disrespecting authority” etc. Also, prisons are a massive system of social control and punitive reinforcement. Vast numbers of people in the American prison system today (which increasingly resembles a kind of privatised system of gulags) are there for non-violent drug crimes. There are many examples of, for instance, disabled people sent away for life because they were caught with a few ounces of weed that they obtained to use personally as a palliative.…

October 23, 2010

Twee… but Pertinent

Jack Graham axos, charles daniels, colony, daemons, death to, dinosaurs, frontier, green death, inferno, mind of evil, monster of peladon, mutants, planet of the spiders, terror of the autons, time warrior 0

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.…