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Beyond Redemption

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I think there is something inherently dodgy about the notion of ‘redemptive readings’.  It seems to imply a determination to look at a text in a positive way that is at odds with what could be called ‘proper scepticism’.  This objection is itself open to the objection that it’s silly to approach a piece of entertainment product with ‘scepticism’, especially when it is part of a series of which one is supposedly a fan.  But, this loses sight of context and agency.  There are various ways of choosing to watch the same thing.  When you sit down to enjoy an episode of a show you like, for fun, you’re a bit odd if you’re not expecting, hoping and trying to like it.  When you’re watching it with the express intention of analysing it and then writing about what it means, proper scepticism becomes appropriate.  Trying to like what you’re watching becomes a somewhat iffy strategy in that context.  Besides, doesn’t the necessity of trying to find ways of praising what you’re analysing tell us something in itself?  This muddle also loses sight of the distinctions that are always to be found within the concept of enjoyment, distinctions that are all too often spuriously aggregated.  You don’t have to think something is politically or morally correct in order to like it (though, in practice…).  No more do you need to think that something is aesthetically sophisticated or beautiful in order to relish its aesthetic.  Conversely, you may dislike a beautifully made piece of art which offers praiseworthy political or moral analyses.  Or you may take enjoyment from the act of hostile reading itself.  I, for instance, very much enjoy hating and criticising certain things, and I don’t see anything wrong with this.

This is by way of a preamble to talking about ‘The Two Doctors’, which has been subject to an attempted rehabilitation from the charge of being reactionary on the issue of race.  The re-evaluation of the story has been pioneered and best expressed by Robert Shearman in About Time 6.  The essence of his argument is that the Androgums are a comment on the concept of the monster as employed by Doctor Who.  They are characterised as generic monsters but it is disarming when people treat them as such because they do not look like monsters.  They are treated the same way as the Sontarans – all of them racially evil and hateful – but, because they do not have potato-heads or eye-stalks, this poses a problem.  We notice the inappropriateness, even tastelessness, of generalising about the evil of an entire race when they look like us.  We don’t blink when the Doctor describes the entire Jagaroth race as vicious and callous but it bothers us when the same racial villainy is implied about aliens who look human.  Philip Sandifer recently summarized and expanded the case admirably, here.

I’m enormously tempted by this reading… and, maybe, if I’d approached ‘The Two Doctors’ with the express intention of finding a ‘redemptive reading’, I would’ve happily seized upon it.…

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Amnesia Day

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I don’t wear a poppy.  Laurie Penny has written a very good article, expressing many views that I agree with, here.  I don’t engage in the silence at 11 o’clock either.  I know that most ordinary people who do observe the silence and wear the poppy do so for sincere reasons.  But I myself cannot stomach it.  I think my reasons are less intellectual and more to do with the sheer, physical revulsion I feel at the hypocrisy on display in images like this:
What’s the collective noun for warmongers?  A troop?  A collateral?  Well, whatever.  There they stand, doing their best sincere and sombre faces.  All guilty of sending people off to fight and kill and die and maim and be maimed in order to protect the interests of the American empire and neoliberalism’s access to markets.  And wrapping it all up in the rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘freedom’.  The poppy, the cenotaph, the silence, the ‘Ode to Remembrance’… I can’t help but see it all as cynical and calculated.  As ideology.  As an attempt by a warmongering, imperialist state to normalise the idea of war, to appropriate our memories of loved ones lost or ruined in wars fought for the interests of others, to associate the wars that ‘our’ country is currently fighting with wars from the past that we’ve been carefully taught to perceive as ‘moral’ and ‘necessary’, to control our responses to the latest news from Iraq and Af-Pak.
Mind you, it’s more than just a straightforward bit of reactionary spin; these days people are more anti-war (at least in broad terms) than just about ever before, so the old rhetoric of patriotism is, while not dead, certainly less user-friendly than it used to be.  Remembrance Day still carries jingoistic connotations for many, but for many more there is a need for a different perspective.  There are several different social and political perpectives overlaid upon each other in our cultural understanding of Remembrance Day.  A common variety of liberal spin on it is to remember the ‘pointlessness’ of, say, World War I.  To tut and shake one’s head at a war now culturally understood by many to be a kind of outbreak of mass insanity (see the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), or an illustration of how bad our system used to be, or a bleak but romantic tragedy about sensitive poets.  It’s the great noble failure… perhaps with some cynical, port-swilling, incompetent generals to sneer at and blame for the whole thing.  (It’s been packaged and sold to us in this way, as has Vietnam to Americans.)  And, of course, there’s the redeeming moral clarity of the ‘good war’ that followed it, the anti-Nazi war, the war that stopped the holocaust, etc.

What’s lost in all this is real history.

Both wars were brutal squabbles between rival imperialisms, competing for territory and markets.  WWI wasn’t a failure by the criteria of the British ruling class at the time; it was a success.  The British empire ended up with more territory than ever before. …

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Victory of the Icon

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In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.

– Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)

In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that masquerades as history in our society.

Moreover, Churchill is an old mate of the Doctor’s. They go way back. In other words, he gets the endorsement of Our Hero, the narrative and moral locus of the series.  Here is Gatiss’ reasoning:

I think in the end it came down to sort of printing the Churchill of legend, because Doctor Who is not the place, really, to examine those sorts of things, except wherever possible, as it were, in the gaps, in the shadows, you can suggest his pragmatism. So in this episode when the Doctor, despite the fact that the Doctor’s telling him that the Daleks are the worst thing in the entire universe, he thinks ‘I can end the war quicker, I can save lives’. So that sort of thing was interesting to play with. But I did, you know, it just isn’t the place to try and have those conversations, because it’s an adventure series.

This reminds me of a page at the BBC website about whether Churchill was “as good as we think?”. As ever, “we” is left undefined. The page lists Pros and Cons. The best Cons they can come up with are a couple of military blunders, the return to the gold standard and Yalta. In other words: was he as marvelous as “we” apparently all believe or did he sometimes make mistakes? The big one on the list is Yalta, so the worst thing he can be accused of is handing much of Europe over to the real evildoers. Pravda would have been proud of such framing.

(The Yalta thing seems especially unfair to Churchill. He assumed that Russia would renege on the agreed post-war frontiers of Europe and advocated ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a lunatic plan to launch an unprovoked attack upon Russia as early as July 1945, thus starting a new war against one of his own allies.)…

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Eyepatch on the Left?

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Perhaps the most interesting thing about ‘Inferno’ (interesting to me anyway) is the way that the fascist world of the Brigade Leader is distinguished by only a very few differences – mainly in terms of attitude and levels of state violence – from the ‘democratic’ capitalist world of the Brigadier and 70s Britain. There are more similarities than differences. There’s very little to distinguish a state-funded project in a ‘democratic’ world and one in a fascist world; very little distance between the basic jobs of a Brigade Leader and a Brigadier. The people behave differently but the essential structure of society is the same, albeit with very different levels of official repression. This reflects – probably accidentally, if we’re honest – the fact that fascism is not a fundamentally different form of economic system but a different way of running a capitalist state.

Actually, I’ve been calling them “fascists”… but the casual reference to the execution of the royal family, the fact that the Brigade Leader is a member of something called the “Republican Security Force” (the Nazis planned to reinstall Edward VIII as their puppet monarch when they took over Britain, not set up a ‘republic’), the Orwellian poster and the fact that a government official can happily go by the name of Sir Keith Gold, all tends to suggest that this might be a ‘communist’ tyranny rather than a ‘Nazi’ one. (By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Jews always had a lovely time of it in Stalinist dictatorships, merely that anti-Semitism wasn’t a central part of ‘communist’ doctrine the way it was with the Nazis.)

There are indications that work for either a fascist or ‘communist’ world… and that was probably the idea: the notion that both are essentially the same, or very similar. Okay, so does that work? Well, the idea that Nazism and ‘communism’ (and other similar systems, like Baathism in Iraq) are all akin to each other and best described as ‘totalitarian’ is still a very common and popular one. The concept of ‘totalitarianism’ is certainly useful to an extent, as it expresses a fundamental difference between a repressive state that attempts to simply force obedience and one that also attempts to impose orthodoxy in all aspects of life. Ultimately, however, it’s probably a bit of a millstone. It allows people like the ‘anti-totalitarian’ left and the French ‘New Philosophers’ to argue for imperialist wars waged by America, the UK and NATO, on the grounds that their opponents are ‘totalitarian’ and are therefore akin to the powerful states that created the Gulag and the death camps. It’s arguable how many societies have really that closely resembled the totalitarian model as represented by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which, in popular consciousness, is a bit like the Platonic ‘form’ of totalitarianism). We should never forget that Orwell’s book is a satire, and as such contains a great deal of exaggeration… and that the representative of Oceanian ideology in the book specifically states that the world of Big Brother has gone further than the Nazis or communists did.…

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Genesis, Genes, Histories, Holocausts and Hiroshimas

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And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

– William Shakespeare, Richard III

Science-fiction is the reiteration of myth and legend in the age of science and technology, i.e. the capitalist age, which is also the age of industrialised imperialism and fascism, of assembly line genocide and nuclear warheads dropped on civilian population centres. No wonder then that sci-fi often retells the history of the 20th century in terms of apocalypse and revelation; that’s to say in terms of Christianity, the dominant mythological schema of Western culture. ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ fuses various Christian myths (most especially, the myth of the creator who creates in his own image, endows his creation with free will and is then turned upon by them… but also the fiery last judgement) with a stream-of-consciousness semiotic representation of Nazis, holocausts and Hiroshimas.

We are shown a world in which the Daleks become possible. A world reduced to two decaying cities fighting each other to extinction for no reason that either seems to understand (which reiterates the myth of Greece and Troy). The Kaleds and the Thals are practically indistinguishable (except for their hair and colour schemes… who knows, maybe it all started as a war between the blondes and the brunettes?). The Thals are just as brutal, just as racist. Who’s to say they didn’t start it? Does it even matter? There is clearly no right or wrong here, no goodies and baddies. The Thals plot genocide, dirty war and the slaughter of those they consider inferior. As such, the Daleks are almost a just punishment upon them. In fact, since Davros and his creatures kill nearly all the Kaleds too, you can look upon these monsters as a kind of judgement visited upon both races for their thousand year war. Divine justice or the revenge of history; it depends if you look at this as history or myth. Of course, it’s both – just like a Shakespeare history play.

A. P. Rossiter called Shakespeare’s Richard III an “angel with horns”, pointing out that his devilish crimes bring down a kind of divine purification upon an England sullied by usurpation and war. In his evil, he’s almost a force for good. Davros is like this. He’s very like Richard. Twisted and deformed but able to turn his deformity to his advantage; charismatic and commanding despite being lame and crippled; able to charm and trot out professions of duty while inwardly seething with malice; narcissistic and vain; thirsty for power; driven by a fierce and implacable intellect; driven through ambition to self-destruction. There are even echoes of Shakespeare in some of the dialogue. “Conscience is a word that cowards use” says Richard. To Davros, conscience is an affliction amongst other “creeds of cowards”.

I wonder if it’s entirely an accident that at least one bit of Davros’ dialogue sounds like it’s in iambic pentameter:

“That power would set me up above the gods
And through the Daleks I shall have that power.”
…

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