Skulltopus 12: Come Out onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle
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…
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| 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’.)…