pop between realities

The argument for Firefly’s influence on Doctor Who is marginal at best. Moffat hadn’t seen the show until a year or two ago, and while Davies might well have, there’s nothing obvious about his Doctor Who that draws from Firefly in the same way that there is about, well, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance. Nor is there any particularly overt influence from Doctor Who on Firefly. I mean, nobody would be surprised to learn that Joss Whedon grew up watching Tom Baker on PBS or anything, but nobody rattling off Firefly’s major influences is going to hit on Doctor Who. Which is actually ever so slightly unfair, as one decent account of Firefly would be “if Robert Holmes had created Star Trek.” I mean, Holmes wrote two space westerns already…

But no. The truth is that the relationship between these two shows is not one of direct influence. Nevertheless, Firefly proves instructive in two regards. First, the history of Doctor Who is still in part a history of cult television, and Firefly provides an odd watershed moment in that history. Second, even if Firefly is not itself a direct influence, both it and contemporary Doctor Who share an aesthetic and structural similarity that is worth comment. There is, if you will, a standard manual for how to craft and structure good genre television these days, and Firefly is as good an example as any as to how it works.

Obviously there are huge differences. Firefly is a huge ensemble show that uses the multitude of relationships within its cast to generate a variety of perspectives on a focused topic. Conceptually, at least, the show is just “Star Trek where the Federation is evil but Captain Kirk isn’t,” or, as I said before, Star Trek if Robert Holmes had written it. It’s not a limited premise by any measure – “guys with a vehicle go to places” is, after all, pretty flexible. But still, when people talk about Firefly it’s not the flexibility of the premise they focus on, it’s the cast. Whereas Doctor Who works with a minimal regular cast and a the most ludicrously extensible premise imaginable.

But there’s a tightness of characterization that both shows share. What Firefly does is use its large cast to generate an even larger number of things it can do. There are thirty-six different two-person scenes that Firefly can do, and eighty-four three-person scenes, and that’s just with the regular cast. And unlike something like a soap opera where characters tend to stick to their own plotlines, Firefly throws characters in the mix regularly. Some are certainly more or less promising than others – I cannot, off the top of my head, think of any particularly memorable Wash/River scenes, for instance (Thanks to several readers at Whedonesque for finding a better example there than the first one I had), and some combinations like Jayne/Inara are god for little more than variations on a given comedic theme. But you have a lot of different combinations.…

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How to handle 9/11 is, from a writerly perspective at least, a tricky business. It’s too big to shove into an “oh yes, this happened too” paragraph in another story. We’re not doing City of the Dead, the book that came out in September of 2001, and even if we were, it would derail that entire entry. And yet it’s too hard to get one’s thought around it to give it its own post as such. We’ve finally hit the point where the events we’re trying to cover are too recent. There isn’t enough distance to historicize. There are still too many different 9/11s to talk about its impact.

There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that this means that 9/11 hasn’t been wrapped up in the comforting bunting of fiction yet. We can still remember the actual event. I was still in undergrad at the time. It was two days after my birthday. I remember calling airlines for a friend who was scared that her uncle was on one of the flights. I remember taking the substantial leftovers from my big birthday dinner two nights earlier and heating them up for the people gathered around the television in the basement. I remember my roommate calling me to wake me up with the news, and clambering out of bed to put on the news and start sifting through the Internet. I remember mentally collating data from a dozen websites, trying to find out what was going on. The visceral feeling of the information starting to flow. The separate track of news as it emerged from my parents in Connecticut: how were they telling students at my sister’s school? The texture of 9/11 as a lived event, outside the master narratives.

But to say that it’s not historicized yet isn’t quite true. It’s been historicized. It’s just that its master narrative is still too hotly contested. 9/11 is still the justification underpinning a host of arguments, both from the right and from the neoliberal consensus. We’re still reeling in the affect of it. Still, let’s sketch out the basic Guardian-reader perspective, if you will. The basic illusion that the world is a stable, safe place was eviscerated. The idea that the systems that hold up the world are a secure foundation on which to build one’s life crumpled. Which, admittedly, they do on a regular basis for large portions of the world, but this was America. New York. The New York City skyline felt like one of the most immutable and permanent images in existence. And yet a couple bastards with box cutters turned out to be able to level it.

This, of course, led to horrifying overcorrection. It does that. Reveal to people that the structures that keep their world running are fragile and easily severed and they begin to create a bunch more to make themselves feel safe. London did it in 1992 in the wake of years of IRA disruption, whacking up a bunch of CCTV cameras that do little to actually secure the city and lots to make it a paranoid police state.…

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There’s an oddity to some of these Pop Between Realities entries. Once again, we’re on a show that we’d never have talked about if we didn’t know that Steven Moffat was going to be one of the central architects of Doctor Who’s revival. But he is, and we do, and so here we are.

Coupling is, of course, sex comedy. It’s more to the point sex comedy about gender essentialism. Precedent suggests I should be infuriated. I mean, let’s be honest: a substantial number of the jokes in Coupling trade on stereotypical depictions of women. And yet somehow Coupling escapes that. There are two aspects of this worth extrapolating a bit. The first is a bit theoretical, but still worth discussing given some of the reactions recent blog posts have gotten. Simply put, just because there are a lot of horrifically imbalanced and oppressive power relations surrounding gender doesn’t mean it can’t be good fodder for humor. Indeed, humor is almost necessary here.

Put another way, as socially constructed, oppressive, and artificial as contemporary gender stereotypes are, they also exist and influence people’s lives. The socially constructed is still real. Put a third way, just today a bemused conversation about why our sofa was functionally reupholstered in blankets led to my showing my fiancee the pillow bit from “The Melty Man Cometh.” Because it applies. It’s solid observational comedy about a real part of contemporary society.

But what’s the difference between it and outright sexist comedy? The main one is something we’ve previously noticed in Moffat’s work. Coupling skewers stereotypes of both men and women, but, crucially, in the grand scheme of things, women win. Or, more to the point, Moffat is far more willing to stick it to the people in his stories who are authorial stand-ins for him than he is to other people, and particularly to women. Coupling makes gestures at the absurd foibles of modern femininity, but it’s nothing like the depiction of men as essentially helpless buffoons.

This is perhaps most obvious in comparing Jane and Jeff, the representatives of each gender who are treated the most absurdly. Both of them are fundamentally absurd and profoundly misunderstand the entire world. But their treatment within the narrative is starkly different. Jeff is all but designed to be a fan favorite character, but he’s the eternal fool. When a plot line happens such that Jeff actually gets a girlfriend, it is in and of itself surprising, and he still manages to bungle everything. Jane, on the other hand, is the oddly charmed fool. No matter how incompetent she’s shown to be, and she’s shown to be at least as incompetent as Jeff, she’s also always given a strange power over the narrative. This pays off in spades in the final episode, where Moffat suggests that she’s actually entirely self-aware and is not actually the fool in the narrative but the character who best understands everything that’s going on.

So men are essentially helpless prats, while women hold both all the power and, as the overall plot regarding Steve shows, the ability to redeem men.…

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So, I watched The League of Gentlemen for this post, and my immediate reaction was, essentially, barely coherent rage. At a very specific aspect of the show, for what it’s worth, namely the character of Barbara Dixon. Barbara Dixon is a transgender taxi driver where the entire joke is the grotesquery of her still masculine features and the way in which she describes in uncomfortable medical detail the surgery involved. The joke is in part how Barbara’s face is hidden from us, thus stressing the way she’s horrible and ugly. And it’s awful. It’s absolutely, vilely, offensively, awful. It’s a joke about how trans women aren’t real women and can never be attractive and are just deformed wretches. That’s the whole joke. Aren’t trans people ugly. I guess the punchline is when one of them gets raped and murdered for it?

Yes, this is an issue I’m particularly prickly on. Transphobia raises my hackles with a directness that other forms of offensiveness don’t. So much so that it’s just not a topic I’m eager to deal with on this blog. I could get two thousand words of sputtering outrage out of Barbara Dixon in which I meticulously track all of the horrific stereotypes trotted out by it and draw the direct line from what’s a “joke” in The League of Gentlemen to what gets real people killed for being trans. Because it’s there, and it affects people I love, and everyone involved should be ashamed, and I really doubt they are. But it would barely be about Doctor Who, and more to the point, the level of rage involved is just too exhausting to go through, and I just did the post on The Shadows of Avalon, and, I’m sorry, dear reader, I just don’t have it in me. So let’s instead just accept that I am never going to be able to give a polite and reasoned analysis of the merits of The League of Gentlemen and instead do the autopsy of this joke. In other words, how does a character like Barbara Dixon happen.

She’s hardly the only offensive bit of The League of Gentlemen. The canonical example is Papa Lazarou, a blackface circus clown whose actual skin color appears to be grotesque blackface makeup. He’s certainly a jaw-dropping character for the late nineties, and I’m thoroughly unconvinced he ends up anywhere near the right side of good taste, but there’s at least some defense that people marshall whereby he’s not actually a racist parody of minorities as creepy lecherous others, he’s a parody of racist depictions of minorities. I’m inclined to say that’s perhaps too slender a reed of irony to support the character, and that the central joke of Lazarou is in fact how creepy and horrible he is, not how bracing a parody of historical British depictions of race he is. But no matter, because nothing resembling that defense exists for Barbara Dixon. And there are more than these two examples we could turn to. So first of all, we should take her as a symptom of a larger problem.…

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I was going to go with this, but I realized I didn’t actually know what Google’s policies on “adult content” were. Oh yeah, NSFW and all.

When talking about The Scarlet Empress I suggested that there was an aesthetic of hedonism represented in the book that was a viable alternative to the paranoid excesses of the 1990s. Then, last post, I made some off-handed comments about abandoning ethics in favor of aesthetics. So I suppose this is a decent time to put my cards on the table, since the turn in question is a pretty massive one. And, more to the point, one that’s broadly germane to what the blog is doing through here.

It has escaped few readers’ notice that the tone of the blog has shifted as we’ve approached the present day. Since we’re now lagging the present only by about thirteen years, the lens of history has grown somewhat less clarifying. Put simply, it’s easier to talk about the movement of historical forces when your subject is 1969 or 1979 than it is 1989, and it’s harder still in 1999 or 2009. The game is still being played. If I say that the idealism of the 60s utopians gave way to the bleaker youth culture of punk and its descendants, well, that’s easy. No points on award for that. But if I start talking about what the culture of 1999 gave way to it means I have to declare a defining cultural milieu for the present day. Which, you know, how to be completely irrelevant in one easy step, that one.

But I’ve got to peel off the Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage eventually, and so we may as well. There is at least one shift left to be had in utopianism between 1999 and the present day. There’s a shift in paranoia as well, of course – two of them, really. But those are easier to track. Look for a big news event and you can find a shift in paranoia. The shifts in utopianism are altogether trickier. But equally, you can clearly see that we’ve had one because Doctor Who in 2005 is unlike what you’d have expected Doctor Who to be just six years earlier. We’ve already seen the technical transition to how to do Doctor Who, and for the most part that’s done: there haven’t been a lot of major jumps in the aesthetics of television since the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, things are getting a bit stagnant on that front. (Though actually, people have won Oscars for achievements in cinematography less bold than the camera-as-unreliable-narrator tricks in Day of the Moon)

But the philosophical transition is altogether more complex. Because there was something surprising about Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who when it showed up in 2005. And it struck a chord we didn’t expect, or even quite realize, could be played. And if 2005 was the first time that chord hit the mainstream then Queer as Folk in 1999 was the first time it was properly played.…

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That I’d have to deal with Grant Morrison before tackling Lawrence Miles in full is obvious. They are, of course, constantly compared. But exactly why is actually a bit tricky. Miles, at least, has been a bit grumpy about this in interviews, snarking, “Oh, that’s right. Start suggesting links between my books and the work of Grant Morrison, why don’t you? It’s not like I’ve heard that before.” And yet there’s not an obvious point of similarity besides a (largely undeserved) reputation for being complex and full of ideas. And yet the comparison is irresistible. Even before I’d gotten around to reading any of Miles’s books I knew, implicitly, that the point where I dealt with Interference was also when I was going to deal with Grant Morrison. Something about them seems inexorable and impossible to disentangle. And having worked my way through quite a lot of Lawrence Miles now, the connection seems at once more obscure and more straightforward. The fact of the matter is that there is little particularly Morrisonesque about Miles’s work beyond the fact that both of them are a bit mad and cerebral.

So, the big Grant Morrison post, in which we look at his work. Except, as I’ve already noted, that’s a monstrous rabbit hole. I don’t want to derail this blog into a meticulous study of Grant Morrison. But equally, he is an important influence on sci-fi media, and it’s impossible not to deal with him. So let’s look, with fantastic superficiality, at Morrison’s magnum opus, namely The Invisibles. The Invisibles is a comic series published from 1994 to the start of 2000 in which Morrison depicts a magical war between the Invisibles, punk anarchist magicians, and the Outer Church, paragons of order and conformity. It’s a philosophically dense and convoluted work – in no way incoherent, but undoubtedly difficult. The book is also notoriously semi-autobiographical; Morrison loves to boast about how he based most of The Invisibles on his own life experience as a practicing chaos magician, and about how the book in turn changed his life, with things he wrote taking place in his life. Which sets up what it is, but not what it’s like.

To be honest, for the most part, The Invisibles is a bit of a mess. Individual moments of splendor stick out, but the book is adept at self-sabotage and when it doesn’t take itself out in a spectacular own goal DC Comics/Vertigo are usually right behind it and ready to clean up. The crowning dishonor are issues 4-2 of the third series, which was published as a countdown to the millennium starting with issue #12 and ending with #1. Aside from overshooting due to delays and finishing six months past the millennium, the big climactic storyline in issues 4-2 were done as an artists’ jam of most of the artists to have worked on the series previously, along with a few others. Unfortunately the end result was sloppy, with several artists failing to follow directions and several more failing to be given them such that the actual plot and exposition of the series’ entire cosmology was hopelessly unclear.…

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There are a vast number of potential paragraphs beginning with “the really brilliant thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is…” It is one of the most emphatically innovative and transformational shows in the history of television. There is no case to be made that it’s one of the most popular television programs ever – it toiled in the low ratings expected of The WB and UPN (more about which in a moment), but nor was it some televisual equivalent of the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall show, where nobody watched but everybody who did watch was terribly important. The show changed everything: the nature of fandoms, the standard model of how to write both genre television and “regular” television, and the landscape of American television.

The latter of these is perhaps the least interesting in terms of this blog, but it’s important both in understanding how the show came about in the first place and, at least somewhat interestingly, in understanding how Doctor Who could become a hit in its own right in the US. The key thing to understand about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that it exists because the channel it debuted on, The WB, was an unsuccessful minor channel. Broadcast television in the US works very differently from how it does in the UK. The entire country is served by regional channels, the bulk of which affiliate with national networks. The big three up into the 1980s were NBC, CBS, and ABC, each of which have essentially 100% coverage of the country. An affiliate commits to showing certain numbers of hours of national programming in the correct time slot, but fills the rest of the schedule either with local programming or material bought for syndication. (There’s also PBS, which still uses the affiliate model, but is basically what Rupert Murdoch would have the BBC be if he got his way, i.e. Wholly dependent on continually running fundraisers to stay alive.)

In the 1980s the big three were joined by a fourth network, Fox. The way in which a new network launches is important to understand: it has to acquire affiliates from across the country, scooping up existing low-rated channels. In markets where no such channel exists or will sell the new network simply won’t exist, or will exist as a secondary affiliate of an existing network, showing programming at odd hours of the night. Accordingly, Fox was at first much smaller potatoes, having lower penetration and lower ratings, which meant that big ticket obvious hits went to the other three while Fox had to content itself with oddball programs like The Simpsons and The X-Files. Then, in 1995 two more networks launched: The WB and UPN. By then Fox was reasonably sized and they were the small potatoes – sufficiently small, in fact, that they merged together to form The CW in 2006 because they couldn’t stay afloat on their own.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was originally made for The WB, although it jumped to UPN for its final two seasons.…

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For all that the TV Movie was a staggering aesthetic failure, it’s telling that so many people in the UK watched it. Yes, nobody actually liked it, but in a way that’s preferable from the perspective of someone who wants something resembling Doctor Who to come back on television and under the name “Doctor Who.” There is, in the wake of the TV movie, at least a clear mandate for Doctor Who’s return. The details on what that return should look like beyond “not like a generic piece of American cult television” were hazy, but it was at least clear that people wanted something Doctor Whoish on their television screens. Jonathan Creek, as we saw, did a good job of feeling like what Doctor Who would feel like if the BBC put some effort into it, but in many ways it is therefore Neverwhere that is more interesting, being as it demonstrates what mid-to-late 90s Doctor Who would look like if the BBC completely half-assed it.

It’s tempting to say that the answer is “not very good,” but saying that requires a slightly strange misreading of history. It’s true that there are many things that are deeply wrong with Neverwhere and that the series disappeared more or less without a trace initially. But one has to take a step back and look at this within the larger arc of Neil Gaiman’s career in order to quite understand what’s going on here. The first thing to realize is that in 1996, Neil Gaiman wasn’t Neil Gaiman yet. His career consisted of some time as a journalist/freelancer followed by considerable success in US comics. His lone novel was Good Omens, co-authored with Terry Pratchett. He was not even a star writer in the UK, little yet in the US. So his doing a fantasy series for BBC2 was a substantive increase in his profile. He wasn’t a novelist doing television – he was a jobbing writer who bounced around media. And in 1996, at least, Lenny Henry’s co-creator credit on the series undoubtedly carried more weight than Gaiman’s name.

On the other hand, Neverwhere was clearly the beginning of Gaiman’s breakout. The US release of his novelization of it and, a few years later, the text from his illustrated novel for DC Comics, Stardust, paved the way for his big debut with American Gods, the novel that firmly lodged him as a major writer. So whatever the inadequacies of the television version, Neverwhere is clearly seminal – the first real step in Neil Gaiman going from a writer who’s influential to a writer who is absolutely huge.

All of which said, there are some inadequacies to the television version. Put simply, and this is hardly an unusual criticism, Neverwhere looks kind of rubbish. It was set to be shot on video and then “filmized,” but the filmization was abandoned after it had already been shot. This means that it looks like it was shot on video, which is generally taken to be synonymous with looking cheap.…

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This post, for those keeping track, will be the first one of the Paul McGann/Christopher Eccleston book. But since we’re still in the chronological whorl of the late Virgin era, let’s cheat a bit and flip a year ahead, to May of 1997, and to the debut of a show called Jonathan Creek. On Wednesday we’ll watch as Doctor Who blows its big shot at a comeback. But before that, let’s glance at the landscape a year after Doctor Who. Because it’s not just that Doctor Who had a bad TV Movie that scuppered its chance of a comeback for almost a decade. It’s also that Doctor Who, less than a year after the TV movie, was rendered in essence culturally obsolete.

While it is not clear that Jonathan Creek was intended to usurp Doctor Who’s place in Britain’s cultural landscape, one has to admit that shooting Colin Baker seven minutes into the first episode is a pretty good opening bid for this goal. Saying this, of course, requires us to offer some general case theory of what Doctor Who’s place in the cultural landscape is or was. This is, of course, terribly controversial, and everyone who provides an answer to a question like this has at least some agenda in mind. I’ve surely driven off readers with views radically irreconcilable to my own on this point, however, so let’s just take for granted that we’re all more or less on the same page about this.

Equally, though, this is a fraught debate within Doctor Who in the mid-nineties. On the one hand you have the viewpoint of Doctor Who fandom, which has increasingly taken Doctor Who to be a fairly straightforward cult television show in that it exists for fans and is continually obsessed with recitation of its own history. On the other hand it clearly has a solid place within British cultural memory as a beloved institution. This is distinct from something obsessed with its own past. Its past is respected and part of its importance, but to love it is not to be a fan of it so much as to enjoy a part of your culture. Someone who likes sitting down and watching Doctor Who is no more a part of Doctor Who fandom than someone who likes eating Marmite is a member of Marmite fandom. And so Doctor Who is in this case more of an aesthetic – a type of thing one likes and a set of iconography.

These two views are a bit at loggerheads, in that one view is based on a doctrinal view of what Doctor Who is and the other is based on memories of having enjoyed a television program in one’s childhood and wanting to see something that reminds one of it. Which, of course, has next to nothing to do with the specific plots of those things and more with the imagery and feel of them. This is what leads to the existence of people with an adamant belief that Doctor Who should be scary, which usually just means they were of the right age for The Web of Fear or The Pyramids of Mars.…

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