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pop between realities

Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 17 (Survivors)

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In one corner, we have Doctor Who running, with considerable vigor, away from the legacy of the Pertwee era. Not just in the sense of moving into a postmodern aesthetic instead of a glam one, or in the sense of its massive and definitive breaks with its history. But in a broader sense, the transition we’re following is in part a turn away from the materialism of the Pertwee era. The series is turning from the immediate concerns of the world back towards a realm of ideas and stories. The first great era of social realism in Doctor Who, which began to spark roughly with The Macra Terror, here is flickering to a close, and we’re still more than a decade out from its next real rise.

With Survivors, then, Terry Nation walks pointedly in the other direction: a science fiction series that is based almost entirely on social realism. A series that is 100%, unabashedly about the ethical issues seemingly raised in The War Games, and for that matter about the ones raised by The Daleks, in which the Doctor pointedly declines to stick around for the business of rebuilding. This is the polar opposite – a series in which rebuilding is the entire focus.

It is, of course, a disaster. It’s tough to call this a surprise. I mean, looking at Terry Nation’s Doctor Who scripts, cutting social realism is not what you’d call his wheelhouse. He’s king of the tedious moralizers. Genesis of the Daleks is a great script, yes, but that’s because he successfully uses the twin mythic giants of the Daleks and Nazi Germany to cover up the fact that Kaled society is astonishingly lazily designed and that the centuries-long war on Skaro is between two domed cities within walking distance of one another that have hilariously lax security. Yes, it’s very good, but the thing that is good about it is very obviously not that it depicts a remotely sane or realistic view of society.

And now he’s tackling a series where the entire idea is probing and realistic views of society. I mean, the premise here is straightforward: an overwhelming majority of the world’s population drops dead of a pandemic, and the survivors have to try to preserve human society. It is, in other words, a sort of prototypical Deadwood – a story about how civilization establishes itself and deals with its most basic problems like providing food or security. In other words, a story that demands the exact opposite of what Nation has proven himself good at.

In light of this, it’s actually surprising how good the show is. Or, at least, it could be taken as surprising. Actually, for all Nation’s inadequacies in portraying civilization, there are things Nation is good at that turn out to be very useful here. Most obviously, Nation has always been one of the best Doctor Who writers at the job of crafting situations of physical and material danger. To my surprise when reading About Time, apparently the scene at the start of Genesis of the Daleks in which the Doctor steps on a landmine is widely hated.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 16 (The Tomorrow People, The Uncanny X-Men)

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Upon its first appearance, under the editorial eye of David Whitaker, the TARDIS was explained via a metaphor of television in which the Doctor justifies his ability to fit a very large room inside a small box on the grounds that the same thing is accomplished via television. Aside from the role this moment plays in setting up the strand of alchemical and mystical thought I’ve traced through eleven years of Doctor Who thus far, this speaks to another crucial metaphor: that of the rabbit hole.

Of course, strictly speaking, if you’re going to talk about connections between Doctor Who and children’s literature in that Victorian tradition (and as I’ve said, there are very good reasons to talk about those connections), the TARDIS owes more to the work of CS Lewis, who, as I never get tired of pointing out, died the day before Doctor Who premiered, almost exactly an hour before the Kennedy assassination, and eight hours before Aldous Huxley. But the basic concept is the same either way – the very first image we had of Doctor Who, where Ian and Barbara fall out of the world.

Of course, that’s any Doctor Who fan’s first image of Doctor Who. That’s what shows like it are. Rabbit holes that we fall into. I don’t mean this according to the utterly banal logic of suspension of disbelief whereby we imagine ourselves endlessly in made-up places. I mean something much more literally. For me, on a weekend afternoon in September of 1992, I fell out of the world. I put a tape into the VCR, and when it was over I was not the same person anymore.

On his blog, after The Doctor’s Wife aired, Neil Gaiman did a little Q&A about the episode, and at one point said, “I like mythologies, and I knew what a Dalek was and what planet it came from, or what TARDIS stood for when I was five, before I knew who Thor or Anubis were.” This is, more or less, exactly it. The significance of Doctor Who, first and foremost, is an entire mythology and system of storytelling that has been unspooling through my brain for nearly twenty years now.

This is the way of fandom. Anyone who lives and breathes in geek culture has their rabbit holes. The books or movies or television shows that grabbed them and began asserting gravity in their minds. Usually the gravity is a subtle thing. Most of us do not embark on too many major life decisions out of fandom. But it is a vast thing. How many Christmases would have had a completely different tenor had the bulk of the presents not been Christmas themed? How would my honeymoon with my ex-wife have gone had we not planned it around seeing David Tennant in Hamlet? How would middle school have gone if the bullying I got for liking something as weird as Doctor Who had been forced to find a different path of least resistance?

This last one is, perhaps, the most interesting.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 15 (Moonbase 3)

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Sometimes the most valuable thing one can do to understand something is to take a step back from it. It should be no secret to anyone reading the blog that I am less fond of the Pertwee era than I am of many of the other eras of Doctor Who. (And it is firmly “less fond,” as opposed to “not fond”) I’ve expressed at least part of that frustration, but honestly, it wasn’t until I tried watching Moonbase 3 that I realized exactly what it is that seems to me so fundamentally flawed about much of the Pertwee era.

Moonbase 3 is interesting. It’s not the first time Doctor Who people went on to try something else – that’s basically Adam Adamant Lives! – nor is it the first spinoff of Doctor Who – that’s K-9 and Company. But it is the first time major production staff of Doctor Who used Doctor Who as a springboard for a new show. Basically, Moonbase 3 is six episodes of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks trying desperately to quit Doctor Who for something else. 
In practical terms, it was a failure – low rated, and with a mixed critical consensus. Accounting for why is a tricky project. Terrance Dicks has largely suggested the show was too dark and lacked a sense of wonder. It certainly is serious-minded in the extreme, but no moreso than Doomwatch (from which its first 20 minutes are stolen wholesale) or than Terry Nation’s soon to be successful Survivors. And anyway, dark and cynical is a pretty good fit for when the show aired, at least plus or minus a couple of months.

Nor is it quite fair to say that the show failed because it was bad. It had serious flaws, certainly, but no more so than the first season of any number of successful shows. Occasionally the show manages to feel like Babylon 5 done twenty years early, which, given that Babylon 5 is, for all its flaws, one of the absolute landmark pieces of science fiction television, is a hell of impressive feat. No, the best case for why it failed, to my mind, is that doing a show about realistic space exploration in late 1973 is about two years later than the last day you could really do that. Interest in moon bases after the Apollo missions were over is a bit… well… low.

But ultimately, why it failed commercially isn’t even the most interesting question. One can just as easily ask why Doctor Who succeeded, and in real terms the answer is going to be a diffuse set of arbitrary and often seemingly small decisions that happened to successfully navigate a given crisis where others seem unlikely to have. The question of industry success is not an uninteresting one, but the answer turns out to be arbitrary and beyond the reach of what can be controlled.

No. Far more interesting is the question of why the show failed aesthetically. And that it did. Again, plenty of cancelled-after-one-season shows have had real impact.

…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 14 (Dad’s Army, Three-Day Week)

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The stereotype, of course, is “stiff upper lip.” Or as I put it last Christmas when my sister was stranded until December 23rd in Heathrow and she was baffled how a couple of inches of snow were something that took four days to clear, “why would the British fix something that they could just stoically endure?” It’s one of the classic national myths of self-identity in the world. Every nation has them. The US are ambitious cowboys, the French have better taste than everyone else, and the British have the ability to keep a level head through anything. “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as the idiom goes these days.

The origin of that idiom, of course, is World War II. The famous image was an unused propaganda poster in case of a German invasion of Britain, putting it squarely in the Battle of Britain mythology. And I should note, I use myth here not to suggest that the claims are untrue, but rather to suggest that they have an almost religious character to them. They’re important not because they are true – i.e. because you can make useful decisions based on them – but because they are so widely believed to be true that they have a real influence. In fact, the perception of their truth is probably one of the major reasons why they’re true. Case in point, the at least partially manufactured photo of people hoisting brooms in response to last month’s riots – a photo that depicted an event that never quite “happened” as such, but that is in its own sense true because it is seen to capture some essential truth about the event.

Which brings us around to Dad’s Army, which is one of those shows I’ve been meaning to get to in one of these entries and never quite had room for, and so now goes into the hopper with the rest of the glut of end-of-era entries. Partially because I don’t think I’ve done a sitcom yet, partially because it was extraordinarily popular, but mostly, and I admit that I kind of missed the best timing on this (I should have done it with Monty Python, though this entry works too), because it’s the other major show in the early 70s featuring a comedic version of the military.

On its most basic level, Dad’s Army bears a considerable similarity to the UNIT era. We’ve talked already about how the Brigadier was always conceived of as a character who worked more like a Monty Python sketch character than like a dramatic character in the traditional sense, and how understanding this and the implications it has on the narrative structure is essential to being able to see how something like The Claws of Axos, to pick a particularly vivid example, works. But saying this presents UNIT as if they were figures of pure postmodernism. And while they obviously work very well as postmodern figures, that’s not the only thing going on there. And Dad’s Army is what illustrates the other angle.

…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 13 (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars)

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With thankful apologies to Chris O’Leary of Pushing Ahead of the Dame.


1. Five Years


Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will. – Tool, “Aenema”


The smart money, you have to realize, was not on reaching 1978. The question was just which of the myriad of ways we might kill ourselves would pull it off. Nuclear war? Ecological disaster? Social collapse into anarchy? Doomwatch, after all, made three seasons off of cataloging the myriad of ways humanist might slaughter itself.

So it’s no particular surprise that Bowie starts the album with a song of apocalypse. And a remarkably concrete song of apocalypse at that – wandering through the streets and observing the people responding to the news that the Earth has five years to live. But notably absent is any explanation of how this happened – of which disaster will befall us. All of them. None of them. In a world in which the end is an absolute certainty, the means are beside the point.

The result, as Bowie exposes, is the fetishization of disaster. The Atrocity Exhibition writ large. The news isn’t that we have five years to live. It’s that we have only “five years left of crying.” The end is a welcome thing. This has always been the logic of Doctor Who – the appeal of looking at the monsters, of seeing the threat. The money shot of Inferno is that we finally get to see the world end in fire instead of just being teased. At last, armageddon stops blue balling us and gives us our payoff. The end of this growing agony and the cathartic release of knowing there is a genuine resolution.  Finally, the finale. At its endpoint, Bowie’s song explodes from its initial yearning sorrow into a soaring football terrace song. A rousing sing-along chorus of “five years,” the end turned into the anthem it always was. You’ll Never Die Alone. You’re Going Home in a Nuclear Fireball. Come On You Daleks.

2. Soul Love


The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle


In a world defined by its imminent apocalyptic finale, the blinding flash of the nuclear inferno becomes the light of a film projector, pressing nuclear shadows to the screen for us to watch. There is nothing but appearances in a pre-apocalyptic world. Bowie’s song begins with a mother kneeling before the grave of a heroic son “who gave his life to save the slogans that hover between the headstone and her eyes, for they penetrate her grieving.”

When the ultimate disaster porn spectacle has become the teleology of the world, there is nothing outside the gaudy glory of slogans. Love is nothing but an ideology, a product, another slogan. There is only idiot love, the love of love. But here again, there is a countermeasure to the bleak cynicism offered by this. The fact that love is empty, cold, a rote formal process.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 12 (Chariots of the Gods?, Ace of Wands, The New Age)

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And now, then, for the other part of the argument. The Daemons was revolutionary in terms of how it expands the domain of what Doctor Who can do. But wait a moment. This is a show that only two and a half years ago was exploring the land of fiction. This is a show where one of its dominant creative forces over the first five years was obsessed with alchemy. And yet on the other hand the show has always praised science over superstition, promoted the idea that there is a rational explanation behind everything, and treated scientists as enlightened men of peace who can bring about positive social change. So to some extent, what’s happening in The Daemons is the resolution of a fundamental tension that has been in place in Doctor Who ever since the Doctor equated the TARDIS with television in the first episode, making it simultaneously a scientific marvel and something that is primarily understood in terms of more wooly notions like “the power of stories.” It’s not accidental that this resolution happens in 1971. But understanding why is a big project. And that’s what this entry is.

Let’s start with Jo’s first line, invoking the Age of Aquarius. The most obvious cultural association with that phrase comes from the 1967 musical Hair, which memorably began by proclaiming that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The idea is that the world is passing out of one era and into another, and that this new era will be one of peace and harmony. But this is just utopian eschatology. Every generation is convinced the world is going to end on their watch because they were dealt such a shitty hand by their parents’ generation. And then they narrowly survive and deal a shitty hand to their kids, and the cycle cheerily repeats itself. Eschatology is just a way of being. The end of the world is a lifestyle choice.

More interesting than the idea that we’re at the dawning of some new eon of possibility – or than the idea that we’re all going to die of some terrible misfortune – is what sort of apocalypse we imagine (remembering that the apocalypse can be positive or negative). And so what’s most interesting about the Age of Aquarius is not that everyone believed an egalitarian society based on peace and love was inevitable. It’s that they believed it to be inevitable because of astrology.

I mean, pause for a moment and look at the essential idea of the Age of Aquarius. Basically, over time the direction that the north pole is pointing changes, moving backwards through the Zodiac. Each change takes a bit over two millennia. The idea is that when these changes take place, it maps to massive social change on Earth. The opportune question isn’t why everyone believed a utopian society was going to dawn – that happens all the time. The question is why people were basing this belief on what stars the north pole was pointing at.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 11 (Doomwatch, The Atrocity Exhibition)

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As we watch the at times compelling, at times just kind of sad spectacle of Doctor Who frantically trying to reinvent itself on a brand new formula and premise, it may be worth looking at other contemporaneous British attempts at Earth-based science fiction to get some idea of what genre Doctor Who is trying to impose itself on. It’s not, of course, as if Doctor Who has never imposed itself on other genres before. The historicals, in their latter days, were all about genre crossing. But note the specific wording – a story like The Gunfighters was about taking Doctor Who and crashing it into the western then filming the explosion. With the UNIT stories we are by and large seeing something different: a fair swath of the production team does not seem to be trying to cross Doctor Who into another genre. They’re trying to make Doctor Who as an example of another genre. Until we understand what that genre is, it’s going to be difficult to say what can be accomplished by turning Doctor Who into that genre.

To some extent we’ve already seen what that genre is via Monty Python. Or, more to the point, we’ve seen that whatever Doctor Who is trying to do, it’s so flamingly obvious within the context of British culture that it can be parodied prior to Doctor Who doing it. Of course, if we rewatch the Science Fiction sketch, we can see that it’s just as much a parody of the old Quatermass formula. In other words, there’s an established sort of science fiction here that Nigel Kneale invented with Quatermass that Doctor Who, under UNIT, comes perilously close to faithfully and blindly discharging. Of course, we’ve also seen with the Brigadier the beginnings of a response, which we’ll see expanded on when we get to Terror of the Autons.

But Doctor Who wasn’t even the only contemporary sci-fi thriller airing on BBC1, little yet the only one being made in Britain at the turn of the decade, so let’s look at two others to set up some signposts. The first is obvious – Doomwatch, created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, is, like Adam Adamant Lives!, a case of “what Doctor Who people did next.” And like Adam Adamant Lives!, the answer is “something that is almost, but not quite, what Doctor Who did next.” Just as Adam Adamant Lives! prefigured the charismatic lead model of the Troughton years, Doomwatch was an attempt by Davis and Pedler to work through their issues (well, Pedler’s issues mainly) regarding contemporary science via contemporary earth-based sci-fi.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about Doomwatch is that it’s actually quite good. This is alarming because the creative talent on it was, as I mentioned, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. We discussed the seeming nature of Pedler’s Doctor Who scripts in the past. Gerry Davis, on the other hand, is responsible for The Celestial Toymaker, The Tomb of the Cybermen, and, to be fair, The Tenth Planet.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 10 (Monty Python’s Flying Circus)

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Well we couldn’t not cover Monty Python, now could we? All the same, if you want to find yourself mildly taken aback by the nature of British culture in the early 1970s, consider that the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired its twelfth episode, The Naked Ant, the day after the first episode of Spearhead From Space aired. Seriously. The first two episodes of the Jon Pertwee era were followed just over 24 hours later with the last two episodes of the first season of Flying Circus, both on BBC1. Superficially, it’s tough to wrap one’s head, in 2011, around the enormity of this – the degree to which those two weeks of January 1970 crackled with what we now recognize as real cultural fire. Upper Class Twit of the Year and the story that brought one of the most iconic images ever from Doctor Who are literally from the same week (although the iconic shop dummies attack sequence was, to be fair, in episode four of Spearhead).

The question is whether this is simply a nifty coincidence or whether there’s actually some fundamental understanding about Britain at the dawn of the 70s to be gained from knowing this strange factoid. As it happens, the answer is the former, but to understand why we’re going to have to answer a different question first – why the heck is Monty Python such a big deal?

Put on your sweeping generalization hat, because we’re about to do a very whirlwind tour of the history of British comedy after World War II. If we leave Monty Python out of the equation for the moment, there are essentially two crucial things to know about British comedy from 1945-1970: Spike Milligan and Carry On. Among comedy snobs, there is no ambiguity over which one of these is superior. Spike Milligan is one of the most famed and accomplished comedians in history, and the Carry On films have a reputation round about the Friedberg/Seltzer comedies of the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, and the like).

Let’s get them over with first, then. Since it’s the Carry On film to directly mention Doctor Who, let’s look specifically at 1966’s Carry On Screaming – a parody of the Hammer Horror film line that we’ve also mostly ignored before now, but will have to get a post out on some time before Philip Hinchcliffe shows up. Carry On Screaming also has, for the discriminating Doctor Who fan, appearances from Peter Butterworth and Jon Pertwee.

The essential premise of a Carry On film is delightfully formulaic. You take a popular genre and do a story in that genre in which every single character is replaced with a blundering idiot. So, for instance, in Carry On Screaming you have a situation that is a familiar horror movie setup – a monster is kidnapping women, and the police investigate. All fairly straightforward. Then you take all the figures this story requires – girl to kidnap, boyfriend looking for his missing girlfriend, police, mad scientist, etc – and have them all be incompetent.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 9 (2001, Star Trek, Neil Armstrong [Including Foot])

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In the White Wolf roleplaying game Changeling: The Dreaming, the point in the 60s that is flagged as being the zenith of hope and dreams and beauty is the moon landing. I adore Changeling, and am actually writing this blog entry in between preparing to start running a new campaign of it, but really, what rubbish.

For one thing, as we’ve already seen, the idealistic aspects of 60s culture were inexorably tied to political liberalism, to an extent that Doctor Who, by embracing a psychedelic aesthetic, lodged a politically liberal approach at the heart of what it does. It is in no way the case that liberalism ended in 1968, but the fundamental shift described in this entry was that political liberalism shifted from being in the ascendency to being on the defensive.  Which means that the idea that any culminating event in the realm of hope and utopian ideology happening in 1969 is fundamentally ludicrous.

And indeed, the moon landing was no darling of the 1960s left-wing, with the usual refrain being some observation about throwing money away in space when there are so many problems here on Earth. Certainly nothing coming out of the Nixon administration had anything resembling a claim to 1960s utopianism.

So what was the moon landing, if not one of the high points of the utopian 60s? By and large, it was a dead end. The reality turned out to be that space is enormously expensive and lacking in all practical value. The moon wasn’t our first step into space – it was our last one, with no realistic plan in existence over forty years later to even return there, little yet to push on to Mars or elsewhere. Why? Mainly because there’s no visible point. No cost-efficient way of gathering any materials from foreign worlds exists or appears to exist. No life or habitability appears to exist. And after a point that’s right around Mars we rapidly reach a point where we are putting people in capsules for obscenely long amounts of time so that they can walk on rocks no more habitable than the last uninhabitable rock they walked on.

In other words, all visible evidence regarding any point in space that we can get to suggests that we are alone and would be spending massive amounts of money for nothing other than the sake of getting there. As long as this remains the case – and there’s no particular reason to think it’s changing at any point in the near future – space travel will never be a major priority of any organization with the money to accomplish it.

If we’re being honest, the moon landing is a military victory in the Cold War more than anything. We should rewind a bit, actually, and look at how we got to the moon. Mostly, it’s Hitler’s fault. In all seriousness, as Neal Stephenson points out, the use of rockets for space travel mostly comes down to the fact that Hitler was oddly obsessed with the things and happened to have (before he destroyed it by driving all the Jews out) more or less the best science program in the world.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 8 (’68)

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And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


The 60s ended.

This may seem like a very obvious thing to point out to anybody with a remote skill in calendar-reading. But when you’re immersing yourself in the raging heat of psychedelia and social justice, it’s as easy in 2011 to forget that its sense of inevitability was a fragile illusion as it was in ’68. As ever, reality stands ready to intrude.

However badly the Summer of Love ended, it was still a utopian moment, beautiful in its naiveté. Even in its most crassly commercial version, its iconography holds a strange power. I mentioned a few entries ago the cover of the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s single “Simon Says,” which you can gaze upon here (which also gives me the opportunity to hat-tip the fabulously good Chart Stats website, from which the first paragraph of almost every entry on this blog derives). What is most interesting about this cover is that despite the fact that it is the cover of an appallingly banal piece of bubblegum pop, the cover is still arrestingly psychedelic. Its b-side – “Reflections From the Looking Glass” – is unapologetically and unambiguously a piece of psychedelic utopianism. Even corporate commercialism proved unable to completely repress psychedelia.

Stunning, then, that less than a year later, on the other side of California, youth culture’s best hope for the future, Robert Francis Kennedy, was gunned down following his victory in the California Democratic Primary. Two months later the Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into a festival of ugly riots as various left-wing groups such as the Yippies prepared to make a bold stand and deliver the psychedelic street theater of the Diggers (see the Summer of Love entry, linked above) to the masses, albeit without the utopian community building of the Diggers (which turns out, perhaps, to have been the more important part). From the perspective of anyone with an aesthetic appreciation of guerilla theater politics, this should have been a high water mark, with the threatened plan to dump LSD in the city’s water supply being a particular highlight.

Meanwhile, the increasingly fierce Vietnam protests, spurred on by moral obscenities like the Mai Lai massacre, descended on the convention as well in an effort to derail the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey, seen as too close to Lyndon Johnson’s war position.…

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