pyramids of mars

April 3, 2012

How Curses Work 3: That Whole Rabbits/Tennis Connection There

Jack Grahamcity of death, david aaronovitch, death to the daleks, eurocentrism, how curses work, Mars, NASA, nigel kneale, pyramids of mars, robert holmes, von daniken, you're not actually reading this are you?4

I always dimly assumed that Stephen Harris – whatever combination of real people he may pseudonymically represent – got the idea for a story about pyramids on Mars from all that guff about there supposedly being pyramids and giant monkey faces on Mars.

However, I learn that the ‘face’ and ‘pyramids’ on Mars were not ‘discovered’ until the NASA Viking missions, which didn’t snap pictures of the region of Mars known as Cydonia (where all the pyramids, town squares and giant useless chimp portraits are said to be) until after ‘Pyramids of Mars’ was broadcast.

The whole pyramids / Mars thing is alive and well today, beyond Who-dom. Viz, this species of utter balls:

This kind of drivel has not been stopped – or even slowed – by better and more detailed images taken by NASA since.

Here, for instance is an image of the ‘pyramid’, taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001:

Self-evidently NOT an artificial, architectural structure, I’m sure you’ll agree. (If you don’t, you have no business reading this blog. Go away immediately.)

Here, is the spooky ‘simian’ ‘face’ on Mars, imaged by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007:

Looks exactly like Roddy McDowell in Planet of Apes, doesn’t it?

And yet, despite the fact that we now have very detailed images of this LUMP OF ROCK clearly showing it to NOT be a sculpted face, a brief (and depressing) googling session will turn up wonders such as this…

Sometimes, scientists must wonder why they bloody bloody bloody-well bloody bother.

But, yet again it seems, good old Who may claim to have ‘got there first’. Hinchcliffe and Holmes did the pyramids / Mars thing before anybody thought there were any Martian pyramids. That’s almost as good as predicting a woman Prime Minister and the existence of Jim’ll Fix It… and it tops Bob Holmes’ previous best of satirising Star Trek: The Next Generation before most British people had even seen Kirk and Spock.

Back before Viking, if Mars had structures (an idea which the Mariner missions had already dented), they were supposed to be canals… even though the guy who first talked about Martian canals was being metaphorical. In Italian.

Of course, most of ‘Pyramids of Mars’ is a concentrated rip-off of Hammer’s The Mummy with some von Daniken-esque seasoning… but still, it seems to have done something original. ”Egyptology and Mars”, as Lawrence Scarman put it, before such a connection had appeared elsewhere.

(If anyone knows of previous connections, please do let me know.)

Even some of those who take the pyramid/face stuff seriously seem happily aware of Doctor Who‘s prior claim:

So – without wanting to become like one of those pompous bumholes like David Aaronovitch (yes, a relation) who write smug, chin-scratchy things about conspiracy theorists and homeopaths – what does this all mean?

After a cursory glance at many of the sites where people pick over photos of Mars looking for evidence of alien buildings, I’m very tempted to wonder about the readiness of our culture to associate Mars with the motifs of the ancient East.…

March 30, 2012

How Curses Work 2: This Fez is Loaded

Jack Graham60s, 70s, colonialism, edward said, george pastell, gothic, how curses work, islamophobia, jack shaheen, orientalism, philip sandifer, pyramids of mars, racism, tomb of the cybermen3

The utility to Western imperialism of depicting Arabs with the kind of culturalist discourse of modern vs. pre-modern, secularism vs. cultish religion, democracy vs. theocracy, civilisation vs. medievalism, rationalism vs. fanaticism (translated out of code: good Westerners vs. bad Arabs) that followed in the wake of the “war on terror” is obvious.

This way of constructing Arab and/or Middle Eastern cultural identities in Western art, literature, media and ideology, is very old.

Edward Said‘s seminal book Orientalism outlines the way in which the West has constructed the East as an exotic, romantic, cruel, sensuous, decadent, fanatical, inscrutable Other. (…though it is occasionally weakened – in my presumptuous and insignificant opinion – by the problems underlying Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, which Said utilises.)

Jack Shaheen‘s book Reel Bad Arabs reveals how Hollywood has vilified and dehumanized Arabs. Here’s a great short documentary demonstrating his thesis. It’s central message may not come as a surprise to you, but it’s still salutary to see the evidence collated and concentrated.

Such representations of Arabs pop up in the Doctor Who story ‘Pyramids of Mars’ (1975) as part of the show’s tactic, at that time, of raiding the motifs of the pop-gothic… with Hammer as a major influence. The Hammer version of The Mummy is the place, above all others, where the Egyptian Fanatic (that character we were talking about in the previous post) is best seen. The character in that film, played by George Pastell, is the template for Namin in ‘Pyramids of Mars’.

“Where ‘dem infidels at???”

Namin is a murderous, raging fanatic. He goes one better than Pastell’s character in the Hammer Mummy: he actually takes over the English country mansion of the Explorer, invading it using forged (or coerced) letters of authority from the Explorer, taking up the Explorer’s place, raging at the Explorer’s servant, barring the Explorer’s brother, insulting and shooting the Explorer’s friend, etc. Inverting real history, the Egyptian invades England, violently taking over. Terrance Dicks’ novelisation makes it clear that Namin is the last in a long line of fanatical worshippers of the old gods, as per standard stereotypes. At one point, Namin even insinuates that Dr Warlock is being racist – or at least xenophobic – in suspecting him of nefarious activities, asking sarcastically if Warlock will report him to the police for being “a foreigner”. Warlock then gets to smash such petty and self-serving nonsense aside. Don’t bring up racism; I only suspect you because you’re a wrong’un. Thus is the depiction of the Arab as a sinister, fanatical invader self-alibied, self-excused… with all criticism automatically and pre-emptively effaced in a “Political correctness gone mad!” moment avant la lettre. It’s a moment when Doctor Who itself says “bloody minorities, coming over here… and then squealing about ‘racism’ when we complain about what they get up to!” It’s one of the ugliest moments in the history of the show.

But Namin isn’t just an evil Arab. He’s an evil religious Arab. In the original version of his essay about ‘Pyramids of Mars’ at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer (while, it should be stressed, criticising the use of nasty stereotypes) accidentally referred to Namin as a Muslim… and got taken to task for it in the comments.…

March 16, 2012

How Curses Work

Jack Grahameden, egypt, gladstone, how curses work, imperialism, islamophobia, orientalism, pyramids of mars, racism, suez, winston churchill1

We’ve all seen him. He’s swarthy, usually (though not always) with a dark beard. He’s often wearing a fez (no, I’m not going to say it) and robes of some kind.

A fanatic. And friend.

Sometimes, he leaves his home desert and comes to England. He may be dressed in Western clothes and live in a house with Western furnishings, but he’s got a secret room, or a shrine, or a sanctum behind a billowing curtain, in which he keeps his infernal idols amidst clouds of suffocating incense.

He’s…

(cue dramatic music)

…the Egyptian Fanatic!

When he comes to England, he becomes the mirror image of the English Explorer Who Has Just Returned from Egypt (henceforth, the Explorer). This man goes to Egypt for the love of antiquities and discovery, and comes back enchanted and bewitched by the place (by the place, mind, not the people); filling his big, wood-panelled home with Egyptiana. The question of whether the Explorer has any right to this Egyptiana is raised only by the Egyptian Fanatic in England (henceforth, the Fanatic).

The Fanatic has come to England from his native land in search of something, some inscrutable justice, some devilish retribution. He nurses a grudge. He clothes himself in Anglo, middle-class normalcy. He speaks impeccable English, albeit in a heavy accent. (It doesn’t have to be an ‘Egyptian accent’, just a generic foreign one will do.) He is usually treated with courtesy (at first) by the bemused English middle classes amongst whom he mixes by default because of his wealth. These people may come to suspect and despise him, but they’re often tolerant enough at the start, though a working class or yokel character may get to utter some ignorant dislike of “strangers”. The middle class characters may even initially tut at this sort of hostility (what with them being so open minded and everything) but it will turn out that the yokel’s xenophobia was (accidentally) quite justified.

I’m a racist stereotype. Racist stereotypes are cool.

Because the Fanatic is there to cause trouble. To raise the mummified body of a long-dead Egyptian High Priest from its slumber inside a sarcophagus and set it the task of killing all those infidels who dared to trespass upon the sacred resting place of the Pharaoh, etc. The Explorer will be the target of the Fanatic’s superstitious rage (it will continue to be looked upon as superstition, despite the fact that the spells work and the mummy really does come to life). The Explorer was just trying to further the cause of science and knowledge, to preserve the ancient Egyptian past, perhaps to delve into mysteries Better Left Undisturbed… sometimes the Explorer has been arrogant in his treatment of the Egyptians, sometimes he was rude and dismissive to the particular Egyptian Fanatic who is now persecuting him, usually when said Egyptian Fanatic turned up and begged him not to open the pyramid / break the seal on the scroll / disturb the body / take the mummy to display in England. …

December 7, 2010

A Critique of the Gothic Seasons

Jack Grahamandroid invasion, brain of morbius, face of evil, louise jameson, masque of mandragora, pyramids of mars, robot, robots of death, seeds of doom, talons of weng chiang, terror of the zygons0

Yes, I know I’ve already done that joke… but it’s too good not to overuse. Here’s my stuff from Timelash II for the first three years of Tom’s tenure, generally regarded as the “golden age” (or something) of the old show. Not much extra stuff. Sorry. Oh, one warning: at several points in the essay below I will be going into gush mode. You have been warned.

‘Robot’

Dafter than the Rt. Hon. Lady Daftetta Daftington-Dafton of Daftwood Hall, Daftfordshire. A robot that grows to the size of King Kong (and starts acting like him)… a disintegrator gun kept in pieces and scattered in different locations… a government think tank that turns out to be a cover for fanatical right-wing scientific ‘progressives’ who think a good way to take over the world would be to destroy it first… umm, well actually the last ten years or so have made that last one seem quite plausible.

This is set in a world in which ‘bad’ scientists are spottable by their evil suits and ties, their evil black armbands and their evil black leather gloves; meanwhile ‘good’ scientists all work on renewable fuels, have bottle-end spectacles (as distinct from the evil little Himmler spectacles worn by ‘bad’ scientists) and cardigans and wildly unkempt hair.

But all that is nothing compared to the idea that, as Wikipedia puts it: “to ensure peace, the governments of Russia, China and America decided to give the locations and launch codes of their nuclear weapons to a neutral country — Britain — for safekeeping”.

Words fail me.

As in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’, people who have an ideological desire to make a better world are portrayed as deluded, ruthless, callous fanatics.

Of course, you can simply decide not to worry about any of this (just as you can decide not to worry about the fact that the giganticized robot spends a lot of time carrying a wobbly doll and attacking tonka trucks) and enjoy this for the utter hokum that it is.

This is the last gasp of the detumescent Letts/Dicks comfy-cosy-nicey-wicey-matey-watey style (complete with the usual bit of largely-fatuous liberal/moralistic political comment). There’s something melancholy about watching a story with the Brigadier, Benton, UNIT HQ, Bessie, etc… but no Pertwee. I understand why they did it that way: if this new guy drives Bessie and the Brig calls him “Doctor” then he must be the same guy. But it just feels wrong somehow. And the style is past its prime. It’s done good service for a few years but now is clearly the time for it to be retired… which, fortunately, is precisely what happened. There are some eras that feel truncated wheras others end right on time, and ‘Robot’ is evidence that the Pertwee/Letts era was one of the latter.

I’ll post something about ‘The Ark in Space’ seperately, and I’ve done ‘Genesis of the Daleks’here.

‘Terror of the Zygons’

Brilliantly done hokum. The direction is some of the best in the series: stylish, pacey, scary, beautifully cinematic (especially the location sequences which are amazing – they could be from a movie).…