Nerd Evidence
Canon and continuity are not the point. Why not go ahead without precedents? After all, a foolish hobgoblin is the consistency of someone with a dictionary of quotations.
All the same…
…
racism
No, I don’t kip
Godfrey Bloom, UKIP member of the European Parliament (there’s a dialectical proposition if ever I heard one), has said how unhappy he is about so much foreign aid going to “Bongo Bongo Land”.
He has subsequently expressed regret over the remark. As always, with the British, the crime is in getting caught.
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| Godfrey Bloom, MEP (UKIP): racist pillock |
But he shouldn’t regret saying “Bongo Bongo Land”. He really shouldn’t. That was at least honest, even if it did sound like the kind of thing Richie from Bottom used to say. It was a sincere little window into the real heart of UKIP’s tweedy fascism.
What Bloom should regret is being a fucking racist pillock.…
A Clarification
If you think this…
…is what Chinese people actually look like, then guess what:
YOU’RE A FUCKING RACIST!
…
ADDITIONAL:
An explanation is probably in order. This post is in response to an assertion made on the aforementioned ‘Talons’ thread, an assertion agreed with more-or-less by several other posters, that one might mistake John Bennett in his yellowface prosthetic make-up (see above) for an actual Chinese person. Yes, human beings – people with brains and opposable thumbs and everything – actually felt comfortable making that assertion in public… though, they do use pseudonyms on Gallifrey Base forum, so maybe that anonymity helped.
Some of the people in question have been engaged in inventive games of circumlocution and tactical point-missing around the subject of the racism in ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’. The usual disingenuous special pleading, most of it. ‘There’s a stupid white policeman – does that mean it’s racist against white people?’ and ‘I’ve shown it to Asian friends and they weren’t offended!’. Y’know, the sort of cretinous, spurious, trivial, entitled, privileged, desperate, dishonest bollocks always trotted out when these waaaah-waaaaahing manchildren feel that their untroubled viewing pleasure may be even slightly complicated by being implicated in the injustice visited upon people other than them.
However, the idea that it might be possible to mistake the above image – in all its Fu Manchu-y and rubbery and yellowy inglory – with an actual human being of Chinese descent… well, it’s simply breathtaking. How is one to respond to people who evidently
a) base their notion of what Chinese people look like not upon the actual appearance of, y’know, actual chinese people, but rather upon racist stereotypes conjured into life by immobile, expressionless yellowface prosthetics, and
b) think that their own comfort with this racist elision is itself an alibi against charges of racism?
There’s something often said by fans about ‘Talons of Weng Chiang’: “ignore the rat”. It means, decide to see past the extremely unconvincing giant rat monster in the story (which looks like exactly what it is: a combination of a real rat in a bad model set and a fluffy puppet) so that you can see the quality of the story beneath. Well, ‘Talons’ is a good story in many ways… and no guilt need be felt by anyone who watches and enjoys it (another straw man set up by the point-missers club). But it’s devastatingly revealing that any fan should be more worried by the unconvincing rat than by the unconvincing yellowface. It reveals priorities that are so insular and narrow-minded as to be… and I don’t think this is too strong a word… inhuman.
However, it’s yet another quantum leap to the point where you find the rat unconvincing but not the yellowface. And you’re prepared to say so in public. This reveals a shameless thoughtlessness, a terrifying absence of self-examination, an arrogance born of privilege. And it also seems to reveal a willingness not simply to be unconcerned by the monstering of a whole race of people, not simply to delude yourself that its not happening in the text (because you’ve never bothered to avail yourself of the myriad opportunities now freely available to anyone with internet access to educate yourself about how representations of people work in the texts you consume) but to actually think that the representations (of, say, Chinese people as expressionless, rubberfaced bogeymen) are accurate and true to life.
The Dr Speaks
Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to get dragged into the latest “is ‘Talons’ racist?” debate at Gallifrey Base. (You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this one would’ve been settled long ago and been filed away in the same drawer with “is the world a sphere?” and “is the Tomorrow People reboot bound to be shit?” but nope, apparently not.)
I won’t rehearse it here, since everyone likely to read this blog is likely to be able to imagine exactly what has been (and remains to be) said.
I just wanted to post this…
…which occured during my (increasingly and pointlessly irate) involvement. Click to make it bigger.
You know, I disagree with Phil Sandifer about a lot… but the above just made me want to hug him.…
Awe & Slaughter
As expected, having been posthumously put on trial for his own murder, Trayvon Martin has been found guilty. He committed the heinous crime of being black and in possession of a hoodie, armed with fizzy drinks and sweets, walking round George Zimmerman’s neighbourhood. What else could Zimmerman do, given that (in his words) “these fucking punks” “always get away”?
Also, how long before Law & Order does a storyline based on Trayvon Martin, in which they bravely confront the issues and break PC taboos by depicting him as a junkie gangbanger, his family’s lawyers as slimey liars, any professional black activist involved as a cynical demagogue and all black protestors as unreasoning, flailing idiots who assume racism without evidence and who frustrate the good faith efforts of the police and DAs office? Just like in all their other ‘race’ episodes that they’ve ever done ever.
(Edited for clarification on one point, and to add a subject label.)…
Punishing Viewing
Something I wrote a while ago, somewhat rewritten. I’m re-posting it to mark the release of ‘The Mind of Evil’ on DVD. In brief, being in colour doesn’t make it any better.
There is a very old idea about ‘human nature’, that we are born with certain social characteristics already implanted or programmed in our brains, usually inherited from our parents and ancestors. You will find this idea laced throughout the whole of modern Western culture. Ruffians and villains in Conan Doyle are often said to have “vile antecedents”. Oliver Twist is incapable of being a pickpocket because, despite being raised in a pauper’s orphanage, he is a middle class child displaced amongst the scum classes. Similarly (because J.K. Rowling is nothing if not studiedly unoriginal) Harry Potter is filled with love just like his late mum, despite being systematically emotionally and psychologically abused up to the age of 11. I could go on at great length.
This conception of human nature (please take the quote marks as read whenever I use that phrase) is directly and inextricably linked to class, and to questions of social role, crime, etc. It is still claimed today that people end up in prison because they have inborn tendencies which lead them there. These days we use the language of genetics. Before genes, people used the language of blood. Before that, people used the language of the Bible. The medieval church claimed that drastic and dreadful social divisions were justified because people were born into one category or the other, based on their bloodline. They were the descendents of Cain or Seth, and thus carried the blood of a vile murderer or a goody-two-shoes. Of course, the idea that the peasants were peasants because they had murderer’s blood doesn’t account for the massive amount of warmongering and killing and torturing and executing done by the supposed descendents of Seth (i.e the Kings and Dukes and whathaveyou). Of course, even today a great deal of chin-scratching cogitation goes into deciding what genetic factors might be causing black urban gun crime… while nobody wonders if the carpet-bombing Prime Minister must have killer genes. And, as John Ball pointed out, if we’re all descended from Cain or Seth, that also means we’re all descended from (non-murdering) Adam and Eve… so how does that work?
As many thinkers have pointed out, being in prison isn’t necessarily a mark of violence or evil (or even, in many cases, actual criminality) so much as a mark of refusing to play your assigned social role. It starts in childhood, with kids medicated for personality disorders for such heinous sins as “disrespecting authority” etc. Also, prisons are a massive system of social control and punitive reinforcement. Vast numbers of people in the American prison system today (which increasingly resembles a kind of privatised system of gulags) are there for non-violent drug crimes. There are many examples of, for instance, disabled people sent away for life because they were caught with a few ounces of weed that they obtained to use personally as a palliative.…
That Isn’t Right
It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at ‘The Reign of Terror’ for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should’ve been called ‘That Isn’t Right’. So I’ve given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.
I wasn’t going out on much a limb dissing ‘The Reign of Terror’ (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it. ‘The Aztecs’, by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good. It isn’t that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it’s Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.
I’m not actually going to say that it’s bad, as such. On the whole, it’s very well made. But….
Black and White and Red All Over
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| “Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa… do you approve of interracial marriage?” |
Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people. It’s not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are ‘darked-up’ (what would you call it… bronzeface?). It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they’ve been reddened. But even if they weren’t actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another. Costume, ostensibly ‘native’ mannerisms and speech patterns, etc. It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar. Remember, not all blackface involves actual ‘darking-up’. These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not. As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal “modern blackface” by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they’re not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of ‘the Few’, thus implicitly comparing today’s supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, ‘entitled’ youngsters with the generation of the “finest hour”. Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys ‘putting on’ verbal fancy dress such as “innit”) are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows. The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.
While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of ‘darking-up’ was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when ‘The Aztecs’ (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made. Even so, it’s far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice. …
Monkey Business
On ‘Ghost Light’.
Let’s leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions – light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive – which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.
Let’s leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.
Let’s leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions… all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition. You want an example? How about the use of the word “wicked”, which – with wonderful irony – appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak. It’s the last word of the story – the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series. And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child… but, by Ace’s usage, and by his own sly wink, he’s giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.
Let’s look instead at what this story says about evolution.
Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the ‘final’ stage when the process is finished.
Or does it?
Secondly, it’s about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don’t understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It’s about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.
Or is it?
Let me suggest that, while there’s some truth in the above, there’s also a lot more to it than that.
I don’t think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people’s ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top… and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of ‘rungs’ which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male… but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.
That’s why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It’s his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it’s his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.…
Prometheus Underground
Warning: Triggers and Spoilers. And waffle.
Sex & Monsters
In Prometheus, the Engineers are ancient Titans who created humanity… and, it is implied, seeded the galaxy with their DNA. There is something very noticeable about them: they are all men. Meanwhile, there is a definite vaginal look to a great many of the alien bio-weapons they created and which then subsumed them. However, I don’t think its really possible to read the battle between Engineers and their bio-weapons as a battle of the sexes. The weapon creatures are also phallic and penetrative, as in previous iterations of the Alien universe. All the same, it’s true that presenting the creators of life (in their own image) as exclusively dudes does imply that generative power resides in the male alone. It is enough for one Engineer to dissolve his DNA into the waters of a planet to kickstart the process that will lead to animal life (if that’s how the opening scene is meant to be read). The Engineers are male but apparently sexless, capable of asexual reproduction. The deadly runaway bio-weapons, which seem hermaphroditic, look like the intrusion of sex into a male but sexless world. Sex is thus a terrifying eruption that destabilises a male utopia. The sexual nature of the weapons suggests that the Engineers – we might even be tempted to facetiously re-christen them the ‘Mengineers’ – find sexual reproduction to be inherently threatening. They set about devising weapons of mass destruction and what do they come up with? Biological goo that sets off a chain reaction of tentacle rape, fanged vaginas and violent monster pregnancy.
Foz Meadows at her blog Shattersnipe (which I heard about from Jon Blum) has made some apt observations about the film’s dubious concentration upon highly impractical female underwear, grueling ‘ladypain’ and forced impregnation. She goes on to say:
Insofar as the alien attacks go, I’ll give Scott some credit for trope subversion: twice in the course of the film, male characters are violently orally penetrated – and, in the process, killed – by phallic alien tentacles. This is visually disturbing on a number of levels, but given the near universal establishment of tentacle rape as a thing that happens to women, I’m going to give him a big thumbs up for bucking the trend. That being said, what happens to Shaw is awful on just about every level imaginable.
And so it is.
One of the interesting things about the original Alien is that it is a man – Kane (John Hurt) – who is the victim of the facehugger rape and the violent birth of the phallic infant Alien. So, although the alien pregnancy also suggests infection, cancer, parasitism and other horrors attendant on life, there is clearly a way in which the original Alien is a personification of sexual violence. This violence is directed at both sexes and emerges through the violation of a man and a subsequent male pregnancy… however, the creature itself is also intensely male. It has that famously phallic head and yet another phallic symbol springs out of its mouth, this one complete with a snapping set of teeth.…
Beyond Redemption
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.…