reaganism

February 17, 2014

Catching Them at Their Best

Jack Graham 60s, 80s, liberalism, pex lives podcast, reaganism, star trek, vaka rangi 6

The Pex Lives boys have done a supplemental podcast about the Star Trek movies. Got me thinking about why I like Star Trek IV so much. I decided to try writing something about it, since anything that even vaguely twitches my interest is worth grabbing hold of at the moment, what with my blogging mojo being critically ill and lying, sobbing and wailing, in a deep dark pit.

I don’t like the movie because it’s ‘tongue-in-cheek’ or because I have any sort of ideological attachment to the idea that SF in general (or Trek in particular) should be ‘self-aware’ or anything like that. I like it because it is, essentially, a movie about a bunch of old relics from the 60s wandering around Regan’s America and disapproving of it heartily.

This is not a deep movie. It isn’t hard to parse. No great leaps of interpretation are needed. Just look at what happens.

In order to survive in 80s San Franciso, Kirk must sell his beloved spectacles, a gift from Bones. He, a man who – as we learn from this film – comes from a culture without money, must commodify something precious to him.

In order to achieve their aims, Bones and Scotty must – essentially – bribe a sexist business manager with promises of the untold wealth which will come from a new commodity. Commodification again.

In the course of acquiring some radiation (or something) Chekhov gets arrested by the US Navy, gets interrogated, called a “retard” and a “Russkie” by paranoid officers, and is chased to the point where he sustains a life-threatening injury.

In the course of rescuing him, Bones encounters an elderly woman, in need of dialysis, waiting unattended and forgotten on a gurney in a hospital corridor.

Kirk and Spock encounter a representative of a moribund counter-culture where the best the ‘rebellious youth’ can offer is loud anti-social music which screeches that “we’re all bloody worthless”. (This is, admittedly, rather unfair on Punk. The depiction is, at best, a clueless and curmudgeonly parody… but then, by this point in the 80s, the real remnants of Punk were, at best, commercialised and decontextualised parodies of the Punk movement.)

Kirk and Spock must team up with a right-on scientist who seems to be the only person who gives a shit about the whales. Just as the animals are likely to be slaughtered for commercial reasons once they are sent back into the wild, so the reasons for their being so sent are implicitly commercial: they’re not enough of a draw to make them economically viable for the cash-strapped institute.

As if all this weren’t enough, how does Kirk justify Spock’s eccentric behaviour? He places him in the context of the 60s.

Diegetically, Kirk et al are from ‘the future’… but, in this film, the future = America’s past. Specifically, the crew are played as displaced representatives of the culture from which they extra-diegetically come: the 60s. They are remnants of utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism. Now, however much wrong there may have been with utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism (and there was a fuck-ton wrong with it), it was mostly preferable to Reaganism, and – more importantly – certainly entailed popular ideas that were far in advance not only of Reaganism but also of its own actual practice. …

November 22, 2013

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Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 60s, apartheid, dialectics, evolution, french revolution, historical materialism, history, into the dalek, liberalism, machiavelli, naomi klein, nelson mandela, production, reaganism, revolution, SF, south africa, syriza, teenagers, tool use, TV, twitterverse, unearthly child 6

What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She’s in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have “discovered television”. We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids – the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces – can be made visual.

Doctor Who‘s very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d’etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘The Space Museum’ pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking… and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show – which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production – crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I’ll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It’s fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from ‘historicals’ and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children’s literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.

The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about ‘cavemen’ who are dying out because they’ve forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.…