robin hood

December 29, 2012

Vixens and Saxons

Jack Grahamfeminism, gender, norman conquest, oppression, philip sandifer, robert holmes, robin hood, sexism, the time warrior5

Some disjointed thoughts about ‘The Time Warrior’. Is it sexist? Is Linx really a girl? And what is the correct Socialist attitude to Irongron?

1. Men Are From Earth, Sontarans Are From… umm… Saturn? No, couldn’t be. ‘Saturn’ is an anagram of ‘Rutans’ for a start…

‘The Time Warrior’ is the chronicle of a failed romance. Irongron and Linx. The odd couple.

Made for each other.

The initial attraction. The slowly dawning mutual realisation that they have much in common. They take turns helping each other out. Terms of affection pass between them: Linx is Irongron’s “brother” and will be his “general”. Physical intimacy follows, as Linx allows Irongron to see his face then almost takes his arm as they leave to deal with the android knight. Irongron gives Linx a familiar nickname (albeit a rather unkind one). Then the inevitable falling out. Linx feels disappointed. He questions Irongron’s commitment. They squabble. There is a physical fight. Violence always changes a relationship irrevocably. An uneasy aftermath. Awkward attempts to rescue and preserve the friendship. “Thanks good toadface… er, good Linx”. Irongron helps the bound Linx in an act of residual solidarity. They stand face to face, close together, Irongron fascinated by Linx’s visage. “I was struck down from behind,” says Linx, not wanting to lose face in front of Irongron, but also sounding almost as though he is pleading for sympathy and solidarity. Then there is the final drunken argument. Linx is ready to move on but Irongron doesn’t like the idea of being dumped. He does the dumping, he doesn’t have it done tohim. “For the last time Linx,” says he, “let there be no more talk of leaving!” But Linx makes it clear, his spaceboots were made for walking and that’s just what he’ll do. Then, of course, the ultimate break. Linx was going to leave and destroy all Irongron’s stuff in a final act of scorn. The drunken, spurned Irongron tries one last time to delay the dumping. He gets physical again. Linx puts him down.

They were made for each other, but that itself is what makes their union impossible. That and the inevitable social stigma against same-sex and different-species relationships (talk about a double standard!).

Am I actually arguing for a gay subtext? No, perhaps not. But there is something unusually… well, ‘relationshippy’ about the way Irongron and Linx come together and then fall apart. Linx even tries to get rid of Irongron’s friends, or at least to push them out of an inner circle which increasingly includes just him and Irongron. Irongron, meanwhile, does a lot of tipsy complaining to his best mate about how unreasonable Linx is.

“My Sontaran doesn’t understand me.”

2. Sexism and the Citadel

I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘The Time Warrior’ is actually fairly good on the issues of feminism and sexism (everything being very relative, of course).…

May 2, 2011

Dwarf

Jack Grahamday of the moon, imperialism, nixon, robin hood, series 6, steven moffat, superstition, the slow death of western civilisation, the stolen earth, the x files, vietnam6

In response to ‘Day of the Moon’

So… the Doctor is now turned on by talking about shooting people and is happy to shake hands with a genocidal mass murderer. Meanwhile, he hypnotises the entire human race into becoming unthinking, automatic killers in order to wipe out a race who stand around in corners doing nothing.

Of course, we know they’re evil (and thus deserve it) because they’re ugly. And say generic evil things. And killed a lady in a toilet once for no reason at all.

I can handle the Doctor having a different morality. Shaking hands with Nixon (who was, by the way, as fascinating and complex as he was despicable… not that you’d know it from watching this) and utilising him as an ally…. yeah, okay. The Doc’s an alien. He’s not Noam Chomsky (not that one should need to be).

The trouble is that Moffat evidently has no awareness of any kind of the queasiness (to put it mildly) inherent in a largely neutral portrayal (some digs about tapes and being “tricky” aside) of a man who conspired to sabotage peace talks in order to get elected and dropped tonnes of bombs (not to mention flaming glue) on a nation of poor peasants.

I mean, Moffat gets that Nixon was a bit right-wing… but this is expressed in a scene where his eyes boggle at the idea of an FBI officer having a boyfriend. In other words, it’s a cultural problem. The mass murder is not on the radar.

“There are no monsters in the Oval office” said Nixon in that prologue thing. Even I thought that just HAD to be intended as ironic or double edged in some way. That it just HAD to be leading to some kind of criticism of the man. What a fool I was.

I’m not going to launch a rant about US Imperialism… but America is, and was then, an empire.

Moffat fails to notice this. Okay, maybe that’s not what the story is about… except that the story isn’t just about ‘America’ as a culture or a nation of people. (In fact, the American people barely figure at all.) It’s focused on the American President. The American Government. The American military-industrial complex. The American federal law-enforcement service. And so on. They all feature. Much more than ANY other aspect of America.

Moffat even mentions Rome. An empire. Is a parallel drawn? Even obliquely? Nope. It ain’t even on the radar. In a story in which the Doctor explicitly (and fatuously) talks about “leading a revolution” against “the Romans”, the Doctor ends up shaking hands with Nixon.

Do I want Doctor Who to be left-wing propaganda for kids? No, of course not. That isn’t what I’m saying. But pardon me if I can’t resist remarking on the sheer mindless complacency of what I just saw. The writer’s sheer unawareness of even the vaguest of issues raised by the semiotics that he’s playing with.

To move beyond the more predictable (for me) political whinges…

It’s quite an achievement… to fill 45 minutes with the breezy, showoffish, tricksy manipulation of plot images and motifs, and to:

a) create not one of them… that’s NOT ONE… that was vaguely original, that hadn’t been seen or done somewhere else before,

and

b) to include not one… that’s NOT ONE… actual, distinct, discernible IDEA.…

December 8, 2010

Binro Was Right

Jack Grahambinro, dawkins, historical materialism, hitchens, progress, religion, ribos operation, robert holmes, robin hood, sam harris, science, shakespeare, superstition, uneven and combined development3

This is a rejigged new version of something originally posted at the old site. I’ve snipped a few irrelevancies and amplified some conclusions. Oh, and it’s dedicated to Iain Cuthbertson and Timothy Bateson, both of whom died last year.

‘The Ribos Operation’ seems, at first glance, to present the cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, spiralling downwards from a meeting with a quasi-God in a surreal conceptual landscape, downwards into a story about the vast conquest plans of an interplanetary warlord, further downwards into a heist caper about two semi-comic con-men, and then further downwards into a short meeting between and old man and a young man in a little flea-ridden hovel… yet it’s in the hovel that we find the real message of the story. But is Binro right?

Well, he’s right about the stars being suns circled by inhabited worlds (just like his somewhat-more mystical and flamboyant progenitor Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake by the Church for, effectively, founding science-fiction… fair enough, some would say). But, in the wider sense, isn’t the story’s most moving and thematically vital scene compromised by what goes on around it? After all, it turns out that the universe is caught in the battle between light and dark “gods”, and shaking bones about and chanting is a valid path to knowledge!

My feeling is that, ultimately, this story’s real gist is a little more complex and contingent than it seems. I’m not convinced that it’s really about oppositions between good and bad, or even science and superstition… but we’re going to have to work around this a bit.

For a story which sets up and begins a quest narrative about the conflict between two godlike entities called the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, ‘The Ribos Operation’ is surprisingly ambiguous in its treatment of morality. The White Guardian here is certainly no lovable Mr Nice Guy. On the contrary, he’s a sinister old bourgeois bully, twisting the Doctor’s arm into helping him for reasons that are (by anything he actually says) self-serving. If he’s God (and the opening scene cheekily teases us into momentarily thinking he might be) then he’s no kindly deity, but rather the Old Testament Yahweh in one of his quiet and scary moods.

(It’s interesting to note that, on the few occasions when the classic series had the Doctor meeting gods, they were usually played by plummy thesps and did an awful lot of sitting around in chairs being coldly inscrutable. Really, the “gods” in the classic series really do an astonishing amount of sitting, i.e. Sutekh, the Gods of Ragnarok, etc. By contrast, the only “god” to have appeared in the new series takes the form of a big, snarling Heavy Metal album cover. Now, the Beast may represent fine CGI, but, if you ask me, it possesses considerably less dramatic power than Cyril Luckham sipping creme de menthe.)

But, anyway… like the old geezer in the chair, Garron and Unstoffe are also hard to pin down morally.…