steven moffat

April 8, 2011

Victory of the Icon

Jack Graham capitalism, fascism, imperialism, mark gatiss, nazis, propaganda, racism, second world war, steven moffat, victory of the daleks, winston churchill, wwii 9

In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.

– Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)

In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that masquerades as history in our society.

Moreover, Churchill is an old mate of the Doctor’s. They go way back. In other words, he gets the endorsement of Our Hero, the narrative and moral locus of the series. Here is Gatiss’ reasoning:

I think in the end it came down to sort of printing the Churchill of legend, because Doctor Who is not the place, really, to examine those sorts of things, except wherever possible, as it were, in the gaps, in the shadows, you can suggest his pragmatism. So in this episode when the Doctor, despite the fact that the Doctor’s telling him that the Daleks are the worst thing in the entire universe, he thinks ‘I can end the war quicker, I can save lives’. So that sort of thing was interesting to play with. But I did, you know, it just isn’t the place to try and have those conversations, because it’s an adventure series.

This reminds me of a page at the BBC website about whether Churchill was “as good as we think?”. As ever, “we” is left undefined. The page lists Pros and Cons. The best Cons they can come up with are a couple of military blunders, the return to the gold standard and Yalta. In other words: was he as marvelous as “we” apparently all believe or did he sometimes make mistakes? The big one on the list is Yalta, so the worst thing he can be accused of is handing much of Europe over to the real evildoers. Pravda would have been proud of such framing.

(The Yalta thing seems especially unfair to Churchill. He assumed that Russia would renege on the agreed post-war frontiers of Europe and advocated ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a lunatic plan to launch an unprovoked attack upon Russia as early as July 1945, thus starting a new war against one of his own allies.)…

March 22, 2011

Companion Relief

Jack Graham amy pond, comic relief, red nose day, rory, sexism, Star Trek Phase II, steven moffat, the slow death of western civilisation, wanking 13

So, it’s now pretty much official. Amy is there to be leered at. We now have plots that hinge on Rory being unable to stop himself staring up her skirt.

Let me just repeat that:

Doctor Who, in 2011, has episodes (albeit charity ‘comedy’ ones) in which vital plot points rest on a man staring up a woman’s skirt without her knowledge or consent.

Classy.

To add insult to injury, the episode coyly reminds us that the man in question is the woman’s husband, as though that makes it okay… So spying on a woman’s privacy and getting off on it is permissable as long as your relationship is sanctified by holy wedlock, is that it?

Still, Amy doesn’t seem to mind too much, so it must be okay. After all, if a woman character in a show written by a man makes a sexist comment or displays a sexist attitude, that proves she’s okay with sexism, as long as it’s all, like, jokey and ironic ‘n’ stuff.

But Amy wouldn’t mind, would she? Firstly, she’s Moffat’s meat puppet and viewer titilation service. Secondly, she’s a self-involved, self-adoring harpy… just like so many women in Moffat scripts. But that’s okay ‘cos she’s ‘feisty’… which means that, while she may be an unflattering misogynistic stereotype, she’s an unflattering misogynistic stereotype in a modern, liberated, post-feminist kinda way.

In fact, Amy is so far from minding being leered at and leched over that she deliberately uses her body as a way of getting favours (i.e. driving test passes) from the poor, helpless men she enslaves with her feminine wiles. Women, eh? They really fancy themselves, don’t they?

Well, Amy is now so self-involved and self-adoring that she literally fancies herself. She flirts with her own doppelganger, providing lesbian fantasy fodder for Rory (but that’s okay ‘cos he’s her husband, remember?).

I’m sure Wossy was amused too… if that’s a recommendation these days.

The Doctor then saves the day by twiddling his “wibbly lever”. I can’t help thinking that this is almost too perfect as a metaphor, both for how Moffat now writes the show and for how millions of lechy mysoginist fans now watch it. Stare at Amy, fiddle with the wibbly lever and, before you know it, the episode has reached a satisfying climax.

As the Doctor says: “Euurrrgghh… so this is how it ends…” Not with a whimper even, but with a sexist wank.

Still, it was all for charity, wasn’t it? Fitting. After all, what is Comic Relief but a great big load of sanctimonious, sentimental, self-righteous masturbation?…

June 30, 2010

Mything the Point

Jack Graham religion, rtd, sci-fi, steven moffat, timey wimey 0

What’s the difference between RTD and Moffat?

RTD, for all that he’s an atheist, has a fundamentally religious view. I mean that, while he may not have any belief in an actual god, his basic outlook on life (at least as it finds expression in his writing) is religious in tone and is informed by religious mythology. RTD can’t think about concepts like ‘the end of the world’, or ’saving the world’, or ‘regenerating’, or any of this stuff (all very much the bread and butter of pulp fantasy fiction, which is all Who is really) without connecting it, maybe subconsciously, to religious concepts and stories. (Well, he can, but for the purposes of this theory, I’m going to pretend that he can’t. So there.)

‘Bad Wolf’/’Parting of the Ways’, ‘Gridlock’, ‘Voyage of the Damned’, ‘Sound of Drums’/’Last of the Time Lords’ and the other season finales… they’re all soaked in religious language and imagery, in Christian symbolism. And the theme of fiery judgement is never far away, nor is the idea of someone sacrificing themselves to redeem the world. Isn’t ‘The Ark in Space‘ supposedly his favourite classic story? No wonder.

I might also mention the fact that his most Whoish work prior to Who (much more Whoish than either of those kids’ fantasy serials he wrote) was about the second coming of Christ. This isn’t unusual. Douglas Adams was another atheist sci-fi writer obsessed with religion. H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Arthur C. Clarke… in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a half-decent sci-fi author who doesn’t spend a large amount of his time thinking and writing about religion in one form or another.

Moffat, on the other hand, has no such underlying religious conception. He plays with these concepts on a technical level. He’s much more interested in playing around with plot for its own sake, twisting it around like origami. But there are some problems with this.

Firstly, he doesn’t tune into the mythological/religious basis of science-fiction (which is a reiteration of mythology in the secular age of technology). Secondly, he seems to lack any real interest in evil… which is problematic because Doctor Who, like religion (and, incidentally, like Shakespeare), is absolutely obsessed with evil (and not always in a simplistic way). You might be tempted to bring up Jekyll now… but I’ll remind you that, in Moffat’s conception, even Mr Hyde turns out to be an expression of the fierceness and danger inherent in love.

Consequently, his stories tend to be about malfunctions. They’re about things going wrong, usually technology. Nanogenes, automatic repair systems on spaceships, etc… but also chronology (any supposedly linear, predictable system, really)… and, when dealing with chronology, he can use that as a way of playing around with plot for its own sake.

The problem with playing around with plot for its own sake is that you tend to tie yourself into narrative knots that are very hard to cut through while retaining dramatic values.…

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