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talons of weng chiang

Fragile Talons, Part 1: Of Its Time

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Thanks to the various people who looked over this and made suggestions, especially Holly.  The mistakes are, of course, mine alone.

This post was originally going to have the alternative title ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to Doctor Who Fans About Race’ but Andrew Rilstone got there before me, damn his eyes.  Seriously, go read Andrew’s post because it’s excellent.  Amongst other things, he looks directly at the arguments put forward in Marcus Hearn’s Doctor Who Magazine editorial.  Which is, of course, what started this.

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We live in a strange world.  I’m being told, on the one hand, that Jeremy Corbyn, the most consistently and committedly anti-racist MP in the Commons, is an antisemite, and, on the other, that ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’, a story in which a Fu Manchu style villain – played by a white actor in rubber ‘yellowface’ – abducts white women with the help of a Tong of “opium sodden” Chinese cultists working out of Limehouse, isn’t racist.  You just know, don’t you, that some professional Doctor Who hacks are convinced that Corbyn, if elected, would institute Britain’s very own reenactment of the Final Solution, but will also quibble with you over whether or not Julius Silverstein, the rich, greedy, grasping, paranoid collector in ‘The Web of Fear’ is problematic or not.

Gee, it’s almost like there is something profoundly, foundationally wrong with our discourse on the subject of race and racism.  The problems in Doctor Who fandom are a tiny – if microcosmic – part of this wider problem.  But Doctor Who fandom is one of the places I come from.  And they picked on my friend. So here we are. 

I won’t say much about the specifics of the kerfuffle which led me to write this.  Apart from anything else, it’s just another irruption of the same running argument that Doctor Who fans have been having about ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’ for quite some time.  El and I, both veterans of Gallifrey Base, were together involved in at least one previous such irruption a few years ago, during which some forum posters – and I shit you not – actually stated that they felt John Bennett’s make-up was realistic.  As I noted at the time, being bothered by the rat but not by the yellowface is one thing, but

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.

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A Clarification

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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.
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The Dr Speaks

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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.…

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Behind the Times

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Doctor Who was (and is) frequently racist in its representations.  Probably no more or less than most other cultural products of our society, but nonetheless…

Now, to deal with the banalities first, I don’t accuse anybody involved in making the show of being deliberately racist.  I don’t generally know much about their opinions.  When you hear about their views, you tend to hear that they were liberals or soft-lefties.  People reminiscing about working with Hartnell tend to raise his right-wing opinions on race (and other things) as though they were considered unusual.  And that’s not the issue anyway.  I’m not interested in making personal attacks on this or that writer or producer. 

The show started nearly 50 years ago… so a lot of it is old, dated, the product of vanished days.  This is often raised by fans who see the problems in certain Who stories but, understandably, are eager to defend them.  Nobody wants to feel that something they love is tainted by racism – that terrible bogey word that stops people thinking clearly because, like so many important words, it’s been systematically stripped of its context and has become a Bad Thing that menaces society from without.

I ‘get’ this desire to explain away racist representations in stories we love.  I get it totally… but I’m against the giving out of passes on the grounds that something is ‘of its time’.

E. P. Thompson – in a very different context… in his book The Making of the English Working Class – coined the phrase “the enormous condescension of posterity”, to refer to the oblivion into which the struggles of ordinary people get consigned by bourgeois history.  It’s a great phrase (which I have previously and idiotically attributed to Christopher Hill!) which expresses something about what is arrogantly forgotten when you invoke ‘the times’ to excuse reactionary representations.

Cyber-Race

In the Hammer film, The Mummy, George Pastell plays the sinister Egyptian who brings the Mummy back to life, which chimes with his role in ‘Tomb’ (and also with the character Namin in ‘Pyramids of Mars’, another story in which genre semiotics transmit a representation of ‘foreign’ cultures as sources or vehicles of sinister, uncanny forces which threaten white Westerners).  As I’ve argued elsewhere, ‘Tomb’ is racist largely because it is a reworking of the ‘Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’ type story.  Klieg is the guy who tries to resurrect the Mummy in order to use it.

Those kinds of stories – gothic colonialist fiction of the 19th century which found its way into 20th century pop-culture via movies – carry certain kinds of baggage with them because they stem from British imperial engagement in Egypt. They’re about Brits breaking into Egyptian tombs, finding Egyptian mummies, being cursed by Egyptian curses as punishment. They express – quite unconsciously I’m sure – a certain anxiety about colonialism. Beneath the surface they seem to whisper ‘we’re barging around where we shouldn’t be and we’re gonna pay for it’. But inherent in such anxiety is fear of the colonised people and their culture.…

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A Critique of the Gothic Seasons

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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).…

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