terror of the zygons

September 6, 2012

We are the Borgias. You will be Excommunicated. Renaissance is Futile.

Jack Graham axos, borgias, catholic church, dark knight rises, evil, fanaticism, hodgson, machiavelli, medicis, pope, protestantism, renaissance, revolution, savonarola, seeds of doom, t.h. huxley, terror of the zygons, terry eagleton, the borgias, TV 2

It’s good that TV dramas have become more complex and ambiguous, particularly with regards to morality. But there is a tendency for them to lose any moral compass in their eagerness to show us the dark sides of the characters with whom they want us to empathize and to care about.

The Borgias wants us to follow Cesare’s career with sympathy, but also shows him having people tortured into madness. What is the show’s position on this? Oddly, it tries to whitewash him even as it revels in his dark side. It makes his victims into rapists and murderers. It depicts him as personally involved in tormenting Savonarola, but makes Savonarola a fanatic (of course) and a vicious homophobe. Now, it’s true that Savonarola instituted strictly puritanical laws in Florence, including against sodomy… but that was applicable to hetero sex as well as homo. Of course, I wouldn’t want to defend Savonarola’s views in their entirety. He was not a modern democrat. But he and people akin to him – Munzer, Cromwell, the Levellers, the Diggers… the p/Protestant revolutionaries of the era of transition from feudalism to capitalism – were more than just foaming fanatics. They meant more than that. Of course, revolutionary ideals are always depicted as fanatical and dangerous in mainstream culture, more horrible by definition than any status quo they may challenge. c.f. anybody in Gotham City who doesn’t like draconian laws and huge imbalances of wealth.

On the subject of Savonarola, we of course get a depiction of the revolution he led in Florence against the Medicis as an irrational explosion of fanaticism and lunacy. We get no hint of the scale of corruption and oppression committed by the Medicis, no real hint of the horror of poverty in Florence alongside the amazing cultural flowering and explosion of wealth. We get nothing about the popular support for Savonarola, the support of artists like Michaelangelo and Botticelli (we even get Machiavelli and Cesare tutting over the burning of a Botticelli on one of the Bonfires of the Vanities). The Florentine republic created after the people kicked out the Medici was astonishing for its time. The franchise was extended, public office was opened to lower ranks, the use of capital punishment was limited, etc. None of that. Natch.

And, to loop back to what I was saying earlier, we get no sense of the scale of corruption in the Catholic Church that Savonarola and people like him were rebelling against. Pope Alexander VI, played (ludicrously, with stuck out chin and silly gruff voice) by Jeremy Irons, is shown to be a libertine, a spendthrift, a buyer and seller of offices, etc… but we’re evidently meant to relish him as a morally ambiguous figure whose passions are enjoyable to witness. He is also shown giving a shit about the poor of Rome, going out at night in secret to investigate why the orphans don’t got no clean water. He even gets to deliver John Ball’s line “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”…

July 21, 2012

Skulltopus 12: Come Out onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle

Jack Graham 70s, autons, axos, capitalism, china mieville, colonialism, darwin, gothic, green death, hodgson, lovecraft, m r james, macra terror, marc platt, peladon, prometheus, science, seeds of doom, skulltopus, spencer, tentacles, terror of the zygons, terry nation, weird 3

Okay, first a quick (well… relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications… because we’ve come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.

The Story So Far…

If only ‘Pirates of the Caribbean II’ had looked this good.

According to China Miéville, the tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as ‘the Weird’. Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc. They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a ‘novum’, unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis. (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and ‘ghost story’ writer M.R. James.) Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic. The gothic – or hauntological – is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return. The Weird is what we don’t – and perhaps cannot – know, erupting without precedent and confronting us with our own incomprehension. Consequently, the gothic and the Weird exist in “non-dialectical superposition”, oscillating back and forth… something which shows in the almost total absence in Western monsterology of the skulltopus, a fusion of skull (gothic) and octopus (Weird) which, on the face of it, would seem to be quite an obvious synthesis, especially given that the central hub of an octopus’s body is decidedly skull-like in shape.

Much later, long after the process in Western literary and graphic monsterology that Miéville describes, and long after tentacles had been thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western Horror and SF, tentacles begin to make their presence felt in Doctor Who. In the early days, most of the tentacles that appeared in the show did so courtesy of Terry Nation. For instance, he adroitly selected an octopus as a meaningless plot-device monster in ‘The Chase’. He may have done this because the octopoidal carried a residual charge of blankness or meaninglessness. Also, Nation seems to have repeatedly associated a tentacular or Weirdesque monster with economic exploitation. The Brains of Morphoton have stubby tentacles and run an entire economy on hypnotism, making scarcity seem like material abundance; the Slyther turns up when the Daleks are forcing people to mine for them and black-marketeers are taking advantage of the situation. This may be a co-optation of the ‘blankness’ of the tentacular inherited from the Weird. It may also be that, because the modernity that filled the Weird writers with such nebulous horror was capitalist modernity, there is something in their pre-eminent monster-type that naturally lends itself to expressing horror at economic exploitation. (They themselves would probably have rejected this, most of them being reactionaries… though, interestingly, Lovecraft – who was a disgusting racist, living in dread of ‘miscegenation’ – once identified himself as a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, even calling himself a ‘socialist’.)…

December 7, 2010

A Critique of the Gothic Seasons

Jack Graham android invasion, brain of morbius, face of evil, louise jameson, masque of mandragora, pyramids of mars, robot, robots of death, seeds of doom, talons of weng chiang, terror of the zygons 0

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).…