terry eagleton

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 13, 2012

Monkey Business

Jack Graham darwin, darwinism, dialectics, engels, evil, evolution, ghost light, liberalism, marc platt, marx, marxism, natural selection, race, racism, science, social darwinism, spencer, t.h. huxley, terry eagleton 1

On ‘Ghost Light’.

Let’s leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions – light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive – which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let’s leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let’s leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions… all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition. You want an example? How about the use of the word “wicked”, which – with wonderful irony – appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak. It’s the last word of the story – the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series. And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child… but, by Ace’s usage, and by his own sly wink, he’s giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let’s look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the ‘final’ stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it’s about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don’t understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It’s about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there’s some truth in the above, there’s also a lot more to it than that.

I don’t think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people’s ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top… and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of ‘rungs’ which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male… but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That’s why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It’s his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it’s his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.…