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the slow death of western civilisation

The No Man

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Well, I watched ‘The Snowmen’.

It started badly, with the loner as unhealthy future villain. Watch out for the loners everybody – they’re scary.

It briefly picked up with a rather good new title sequence.

Then we got into the mystery section, which was okay. I have serious issues with the idea that the Doctor is now mates with a Silurian and a Sontaran. Both races should hate his guts, the Silurians with good reason.  He’s repeatedly failed to do anything but posture some platitudes for these Palestinians of the Who-world.  And then either sit by while his mates kill them, or kill them himself.  And the Sontarans don’t work as comedy pratts.  I remember when they were satirical deconstructions of literal-mindedness and militarism, compared archly to medieval chivalric hypocrisy.  Now they’re straight men.

But some of the jokes were funnyish, even if they did rely on the idea that it’s okay to mock people for being short, looking odd, etc.

The spiral staircase was nice.

But then… Look, it’s now clear that this show has no ambition to be anything more than put-down comedy and sentimentality, interspersed with stuff about how awesomely wonderful the Doctor is… despite the fact that he’s now a prattling, petulant, sulky, self-pitying idiot.

Fatuous tear-jerkery. Manipulative, hollow gunk which instructs the viewer to feel certain things on command. No sense of history or politics at all, beyond some nonsequiturs about “Victorian values” which connected to nothing. And we have to get preached at about how wonderful it is to love your kids and cry. The most banal and bland moralising posing as inspirational and uplifting profundity. The most cynical arm-twisting of the feelings, posing as moving drama.

And then… “the only force in the world capable of conquering evil… the tears of a whole family on Christmas Eve”. I just don’t know where to start. I literally felt sick. It’s like inhaling Steven Moffat’s farts after he’s spent 48 hours doing nothing but reading the insides of greetings cards and masturbating in front of a mirror.

And am I to understand that the Great Intelligence began as a lonely child’s imaginary friend? You know, I have no problem with continuity being rewritten… but rewritten as explanations, couched in terms of cloying sentimentality, when there was no need for explanations in the first place?

Also, on the subject of the Clara mystery… who cares? I mean, how can one get interested in the solution to a riddle when you know that the solution will be ‘some bit of sci-fi handwaving’. The interest in the best Doctor Who always used to be ‘what does this mean?‘. ‘The Snowmen’ tells you what it means (ie ‘be nice to your kids, being a loner is bad for you, Victorian Values are BAD… whatever they are, and the Doctor is amazing’. Profound stuff like that.) The interest supposedly now lies in what everyone is feeling (which usually turns out to be something like ‘Sad’ or ‘Happy’ about completely inhuman and unrelateable experiences) and ‘how will Moffat cleverly resolve this bit of apparently inescapable plot trickery?’.…

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A Role Model

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In an age when the suffocating omnipresence of the imperatives of neoliberalism has penetrated every single corner of culture – aggressively colonizing even the formely overlooked, underpoliced nooks and crannies where eccentricity and offbeatitude used to be free to spring up like hardy weed – and even the supposedly nerdy heroes have to be marketably thin, sexy and dressed in geek chic, it might do us all good to remember…

My.  Fucking.  Hero.…

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Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields

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A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:

…we’re not being encouraged to think there’s something wrong with this person [River]: it’s the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.
It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html

I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it’s still excellent.  Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable… depressing but irrefutable.

I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced).  Personally, I’m coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren’t racists or sexists don’t need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things. 

Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or ‘old Legohead’ as I always think of him) for putting this my way.…

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Not With A Bang

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Some assumptions ‘Closing Time’ relies upon: a man being rubbish at looking after a baby is richly hilarious; James Corden has talent of some kind; it’s still amusing when someone wrongly thinks two men are a couple.  All very questionable.

And, as ever, (heteronormative) love conquers all.  It kills Cybermen because emotions ‘n’ stuff, yeah?  Okay, they did something like that in ‘The Invasion’, but at least there it was any emotion, and it made the Cybermen go bonkers instead of just conveniently dying of endoftheepisodeitis.  Notice the utterly pedestrian, idea-free logic here.  You kill the loveless things with love.  That’s like saying you kill poor people with money.  I know the gold thing was stupid, but at least that suggested the logic of using a magical metallic talisman against the zombies.  And at least, when the Cybermen got killed by gold or gravity or radiation, they were simply defeated and chased off rather than being negated or solved.  Kill a Cyberman with radiation and you simply defeat his physical presence.  Kill him with love and you solve him.  You explain him away.  You fill the empty space that he once was… with syrup.  The Cybermen are worthless now.  They have been emptied out of all threat because their hollowness has been stuffed with candyfloss.  Thus is the rump gothic ritually defeated by the power of comforting banalities.

By the way… remember when Gareth Roberts scathingly wrote about how silly ‘The Green Death’ was because nobody in the audience needed to be told that pollution was bad?  Well… does ‘Closing Time’ mean that he now believes people need to be reminded that loving your baby son is good?  Are we to understand that banal statements about political issues are a Bad Thing while banal statements about personal feelings are Inspirational Drama?  I guess so, since the former is about boring stuff like public health and business ethics, while the latter is about interesting stuff like oooo i wuv my pwetty ickle baby.  Why are the British public assumed to need weekly reminders that love is a good thing?  Why, furthermore, must love always be reduced to a simple and unambiguously positive thing, as though it’s a kind of neurological Angel Delight?  And why is it thought that they need to be constantly reassured that it can conquer absolutely anything just by being felt?  What right to these fucking hacks have to inform us how we are obliged to feel in order to be normal and earn the Doctor’s gormless yawp of excited approval?  And isn’t this constant emphasis on love as something overpowering and perfect just an emotional version of the media peddling of body images?  Just as we are constantly told how we should look, are we not also being told that our feelings should be just as glossy and perfect and swaggeringly healthy?  There is a catwalk for the feelings, and yours must be capable of poseurising their way down it, looking just right.  Fuck off.

There is something repellently wholesome and healthy about garbage like ‘Closing Time’. …

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Tygers & Horses

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“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” said William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and on lots of European walls in the 60s, and under the cover of an Eighth Doctor Adventure by Kate Orman.

I disagree.  I think you need the horses of instruction just as much as you need the tygers of wrath.  The thing about the tygers is that they chase you.  The thing about the horses is that you have to chase them.  If you’ve got a horse ahead of you and a tyger behind… well, that’s not comfortable, but it’s the better way round.  It gives you both a strong impetus and a goal.

Of course, horses can be wild and tygers can be calm.

I’ll stop there.  All analogies can be pushed to breaking point.  Even the ones invented by geniuses.…

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In the DNA

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Happy birthday Douglas Noel Adams.  Shame about you dying, but still.

I hear there’s a new TV series based on Dirk Gently.  I haven’t watched it.  With is odd.  If someone had told me, even ten years ago, that there would one day be a Dirk Gently TV show and I wouldn’t watch it, I’d have thought they were insane.

But look at this.

That’s Dirk, apparently.

Funny.  It reminds me of something.

Oh yeah.

In the novels, Dirk is described as fat, ugly and toadlike with a wildly mismatched clothes, a long leather coat and a ludicrous red hat.

Still, that wouldn’t make good telly, would it?

Adams was, in his way, as concerned with entropy as Bidmead.  He even has Skagra mention it in ‘Shada’.  Entropy, of course, is the shuffling of everything into predictability.  The ultimate terminus of increasing entropy is the reduction of all things to homogeneous porridge.

Just saying.

Adams himself was very concerned with the corporate crapization of everything into synthetic banality.  It’s a running concern of the Hitch Hikers books, from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to Infinidim Enterprises.

Funny thing is, if you were going to do Dirk as he’s written, you’d probably end up with something not entirely unlike this.

Damn that Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser.

Pudgy, loud, obnoxious, loquacious, domineering, tasteless, grumpy.  Just add chain-smoking, pizza-addiction, slovenliness and a tendency to con rich old ladies.

Adams was sometimes very influenced by Doctor Who.  For instance, the cricket-commentator stuff in Life, the Universe and Everything is highly reminiscent of similar scenes in ‘Volcano’ (but funny) and Arthur Dent even finds himself faced with a gigantic stone image of himself on an alien planet in the second series of the Hitch-Hikers radio show, just a few years after pretty much the same thing happened to the Doctor.

I’m not accusing Adams of plagiarism, you understand, just of having been influenced… and no writer can work without influences.  Indeed, one view of writing is that it consists of the shuffling around and misinterpretation of what other people have already done in some way or another.  Nothing wrong with that.  And Adams was one of the most brilliant comic writers who ever lived, so….

But I’ve often wondered if the Sixth Doctor bequeathed a little something of himself to Dirk.  Was Adams watching the show in 1985-6?  The first Dirk book came out in ’87.

Perhaps its just the elision that I created in my own mind when reading the Dirk Gently novels as a teenager.

In any case, happy posthumous birthday Douglas.  Thank you for ‘Pirate Planet’ – a deceptively angry story about imperialism and the cost of prosperity – and for co-writing ‘City of Death’.  Sorry about what they did in that fucking film.  And sorry about that Artemis Fowl  bloke pissing on your grave while lighting cigars with banknotes.  And thanks for creating an award for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Fuck in a Serious Screenplay.  I remember reading that at about the age of 16 and laughing so much I nearly suffocated.…

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Trouble & Strife

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Just brought myself to watch the Neil Gaiman one. 

Shit. 

Bunch of tricks.  Everything, from the mail-cube to the supposedly scary goings-on in the TARDIS corridors turned out to be a trick of some kind.

In line with Gaiman’s usual style, it was a load of cynical and calculated pandering to his market’s baser instincts (fanwank) while also patronising them. 

The makeshift lashup junk-TARDIS was like the writer was patting the old show on the head and going “awww, bless”. 

Such condescension would be obnoxious but justifiable if Gaiman’s episode had expanded and fulfilled and outclassed the best of the old show.  But it didn’t.  It was meaningless and equivocal as a compliment.  It was like someone who claimed to love me giving me a Jeffrey Archer paperback as a birthday gift. However warm the inscription, it’d be obvious that the gift-giver didn’t really know or care about me at all.

It was vacuous and superficial, which was all the worse because it toyed listlessly and disinterestedly with concepts (rejectamenta, reclamation, reconstruction) which are potentially oneiric, semiotically rich and thematically charged.  Gaiman used them as nothing but a self-consciously grungey backdrop for a story about… umm… er…

Well, it wasn’t about the junkyard people at any rate.  They were all briefly employed for cutesy weirdness and then callously dispatched without the narrative bothering to register that they were even people, rather than collections of mannerisms. 

Even Idris was killed without anyone seemingly noticing, simply because she was a vehicle for… well, for a vehicle… a vehicle which was alive… which we already knew. 

In other words, rather than bothering with any concepts or characterisation, we got a story in which the Doctor essentially concentrates on how fond he is of his car.

The present-day show to a tee.  Worship and fondle and mist-up over the kit and the stuff.  Announce banalities like “oooh, ‘alive’ is a complex concept” with blaring musical cues but never bother to actually make any of the onscreen life complex at all.  Spice with ersatz characters, pad with tricksy narrative effects and drizzle with arbitrary fanwank.  

Still… probably the best episiode of the series.…

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Spot the Difference (Hint: There Isn’t One)

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Practically indistinguishable, aren’t they?

Two utterly generic, handsome-in-a-slightly-unusual-but-not-too-unusual-way blokes, both with hairdos that were carefully shaped to look messy, both in geek chic costumes, both playing dreary ‘modern’ versions of fictional protagonists who have now become brands and nothing more, both as bland as fuck.

How telling that the RT can deliberately put them both on the same cover… without realising that, in so doing, they’re demonstrating the paralysing homogeneity to which two great characters have now been brought by a cavalcade of cynical, philistine, cultural vandals.…

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Dwarf

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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.…

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Companion Relief

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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?…

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