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“If I’ve lived a thousand times before/And if I’m gonna live a million more”: Requiem for Methuselah

, 10

“Hi there. This is Flint, for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation…”

“Requiem for Methuselah” is an episode I feel like I should probably like a whole lot more than I did. It’s got a knowingly overreaching central premise, sublimely poetic dialog, and strong, moving acting. Furthermore, it also has that signature hallmark of the very best budget-starved speculative fiction TV around: The main characters sitting around in a room debating philosophy with the guest stars. Somewhere in here is a tragic story about human frailty and the human condition: In some ways it does 1970s Gene Roddenberry better than Gene Roddenberry. It’s also Jerome Bixby’s final Star Trek contribution, and, judging by his later work, a story that meant a great deal to him.

And here I am trying to figure out what to say about it.

I guess a plot summary is in order. After an outbreak of lethal Rigellian flu renders the Enterprise a literal plague ship, Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet on an emergency mission to acquire a sample of a rare element from which McCoy can derive an antidote. If they don’t return to the ship in two hours, everyone aboard will perish. On the planet they meet a mysterious man named Flint, who claims to have fled Earth to escape it’s neverending barbarism and conflict. After a “test of strength”, Flint offers to have his robot servant collect the ore McCoy needs to craft the vaccine, and invites the landing party to his house, a sprawling mansion lavishly adorned with an impossible array of collectibles, including a first edition Gutenberg Bible, first drafts of William Shakespeare’s plays and what appear to be brand new, authentic works by Brahms and Leonardo da Vinci. But his biggest surprise is his adopted daughter Rayna, whom Flint claims is educated in centuries of art, music and science…and who immediately captures Kirk’s heart.

The first half of the episode seems to halfheartedly play with doing another critique of Star Trek‘s claim to utopia, having Flint debate with Kirk, Spock and McCoy about how and by what standards humans consider themselves advanced, but this largely takes a backseat to the primary sci-fi mystery: Who Flint is, why he behaves so erratically and what his sudden interest in the Enterprise crew is. The problem is the mystery is painfully easy to guess, and this is clear to everyone except the actual characters from about ten minutes into the runtime. I’m just going to go ahead and spoil “Requiem for Methuselah”’s big trump card right now, because it’s pretty much the script’s only actual idea and the fact it holds it to the climax makes the whole episode feel tortuously padded: The reason Flint is able to amass such a collection and has the money for his enormous compound (and so apparently we’ve decided money does exist in the world of the Original Series then?) is that he literally is Brahms and da Vinici, as well as Alexander the Great, Lazarus and Methuselah, as well as a whole host of other major historical figures.…

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“I’ve known many times,” says the Doctor, “some of them much more pleasant than others.”

“Well, I quite like it here, I must say,” interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, “Everyone’s been most kind.”

The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.

The Doctor, however, is unimpressed.  He swills more wine.  He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.

“Well, I met some people today who were far from kind,” he says.  He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller’s utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.

“That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you,” says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, “You must not jump to conclusions.”

“Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard,” snaps the Doctor, “Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?”

We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime.  It looked like a gulag.  People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment.  At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.

Grapes make wine, of course.  Wine is strangely present in this story.  Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles’ wine cellar.

“That was not a factory, Doctor,” returns the Controller mechanically.

“Oh? Then what was it?”  The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.

 “A rehabilitation centre.  A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals.”

“Including old men and women, even children?”

“There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor,” says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate… but then, to people like him, it always is.

“Now that’s an old fashioned point of view,” says the Doctor “even from my standards.”

I love that line, but it makes me feel sad.  It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint.  I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work… so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.

“I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run,” says the controller.

Note that.  It’s never been more efficient and more “economically run” than when the bloody Daleks are in control.

“People have never been happier or more prosperous,” he continues.

“Then why,” asks the Doctor, “do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don’t they like being happy and prosperous?”

This cuts right to the quick.  It cuts to the delusion – still widespread on the left at that time – that ‘really existing socialism’ was in some meaningful way an improvement. …

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“What if there’s no one out there?” asks the Doctor.  He’s inside the Brannigans’ floating car, stuck in gridlock.

What if the world ended when you weren’t looking?

“Someone’s got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it’s there in your eyes. What if the traffic jam never stops?”

“There’s a whole city above us,” says Brannigan, “The mighty city state of New New York. They wouldn’t just leave us.”

“In that case, where are they?” counters the Doctor.  “What if there’s no help coming, not ever? What if there’s nothing? Just the motorway, with the cars going round and round and round and round, never stopping. Forever.”

What if the whole system is an utterly insane roundalay, going nowhere, getting noplace, just leaving everyone stranded, doing nothing but belching out endless clouds of toxic smoke?  What if the crisis is permanent.  What if normality is the crisis?  What if everyday life is the end of the world?

Walter Benjamin said that history was a train crash, and revolution was when the passengers pulled the communication cord.  The people of New New York left it too late to pull the cord.  Capitalism crashed around them, shattering as one of their products ran out of control (a bit like, say, a stock market or a credit system).  In the story, the product was a patch that managed mood.  It was a palliative against the horror, which only intensified the horror.  The Heaven of the state was depopulated, leaving lofty council chambers full of skeletons.  The Hell of the lower levels filled up with fumes, and monsters of the repressed started to breed within them.  And Limbo filled up with the survivors.

“Shut up! Just shut up!” cries Valerie, Brannigan’s wife.

Sally Calypso appears on the screen.  “This is Sally Calypso, and it’s that time again. The sun is blazing high in the sky over the New Atlantic, the perfect setting for the daily contemplation.”

“You think you know us so well, Doctor,” says Brannigan, “But we’re not abandoned. Not while we have each other.”

Contrary to what most pop-culture will tell you, ordinary people are generally pretty damned good to each other in the aftermaths of disasters.

There’s a sense in which the amazing co-operation to be found, for the most part, in Tahrir Square and Occupy, was something akin to mutual aid in the aftermath of a disaster.  Under capitalism as it stands (or tries to stand) every single day is the aftermath of a disaster.  Prescient in so many ways, this episode.

The people of the gridlock are all locked away from each other in their seperate boxes, the way capitalism locks us away… but in the aftermath of the ongoing disaster of modernity, they’re also making lives and friendships and networks of support.

“This is for all of you out there on the roads,” says Sally, “We’re so sorry. Drive safe.”

And everyone in gridlock starts to sing in unison.  This may be another patch, another mood stabiliser… but it is also a real and material act, an act of solidarity. …

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The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.

Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue.  Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form.  But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution.  Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth.  It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property.  It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light’s ship.  A colonizing mission.  A merger and acquisition.  This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting.  The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire.  It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of ‘the survival of the fittest’… meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best.  With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of ‘lesser races’ and ‘lower orders’ and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey’s purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.

But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar.  Just to see what would happen.

Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.

To Light, we’re merely walking bowls of “sugars, proteins and amino acids”.  Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying “I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it”.  That’s just how reductionism works.  To understand something, you take it to pieces.  But what happens when you can’t put the pieces back together again?  Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits?  Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory… and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism.  A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules.  Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon.  It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul.  It is something people name, and build towns around.  Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people.  It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen.  Likewise – more so – people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not).  Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property.  Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That’s part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress.  It’s partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock. …

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Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee shop.

 “I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.

It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”

Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.

Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet’s client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.

So it’s the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design – the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.

And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible – to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”

 “The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.

“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”

So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.…

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Everyone is down a mine.

(Incidentally, it’s funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines.  I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners’ unions and their industry by the Tory government.  Oh ho no.)

Anyway.  As I say, everyone – the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato – is down a mine.  And things are coming to a head.  (Head.  Pit-head.  Geddit?  Never mind.  It doesn’t really work anyway.)

Yes, so anyway…  Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.

“Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement,” says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. “Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals….”

There’s an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.

“…the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll,” the Doctor continues, “Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there’s a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so…”

“So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!” finishes Romana.

“Right. But who was the first person he met?”

“The person who held the monopoly of metal here,” supplies Organon in response to the Doctor’s rhetorical question.

He means Adrasta, by the way.

“Right,” agrees the Doctor, “And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him.”

If you don’t know what that last bit means, well I’m sorry… I have limited space and no inclination to explain.  What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you’re not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?

What Erato didn’t reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism…  By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.

The funny thing is… this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history.  Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged).…

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LIN’n’DA has allowed ‘Mr Kennedy’ into their little circle of friends.  His determination to find the Doctor is the opposite of their desire to socialise & laugh while sharing their ideas & obsessions & histories.  Even if much of what we know about LIN’n’DA is just Elton’s garbled wish-fulfillment, it’s still a nice story.  Until Kennedy arrives.  It’s never the same again.  Hierarchy is introduced, along with work schedules & targets & orders & timetables & a drive for objective ‘results’.

“Though we had to admit,” recalls Elton, “he was right. His methods were much more rigorous. It felt like we were getting closer & closer to the Doctor.”

As if that had ever been the point.

“Umm, Mr Kennedy?” says Elton cautiously, raising his hand as though he’s a kid at school trying to attract the attention of his teacher… & actually, LI’n’DA’s headquarters now looks like a school room.  The friends are sat at desks, toilng away individually & silently at private work.  Mr Kennedy is every inch the teacher.  He sits at the head of the room, behind a desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of pedagogy.

“We were wondering…” Elton continues, “…no sign of Bliss. Do you know where she is?”

Bless Bliss.

“Yes,” replies Kennedy irritibly, “didn’t she tell you? She’s getting married. She left a message. It’ll never last, stupid girl. Come on, back to work.”

Yes, back to work kids…

Thing is though, LI’n’DA doesn’t just look like a school room now.  It also looks like an open plan office, or a call centre.  The friends are now workers, arriving on time & working on projects according to the dictats of their new boss.  He watches to make sure they don’t slack.  He assesses their results.  He expects to profit from their work.  That’s what he’s in this for.  LI’n’DA has become a Doctor-finding factory.  LI’n’DA has been enclosed.  Accumulation by dispossession.  The relentless absorbtion of everything into itself: the essence of neoliberalism.

It’s no coincidence that the school room also looks like the workplace.  The school system in capitalism is a way of training the future workforce to arrive on time five days a week, to savour the weekend, to obey orders, to work towards output targets, to have your work judged & tracked, & discipline oneself for a lifetime of showing up.

Kennedy is many things (teacher, boss, repressed misanthrope, caricature of the uber-fan…), but among them he is a summation of something the Doctor has found himself facing many times before: he’s capital as a monster.

He’s a ruthless, pin-striped posho… but it goes deeper than that.  Like the Cybermen, he’s a user & utiliser, an employer, an encloser of hopes & dreams & friendship… & even flesh.  Like so many monsters from the Wirrn to the Krynoids, he absorbs people into himself, first figuratively then literally.  He encloses even the bodies of the workers in his factory, adapting them to his purposes, feeding off them & monopolising all life – just like a vampire, that gothic monster of capital. …

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For March Against the Mainstream Media Day

The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki’s true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she’s actually…

“Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?”  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

“The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five’s transmissions,” says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, “We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people.”

“Ooo, I love it,” he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he’s listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, “Say it again.”

“This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?”

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he’s a slave himself.

“I answer to the Editor in Chief…. If you don’t mind, I’m going to have to refer this upwards.”

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

“What is that?” she asks.

“Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born.”

Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

“I don’t know anything,” she says proudly.

“Don’t you even ask?”

“Why would I?”

“You’re a journalist.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

She genuinely doesn’t understand him.  She doesn’t know what is on the floors above her… except that on the executive level, the place she’s been trained to yearn for, “the walls are made of gold”.  She doesn’t know why “immigration has tightened up”.  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random ‘shit happens’ model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by ‘News’, in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the ‘news’ and ‘information’, they don’t know what’s going on or why.

“This society’s the wrong shape…” says the Doctor.

When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren’t made of gold, they’re made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies – including Suki.

“I think she’s dead,” says the Doctor.

“She’s working,” says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead… or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

“It may interest you to know,” smarms the Editor, “that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it’s not actually human at all. It’s merely a place where humans happen to live…”

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

“…yeah, sorry…” the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, “It’s a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client.”…

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A Giant Book Launch

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Right, lots to cover here. First of all, the final part of Alex and my guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog is up, with me running over some videos of and about They Might Be Giants.

As this suggests, our book for the 33 1/3 series on They Might Be Giants’ 1990 landmark Flood is now available for purchase. The Kindle edition looks to be, for some reason, held back until November 28th. Nobody tells me anything about these things or why. Further frustrating is that in the UK, print isn’t available until January, although, oddly, you seem to be getting the Kindle edition in two weeks. There are no doubt sound reasons for this as well.

But enough about the details. Let’s talk about this book. And then after I talk about it, I’ll give two copies away.

Flood is, without being particularly autobiographical at all and with half of it written by someone else, probably the most personal book I’ve ever written. They Might Be Giants formed an absolutely massive part of my childhood cultural landscape, effectively plugging the gap between my flaming out of interest in Doctor Who come 1996 and the early stages of adulthood represented by college. They were the soundtrack to my middle and high school years.

Much of this had to do with their peculiar status as the quasi-official band of a summer camp for “gifted and talented” students that I went to. The camp, called CTY, was a three-week session in which you took a condensed eight-hour-a-day course, punctuated by a smattering of mandatory fun including a trio of weekly dances. Within these dances there was a canon of songs that absolutely had to be played somewhere in the event, culminating in the final song for every dance, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a fact about which there is a ten thousand word essay just begging to be written.

CTY is an impossibly large experience for me. It marked the first time in which I was in any sort of social setting in which I was normal. Frighteningly so, at times. This necessitated a rather massive paradigm shift. And my experience was hardly unusual – indeed, Alex attended a few years before I did. The camp was also deeply leftist in terms of the leanings of its student population – there was a widespread protest against an administrative decision to forbid cross-dressing in 1997 – and an aggressively horizon-expanding experience. It is a carnivalesque experience for anyone whose usual social interactions are defined by the ever-present threat of bullying. That the age range in which one attends – 12-16 – coincides with puberty and interest in sex further adds to the strange and heady mix.

Returning to the dances, then, it is notable that They Might Be Giants had two songs in the canon: “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” No other band had two slots like that. No other band ever could. So let’s freeze the image there. In a context in which hundreds of nerds encounter widespread social acceptance for the first time, overlapping with sexual awakening, come weekly dances – a particularly fast pace of them.…

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Earl plays a C on his harmonica.  It starts a sympathetic resonance in the pipes that stretch under and through the regime on Terra Alpha, like the arteries in a body.  What flows in these arteries is sugarly gloop, the outpourings of the Kandy Kitchen.  It fills the regime with the glucose it needs to survive.  And the regime uses it to kill dissidents or refuseniks or men wearing pink triangles, drowning them in sweetness.  Earl’s note causes the encrusted, crystallised, fossilised sugar coating the insides of the pipes to crack and fall.  Tonnes of the stuff falls on top of Fifi, Helen A’s savage attack dog and beloved pet.  She sent it into the pipes to kill the Doctor and the Pipe People, the surviving aboriginals on her colony.

“Happiness will prevail,” says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, “Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting.”

This is a revolution.  The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules.  The factories are falling to strikers.  Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act.  And, as in ‘The Sun Makers’, you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.

“It’s only one factory, Daisy K,” says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, “I’ve built over a thousand.”  (Not that much like Thatcher then.  She didn’t build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)

“What about the reports of riots?,” asks Daisy K, “And public unhappiness?”

Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat’s piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.

Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer… but it turns out that she’s already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don’t have ‘prisons’ on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds).  So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to…

“Get me the Kandyman.”

“You’re not unhappy about something?” asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A’s ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened… just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.

“GET ME THE KANDYMAN!”

The Kandyman answers his telephone.

“Kandyman,” he says.  (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time.  It’s so arch.)

He’s an evil Bertie Basset.  Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit.  The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority.  He’s the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist… and he’s a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power. …

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