Eruditorum Press

Fashionably late capitalism

A Fluctuation in the Visual Purple (The Last War in Albion Part 18: Steve Moore, Doctor Who)

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This is the first of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Doctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore quit his job to become a comics creator, and between his work in Sounds Magazine and in his local paper was able to make £45 a week, slightly more than he was making on welfare. Thus began his career as a full-time professional comics creator. But Moore recognized that his art skills were not up to the task, and that he should look into the more efficient approach such as writing scripts for other people to draw…
There’s nobody there, was never anybody there except a fluctuation in the visual purple, a perceptual misunderstanding, trick of moonlight. -Alan Moore, Unearthing
Figure 136: Part two of Three Eyes McGurk
and his Death Planet Commandos (Steve
Moore, as Pedro Henry, and Alan Moore,
as Curt Vile, 1979)
Moore’s ascent from a grubby £45-a-week freelance existence to becoming one of the most successful and acclaimed artists of his era was similarly dependent on a variety of friends and helpers. Most significant of these, early on, was his friend Steve Moore, who he first met in the late 1960s, and who provided the model for his eventual transition into being a writer instead of a writer-artist. Steve Moore, in fact, is the writer behind the Pedro Henry pseudonym, and stepped in to help Moore manage his workload by plotting the final year of The Stars My Degradation. But Steve Moore’s influence is not just limited to this late game assist. One of the major characters of The Stars My Degradataion is Axel Pressbutton, an extravagantly violent cyborg who made his first appearance in a strip called “Three Eyes McGurk and his Death Planet Commandos,” another early non-paying gig Moore did for the minor British music magazine Dark Star. Moore had been working on a strip called The Avenging Hunchback, a superhero parody, but the second installment of that strip was lost when the editor’s car was stolen, and Moore was too disheartened to repeat all of his delicate stippling. Accordingly, Steve Moore stepped in to help his friend, writing “Three Eyes McGurk” as a replacement strip, and including the Pressbutton character. (Moore in fact based Pressbutton’s visual design on Lex Loopy, a Lex Luthor parody designed for The Avenging Hunchback.) “Three Eyes McGurk” ended up being Moore’s first American publication, getting a reprint in a 1981 anthology edited by Gilbert Shelton, and Moore went on to incorporate the character (earlier in his life, as he dies at the end of his original appearance) into The Stars My Degradation. 
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“Come in, won’t you?” calls the Doctor, “I’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

Koquillion answers the invitation.

“This used to be the Peoples’ Hall of Judgement,” remarks the Doctor, regarding the empty chamber sadly, “Fitting, in the present circumstances don’t you think?  Mr Bennett, may I remind you that masks and robes such as you are wearing are only used on absolutely ceremonial occasions, hmm?”

Koquillion removes his face.  Bennett is beneath.

He explains that he is a murderer.

“I killed a crewmember on the spaceship to Astra. I was arrested. The ship crashed. My crime hadn’t been radioed to Earth. I knew if I could get rid of the other crewmembers…”

“Get rid of the other crewmembers and blame their deaths on the Dido people, hmm?”

“When we crash landed, the inhabitants invited us all to a grand meeting. It was simple. I just arranged an explosive, using the ships armaments. The whole thing went up. All the inhabitants, the crew, the whole race.”

“You destroyed a whole planet to save your own skin. You’re insane.”

“The girl didn’t know I’d been arrested. When we get back to Earth, she’d support my story. I dressed up as Koquillion to show her how terrible the people here were.”

According to the Doctor they were actually hospitable and sociable people, the few hundred that used to live there anyway.  The ones that survived Bennett’s explosion, and who turn up to get him, are pretty pissed off however. Understandably. But Bennet never had a moment’s doubt that his fable of their murderous fierceness would be believed.

Implicit in the very fabric of the story is the assumption that ‘Earth’ or ‘humanity’ means Whitey.  Caucasians.  Westerners.  This is something that is far from unproblematic, and it occurs again and again, even – perhaps especially – in SF satires of colonialism.  And, when the “Dido people” appear, they’re not represented as people of colour, which tends to rub people of colour out of their own story.  And yet, as ever, there’s a double bind here.  To represent them as people of colour would be for the culture industries Western imperialism to take it upon themselves to represent the kinds of people their own societies decimated.  The solution isn’t to be found within the culture industries, or within the creation of TV texts. The necessary solution is a dialectical and political one that changes society, not just the attitudes of society, or the way society makes television.

And yet, all that being said… also implicit in this particular story is the assumption that Bennett would be believed without question when he dishonestly blamed the aboriginal inhabitants of an uncolonised ‘New World’ for a senseless massacre of his fellow passengers and crew.  Also implicit is the assumption on the part of Bennett that the culture and sophistication of the Didoans counts for nothing, that their People’s Hall of Judgement is just another place that he can use and abuse them without being judged.

They key figure here is the mask. …

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The Doctor, the Brigadier, some scientists and a Ministry bureaucrat have ventured inside Axos, a living ship that has just landed on Earth.

The Axons have greeted them.  They are a nuclear family – man in charge, surrounded by wife and boy and girl – modelled on classical statuary, their skin a lustrous gold.

They reflect the prejudices of those they meet.  They are part of Axos and have formed themselves from the ship/entity.  They easily adapt their image to Westernism, Patriarchy, Classicism, the worship of the commodity and of wealth itself.

In return for shelter (ostensibly), they offer “a gift… a payment”.  They appear unable to quite understand the concept of ‘gift’, immediately amending their use of the word.  They meant ‘payment’, which implies a commodity transaction.

Their payment is…

“Axonite!”

It looks like a mineral, something torn from the ground by labour.  In reality it is just another aspect of Axos, individuated from the amorphous and tentacular mass of the whole so it will pass as a rock.

“Axonite is the source of all our growth technology,” says Daddy Axon, “Axonite can absorb, convert, transmit and programme all forms of energy.”

Note the word ‘growth’.  To Axos, this is a central concept.  It’s why they’re here.

They do a deal.  Axonite will be distributed around the globe.

“This is indeed a rich planet you have brought us to,” Axos tells their unwilling partner, the Master.

Axos has found a new market into which it can spread, new material to consume.

“Axonite must encircle the world,” says Axos.

When it has been distributed globally, Axonite will absorb all energy and return to Axos, glutting it with new power.  Remember, Axonite can be anything.  It can take any form.  It can grow via an occult process.  It covers the world.  It has a “cycle” which ends with its absorbtion and assimilation of everything around it.  It returns to Axos, which is another aspect of itself, bigger and richer, swelling and increasing the whole.  It is the commodity form itself – the commodity fetishised and come alive, personifying itself and then treating people as commodities to be consumed.  It is scrambled, insane, multifarious, protean, yet singular and unitary.  It glitters.  It is lusted after as a transformation of production (of food, technology, anything at all) and as power in and of itself… yet the people who want it to serve them end up serving it.  It is alien to humanity, yet dresses in the clothes of Western tradition, classical values, oppressive gender relations and wealth.  It offers itself as payment, then takes everything as profit.  It is ravenous.  Vampiric.  It circulates and ends its cycle with profit it has sucked from the world.  And then it moves on, still hungry.

It is capital.…

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TW

Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale’s dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It’s one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In ‘The Time Meddler’, Edith’s implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In ‘Vengeance on Varos’, Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It’s utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That’s not worse… except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that – it’s Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she’s a ruthless killer in battle… but slapping a ‘hysteric’ like she’s James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors’ code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She’s even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela – or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela – has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as “the owner’s fancy woman”.  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways… but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it’s quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on “men’s clothes… working clothes”, etc.  Leela’s actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn’t just a dishrag because she’s a woman; she’s like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class… a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap… which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or ‘Human Nature’). …

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Having devoured Harg, giant green squid monster Kroll is off to the settlement of the People of the Lakes, known to Harg’s compatriots by the derogatory name of ‘Swampies’. 

Constructed from tropes and white liberal guilt, these green space Indians are still better than the blue ones in Avatar.  They don’t get their world back in the end (neither did the Cherokee) and don’t get a white man as a leader.

“The Swampies most certainly do have some problems,” chuckles Thawn – Company man, racist and boss of the Refinery.

“You know,” muses his second-in-command Fenner, a cynical and cowardly man, “I don’t particularly like the Swampies… but I can’t say that I really hate them.”  He is just decent enough to be faintly disturbed by Thawn’s open callousness.

Suddenly serious, Thawn says “Oh, I don’t hate them Fenner.  I just want them permanently removed.  I spent many years persuading the Company to back this project, and now that we’re on the verge of success I’m not going to be stopped by lily-livered sentimentalists wailing about the fate of a few primitive savages.”

Thawn is lying, of course.  He hates them.  He thinks they’re inferior, worthless… but he never mentions the fact that they’re skin is a different colour to his.  In many ways, this story downplays race too much as an axis of oppression… and then, on the subject of axes of oppression being downplayed, there’s the fact that there seem to be no women on the planet at all apart from Romana. 

To Thawn, the worst thing about the Swampies is that they’re in his way.  They’re bad for business.  They sit on resources that Thawn claims, but which happen – irritatingly – to be buried in someone else’s land.  So, for the sake of Progress, you have to get rid of the ‘savages’.

Thawn and Fenner hold these truths to be self-evident.…

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Outside the Government: Adrift

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All this week my coauthor Alex Reed and I are guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog in celebration of our book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood coming out on Thursday. The latest post is my short essay “How to be Fifteen,” a reflection on teenage music fandom in the late 90s. If you miss the Nintendo Project, this post is in a similar vein.

It’s March 19th, 2008. Duffy’s at number one with “Mercy,” with Leona Lewis, Alphabeat, Utah Saints, and Nickelback also charting. Nickelback has been charting for a really long time, actually. It’s kind of unnerving. In news, Queen Elizabeth opens Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Geraldine Ferraro resigns from the Clinton campaign for saying stupid things, and Wales win the Six Nations tournament, taking the rugby Grand Slam in the process. There’s sizable unrest in Tibet, Bear Stearns goes under as the Great Recession gathers steam, and Obama gives his big race speech in Philadelphia.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Adrift. Where Something Borrowed marked a satisfying return to Torchwood’s strengths, Adrift marks an unabashed celebration of those strengths. Double banked with Fragments, it pushes the bulk of the regular cast to the margins to tell a story that is focused intimately on Gwen Cooper and on her personal supporting cast of Rhys and Andy. From the start of the series it has been clear that Gwen is its real star. Captain Jack may have the Doctor Who connection and the leading man charisma, but Gwen has the astonishingly gifted Eve Myles, who routinely offers an impressively brave performance that imbues the character with a warmth and humanity that never makes her feel like she was designed to be part of a generic action-adventure ensemble.

What really underlines just how impressive Gwen is as a character is the fact that even here, at the end of the first season, elements of her character that were designed to let her function as the “viewpoint” character are still in place. Initially, after all, Gwen was the character through which we found out about Torchwood Three. The first few episodes used the order in which she learned things as the order in which they were revealed to the audience, and her character was defined by her inexperience and lack of knowledge. By this point in the show, of course, that’s long gone; Gwen is thoroughly experienced with Torchwood and hyper-capable.

And yet elements of her initial characterization persist. Gwen wasn’t just a fish-out-of-water character, but a character who was defined by the fact that she did not originate in the world of Torchwood, which was first presented as a strange and eccentric space that superimposed itself over her world. What’s key in Everything Changes is in hindsight the way in which she slowly remembers her trip to the Hub, as a flickering dream that plays out over her world, not quite making contact. She is an ordinary person who comes to Torchwood. The next episode makes clear that this is a trait unique to her – every other member of Torchwood either originates from that world or has their ordinary life torn down around them before they join.…

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“They live, we sleep.”: The Cloud Minders

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“My beloved, let’s get down to business/Mental self defense fitness”

Well. This, I did not expect.

There are quite possibly no bedfellows stranger than Dave Gerrold, Oliver Crawford and Margaret Armen. Gerrold is at this point still an energetic young Star Trek fan and beginning writer, albeit one who, with the help of Gene Coon, penned arguably the single greatest episode of the Original Series. Crawford was an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who miraculously recovered his career after being blacklisted for refusing to disclose names of supposed communist sympathizers, but his only Star Trek credits have been co-writing “The Galileo Seven” with Shimon Wincelberg and somewhat misreading Gene Coon in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. Armen, meanwhile, is one of my least favourite writers in the entire series and a compelling candidate for one of the worst as well, with the two spectacular turkeys that were “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome” to her name. The prospect of a story jointly written by all three of these wildly disparate talents is quite frankly inconceivable. But hey, we got Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop last week, so stranger things have happened.

Actually, “The Lights of Zetar” is a good point of comparison because like it, “The Cloud Minders” is absolutely a flawed masterpiece, which took me completely by surprise: This one is properly excellent. I mean, it’s not perfect-It has some worryingly serious flaws which, although customary for the third season, are still really annoying and keep “The Cloud Minders” from completely going the distance. But there are moments of genuine greatness in this story, and it crackles with an energy and passion the show hasn’t seen since John Meredyth Lucas was running the show. This is most likely the part of the episode inherited from Gerrold, who wrote the original story pitch, entitled “Castles in the Sky”. Thankfully from my perspective, Gerrold gave a quite lengthy and detailed comment about the differences between his story and the episode that made it to air in his book The World of Star Trek, which both gives me ample fodder for discussion and saves me having to summarise the plot:

“It was intended as a parable between the haves and the have-nots, the haves being the elite who are removed from the realities of everyday life – they live in their floating sky cities. The have-nots were called “Mannies” (for Manual Laborers) and were forced to live on the surface of the planet where the air was denser, pressure was high, and noxious gases made the conditions generally unlivable. The Mannies torn between two leaders, one a militant, and one a Martin Luther King figure. (Mind you, this was in 1968, shortly after King was assassinated, and just before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

In my original version, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura were captured by the Mannies when their shuttlecraft was shot down by a missile. (The Enterprise desperately needed dilithium crystals. This planet was one of the Federation’s biggest suppliers, and Kirk’s concern was to restore the flow of crystals.

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Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it’s not the sort of place the old Midge would’ve visited.  The old Midge would’ve been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

“Waiting on the Sarge?” he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  “He’s been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you.”

This is a lie.

“I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I’d share it with you.”

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He’s been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed… not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that – one senses – is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of ‘fuck you, I’m all right’.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

“It’s common sense, right?  It’s just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest.”

And he’s right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher’s Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It’s in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It’s in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It’s in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It’s in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn’t matter that it’s one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn’t because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

“Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me.”

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that’s what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room. …

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“My goodness…” says the Doctor as yet more fine fare is brought to the Tharils already-laden table, “You live like kings.”

“We are kings,” says Biroc impassively.  He merely states it as a fact.  He is both part of this feast and an observer of it.  He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline.  He can travel along his own trajectory.  He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat.  He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either.  His tone is neutral.  Truthful.

Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men – who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use – are sitting down for their lunch break.  They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.

Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is.  He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them. 

Back in the ‘past’, back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils’ luxury and variety comes from.

“The universe is our garden,” says Biroc simply.  Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.

“Ah. So this is what it was all like.”

“At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men.”

The mention of slaves turns the Doctor’s mind instantly to the servants moving around the table.  He responds to Biroc’s barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.

“I notice you don’t do too badly for staff,” says the Doctor.  “This garden of yours, the universe… how do you manage it”

“We use our power.  For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle.”  The Tharils have the power to travel where they will – the basic requirement of any imperial project.  “Everything is ours.”

The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet.  The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly.  The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.

“Including her?” he asks.

“They’re only people.”  Again, Biroc’s tone is flat.  He does not endorse or condemn… except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation.  He simply recites the truth of how this system operated.  To the Tharils, their slaves were only people… just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils.  But there is no self-justification from Biroc.  He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses.  Rorvik is losing control of his present.  Biroc owns his past. 

“So you’re the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?”

“The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that.” …

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John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea.  John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.

“Ah,” says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, “A decision. Would it make any difference?”

“It would make your tea sweet,” says John, humouring this strange customer.

“Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?”

“Not really.”

“But…”

John is suddenly strangely interested.  “Yeah?” he prompts, wanting to hear more.  (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the ‘magical negro‘ stereotype… but actually he’s just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman.  As such he’s one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people.  Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)

“What if I could control people’s tastebuds?” suggests the Doctor, “What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane.”

One person making a little decision doesn’t change much.  Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however…

“My father, he was a cane cutter,” says John.

“Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter, would he?”

“If this sugar thing had never started,” says John, “my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African.”

In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal.  Slaves were literally worked to death.  The horrors of Caribbean slavery – virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries – equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans).  The connection between these horrors – that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery – is still less often made.

John is lucky to exist at all.  For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.

Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism.  ‘Race’ is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct… and a relatively recent one in its current form.  ‘Races’ were made socially.  It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were ‘white’.  The idea that ‘negroes’ were an inferior ‘race’ arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the ‘New World’.  It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions.  The American Declaration of Independence stated “all men are created equal”. …

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