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Outside the Government: His Last Vow

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It’s January 12th, 2014. Pharrell Williams is happily at number one, with Beyonce, Eminem, Ellie Goulding, and Pitbull also charting. In news, a cold snap in the US has all fifty states with at least somewhere below freezing, and a chemical leak in West Virginia leaves 300,000 without clean water. In the UK, the death of Mark Duggan, which kicked off riots in the summer of 2011, is ruled to have been lawful, while Keith Wallis pleads guilty for falsely claiming to have heard Andrew Mitchell call some police officers “plebs.” 

On television, meanwhile, the shooting star that is Sherlock Series Three finishes its arc across the firmament with the Moffat script. His Last Vow is an odd thing. There are days on which I think it might be Moffat’s greatest ever script. But I mean “great” in its most complexly troubled sense. Moffat has been open about the fact that Series Seven of Doctor Who and The Day of the Doctor were miserable experiences. If the latter was him hauling himself back into fighting shape, then, this is the script with which he means to take back the mantle of being one of the most essential voices on television. But that means that this story lacks the runaway sense of triumph the fiftieth anniversary had. This is the long, hard title fight in which Moffat goes the distance with a set of ideas that are right on the edge of his capabilities. The result is harder, spikier, and far less approachable. It’s also the far greater accomplishment. Chris O’Leary, writing about “Station to Station,” describes the song thusly: “One of the many lies we tell children is that there’s no limit to the imagination. Of course there is. Even the most consuming and perceptive of minds reaches its borders and retreats. Expanding the mind is dog’s work, as grueling as it’s often fruitless; few attempt it, fewer succeed in it, and those who do often come out twisted and torn. In 1975, binging on cocaine, living in paranoid isolation and making a rock record, David Bowie succeeded.” One doubts Moffat’s version of this involved quite so much cocaine, but there is a similar sense of an artist clawing his way, bloodied and stunned, to a peak he knows even as he reaches it that he will never surpass. 

But while Moffat’s script is the element that’s pushing to new heights, it comes off because he’s backed by an absolutely staggering array of talent. Cumberbatch, Freeman, and especially Abbington rise to the ambition of the material, while Nick Hurran shows why he’s become one of Moffat’s most trusted collaborators. With Moffat at the frayed ends of his powers, he needs everyone to show up. They do, and the effect is an entire show determined to see just how far it can push things. In answering that question, then, we basically have to start at the ending, in which Moffat comes down firmly on the side of shooting Rupert Murdoch in the face. …

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The Ron Paul Revolution (Part 1)

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In my opinion, any account of the rise of the alt-right, especially one which emphasizes the role of libertarianism, and thus the distal causal role of the Austrian School of economics, must begin with Ron Paul.

In his essay ‘On Social Sadism’, published in the journal Salvage, China Miéville recounts an occasion when

[a]t a debate between Republican candidates in September 2011, Wolf Blitzer, the chair, mooted the case of a hypothetical thirty-year-old uninsured man who becomes sick. ‘[C]ongressman,’ Blitzer asks Ron Paul, ‘are you saying that society should just let him die?’

‘Yeah!’ comes a shout from the audience. A smattering of applause. The shout is repeated, and again, and the applause grows.

Paul retired from politics in 2013, but his shadow is long on the libertarian Right.  After the above exchange, Paul – a former medical doctor and a fervent libertarian, indeed a ‘paleolibertarian’, a follower of the syncresis of libertarianism and far-right conservatism invented by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell – suggested that the hypothetical man in the question should have a private medical plan.  “We’ve given up on this concept that we might assume responsibility for ourselves, that our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it,” opined Paul sententiously. He later clarified his position on Twitter saying that “[t]he individual, private charity, families, and faith based orgs should take care of people, not the government.”  Recognisably a species of the same weaselly ‘Big Society’ argument employed around the same time by the coalition government in the UK as its Tory leaders tried to find a way to reconcile lethal austerity with their claim to no longer being ‘the nasty party’. Charity as a moral imperative, supplanting the need for socialised care. Chilly Victorian workhouse morality, dressed up as a plaintive cry for us all to be nicer to each other (so no surplus value has to be diverted anywhere useless).  Paul’s iteration has a more overtly Christian flavour, as befits American politics, and a tang of his ostensible anti-authoritarianism, but it boils down to the same thing: a thoroughly neoliberal impulse to relieve the state of its responsibilities to its subjects, while framing this as asking the subjects to take back control of their responsibilities. In Cameron’s version, the emphasis was more on countering a supposed culture of dependence, whereas in Paul’s the emphasis was more on encouraging individual liberty.  But we’re splitting hairs. The difference here is, as I say, a matter of emphasis. And we learn a lot from the fact that the same argument, with tweaks for tone, can be advanced from what are supposedly ideologically distinct varieties of conservatism.

Neoliberalism is a broad church.  This has been true since its birth, since the Mont Pelerin Society included Austrians and monetarists, neoconservatives and ordoliberals.  It is key to its success. The collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas speaks to its status as a class project rather than a distinctly ideological one.  It’s one of the tragic ironies of history that the revolutionary projects of the ruling class are (or at least can be) marked by tolerance and cooperation between different branches of ruling class ideology, whereas the revolutionary projects of the working class have tended to be marked by the exact opposite.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 39/39: The Wrath of the Lamb

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THE WRATH OF THE LAMB: Reframing the title scheme for the back half of the season away from “Blake paintings” and towards “lines from Revelation,” and not entirely honestly. The title drop in the proceeding episode forces single vision, such that it can only refer to Will’s vengeance against Hannibal, although it’s not as though it would have been long on ambiguity without that.

I complained on Twitter a while back that there are no good instances of the deceptive edit, in which information is withheld from the audience purely by selectively editing around it so as to obscure it. The general problem with this is that it depends on selectively and covertly breaking the basic narrative codes of the medium, which state that editing is for communicating information, not for casual lying without any hints to this effect. Hannibal likely comes closer than most to being able to get away with it by the simple virtue of its editing never really suggesting a directly communicated reality in the first place. But the real reason it just about gets away with having an unseen cadaver in the room for this entire scene is just that the deception is mercifully short-lived.

It’s also worth noting that fully six minutes of this episode are pulled forward from “The Number of the Beast is 666.” To my knowledge the full details of the production of “The Wrath of the Lamb” have not yet been shared, but it’s evident that it was a troubled production, a fact that particularly affects the final fight scene, and the amount that had to get moved into it to get it up to its length seems to speak to that.

REBA MCCLANE: I drew a freak.

WILL GRAHAM: You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, don’t let yourself believe there is.

REBA MCCLANE: I know there’s nothing wrong with me. In making friends, I try to be wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. I’ve been with a few. The blind attract them.

WILL GRAHAM: Not just the blind.

It’s probably not the show’s deftest handling of blindness to use it as a basis for equating Reba and Will, but equally, the moment of shared empathy is important, especially as it’s the one opportunity to interact with someone other than Dolarhyde that Reba gets. The more interesting line, however, is Will’s defense of Dolarhyde, which grants the reality of his split personality in a way that leaves Dolarhyde himself oddly blameless. 

WILL GRAHAM: Molly and I want it to be the same.

HANNIBAL: When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will, don’t worry about me.

There’s a cut to Hannibal’s line, which is scripted to begin “Mutual assurances you try to exchange in the dark and in the day will pass through some refraction, making them miss their mark.” One assumes it’s for pacing reasons so as to get to the punchline faster, and in turn set up Will’s retaliation, but its a pity, as it’s a good line.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 38/39: The Number of the Beast is 666

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THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST IS 666: Last and in most ways least, it is to “The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea” what “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun” is to “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun”—a drabber and less chilling counterpart. The dragon is in an awkward pose that serves to expose the limitations of Blake’s anatomy, his face flattened in profile in such a way as to lose all animalistic grandeur. It is the one of the paintings to arguably look better when Fuller and company recreate it in “And the Woman Clothed in Sun.” Its one interesting element is the lamb-like figure behind the Beast from the Sea, a point of contrast and dissonance that enlivens the whole.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: It’s hard to predict when brittle materials will break. Hannibal gave you three years to build a family and a life, confident he’d find a way to take them from you.

WILL GRAHAM: And he has.

The blunt fatalism of this admission surprises, and doesn’t really seem to follow from any of Will and Molly’s interactions last episode. Nor is it entirely clear what’s going on here. Will asserts that he sees himself killing Molly over and over, which is consistent with his general psychological state, but feels very Season One, and kind of lazily disconnected from the show’s current concerns.

WILL GRAHAM: Bluebeard’s wife. Secrets you’re not to know, yet sworn to keep.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: If I’m to be Bluebeard’s wife, I would’ve preferred to be the last.

WILL GRAHAM: Is Hannibal in love with me?

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment in the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?

Bluebeard gives his wife a key to every room in the house while forbidding her from the basement, where it turns out all his previous wives are. The story goes more or less how you’d expect from there. Bedelia’s “would’ve preferred,” however, prompts Will to consider his relationship with Hannibal in a new light, leading to the meat of the exchange. Bedelia’s definition of love is revealing of her own pathologies, reducing love to its pathological components as opposed to treating it as an affirmative feeling. This is partially because of the understandable need to frame love in terms of appetite, but also because of Bedelia’s own callous detachment. Still, it’s slashy as fuck, so that’s something.

HANNIBAL: Will’s thoughts are no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics. He is both free and damned to imagine anything.

The odd turn of phrase is unsurprisingly from Harris—a description of Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs. But it’s an odd line. There’s no particular connection between Milton and physics, and the idiosyncrasy of the invocation provides another faint echo of Blake.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s got your attention? God, the Devil and the Great Red Dragon?

…

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Outside the Government: The Sign of Three

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We continue to count down towards the TARDIS Eruditorum relaunch on March 19th with revised versions of some old blog posts on Sherlock. Proverbs of Hell will run its final two installments on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

It’s January 5th, 2014. Pitbull and Kesha are at number one with “Timber,” and while the rest of the charts are pretty similar to four days ago, we’ve got Avicii, Jason Derulo, Martin Garrix, and OneRepublic as artists we didn’t actually mention last week. News is about as sleepy as you’d expect for four days at the beginning of the year, although there’s some flooding in Wales, Scotland, and the west of England. On television, meanwhile, the third season of Sherlock continues its twelve day blitz with The Sign of Three.

Let’s talk about what Sherlock is. Although its main character is a detective, it is not quite a detective show, in that the solving of mysteries is not its main narrative engine. One suspects that had it been comprised of six hourlong episodes a season it would have been, as it would have had several filler episodes each run that would have ended up being case of the week romps, but the reduction to three episodes a year changed it into something weirder. Nevertheless, its basic dramatic engine is still closely related to that of the detective show: the moment of Figuring It Out. Its defining pleasure is the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.

Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television, and The Sign of Three is a prime example. It is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death. No effort is made to tease the impending threat of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do in order to hold interest over the course of months and years.

Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who’s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised—the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic resolution of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else.…

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Fromm Frankfurt With Love (Part 2)

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Part 1 can be found here.

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The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4

It is an historical irony that, though they today seem to embody a view of life dear to the moralistic Right, the Puritans were the ‘Left’ in the great political debates of the era of the European transition from feudalism to capitalism.  But, while ironic, this is hardly accidental.  They were expressing the views and imperatives of the rising class of bourgeois, this class being both product and inheritor of what is now the capitalist system.  This is, of course, the very market system the Austrians (and those like them, because they are by no means as distinct as they might like to think) are committed to defending as ‘moral’.  

In the essay from which we have been drawing, ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’, Corey Robin quotes Hayek saying:

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created.

Ironically, for all his ostensible rejection of authority, Hayek is revealed as subscribing to the Protestant Misery Ethic, and for very good historical reasons which (in yet another delicious irony) are revealed by the Marxist class-based view of the Reformation and the rise of capitalism.

Robin also quotes Hayek thus:

So long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least important of the desires we were able to satisfy. A “merely” economic loss is thus one whose effect we can still make fall on our less important needs…. Economic changes, in other words, usually affect only the fringe, the “margin,” of our needs. There are many things which are more important than anything which economic gains or losses are likely to affect, which for us stand high above the amenities and even above many of the necessities of life which are affected by the economic ups and downs.

A fascinating paragraph, which reveals staggering complacency amongst other things.  He essentially disregards either the existence or the moral sentience of those portions of the human race who can never regard economic losses as “merely” anything.

Meanwhile, Hayek’s loathing of government intervention (at least in the interests of the propertyless) stems from this idea of values, ends, and morals.  Government’s interference to make provision can only deprive us of the choice of ends and means to pursue on the market, and thus of our opportunity to create subjective values (what we value highly, what is lowly, etc), and thus of our very capacity to be moral.…

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To Switch a Witch

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With the re-release of her first two games on the Nintendo Switch, a third on the way and her creator already musing ideas for a fourth, Bayonetta is in the news again. And, as is typically the case with Bayonetta, she’s drawn quite a crowd and her fair share of controversy and anger. But of course, you can’t be a powerful, confident and self-assured woman and not.

Bayonetta is the modern day evolution of the archetype pioneered by Lara Croft and Rayne, and is the most honed, polished and refined version of that concept. She is an overwhelming, overclocked, unstoppable, inescapable feminine force of nature, and that confuses and frightens lesser people. The protagonist of an eponymous series of action games created by Hideki Kamiya and his studio Platinum Games (formerly Capcom Clover Studios), known for Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry and Okami, Bayonetta is a witch who carves out her own niche in the war between Heaven and Hell by laying waste to legions of angels and demons as a one-woman mercenary army. She is pure magick, and, like all witches, she is liminal figure who stands outside of social norms and conventions. She makes the existing order profoundly uncomfortable because her very existence is an affront to their worldview and long-held assumptions.

From a video game history perspective, the best point in Platinum’s oeuvre with which to compare Bayonetta is the Devil May Cry series. A hallmark of the sixth generation, those games featured platforming and puzzle solving elements as a loose framework to show off their combat: An action system involving a complex mixture of light and heavy attacks triggering breathtaking combo moves. There was exploration, but the game generally progressed through a linear series of arenas where protagonist Dante would have to square off against wave after wave of enemies. The Bayonetta games are a spiritual successor to Devil May Cry and play the same way, but that’s not the only way they’re comparable: Devil May Cry’s story, and especially Dante, were known for being deliberately excessive camp parodies of melodramatic narrative.

Calling Bayonetta “over the top” is a horrible cliché that does not in any way convey the extent to which she absolutely revels in exaggerated camp. She is a magickally-infused exotic dance battler dominatrix who wears pistols for stiletto high-heels and summons Eldritch Abominations and medieval torture devices made out of her own hair. Hair that she also wears as a backless jumpsuit, and without which she is entirely naked. Bayonetta is the woman who codifies the phrase “orgasmic combat” par exemplar, she knows it, and she loves it: She spends every battle moaning and grunting in very specifically suggestive ways, her finishing moves all involve punishing her enemies in exactly the way you’re thinking and one of her in-game taunts involves her lying on her back, spreading her legs wide and shouting “Come On!”. And that’s not even just the beginning.

Obviously sexuality is a primary theme in the Bayonetta series.…

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Outside the Government: The Empty Hearse

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TARDIS Eruditorum will return on March 19th. But as a prelude, we’re rerunning lightly edited versions of some old essays from the earliest days of the Patreon, now reskinned as the Outside the Government essays for Series 3 of Sherlock. I would also be remiss if I did not note that we are in the final 48 hours of the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter, and it’s a nailbiter whether we’ll make all the stretch goals.
 
It’s January 1st, 2014. Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” has unseated Sam Bailey at number one, while Eminem and Rihanna, Lily Allen, Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, and One Direction also chart. In the news, since Matt Smith got old and died it’s been exceedingly quiet. Obama signed a budget deal, marijuana was legalized in Colorado, incandescent light bulbs became illegal to sell in the United States, and Latvia adopted the Euro. While on television, Sherlock informed the audience that it was going to lie to them, and then went on to do just that. It had, in the tradition of fair lies, given ample warning. “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” And so, of course, it was. Indeed, The Empty Hearse is in effect a ninety minute exercise in arguing that the question of how Sherlock survived The Reichenbach Fall is irrelevant, or at least largely uninteresting.
To call this a bold response to one’s own iconic pop culture moment seems an understatement. And the reactions at the time are worth recalling, even if it is only a year on. First and most interesting were those who felt that The Empty Hearse was mean-spirited in its treatment of fandom, a criticism that focused especially on the depiction of slash fiction within the episode. And yet it’s difficult to quite articulate what about the portrayal of slash fans is offensive here. The only person to really mock them is Anderson, and Laura’s observation that her Sherlock/Moriarty slash is no more ludicrous than some of Anderson’s own theories is, in the context of the story’s larger attitude towards the idea of “solving” Sherlock’s survival, significant. She, at least, is in on her own joke, which Anderson never gets to be.

And it is, ultimately, the joke that’s at issue, which is where this episode’s boldness comes in. That The Empty Hearse was going to be read largely in terms of how well it resolved the cliffhanger was, of course, a foregone conclusion. You don’t get to have that kind of media coverage and then not be judged on how you stick the landing. Devoting an entire episode to it instead of, as they had with the cliffhanger of The Great Game, lampshading it with an absurdly trivial resolution was a necessity. But what wasn’t necessary was making The Empty Hearse into a ninety minute exploration of what it means to resolve the cliffhanger in the first place.

Which brings us to the second reaction, the accusation that the story was self-indulgent. Which misses the point in many ways.

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Your Favourite Audio

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I’m delighted to share the most exciting news of February. The eagerly awaited return of, and the link to, the new episode of Pex Lives.Kevin and I talk – for free, I’ll remind you, we’re just giving this stuff away – about the Peter Davison serial Kinda. Classic stuff to keep you company as you tidy that filthy hovel you call a home or commute to that job you can tolerate, or during the job itself, or however you listen to podcasts. i don’t know, you can do as you please. But it is lovely to be able to continue to sit down with Kevin and still be chatting nonsense at eachother about our favourite show after all these years. In this episode, Kevin binds me to a promise to write erotic Tegan focused Dr Who fanfiction when I get 50 patreon supporters. So, that’ll be a thing I spend my time doing.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/44-kinda-or-the-not-we-must-know

Lee Russell is one of my best damn friends in the world and our Amicus podcast is excellent. Late last night, while recording an upcoming Wrong With Authority, my tongue slipped and I embarrassingly called him Lee Daniel. I don’t know who Lee Daniel is, but I’m sure he’s nice too. This is me and Lee, one of the most underrated characters out there on the internet, somewhere beyond the grave.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-18-from-beyond-the-grave

Speaking of WWA – the show about films which purport to be about historical events but which usually prove, on closer inspection, to be a catacomb of pointless lies – we’re starting to pick up a little bit of steam and get them out more quickly. We consider ourselves a supergroup, which means we often find ourselves wearing tights on dark city streets, slick with rain. The latest episode was hosted by me, which means I didn’t have to think very much and let my very clever friends be interesting as I asked probing questions like “What you think of movie? Good movie? Good.” Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

http://wrongwithauthority.libsyn.com/wwa-ep7-gangs-of-new-york

I’ll close this out with a plug for a patreon. Not my patreon, no, not the one over here https://www.patreon.com/jimslater  where you can get exclusive content from me for as little as a dollar a month, including very early drafts of the novel I’m writing with Kit Power and audio stuff. No, I’d collapse at such gauchery. I want you all to know that the man Daniel Harper has a Patreon and he is doing invaluable work researching the alt-right. Let me inject a note of seriousness into this post – Daniel is learning more than any of your favs about the fascists and fashish online and it is hardgoing work. Help look after a man who, I believe, will be vindicated in years to come for a far-seeing, far reaching project that will shine real light on where we are, how we got here, and where the racists will take us next.

https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

 

Alright. Thank you very much for your attention. Thanks to Phil for continuing to allow me an amplifier on his site.…

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Shabcast 36 – Jack Gets Shipped With Seven

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Yes, it’s the long-awaited (by a tiny number of people) return of the Shabcast. 

And for my big relaunch I’m joined by a mystery returning guest who has a kickstarter going for a new book about the McCoy-era and Wilderness Years of Doctor Who, complete with some chat about the Virgin New Adventures, the new series, and sundry other inevitable digressions.  Because it’s us. 

Bet you can’t guess who my guest is.

That’s a Kickstarter you should totally contribute to, by the way.  In fact I’d almost say you were morally obliged at this point. Here’s the link.

And here’s the new Shabcast.

And here’s my Patreon.

Happy listening and pledging-of-money-to-Kickstarters-for-new-books-about-the-McCoy-era-and-possibly-also-to-my-Patreon.

(Plus, you can still buy our mystery guest’s last book, to which I made a modest contribution.  It too was made possible because people funded a Kickstarter.)

 

 …

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