Lucid
Frenzy has finally reached the same balance against the rest of the
internet as those crack Spartan troops who held back the Persian
hordes. (Well apart from that holding back bit.) Yes, shortly
after clocking up five years, we've hit our three hundredth
post!
So
let's not stint on the celebrations. Let's wave our hands in the air
like we just don't care, open a bottle of fizzy pop and make a few
announcements...
The
Author Recommends
A new page added to the site which links to twenty posts which I've
particularly liked myself. (Mostly added to show how wrong everyone
else is over what have come to be the most popular posts!)
The
'Dredd' movie reviewed
”Picture
a Seventies cop flick filmed on the set of 'Blade
Runner', with extra side-orders of litter and graffiti.
Dystopias assume the future will be like the present, only more so.
And here Mega City One is New York, just bigger and badder.”
Coming
soon! More stuff about out-there music, 'Doctor
Who' and a fair few out-of-date art exhibitions. (In fact
that description will probably end up standing for the next three
hundred posts, I would imagine...)
Today,
good reader, is our fifth birthday! Yes it's five years to the day
since the first ever 'Lucid Frenzy' entry was posted, a
look at the first 'Quatermass Xperiment' film. Of course
it's been nine years since things actually began, as an old-school
photocopied fanzine handed out to all and sundry. (Well, not to all but
there was the odd bit of sundry.) And it's nigh-on thirty years since
I first started contributing to comics fanzines.
But
that just makes me feel old, so let's focus on the most recent
anniversary and celebrate by outlining the two pillars of Lucid
Frenzy.
Now
Islam, needless to say, has marshalled five pillars to its name. But
that’s a global religion steeped in ancient wisdom. Here at Lucid
Frenzy we’re more of a budget enterprise, and the most we can
muster is two. In a half-hearted attempt to atone for this, each
comes with an accompanying illustration. (Actually, one’s a video.)
Of
course these may have differed if one of the other mooted names for
this blog had come to pass; which included Double Negative,
Sympathetic Magic, The Iconoclastic Fury, To Encourage the Others, A
Hotbed of Baboonery, Crash Course, Hurly Burly, Dirty Looks and Early
Closing Wednesday. (Dirty Looks would have at least upped the Google
hits. And I do still intend to one day open a web shop for my comics
which closes early on a Wednesday.)
1.
A Lucid Frenzy
“Although
rationality is a marvelous tool, it has its limits. Sometimes
intuition can yield equally powerful and impressive results. But the
title suggests having fun.”
Though
I borrowed this blog’s name from a surrealist term it’s perhaps
best illustrated by a Diego Riviera linocut, ‘The
Communicating Vessels’ (1938, above), which doesn’t use
the term at all! His aim was to illustrate Breton’s description of
the relationship between dream and wakefulness not as opposite states
but as an interaction, a perpetual interplay, like the ebb and flow
of a fluid between two containers.
I’m
attracted to this concept because it does precisely what Surrealism
often didn’t do. Observing that the “bourgeois
culture” of its era fetishised consciousness and feared the
Freudian id, it attempted to turn all that upside down. Yet just to
take up a parallel fetishisism, merely of the unconscious, was always
heading for a fall. The common observation that surrealist imagery
now fills adverts has its moment of truth here. We’re now told our
dreams and desires can be fulfilled if we start buying shit.
Not
only does Riviera’s image seem to me to be a more desirable state
of affairs, it’s also a better description of how the act of
creation works. The intuitive and puzzle-solving aspects of the brain
have to work in an alliance. If they do then the result, both lucid
and frenzied, will always be more than the sum of its parts.
Furthermore,
there’s a tendency to assume critical writing merely applies some
post-hoc analytical thinking to the original moment of artistic
insight. The artist leaps boldly off into pastures new, then the
critic follows while delineating the map. This seems to me to make
pretty much the same error as above. The vessels communicate in your
own head, which then ebb and flow into the original artwork and back.
By making you see the artwork in a different light, the critic has
effectively rewritten that work. As music writer Simon Reynolds has argued:
“Theory
seemed to provide genuine illumination into qualities and powers
possessed by the music. But beyond that the combination of the ideas
and the music had a potentiation effect, to use the pharmacological
term for when two drugs synergize to create a fiercer buzz.”
(Actually,
after titling this blog, I realised that the Surrealists hadn’t
used the term much at all! If you google it you mostly get references
to here. The few other hits sometimes use it to mean what I mean, but
more often take it as a general statement of exhilaration. Pretty
rarely is it ever quoted from or referred back to the Surrealists!)
2. I’ve Started, I’ll Never Finish
“The
further I go the less I know,
One
foot goes in front of the other...”
As
well as the clip above showing one of my favourite Fugazi songs
(given a particularly fine performance), in my more self-aggrandising
moments I like to imagine it’s this blog’s school song. (Of
course my personal theme song is the Soft Boys' 'I Want To
Be an Anglepoise Lamp', but there I digress.) Now I may
have been at this sort of thing some while now, but I am as nothing
compared to song author Ian MacKaye. He’s the very inverse of the
trajectory Jello Biafra acidly described as “harder core than thou
for a year or two, then it’s time to get a real job”. He's played
his own style of punk his way since 1979 (when he was but seventeen).
But I can’t see MacKaye writing a song to brag, so I don’t think
that’s the nub of the issue here...
The
song’s based around the double vision required of a long distance
runner. Picturing the whole length of the course is just going to
crush your resolve, so you make your mission something in sight - to
get to the next hill. But there’s no use sprinting there, you set
your sights on the next horizon but you run as though you’ll be
doing it forever.
The
key line is “there is not a fixed position.” Don’t ever expect
to get to the end of this. There’s no point where everything has
been said and the subject can be closed. And that's not just true
because new people see the artwork and spin more lines from it, or
new artworks are created which shine the old in a different light. It
would be equally true if there was no further input, if people
stopped making new artworks tomorrow. Art is like one of those magic
wells or bottomless glasses of folklore, which can never be emptied,
which always somehow renews.
In
the above I’ve attempted a kind of brief explanation of a Riviera
linocut and a Fugazi song. But of course those are only limited
explanations, single perspectives. Someone reading them might even
find them valuable, but at most they’re the next hill, never the
finish of the race. And the same would be true if we got Riviera in
to explain his linocut, or Mackaye his song. All knowledge, all
insight, is only ever provisional.
As
Paul Éluard (back to the surrealists) said: “There cannot be total
revolution but only permanent revolution. Like love, it is the
fundamental joy of life.”
Coming
soon! Believe it or not, another anniversary...
...now
finished in London, possibly on tour somewhere
For my
third visit to the theatre dedicated to Shakespeare, I figured it
might be time to take in something actually by the bloke.
Also, having
seen the left-field reworking 'The Rest Is Silence' earlier this
year I thought to take in a 'straight' version of
'Hamlet', as a kind of control to measure against
the experiment.
I can be as partial as the next man to the sexed-up, cinematic Shakespeare we often see on screen. But there
is still something appealingly rootsy about seeing a bare-boards production, in which planks of wood can represent the ramparts of
a castle or the bow of a boat, all under an open night sky. (Albeit one more beset by police
helicopters than 'twould have been in the Bard's day.) Typically, and
almost certainly traditionally, the company make most use of their
limited numbers by multi-assigning roles. But they also use these
editorially. For example, in a nice touch both the Ghost and Claudius (who
murders him and usurps his Kingship) are played by Dickon
Tyrrell. (Meat and drink to my theory the play is partly about the
child's split view of the parent.)
Similarly,
when the Players turn up their King and Queen are played by the same
actors as Claudius and Gertrude. An on-stage curtain closes and
opens, portraying their shocked reaction and underlining the
reflection. It's a neat device, but overall this scene epitomises all
that's wrong with this production.
After
an opening where the company take to the stage, playing instruments
and addressing us directly, it's less that the Players are cast
within the play and more they're producing the whole thing. The
play-within-the-play should not just be reflective but recursive,
smaller. It should be like a 2D construct within a 3D world, or a sketch
inside a portrait. As it is, there seems very little difference
between the two. The stock characters grate against any suggestion of
a psychological study.
We
talk of “Hamlet without the Prince” as a definition of
pointlessness. And it has to be said Michael Benz's Hamlet is
lacking. He can give us the mad Hamlet, but less the bad or
dangerous-to-know one. He seems more like a boisterous teen, playing
pranks, making smart-arse remarks, getting crushes on girls then
going off them. (Which interestingly isn't entirely unlike the sulky
emo Hamlet of 'Rest Is Silence.') The mad seems to
leech through when it shouldn't, and the crowd laughs at inopportune
moments. (Including his hesitation over killing Claudius, a dramatic
moment if ever there was.) However other actors are stronger,
particularly the afore-mentioned Dickon Tyrrell, so that's not the
whole of the problem. We must widen our gaze.
For
all of this being a dedicated theatre, it's quite possible the
setting is wrong. I've enjoyed plays at this very spot on two
occasions, the
Mystery Plays and Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus'. But, perhaps
significantly, these were both performances as
much as they were dramas, works which came out at
the audience.
A
production of 'Hamlet' needs to do precisely the
opposite - draw us all in.The
recent version of 'Macbeth' by Platform 4 was in a dark and
confined box, which might have worked better than this open-air
space. Here, even after darkness falls, you're still aware of the
rest of the crowd, that we are all here watching this. Most likely
the play was written for an indoor theatre. (One opened in 1599,
replacing the Globe. There's no mention of 'Hamlet'
until three years later, though of course records of the time are
scant.)
But
most likely, what we have is a deliberate choice. In the programme
Dominic Dromgoole's 'Note on the Text' bases the
performance on the First Quarto (often dubbed 'the Bad Quarto'),
“which has a robust energy and a winning ability to get on with
it.” Later, Michael Dobson's 'More Matter, With Less
Art' expands upon the point:
“While
some actors and directors have preferred this play to be a lengthy as
possible, the most central part of its action occurring within the
brooding consciousness of it's protagonist as he thinks slowly and
meditatively aloud, many have instead wanted their 'Hamlet'
practicably short, the pith of the play lying in the
action-packed and political struggle.”
Talk
ye of politics, sir? Any politician knows the trick of pushing people
towards one bad alternative by contrasting it to another, while
steering the flock from all other options. Of course we don't want a
'Hamlet' that's three hours of a luvvie bedecked
in tights, orating endless soliloquies to a patient skull until it's
not just the Ghost who feels stuck in purgatory. This is a play by a
popular writer of the day. It has ghosts, wars, plots and duels - so
many of them it's a wonder Elsinore isn't rent asunder. It
should be exciting and animated.
But
there's a crucial difference between thrilling the audience and being
a thriller. There are a thousand revenger tales from the era, all
forgotten save by the most dedicated academics. Shakespeare was using
these as a base, but had other designs. As
said over 'The Rest Is Silence', “the
play exists first to precipitate Hamlet's conflicted state of mind.”
Any other method leads to madness.
Much
of the appeal of cutting down, reducing and simplifying the play
comes from pruning back at the ambiguity which suffuses it. But the
ambiguity isn't some obstacle, to be chopped away until the true play
is revealed – it is the essence of the play.
It's true that at least some of this may have been unintentional on
Shakespeare's part. It seems unlikely for example he would have
plotted to leave us with three text sources which can contradict each
other, even if he'd been able to. But he did write
a play where Barnardo and Horatio sight the Ghost before Hamlet even
shows up, yet Gertrude can't see him at the very moment he lectures
Hamlet. The net result is that all the ambiguity becomes beneficial,
whatever its source. It's there to be embraced, not thrown away. The obstacles become the signposts.
But to
assign the production a motive of 'fixing' the play, of making it
serviceable, may be to assume too highly of it. Something is more rotten still upon the South Bank. Things finish, I kid
not, on a song and dance number. The aim is crowd-pleasing, to give
the punters a good supply of yuks, a smattering of angst and nothing
too likely to confuse.
...with another crop of photos of Brighton graffiti. This time with more of a focus on murals, iconic characters and the like. Check out my Flickr page for more of this sort of thing. (More regular posting soon to be resumed. Probably.)
Given the auspicious date, for once we have a timely post. In which minimalist musical commemorations of 9/11 are
considered, before expanding into film and documentary and winding up
as a partly political broadcast
As it turns out, there’s a fair few
things which are next along on the shelf, with the ever-busy Kronos
folk seemingly at the centre of it all. (Though ‘Awakening’
was not a standalone composition but a programme put together from
already-recorded works, I'll call it a ‘piece’ here for
convenience. I also use the American term 'progressive' for anyone
with a liberal/leftist political perspective, even if in the UK it
more suggests indulging in musical meanderings about Topographic
Oceans while wearing white flares.)
Now it may seem contrary to link to
(let alone post) a YouTube video that’s just a black screen. In
fact, for anyone that image-fixated, there are other YouTube clips
that add the expected 9/11 disaster footage. But, honestly,
listen to the piece and the black screen works
better. (A white screen may have been better still. Or a black screen
which slowly shaded into white as the piece progressed. But
anyway...)
As Adams says in
this interview, almost in echo of my comments following the
Kronos Quartet Meditation, “9/11 had been so over-exposed... the
country had gone into an orgy of repeating these images.” So
instead of the sheer spectacle of the event the focus here is on the
human cost; in Adams’ words “not the political aspects but the
personal aspects.”
True, the inner sleeve does contain
recognisable 9/11 images but of post-attack ruins. Looking at them
feels contemplative rather than reactive. In fact there's something
almost cathedral-like about them, with a workman kneeling as if in
prayer. Which feels fitting to the music.
I’d called the earlier evening “the
sonic equivalent of a commemorative wall – the place where people
pin photos of the disappeared.” In this case the words from the
opening section, after the repeatedly intoned “missing” are from
actual missing persons boards pinned up after the tragedy. It's their
unadorned artlessness, such as the quote above, which make them
effective. Recordings of street noise add to this sense of verite.
(It later moves into longer personal reminiscences, published in a
New York Times series.) Adams has called the piece a “memory
space.”
And, again similar to the earlier
evening, the piece has a palindromic structure - building to an
explosive middle before turning back into reflection. However, it
doesn’t attempt to follow the same chronology of events. The line
repeated over this build, “I know just where he is”, feels
ambiguous. Though taken from a woman talking about her dead husband,
it could be taken to mean that we know from where we were attacked.
Similarly the music feels ambiguous, it could be illustrating either
anguish or a war-cry. (I am fairly sure that I heard this section
played on the radio, and it was explained Adams was giving vent to
the revenge instinct that was vibing at the time, though he didn’t
share it.)
Overall however, the piece seems to
share the same humanistic concerns as 'Awakening'.Adams commented:“I hope that the piece will summon human
experience that goes beyond this particular event." If the
comparisons are there to be made, perhaps the main thing I got wrong
was suggesting that the passage of time had led to this response –
for Adams wrote this piece almost immediately. (“The request to
compose this piece came in late January, which meant I had not much
more than six months.”)
Indeed the CD's sleeve notes by David
Schiff take quite the opposite tack: “In the months that followed
the catastrophe, 9/11 became a source more of civic pride than of
nationalism. The heroes were policemen and firemen, not soldiers; a
mayor, not a president. The names read... reminded New Yorkers of
their diversity and commonality.”
”The world to come...”
Steve Reich's 'WTC 9/11',
also written for the Kronos Quartet and first performed in March
2011, uses actual voice recordings rather than transposing the words
onto performers, perhaps only a minor difference to Adams'. Yet these
surface similarities in fact merely place their differences into
sharper relief.
It might at first seem more natural for
Reich to create such a work than Adams. Unlike the West Coaster, he's
a long-term New York City resident who lived a mere four blocks from
the towers. (Though he did not witness the attacks first hand.)
However, though some earlier works
could be considered politically progressive, lately his concerns
became more mystical through a re-acquaintance with his Jewish
heritage. ‘Come Out’ was released in 1966, at
the height of the Civil Rights movement and shows it. Yet 1981's
'Tehillim', in which Psalms are sung in Hebrew,
marked a slow but steady change in direction. While, at least in
operas such as 'Death of Klinghoffer,' Adams has
taken a more explicitly political line. (He's
stated that things have since been made difficult for him,
not just in terms of his career but also in so simple a step as
security checks at airports.)
Yet listen to the pieces and it's as if
they get it the wrong way round. Adams was more the post-minimalist
composer, more willing to introduce symphonic dynamics to his work.
As
I've said before, I think of Reich’s work as harmonious
and serene. Yet 'WTC 9/11' is much the more
discordant of the two, composed significantly later but shorter,
sounding more urgent and contemporary, homing in on the events of the
tragedy.
Even that
trivial-sounding decision to use field recordings helps to throw
Reich's response into sharper relief.He's
commented “these
are actual recordings with the intensity and the grit that is
embodied in people who were there who didn't know what was going on.”
Based around actual recordings of
Aerospace Defence Command and the Fire Department, the strings
matching the line crackle as a flurry of communications try to
respond to the disaster. The first movement starts and ends with the
sound of a phone off the hook. It's another work which could be given
a Tower of Babel interpretation, falling towers scuppering
communication.
Yet, interestingly, controversy
ensued over the original CD cover for this release (above).
As said above, the choice to visualise the attacks is more logical
than for the other two pieces, for the focus is more specifically
upon that day. However, this choice was widely criticised, and not
just by the political Right. Reich finally released a statement that
the cover would be changed, feeling the furore was distracting people
from the music. (it was replaced, I kid not, with fluffy clouds.)
This perhaps underlines a dichotomy.
9/11 was a huge national, if not world, event. Yet minimalist and
even post-minimalist music are marginal pursuits, beloved perhaps by
the likes of you and me but bypassed by the general populace, their
influence well exceeding their reach. Why a number of such works on
this subject?
“What hit the coast was a
natural disaster, pure and simple. The flooding of New Orleans was a
man-made catastrophe, a federal fuck-up of epic proportions.”
With the Neoconservatives' rise in
political influence following the attacks, the right soon came to
’own’ 9/11. If it was ever questioned how failing to stop a
terrorist atrocity should be seen as a virtue, the answer was simply
that we need to get more right-wing. A notorious example of this
seeping into popular culture would be Paul Greengrass' 2006 film
'United 93.' The English director had previously
seemed something of a leftist, with films such as 'Bloody
Sunday' (2002) dramatising the murder of Irish
demonstrators by British soldiers. Significantly 'United
93' uses many of the same devices as both the previous film
and Reich's piece, even up to utilising the same air traffic control
transcripts. It's a very good film.
It's also the most blatant piece of
baseless right-wing propaganda this side of Fox News. The faux
documentary style merely convinces us that events must have happened
when there is no evidence for them whatsoever. Slipped in among the
actual is a German passenger acting as a 'surrender monkey' to the
terrorists.
The film's climax, when the passengers
rush the terrorists, is preceded with intercut scenes of their
reciting a Christian prayer and the terrorists intoning the Quran.
The poster, in tastefully pushing the burning towers to the back of
the image, shows a plane instead advancing on the Statue of Liberty's
crown – aligning perfectly with the right-wing insistence that
“they're jealous of our freedoms.”
Meanwhile, excluded from Ground Zero,
progressive opinion soon shifted to another disaster site - New
Orleans, hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Though precipitated by an
act of nature the disaster was massively exacerbated by official
failures and neglect, with a response that matched astonishing
incompetence with appalling malevolence - including virtual ethnic
cleansing of poor districts. (Causing the rapper Kanye West’s ripple-inducing comment on live TV “George Bush doesn’t care about black
people”, which some took as though it was fresh
information.)
If the Twin Towers transmogrified into
the War on Terror, Katrina came to represent the destructive excesses
of free market capitalism, sucking up and destroying the lives of
working people. Government proved both incapable and unwilling to
protect people from it’s rampaging.
Perhaps the best example is Spike Lee’s
documentary ’When the Levees Broke’, begun
only three months after the event and released the following year.
It’s sub-head ’A Requiem in Four Acts’ takes
on similar language to the musical pieces we’ve looked at.
Structurally it also seems similar - built up of a myriad of
interviews from many different places, adding together to give a
ground-level perspective. However, even though there’s no grand
voice-over or editorialising, it’s much more polemical, much more
impassioned. It doesn’t just list the dead, it asks how they got
there.
(I’d like to say something about the
series ’Treme’, about the aftermath of
Katrina, from which comes the quote atop this section. It might make
for something of an interesting comparison as its maker David Simon,
best known for ’The Wire’ previously produced
’Generation Kill’, if not about 9/11 then
about the resultant invasion of Iraq. However, as I’m yet to see
any of ’Treme’ that might have to wait!)
It feels like separate tram lines have
been dug. It's reminiscent of the Red and Blue Americas, described in
art speigelman’s post 9/11 comic strip 'In Shadow of No
Towers.' “The map of the 2000 election – the one that
put the loser into office – made it clear that we’re actually a
nation under two flags! The state he lives in is the state
of alienation.” Talking of himself as a cartoon
character, in the third person, he continues “he’s barely ever
been in the Red Zone, where the 44% of Americans
who don’t believe in evolution tend to gather... He hardly knows
anyone who supports the war and no one who voted for that creature in
the white house [Bush].”
If this is the case then I’m not sure
how I feel about it. I may have stated out exploring something I
hoped to find a rich seam of (humanistic responses to 9/11 within
America) and instead run into a barrier. It sounds like the red and
blue Americas are happiest when their different reality systems don’t
collide. As is probably obvious from the above, I prefer one colour
to the other. Yet does that mean I should seal out the other from my
life? Yes, of course Katrina was an important event. But that doesn’t
mean 9/11 should be abandoned to the Right.
Of course it is absolutely correct when
considering 9/11 to start with the human tragedy. And music, always
better at evoking feelings than constructing arguments, is a
well-placed medium to do that. But should you stop there? A
documentary, in the style of 'When the Levee Broke'
might go on to do this, but none seems to exist. Even a folk or rock
song, with more of an emphasis on lyrics, would more naturally be
drawn into wider questions. I'm sure such songs exist. But they're
not public works like these musical tributes.
Many places in continental Europe now
have statues or other public installations commemorating the victims
of the Nazis. Yet of course none of them ask how it cam to be that
the Nazis arose - that's simply not what they're designed for, any
more than a gravestone would ask why cancer was widespread.
Similarly if you want to commemorate an event without commenting on
it, these musical memorials have become the go-to.
Restricting progressive responses to
such pieces, however moving and however valuable they are in
themselves, is almost tantamount to suggesting that going any further
takes you into the Right’s territory. Which of course is absurdly
incorrect.
Of course we should acknowledge the
problem. There are sections... sizeable sections of the Right whose
tactic is to repeat baseless lies in the hope that they stick. (The
so-called ‘mosque at ground zero’, the concocted ‘birther’ controversy over Obama,the British NHS supposedly running “death panels” and so on.) It is hard to respond
meaningfully to such absurd slurs, it’s like trying to start a
debate with a fanatic shouting things in the street. Seriously, how
do you respond to the screechy fantasies of Fox
News? How do you hold a conversation with someone who's not holding
one with you?
Perhaps we have domestic parallels, for
example the European Union. Even now, with it's insistence on
continent-wide austerity measures, when it couldn't be more obvious
what a reactionary banks-and-big-business-biased institution it is,
it's still difficult to the point of impossible to say
any of that. Being anti the EU is the property of far-right little
Englanders like the xenophobic UK Independence Party, fulminating
over Brussels' plot to wiping the Queen's head from our currency and
other such vital issues.
But there's significant differences. A
large number of people... perhaps the majority are agnostic or even
indifferent to the whole question, assigning it to the
incomprehensible and distant world of capital-P politics. (Rightly or
wrongly. Well actually wrongly, but never mind that now.) 9/11 was a
much more immediate and visceral issue. A large number of people
killed in a terrorist attack, targeted simply because of the building
they worked in, that's not something which leaves people on the
fence.
It amuses me when politicians talk
about political engagement like it's an automatic social benefit,
rather than something which simply suits them. The last election in
America seemed to carve the tram lines deeper, with the
“hopey-changey” arguments for Obama seemed to centre around his
personality differing from Bush, much more than his policies. In the
UK few people would seriously expect Miliband to act significantly
differently in office to Cameron, something which quite frankly is to
our advantage. In general I try to avoid “America bashing”, which
seems at best pointless and most often hypocritical. However, when
the evidence speaks you need to go with it...
The last, spoken line in Adams' piece
is “I love you.” Not, I fear, a sentiment which looks to be
widely shared any time in the near future.
Finally got round to posting more photos to Flickr, mostly on a stencils and street art theme. (My Flickr backlog is just about as big as everything else, so hopefully should get more done in the near future.)
No, not that Doctor.... In the latest of a series of posts where I basically agree with someone else, I hereby cite Dr. Richard Turner's letter to the Guardian newspaper, on the Tories' market "reforms" to the National Health Service. (Which seem to be strangely unpopular with those who work in the medical sector in general. Funny that...)
“The
Daleks are mad. That's what makes them unique among the Doctor's
enemies... A Dalek is a robot with anger problems, a tank that hates
you.”
So
wrote Stephen Moffat in this weeks 'Radio Times'.
He's right of course. Even when we first met them, they had already been driven insane
by ceaseless war, literally unable to live in anything that wasn't
battle armour.
But I
was skeptical of making this into a theme. Jumping from the general
observation that the Daleks are mad to writing an episode about mad
Daleks, that seems to exhibit the fixatedness of fan writing. It
sounds a little like that
'Spitfires Versus Daleks' stuff we've already sat through -
the sort of thing you'd draw in felt pens as a child, a cool-sounding
notion. But a cool-sounding notion is an idle fancy, not a story in
the making.
Worse,
New Who has already hinted heavily that perpetually battling the
Doctor has pushed their gooey green noggins over the edge. They have
come to epitomise the death wish, planning to take the whole universe
down, including themselves, as the only sure way to take the Doctor
with them. (Of course this isn't stated openly anywhere, and may well
itself be a fannish extrapolation. But their behaviour in a story
such as 'Journey's End' makes sense in no other
way, so I'm sticking with it.)
But
actually it worked strangely well. To see those pitiable, broken
creatures slumped in the shadows, activated only by hatred.
Baudrillard once said the purpose of Disneyland so there could be a
border between Disneyland and the rest of the world, because of
course there is no longer any difference between Disneyland and the
rest of the world. Similarly, the Daleks need the Asylum so they can
tell themselves that is where the broken Daleks go. Yet they will all
eventually go there, even if they're not in effect there already. The
heavy reliance on old models in the Asylum isn't just a fannish
indulgence, it's a sign that the only gap between the Parliament and
that planet is time. (They should probably have found some story
device to make the Asylum Skaro itself, the parental home, where they
had to abandon and wall in their forebears.)
As I
must have said many times by now, I'm not a fan of all this bigging
up of the Doctor. Every time some of that Great One stuff gets
uttered, I expect him to add “so you really should be watching my
show” and pull a thumbs-up to the camera. But since both
'Dalek' and 'A Good Man Goes to War'
the show has developed a counter-theme, where this new bigger, badder
Doctor ran the risk of becoming dangerous. 'Dalek'
in particular held that his particular anathema to them could blind
him to all else, with less-than-hilarious consequences. Hitler once
said that the greatest victory for the Nazis would not be their
defeating their enemies, but that in fighting them their enemies
would become like them. The show's great Nazi stand-ins have seem to
have been having this effect on the Doctor.
But
would this counter theme lead to the show self-innoculating, or would
these objections be duly noted and genre rules reassert themselves?
Though it's a smart Asylum setting which leads to some decent
set-pieces, it has to be said that plot-wise it's predictable and
repetitious – basically a mash-up of the afore-mentioned
'Dalek' and 'Silence in the Library,' with a dash of 'Source Code'. (Plus Moffat still seems to be turning into the writerly equivalent
of those decrepit Daleks, endlessly reiterating a few phrases – the
dead reanimate and attack us, people get memory lapses and so on.) It
carries absurd plot holes. Why do the Daleks even need the Tardis on
board when they've already captured the Doctor by separate means?
But
let's cut to the chase - did it lead anywhere? Arguably it takes what
was before (the incognito Doctor, something no-one ever imagined
would last) and inverts it. Instead of an anonymised hero we now have
amnesiac enemies. Which runs the risk of making the Daleks epitomise
all the Doctor's enemies. And in making humans into Daleks, they
already seem to be stealing the schtick of the Cybermen. As the
Daleks are already the Doctor's default foe, this seems a slippery
slope to step on.
But
amnesia... right now, the prospect seems pretty appealing. The
revived show has always been careful about it's references to Old
Who, carefully dropping them in for fans who choose to look but in
places where new viewers will skip past them. (This very episode
referenced 'Genesis of the Daleks' a few times,
suggesting the Daleks' fate was inherent in their birth.) But, alas,
it seems it could not do the same for it's own history. The last
series in particular became hopelessly convoluted and
self-referential, to the point where it was fast putting me
off – let alone the casual viewer. (Remember that the old show got
to a point where it was chiefly being written by fans for fans?
Wasn't that shortly before it got cancelled?)
Derivative
and repetitive though it was, this episode moved along briskly,
managed a few decent moments along the way and... hurrah!.. was
reasonably self-contained. We can only hope that's a sign for the
future...
Coming
soon! Well, probably less of this sort of thing. Though
I'll doubtless be sad and fannish enough to watch the Toby Whithouse
and Chris Chibnall episodes, I doubt I'll be motivated to write
about them. After which we get one more serving of Moffat...
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