tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42026252341674138142024-03-19T08:47:02.134+00:00LUCID FRENZY JUNIORWelcome to Lucd Frenzy, please wait to be seatedGavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comBlogger913125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-72554407904025140002024-03-16T10:52:00.002+00:002024-03-16T10:52:33.097+00:00‘DUNE’ (NOT A PROPER REVIEW AT ALL)<span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2H7vIzZZppvgZoRb9PB-UNpN4HZByWkLFLjKNTtFnd8A9FRsam8dR1OAfLca__0l9zN933c2KgSdMsPyhXQaUkF2D_IM0h3gV3Cbki4JQb0eENvoHCGLGXpkNslJ-4Fhm2zmxH-SrPY37_VU8di0YexKiFUW49ZvQXBfSzhP7qUvb2G7y3uzdS-AxnHM0/s792/Dune-Part-Two.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="792" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2H7vIzZZppvgZoRb9PB-UNpN4HZByWkLFLjKNTtFnd8A9FRsam8dR1OAfLca__0l9zN933c2KgSdMsPyhXQaUkF2D_IM0h3gV3Cbki4JQb0eENvoHCGLGXpkNslJ-4Fhm2zmxH-SrPY37_VU8di0YexKiFUW49ZvQXBfSzhP7qUvb2G7y3uzdS-AxnHM0/s16000/Dune-Part-Two.jpeg" /></a></div><br />That story about George Lucas writing<i> ’Star Wars’ </i>as a Vietnam analogy, everyone likes to repeat it. Except, come on, we know it’s not actually true. I suppose it’s possible he believed it himself, perhaps as a alibi against accusations he was selling out. There may even have been earlier version of the many redrafts which actually had some of that in them. But none of it’s up on the screen, is it? <br /><br />Except it <i>is</i> there in <i>’Dune: Part Two’. </i>The scenes where the monstrous black machines churn their way through the desert, to be defeated by tiny human figures literally rising up out of the ground, David slaying MechaGoliath, is very much Revenge of the Third World. The feeling is very much like the <i>’Hunger Games’ </i>sequel where a character ups and says “remember who the real enemy is”, and everybody then does. It’s not exactly going to change anything. But highly welcome. If there currently seems no viable way of fighting back politically, we can at least do it culturally. Give us culture wars, we’ll fight culture wars. <br /><br />Even now there are snobby film critics who disdain anything Science Fiction as ‘mere spectacle’. As if there’s some innate dividing line between spectacle and imagery. While the appeal of Science Fiction, at least good Science Fiction, is that it can let imagery run riot. Much of the meaning of this film is there in those scenes, stuck up on a big screen, captured in such an arresting way I think it’ll stick around in my head for some while. <br /><br />Another example would be the distinction between the three worlds - Arrakis, Caladan and Geidi. There are those of us old enough to remember how SF was restarted in the cinema with <i>’Star Wars’</i> and <i>’Alien’.</i> Films which came out two years apart but were chalk and cheese, one SF as Fairy Tale, the other as Gothic Horror. Then the surprise when we discovered they both sprang from the same source, Jodorowsky’s unfilmed (and entirely unfilmable) version of <i>’Dune’.</i><br /><br />In particular he had wanted the sections devoted to the different Houses to have their own entirely different styles and aesthetics, even down to different soundtrack composers. They shouldn’t look like different stopping points in the same universe so much as different reality systems. Smartly, that’s what director Villeneuve takes up here. Which means the effect of <i>’Dune’ </i>spread so far that eventually it even went to <i>’Dune’.</i><br /><br />So in short this is a great, truly great, achievement. No-one was ever likely to actually make a better <i>’Dune’ </i>adaptation than this. <br /><br />However… <br /><br />There’s two main plot themes. Paul, our protagonist, gets the gift of prescience. Except in time-honoured fashion the gift turns out to be a curse. Seeing Fate coming towards you, like a hurtling train, turns out to bestow on you no ability to step out the way. You know its going to hurt, and then it does. It’s not original, it’s somewhat reactionary in its assumption there’s no real agency in life. But that’s extrapolation. What you’re supposed to dwell on is the taste turning sour. <br /><br />But there’s also the White Saviour narrative, foreigner as Messiah. Paul looks to be the One sent to rescue Arrakis, the prophet he is here and all that. Only for us to discover this isn’t indigenous notions but a cargo cult seeded by the Bene Gesserit (galactic Macbeth witches who are also the Secret Services). Paul’s mother immediately cashes in on this, while he rows with her and tries to dodge it. <br /><br />Both of these are in themselves pretty good narrative arcs. But how do they fit together? They don’t at all. First it becomes Paul’s role to not fall into that role, not the natives to resist their programming. (Or at least the narrative weight falls heavily on Paul.) Paul is gap-yearing as the Messiah, and the fact he feels bad about this doesn’t undermine but underline the problem. It becomes reduced to a plot obstacle, the Campbellian Refusal of The Call. <br /><br />The film rather schematically divides the natives in two, more savvy Northerners and “fundamentalist” Southerners, which allows them to act as objective-correlatives of Paul’s journey, maps of his mind. The South is the one place Paul cannot go without them all doing his bidding. (Even as he bids them not to do his bidding.) So of course he keeps saying “I must not go South”, shortly before going South. <br /><br />It’s not so much there’s no realistic prospect of his avoiding any of this. It’s that the audience is put in the position of not only expecting but wanting this to happen, so the Plot can take place. And this in the same film so keen to convey to us the Revenge of the Third World? <br /><br />We are not obliged to take a film’s protagonist as the hero. And in fact this film’s heart lies in Chani, who constantly says the right things, and mostly goes out and doing them. So its strange to note that film ends with her walking off in disgust. (Okay, riding a giant sandworm off in disgust. This is Arrakis, same thing.) <br /><br />Can any of this be brought together in the mooted third part? I read the books in my early teens, which is possibly a longer time gap than between the second and third novel. But the internet seems strangely agreed that author Frank Herbert was aghast to see so many siding with Paul, so turned the sequel into a corrective, underlining the fact he decidedly wasn’t. “Now here’s another clue for you all, the head of the messianic death cult was Paul”. Such a thing is depicted in this handy internet meme. Though the cynic in me suspects this was a flaw in the book itself, which the author then projected onto the audience.</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHyQ-bV0R1FNK4hbSwxaktDFflncEdcJxDMZkGjlPrvOWEl-uL5X44xVu2bBm7CoReqzT7Yru_mRQr7dZdxMvZQYCo4HmQxqoAMTeqxFyAA-9fvHejUBbVXix9T_Oz7r_Xo7Lm2h6sAN22aZf3KMu6oUt84us3PjpsO_GYoIMHZfYUPtzTea5UFW8Og1hJ/s528/PaulIsBad.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHyQ-bV0R1FNK4hbSwxaktDFflncEdcJxDMZkGjlPrvOWEl-uL5X44xVu2bBm7CoReqzT7Yru_mRQr7dZdxMvZQYCo4HmQxqoAMTeqxFyAA-9fvHejUBbVXix9T_Oz7r_Xo7Lm2h6sAN22aZf3KMu6oUt84us3PjpsO_GYoIMHZfYUPtzTea5UFW8Og1hJ/s16000/PaulIsBad.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Conceivably then, the film has run into the same problems the book faced, despite knowing them in advance. So it shares the fate of its lead. It sees it coming up and takes steps to prevent it happening, which prove useless. <br /><br />So what next? My somewhat weak memories are of a second book much bleaker, much less action-adventure than its predecessor. So whether that could either resolve any of this or even be made into into a viable big-budget film… such a thing remains to be seen. To all of us except Paul, anyway. <br /><br />A more sensible review of this film<a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2024/03/dune-part-two.html" target="_blank"> lies here</a>.</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-30802653068421111942024-03-09T11:35:00.002+00:002024-03-09T11:38:19.412+00:00‘BATTLEFIELD' (SYLVESTER McCOY'S DOCTOR WHO) <i><span style="font-family: verdana;">First broadcast: September 1989 <br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Writer: Ben Aaronovitch </span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">What witchery is this? Plot spoilers reside below, beware unwary surfer!</span></i><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i></span><i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnlEaoGKl5B_yI4uqP-Ew7M1e3xpBBfPotyWEl0cdGkRzbF5ny-JCCAWWOhA3NQmqrcE9BwSe28PUX-1IgEahKCNQdWRCj8mmEb5CN_LTQTby2Sn7liJ9n_ZiwT0EVRQSE3VjOFcTh61jlRyH4MQr66rDBVl4lT8qSrSQoaHSPXHZuxGnutnjsDFDb-s0o/s483/1.Battlefield.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="471" data-original-width="483" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnlEaoGKl5B_yI4uqP-Ew7M1e3xpBBfPotyWEl0cdGkRzbF5ny-JCCAWWOhA3NQmqrcE9BwSe28PUX-1IgEahKCNQdWRCj8mmEb5CN_LTQTby2Sn7liJ9n_ZiwT0EVRQSE3VjOFcTh61jlRyH4MQr66rDBVl4lT8qSrSQoaHSPXHZuxGnutnjsDFDb-s0o/s16000/1.Battlefield.jpg" /></a></div></span></i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><i>“Any advanced form of technology many not necessarily make much sense."</i><br />- Arthur C Clarke <br />(or at least it was something like that) <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”Infamy, infamy...”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Given the cod-heightened dialogue that crops up throughout this Arthurian storyline, it would be tempting to start with the celebrated quote “infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!” <i>'Battlefield'</i> is infamous for being the <i>'Who'</i> story with the worst-ever viewing figures, and credited by many as less another nail in the show's coffin than the lid slamming down. <a href="http://grke.net/anorak/Battlefield.html" target="_blank">Tomb of the Anorak is not alone in dismissing it as</a> “the worst Doctor Who story of all time”. Yet, all told, it induces not a negative so much as a polarising reaction. Few are they who would uncritically defend it. But other views are available. <a href="http://shabogangraffiti.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/real-mccoy-and-forgotten-sacrificial.html" target="_blank">As Jack Graham puts it</a> “as so often in this era, there are superb ideas under a surface mess”. <br /><br />And haven't we been here before? It's almost like the show is going out the way it came in. As with, say, <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-reviews.html" target="_blank">'The Web Planet’</a> or any other from a number of Hartnell episodes you spend half the time wanting to like this a whole lot more than you really do. Or possibly wishing there was some way for you to ingest it, absorb its themes and concepts, which didn't involve the often-tedious business of having to sit through the bloody thing. While, and unlike <i>'Web Planet', </i>you spend the other half wishing you didn't like it at all so you could in good conscience just switch it off. <br /><br />A large part of the problem is the wearily leaden direction. It lacks… well, what it really lacks is <i>direction</i>, which is a bit of a problem where direction’s concerned. Take the scene where the villainous Morgaine (below), invading our reality, comes across a war memorial in a church. Realising humans are perhaps not entirely the base brutes she's imagined, she orders her knights to stand and pay their respects. Then, running into the Brigadier, she tells him the occasion is not a time for fight. (“I wish you know that I bear you no malice… but when next we meet I shall kill you.”) But it's filmed about as prosaically as his earlier visit to the Garden Centre.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6mN5BPSmA7ekOSe3KtIaXV48ESFLl1J8jdBBrd7DT7QaEoXXGdcKTkkAeB4SuyEjv3Up2ysvmEaYNtCUYzNmrPmlFPQAtcTPZqmlLjs-E4b6PRRTvq0FmwCo6omdqblyHH5K1Hh6tBgZcV2AurzWA1tGCoxYk0vdpFmM_ySuvHU1gSXeVKTu7xirWlKOG/s460/2.Morgraine.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6mN5BPSmA7ekOSe3KtIaXV48ESFLl1J8jdBBrd7DT7QaEoXXGdcKTkkAeB4SuyEjv3Up2ysvmEaYNtCUYzNmrPmlFPQAtcTPZqmlLjs-E4b6PRRTvq0FmwCo6omdqblyHH5K1Hh6tBgZcV2AurzWA1tGCoxYk0vdpFmM_ySuvHU1gSXeVKTu7xirWlKOG/s16000/2.Morgraine.jpg" /></a></div><br />Those yet to have the pleasure of this story might say we should be trained to look past this sort of thing by now, that we should focus on the wood being suggested rather than the trees actually stood in front of us. But the execution really is too terrible to ignore, at a time when you might think TV was improving at least a little. 'Back to the Hartnell era' is not much by way of a compliment. Some scenes would embarrass a fan reconstruction, let alone an actually broadcast story. And worse, like looking a painting through a crappy distorting lens, it distorts the underlying theme. <br /><br />Which, not terribly surprisingly given the title, is war. By tradition, something <i>'Who'</i> tends to be a little skeptical about. Yet, <a href="http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/batt.htm" target="_blank">to quote Owen A Stinger,</a> “if anything, the directing... belittles the act of war, showing it to be a fun game for arrogant swaggerers.” <br /><br />Consequently the story often feels like the archeological dig it's partly set in, the trawling through mud can feel endless but reveals the occasional jewel. For example, there's <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/quatermass-and-pit.html" target="_blank">the Knealish emphasis</a> on history seeping through into the present via place names. The Gore Crow Hotel (below) is lingered over by the camera but never remarked upon by the characters, which just lets it marinade into the overall atmosphere. It's like the way an actual sleepy Sussex town can be called Battle. The garden of England is a graveyard to wars past, we drive our cruise-control cars over the bones of the dead.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVmsLRjyIXPJ-qBPoODVdOrvVE4cSodWzsnciPgRfsh7lziTkRruq1kLVU9uZjOxOlJsSv0EdmjmWuZDVQ9Aae-Sdse1RMpI10tJJEFMcAlJGH3Dm-AZq6MZxc0eJ7IsyrL83upC1BSJXvRWu3qULqTEwca6opnLzi1opKTAC_N3YgA3l19-t4kZ9jw42r/s340/3.gore_crow_hotel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="340" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVmsLRjyIXPJ-qBPoODVdOrvVE4cSodWzsnciPgRfsh7lziTkRruq1kLVU9uZjOxOlJsSv0EdmjmWuZDVQ9Aae-Sdse1RMpI10tJJEFMcAlJGH3Dm-AZq6MZxc0eJ7IsyrL83upC1BSJXvRWu3qULqTEwca6opnLzi1opKTAC_N3YgA3l19-t4kZ9jw42r/w400-h296/3.gore_crow_hotel.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The Doctor being equated to Merlin might sound merely hackneyed. But making Merlin a future Doctor, so the Doctor himself becomes a pawn in his own game... that's much more involving stuff. By essentially splitting the Doctor role it inoculates against the standard McCoy-era problem that the Doctor is too alien, too remote. Which he is, but at the very same time he's reduced to the role the rest of us usually take up – trying to figure out what the Doctor has been up to this time. (“I could have given myself more warning,” he grumbles.) <br /><br />It also necessitates his tactic of throwing himself into situations by acting as much like the Doctor as possible – a task he takes to with relish. (“Go!” he cries at one point, “before I unleash a terrible <i>something</i> upon you!”) And they stick to the conceit that the Merlin Doctor (so to speak) remains an off-stage mystery, where narrative conventions might seem to insist on a last-minute showing. <br /><br />And despite the near-total inability to endow the trans-dimensional nobles with any genuine gravitas, at points the story somehow still manages to creatively contrast them with the contemporary and everyday. This is used humorously, but applied som thickly that the initial juxtaposition eventually erodes. Perhaps the most obvious moment of this is when Ace rises from the lake clutching Excalibur, to unceremonially shove it into the mitts of the nearest noble. As he pontificates actorly on the significance of the moment, she cuts him short - “That's what I said, Shakespeare.” <br /><br />In this way, and much like the Hartnell era, the story seems almost self-inoculated against its own cheapskateness. The nobles hail from a parallel dimension “sideways in time”, and we've already seen the significance of that term for the Hartnell era. In short they come from somewhere so distant that its unframeable, that there isn't much point in worrying about it. What matters about them is what they <i>signify</i>.<br /><br /><b>Blasted By the Past </b><br /><br />Yet, however ill-served by the production, the story itself is pretty cockeyed. Like something found in an archeological dig, it comes up bent and broken with bits missing. What, we feel entitled to ask, is supposed to be going on? Lots of stuff gets alluded to without ever really being picked up. Morgana's near-constant feuding with her son Mordred suggest the younger generation are about to break free from her insistence upon etiquette among tyrants, but this doesn't really go anywhere. <br /><br />There's also the suggestion that the Doctor isn't just playing at being Merlin, that he won't at some future point stick on a false beard and start saying “thee” a lot, but <i>is</i> Merlin – he belongs with the other-worldly nobles, not with us. This does often look like the Doctor at his most manipulative, at one point hypnotising the locals into leaving. Which doesn't really get taken up. <br /><br />But then neither does he convince as the humanitarian voice of peace. There's a nice scene where two swordsmen parry, and fling each other back, for the Doctor to stroll through the ensuing gap. But his declammatory “no battle here” rhetoric, delivered in the middle of a battle, ultimately allows us to have our cool lazer-gun swordfights and eat them. (Okay, they're not actually very cool-looking. The point still stands.) <br /><br />Still, if you have to squint pretty squintily in order to make sense of things, you can sort of do it. One of the main things the Arthurian characters represent is the past. Their reawakening/reappearance (whichever its supposed to be) threatens us with being trapped in their world of cyclic time, in endless round of war and conflict – those battle-commemorating place names come to life, reasserting their spells, memorials becoming predictions. <br /><br />Critics of the story say Morgana doesn't demonstrate much of a clearly defined masterplan. But that's because she doesn't <i>have</i> one. She just wants to renew her perpetual conflict with Arthur. Their lives are based around each other more than most couples. The near-future setting, as well as being an in-joke on <a href="http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/UNIT_dating_controversy" target="_blank">fandom's UNIT dating controversy,</a> suggests what we are fighting for is literally the right to a future – the establishment of linear time. <br /><br />There's an association made between Excalibur, the demonic Destroyer and the nuclear warhead – even if the story slings them together so inelegantly. It's never quite explained why the warhead gets stuck. But let's imagine it gets held near Excalibur, the sword having some magic attraction over it the same way it works on the scabbard on the hotel wall. Which establishes some innate equivalence between the two weapons, totems of might in the two different worlds.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnMbZEljmFD-09obne8E3KDolxMPk2GhyphenhyphendILeqjuzuwfeYvYxwD909InmhCBn8P92CnhhFNkWSqMalvBu5Y397ntD8k-LoDe5rwaILtjjuJQIUbmUKG8iTcg1Z9Gs4HIfc3eXH069fc6Djt2P0qz_-uAl23n2WoFAvvEIOFpDELO94rzXPYQvkHatuf-2C/s400/4.%20Destroyer.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="242" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnMbZEljmFD-09obne8E3KDolxMPk2GhyphenhyphendILeqjuzuwfeYvYxwD909InmhCBn8P92CnhhFNkWSqMalvBu5Y397ntD8k-LoDe5rwaILtjjuJQIUbmUKG8iTcg1Z9Gs4HIfc3eXH069fc6Djt2P0qz_-uAl23n2WoFAvvEIOFpDELO94rzXPYQvkHatuf-2C/s16000/4.%20Destroyer.jpg" /></a></div><br />While, when we first meet the Destroyer (above), he's presented as a kept demon of Morgana, as if representing her most destructive impulses - her warrior instincts unchecked by her warrior's code. She fears him even as she holds him. The original concept was of a man in a business suit who grew more demonic as he grew more powerful, as events in the story went more his way. She threatens to others that she'll release him, even though she knows to do so would be to unleash total destruction. So she parades him, as a deterrent, ultimately as a bluff. And if you haven't yet seen where this is going, remember at the time of broadcast the Cold War was still a live concern. <br /><br />But those pointy fingernails of hers become forced. Effectively, they're forced twice and she takes the opposite courses of action – releasing the Destroyer, then refusing to press the button. Which doesn't really make much sense. Well, maybe a little if 're still willing to squint. If we see the Destroyer as representing her unchecked ego, as part of her, and the warhead as the depersonalised results of this. A chain of logic which progressively removes the human element and with it ramps up the destructiveness. <br /><br />And what accelerates that chain better than technology, than modernity? We've become better at killing and worse at everything else. The Doctor breaks the chain by pointing it out, causing even Morgana to be repelled by evoking the mass, indiscriminate slaughter the bomb will bring. <a href="http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/batt.htm" target="_blank">As Rob Matthews says</a>, her “almost romantic notion of war has no place in a world like ours, a world where death has indeed gone mad.” (Notably, a working title for the script was <i>'Nightfall'.)</i><br /><br />But of course Morgana's just a construct, devised purely so this can be said to her. The Doctor's the protagonist of a TV show, he's really talking to us. So why do <i>we</i> need to be told this? Because we must transcend her cyclic world of recurrent warfare – its become a necessity. Like the Destroyer the missile's something too powerful to be held in check by any code. We can change our ways or we can die. Hence the character who would have been the most noble of all these nobles, Arthur, is dead before events even begin. His ethics, though genuine, are now untenable. (Though why he's also sending a distress signal is another loose plot thread to add to the tangle.) <br /><br />Which sounds not just an oddly conservative moral, but (like so many such) one based on a nostalgic haze rather than solid ground. They're praising the past, when they said they came to bury it. Even after they told us the past and warfare were effectively interchangeable concepts. Were there past chiefs who refused to take up iron weapons, gunpowder, cannonballs and all the rest, because they looked a bit too nasty? We wouldn't know because they would have been crushed beneath the boots of history, but it seems unlikely and besides it doesn't matter much. It might have worked better if “sideways in time” had been the parallel dimension of myth, Morgana stepping from the Avalon of the 'medievalist romance' section of one of those bookshops with rainbows painted on the front – only to be confronted by base reality. But that's not what happens on the screen. <br /><br />Besides, out of the hamfisted way the three symbols are squashed together, the worst is the way the warhead is dumped into the story. It equates so easily with the liberal anti-nuclear agenda of the era, images generated by pressure groups like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Nuclear_Disarmament" target="_blank">the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament</a> which showed missiles stuck incongruously onto the rustic English countryside. (Pete Kennard's post-Constable montage, below, was an at-least-witty take on the theme.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjor_I-eULz1OzAMe-NFrbyBJIcN_SDORKTx9IqCVEkUEduOEu5mURg7N2bi2WwSJW7EOXSGlk5ODH3Y90Z5PXQ1QZlpM5grekUc-FUi3RtfQXGLbEtLSdcPySj1VOuZFnIaJwPwlFJxrFnus9dMOD6gETw9eYV_Ui_Kj1fYjLvoheKVDZAOOqWxyEcOSyt/s472/5.PeteKennard.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="472" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjor_I-eULz1OzAMe-NFrbyBJIcN_SDORKTx9IqCVEkUEduOEu5mURg7N2bi2WwSJW7EOXSGlk5ODH3Y90Z5PXQ1QZlpM5grekUc-FUi3RtfQXGLbEtLSdcPySj1VOuZFnIaJwPwlFJxrFnus9dMOD6gETw9eYV_Ui_Kj1fYjLvoheKVDZAOOqWxyEcOSyt/w400-h276/5.PeteKennard.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Nuclear weapons were seen as an aberration grafted onto an otherwise civilised society, like a thorn somehow stuck in our collective paws, rather than the logical outcome of a whole set of political and military alliances. That way, we could reject the conclusion without having to change our working out. The Doctor makes the usual uniform-baiting comments about UNIT, but its never suggested the missile really comes from them. They just happen to be guarding it. They're all presented as headstrong but ultimately stout-hearted types. <br /><br />(The multi-ethic 'rainbow coalition' nature of UNIT, most epitomised by new Brigadier, Bambera being black, suggests we should be looking respectfully upon them. The story may intend us to visualise a multi-ethnic future, which just happens to mostly present itself through UNIT. The whole presence of Shou Young seems designed around giving Ace a politically correct friendship, her only other role seems to be to own a car. But come out mostly through UNIT is what it does.) <br /><br />And speaking of Brigadiers... <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>The Brig Is Back (Long Live the Brig)</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The story is perhaps best remembered for the final appearance of the <i>original</i> Brigadier - Lethbridge-Stewart. And indeed the old chap is the main thing it handles right. He's often seen as merely a straight man to the Doctor, <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/quatermass-and-pit.html" target="_blank">an echo of Colonel Breen's “slide-rule mind” in 'Quatermass'</a> - something for the Doctor to take his creative tangents from. Yet here they don't even meet until the third episode. His return from retirement, if woefully stretched out, is essential to his story arc. Initially he's so busy among his begonias he won't even answer the Brig-phone - “I don't care if it's the King!” (Which it sort of is, of course.) He's even been replaced by Brigadier Bambera, who wastes no time pointing this out. It's as if Bilbo had again left the Shire for <i>'Lord of the Rings',</i> rather than delegating to Frodo. His gun is the ring he elects to carry once more. <br /><br />Arthur may be dead, but its the Brigadier who's the <i>real</i> Arthur, the old warrior reappearing to save the day. And he can do it, reappear from his own personal Camelot deep in the garden of England, precisely because he <i>is</i> real. He's not conjured from dry ice and glowing globes like some others you could mention, he just got a phone call and a lift. He's gone from professional soldier to volunteer reserve. <br /><br />And he's not just Arthur. In his final confrontation with the Destroyer, he's asked scornfully “can this world do no better than you as their champion?”, and replies calmly “Probably. I just do the best I can.” People rightly commend this exchange, as one of the moments that get to the heart of the show. But perhaps what's significant is that its something the Doctor, the ultimate gentleman amateur could have said, but doesn't. The Doctor becomes too associated with the nobles here, doors opening obediently at the sound of his voice. Someone else has to take up his champion-of-the-little-people role. <br /><br />So the Brigadier knocks him out, to take his place in taking down the Destroyer. In a story about the importance of change, the necessity of linear time, we see a recurring character in a new light. And in a story telling us we need to put the old ways behind us, that's exactly what he was doing. He was never a warrior at heart, it was a role he could hang up like his uniform. But when the phone rang he was equally willing to die if need be. <br /><br />...which makes it all the more annoying that they rolled back from their original decision. His death is less foreshadowed than pre-announced. The whole scene is played as intended, then inexplicably at the end of it he lives. Marvel comics have never been crasser. And just think, if they had stuck to their intent, we'd have escaped all that Cyber-Brig business in <i>'Death in Heaven'.</i><br /><br />There's a telling scene where Bessie (the vintage car loved by the Pertwee Doctor) is reintroduced. Ace laughs at its antiquity, only to find it's been revved up and can fly by at superspeed. The story ends with her excitedly taking a trip in it. <br /><br />...which seems to sum up the way we're supposed to see this. It may look like the old show, it may have no better production values, but there's a whole lot more going on under the hood if you care to look. Unfortunately the argument's not much more effective than the special effects used to convey this. You need patience, diligence and a very forgiving temperament to get there - and not everyone's an archaeologist. The casual viewers who tried ten minutes of it then shook their heads and switched over, they can't really be blamed. There <i>are</i> superb ideas under this surface mess, even if they don’t really come in an assemblable order. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">But at the very heart of it all is a dead King, inside a spaceship that's going nowhere. The Brigadier doesn't die. But he should. And with the theme of breaking the cycle and moving on, at times it feels like the show is straining to put itself out of its own misery. <br /><br />…which may be an apt time to say that this will the last of my *’Who’* reviews. Thanks to those who read them.</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-2659408355384552712024-03-02T11:54:00.002+00:002024-03-02T12:01:31.866+00:00'VENGEANCE ON VAROS' (COLIN BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO)<i><span style="font-family: verdana;">First broadcast: Jan 1985<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Written by Philip Martin</span></i><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i></span><i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI-Yx66MG2HrHWpHFjxzBidh_I-w_OkqaTgmFMiobMLbIIL_GLbi5B4VvF8JLjYak9-AsncnBUPxy_f56EfDoekjmv5VgCCO-zbZ28OvBcQyhDDaYujEI2WeP4HpgcBIkmmkNt5VS5CT69ReIbJEO7eypw4hMJZxIeZXkj3CAc93QsI8Ln2nJaSv-LUg1e/s574/1.doctor-who-vengeance-on-varos-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="574" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI-Yx66MG2HrHWpHFjxzBidh_I-w_OkqaTgmFMiobMLbIIL_GLbi5B4VvF8JLjYak9-AsncnBUPxy_f56EfDoekjmv5VgCCO-zbZ28OvBcQyhDDaYujEI2WeP4HpgcBIkmmkNt5VS5CT69ReIbJEO7eypw4hMJZxIeZXkj3CAc93QsI8Ln2nJaSv-LUg1e/s16000/1.doctor-who-vengeance-on-varos-2.jpg" /></a></div><br /></span></i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>”MORAL: TV is bad for you. Oh. Wait a minute”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />- <a href="http://www.androzani.com/varos.shtml" target="_blank">Androzani</a> <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Torture Porn Goes Teatime</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />This was a controversial story for a controversial era, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_on_Varos#Broadcast_and_Reception" target="_blank">criticised by foes and even some fans of the show</a> for its supposed sadism - the point torture porn went teatime. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0562982/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">IMDB gives it </a>the keywords 'bare chested male', 'bare chested male bondage', 'torture', 'execution' and 'electric torture', not exactly what they said about <i>'Black Orchid'.</i> <br /><br />This may well be a case of becoming the news you intended to comment on. For against a background of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_nasty" target="_blank">the ongoing Video Nasties moral panic,</a> the scenario essentially recaps <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Sex_Olympics" target="_blank">Nigel Kneale's classic dystopia 'Year of the Sex Olympics' </a>with torture porn replacing the... er... porn-porn. <br /><br />The Varosians are providing the universe's only supply of Maguffinite. (At least I think it was called that). Despite everybody else needing this for space and time travel, they are continually ripped off over its price and kept impoverished. (It may be worth noting <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984–85)" target="_blank">the British miners’ strike</a> was also much in the news at time of broadcast.) Their reliance on torture becomes a way of keeping the workers acquiescent, while providing a secondary export in selling the tapes to thrillseekers. <br /><br />Yet there's an extra element which frames all this. We continually cut to Arak and Etta, two regular Varosians, watching events on their home TV as they are broadcast. The conceit is that TV on Varos is essentially CCTV - viewers will see rebels caught and punished, as this is intended to work as a deterrent. You survive this crushing life by transforming your daily masochism into your end-of-shift TV sadism. And it's this intra-story meta-commentary you focus on. (Though, bizarrely, it seems <a href="http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/6v.html" target="_blank">they were added only in the final rewrite.</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqx1OhwbUHHksiYffs9S1ErYfqhKqMhadN9brtGRLgBVTRLrK3BRCtY9O9TAGqj4pyg1z_3JjXyW6saLfiZEsq1WFkO51ZbLJ8pOxP7tlmZvSQpuH_ac55LxCdImrXN-PpXIzchz9rijt3h4UOMgmcTjJ2AQvsgrFJHcLpKJmy46zFYxCFvN1wYPha4GNO/s600/2.Etta-and-Arak.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="386" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqx1OhwbUHHksiYffs9S1ErYfqhKqMhadN9brtGRLgBVTRLrK3BRCtY9O9TAGqj4pyg1z_3JjXyW6saLfiZEsq1WFkO51ZbLJ8pOxP7tlmZvSQpuH_ac55LxCdImrXN-PpXIzchz9rijt3h4UOMgmcTjJ2AQvsgrFJHcLpKJmy46zFYxCFvN1wYPha4GNO/s16000/2.Etta-and-Arak.png" /></a></div><br />Neither Arak nor Etta analyses or critiques the action. In fact they just sit there and utter grumpy banalities. Which is the whole point of them. Which becomes the very point of the story. It's less a clever metafictional conceit and more a distorting mirror held up to the viewer, which makes the story feel almost like an agit-prop drama. At times it all seems uncannily prescient, satirising TV trends then still to come - <i>'Gogglebox'</i> fused with <i>'Big Brother’,</i> cross-booked with <i>'Saw'.</i><br /><br />Admittedly, this happens partly by default. The supposed main story is, for the most part, so incidental and lacklustre you couldn't give it your attention if there was money on it. (Mostly it's a random series of encounters with cheap and unimaginative hazards, seemingly dreamt up by an accountant told to attract the BBFC guideline 'contains mild peril' as frequently as possible.) But the distinction between the two is best explained by looking at the ending. The actual ending, the story ending, is risible in extremis. It just sort of <i>ends</i>. Someone might as well have walked out and hung a sign up saying “and then everything was alright again”. In fact, it pretty much ends with that message read from a monitor screen. <br /><br />But the cut-back to Arak and Etta verges on Beckett. Blinking in this new-found freedom they never asked for, they turn to one another: <br /><br /></span><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">“It's all changed. We're free.”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Are we?”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Yes.”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“What shall we do?”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Dunno.”</span></i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />You naturally assume at some point they'll become sucked into the main story, that the Doctor will burst into their little flat seeking shelter or something similar. The internal fourth wall seemed already established as such a filmsy partition, surely it'll get broken down. But it doesn't and it's so much better that it doesn't. <br /><br />Part of the scenario is that Varos used to be a prison. But its clear, even if no-one ever says so out loud, that this is only so everybody can pretend its not a prison now. At one point we even see a set that remains a prison, but it looks pretty much like everywhere else. After all, what is wage labour but day release prison? You finish your shift, eat your ration, you watch TV and you watch your mouth. The descendants of the officers are now the political class, and the convicts the workers. Not a subtle allusion, but an effective one. <br /><br />The prison setting also makes use of the limited indoor sets. Even their cheapness and basicness becomes kind of incorporated into the shabby aesthetic. Like the besieged bases of the Troughton era, production limitations are turned into an advantage – to evoke claustrophobia. <br /><br />And speaking of politics... Here the chains of office are precisely that. Well-meaning politicians are constrained by a system, corralled by capitalists and chiefly there to get blamed by the workers when nothing changes. (Which it always does.) On Varos even they risk torture. Popular votes are made a binary choice, pressbuttons located handily beside the citizen's tellies. And whenever a politician loses a vote they get an electric shock, the degree proportional to the scale of their loss. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">William Burroughs once described the President as “the dumbass frontman who takes all the rap”, which is pretty much the Governor's job description. Even as he orders the arrest and execution of others he looks trapped himself, knowing he won't be getting out of this job alive. We see Arak salivating at the prospect of his demise, as he will have done with so many before. <br /><br />A fitting dystopia for the era, with a metafictional conceit to bring the point home. So far, so good. However, if we look past the Governor to those corralling capitalists problems start to emerge…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCRhR7bTD22juF7aaMEEA5-sLyEX9jXjaw9NKrSeQkpmhxlTVj-QVEY3g3zwOPLWIs3A0d432TzX5y5PBxteMupp1hyphenhyphenb5DXA7exDOCDtOHTL9zlmLJc_n7ls9anY5k9KPkoYme6AZWCT16yXIudVg_aZXRWtKyK5kmD647UgR9QAHoA2CRSC4NAKXpJwfx/s540/3.Sil.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="540" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCRhR7bTD22juF7aaMEEA5-sLyEX9jXjaw9NKrSeQkpmhxlTVj-QVEY3g3zwOPLWIs3A0d432TzX5y5PBxteMupp1hyphenhyphenb5DXA7exDOCDtOHTL9zlmLJc_n7ls9anY5k9KPkoYme6AZWCT16yXIudVg_aZXRWtKyK5kmD647UgR9QAHoA2CRSC4NAKXpJwfx/s16000/3.Sil.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>There's Something Wrong With Sil</b><br /><br /><a href="http://mindlessones.com/2013/04/01/doctor-who-fifty-stories-for-fifty-years-1985/" target="_blank">Andrew Hickey, noted 'Who' sage and fan of this story, comments</a> “it’s not a matter of goodies and baddies, but of people being forced to fit into a corrupt, evil system, no matter what their nature.” And indeed the story’s at its strongest where this description holds. <br /><br />Yet he also describes the adversary Sil as an “evil slug-like reptilian capitalist,” which seems pretty much like a baddie if ever there was. He is, it should be conceded, quite possibly right to call Sil “the last great comic grotesque of Doctor Who’s history”. Nabil Shaban gives a bravura performance, unashamedly and quite gloriously over-the-top without getting kitschy or knowing. Yet despite this there is something very wrong with Sil - and the gulf between those two quotes helps explain it. <br /><br />Essentially Sil is the SF trope of the malevolent brain in the jar (here transposed into a grub in a tank), crossbred with the agit-prop standard of the wicked capitalist. And, on the surface, they fit together easily. But perhaps that's the problem, the character slips too easily into a genre in a story otherwise intent on disrupting things. <br /><br />The problem with the wicked capitalist figure is that it assumes capitalists cause capitalism. Whereas in reality it is capitalism which causes capitalists. As Marx said ““the capitalist is only a function of capital, the labourer a function of labour power.” The problem with giving capitalism a face (even a malevolent face) is that it hasn't got one, it's an inhumane system because its inherently inhuman. <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/alien-series-that-starts-with-a.html" target="_blank">I've argued before</a> that the way to present those faceless corporations is <i>as </i>faceless corporations, issuing orders remotely and clinically – the way it was done in <i>'Alien'.</i><br /><br />Or if we are to have a Sil we need several Sils, all vying to get their bid in while keeping the overall price down, all knowing they risk torture from their own corporations should they fail. Underperforming Sils could disappear and be replaced by other Sils. (Think for example of the succession of Number Twos in <i>’The Prisoner’.) </i>Every player convinced the real decisions are being made elsewhere. <br /><br />Worse, once you effectively remove capitalism as a motive for capitalists something else needs to be found. At which point the trap-door is thrown open to the basement of a lot of dodgy associations. There is, thankfully, no sign of anti-semitism in the portayal of Sil. But he is something of a <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/british-folk-art.html" target="_blank">blackamoor</a>, a folk culture demon, a jumble of signifiers for foreign-ness. Instead of <i>a</i> foreigner, he's <i>all</i> that's foreign. While the Varosians are white he's quite literally painted black, and given two black henchmen to silently do his bidding. He talks very differently to the regular English everybody else manages. (Something diegitically blamed on a faulty translator circuit.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8soYnUa3BQp8Z0Fu5VH6z5__TPs2AhrpilnvOvPj8iRf309gFqXLMbRBg1YPkIdb89H9i8VjgCj-ARrnMWKXXjj-q3BjC4tUL-v_MmJ_ovKcMQAcyKX24aJn6OhBcXDP8VTYhbSzzvuanC7-4dAJuAKeWJx_BXSJ4ViNwfkCa-S2l_TZRONOtrumg8U6l/s357/4.Varos%20Monitors.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="357" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8soYnUa3BQp8Z0Fu5VH6z5__TPs2AhrpilnvOvPj8iRf309gFqXLMbRBg1YPkIdb89H9i8VjgCj-ARrnMWKXXjj-q3BjC4tUL-v_MmJ_ovKcMQAcyKX24aJn6OhBcXDP8VTYhbSzzvuanC7-4dAJuAKeWJx_BXSJ4ViNwfkCa-S2l_TZRONOtrumg8U6l/s16000/4.Varos%20Monitors.jpg" /></a></div><br />Varos has hierarchies, it has wage labourers to extract goods and officials to then sell them as commodities. We see all this on the screen. But like the criminal in the mind of the tabloid columnist the capitalist is literally an alien to Varos, something from outside. Things can get better just from him going. Yet of course the longer we keep pretending capitalism lies somewhere else, intervening with but outside of our lives, the longer it will be able to stick around. <br /><br />Moreover, to the foreign we need to add the missshapen. There's something creepy in learning Shanan was cast as part of an affirmative action programme for disabled actors, only to have his disability made into a visual metaphor for his villainy. Signifying villainy through disfigurement is nothing new of course, Shakespeare saddled Richard III with a hunchback. '<i>Who' </i>itself has done this before now, for example with Davros. And, ultimately, is deliberately casting a disabled actor as a villain any different to deliberately casting an Asian actor as a villain? <br /><br />And there's an added inducement to make capitalist villains disabled, confirming the separation between them and the supposed dignity of manual labour. For example, in the 1968 film <i>'Once Upon a Time in the West'</i> the railroad magnate Morton is made a cripple. Both disability and capitalism can be seen as unnatural, deviations from the norm. <br /><br />Plus, the need to make Sil the sole, or at least the primary, source of their predicament forces the story to play about as fast and loose with economics as the Tardis does with physics. If we were to get semantic about names, Sil is a word associated with a threshold (as in window sill), suggesting he's their sole link with the outside. Varos is the universe's sole supplier of the vital Maguffinite, but the whole planet seems unaware of this and the idea of sounding out another buyer seems only recently dreamed up by the current Governor. One half of the planet torturing the other half in order to flog recordings of it, that occurred to them first. At the story's end other supplies of Maguffinite are found – and the sale price promptly goes <i>up</i>. <br /><br />Let's give it a half mark, however. Perhaps this is in part a riposte to the commonly held view that poor countries suffer from being 'under-developed' due to a 'lack of resources'. While the conflicts that almost perpetually seem to beset, for example, the Congo are happening precisely <i>because</i> the country has abundant mineral deposits. The fighting occurs because there's something worth fighting over. If there wasn't, the vultures would fly elsewhere. And as the majority of the population seems unlikely to see the value of any sales, whoever might win, they'd essentially be better off if the minerals had never been discovered. And here, Maguffinite is precisely why Varos is being squeezed. <br /><br />Okay, it could be claimed that criticising a <i>'Doctor Who'</i> story for an underdevelped analysis of capitalist economics is kind of missing the point. The Tardis, after all, <i>does</i> play fast and loose with physics. Ordinarily, this objection would be right. There's not much point listing all the things a popular TV show didn't say, we're better off focusing on what it did. But by taking on these agit-prop attributes <i>'Varos' </i>is something of a special case, almost setting itself up for such questions to be asked.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUJDXMUFbm4oDzv0r_e22azxAAWmR7n6O12e3A2UclPEqs0X1k_faZexV9lZaS-08Qj43ShA8MIupTWrRCFsZYJipPTvuSosuh-naQHp8DGR_kqMv2-kfn_1Q1LF0Eu6rTrzPfeD4hzYoHlq5krEXGRAEcO9rbF-5OCbSFcigzyhj2jOqjyun0NWiCWcxX/s538/5.DoctorOnVaros.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="218" data-original-width="538" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUJDXMUFbm4oDzv0r_e22azxAAWmR7n6O12e3A2UclPEqs0X1k_faZexV9lZaS-08Qj43ShA8MIupTWrRCFsZYJipPTvuSosuh-naQHp8DGR_kqMv2-kfn_1Q1LF0Eu6rTrzPfeD4hzYoHlq5krEXGRAEcO9rbF-5OCbSFcigzyhj2jOqjyun0NWiCWcxX/s16000/5.DoctorOnVaros.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>A Cocktail Of Poisons</b><br /><br />It can be hard to escape the feeling the story is actually little more than one of the torture porn tapes it's supposedly satirising. It's cheap production and poor direction only add to this. The feeling doesn't come from the degree of violence, which (despite all the infamy) isn't actually high. It's more the unremitting nature of it all. The story's structured around an attempt to escape a dungeon that finds everywhere else is a dungeon too, torture and claustrophobia crossbred. You start to yearn for one single shaft of daylight to cross those dungeons. Video nasty? Well it's shot on video and can be pretty nasty. <br /><br />And that’s partly due to the peculiar combination of torture and metafiction having a strangely lacing effect. Strange, but with a precursor. <a href="https://them0vieblog.com/2016/08/03/star-trek-the-empath-review/" target="_blank">Darren at The M0vie Blog</a> describes ”the set design [of the original Start Trek episode] ‘The Empath’’” as ”sofas without furniture sets, consoles without walls, chains without ceiling hooks. It is haunting and unsettling, feeling incomplete. The set design in <i>’The Empath’</i> looks wrong on an instinctive level. <i>’The Empath’</i> wanders into the realm of the uncanny, suggesting that there something fundamentally broken.” <br /><br />And like<i> ‘Vengeance On Varos’,</i> it’s also notorious for torture scenes. (Which led to it being banned by the BBC until 1994.) Yet was that just the torture? Didn’t that uncanny set design and those visceral scenes combine to create a cocktail of poisons? Something too strange to accept, yet too harsh to dismiss as mere artifice. Different, opposing reactions are stirred in you at once. The sets on <i>‘Vengeance On Varos’</i> aren’t as blatantly Brechtian. But the metafictional aspects of the story, the ever-present reminders that everything you see was made to be filmed, creates a similar cocktail. And with both, there’s often the feeling that the creators aren’t really aware of of what they’ve created, how powerful it it and so can’t really control the dose. <br /><br />Added to which the second-biggest problem after Sil... well, that's the Doctor. It's bizarre to consider the story was originally conceived for the nicer-than-nice Fifth Doctor. Because Baker is here at the height of his psychopath-dressed-as-clown persona. Before the adventure starts, he's presented as listless, sinking into a torpor. He seems to need the conflict as much as the Tardis needs Maguffinite. <br /><br />And once on Varos he seems to take to life there. Virtually the first thing he does on landing is to point a laser gun at a guard. We also see him prepare a death trap using poisonous vines, and in the acid bath scene (the most infamous moment of this infamous story) not only do his actions lead to the gruesome deaths of two guards he even makes <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/288431.Inside_the_Tardis" target="_blank">what James Chapman calls</a> a “sub-James Bond quip”. With the protagonist himself taking such a relish in what you might expect him to oppose, it comes to feel as confining morally as those limited sets are physically. <br /><br />However, the Doctor’s implication in this is less to do with any grand scheme to make him initially dislikeable, and more to do with good old-fashioned cock-ups. The guard was supposed to fall into the acid bath by accident, but poor direction left this unclear. And as scripted the other guards would have blundered into those vines. However, the real cock-up is something broader... <br /><br />To quote Andrew Hickey again, he notes the story “feels a lot like <i>'2000AD' </i>of the period… biting political satire and ultraviolence For The Kids.” <a href="http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/6v.html" target="_blank">In fact the story was broadcast in place of an ultimately unfilmed script by '2000 AD's chief deviser, Pat Mills</a>. And one of the chief ingredients of <i>'2000AD' </i>of the era was its irreverent black humour. However, much of this was taken out of Martin's script during editing. And when you extract the humour, what you're left with is the blackness. Where it remains seems largely confined to Arak and Etta. Elsewhere, the few lines that survive merely sink things deeper. The acid bath scene was intended to be played comedically, presumably some kind of 'black slapstick', after which the Doctor's sub-Bond quip would have been more in context. <br /><br />However, we should remind ourselves that after the saccharine Davison a more rough-edged Doctor was required. If they pushed the dial too far in the other direction, it was at least the <i>right</i> direction. Acid bath deaths are tricky to overlook, true, but at the same time – this is kind of what he does. This could be the biggest time since <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/power-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘Power of the Daleks’</a> where the Doctor has behaved as such an anarchic, disruptive force – throwing everything up in the air and then abruptly leaving, figuring where and how it lands is someone else’s business. Sil's raging cry “why is everything no longer as it was?” is actually quite glorious, one of the show's signature lines. <br /><br />There's little silver lining to be found with Peri, however. Particularly given the way the story insists on auto-critique, her role become self-parodic without anyone seeming to notice. She basically gets herself into rescue situations while wearing a tight-fitting top. Nicola Bryant might as well have given up on acting the part altogether and just struck model poses. As much as she's given any characterisation it's a general disgruntlement with the overall state of things, including her (non) relationship with the Doctor. <br /><br />While the only other intra-story female character, Areta, seems to have the role of a rebel's girlfriend. (Handily for her, Varos' prisons allow hairspray.) As with the wicked capitalists, this seems all the worse for a story so keen to be making some kind of a progressive political statement.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrYvKTvvJeXR6CmyQi0gfMAMC_CTv5sUT_Wl6LddM3l_y7sZgnqY-aAPXkWLhIH8BxBbUuV-3wvtUGI5HioEogfHlrfBTcZfsRbSDzzUFM4sQLazwS_F45BlAHAwJB0sy6jP20irpesuBx5PxwpctJbnCuIu0MN3_lb-ikZuGmtMllJKqAw7_w7HOEMXlW/s600/6.MeetThecast.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrYvKTvvJeXR6CmyQi0gfMAMC_CTv5sUT_Wl6LddM3l_y7sZgnqY-aAPXkWLhIH8BxBbUuV-3wvtUGI5HioEogfHlrfBTcZfsRbSDzzUFM4sQLazwS_F45BlAHAwJB0sy6jP20irpesuBx5PxwpctJbnCuIu0MN3_lb-ikZuGmtMllJKqAw7_w7HOEMXlW/s16000/6.MeetThecast.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>Torture to the Left, Torpor to the Right</b><br /><br />And while we're focusing on the downside, Arak and Etta aren't entirely getting off the hook. It needs conceding that there's problems with the metafictional device itself. Those who celebrate this controversial story tend to see it as the one which “took on” Mary Whitehouse and the show's other censorial critics. But ironically it may be the one which gave them the most ground. <br /><br />Certainly, if this is 'about' the video nasties moral panic the panic is less called out than used as a basis. Chiefly, this was the association of horror films with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_film" target="_blank">snuff movies</a>, an accusation then widespread and about as baseless. (Mostly centred around <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_(film)" target="_blank">the 1976 film 'Snuff'</a> which, seeking publicity through notoriety, claimed to show a real murder. This stunt may have been sick but it was a blatant hoax, and was well known as such before the 'nasties' moral panic even began.) <br /><br />Moreover, while <i>'Snuff'</i> and some of the other films might have well deserved their 'nasty' tag home videos had become quite a working class pursuit, and much of the panic was underlain with a paternalist concern the proles were escaping the regulated world of broadcast TV. (Even commercial TV in those days operated under strict controls.) It was a moral panic in about every sense. <br /><br />And, as is so often with agit prop, there's the same self-righteous middle class concern the masses aren't being educated in the way they <i>should</i> be, and so are complicit in their own torpor. (Think of <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/ill-make-no-subscription-to-your.html" target="_blank">the sanctimonious disdain so often found in Crass' 'You're Already Dead' rhetoric</a>.) It fits all too easily with the common conservative myth that the poor are responsible for their own state of being. One just proposes regularly scheduled does of elevating costume drama, the other sub-Brechtian shock tactics. <br /><br />Take Arak and Etta on their proletarian sofa. Ostensibly, they're watching <i>'Doctor Who'.</i> They're watching the same scenes as us, after all, and <i>we're</i> watching <i>'Doctor Who'</i>. But it's clear they're watching <i>TV, </i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">just watching</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">what happens to be on. They demonstrably don't even know the names of the characters. They're a '<i>Doctor Who' </i>fan's somewhat condescending picture of the casual viewer. Had I watched it on transmission, I'd almost certainly have associated the couple with my parents, grumbling endlessly about repeats and politicians. Watching it now, <i>'Who'</i> fans probably think of the gullible fools who'll watch reality TV over their readymeal dinners when they could be treating themselves to a DVD of <i>'The Space Pirates'.</i> Whichever, fans of show and by association the show itself, are semi-inoculated from this auto-critique. We’re okay, the problem’s wall with you. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />In an era of interesting failures this may be the biggest of all, and you may notice I didn't qualify there which word I was referring to. If it doesn't really work, if it got confused over itself about what it was doing, there may not be any way it possibly could work. But you're not even sure if its actually <i>trying</i> to. It may have intended to fail, to be self-sabotaging, breaking itself on prime-time TV hoping the shrapnel it throws off breaks everything around it and chucks us Arak and Ettas off our collective sofas. A slap in the face of public taste, the Dadaist urinal of broadcasting. <br /><br />Or, to misquote Arak and Etta: <br /><br /><i>“What was </i>that <i>all about?”</i><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Dunno”</i></span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-42977468953427590372024-02-24T11:51:00.002+00:002024-02-24T11:54:31.943+00:00‘THE FACE OF EVIL' (TOM BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Written by Chris Boucher <br />First broadcast Jan 1977 <br />Plot spoilers happen!</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSIF6LS2DEcdVkeeObO-Wx3poUxZejnTlapJhf7YFH_hJHIertRO1iRdrS8qANaMspJQGv6HVRAmAjvGCV6xWHbdWoVnjiX1sPvNf0L_r6fXqa3kPE7y5JBfxTFJ_tWGyF1d8n9Cr_lBG4Qgqzu5J71AvUFGpzjSAE91tRLn8_bCtqz0Yi-EunKkd03hXJ/s400/15.who445.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSIF6LS2DEcdVkeeObO-Wx3poUxZejnTlapJhf7YFH_hJHIertRO1iRdrS8qANaMspJQGv6HVRAmAjvGCV6xWHbdWoVnjiX1sPvNf0L_r6fXqa3kPE7y5JBfxTFJ_tWGyF1d8n9Cr_lBG4Qgqzu5J71AvUFGpzjSAE91tRLn8_bCtqz0Yi-EunKkd03hXJ/s16000/15.who445.jpg" /></a></div><br /></i><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“At last we are here. I shall be free of us.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />- Xoanon <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>When Two Tribes Go To War</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />As we all now know, this is the one where future companion Leela is found. She’s not fitting in terribly well amid her tribe, the Sevateem. Who seem remarkably similar to <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2013/11/william-hartnells-doctor-who-unearthly.html" target="_blank">the Tribe of Gum way back when</a>, as if savagery hadn’t advanced much in the meantime. There's the same machiavellian power struggles, and so on. In fact the differences only occur when the plot compels them. Not only is their religion different, if equally plot-driven, this becomes more central to the story so they have a shaman to reiterate it. (Rather than just the power struggle over leadership.) <br /><br />In fact it can feel like they've come back to savagery to complete the quota of colonialist tropes. They missed some last time, such as cargo cults and foreigner-as-divinity. It's useless complaining these aren't really common features of tribal societies. One only ever really happened during a narrow time period in the south Pacific (and some doubt even there that 'cargo cult' is an accurate term) and the other only happened to the Aztecs, who weren't a tribal society but an ancient civilisation. <br /><br />But they allow us to indulge in infantalisation of primitive peoples. Cargo cults demonstrates them playing at things they don’t understand the way children do. Which is of course required thinking for colonialists, to see other people as our charges. And so people want to believe them, and so here they are.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb5Liqtwyl6sC9ObAKgMchDBoew4IWTiMoqcYaIctcr5Ngyem98tk7L5H9Ms0VkzP932YweExwf9JUi5q19QH-fE_IPzXmUWxGHxwazN5rapV1G1V3oThGU8OftinD8QlqhZ2Stl6qZBYx9DB9pDKR1bX5cnbq2KEUQ1YsEExc4x2hqIeM5dvgmRPB7W4J/s480/15a.FaceofEvil.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb5Liqtwyl6sC9ObAKgMchDBoew4IWTiMoqcYaIctcr5Ngyem98tk7L5H9Ms0VkzP932YweExwf9JUi5q19QH-fE_IPzXmUWxGHxwazN5rapV1G1V3oThGU8OftinD8QlqhZ2Stl6qZBYx9DB9pDKR1bX5cnbq2KEUQ1YsEExc4x2hqIeM5dvgmRPB7W4J/s16000/15a.FaceofEvil.jpg" /></a></div><br />As from it's early days science fiction aped and echoed colonialist fiction, it's scarcely a surprise that this stuff got absorbed along with everything else. <i>'Star Trek'</i> did it on less than three times, with '<i>The Apple', 'Return of the Archons'</i> and<i> 'A Piece Of the Action'</i>. About which Josh Marsfelder <a href="http://vakarangi.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-devil-you-know-apple.html" target="_blank">says this,</a> and there's not much point me paraphrasing him. <br /><br />But of course, here there’s a twist. Which, as we all now know equally well, is that the Sevateem and their arch-enemies the Tesh both turn out to be descendants of an original landing party, respectively the Survey team and the Techs. The fact that they've created a cargo cult around their own history is, true enough, a tasty paradox. My favourite moment is when they use a steel panel from the spaceship as a gong, which may well be because they're not mimicking its original purpose but finding their own. <br /><br />Commentators often talk about this story in terms of its influences, which may be understandable. The Baker era has, up to now, done their take on Frankenstein, on Triffids, on Mummy stories and all the rest. In a way the show hadn’t since the decline of the historicals. But here it’s misplaced. This story may well have had influences, but its not taking a recognised trope out for another spin. Its basis is more the classic science fiction extrapolation of a high concept. Which, as we all know was, What If God Went Mad? (More on Gods going mad later.) <br /><br />And this may be partly why the story’s so under-rated, normally ranked below Chris Boucher’s other two scripts, <i>’The Robots of Death’ </i>and <i>’Image of The Fendahl’ </i>- despite that introduction of fan fave Leela. People aren’t looking at it in quite the right way. <br /><br />More strangely, those same commentators often overlook what must surely be its biggest influence. Mostly it channels <i>’Zardoz’</i>, just with Leela taking up the Sean Connery role of the half-naked savage who crosses the threshold to civilisation. (Through a big stone head, even.) There's the same exotic science-fictiony names which turn out to be corruptions of more familiar ones. The evil overlords even have similar names, from the titular Zardoz to Xoanon. <br /><br />Well, except... <i>’Zardoz’s</i> theme was civilisation leading to decadence and ennui, and therefore needing the odd bit of prodding by some passing half-naked savage to liven life up a bit. While this goes back to that great SF staple of the division between mental and manual labour. (Seem most clearly in the influential <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2017/11/metropolis-with-score-by-factory-floor.html" target="_blank">’Metropolis’</a>.) While the Tesh are ascetically religious, as fixated upon the life of the mind as the Sevateem are on physical prowess. (Their mind control powers should really have extended to telekinetic abilities, allowing them to carry out their daily tasks without sullying their fingers.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXYJh6b9TrlyeK5P5zI7TlrVogiXwyH9DO4V0YtUZ2gRxHNQp85W3b8MYsif4kyvSdM6-tz62TT2ZfPyyGXNJYleMKzEKijGYaItC77avQ-BqJxEbDhscrh7H9LYavGv5-0BIaAslQ5znxqVCEXKaK8A0dI5i_ajQaF7ouaCCE30SquPVkBqzx7VrpNAbC/s528/15b.Sevateem.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXYJh6b9TrlyeK5P5zI7TlrVogiXwyH9DO4V0YtUZ2gRxHNQp85W3b8MYsif4kyvSdM6-tz62TT2ZfPyyGXNJYleMKzEKijGYaItC77avQ-BqJxEbDhscrh7H9LYavGv5-0BIaAslQ5znxqVCEXKaK8A0dI5i_ajQaF7ouaCCE30SquPVkBqzx7VrpNAbC/s16000/15b.Sevateem.jpeg" /></a></div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyZJ81Dkf_Us3seBv97qnn6Wv1D_wHKyuLz5WFVGYgmSnWDLt1Bi0rsOZjUSGlHjNp_VfGTdYSa5AiEcu_ZEygc0K6-_4BtHUWL4lgcyu3rnJ2NxH6OMszB6ururwP9pZ733CP_ygO_IIBA5o2CeaqVGIGtZ6DUB3kpiQnVh7kA_j5qQhd3TZwxrYIkpZl/s528/15c.Tesh.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyZJ81Dkf_Us3seBv97qnn6Wv1D_wHKyuLz5WFVGYgmSnWDLt1Bi0rsOZjUSGlHjNp_VfGTdYSa5AiEcu_ZEygc0K6-_4BtHUWL4lgcyu3rnJ2NxH6OMszB6ururwP9pZ733CP_ygO_IIBA5o2CeaqVGIGtZ6DUB3kpiQnVh7kA_j5qQhd3TZwxrYIkpZl/s16000/15c.Tesh.jpg" /></a></div><br />Though while they guard the inevitable sentient super-computer and see themselves as superior to the brute Sevateem, unlike the Eternals of <i>’Zardoz’ </i>they're ultimately as clueless as to what's really going on. (There's a touch of <i>’Canticle For Liebowitz’</i> in their turning science into religious litany.) <br /><br />An artificial barrier has been constructed by that super-computer to keep the two apart, and the story's largely predicated upon bringing this down. In short, despite the technophobia you might expect, it's not technical development which has placed people on either side of it, the early adaptors versus the stuck-in-the-mud Luddities with their hunting knives and dial-up connections. Xoanon represents a false consciousness which needs throwing off. Social stratification has a social cause. <br /><br />And if the plot has Leela lead the way, the Sevateem eventually follow. They cross the same physical and psychological barrier as her, they just do it a bit later. Intra-story at least, they make the mental leap of their own accord. The shaman plays a crucial role in overcoming Xoanon, with the Doctor admitting he's underestimated him. <br /><br />And the name ‘survey team’ suggests they weren't colonising invaders, so would most likely have been of the same scientific bent as those who stayed in the rocket, suggesting this difference wasn’t innate but developed over time. (Which may explain how they're able to carry crossbows, which seem well beyond their general level of development. Perhaps.) But that’s not really the point of the thing. <br /><br />And this is accomplished by the same thing happening in microcosm – a team-up between the Doctor and Leela. When Leela first encounters the Doctor, she crawls up to his feet. But that turns out to be something of a throw, as they soon shape up into a team. If Leela’s from the Sevateem, the Doctor's not <i>of</i> the Tesh in the same way. It’s that in their cosmology he belongs that side of the barrier, and is more associated with brain work. <br /><br />But for their team-up to be effective the differences between them need to be overcome. When the Doctor insists on imposing that division of labour, Leela guarding the door as he confronts Xoanon, it becomes cliffhanger time and she needs to rescue him. And just as he teaches her the rudiments of science, at one point he has to uncharacteristically resort to fisticuffs. <br /><br />So all this could end up with any essentialist difference between the two tribes erased, the sides learning to just get along. That would after all take us back to how things were before this even began. But the story pointedly shows us neither before nor after, it ends with no-one knowing what to do and with everyone arguing. As do many <i>’Who’ </i>stories, it’s true, such as <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/power-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘Power of the Daleks’</a>. But that doesn’t change the basic fact – we don’t see any of this happen, it essentially ends on a freeze frame. <br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”I’m Not Feeling Myselves Today”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />As things progress, we gradually discover Xoanon has some kind of split personality. He later states the split he's created in society is a duplicate of his own mental state, which most commentators take as gospel. But it isn’t at all. You could have written an evil computer who comes unplugged in the end without any of the tribal conflict, or have the two groups separated by some natural force, a gorge or raging river, or a force filed without any sentience behind it. The real split's in the story itself. <br /><br />In almost a reprise of <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/11/william-hartnells-doctor-who-ark.html" target="_blank">'The Ark’, </a>the Doctor caused all this on an earlier visit when he tried to fix the computer. That face of evil, it’s his! This is most obvious in the blatant <i>’Forbidden Planet’ </i>borrow, where the invisible monster is revealed to have his face, as if it's his rampaging id. (Just his face. But still able to leave footprints.) There’s multiple mirror and fractured screen scenes.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP31luxgWKuwyDjk1ne8irxh8q6IYSILPsjkJiJzKz2GQiDHRODhhndEiaWB-rLxFwQcBUDzSj6hebPZFk4UNXMjDH59uMr4EWaMQ2456isMPIcJ108Cz-0Y_hq2Dme3-CfINit5bfYBtQRljw9hiB0fY4t0eBS1IdXXMPW4WdmvXOk_HkA5QFXHdxCQkl/s504/15d.Maincomputercomplex.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="504" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP31luxgWKuwyDjk1ne8irxh8q6IYSILPsjkJiJzKz2GQiDHRODhhndEiaWB-rLxFwQcBUDzSj6hebPZFk4UNXMjDH59uMr4EWaMQ2456isMPIcJ108Cz-0Y_hq2Dme3-CfINit5bfYBtQRljw9hiB0fY4t0eBS1IdXXMPW4WdmvXOk_HkA5QFXHdxCQkl/s16000/15d.Maincomputercomplex.jpg" /></a></div><br />The literal going inside of the Doctor’s head (if in carved form), the appearance of a couch, that most Freudian item of all furniture… these are two heavy hints among many that we should be seeing this as a psychological story. It’s probably unsurprising that the Black Archive book for this was written by a psychologist, Thomas Rodebaugh. <br /><br />But rather than offer a talking cure the story seems as beset by confusion as Xoanon. The Sevateem believe Xoanon is held prisoner behind the barrier by the Evil One, who the Doctor looks like. Yet when Xoanon talks to the tribe on the cosmic walkie-talkie he has the Doctor's voice. And why, if its too insane and conflicted to even know itself, has it embarked on this human engineering programme in the first place? <br /><br />Xoanon is really a whole bunch of cultural signifiers for a troubled mind pasted together. (Rodebaugh states politely “Boucher thinks psychologically [but] does not think psychoanalytically, which is a different matter entirely.”) Which shouldn’t be seen as altogether surprising. Professional scriptwriters are more likely to go with what they half-remember on a subject than decide to read the complete works of Freud and Jung before starting on scene one. <br /><br />Look at <i>’Face Of Evil’ </i>up close, and the sense of it dissipates. But its like looking at a painting up close, and getting surprised it goes abstract. Stand <i>back</i>, stupid! This isn’t something that’s intended to make sense. Its trying to be stimulating, not polemical. It throws a bunch of stuff at us, and gives us the job of sorting it. <br /><br />Okay then, let’s get started on that. <br /><br />So, the Doctor repairs the faulty computer, but in so doing he creates Xoanon, who is modelled on him. And Xoanon could be seen as an abandoned child, both modelling himself on his parent and wanting to establish his own self by breaking away from him. God went mad because of Daddy issues. As the child rebels against parental authority, that control seems not just bad but definitional of evil. To the child, after all, this is the point from where all authority seems to stem. And the solution can seem to be to rid yourself of the parent, allowing you to replace them. <br /><br />It’s perhaps possible to see the two tribes as a child mind obsessing over sorting, over putting things in their place. Of course the Tesh and Sevateem cannot mix, any more than the land can meet the sky. <br /><br />And in the one way you could say the story is psychoanalytical, its cool that the super-computer doesn’t just become a life form, its allowed to stay one. In a longstanding Who tradition it doesn't need defeating but curing. To overcome our reliance on our parents and become our own self, the paradox is that we need our parents to help with that. It gets harder when your Dad keeps shooting off. But works out alright in the end. <br /><br />The rest of this review will be a semiotic analysis of Louse Jameson’s legs. <br /><br /><b>A Semiotic Analysis Of Louise Jameson’s Legs</b><br /><br />Told you.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibpZAOrKSel0vJDdNuNRVl7ToJVw5dU2ywl9CPutAtJzsqqij0LANdct7teZJqMAmLF0xjCrVwFdcwodSJFU6mtwkXo30WLXdnf81kaQDem9Ze3VAhqrfdM0G2-XKT2xS3Sj58STaZ47iZmGlKXJV_R_r52K45FJogWjkgen4KeNCRxvQt4Y8xWfjF9MTx/s782/15e.Leela.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="782" data-original-width="591" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibpZAOrKSel0vJDdNuNRVl7ToJVw5dU2ywl9CPutAtJzsqqij0LANdct7teZJqMAmLF0xjCrVwFdcwodSJFU6mtwkXo30WLXdnf81kaQDem9Ze3VAhqrfdM0G2-XKT2xS3Sj58STaZ47iZmGlKXJV_R_r52K45FJogWjkgen4KeNCRxvQt4Y8xWfjF9MTx/s16000/15e.Leela.jpg" /></a></div><br />The Sevateem seem to have one other woman amongst them, whose role seems to be to stop anyone saying Leela's the only woman among them. (Nor do they have any children or old people.) Because of course she’s a blatant example of <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NubileSavage" target="_blank">the nubile savage</a>. The classic version of which is Raquel Welch as Loana in <i>'One Million Years BC'</i> (1966). Not only does she illustrate that TV Tropes entry, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur_bikini_of_Raquel_Welch" target="_blank">the fur bikini she sports even has its own Wikipedia page</a>. (Even the names are suspiciously similar, Leela and Loana. But then primitive languages don't use consonants much. Or at least that’s what I was told by Looalla.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggEfUePK7kcwkQS0m_W79HVCKF1rSOWpeWb1jywyHNvczFHqiuFI9HCPU4t5oI3w9EsQDJZ3yOFIGQ-QkRHE8tA-H-Jpso3bsqhvUcz1ktoPs1KslnNjH876uXVip9OQLv1KYhspjs7CMhQXMV-nu5xhuzwVESXm5IwWx3pjCUlugcxUfEyqd9WBbShbq0/s719/15f.Raquel-Welch073.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggEfUePK7kcwkQS0m_W79HVCKF1rSOWpeWb1jywyHNvczFHqiuFI9HCPU4t5oI3w9EsQDJZ3yOFIGQ-QkRHE8tA-H-Jpso3bsqhvUcz1ktoPs1KslnNjH876uXVip9OQLv1KYhspjs7CMhQXMV-nu5xhuzwVESXm5IwWx3pjCUlugcxUfEyqd9WBbShbq0/s16000/15f.Raquel-Welch073.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>The Nubile Savage’s ability to scour her environment for naturally occurring hair and beauty products is much-mocked. But if it’s effectively a form of fancy dress, the Doctor’s an example too. Closer to the point is the double standard rolled up in the popular term for the sexy companion figure, Something For The Dads. The Mums are presumably in the other room, making everyone’s tea, so let’s not worry. Arguably this is almost the norm with the companion figure. But with her skimpy leathers upping the sexiness, Leela brings it more out in the open. Though there’s more specific things to bring up… <br /><br />First off, Google-image the term and see how many Nubile Savages are white girls hanging around in black parts of the world. One very common iteration is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_girl " target="_blank">the Jungle Girl,</a> the female Tarzan. Because after all we wouldn’t want that lechery getting inter-racial, now would we? <br /><br />Moreover, and put bluntly, the supposition is that primitives will be unconstrained by our social norms and so make for better shags. But at the same time a recurrent feature of the Nubile Savage is her sexual innocence. Unsocialised, with the mind of a child in the body of a woman, she doesn’t know what her parading about in her skimpies does to the rest of us. The number of times she’s made some solitary figure, discovered by some expeditionary party, attest to this. Which of course is about making her unthreatening the same time as sexy. <br /><br />How much of this applies to Leela? She’s white, and living in a jungle. And she’s isolated from her tribe after the first scene. While this is a family show, so subject to obvious constraints, no mention is made on-screen of her sex appeal despite that being blatantly what she’s there for. <br /><br />I’ve peppered these reviews with personal recollections of first watching them. But this one’s not quite as charming as a wide-eyed boy having nightmares about Daleks. Leggy Leela’s arrival was for me just at… um, well, the right time. I’ve no idea what my Dad thought of her, but I got to be pretty keen. <br /><br />What if we were to ask the young me what made him so besotted? There’s little point pretending I‘d have been the same had they made her an Inuit wrapped in furs, instead of what <i>’Futurama’ </i>would call “a compelling short garment”. But maybe it wasn’t <i>just</i> that… <br /><br />There was then something of a negative feedback loop between girl characters in popular dramas and boy audience response. There just to give the hero someone to rescue, they spent a lot of time screaming and simpering. A little young for terms such as ‘media construct’, my schoolmates and myself tended to conclude “girls spoil it”. Why not get straight to the fight scene, we reasoned, past that lovey-dovey stuff? <br /><br />Whereas Leela didn’t simper much, which wasn’t always true of the type. Loana is simultaneously Nubile Savage and <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DamselInDistress" target="_blank">Damsel In Distress</a>, her Fay Wray role in the film is to get captured by various kinds of dinosaur, who may well have been queuing up offscreen. Whereas Leela, strong-willed and resourceful, is Savage as much as Nubile. (Or, more accurately, cross-bred her with <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ActionGirl" target="_blank">the Action Girl trope.</a>)<br /><br />Previous woman companions, such as Liz Shaw, had been given agency by beefing up their brains. Leela might seem to go in the other direction. Her role in terms of plot function is less Liz and more a throwback to Ian, Steven or (another primitive from a fightin’ background) Jamie, sometimes clashing with the Doctor over the use of force. <br /><br />But while her educational record may have gaps, its also established from the get-go that she’s savvy. <a href="http://www.eyeofhorus.org.uk/content/editorial/interviews/jameson.html>" target="_blank">Jameson has said she played the character as</a> “very intelligent but uneducated”, and part-based her on a child she knew.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtekb-qVyxwVPnYU5k48PFUXmpwIGHw-KAEBw6Upc66AOCu95LNBPpyKzfoiDMasOOjMyV0EGhdFqw2q1AE3QAFY0MAEfPUBBO08wc38hjbBhmwAZLu1Vbtim2pHlwe3bICwvav5y0iIbswhCOl9pGY7amMKUJNuQ8EUSDetQ21HY_TZ8HdRnc1ul_xho/s510/15g.Leela+Doctor.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtekb-qVyxwVPnYU5k48PFUXmpwIGHw-KAEBw6Upc66AOCu95LNBPpyKzfoiDMasOOjMyV0EGhdFqw2q1AE3QAFY0MAEfPUBBO08wc38hjbBhmwAZLu1Vbtim2pHlwe3bICwvav5y0iIbswhCOl9pGY7amMKUJNuQ8EUSDetQ21HY_TZ8HdRnc1ul_xho/s16000/15g.Leela+Doctor.jpg" /></a></div><br />As said, she soon strikes up a rapport with the Doctor. The story opens with her decrying tribal customs like a one-woman Enlightenment, and getting exiled for her pains. She elects to travel with him. And her rejection of tribal leader status is a more stammering version of how he’s responded on other occasions. (Essentially “you are making a category error here.”) It's strange to read that two endings were deliberately written, to keep their options open with her. You can't imagine the other having worked half as well. <br /><br />It’s true we have Jameson herself to thank for much of this. While Walsh figured her best response to being cast as Loana was to “strut my stuff”, <a href="http://www.eyeofhorus.org.uk/content/editorial/interviews/jameson.html" target="_blank">she became more protective of her character.</a> Frequently given scripts saying “girl companion screams” she’d simply state “Leela doesn’t scream”. From Susan on, the standard pattern for the girl companion was to establish someone as more interesting and then progressively wear them back down to cliche. Jameson didn’t make the feisty Leela up, but she took the character from this story and stuck with her. <br /><br />I’d like to look back and believe this planted some early seed in my young mind about how different women characters could be depicted. Perhaps to some extent it did. But my reaction at the time was something else… <br /><br />Jameson’s best-known comment is that what they gave Leela in proactivity, they took away from her in clothes. But what she saw as a trade-off my young mind took as a combination, it was legginess <i>plus</i> knife-wielding which made her sexy. (Leela replaced Sarah-Jane, who didn’t simper much either. But whenever she did anything pro-active I suspect my young mind went ‘honorary boy’.) <br /><br />The Action Girl overlaps with what, in the terminology of the day, was called a Tomboy – a girl who takes to boy's stuff. You see the same trope at a similar time in Leia's anti-Dale Arden act in <i>'Star Wars'</i> (1977). The figure’s appealing to young boys partly because it’s a girl coming into your world, doing your things, not asking you to move too much. <br /><br />Which also exposes the limits. A girl who survives in a boy's world by doing boys' stuff, the Action Girl sidekick doesn't break the presumption that an audience is bad default a male audience. (Quite often she'll be just bad enough to be sexy, hence the hero keeping her in line.) it's also implicit that there's something unorthodox in hers heroics, and with it something kinky. <br /><br />Rodebaugh states Philip Hinchcliffe, then the producer, thought the character might lead to more girls identifying with her. I’m not sure of this. Emma Peel from <i>’The Avengers’ </i>had a lot of… well her name was devised as a homonym for ‘Man Appeal’. But I’ve also met not a small amount of women who took her as a kind of role model, even if that wasn’t the original plan. I’m not heard anyone say anything similar over Leela. She was made for the males. And if she did anything progressive, it was to the males. <br /><br /><i>Further reading: </i>“You could argue that this is the personification of the core divide at the programme's soul at this time. Threatening to destroy the series is the untapped ego of Tom, with the self-reflexive query ‘Who, am I?’ an internal debate over whether or not he's bigger than the programme itself. Nah, not really - but food for thought, innit?” <br />- <a href="http://grke.net/anorak/FaceEvil.html" target="_blank">Tomb Of the Anorak</a><br /><br /><i>Coming soon!</i> Further disruptions in the space-time continuum…</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-32238701369549395002024-02-17T12:56:00.001+00:002024-03-02T11:20:32.555+00:00'SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE’ (JON PERTWEE'S DOCTOR WHO) <i><span style="font-family: verdana;">Written by Robert Holmes <br />First broadcast: January 1970 <br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Plot spoilers: Medium-to-high</span></i><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i></span><i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtyUNT7G7Rlff6nJwg-qoDazn1jQdNNmtd9IaXKq-c_TW5-oi_1LR33JKzNFhOdidKKW3QTZMu966wN4iTERXEzxFUpMcBfm9qPnrinCzxDhPEddSJj7UaSTtKW36mku5J4M57ZidHECYHhZ2LDHqiZFs5WXoZMbq0LAQqWDAy4ezDEVFtqTIOeiqE62DC/s528/1.Autonsrampage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtyUNT7G7Rlff6nJwg-qoDazn1jQdNNmtd9IaXKq-c_TW5-oi_1LR33JKzNFhOdidKKW3QTZMu966wN4iTERXEzxFUpMcBfm9qPnrinCzxDhPEddSJj7UaSTtKW36mku5J4M57ZidHECYHhZ2LDHqiZFs5WXoZMbq0LAQqWDAy4ezDEVFtqTIOeiqE62DC/s16000/1.Autonsrampage.jpg" /></a></div></span></i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><b>”The New Policy”</b><br /><br /><i>”No eyes, no hair, just stares...”<br />”What?”<br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>”Men. Creatures! Made in the factory!”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Some <i>’Who’</i> stories, there’s no real doubting which one they are. Take this. It’s the one where the dummies break out the shop windows and run amok. It’s one of the show’s most memorable sequences. Though I’ve never specifically heard it said, I would bet my frilly cuffs that this kicked things off and the script was then written around it. <br /><br />But then <i>why</i> should that be so iconic? Why should one and a half minutes stand out so much from twenty-six years? <a href="https://youtu.be/f9HCzAXoDI8" target="_blank">(Particularly if you watch it back and realise they could only break that plate glass by having it happen off-screen.)</a><br /><br />Perhaps the child psychologist Piaget will know. He conceived of the young mind as animist, progressing from a generalised sense that “all things are conscious”, even the most inanimate objects, through “things that can move are conscious” to what he called the mature view. (“Not everything that moves is necessarily conscious, just look at Ian Levine.”) <br /><br />Interestingly, he saw the source of this as anxiety, a reaction to what otherwise seemed inexplicable. “It is when some phenomenon appears doubtful, strange and above all frightening that the child credits with a purpose.” <i>(‘A Child’s Conception of the World’,</i> 1929) And the child progresses through these stages not mechanically, like passing exams, but unevenly, shifting back and forth. So the old beliefs linger, overwritten but never truly banished. <br /><br />Crucially, then, this is less a child’s anxiety than an anxiety rooted in childhood. (Surrealist art, not known for being aimed at an infant audience, often played on it.) So even in the adult that child sense can be re-induced. Which is crucial for a ‘family viewing’ show such as this. How do you appeal to both child and adult at the same time? You allow adults to reconnect to their child fears. <br /><br />And this animism is all the stronger in the case of things in the image of a human. <i>’Who’</i> has already featured animate toys and dolls in <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-celestial-toymaker-william.html" target="_blank">‘The Celestial Toymaker'</a>. (If poorly applied, alas.) And it would frequently return to the trope, for example with the Weeping Angels. Further, Piaget insisted that animism isn’t anthropomorphism; in other words, things are granted sentience, but they continue to merely fulfil their function just as things do. So here the Autons don’t just oppose the shoppers they shoot, they behave in a contrary way to them. They are life and unlife at the same time. <br /><br />So in a sense this sequence is classic because it's timeless, reversing development, taking adults back to a child perspective. But at the same time there is something very timely about it. And to get there we need to compare it to some near neighbours. The ’<i>Twilight Zone’ </i>episode ’<i>The After Hours’</i> (1960) essentially takes mannequins as a variant of toys, and tells a Pinocchio tale. While the 1967 <i>'Avengers' </i>episode <i>'Never, Never Say Die’</i> focuses on duplicate copies. <i>'The Avengers'</i> and <i>'Who'</i> in particular were always exchanging writers and story ideas, so similarities are not so surprising. But instead let’s look at the differences. The <i>'Avengers'</i> story becomes that spy-fi staple, the bodyswapping farce. Whereas here the focus is on duplication itself – on production. <br /><br />This is of course not just the first story to feature Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, but the first of the new Earth-based adventures. (The conceit being he’d been sent there by the Time Lords, and told to think about what he'd done.) And if these new direction stories were to become more indebted to the classic BBC series <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/quatermass-experiment-in-science-fiction.html" target="_blank">'Quatermass',</a> they waste little time about it. The alien takeover narrative of <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/quatermass-ii-1955.html" target="_blank">'Quatermass II'</a> is unceremoniously filched in almost its entirety. <br /><br />And then, more shamelessly still, they borrow to an almost equal degree from the show's own earlier <i>'Quatermass'</i> homage – <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-war-machines-william-hartnells.html" target="_blank">'The War Machines’</a>. To steal not only from another show but your own prior stealing from it – now that's chutzpah. <br /><br />But the difference lies in the differences. In <i>'Quatermass II'</i> alien takeover is signified by the familiar trope of a mark, echoing folk tales and witch trials. Here it is a plastic sheen, like spray-tan. One of the first encountered 'humanised Autons' (as opposed to those shock troop shop-front dummies) is a Secretary. And she sports the bland perfection of the Seventies 'dolly bird', recalling the then-familiar phrase “putting my face on”. In fact the closest parallel might be nothing from the list above but <i>’The Stepford Wives’ </i>(1975, from a 1972 novel), which while more feminist had the same focus on getting replaced by a more perfect version of yourself. (And when you look at the silicon sheen on today’s celebrities, I’m not sure the Autons didn’t win after all. Rylan Clark? Clearly an Auton.) <br /><br />Simon Reynolds writes that “plastic as a pejorative dated as far back as the Twenties...but it was really in the Sixties that people started using the word to mean fake and superficial.” <i>(’Shock and Awe’</i>,Faber & Faber) Think for example of the 1967 Mothers of Invention track <i>‘Plastic People’:</i> “She paints her face with plastic goo/ And wrecks her hair with some shampoo”. <br /><br />Which you might expect. Though their history is longer, in the Seventies plastics were becoming increasingly ubiquitous - to the point where they seemed almost new technology. Notably, the <i>'Doomwatch'</i> episode <i>'The Plastic Eaters'</i> hit the screen only a month later. Though, unsurprisingly, <i>'Who'</i> is less concerned with maintaining scientific caution than using the stuff as a poetic symbol. Just like the Cybermen weren't really about your Auntie getting a replacement hip, the malevolent Autons aren't really about plastic bags replacing paper ones.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6VlK4yeKsU4AEjPRiZHcnYiPC7cL6VfsT1vNZ2Cb4QvuMjSZ92jo-WXMa9gWPPL0w2rflixMGMvoLbM4Ca-hrnz0BM8vjkjfgfxL0oSpSJ1CLvy41BEfJ_Wed1mQgJd_9blpnq4YZ0embJtNAdCGDaD3hNqPhhDPVa_Vg5AhGkUXrYqY1eDmOmRN8_81Y/s480/2.Auton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="307" data-original-width="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6VlK4yeKsU4AEjPRiZHcnYiPC7cL6VfsT1vNZ2Cb4QvuMjSZ92jo-WXMa9gWPPL0w2rflixMGMvoLbM4Ca-hrnz0BM8vjkjfgfxL0oSpSJ1CLvy41BEfJ_Wed1mQgJd_9blpnq4YZ0embJtNAdCGDaD3hNqPhhDPVa_Vg5AhGkUXrYqY1eDmOmRN8_81Y/s16000/2.Auton.jpg" /></a></div><br />So plastic comes to play an almost transmutive role in the story. It becomes the bridge in the once-firm division between man and machine, between metal and flesh. One of the key settings is the Auto Plastics factory, where designer Ransome returns after a business trip. To find everything changed. His presence is now no longer required by his former business partner Hibbert, who has a new and somewhat sinister compatriot in Channing. In general, everyone seems to be behaving very strangely.<a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2019/10/william-hartnells-doctor-who-edge-of.html" target="_blank"> 'Edge of Destruction’</a> levels of strangely. They don't shake hands when they do business. He's fobbed off by being told all the changes are down to “the new policy”. <br /><br />But perhaps the key sequence is the one preceding this, set on the factory floor. It has, as you might expect, similarities to the factory sequence from<i> 'War Machines'</i>. But, again, the differences... That was clearly being undertaken in secret, happened upon by a tramp. Here they are not surreptitiously making robots by night but doll parts by day. After the 'poetic realism' of '<i>War Machines'</i>, this is 'real realism'. It could be documentary footage of a doll factory merely inserted into the episode. It might even be taken for filler. <br /><br />…except the whole significance of the story is there in that scene. One of Marx's famous dictums was “it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour but the instruments of labour that employ the workman”. This scene is like that sentence turned into a feedback loop. The workers (all women here, despite Charlie's chosen phraseology) are making approximations of human parts with machines. While they themselves work robotically, to the machine's speed, just a replaceable set of parts themselves. <br /><br />“We're turning over to automation,” explains Channing. “It means we can keep staff down to a minimum.” But of course the meaning of the phrase is not literal. Its not a story about mechanisation resulting in rising unemployment, something in its infancy at the time of transmission. It means a minimum of autonomy. In <i>'Quatermass II'</i> the manual work still needed to be done by workers, who could scupper the invaders' plans simply by folding their arms. But times change... <br /><br />It's like lifting up the lid and exposing the workings. You could look at that scene and wonder if, like the Secretary, the workers have been taken over yet. But when you do you come to realise it doesn't really matter. The Autons may win, or the Doctor may defeat them. But whichever way the workers are staying on that production line. <br /><br />That shop-window-busting scene, where the immaculately attired dummies usurp the somewhat-shabbier-looking shoppers – yes it’s iconic, but it’s not altogether surprising. In a way it’s cachet lies in the fact it’s a moment whose time had come. As the counter culture came to be more subsumed into the mainstream, critiques of consumerism became a staple of the Seventies. But this story goes beyond that. It takes not just consumption but <i>production</i> into its lens. True it only does this incipiently, but its being there at all is noteworthy. <br /><br />In this way the replacement of mind control (used in both <i>'Quatermass II' </i>and <i>'War Machines')</i> by... well... <i>replacement</i> is significant. Notably, Holmes' working title for the story was <i>'Facsimile'</i>. In this new, plasticated world we all become replaceable. People aren't just done away with but vaporised, made to disappear. (Via the command “total destruction”.) Being surplus to production is analogous to non-existence. <br /><br />In <i>'The War Machines'</i>, the plan's combination of takeover by mind control (represented by the sentient super-computer in the Post Office Tower) and by robot invasion (represented by the factory) never seemed very joined up. And here the Post Office Tower is essentially replaced by another handy London landmark, the waxwork museum Madame Tussauds. Which makes more sense... <br /><br />...no really, it does! Well, that symbolic sort of sense anyway. Because it is used as their warehouse of Auton duplicates of the great and the good, the “government types” and military top brass. Because it matters who our betters are. While us proles, we’re essentially mere parts - faceless, interchangeable cogs. We can be replicated by the production line we're working on. <br /><br />Yet it needs stressing that the critique of production <i>is</i> only incipient. Just as with <i>'Quatermass II',</i> as with <i>'War Machines',</i> as with <i>'Tenth Planet'</i> or countless other examples, the problem is framed less in terms of our losing our agency than a rather fetishistically individualised sense of the pure self. The Nestene Consciousness, who control the Autons, are bad because they are collective. Ransome becomes suspicious of Hibbert when “you keep saying we”. When Channing later intones “we have no individual identity” we are intended to be chilled. <br /><br />There's a plethora of telephone scenes, despite the fact that unlike <i>'War Machines' </i>they have no obvious narrative function. But they're most likely there to underline one early scene where Channing is in a phone booth. Someone impatiently barges in to ask how long he'll be, to discover the receiver is down. We separate beings communicate one-on-one, nodes in an exchange. While the Nestene, a hive mind, pool their thoughts universally by telepathy. <br /><br />Except of course they possess only the supposed downsides of collectivity – and so they still have leadership! While their consciousness arrives on Earth via meteorites (giving the story it's title) which can then inhabit the Auton shells, its the 'swarm leader' which goes missing – putting their plans on hold until it can be found. “Swarm leader” seems a peculiarly oxymoronic phrase, reminiscent of Kenneth Williams insisting on being called “Citizen Sir” in <i>'The Black Fingernail'.</i> <br /><br /><a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-tenth-planet-william-hartnells.html" target="_blank">When looking at 'Tenth Planet’,</a> it became obvious that the notion of the Cybermen standing for communism can't really hold up to scrutiny. This story may be firewalled against misinterpretation, but from another direction. Ransome has been away on business, which is carefully specified as in America. Though by the Seventies this had become common, there may be a significance to it. <br /><br />Particularly back then, America seemed the place where capitalism came from. “The latest thing from America” was a common phrase. Any mention of “the new policy” might stir up Stateside thoughts in people's minds, new business practises shaking up the trusted old ways. Ransome's trip throws us off this wrong scent. (Though my mind goes in another direction. The Nestene’s name always make me think of the notorious Swiss multinational Nestle.) <br /><br />Because, just like the Cybermen, the Nestene come from neither west nor east, neither left nor right. Not even up, not really. Outer space is not being used as a blind to disguise their actual origins. In a cautionary story, they stand for the future. (The meteorite's calling signals sound almost uncannily prescient of mobile phone rings.) And space stands for the future just fine. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>From A Clown To A Dandy</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>”I couldn't bear the thought of being tied to one planet and one time.” </i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBvLBUP0ylg2ab4Mh1smcjmDJfarnJhhpXDm494qTfPVPCZMpPXLEHB_3QwLk3tsIsqXFNeiuivr-Kt1MHXj-nz_tktZeVFm5BgDR9dQ7xSmH8pu_LVaYOdEfRP3FlChiTdF2MJA8uFXNUpXWzFzDNo45d1cp3fIYGEv1ukHlYXGaZD1IBEjINqZPMTmZz/s510/3.Doctor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="286" data-original-width="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBvLBUP0ylg2ab4Mh1smcjmDJfarnJhhpXDm494qTfPVPCZMpPXLEHB_3QwLk3tsIsqXFNeiuivr-Kt1MHXj-nz_tktZeVFm5BgDR9dQ7xSmH8pu_LVaYOdEfRP3FlChiTdF2MJA8uFXNUpXWzFzDNo45d1cp3fIYGEv1ukHlYXGaZD1IBEjINqZPMTmZz/s16000/3.Doctor.jpg" /></a></div></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />If not much has been said about the new Doctor so far, then the story doesn't do much more. He's kept out of the action for almost the first half, as he recovers from his (still unnamed) regeneration. <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/patrick-troughtons-doctor-who-changed.html" target="_blank">(While Troughton’s first outing got an instalment to itself.)</a> And when he does appear, as perhaps should be expected in a story so indebted to <i>'War Machines',</i> he's clearly a successor to Hartnell. <br /><br />Donning the aristocratic signifiers almost as soon a stepping from his sick bed, he 'borrows' his trademark cape and vintage car from... yes, really... a Doctor. Which he promptly drives to UNIT and speaks so imperiously to a sentry you can't help but be reminded of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebgate" target="_blank">Andrew Mitchell's Plebgate affair</a>. His commanding voice, we don't even need to be shown, gets the job done. In fact, it could be argued he doesn't <i>really</i> behave like the Pertwee Doctor until he's in his posh togs. In his sick bed he feigns derangement as a means to get what he wants, then pulls a face of mischievous-child triumph, a very Troughton trick to pull. <br /><br />At points he acts less like a hero and more like an aristo who, after losing his heritage, has been thrust unwillingly into a day job. Suddenly he has responsibilities, even the need for a name. At first he tries to evade it by sneaking off, only to find the Tardis disabled. <br /><br />And herein lies the paradox. For a story about the alienation induced by modern production methods (which in no small way this is), it is all the more bizarre to have a protagonist so steeped in privilege culture. But rather than searching for some intra-story way of getting to grips with this, we are better off seeing it as symptomatic of Seventies culture overall - perhaps even British culture in general. Andrew Hickey has often observed that there is much of George Orwell or Tony Benn in the Doctor, the toff who turned to the proles. This paradox will be turned over again and again by the show. It's the grit that makes the oyster. <br /><br />The Autons and their replacement/takeover scenario may have been devised to match his regeneration. The Doctor conveniently manages to land not just at the same time as the Nestene's meteorites, but in the same wood. (In the Pertwee era, not only does the Earth reduce to the Home Counties, they can be spanned by stretching out your arms.) His line about his new face being “very flexible, you know” might seem to suggest at some kind of parity. Yet the Autons' replacements ultimately do the opposite of the Doctor, who is the same person only looking different. <br /><br />However, for all that there's a newfound emphasis on his alien-ness. He's shown to have two hearts, something he's been previously quiet about. But of course this alienness is now required precisely <i>because</i> of the new format – because things are now Earth-bound. However copycat the scripts might get, the Doctor is not Bernard Quatermass the Earth scientist. He's from another world and has at root an inscrutably alien nature. The <i>'Radio Times'</i> cover which introduced him was keen to show him as some kind of magician.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmL_On4aS6tNH_QnyR653MR6_E0vRF9zVv0gxfQxKYlqyxY_XvQyWgj8dbjM0PiTG5t-YeENkCisbMAM4-02UCZuqQuHBz18Mq1x0MMyqR1pr0tyDmHbX2HBciQSUmn-GMMAgJcMyLbwao5xjP7I8KCvOA8Jhbzh1mdFn4Pp5p7zwG0plkp38aKKjuTxAN/s555/4.RTCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="431" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmL_On4aS6tNH_QnyR653MR6_E0vRF9zVv0gxfQxKYlqyxY_XvQyWgj8dbjM0PiTG5t-YeENkCisbMAM4-02UCZuqQuHBz18Mq1x0MMyqR1pr0tyDmHbX2HBciQSUmn-GMMAgJcMyLbwao5xjP7I8KCvOA8Jhbzh1mdFn4Pp5p7zwG0plkp38aKKjuTxAN/s16000/4.RTCover.jpg" /></a></div><br />If this is not the first UNIT story, it's clear UNIT is now being set up to be regular feature. (We're almost explicitly told the Autons will be back for a rematch.) This story went out the same year as yet another Seventies SF show with an alien invasion premise,<i> 'UFO'.</i> While SHADO, UNIT's equivalent, hide behind the cover of a movie studio, their glam fashionista uniforms suggest the cover they've gone in for is quite deep. Nominally SF, <i>'UFO'</i> overlapped considerably with pop-surreal spy-fi stories, such as <i>'The Avengers', 'The Man From UNCLE'</i> and Marvel comics' <i>'Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD'</i>. (Where SNAAC applies, Snappy Acronyms Are Always Compulsory.) <br /><br />UNIT can't compete with this fashion parade, but they still look a good deal more dashing than that regular army clobber. Of course they have to act the straight man to the Doctor's dandy. But like the plastic they occupy a between-space, not as hidebound as the straight army, but neither as savvy to strangeness as the Doctor. Notably it's Captain Munro from the regulars who gets replaced. <br /><br />And with UNIT of course the Brigadier is back. This significance of this may be hard to reconstruct from hindsight, as we tend to see his role as effectively beginning here. But while fans frequently complain the new policy of Earth-set stories constrained the show, the contemporary casual viewer – tuning in to a much faster-paced show, with more location shooting and now in glorious technicolour – would have seen it as opening up. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />All those revelations about the Time Lords to top off the last season, now they don't even get mentioned by name. This is built to be a jumping-on moment for new viewers. (Ratings had been falling through Troughton's tenure, and are known to have increased with this story.) Given all this, the Brig's reassuring face becomes one of the very few recurring features, the only person around who would have been able to recognise the old Doctor. (The Tardis is alternately guarded and ferried around like a totem, but we don't see inside it.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTSW-_tehiiPzDxAAgwLdbyTa47O5jXpNwfUJMlNS3XMS96B_gipmKKs8mZXpOBHB7Yln7jyIAdb-2JooH0skfv2ohPBoqPdgZvwWng1uty1vpKMXHqA-6tiEGb7PqTbZntui3GvXDBaQEnCqq51oyDLQURQ1BNNBsIcVLbghuSBQtrRPY3BZonWrHazEu/s486/5.LizNBrig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="486" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTSW-_tehiiPzDxAAgwLdbyTa47O5jXpNwfUJMlNS3XMS96B_gipmKKs8mZXpOBHB7Yln7jyIAdb-2JooH0skfv2ohPBoqPdgZvwWng1uty1vpKMXHqA-6tiEGb7PqTbZntui3GvXDBaQEnCqq51oyDLQURQ1BNNBsIcVLbghuSBQtrRPY3BZonWrHazEu/s16000/5.LizNBrig.jpg" /></a></div><br />Yet if the Brig is the familiar face, all the audience identification business falls to new companion Liz Shaw. When Hartnell became Troughton they made sure it happened mid-season, with Ben and Polly still around to provide a live commentary. This time it’s a season-opener. Here, <a href="http://mindlessones.com/2012/02/20/doctor-who-fifty-stories-for-fifty-years-1970/#more-23689" target="_blank">as Andrew Hickey comments:</a> “we’re introduced to these vaguely familiar elements as if they’re totally new, through the eyes of new companion Liz Shaw.” <br /><br />Her introductory scene is all about her, and us, being brought up to speed. But it also tells us about both her importance and her character. Her initial skepticism has to be seen in this light. We're used to encountering the small-minded disbelief of the petty bureaucrat - obsessing over protocol and procedure oblivious to the fact that silver-suited extras are even now over-running High Wycombe. But from Liz, coming so early in the reboot, its a skepticism she expresses for us – and so in her we see it as a sign of intelligence. (Though she doesn't need to worry about those “little blue men”. Everyone she runs into will be green.) <br /><br />She's clearly been head-hunted by UNIT on her own prowess, though just in case we haven't got it yet the Brigadier states firmly she's “not just a pretty face”. If the Doctor's still a magician, this time he's not handed another mini-skirted assistant. Liz is an actual scientist who does actual science stuff, almost a dummy run for Romana. To think that it was only four years ago when Polly first appeared, and we got almost excited over her being a secretary. <br /><br />Though <i>'Quatermass'</i> featured female scientists, despite so much else being sourced from there Liz has no real antecedent. She's more an acknowledgement of shifts in Seventies culture – what was then dubbed “Women's Lib” and we now tend to call <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism" target="_blank">second-wave feminism</a>. A wave which had expanded from political and legal campaigning to a general critique of culture, which of course included popular culture. Gloria Steinem’s article <i>’After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’</i> was at this point barely a year old. <br /><br />A popular TV show keen to expand its audience may have not wanted to seem behind the times, or to cut itself off from a potential female audience. Certainly, like the UNIT uniforms Liz's look seems pitched - tied-back hair but mascara round her eyes. Not too old-world, not too dauntingly modern. <br /><br />Given all this, when Liz is shown taking to the Doctor straight away the man she's meeting is the man a whole chunk of the fresh audience may be meeting. A mysterious stranger, an alien. All we can be really sure about is that he's brilliant and here to help us. Actually, we can't even be entirely sure he's here to help us. <br /><br />One of the more unfortunate similarities to <i>'War Machines'</i> is that the ending is as much of a let-down. Things are essentially solved by the combination of a technomaguffin and overacting. (<a href="http://www.androzani.com/spearhead.shtml" target="_blank">Androzani calls it</a> “a disappointing ending which fizzles out in a sea of woeful tentacles”, and indeed its a sequence about as infamous as the Autons coming to life is famous.) Seemingly you're only supposed to twig that Channing was an Auton himself right at the end. A natural reaction to which would be “if I'd have known I wasn't supposed to guess that, I'd have tried harder not to”. <br /><br />Yet overall, while Holmes' previous two efforts <i>('The Krotons’</i> and <i>'The Space Pirates')</i> are not what you would call well-remembered, this has gone on to be a favourite among fandom. Yes, the same fandom which normally so takes against the Pertwee era! Which is perhaps odd, as it very much establishes the new policy rather than provides an exception to its rule. Maybe sometimes its the first time that can be the charm. <br /><br /><i>Coming soon!</i> Those anomalies in the tempo-spatial sphere persist…</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-27290431493906462252024-02-10T11:27:00.000+00:002024-02-10T11:27:58.075+00:00‘THE DOMINATORS’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S ‘DOCTOR WHO’) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Written by Norman Ashbury (and definitely not Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, not them, no not at all) </i><br /><i>First broadcast: August/ September 1968 <br />Plot spoilers? Officially yes, but I shouldn’t worry</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_1V4tj4D_q39F4j9wBG96mw5m4l5URyJjMhr7Oe8YbAXuE5KHgzenGxB5ZvZfZyi7zOynh3tOdqpaLM7TJ1hTJRnN8YaI59wjG6xjIGUhas40NeGCwDH0wbj4qTtXsUKx9y51_8e3vL8wHcFWd2Aju-e4wKWeHiTNrynTcOe0Q2jGyiSMOGz0J-lHXNK/s528/1.The%20Dominators.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_1V4tj4D_q39F4j9wBG96mw5m4l5URyJjMhr7Oe8YbAXuE5KHgzenGxB5ZvZfZyi7zOynh3tOdqpaLM7TJ1hTJRnN8YaI59wjG6xjIGUhas40NeGCwDH0wbj4qTtXsUKx9y51_8e3vL8wHcFWd2Aju-e4wKWeHiTNrynTcOe0Q2jGyiSMOGz0J-lHXNK/s16000/1.The%20Dominators.jpeg" /></a></div></i><br /><i>“Shall we destroy? Shall we destroy?” </i><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”Destroy”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />“Overall verdict”, <a href="http://grke.net/anorak/Dominators.html" target="_blank">says Tomb of the Anorak,</a> “it’s crap”. This is not a popular story. It normally finds itself in a three-way tie for last in the Troughton popularity stakes, with <i>’The Underwater Menace’</i> and <i>’The Space Pirates’.</i> (Respectively, a story I didn’t bother with, and one I won’t be.) <br /><br />People are keen to point out that the premise is daft, the plot thin, the costumes ludicrous, the ‘deadly’ robots actually weirdly cute, and its all bundled up in a reactionary rant against the peace movement. Even the writers washed their hands of it, insisting it went out under a pseudonym.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFYjekPypvvp4XTm72uZpI_ce59KOZ6mBQCC8EUFU11JJjRccfN9lwIyKVpUm0cHj3MmNmWFMMzsHFiYP1RaxCe84DWVaPuTN2nBBVmsJn9tcCRnT7trz-E-tnyHZq3NQXgXZkTkU7YAWXI36uqUByuSdyk0CUaNUoCq74HNW0ua4AL0ZyiqzHpHZlbA-u/s528/2.DominatorsTimesTwo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="403" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFYjekPypvvp4XTm72uZpI_ce59KOZ6mBQCC8EUFU11JJjRccfN9lwIyKVpUm0cHj3MmNmWFMMzsHFiYP1RaxCe84DWVaPuTN2nBBVmsJn9tcCRnT7trz-E-tnyHZq3NQXgXZkTkU7YAWXI36uqUByuSdyk0CUaNUoCq74HNW0ua4AL0ZyiqzHpHZlbA-u/s16000/2.DominatorsTimesTwo.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibokfpTSfu7NaHl5VNCJOSiByzfnDPZmbMaXOLRX6-QHVaqqVyPAnbjQ6f_nYjihZ7vGdxsDvbgYpboZf5BNfPYprozZHhNiH8UWZvKJ6xQWJ7YfDSD61l1At0aaa3bZSRZH9oXq3jaAzMzgUmO3L-fuMBfUWgmlUFWaVH7AxDeA318ifLq58n5wH4Qccd/s528/3.Dulcians.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibokfpTSfu7NaHl5VNCJOSiByzfnDPZmbMaXOLRX6-QHVaqqVyPAnbjQ6f_nYjihZ7vGdxsDvbgYpboZf5BNfPYprozZHhNiH8UWZvKJ6xQWJ7YfDSD61l1At0aaa3bZSRZH9oXq3jaAzMzgUmO3L-fuMBfUWgmlUFWaVH7AxDeA318ifLq58n5wH4Qccd/s16000/3.Dulcians.jpg" /></a></div></div><br />Which might seem hard to argue with. Starting with the costumes, I would bet money that the actors were signed up before the first costume fitting. The Dominators are for some reason dressed up as armadillos, in armour so stiff and awkward that when they try moving blockily about they resemble a <i>’South Park’ </i>animation. For their part, the Dulcians parade about in curtains. And the robots Quarks look like packing crates turned bling but also punk, while also a child gang. The Chumblies were more menacing, frankly. You’re clearly intended to understand what they’re saying, and it’s impossible to work out a word.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj2ZtpCayQefHTj5bb4igaXA73ZQGJxiooy4sUmuvGWSA-pwODvr963pD9eobilUkTa8XXRsJdnSEEyvkq1O6XBWNYm7af-Az3atfP3iIEqs-PrHsMAyeq_vVzqcPCVVE-pgUJz7okiAN_qkoUx2yocwLWH3hFv0RNboMdtIRUckNeiKKG2EZwIf0IftHM/s528/4.Cully.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj2ZtpCayQefHTj5bb4igaXA73ZQGJxiooy4sUmuvGWSA-pwODvr963pD9eobilUkTa8XXRsJdnSEEyvkq1O6XBWNYm7af-Az3atfP3iIEqs-PrHsMAyeq_vVzqcPCVVE-pgUJz7okiAN_qkoUx2yocwLWH3hFv0RNboMdtIRUckNeiKKG2EZwIf0IftHM/s16000/4.Cully.jpeg" /></a></div><br />One character, Cully, is scripted as a headstrong and impetuous youth - but is played by the most incongruously middle-aged duffer since Bill Hayley. (Actor Arthur Cox was 34 at the time, but in all honestly looks older.) But it’s the reactionary moral, and the virulence which its given, that gets most goats.<a href="https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/why-are-earth-people-so-parochial-the-dominators" target="_blank"> El Sandifer found it: </a><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“…an overt attack on the ethical foundations of Doctor Who… an attempt to twist and pervert the show away from what it is and towards something ugly, cruel, and just plain unpleasant. The sheer sickening stench of this story is enough to turn one off the program entirely.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Yet <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2007/11/here-come-daleks.html" target="_blank">’The Daleks’</a> was an anti-pacifist story too. But as pointed out by approximately everybody, that gave its target their best face. The Thals were as noble and principled, and in their own way brave, as the Dulcians are a ludicrous Aunt Sally inside a curtain. Anyone can knock down a straw man, in fact that’s what they’re made for. (In addition, I suspect most aren’t objecting out of some card-carrying pacifist conviction. The problem is the familiar elision between being anti-war and pacifism, then pacifism with passivity.) <br /><br />Except, as you may have already guessed, it’s around now that I’m going to say that its the business of <i>’Doctor Who’</i> to be absurd. So, while it’s no competitor for <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/power-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘Power of the Daleks’</a> or <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-web-of-fear-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘Web Of Fear’,</a> this is a whole heap better than <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-wheel-in-space-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘The Wheel in Space’.</a><br /><br />True, the anti-anti-war angle is the second-hardest thing to take. It does feel highly un-<i>’Who’ </i>for the Doctor to be messing so readily with guns and bombs. And while the Sixties peace movement certainly deserved its share of criticisms, none of them are the knee-jerk reactionary reasons doled out here. But I always say, you’re better being ridiculed than ignored. When they try this hard to misrepresent you, you must be doing something right. <br /><br />More importantly, with this sort of thing they always imagine they’re telling on us. But of course they’re really telling on themselves. And they don’t know that. Which only makes it more telling. As we’ll see later. <br /><br />I may have had an advantage here, as I knew before watching that this was originally intended as a satire but had those elements edited out. Which was part of the reason why the writers huffily resorted to a pseudonym. (The other part being a squabble over the robot Quarks, imagined as being as marketable as the Daleks in the same hopeful way as I imagine Ana de Armas and matrimony.) <br /><br />Except of course the satire kind of sticks. It’s a bit like the adage about rock & roll, you can’t clean it up because it’s dirty to begin with. It could even be argued that the insistence all this is played straight just sharpens the satire. With the story as broadcast it would be more than difficult to work out how intentional the comedy is. But certainly none of it is intentional from the point of view of the characters. Which, like a planet filled with straight men, only makes it funnier. Being asked to take this seriously and finding you just can’t, that’s perhaps the best way to watch it. <br /><br />The tiffs between the two Dominators are especially hilarious. Big Dominator (as I was soon calling him) is forever called off-stage, insisting that in his absence Little Dominator to not do any more of that destroying business. But as soon as he’s out of sight what do you know but some pressing problem rears, which unfortunately can only be resolved by destroying some more stuff. So what’s a poor Dominator to do? Reluctantly he has to give the order again - “destrooooy!” <br /><br />Only for Big Dominator to return and ask angrily whose been destroying in his house. Hilariously, his objection to all this isn’t anything to do with scruples or even strategy, he just figures it wastes too much power. He may be concerned they’ll run out of 50ps for the meter, it’s not exactly clear. Little Dominator then sulks and seethes, before muttering the passive aggressive “order accepted.” It may be he’s actually a Destroyer, enrolled in the Dominator fleet by clerical error. <br /><br />But the Dulcian Council, who endlessly debate stuff and occasionally try to decide whether they should maybe be deciding something, are not exactly ept either. Perhaps their attire comes out of the fact that it’s clearly curtains for them, no matter the size of the threat. Their meandering musings seemed absurd to me. And I work for the Council. In fact the whole thing could be summed up as a resistible force meeting an ineffectual object. <br /><br />So in short the Dominators look and act like a right bunch of prats, and the Dulcians a different bunch of prats. And that’s a vital part of the story. Their respective costumes represent their respective ideologies. They’re absurd because those ideologies are absurd. The Dominators are encased in rigid armour, their movements little more than literally one-track. While, less happily, the Dulcians look remarkably like men in dresses, emasculated and enfeebled. (I did say less happily. This is in fact the hardest thing to take about the story.) <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”Destroy!”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />But also, forget all this for a moment and try to picture a contemporary satire of the Sixties peace movement. Surely Rada members in wigs saying “hey man” a whole lot. Hopeless hippies, useless youths who won’t fight the godless Commies like they should because they’re too busy lying down and listening to the Grateful Dead. Kids today… <br /><br />So then why are so many of the Dulcians so bloody old? They’re one of the most gerontocratic societies yet seen on this show. Yes, there’s Cully the reckless youth. But that suggests reckless youth starts at forty. (Like the daft costumes, there’s a way in which the ludicrousness of this helps the story.) <br /><br />Further, but relatedly, what’s with the Classicism? I mean, it’s pretty hard to miss. They wear togas. Okay, they look like they all wanted to wear togas but had to resort to curtains, but even so… What could that possibly have to do with peacenik hippies, in their kaftans and patched jeans? <br /><br />And further still… At this stage <i>’Who’</i> almost entirely ignores the mechanisation of labour. And this story soon continues the series tradition of humans doing manual labour while machines look on. The Doctor does ask “What would they want Dulcians as slaves for, they've got the Quarks?" But no real interest is paid to this. We’re told the Dulcians don’t do labour, and the Dominators finally decide they’re useless as slaves. (A message from their home world, confirming what we could have told them inside of five minutes.) But if (as is stated) we’re not just seeing some aristocratic caste, if they don’t labour at all, whose keeping them in curtains or maintaining those travel tubes? <br /><br />Because it keeps up the link between pacifism and passivity. And it effectively fits with our received history of Classicism, where slaves are kept off-stage and invisible. But then the next thing doesn’t… <br /><br />What about their rote learning? To the point where “better to do nothing than do the wrong thing” is their credo. Which might seem more part of the Dominators’ culture than the Dulcians. This certainly has nothing to do with our received ideas of Classicism, that it was some kind of forerunner of the Enlightenment. <br /><br />(While watching I was convinced the Dulcians should be seen as the philosophising Greeks and the imperious Dominators as the invading Romans. But it seems the names are all from Latin. Dulcian means “beautiful people”, an early working title.) <br /><br />Remember the Thals too had classical-sounding names like Ganatus and Antodus, intended to confer gravitas upon them. But unlike them the Dulcians aren’t there to be seen as nobly wrong. Their society is, in its own way, as problematic as the Dominators. It can’t be a peaceful utopia, whose problems unfortunately rear up from outside. It must call those problems down on itself. <br /><br />And the learning-by-rote is function overriding theme that allows for this, foregrounding that what we’re looking at is a stagnant society. In a twist on Jules Feiffer’s famous gag about the Republicans and Democrats, the Dominators do all the wrong things while the Dulcians don’t do anything. If they’ve seen no wars for thousands of years, they’ve probably just not got round to one. <br /><br />Because the point we’re supposed to take about these useless hippies is that they aren’t an aberration but a symptom of a wilder malaise. Like children copying and magnifying their parents’ bad habits, they’ve taken on the worst elements of the generation before. The post-war world of peace and prosperity has softened people up, left them insulated from the harsh realities of life, turned decadent by such luxuries as indoor toilets and central heating systems. What they need is some shock therapy before the inevitable next war rolls round. Haisman and Lincoln spent a good deal of their spare time berating the end of national service, would be my guess.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcv1nruFB1k1B0ATjH4RMqLzhLCVzoFoAMzKgk4UGRU6T4Iia4X_LV7UkFFhawaptBYAfCosqLMUSc8bPPpi5Jerd1iUsMMKjWpbdvZhq4EM9BLxUiP8vHBeaX74sgZEWtIrdnqWSWt_u2MLBzseQZRTo8MC8068eA4cIPWPDAxPh336qnlGd6vLBzQfSp/s500/5.Penta%20Ray%20Factor.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcv1nruFB1k1B0ATjH4RMqLzhLCVzoFoAMzKgk4UGRU6T4Iia4X_LV7UkFFhawaptBYAfCosqLMUSc8bPPpi5Jerd1iUsMMKjWpbdvZhq4EM9BLxUiP8vHBeaX74sgZEWtIrdnqWSWt_u2MLBzseQZRTo8MC8068eA4cIPWPDAxPh336qnlGd6vLBzQfSp/s16000/5.Penta%20Ray%20Factor.tiff" /></a></div><br /><i>’The Penta Ray Factor’</i> (July/Aug ’65), a <i>’Daleks’</i> comic strip in <i>’TV21’,</i> is strangely similar. We have a decadent Classicist society who chooses to do nothing when warned of invasion, we have a brash and reckless son of the leader, and so on. (It’s also similar to <i>’The Trigan Empire’, </i>though preceding it by four months.) Suggesting these themes were in the air. (<a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-midwich-cuckoos-by-john-wyndham.html" target="_blank">Wyndham’s ‘Midwich Cuckoos’</a>, as we saw, also dealt with this projected problem.) <br /><br />There’s two odd things about this. First, much of their earlier <i>’Web of Fear’ </i>was about the uselessness of a military response to an otherworldly threat. Okay that threat was specifically designated the Weird, rather that a pair of bickering buffoons in cumbersome costumes. But it’s still somewhat bizarre they went from there to here in one script. <br /><br />But also, this sounds like last weeks moral panic. By time of broadcast (after, for example, the Grosvenor square riots) the Dulcians should have been if anything more like Little Dominator, headstrong and reckless militants, convinced that the world they want is only one explosion away. (Or jump arbitrarily between hopeless space cadets and deranged fanatics, as the Planet People did in <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-reviews.html" target="_blank">’Quatermass’.)</a> <br /><br />But popular culture is never so neat, and the first draft of history normally arrives late. Literally, so here, where the script was commissioned on Jan 2nd ’68 then written over February and March. This was effectively a ’67 story, which just happened to be broadcast to the world of ’68. <br /><br /><b>”Destrooooy!!!"</b><br /><br />If the Doctor taking too readily to guns and bombs seems problematically out of character, his decision to act the part of a dumb local, in order to stay under the radar of the Dominators’ arrogance, seems very Troughton. <br /><br /><i>”An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie. Just act stupid. Do you think you can manage that?”</i><br /><br />Speaking of Jamie, all the fighting stuff gives him something to do, likening the Quarks to redcoats. True, this mostly takes the form of throwing styrofoam rocks at kids dressed up in packing crates. But he looks happy about it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6x6JdxeRUq_kLs29oII0jD9vGN1mDKiD2TH2IPxbbGFzaD_rYOI_nI3TMzWyLvXF75Cn1OfRISNd6gWaBW17t8sj2njZf3dVHGzMKHxTJ2R4iFL6awurvZrKUP_-c_i14HCz8DI7U-YTk9CmWagQ2Y81a9LhDsGCQ4CVlOPgnh1kN4lmJqa_pmUgdgZK/s528/6.Zoe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6x6JdxeRUq_kLs29oII0jD9vGN1mDKiD2TH2IPxbbGFzaD_rYOI_nI3TMzWyLvXF75Cn1OfRISNd6gWaBW17t8sj2njZf3dVHGzMKHxTJ2R4iFL6awurvZrKUP_-c_i14HCz8DI7U-YTk9CmWagQ2Y81a9LhDsGCQ4CVlOPgnh1kN4lmJqa_pmUgdgZK/s16000/6.Zoe.jpeg" /></a></div><br />While Zoe fares the best. Rather than just being a walking Wikipedia she scores on the gumptionometer. Separating her early on from the Doctor and Jamie takes her out of their shadow, and allows her to be contrasted to the Dulcians. As Cully points out: “She can't be a Dulcian - she has an enquiring mind.” It would have been better not to dress her up as a Dulcian, as the earlier scenes visually contrast her from them. But curtain-covered or not, she gets her moment. <br /><br /><i>Coming soon! </i>Disruptions in the space-time continuum…</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-26312190124654882452024-02-02T17:45:00.007+00:002024-02-02T17:45:44.760+00:00LIBERATE THE FORCES WHICH MATTER BINDS! (A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)<span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitB2H9lnDIzPMXeeZmXFkDgwgXD70diMd2XRIeneIB9qXSL4CgrNIDJgsnsbck8p5dTiSYumx8lfQJbFxKR6ahdssh-IM4hUCUOFC3zEEpMOJHv6GD9kYcdlL8-PF1AbB8cUWcg8I3V9GD5fQZEdc8Kcgf0cTUeFM4MNO3Ec-j8Z7YqKab-tE-LWBLztns/s528/9.LiberateTheForces(Cometinnit).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitB2H9lnDIzPMXeeZmXFkDgwgXD70diMd2XRIeneIB9qXSL4CgrNIDJgsnsbck8p5dTiSYumx8lfQJbFxKR6ahdssh-IM4hUCUOFC3zEEpMOJHv6GD9kYcdlL8-PF1AbB8cUWcg8I3V9GD5fQZEdc8Kcgf0cTUeFM4MNO3Ec-j8Z7YqKab-tE-LWBLztns/s16000/9.LiberateTheForces(Cometinnit).jpg" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3iqQUdMsOBoGGIAt54ux0m?si=8ff7b6e5aafb4ed5" target="_blank">Our next Spotify playlist </a>takes the form of a winter ritual. The opening 23 Skidoo track is from the album <i>’The Culling is Coming’,</i> which came with bespoke ceremonies for Winter, Summer and Autumn. Presumably because you can get through Spring by yourself. Things then carry on in similar vein… <br /><br />Mostly, this is tracks to trance you out rather than have you listen to them. Never a bad thing in my book. And of course the primary purpose of a Winter playlist is to take you out of the fact that its currently Winter. If it doesn’t work for you, then your entry fee will be refunded in full. <br /><br />The title may well come from <i>’Invention For Destruction’,</i> a Czech animated version of <i>’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’.</i> Or somewhere else. Who can say? <br /><br />23 Skidoo: G-2 Contemplation (Part 1 - A Winter Ritual) <br />The Sabres Of Paradise: Duke Of Earlsfield <br />Fuck Buttons Race You to My Bedroom / Spirit Rise <br />Bowery Electric: Slow Thrills <br />Silver Moth: Hello Doom <br />MONO: Halcyon (Beautiful Days)</span><br />Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-34660435212264951132024-01-27T12:01:00.000+00:002024-01-27T12:01:36.123+00:00“THE HIGHWAY THAT’S LEADING ME”: JONI MITCHELL’S ‘HEJIRA’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)<span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“I’m not an evasive writer. You don’t have to dig under the words for the meaning… When someone asks what a song is about, I want to say, ‘Well, did you listen to the words?’”</i><br />- <a href="https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=107" target="_blank">Joni Mitchell</a></span><div><span style="color: #0000ee; font-family: verdana;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><u><br /></u></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=107" target="_blank"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=107" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGXUz3AfcjvfWVRceAZEiN7E5GxzO-7pE5RHeIySUSnm2t6NaAbv4Zcn2Y2C-hVGtQpmE3eamLj4c4DkSuxGFQqlkUyHfrlSaAMqq-k77nwJpMZ721-ugzOXCKET0PJY5ppthWhczWTQOjyGwfGPs7aPn4hHbH_mlckmEZ47SsKPabEzmuicPU8vtiomZK/s528/Joni%20Mitchell-%20Hejira%20copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGXUz3AfcjvfWVRceAZEiN7E5GxzO-7pE5RHeIySUSnm2t6NaAbv4Zcn2Y2C-hVGtQpmE3eamLj4c4DkSuxGFQqlkUyHfrlSaAMqq-k77nwJpMZ721-ugzOXCKET0PJY5ppthWhczWTQOjyGwfGPs7aPn4hHbH_mlckmEZ47SsKPabEzmuicPU8vtiomZK/s16000/Joni%20Mitchell-%20Hejira%20copy.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>”A Decade Full of Dreams”</b><br /><br />We are here to talk about the 1976 Joni Mitchell album<i> ’Hejira’.</i> But if we take our time in getting to it, wind our way round some serpentine curves, wouldn’t that be the most *’Hejira’* way of going about things? <br /><br />The NME Book of Rock, the first music book I ever read, described Mitchell as a “singer/songwriter with a pure voice, specialising in highly-wrought emotional ballads… notorious for various romantic attachments”. A widespread notion which reaches its nadir in the notion that her music’s ‘confessional’, like an emotional version of striptease. (Notably, its a term she always disliked.) <br /><br />And some still see her through that frame, the epitome of a hippy-dippy Sixties artist, going gooey over clouds, getting wide-eyed about Woodstock and falling in love with passers-by every few minutes. But they mistake the overture for the act. It’s the early-to-mid Seventies where she came into her own. <br /><br />It's the first two albums which most match that popular image, and while they do contain some great tracks there’s also times where she sounds like Phoebe from <i>’Friends.’ </i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Morning" target="_blank">Mitchell herself later conceded “to me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.”</a> It was the third try, <i>’Ladies of the Canyon,’</i> which first brought in the changes. Released in 1970, it meant that for Mitchell the Sixties ended right on cue. <br /><br />A few numbers, such as the title track, could have come from the earlier albums. But mostly it pointed forwards. Which also meant wider. While the earlier albums had featured occasional bass, extra instruments came to be used more expansively. But perhaps most significant of all was the guitar-sporting folkie making greater use of piano. <br /><br />It was followed by <i>’Blue’</i> (1971), which capitalised on all of this and is regarded by some as her best album. And where the title track made it clear which element she was channelling - “Blue/ Songs are like tattoos/ You know I’ve been to sea before”. Then on <i>’River’ </i>she imagines the titular body of water as something she could “skate away on”. (Yes, skate. She was Canadian.) And her piano-based music came to flow like a river. Which went with something else… <br /><br />Leonard Cohen, particularly on his earlier albums, set his songs in a heightened realm, full of slightly mystic characters doing richly symbolic things. It is something of a wrench to hear that famous lines in <i>’Suzanne’ </i>may have been inspired by someone called Suzanne making him a cup of tea and putting bits of orange in it. <br /><br />While other songwriters use a more straightforward, conversational style, directly addressing the listener in a way which feels immediate and involving. (Think of how many songs are sung second-person, to “you”.) As John Lennon put it: “say what you mean and put a backbeat to it.” Sinead O’Connor’s <i>’The Emperor’s New Clothes’ </i>would be an example, with its payoff line “you asked for the truth and I told you.” If you were ever to find out that the song wasn’t a faithful description of her life at the point you couldn’t help but feel it was lessened. <br /><br />And these are diverging approaches, branching off from each other. You need to pick one. <br /><br />Well, maybe me or you would. And most people seem convinced Joni Mitchell picked the second. But she didn’t. Instead, she straight out refused to pick. And she seems able to slip between the two irreconcilable opposites within a single line. At times she’d deliberately juxtapose them for effect… <br /><br /><i>“She speaks in sorry sentences <br />“Miraculous repentances <br />“I don't believe her.” </i><br /><br />…the punchy immediacy of the last line added like a pin to a balloon. <br /><br />And this created a kind of double virtue. You feel like something significant is being imparted while, at the very same time, that she’s talking straight to you. <i>’Song For Sharon’</i> (which we’ll get to, promise) is written as if a letter to a long-time friend, casually mentioning Dora and Betsy as if we know them. <br /><br />And the flowing piano enhanced this, enabled her lyrics to be more free-flowing and semi-stream-of-consciousness. Her tracks can have the buzz of meeting up with an old friend, where the torrent of conversation seems both effortless and endless, something to ride. It gives it a compulsive quality, the exhilarating feeling of being absolutely in the moment. (Yeah okay, she’s the only one doing the talking. It still feels that way.) And the immediacy of music, the sense that it’s all happening <i>now</i>, is always a positive feature. <br /><br />And these go on to work as part of a triple whammy, with her Seventies shift in subject matter. <i>’California’</i> starts: <br /><br /><i>“Sitting in a park in Paris, France <br />“Reading the news, it sure looks bad <br />“They won't give peace a chance <br />“That was just a dream some of us had” </i><br /><br />…and this just one year after she’d written the hippie anthem <i>’Woodstock’! </i>John Lennon, the one who’d coined ‘give peace a chance’, later sang “the dream is over.” Yet where he was rueful she was phlegmatic. Her tone is “remember when we thought that peace stuff? Boy, what had we been smoking?” From that point on the song moves on to other subjects, like waking and shrugging off a strange dream. <br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joni_Mitchell#Rejection_of_Baby_Boom_counter-culture" target="_blank">Mitchell has said she saw her generation as an equal-but-opposite reaction to the stultifying, conformist Fifties</a>. “Out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it. [But] I was not a part of that.” <br /><br />Except of course the writer of <i>’Woodstock’ </i>was. Giving up on social change after finding out you won’t be <i>given</i> it seems pretty on-brand for that description. With Mitchell, as with many others, the dominant subject of her music became herself. On the afore-mentioned <i>’Song For Sharon’ </i>she sang, out loud and upfront: <br /><br /><i>“Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes <br />“And lovely landscapes to discover <br />“But all I really want right now <br />“Is... find another lover” </i><br /><br />And its the self-importance of singer-songwriters which so often grates. The genre often feels like First Word problems recited over some strummed guitar. Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck once called it the “privileging of individual angst”, while Mclusky recorded an album acidly titled ’<i>My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours’.</i><br /><br />All true. Except there’s a crucial difference between Mitchell recording <i>’Hejira’</i> and Jerry Rubin becoming a stockbroker. An artist’s first responsibility is to find what they’re good at and do that. There’s not a lot to be gained in demanding they write a song calling for the military-industrial complex be dissolved if their talents lie elsewhere. Mitchell was made to sing about the bittersweet richness of life, in all its complexities and self-contradictions. If it took her a little while to get round to that, she still got there. And anyway, personal relations, aren’t they part of life too? Or should we be stamping down Jericho full time? <br /><br />As she said herself: “A lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on <i>’Hejira’ </i>could only have come from me.” Or as she <i>sang</i> herself… <br /><br /><i>“People will tell you where they got <br />“They’ll tell you where to go <br />“But till you’ve got there yourself <br />“You never really know” </i><br /><br />Besides, in her case that free-flowing, semi-conversational style mitigates against self-absorption. (Or at least too much of it.) She sings less like she’s shining a spotlight on her personal dramas and more like she’s catching up with us. <br /><br />And also, for someone supposedly so self-obsessive, Mitchell could be acutely observational, pinning people with a phrase… <br /><br /><i>“Like a priest with a pornographic watch <br />Looking and longing on the sly <br />Sure its stricken from your uniform <br />But you can’t get it our of your eyes” <br /></i><br />And once more, there’s a companion musical shift. As said, post-<i>’Blue’ </i>she started the move to a fuller band. The music grew more intricate, bringing in brass and strings. This grew slowly, but was unmistakable by 1975’s <i>’The Hissing of Summer Lawns’</i>, which even incorporated the jazz standard <i>’Centrepiece’. </i><br /><br /><i>’Ladies of the Canyon’</i> had, clearly enough, been her Laurel Canyon album, the backpackers and freewheeling hippies who passed through it drawn from her own crowd. Songs are like quick snapshots of life happening around her, friends caught in character poses. While <i>’Summer Lawns’</i> is definitely her take on LA – “the city of the fallen angels”. Its like a film, with a cast list full of larger-than-life figures. Which means the most inventive, the most musically rich Mitchell album is the one most concerned with artificiality. (“Beauty parlour blondes with credit card eyes/ Looking for the chic and the fancy/ To buy.”) <br /><br />But then there’s a bend in the road. <br /><br />By this point the ‘studio album’, rich with effects and overlays, had become a thing you did - cemented in the popular mind with <i>’Sergeant Pepper’.</i> And, as with that example, there wasn’t much to do once you’d gone there but reverse back out again - go back to what you were doing before. And at least in part <i>’Hejira’ </i>does this, goes back to the simpler and more direct songs of <i>’Blue’</i>. Precisely one track has more than four players, most have three. <br /><br />But at the same time the sound became more jazzy. Mitchell had always been as much a Jazz as a Folk fan and, feeling Rock musicians lacked finesse, she started to work with Jazz players. Perhaps starting off with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Express" target="_blank">LA Express</a> playing on her 1974 album <i>’Court and Spark’.</i> Which ended with the Jazz cover… yes <i>cover, ‘Twisted’.</i> But <i>’Hejira’</i> was the first of her albums to incorporate the fretless bass of Jaco Pastorius, and involved her singing evocatively about “strains of Benny Goodman”. So the album which went back simultaneously went forwards. <i>'Summer Lawns’</i> had worn its sophistication on its sleeve, while <i>’Hejira’</i> held it closer to the heart. <br /><br />Now Jazz to me is like chilli or garlic. You wouldn’t want to taste it on its own too much, but it can serve well when added to other things. And when added to Folk it creates a kind of sweet ’n’ sour. (Just think Pentangle.) This fretless playing just went with her lyrics, free-form music to give wing to her free-form narrative. <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2015/03/when-you-fall-into-trance-van-morrisons.html" target="_blank">(Not unlike Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.)</a></span></div><div><span style="color: #0000ee; font-family: verdana;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><u><br /></u></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2015/03/when-you-fall-into-trance-van-morrisons.html" target="_blank"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2015/03/when-you-fall-into-trance-van-morrisons.html" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGicynw-LV_Lt9rDyPvWxQ5JMPXcz0iEu_QZF4yEgZAOaThk4kxBIxEgz2TLsJyOhcB4pXnw9jYAfTzuvgWPP-wlavhgeR1Qme28BSLZup0XiGKyQd6c1UiNEkxPaFnIYJyHslovj9XSrFne33nOkEFA6mYnBkFQbMSjXUtriPyyuq7BUKrjhZsgpAIyI/s528/Hejirabackcover.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGicynw-LV_Lt9rDyPvWxQ5JMPXcz0iEu_QZF4yEgZAOaThk4kxBIxEgz2TLsJyOhcB4pXnw9jYAfTzuvgWPP-wlavhgeR1Qme28BSLZup0XiGKyQd6c1UiNEkxPaFnIYJyHslovj9XSrFne33nOkEFA6mYnBkFQbMSjXUtriPyyuq7BUKrjhZsgpAIyI/s16000/Hejirabackcover.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><b>”Porous With Travel Fever”</b><br /><br />Also, if the element running through <i>’Blue’</i> had been water, and the instrument piano, this changes too. This album featured not a note of piano. On <i>’Amelia’,</i> she sees the vapour trails of six planes in the sky, and likens them to guitar strings. A track named, of course, after the aviation pioneer. Elsewhere she paid tribute to those “who’ll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline.” The music doesn’t seem even as bank-bound as <i>’Blue’, </i>but passing in jets and flurries like air streams. <br /><br />As is often, the immediate reason for the switch was simple and practical. It was largely written on a road trip across America, from LA to Maine, and a guitar had simply gone in the van easier. At one point she describes coming across a piano mid-journey, and falling on it like an ex-lover. But that necessity was fortuitous. When she picked up a guitar again, it was as if it was a new instrument. The result was, if not in the standard sense, a classic air guitar album. <br /><br />And, yes, travel… The observant reader might want to point out she had written about travel before. Often, in fact. <i>’Blue’ </i>had opened with the line “I am on a lonely road and I’m travelling”. But those travel songs tended to focus on place. <i>’California’ </i>was sung <i>to</i> California, as if to a person. Here the travel itself was the thing, the road runs through the whole album. One track is titled *’The Refuge of the Roads’* and the highway appears on the cover superimposed over her figure, as if it’s what she has inside - a space where you’d expect a presence. <a href="https://www.jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=234" target="_blank">She said herself: </a><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“I wrote the album while travelling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The title track opens with “I’m travelling in some vehicle/ I’m sitting in some cafe”, and its the “some” which sticks out. It’s the smooth transience of the road which soothes you, like rubbing a succession of freshly laundered hotel towels across your cheek. Freedom is the absence of snags and ties, passing through places the way a ghost walks through walls. On <i>’Coyote’ </i>the road offers odd-couple romances and one-night-stands, inoculated against entanglements. Because all the time you’re in some place you’re just some person, unencumbered by the associations and expectations of those who ‘know’ you. <br /><br />She sang “Your life becomes a travelogue/ Of picture postcard charms.” And the songs are like travelogues, flitting from one incident to the next, passing a farmhouse on fire or a couple sitting out on a rock. <br /><br />The result’s an album that’s literally as free as air. Not in the sports commentator sense of “I literally don’t know what literally means”, but literally as free as air. Drums, which usually play a grounding role in music, are so sedate you pretty much need to check the track listing to know when they’re there. (They appear on four tracks, percussion on three, while two feature neither, seeing as you asked.) <br /><br />But then there’s a curve in the road. <br /><br />Like a yin/yang sign, pursue one course for long enough and it’ll bend and turn and become its opposite. And with that in mind it would be tempting to take songs as antonyms, set the floaty, gossamer-light title track and <i>’Amelia’,</i> the world seen from “clouds at icy altitudes”, against <i>’Song For Sharon’, </i>with it’s more distinct pulse, and self-confessed hankering for human attachment. But, as is often the way with Mitchell, nothing is so clear-cut… <br /><br />Faulkner wrote the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. He probably wasn’t thinking about Joni Mitchell, but he might as well have been. She writes not like she’s providing some summation of her life, where it all led to this, but mapping the beats of her heart. And <i>’Hejira’</i> frequently returns to her conflict between this wanderlust and a desire for the most tied of all knots. Described by her as ”the strongest poison and medicine of all.” Brought on not by a love affair, a one night stand or even a crush, but by spying “the long white dress of love” in a Staten Island window. <br /><br /><i>“In our possessive coupling <br />“So much could not be expressed <br />“So now I am returning to myself <br />“These things that you and I suppressed” </i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i>But later in the same song she adds: <br /><br /><i>“I’m porous with travel fever <br />“But you know I’m so glad to be on my own <br />“Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger <br />“Can set up a trembling in my bones” <br /></i><br />And this is (as promised earlier) <i>’Song For Sharon’, </i>sung as a letter to a home-town friend. Notably, Sharon’s possessions are material, Mitchell’s metaphysical… <br /><br /><i>“Sharon you've got a husband <br />“And a family and a farm <br />“I've got the apple of temptation <br />“And a diamond snake around my arm”</i> <br /><br />The concluding track is ’<i>Refuge of the Roads’ </i>as if Mitchell never really returned from that trip. But <i>’Song For Sharon’,</i> the longest number, feels like the album’s centrepiece. Ultimately she doesn’t resolve any of this, or even try to. She just tells us it like it was. <br /><br />To sum up… Heading for another drudgeful and demanding day of work one Monday morning with <i>’Hejira’</i> playing in my head, I figured that whatever transpired after I arrived, in that moment I was in free transit. An album that even makes Monday mornings more bearable. Who could ask for more?</span></div></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-7925051379422000502024-01-20T12:13:00.001+00:002024-01-20T12:14:08.723+00:00 ’CHILDREN OF THE STONES’ <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Happy days! Our look at Teatime Dystopias, when kids' TV went weird <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-changes.html" target="_blank">(starting here),</a> continues with a well-remembered if rarely repeated classic. We foretell PLOT SPOILERS!</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1PsZJOwlbBQS5iNlrif24hKVhK22SuAoCe3P5390zEFrJJ1x4Mi9i-92JWKZCxhyphenhyphenxbo26rZ2k3NSNBwk_E0Vs2Z1_GLJ2MUM6OxQtIqBZi8NzEtRTBVnL4mJtsmmYEdBMIopfHJEh_Z3gdV9_4tbCNnbpGupZuoGJMoEyE_JagdyRSyEBYZ4GgwoKXkt8/s320/1.%20Titles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="251" data-original-width="320" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1PsZJOwlbBQS5iNlrif24hKVhK22SuAoCe3P5390zEFrJJ1x4Mi9i-92JWKZCxhyphenhyphenxbo26rZ2k3NSNBwk_E0Vs2Z1_GLJ2MUM6OxQtIqBZi8NzEtRTBVnL4mJtsmmYEdBMIopfHJEh_Z3gdV9_4tbCNnbpGupZuoGJMoEyE_JagdyRSyEBYZ4GgwoKXkt8/w400-h314/1.%20Titles.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Where There's Stone There's Strange</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />Like all great TV shows, ’Children of the Stones’ starts with a great credit sequence. And, like all TV shows made in the Seventies, it starts off with a very inexpensive credit sequence (see end). In fact, it’s just a bunch of close-ups of some old stones. <br /><br />Of course, it’s the disorientating music that makes it, that gives it that eerie effect. It was described by Stewart Lee as “the most inappropriate children's TV theme ever penned.” (In his Radio Four documentary <i>'Happy Days'.)</i> Needless to say he meant it as a compliment. <br /><br />Admittedly composer Sidney Sager may have been at something of an advantage. In those staid days, science fiction and fantasy were permitted more out-there music and sound design than the norm, just by invoking that catch-all heading ‘weird'. I genuinely think that throughout my childhood, the only time I heard any music other than pop fodder was through science fiction shows. As a sensitive youth, I found that fear was more easily triggered by sound than by vision, particularly the uncannily ‘causeless’ sound of soundtrack music. When it all got too much, don't shut your eyes - cover your ears. <br /><br />But the music comes to affect and infect the visuals, in a kind of sinister synaesthesia. As you listen to the voices (provided by the Ambrosian Singers) rising and falling, undulating and unpredictable, you start to see the misshapen stones the same way. In fact as the show progresses, great play is made out of their inscrutable shapelessness. Those undulations become like Ernst’s famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frottage_(art)" target="_blank">frottage artworks</a>, when you were never quite sure what you were seeing and what you weren’t. (I suspect that at points fake stone props were deliberately used to suggest semi-subliminal clues of this kind.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV2aI48tycMeVtIH8uWuYmKSne_8Ix_pyZpL-PNCo1Cj5oL42U-2bQDavHJStiKgYGVMIyqC_SYLN4r_i1Lsgd7Inqp6n2GdGw0OjgWGpE-byQDxa4nAo9Uh5jYVMKcm71jzVPghUM1vwSis0jgipO9QgVtczjWSZ8hqJJjhCMsBi1_ceWlTwwO1uaLUxE/s550/2.Measuringthestones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="437" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV2aI48tycMeVtIH8uWuYmKSne_8Ix_pyZpL-PNCo1Cj5oL42U-2bQDavHJStiKgYGVMIyqC_SYLN4r_i1Lsgd7Inqp6n2GdGw0OjgWGpE-byQDxa4nAo9Uh5jYVMKcm71jzVPghUM1vwSis0jgipO9QgVtczjWSZ8hqJJjhCMsBi1_ceWlTwwO1uaLUxE/s16000/2.Measuringthestones.jpg" /></a></div><br />But perhaps most magnificent is the image above, where they’re held in contrast to the electrical boxes and measuring devices which our protagonists heroically take to them – the measuring rod held up against the defiantly askew. In many ways the image acts as a microcosm of the whole series, and much like the show it seems to pack in so much. <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2018/08/mark-fishers-weird-eerie.html" target="_blank">As I once said of Paul Nash’s megalith paintings:</a> ”Inevitably we come to see these things as outside ourselves, a puzzle to be solved with measuring tape and aerial photographs. Yet there's the nagging sense the answer is within us, one of those things we seem to know but cannot quite recall.” <br /><br />As with <i>’Sky’</i> you could diminish <i>'Stones' </i>by reducing it to a formula; it’s at root a mash-up of '<i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers’</i> with <i>’The Stepford Wives,’ </i>with a dash of <i>'The Wicker Man'</i> thrown in for garnish. But that would be to mistake the recipe for the taste, and the <i>taste</i> of that eerie opening remains. <br /><br />Broadcast in 1977, only two years after <i>’Sky’, Children of the Stones’</i> is more insistent still on the fundamental weirdness of the English landscape, and is often cited as an example of the Old Weird Britain. This is less a genre (a set of rules which more or less associate with a mode of thought) than a mood. And this lack of specificity gives the concept a flexibility, a resistance to hard definition. <br /><br />And <i>'Stones'</i> knows how to play this ambiguity. Though both it and <i>'Sky'</i> were ITV shows, we who grew up in the shadow of our parents’ snobbery cannot help but see <i>’Stones’</i> as an honorary BBC production, <i>’Blue Peter’ </i>to <i>’Sky’s ‘Magpie’.</i> This difference is there even as those credits roll. <i>’Sky’</i> is full of filters and post-psychedelic effects, here we’re just shown some stones. (It is hard now not to see <i>'Sky' </i>as a period piece, while the lesser use of special effects allows <i>'Stones'</i> to seem more timeless.) <br /><br />While much of <i>'Sky'</i> is chase-and-run, <i>’Stones’</i> has a more complex storyline which develops quite slowly. Clues marinade, events accumulate. (In fact co-author Trevor Ray had been an associate script editor on <i>’Doctor Who’, </i>with which <i>’Stones’</i> shares both strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, it lasts seven episodes when it could easily have fitted into five or even four.) Those who think of Brit SF TV as extras in rubber suits shouting “boo!” at the screen will be somewhat nonplussed by all of this. <br /><br />While Sky has some iconic force to his performance, the series’ acting in general is at best adequate. By contrast <i>’Stones’ </i>has some name actors in chief roles, including Ian Cuthbertson and Freddy Jones. (Though admittedly that does expose the poorer child performances somewhat.) <br /><br />Let's go back to <i>'Stepford Wives' </i>a moment, because the similarities are so strong they throw an emphasis on the differences. Both used location filming heavily, but used quite different locations to quite different effects. <i>'Stepford Wives'</i> is set in an idealised suburbia, as if a gleamingly pristine advert for a newly built estate sprang to life, so was shot in small town and suburban locations wherever possible. It's a bit like the way Portmeirion works in <i>'The Prisoner'</i>, you're aware you're looking at something simultaneously real (not a set, a real space) and artificial (an un-place with none of the feel of the lived-in). <br /><br />While <i>'Stones'</i> is set in a village. The makers based their fictional Milbury closely on the actual geography of Avebury, a Wiltshire village genuinely nested inside a stone circle. (From today’s perspective Milbury can seem pretty idyllic; with a population of fifty-three it can claim its own Post Office, museum and pub. In fact the pub seems to survive on precisely three customers. They must have been pretty heavy drinkers...) And this distinction between suburb and village is significant. Here it's the rootedness, the connection of everything to its own history which is the cause of all the problems. These aren't plastic people. These are stone people. <br /><br />You can read in any book on Romanticism how Britain’s early and rapid urbanisation led to the veneration of the rural. The heart and soul of the country, clearly it wasn’t where we were. So by default it must be where we weren’t. As a child I was taken to see twee English villages in much the way I was taken to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower. It was worth seeing because it was so unfamiliar, yet at the same time supposed to be our heritage. This made it ripe for inverting. <br /><br />And stone circles, aren’t they ideal for this? They’re kind of just <i>there.</i> They’re used as emblems of Britain, appearing on tourist posters and the like. But at the same time as being quaintly traditional, like country pubs and cricket greens, they’re foreign objects, sitting loftily on our landscape like they own the place, despite the fact we know little about why they were put there - defying our supposed smartypants modernity. We construct theories to explain away how and why “they” built them, like a kind of intellectual comfort blanket. <br /><br /><b>”Complete the Circle”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4OdJqJPaSVOm0ByTQJTlb9IPikxQ8KkCDBtM5In-sSrV-zcmNrOIWozTqdQ6yrbtqhtUZyCFSkhfNMkWYSDWtdj_pDjk9lRTsvDtF5GkqaIcT5SIWBeJZfH7J8B9JJbI0Qb20AcUArGLAudVzx9VBOqPrLKkcpnpFhaUwnmFQuvW6ol83Sc_N823JzAM3/s550/2.Measuringthestones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="437" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4OdJqJPaSVOm0ByTQJTlb9IPikxQ8KkCDBtM5In-sSrV-zcmNrOIWozTqdQ6yrbtqhtUZyCFSkhfNMkWYSDWtdj_pDjk9lRTsvDtF5GkqaIcT5SIWBeJZfH7J8B9JJbI0Qb20AcUArGLAudVzx9VBOqPrLKkcpnpFhaUwnmFQuvW6ol83Sc_N823JzAM3/s16000/2.Measuringthestones.jpg" /></a></div></b><br />The story's central conceit is that Hendrick, Lord of the Manor, is using ancient magic to brainwash the villagers into docile happiness. He’s been at this a while, since roundabout the dawn of humanity. The main image of this is the circle, a word which comes up in every episode’s title. When the outsiders Adam and Matthew arrive, the circle vies with the straight line - the primary relationship of parent and child. In that earlier image it’s their magnetometers and other paraphernalia which are pointed hopefully at those old, weird stones. <br /><br />In a key instance of the show's <i>'Blue Peter'-</i>ness there’s none of <i>'Sky’s</i> working class protagonist or its suggestions of the generation gap. Adam and Matthew are a father-and-son team, with Adam in the finely middle class job of academic researcher. (An astrophysicist, albeit one who seems confused between his own job description and that of a geographer.) <br /><br />While <i>’Sky’s</i> Arby Vennor has to abandon his regular work to get involved in the adventure, here it’s the father’s job which takes him there. Being “very clever at working things out” Matthew helps his father in his researches, and is essentially a junior version of him. As Adam gets rather pally with Margaret, the museum creator, Matthew does the same with her daughter Sandra. Generations don't gap here. They recur. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />It’s an unstated but fundamental rule that, when people go to Hendrick to be converted, they go two by two. In Matthew’s case, there’s a brief explanation that his mother has died. There may also be one for Sandra but if so I missed it. But notably everyone seems to be in a one-parent family, for example the Doctor and his son. This rule is upheld by Hendrick’s table/altar (below) only having three chairs. For a family even of three would risk counterposing the bigger circle with a smaller one.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4tv2upX0fYLOjPCoLTn-bFihgUEmank_KVD0EeHj5JYxz8RvXoLQ6lIvg4QakH60tV0ppBs26JZU7_2GesxgmL6-xA_HcZeNWAmYUC3Dhm51dZSZ3z-IaJ1ApEY9gKsrIWCleKPuR39aTWpXWjobENv8N2lfTjN8VVpKTKhy6RtyMvYBWYiCvQWOgyHDY/s550/3.%20Table%20Altar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4tv2upX0fYLOjPCoLTn-bFihgUEmank_KVD0EeHj5JYxz8RvXoLQ6lIvg4QakH60tV0ppBs26JZU7_2GesxgmL6-xA_HcZeNWAmYUC3Dhm51dZSZ3z-IaJ1ApEY9gKsrIWCleKPuR39aTWpXWjobENv8N2lfTjN8VVpKTKhy6RtyMvYBWYiCvQWOgyHDY/s16000/3.%20Table%20Altar.jpg" /></a></div><br />The sole exception is the solitary Dai, who survives by avoiding the village, clutching his magic amulet and going into endurance bouts of loony mumbling. Alone he cannot fight the circle, so instead he continually dies and is reborn, the show’s equivalent of Kenny from <i>’South Park’.</i> (There may even be a sneaky pun in his name.) Unlike others he’s not an outsider to the village, his exception just proves the rule. <br /><br />Hendrick himself is not exception but variant. At first he’s rather like Goodchild in <i>’Sky’</i> an ominous presence prone to turning up unannounced, his urbane charm merely part of what makes him chilling. (Though he’s more the series’ answer to Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle from <i>’The Wicker Man.’)</i> Though it’s often spoken of as the circle’s centre, we don’t get inside his manor house until the fourth episode, when we first see it through Adam’s eyes. From that point we are enabled to follow Hendrick from his own point of view. We find that instead of the standard parent and child relationship he has a butler, reinforcing his separation and authority. He is outside and at the centre of the circle he creates, his is the burden of command.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuAUXUY9Y1TF2HhxUUcHICJJ3tHLfJSSKZOWf_7nMWrGJC6TclQc8G3KHpGr6lGW5d_MVS3hbTzOMU2olrb_rqTKN9trSYyCnIfVG_Db2XEJ-jkzKXjy7iDfnf6QjmPv-wPV-8qA07oKHGpF7_RqhyphenhyphenYswIqKZgIw64qUBHmrh-XblNpaBk7GJzlXpUslaM/s507/4.hendrick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="507" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuAUXUY9Y1TF2HhxUUcHICJJ3tHLfJSSKZOWf_7nMWrGJC6TclQc8G3KHpGr6lGW5d_MVS3hbTzOMU2olrb_rqTKN9trSYyCnIfVG_Db2XEJ-jkzKXjy7iDfnf6QjmPv-wPV-8qA07oKHGpF7_RqhyphenhyphenYswIqKZgIw64qUBHmrh-XblNpaBk7GJzlXpUslaM/s16000/4.hendrick.jpg" /></a></div><br />As Matthew points out, and like all great bad characters, the fantastic and terrible thing about Hendrick is that he genuinely believes he’s working for everyone’s good. His spell runs ”return to us the innocence that once we knew. Complete the circle. Make us at one with nature and the elements.” By making the villagers docile he purges them of all capacity to do evil, and in return gives them harmony and (in an interesting twist) intelligence. <br /><br />Despite my heading it’s arguable how dystopian this series actually is. While <i>’Sky’ </i>boldly tells us our whole way of life is doomed, <i>’Stones’ </i>has a set-up which tacitly assumes that everything outside the village circle – in Adam-and-Matthew land - is okay. True, the village itself turns out to be a faux utopia, if one seen through almost from the start. In fact, at its most basic level, the series is about the conformism of closed communities. (This was the element picked up in the comedy film <i>’Hot Fuzz’,</i> which is simultaneously tribute to and parody of the series.) <br /><br />In this way, it’s tempting to see it as Enlightenment values trumping pagan superstitions, religion casting out the unknown versus science trying to understand things. Adam and Matthew represent a virtual roll-call of scientific rationalism – inquisitive thinking, individual identity and all the rest of it. They’re like science fiction characters trying to navigate through the tropes of a horror story, their magnometers like crucifixes against the strangeness. <br /><br />Given the date, it would even be tempting to see it as a parting kick to the already waning back-to-the-land rhetoric of hippie subculture, with their feelgood mantras. Couldn’t Hendrick’s spell be the founding statement of some well-intentioned Home Counties commune?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7nKUVFPAhyphenhyphenvBgH4ukSnnlOJ90ra1kDG5_L84vDM_roR_ksn3NVFzt9b7zFKSfjwbf4hYuOSSGEddfeSWpEwfJ58LGgaMbMkEylfkuI3NJb5fBO-cFFq8vXrPxKaC21YXzOj18y9TtjuehusE0eDcw2BoGawPpIVkyoqPku15v1QRXQZBM1i3VMXldPgFR/s528/5.hawkwindgatefold.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7nKUVFPAhyphenhyphenvBgH4ukSnnlOJ90ra1kDG5_L84vDM_roR_ksn3NVFzt9b7zFKSfjwbf4hYuOSSGEddfeSWpEwfJ58LGgaMbMkEylfkuI3NJb5fBO-cFFq8vXrPxKaC21YXzOj18y9TtjuehusE0eDcw2BoGawPpIVkyoqPku15v1QRXQZBM1i3VMXldPgFR/s16000/5.hawkwindgatefold.jpeg" /></a></div><br />And yet… Hendrick is himself a scientist, holding banks of computers in the deconsecrated church’s crypt. If the stones themselves are the dominant image of the series, this seems the broadening point, the image which connects it to the science fiction of the era. See the amp monoliths of the gatefold sleeve of the first Hawkwind album from 1970, above. Author Arthur C Clarke famously claimed “any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Sixties and Seventies were the point where that became true of <i>our</i> technology, where our lives became besieged by an ever-increasing supply of devices and accoutrements - with us lacking the faintest clue how they really worked.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWveLU9X-uxs2ZqWECLMrcJs9tEmyN9XAn8Ngbgg9tk8JpSHIs9-C3Xr4sjmqLPQYluSnqCes3TgFUb11ucdvbJBTWb_3Qeod6Xfwc2dYHB1H-a15pf-GLwMyN-5P6g4ExaeSVV7hNrTLSmt_IlgJOmuQizd8X4FxFRZHgjIbrWAGjLHFNvhYrCy52pDRu/s550/6.%20Psychic%20Matthew.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWveLU9X-uxs2ZqWECLMrcJs9tEmyN9XAn8Ngbgg9tk8JpSHIs9-C3Xr4sjmqLPQYluSnqCes3TgFUb11ucdvbJBTWb_3Qeod6Xfwc2dYHB1H-a15pf-GLwMyN-5P6g4ExaeSVV7hNrTLSmt_IlgJOmuQizd8X4FxFRZHgjIbrWAGjLHFNvhYrCy52pDRu/s16000/6.%20Psychic%20Matthew.jpg" /></a></div><br />Also muddying the occult/rational waters, and with shades of ’<i>The Tomorrow People’</i>, Matthew develops psi powers. (Adam has a strong reaction when he touches one of the stones, suggesting he too is ‘sensitive’ but it is Matthew’s powers which develop.) So, rather than opposing Hendrick's magus with rationalism, their chief counter-weapon is itself a kind of shamanism. <br /><br />The series might seem to resolve more neatly into good guys versus controlling baddies than the cosmic moral ambiguity of <i>’Sky’</i> or the conflicted wish at the heart of<i> ’The Changes’,</i> but the autochthonian is still given its seductive appeal. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochthon_(ancient_Greece)" target="_blank">As the Wiki entry for the concept in Greek myth says</a>, "they are rooted and belong to the land eternally.” Folk horror often uses protagonists as interlopers, going somewhere else within the UK (here less than a day’s drive from London) but finding it foreign soil. Yet unlike say *’The Wicker Man’* the incomers are seen not so much antagonists as the sick who need curing. Newcomers are incorporated until they belong. Milbury’s danger is through being someone else’s utopia. Welcome, friend.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZpAmuOXxB3LMG_wqcTNhsntfCnFlYgRHJqxiaTSyu-M7OpS-LJGo3l0Q3wJ50zrv9wUiNeBpbYRKuT87PQCDR69O0j6Pc9g_uZoJpHx2dIOLOsjgJ6PNlk0AdsMLnrIGZQLUoLWLusZR_nshuu1x0IqkOojFZ_VI_L7qTRuN07L0vHolVII10l36eY0vE/s500/7.Painting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="321" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZpAmuOXxB3LMG_wqcTNhsntfCnFlYgRHJqxiaTSyu-M7OpS-LJGo3l0Q3wJ50zrv9wUiNeBpbYRKuT87PQCDR69O0j6Pc9g_uZoJpHx2dIOLOsjgJ6PNlk0AdsMLnrIGZQLUoLWLusZR_nshuu1x0IqkOojFZ_VI_L7qTRuN07L0vHolVII10l36eY0vE/s16000/7.Painting.jpg" /></a></div><br />Ultimately, circle versus line manifests as the conflict between circular and linear time. Events happen less in a causal than a fatalistic manner. The painting, found off-screen by Matthew before the series even starts, is an inbuilt plot spoiler - demonstrating almost everything that will happen. Dai lives a prisoner of circular time, living (and dying) the same events over and over. As Rob Young wrote in ’<i>The Magic Box’</i>, “when narratives engage with paganism and ritual, actions get stuck in a loop.” <br /><br />Whereas Adam and Matthew are the champions of linear time; they must enter the village, complete a project and then leave. To Hendrick leaving is a non-concept. Notably they arrive by road, their journey interrupted when they (think they) see a strange stone figure jump out at them. And they defeat Hendrick through manipulating linear time, like it’s their element. (Check out the denouement for what I mean.) <br /><br />Yet circular time is also, in a sense, accumulated time. Instead of the present arriving to replace the past, events recur, deepen like a coastal shelf. <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2010/07/safe-from-harm-henry-moore-at-tate.html" target="_blank">In an earlier piece</a>, we looked at how Henry Moore’s sculpture explored his own fascination with the autochthonian. As the show’s name suggests, here this fascination becomes a phobia. The number of villagers not only equals the number of stones, in the end they turn into them. Perhaps the stones grow like coral, thickening with each iteration. <br /><br />And the series does a good job of suggesting the vast timescales involved, rather than succumbing to attempt an inadequate literalisation. At one point, Hendrick takes umbrage at Adam's jibe at our primitive caveman ancestor. The inference is that he has good reason to take the insult personally. The “magus” he insists the caveman was, that's him. <br /><br />Like <i>’Sky’,</i> there’s no sense that victory is in any way complete. This war of linear versus circular time isn't really resolved – each just returns to its respective corner. And perhaps the point is that it can’t be. The picture, we should remember, predicts their escaping the village. Which it does by portraying a previous occurrence. And the coda suggests that circular time may already be reasserting itself and will always recur, like the seasons, no matter how many times it is defeated. This is a Manichean war, opposites endlessly attracting and then repelling one another. <br /><br />The series as a whole is nicely open-ended; rather than being spoon-feed, you are left a lot of plot points to tie up yourself. However, there are times where you can’t help wonder whether those points <i>do</i> fit together, or whether you’ve been set a fool’s errand. <br /><br />For example, it's debatable how much sense the conceit of stone people actually makes. Are they stones brought to life through these ancient magical forces? Have those people been in the village all these centuries, so the stones are their natural calcified form? But of course it’s there because it makes a great deal of <i>symbolic</i> sense - the stones quite literally have no free agency and are locked in a circle. <br /><br />There's similar problems with the black hole/ supernova element. It’s originally a mystery what the stones are aligned with, it seems an empty section of sky. Then it’s revealed as a black hole which, back in the day, was a bright supernova. But Hendrick’s whole shtick is to dispel the villagers’ ‘evil’ into the repository of the inescapable black hole. If time is circular, how was that possible with the supernova? The star's collapsing seems there merely as a measure to indicate the vast timespan rather than a piece of internal story sense. <br /><br />However, if not every piece fits perfectly, that’s no reason to throw away the whole picture. This series assumed its child audience were intelligent enough to follow it’s not-always-straightforward plot, run through some quite philosophical concepts and (at times) cope with being quite thoroughly spooked! Do they write ‘em like that any more? I’m not at all sure that they do... <br /><br />The first five minutes, including that eerie opening...</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bLpcr7KTi9I" width="320" youtube-src-id="bLpcr7KTi9I"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /></span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-37190557158234096992024-01-13T12:20:00.002+00:002024-01-13T12:20:20.139+00:00'SKY' <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>(The first part of Teatime Dystopias, our look at SF in Seventies Kids shows, on ‘The Changes’, lies <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-changes.html " target="_blank">here</a>. Though they can be read in any order.)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcHO2GTVg5M0l6OGinwcedhjE-CWaTx5xe4hDhWyJTCgbbZ7Q64SxjC5LIobeAYVSBiFAClW8_8fT01hK5KkxW3hA-CFuD9MzecQD3KZI5pyhdH4sR85RVF8iAN2XqhBmRARoTpSNnza1671WECh0T36OxSpJNdG2_kWTC2mzYG3xNWKggCSxfa5ztTlzY/s384/1.sky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="384" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcHO2GTVg5M0l6OGinwcedhjE-CWaTx5xe4hDhWyJTCgbbZ7Q64SxjC5LIobeAYVSBiFAClW8_8fT01hK5KkxW3hA-CFuD9MzecQD3KZI5pyhdH4sR85RVF8iAN2XqhBmRARoTpSNnza1671WECh0T36OxSpJNdG2_kWTC2mzYG3xNWKggCSxfa5ztTlzY/w400-h300/1.sky.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>”It is like this. The truth that men once saw was a window of many colours, now the window is shattered and lies in glittering shards across the floor. But the fragments you pick up cannot be the whole and the wind of chaos begins to blow through the open space.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />When middle-aged men blog about old TV shows its normally because they have youthful memories they wish to indulge. But this post is appearing precisely because when the ITV children's series<i> 'Sky'</i>, by Bob Baker & Dave Martin, was first shown back in 1975 I <i>didn't</i> watch it. <br /><br />I mean, I didn’t miss it either. I was home from school and plonked before the telly every evening. This was the Seventies, after all, there was bugger all else to do. But truth to tell, my young brain found it all too much to take. Some weeks I'd try risking it only to find myself hastily changing channels. While with others I didn't dare put myself through the ordeal at all and I'd stick to the altogether safer realms of the BBC. <br /><br />Of course, times were simpler then and I certainly was. But it wasn't just that I found it scary. Worse, I found it <i>unsettling</i>, reason-defying, literally uncanny. It was like a bad dream. It seemed almost impossible to figure out what was going on, even who the good guys were. <br /><br />I'd now be less likely to reach for the word 'scary' than 'Seventies'. It seems like the elements from every other Seventies SF show distilled into one - someone's overlaid, composite memory of them all. Strangely blonde alien messiahs, psi powers, cosmic pontificating, ecological themes, visions of armageddon, Stonehenge-is-really-sci-fi, a spaceship as a wicker man… all seen through a filter of spacey music and post-psychedelic screen effects. Even Glastonbury hippies get a look-in.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcB-wstt9EUKVAp-aB9BfCDG5hxaqXl_zcYqNMgnXNIoNvsuKCVtYbRBa5Rr1jOawJOJagpVcafrLtQPFFlg1DT0sjpBUERftHAcpfpKhxm6Riwub0wKM5xskdVqZTgsWugwFQGviA9228nD4WMPMX-Abv9_Ml3fVc6AVfdkgmt1WHRZoyfbnDEv-HE8Cy/s500/2.village.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcB-wstt9EUKVAp-aB9BfCDG5hxaqXl_zcYqNMgnXNIoNvsuKCVtYbRBa5Rr1jOawJOJagpVcafrLtQPFFlg1DT0sjpBUERftHAcpfpKhxm6Riwub0wKM5xskdVqZTgsWugwFQGviA9228nD4WMPMX-Abv9_Ml3fVc6AVfdkgmt1WHRZoyfbnDEv-HE8Cy/s16000/2.village.png" /></a></div><br />Part of what so fazed my young brain was the title character (up top). With his synthesised unearthly voice, spaced-out eyes, spectral presence and general all around alien-ness, was he hero or villain? He had recognisably human sidekicks, but unlike the good Doctor seemed far too otherly to be the hero. He didn't look so far from the scarily superior aryan kids from the film <i>'Village of the Damned' </i>(above). And yet he simultaneously seemed so vulnerable, so haunted. Without that sort of pole to set your compass by, how could a young child be anything but lost?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTTvlyDAK3bRnK9cZpyuOzwdTsK5OGN3KzHuAj9jZDIkqS2Cq2rFdRiKDzIt3M18gQc3z2uSPsY6oMCCH4Kg3JXWpy3ca-MtiEnlt7Kcg-WMcDDkAhKJJHnO8BkFQU9v9QG6s-4wAP2Wx-PLp6SDVX0tN6a9qX863YGYgZKWRqyAtosi5FdqozsaRF-9_t/s500/3.manwhofelltoearth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="215" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTTvlyDAK3bRnK9cZpyuOzwdTsK5OGN3KzHuAj9jZDIkqS2Cq2rFdRiKDzIt3M18gQc3z2uSPsY6oMCCH4Kg3JXWpy3ca-MtiEnlt7Kcg-WMcDDkAhKJJHnO8BkFQU9v9QG6s-4wAP2Wx-PLp6SDVX0tN6a9qX863YGYgZKWRqyAtosi5FdqozsaRF-9_t/s16000/3.manwhofelltoearth.jpg" /></a></div><br />I knew it not at the time but, also archetypically for the Seventies, the character was channelling a great deal of David Bowie. Actor Marc Harrison was encased in a blonde wig and blue contact lenses. (Which ironically made him look most like Bowie in <i>'The Man Who Fell to Earth',</i>, above, a film not released until the following year.) And of course blondeness and whiteness was a general signifier of futurism in the Seventies, in fashion and design as much as SF. <br /><br />Bowie had repeatedly used the metaphor of aliens to represent generation gaps, with youth as the nascent “homo superior” who were becoming increasingly unknowable to their own parents. <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-x-men-vs-tomorrow-people.html" target="_blank">(Which, as we’ve seen, was a phrase instrumental in developing another ITV children's SF series,'Tomorrow People', in 1973.)</a> Yet the Tomorrow People didn't wear weird all-blue contact lenses but smart jumpsuits, and behaved quite properly – as if the cast of <i>'Blue Peter' </i>had developed psychic powers, which they'd decided to utilise to defend the Earth when they weren't busy on bob-a-job week. <br /><br /><i>'Sky',</i> conversely, was almost the anti <i>'Tomorrow People,' </i>the point in the schedules where the uncanny just erupted. And one component of this was its incorporation of generational conflict, albeit in an unusual way. It's almost a staple of children's SF that its young protagonists are as beset by everyday travails as by extraordinary ones – they're set detention at school or grounded at home, and always on the night when they need to meet the passing space rocket. (Of course appealing to the young mind, with whatever it had fixed on to do that evening feeling as important as meeting a space rocket.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIa76S_N9Qe7Tdce1JzmwT1sa6JI7FaodoUPloOQTXMWODoEmjX24cH00ySIgTOqwT9iqaTHtKyl_2Yisdzg2VN5AVXABAyqNfTW-O40yGaWkNOBCAOmA8kTJnkZA0TRJb68WZfpjHuLQLKQtmq2JczboZ77l8ff70S_SaW3k6LlrXwv1HTM7y2gv83xys/s400/5.Goodchild2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIa76S_N9Qe7Tdce1JzmwT1sa6JI7FaodoUPloOQTXMWODoEmjX24cH00ySIgTOqwT9iqaTHtKyl_2Yisdzg2VN5AVXABAyqNfTW-O40yGaWkNOBCAOmA8kTJnkZA0TRJb68WZfpjHuLQLKQtmq2JczboZ77l8ff70S_SaW3k6LlrXwv1HTM7y2gv83xys/s16000/5.Goodchild2.jpg" /></a></div><br /><i>'Sky'</i> has a school, true, but one seemingly without any teachers to it. In general, adult characters are weak and marginal - an alcoholic Major, ineffectual yokel cops. But this just allows adult authority to be bundled up inside one figure – Sky's antagonist, the ironically named Goodchild (above). Played in an almost absurdly melodramatic way by a black-clad Robert Eddison, like Dracula but with less redeeming features. <br /><br />The patriarchal Devil was a staple of Seventies horror (albeit in horrors more normally aimed at adult audiences), and Goodchild is a chip off this block. After a first line “I'm looking for my charge”, he spends almost the whole series chasing Sky around the place. He often explicitly takes on roles of adult authority, such as that of a Doctor at the hospital.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Z4Osq5HNpTnn5Vqt1CJtEwB0a_TcH7kBNv51E_6fgWtMMqsvTSIAa4-SvQnAVdnkR-4H69uo8BGLgd1s-EKNtQ3WkD1VKe6QFobBjPVIpgVsyzlmureCcOqAeBgQKpesAsWOc23nJ7Al5rGjofCFs6HYQHHwefKfabopYbRJthrMDSoWGw4SPV4nepPN/s437/4.Arby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="334" data-original-width="437" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Z4Osq5HNpTnn5Vqt1CJtEwB0a_TcH7kBNv51E_6fgWtMMqsvTSIAa4-SvQnAVdnkR-4H69uo8BGLgd1s-EKNtQ3WkD1VKe6QFobBjPVIpgVsyzlmureCcOqAeBgQKpesAsWOc23nJ7Al5rGjofCFs6HYQHHwefKfabopYbRJthrMDSoWGw4SPV4nepPN/s16000/4.Arby.jpg" /></a></div><br />More unusually, class makes an appearance alongside age. With Sky so strange and remote, the primary audience identification character is Arbie (above). He's not just working class, but surly and widely distrusted as a tealeaf – James Dean meets Ed Grundy. His family lives next door to the more middle class Roy and his Major dad, not out of any Seventies egalitarianism but the better to juxtapose them. <br /><br />In a seemingly perpetual plot point the natural word is constantly turning against Sky, like antibodies against a foreign intruder. Which was perhaps the main source of my youthful disquiet. Firstly, it found horror in what was all around you – the English landscape, the stuff more commonly used for pretty backdrops. And worse - if this was the hero, how could the very Earth turn against him? Which is actually quite a good question. Despite Goodchild's panto villainy, there's a sense that the two are locked in some endless Manichaean dualism. <br /><br />Sky's white coding goes against Goodchild’s black, not just foes but primary antagonists. Upon age versus youth and white versus black the show then places every other dualism – authority versus rebellion, custom versus innovation and earth versus... well, <i>sky</i>. Only some way in do we discover the SF-sounding Juganet which Sky searches for is actually Stonehenge, which of course is some time machine/ astral portal sort of thing. (The original purpose of Stonehenge was almost certainly to <i>link</i> earth and sky rather than oppose them, the builders abundantly aware how deep those stones had to be sunk just to stand up. But let's not fret.) In fact the moralistic name Goodchild is perhaps not entirely ironic, for he ultimately represents the natural order. <br /><br />Nor is this just a matter of painting Goodchild less black. Contemporary viewers watching the opening scenes would most likely assume Arby to be the sidekick to pheasant-hunting posh kid Roy – at which point he promptly drives off on his own. But there's a sense in which by finding Sky he merely swaps one bossy rich kid for another. <br /><br />Arbie's sister Jane seems inserted into the script at a late stage, to give the girls someone to relate to. And as she mostly just follows Arbie around as he follows Sky, it's doubtful that strategy was particularly successful. Yet at one late point its she who not unreasonably suggests Sky is simply using them. And certainly nothing happens to dissuade us of this. The war of earth versus sky seems to have little interest in the human jam sandwiched between them. One way of reading things would be to pursue the Bowie metaphor, where Sky is the star with his head full of visions and mouth dispensing significant statements, and Arbie his lowly earth-bound fan. <br /><br />As we discover, while Sky is <i>a</i> saviour he isn't really <i>our</i> saviour. Because of reasons he's shown up at the wrong time and, while he expects and accepts human assistance, he shows a right royal lack of gratitude for it. Not being meant for us, he's consequently not able to tell Arby anything particularly useful. What he does have to say basically boils down to “I'm not your messiah, I just took a wrong turn. Actually, you lot.. well, you're all buggered. Sorry about that.” <br /><br />Which seems the mood of the moment. To go back to Bowie, the year before <i>‘Sky’ </i>was broadcast <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beat-godfather-meets-glitter-mainman-william-burroughs-interviews-david-bowie-92508/" target="_blank">he tried explaining what the ‘Ziggy’ album was all about</a>: “Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe.” This is clearly a post-hoc construction, almost entirely unrelated to the album made a couple of years before. But the remarkable thing is how close it is to <i>‘Sky.’ </i><br /><br />One intriguing aspect of this is that neither Sky nor Goodchild wants the world as it is now. If Goodchild represents nature, it doesn't follow Sky is in hock to the white heat of technology. Despite his name he's not here to predict any media empire branding, explaining things have been on the wrong track since the time when “with the first flint man bent nature to his will”. <br /><br />As stated at the opening, psi powers were a staple of Seventies SF, mind control battles about as common as bell bottoms. Yet what's interesting about <i>'Sky'</i> may be less than it's yet another iteration, but the way it knocks out what often seems a core component of them. Think again of <i>'Tomorrow People’</i> and their jaunting belts, human evolution and technological development so aligned as to be almost symbiotic. Whereas in <i>'Sky' </i>it's all just got to go.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCSAAlW5PAbV_TOkspyLqZVop2upPgJPQCxpOfOF0tb6UyffXGTf1I9oN-4-iSVnn_8l-toEEYh0c6BF0O_jUkWu-EQ6RE0pxGSU3CKbCYnU5GHhdQbazD9WMyyTbWJnEhz3ZDMtyzDVIsu57-PaR1WEGAXJrvx8NZWazdBeGGnpqmF70SzzDKSj-jSYmK/s400/6.sky2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCSAAlW5PAbV_TOkspyLqZVop2upPgJPQCxpOfOF0tb6UyffXGTf1I9oN-4-iSVnn_8l-toEEYh0c6BF0O_jUkWu-EQ6RE0pxGSU3CKbCYnU5GHhdQbazD9WMyyTbWJnEhz3ZDMtyzDVIsu57-PaR1WEGAXJrvx8NZWazdBeGGnpqmF70SzzDKSj-jSYmK/s16000/6.sky2.jpg" /></a></div><br />What Sky's mission means in practise, or how it even differs from Goodchild's vision, is... wait for it... ill-explored. Insofar as it's possible to tell, his psi powers – and in particular his telepathy - represent a kind of nouveau spiritualism. Using them makes us at one with the world, while tools and even speech just separate us from it. Or something. Yet while there is something New Agey about this it doesn’t have the feelgood factor that seems central to New Age ‘thinking’. We get to visit Arbie’s post-tech future and it’s not much of a utopia. (Despite the telepathy it’s not unlike the world of <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-changes.html" target="_blank">‘The Changes’</a>, including the sense that we’re in somebody’s utopia, just not ours. <br /><br />Though there is a sense this is fitting. We see all this from our perspective, from a fallen, lesser world. So of course what we see is fragmentary, and hard to interpret. And perhaps what's really significant is what's absent. In a quietly brilliant scene, when Arbie finally gets back home he doesn’t rush back into the arms of his family but goes round the kitchen switching on lights and taps – refamiliarising himself with familiar things. But we’re supposed to do the opposite. The ambiguous dualism essentially tells us soon there’ll be no more water in that tap, the whole thing is up the spout and we need to sort it out for ourselves. <br /><br /><a href="http://thiswayupzine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/up-words-shades-of-blue.html" target="_blank">Producer Patrick Dromgoole later said</a> “What we were trying to say to the children was their normal definition of good and bad was not going to work because they were suddenly confronting one of the great mysteries of the universe and a very simple definition wasn’t available.” (So yes, they <i>were</i> screwing with my young mind!) <br /><br />And perhaps that’s what's significant. Nowadays we fancy ourselves as dystopian connoisseurs, like a drunk boasting he can take his booze. But would we countenance anything so bleak, strange and challenging as this on contemporary children's TV? <br /><br />True there may be films which have taken on this mantle. <i>’The Hunger Games’, </i>based on teen-lit novels, may be something of a sibling. But they’ve mostly been overwritten by apocalypse porn. A genre where, while the disaster may even be pulled from the headlines, it is always rendered as something known and explicable. Both characters and audience will be aware what they’re up against. Even horror variants, such as zombies, are normally subject to quite rigid rules. And, however much they fetishise the spectacle of destruction, at heart they’re Robinson Crusoe stories. Even when stripped of our lattes and i-phones, we Westerners will find within ourselves the will to survive. <br /><br />But most of all… Wilfred Owen once said “all a poet can do today is warn.” And when you’re issuing a warning, it makes sense to direct it at the young, those least inured in the bad habits. I’ve now lived through many of the dates they used to flaunt so ostentatiously in science fiction in those big futuristic fonts. We passed those warning signs. So inevitably they now seems prophecy. I’m not surprised that things have skirted so close to disaster. What I’m surprised about is that they haven’t tipped over yet. <br /><br /><i>’Sky’ </i>is not particularly well-acted or even necessarily that well-written. As Goodchild chases Sky from one hidey-hole to another, as the super-intelligent alien hides in another country setting (“you'll be safe here”) then belatedly remembers nature has it in for him, it quickly becomes repetitive. And its boldest defenders would have to work hard to claim it's in any way coherent. <br /><br />But it's got the sort of qualities that analysis can miss. It throws up interesting concepts and memorable images, which can stick in your brain. (In my case, over decades. Despite the fact I didn't even watch it.) You're never sure what are flaws or weaknesses, or what are deliberate ambiguities and clever devices. (For example, the rather wooden performances of the others throws into relief the larger-than-life nature of Sky and Goodchild.) <br /><br />Compare it to a dark psychedelic track, like something by Trees or early Pink Floyd. (Similar visual effects were, after all, regularly used on music programmes of the time.) The underlying structure may be of an overly familiar pop number, but that's simply not the part to focus on. The disorientating psychedelic effects leap up at you, take you by surprise, drag you into their realm. Similarly the spooky music, the photo-filter effects, the strange-looking characters aren't embellishments to what's going on, they <i>are</i> what's going on. As Sky says at one point, “What you read are symbols, and fragments of symbols.” My eight year old self was right. It can't be made sense of, and that's the key thing about it... <br /><br />That <i>very</i> Seventies credit sequence...</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uBwreulA8HE" width="320" youtube-src-id="uBwreulA8HE"></iframe></div><br /><i>Coming soon! </i>Perhaps the best-known teatime dystopia of them all...</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-40132343668378478312024-01-06T11:59:00.001+00:002024-01-06T12:00:48.009+00:00‘THE CHANGES’ <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>(Here starts ‘Teatime Dystopias’, a three-part series on how science fiction was used by Seventies children’s TV. Which, primarily, was as a means to traumatise tots. Please BEWARE PLOT SPOILERS!)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAdkE7Krc0yxAQJbvFEV0H1ui80fLqU5b5PWeOIfmg0s-0NafuioauSbKmXtTDzVJJbnpBrM6Bo6yF3ji_WwJwcPe5dVMtrK2uF2k2pN2Y2V17S2BDIgZQhksk9zpVtEZ0RlNFugHqYDA3sK1ROHW6WlYryitC-XSrab4F79jgFcnxHjIsBDTHDDJ1YI_V/s333/1.TheChangescredits.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="333" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAdkE7Krc0yxAQJbvFEV0H1ui80fLqU5b5PWeOIfmg0s-0NafuioauSbKmXtTDzVJJbnpBrM6Bo6yF3ji_WwJwcPe5dVMtrK2uF2k2pN2Y2V17S2BDIgZQhksk9zpVtEZ0RlNFugHqYDA3sK1ROHW6WlYryitC-XSrab4F79jgFcnxHjIsBDTHDDJ1YI_V/w400-h300/1.TheChangescredits.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></i><br /><b>Adverse Conditions Ahead</b><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“We interrupt our regularly broadcast programme to bring you the end of Western civilisation...”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />That’s not quite how <i>’The Changes’</i> started, but it’s not far off. If it's something like a junior version of <i>’Survivors’,</i> it actually came first. (Both were broadcast in 1975, but it had been filmed two years before.) Except <i>’Survivors’ </i>took a scientifically plausible explanation for social collapse, <a href="https://youtu.be/Ch7N7KCn778" target="_blank">reiterated in its title sequence</a>. While this took a fantastical one, as in its own title sequence. Speaking of which…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w0A3IZyIIWs" width="320" youtube-src-id="w0A3IZyIIWs"></iframe></div><br />For the first but not the last time in this series, those highly effective titles are an example of restriction generating innovation. The repeat image of things just <i>stopping</i> is as effective as it is simple. To end life as we know it doesn’t require an epidemic to be unleashed, the nuclear button be pressed, resources to run out or the workers to rise up from the Lower City. In fact it doesn’t require <i>anything</i>. The lives we had been living weren’t even precarious, they were arbitrary. They could have stopped at any point, it just happened to be today. <br /><br />And the soundtrack… it’s bizarre to think that little more than a decade later, electronic beats would be used to induce ecstatic states. Here its machine sounds to convey a machine sense - the regular, the humdrum heartbeat of the daily grind. Then that stopping. <br /><br />There’s two things you can’t avoid saying about <i>’The Changes’,</i> and they go together. First, it’s strong use of location footage gives it an immediate, <i>verite</i> feeling quite at odds with the staginess of much TV from this time. Added to which the camera is mobile, following the action around. <br /><br />Second, it needs to be situated in its era, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week" target="_blank">a time of power cuts and social upheaval.</a> Our modern phobias are wrapped up in mighty CGI conflagrations, sometimes referred to as the spectacle of the end of the world, where we’re all inevitably going to die but at least it’ll be while watching a good show. While the Seventies was about the taps stopping working and the water going bad. Their apocalypse wasn’t just coming, it was going to get you where you live. <br /><br />Peter Dickinson’s source novels predate this era, the last being written in 1970. Many scenes from them are excised, to be replaced by more budget-friendly alternatives. But there’s two significant points where the show adds scenes, and this is the first. All the books started after the Changes had begun. Whereas some of the show’s most memorable moments are in the first episode, where we see the actual a-changin’.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8_4Ql9bwfDSLO_pAPhBU-FLYzk37hyphenhyphenUdoGCY7CMsZkiEbp50A2alQ48rbafZBHPlZMR-nq8kMjOgLOo89c4qiLrQWELTc-D-hOL_5iJIb9JZwXFouougWBZE1S-Tbsb8_vttYd6QhNZW-mgY5KFkPrB9yZIiPcsB9JW6uq8bToj41aar9PWW3KQDby_JE/s528/2.NickyTheChanges.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="397" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8_4Ql9bwfDSLO_pAPhBU-FLYzk37hyphenhyphenUdoGCY7CMsZkiEbp50A2alQ48rbafZBHPlZMR-nq8kMjOgLOo89c4qiLrQWELTc-D-hOL_5iJIb9JZwXFouougWBZE1S-Tbsb8_vttYd6QhNZW-mgY5KFkPrB9yZIiPcsB9JW6uq8bToj41aar9PWW3KQDby_JE/s16000/2.NickyTheChanges.jpeg" /></a></div><br />We first see young Nicky dutifully doing her homework in a setting of domestic quietude. Then a mere three minutes in, to quote the first episode’s title, the Noise starts. And the family are immediately reduced to a destructive frenzy against anything mechanical. As, it transpires, is everyone else. The motivation is moralistic if not actively religious, the machinery deemed “wicked”. (And not in the “well wicked” sense.) The first blood-and-thunder preacher has shown up mid-way through the first episode. While you’re probably not intended to think of it directly, it recalls <a href="http://art-in-space.blogspot.com/2020/12/anonymous-iconoclastic-fury-of-dutch.html" target="_blank">the iconoclastic fury.</a></span></div><div><span style="color: #0000ee; font-family: verdana;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><u><br /></u></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://art-in-space.blogspot.com/2020/12/anonymous-iconoclastic-fury-of-dutch.html" target="_blank"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://art-in-space.blogspot.com/2020/12/anonymous-iconoclastic-fury-of-dutch.html" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpZF3KtHEp_-JlHBOtkQXhIp_NXB0q_UqQELOxYPtSposggrClBY88cTsDsqGpVa5h0xmghqwsHsJhnJEmK0q4dcQzGdPwzh2PoB1mMoqnyTQt2pNdiExvPtGhTUJKFJnCE9yv8RvRN0f6ys4lED5BpBqhossMQ6vbN9zrCQAY9g1NkgTN7zKUt-X9kUe1/s528/3.TheNoise.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="528" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpZF3KtHEp_-JlHBOtkQXhIp_NXB0q_UqQELOxYPtSposggrClBY88cTsDsqGpVa5h0xmghqwsHsJhnJEmK0q4dcQzGdPwzh2PoB1mMoqnyTQt2pNdiExvPtGhTUJKFJnCE9yv8RvRN0f6ys4lED5BpBqhossMQ6vbN9zrCQAY9g1NkgTN7zKUt-X9kUe1/w400-h297/3.TheNoise.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />(If they <i>why</i> of this is taken up later, its somewhat unclear <i>how</i> people are affected. At first it seems it’s an intermittent madness, lasting only as long as the Noise sounds. Once it stops, people’s immediate reaction is to escape somewhere, as if the problem’s confined to others. But it’s also a permanent reset, bedded in people’s minds, where even mention of the wicked things by name can cause shock and outrage. Or for that matter what the limits of this wickedness are. For example, bicycles are bad but carts are okay.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRJ5iO_1MdDFEfDNd03-qWB4WQ_Gg4JQVkhq0K1mWWpRLCo2zyOBmGzgUY_AtEmf3R4iN6nFl0smLL5eOYal3yphEyeK_oLkMVb36aIehd8bj72gSEs1NhzjeIa6bqsFOVqPo5Klvy4jTYBmw9-Vj2D_FzonkaUSXmyE68_W95NiqjTiEcicU8zMIiQZ6/s528/4.Sikhs.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="413" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRJ5iO_1MdDFEfDNd03-qWB4WQ_Gg4JQVkhq0K1mWWpRLCo2zyOBmGzgUY_AtEmf3R4iN6nFl0smLL5eOYal3yphEyeK_oLkMVb36aIehd8bj72gSEs1NhzjeIa6bqsFOVqPo5Klvy4jTYBmw9-Vj2D_FzonkaUSXmyE68_W95NiqjTiEcicU8zMIiQZ6/s16000/4.Sikhs.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Nicky soon falls in with some Sikhs, travelling with them. Why Sikhs? The Seventies were the ‘look East’ era, with an increased interest in its mysticism. But that rarely took in Sikhism. Dickinson dedicated the book they appear in to a Sikh name, so possibly this originally stems from a personal relationship. <br /><br />However, two things are striking. Firstly the Sikhs are accurately presented as, in the book’s words, “a warrior people”. When the distrust they’re met with spills over into hostility they are quick with self-defence, which makes them useful protectors for Nicky. (Note to self - when civilisation ends, don’t get yourself stuck with a bunch of aum-ing Buddhists if Sikhs are available.) <br /><br />But a wider (if not unconnected) point is that they’re outsiders, that they were outsiders before any of this started, and they’d be scarcely any less outsiders if they were still in India. Which manifests within the story as their being unaffected by the Changes. In fact their initial reason to allow Nicky to travel with them is that she can be their ‘canary’ of wickedness, alert them to what’s considered wrong-doing in these new social mores. <br /><br />Based on a trilogy, the series divides neatly into three. And it’s significant that even after Nicky parts company with them she takes up with Jonathon. Who is white but before the Changes was a keen engine tinkerer, and so any Noise effect has already rubbed off him. Meaning Nicky always has someone with her less changed than she is. <br /><br />Why do this? She’s the audience identification character, if not our brave heroine. Why not show her as unaffected by the Changes as we are? Instead things are played very much the other way. She loses her parents when, rather than follow them, she joins a mob attacking a car. And at first she attacks the Sikhs, when one tries to start up an engine. <br /><br />Before watching, I’d blithely assumed the Changes would only affect the adults. Who when I was a child always seemed strangely vexed about technology which I just saw as ubiquitous, rationing TV viewing, guarding telephones, fretting about amplified music’s ability to suddenly strike you deaf and so on. The story does suggest the Changes wear off with the children the quickest, but still has them affected initially. <br /><br />Let’s segue into another question, as that may turn out to have the same answer. The Changes are shown as a terrible rupture, a “madness” which kills many and constantly throws Nicky into danger. England has descended into a kind of Home Counties Fascism, ruled by village despots and malevolent witchfinders. (Prone to saying things like “Wickedness! Right here in the heart of Shipton!”) Otherness is so feared it’s like the Daily Mail comments board comes to life. The reassuringly strangulated BBC voice-over at the start of each episode seems strangely jolting. <br /><br />But at the same time the series demonstrates the way Sixties counter-cultural themes had by the Seventies gone mainstream, the critique of consumerism, the back-to-the-land movement and so on. Another show which premiered in 1975 was the long-running sitcom <i>’The Good Life',</i> about a middle class couple who opt out of the rat race for “self-sufficiency in Surbiton.” And in their travels Nicky and Jonathon come across a remarkably similar couple, Michael and Mary, who had swapped London for “the simple life” of rabbit-hunting and bread-baking before the Changes even began. (They’re the second major invention of the show, with no correlative in the source novels.) <br /><br />And these can clash. The witchfinder chases Nicky across a whole episode, gaining knowledge of her whereabouts by threatening another with a knife. But the chase is a leisurely affair, a canter across the countryside set against repeat panoramas of bucolic England, taking in a visit to a village pub. The incidental music sticks to the Seventies synths, but to fit those views shifts into pastoral. (And there’s little that’s more Seventies than folky snyth.) <br /><br />Laid out like that, it sounds like a weakness. Some popular trends have been tossed together, and what results is a mish-mash. And at times it seems that’s the case. But at others it turns out quite the opposite. It’s perhaps best summed up by the kindly old man Nicky meets in the first episode, before she’s left Bristol. Much like <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2014/10/quatermass-ii-1955.html" target="_blank">the tramp in ‘Quatermass II</a>’, he acts as a kind of moral compass. He comments “it’s funny not having the noises, it’s like when I was a kid, nicer really, more peaceful”, even as he knows he’s dying. Let’s look at how that works… <br /><br /><b>The End of Civilisation And Its Discontents</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji5wAZuKTj3wgkcOd0_AiiiLgXnFRSiqwoOeRnncjuNINND-uob0CqexxO0R89uP3vbVrfBWN-fraa1y3WGePE6U1pDCA5_CeglfmXbhPBeQHs7fIUqjFhi6tgOny2yxhuJ51k5pjfjc0QDmZXYygHZ_nW6066mw52UtAEwuwcBOiYMzEYv0pxYzZ2dpD-/s320/5.The%20Changes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji5wAZuKTj3wgkcOd0_AiiiLgXnFRSiqwoOeRnncjuNINND-uob0CqexxO0R89uP3vbVrfBWN-fraa1y3WGePE6U1pDCA5_CeglfmXbhPBeQHs7fIUqjFhi6tgOny2yxhuJ51k5pjfjc0QDmZXYygHZ_nW6066mw52UtAEwuwcBOiYMzEYv0pxYzZ2dpD-/w400-h300/5.The%20Changes.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></b><br />First off, Nicky consistently under-reacts to all of this. After the initial outbreak of the Noise, to her parent’s shock she calmly gets dressed for the next day’s school. When they tell her not to go, she sneaks out anyway. She then seems strangely phlegmatic about being left behind by them, who seem strangely phlegmatic about leaving her. This may just be a narrative necessity, to avoid having multiple episodes where she’s just sobbing on her bed. But it’s referred to diegetically, she’s asked about this by the Sikhs and shrugs the question off. And children can be a strange combination of conservative and adaptable, adjusting to a new normal more quickly than adults. <br /><br />It’s also noticeable that in both the first and second section Nicky is befriended by both a boy and a girl. There’s a scene where the camera stands with the Sikh girl Ajeet as she looks up at Nicky and the Sikh boy Gopal, who have climbed a tree. She’s asked if she doesn’t mind getting so dirty, but doesn’t seem to. Then later as she goes travelling with Jonathon his sister Margaret helps their escape, then returns to help her mum with the farm. The Changes of <i>’The Changes’</i> grant her what might, in Seventies terms, be called ‘boy’s liberties’. Had the Noise never happened, she’d probably have just stayed with her homework. <br /><br />For some reason, I never watched this show at the time. However, I was a big fan of <i>’Here Come The Double Deckers’</i> (first broadcast 1970/1, but endlessly repeated). And what attracted me was the trope of <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FreeRangeChildren" target="_blank">Free Range Children</a>. It showed kids living in a secret hideout, where adult authority would attempt to intrude with slapstick ensuing. No parental edicts about bedtimes or the tidiness of rooms, just endless hanging out with your mates. <br /><br />And the first film I saw at the cinema was <i>’Lost In the Desert’ </i>(1969), a tale of a young boy who got lost in the… well, you probably guessed. (It’s essentially <i>’Walkabout’ </i>without the elder sister.) Watching a child about the same age as me strive to survive on that big screen was a demanding watch, a feeling amplified by the realisation that if I reacted too visibly I wouldn’t get taken to the cinema again. <br /><br />Both stemmed from the same source. But it was an unspoken assumption that it was okay to feed kid’s desire to be free of adult authority and also stir their phobia of being without their parents, provided they were delivered via different channels - never the twain shall meet. <br /><br />Except for <i>’The Changes’,</i> which was (consciously or otherwise) all about them meeting. Nicky gets to climb her trees, but with that freedom comes the witchfinder who wants to stone her to death. <br /><br />And that was in a sense a juvenile microcosm of the wider culture, which both fretted about what technology was doing while fearing it being taken away. There’s more to this than the love of adventuring, even if that becomes our route in. It’s the notion that technology has coddled us, disconnected us from the real world, to the point that life now lies elsewhere. <br /><br />And popular cultural themes are normally conflicted. Quite possibly it’s that conflict which causes them to become themes. Dramas can seek to resolve them, which they’re unlikely to do to everyone’s satisfaction. Or they can opt to ride the turbulence, and perhaps even map some of it. <br /><br /><b>Deus Versus Machina</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWaLaToz7QETFUgzZqUV73Fj9UfAiDkqws1yufHmj-k-EA5M3YAJaOQGc6S1aLp90AZm66R8TWnN1viZ7v7-hhbs5BqSmx6zLUJe_lEZLNWwlejVpPJ1FtUHxeBnOxKeC47fVP3YKnSFBwSbvf8ESaL91nF7LVmah8t8Ap6uGGXgw-YqHn88Ba-NtEgy9q/s462/6.The_Changes_closing_titles.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="462" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWaLaToz7QETFUgzZqUV73Fj9UfAiDkqws1yufHmj-k-EA5M3YAJaOQGc6S1aLp90AZm66R8TWnN1viZ7v7-hhbs5BqSmx6zLUJe_lEZLNWwlejVpPJ1FtUHxeBnOxKeC47fVP3YKnSFBwSbvf8ESaL91nF7LVmah8t8Ap6uGGXgw-YqHn88Ba-NtEgy9q/s16000/6.The_Changes_closing_titles.jpg" /></a></div></b><br />And what turns out to have caused the Changes? There’s a megalith-like stone, sitting in a cave, seen over the closing credits of every episode. That’s our culprit. It’s a kind of spirit of the land - “there in nature, deep in the root of things.” And it’s Nicky, not the unaffected Jonathon, who’s able to sense it, to realise what it is and to plead with it. (In a scene remarkably like the ‘talking down the maverick supercomputer’ trope Seventies SF was so fond of. This was the decade that truly wrapped science and mysticism up together.) <br /><br />She saves the day by appealing to it’s better nature, which is an example of the ‘talking cure’ so beloved of liberal culture. But it makes more sense in this context than something like <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2014/09/quatermass-experiment-in-science-fiction.html" target="_blank">‘The Quatermass Experiment’.</a> <br /><br />Some while ago, <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2008/03/triology-of-dead-plus-one-part-2.html" target="_blank">we looked at ‘Day of the Dead’.</a> Which speculated that the zombie rising happened because our hubris made God wrathful. But the Changes seems more like something so powerful a force would do. Take away our noisy toys, not give them back till we’re better behaved. (Though at one point lightning strikes Nicky and Jonathon’s boat, so the stone’s willing to do its own dirty work at times.) <br /><br />They encounter Furbelow, who touched the stone and made a wish upon it. “I didn’t mean it to turn out like this, of course”, he cries, “I thought it was for the best.” And he’s like all of us at this point of history, concerned about something, not quite knowing why or what to do about it, in his befuddlement just making the whole thing worse. Which is echoed in the stone’s warning - “whoever touches me unbalances the world”. <br /><br />Though how this muddled wish transpires as the Changes is, perhaps inevitably, in itself muddled. He wishes for world peace, a cure for cancer and the usual stuff. Perhaps the stone picks up on his underlying technofear, or on waking up sweeps the land of all the newfangled stuff its not used to. <br /><br />Furthermore, we’re also told that the stone’s wake-up call was “too soon, too sudden”. (In which case it must surely have set the alarm clock for about now.) What its waiting for, or what this has to do with Furbelow’s befuddlement is anyone’s guess. (This confusion may be here because the book’s ending gets changed, without being entirely overwritten.) <br /><br />Still, if you need to squint at the thing for it to work then let us squint. The upshot is - because Furbelow, one of us, has made this muddled wish which becomes more like a curse it takes Nicky, another one of us, to un-wish it. And with it un-wish her adventuring. <br /><br />After which, there’s noticeably no happy-ending shot of Nicky being reunited with her parents. She explains to Jonathon that its all over. Then the end credits are essentially a mirror image of the opening ones, with motion restarted. The immediate problem is over, the stone’s gone back to sleep. But the underlying causes, they all remain. <br /><br /><i>Coming soon! </i>Further teatime dystopias! (Same time, same channel...)</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-72766487663965846512023-12-16T12:10:00.002+00:002023-12-16T12:10:29.635+00:00‘A NEW BRAND OF BRILLIANCE’ (A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJsPTAOxqyO1rOUcPHeJoRSfPEPyyB1RMwWEbyN8t2PesN4wenV7JlU-YrHEW_E0A3WKvoxQ5e0t4OdzYmmvdFDw7ab2Hp1oqsXNZCFr1_r8BXi_5GLVkjsmH3OSLi1idanhJM2jxUekan_T38EkPYg3hOHkARgwiP2M94cyzmPOq4PI9qG27IAkjkQY5_/s679/8.ANewbrandofBrilliance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJsPTAOxqyO1rOUcPHeJoRSfPEPyyB1RMwWEbyN8t2PesN4wenV7JlU-YrHEW_E0A3WKvoxQ5e0t4OdzYmmvdFDw7ab2Hp1oqsXNZCFr1_r8BXi_5GLVkjsmH3OSLi1idanhJM2jxUekan_T38EkPYg3hOHkARgwiP2M94cyzmPOq4PI9qG27IAkjkQY5_/s16000/8.ANewbrandofBrilliance.jpg" /></a></div><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6qbs2XLkQ3LZ9VH9GFTq3Z?si=340a1032d8e4443d" target="_blank">Click here for</a> a Spotify playlist packed full of Xmas songs and general good cheer! Well, some Christmas songs… okay not any, just the usual stuff. Sights along the way include… <br /><br />Bardo Pond's blistering psychedelia doesn't know about us but we know about it, Brian Eno talks only in incomprehensible proverbs, New York punk trio Ut provide the spikiest of no wave, Low disappear (as they unfortunately did after the untimely death thus year of Mimi Parker), Jonathan Richman finds the financial zone to be something akin to Wordsworth’s field of golden daffodils, my bloody valentine take off for dimensions unknown (as is their wont), Mazzy Star ring dem bells - and more! <br /><br />The illo’s a collage by the pioneering Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. (Much appreciated in these here parts.) <br /><br />The Delgados: Lazarwalker <br />Bardo Pond: Don’t Know About You <br />Brian Eno: Blank Frank <br />The Waterboys: Nobody’s Baby Anymore <br />Ut: Big Wing <br />Sleater-Kinney: Ruins <br />Low: Disappearing <br />Emma Ruth Rundle: Protection <br />Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers: Lonely Financial Zone <br />my bloody valentine: sometimes <br />Mazzy Star: Bells Ring <br />Swans: The Sound <br /><br /><i>"Blank Frank is the siren, <br />He's the air-raid, he's the crater <br />He's on the menu, on the table, <br />He's the knife and he's the waiter” </i><br /><br />Back in the New Year…</span><br /></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-20471720863299909232023-12-09T11:38:00.000+00:002023-12-09T11:38:43.005+00:00'PHILP GUSTON’ <span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/philip-guston" target="_blank"><i>Tate Modern, London</i></a></span><div><span style="color: #0000ee; font-family: verdana;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><i><u><br /></u></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/philip-guston" target="_blank"><i></i></a><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/philip-guston" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH1iPnbkpXaFaAi4m4rigGwP-5J-tQo5B8ktECUpiZoM9XlnXaE-uIVUPVoLJvyBa8xF09kLnFkVOEbKOwr92QRK4Qb8-69Ofv3hGhP64A3UaKUK9HZoaPeiwV_5tuKx2XhETVH1pk6MzRyDWOyqiAVKTahKjezoIsyroNXmvYGNArr-Id1af1ahyphenhyphen4ZVqg/s254/1.GustonPoster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="254" data-original-width="179" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH1iPnbkpXaFaAi4m4rigGwP-5J-tQo5B8ktECUpiZoM9XlnXaE-uIVUPVoLJvyBa8xF09kLnFkVOEbKOwr92QRK4Qb8-69Ofv3hGhP64A3UaKUK9HZoaPeiwV_5tuKx2XhETVH1pk6MzRyDWOyqiAVKTahKjezoIsyroNXmvYGNArr-Id1af1ahyphenhyphen4ZVqg/w282-h400/1.GustonPoster.jpg" width="282" /></a></div><br /></i><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Probably the only thing one can really learn is the capacity to be able to change.” </i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />-Philip Guston <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>A World To Win With Murals</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Everyone knows the Guston story. It’s the one about the dissident American Abstract Expressionist, the one who went back to painting… gasp… <i>things</i>, to great controversy. In a style bordering on cartoony, which some also found controversial. Which included depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Which <i>also</i> proved controversial. <br /><br />But as the opening rooms of this show demonstrate, his origin story was almost bog-standard. He was even a teenage friend of the most Ab of all Exers, Jackson Pollock. He followed the familiar recipe, which <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2016/12/abstract-expressionism-1-just-what-was.html" target="_blank">as we’ve seen before, was a mixture of Surrealist practices and the scale of New Deal muralism.</a><br /><br />We start off with some fairly standard Surrealist works, clearly indebted to de Chirico but with the silkily synthetic painting surface of post-Dali. There’s nothing wrong with them, but nothing particularly right about them either. They’re <i>regular</i>, when Surrealism needs to be estranged from us. <br /><br />The murals are a different story, however. He’d soon joined the Block of Painters, a group of political muralists in Los Angeles. As these are somewhat challenging to transport, they often get left out of this story. But the Tate goes to efforts, including projecting roving sections of <i>’The Struggle Against Terrorism’ </i>(1934) on a wall. But let’s focus on a drawing, specifically <i>’Drawing For Conspirators’ </i>(c. 1930, below.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTz-JaOPa7fxx7ff8b7iSfBKAX2BrYgfRbhorsEHRiEqsoxE-MEsbvAQf77zvDnyFuYq6VReRfKbJ58jqhxQte4t0pZMVxtFrisAXfdfT_66i5bH2Snfcfag2YeM8NDN09wB8NKFVwTMUmgscBCeCTk4bBHHohAoyF3Ee3E6YNZnoq_xrgEjwczp9VdzB/s795/2.DrawingForConspirators.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTz-JaOPa7fxx7ff8b7iSfBKAX2BrYgfRbhorsEHRiEqsoxE-MEsbvAQf77zvDnyFuYq6VReRfKbJ58jqhxQte4t0pZMVxtFrisAXfdfT_66i5bH2Snfcfag2YeM8NDN09wB8NKFVwTMUmgscBCeCTk4bBHHohAoyF3Ee3E6YNZnoq_xrgEjwczp9VdzB/s16000/2.DrawingForConspirators.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Its as politically committed a work as any Berlin Dadaist ever spewed. Had it been given a thumbs-up by the critics and no more, it would have failed in its intent. It exists to make a point. Yet however politically charged it might be, its not a reportage image. In fact its as much a tableau as any Victorian ever painted. <br /><br />You don’t question this, the crucified Jesus and the black lynching victim being placed next to one another, because there’s no attempt to convey any actual pictorial space. The setting’s a stage, not a place, the figures theatrical. And the creation of works from big, broad symbols… this segues quite neatly into Abstract Expressionism. The symbols just become more general, more universal, that all. <br /><br />But also… yes, the Klan show up this early. And why wouldn’t they? This period, the inter-war years was their strongpoint. And while this work displays their notorious anti-black racism, they were as much anti-semitic and anti-immigrant. With Guston (birth name Goldstein) a Jewish child of immigrants. In 1932, another mural of his was defaced by the LA Police (then closely linked to the Klan) when they raided the centre which held it. Yet at the same time the era contained a sense of hope, the feeling that old certainties had eroded, that what gave danger also raised possibility. “There was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change” he commented afterwards. <br /><br />Guston’s personal image bank was filled up then, and he continued drawing on it throughout his life. In his later return to the representational pretty much all that’s new in terms of imagery is the backdrops. (Which are of his adopted New York rather than his original Los Angeles.) <br /><br />And why shouldn’t this be? After all, when we’re young aren’t we soft clay, impressionable and absorbing? We then progressively harden as we go through life, until our attitudes become impervious.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwETrhtkfmlQ6yccpDK8iAqPMNNfyfBwkg5prFL2tla5JSz-bcN_0FWjHbOfErJaFzi4RUTO3Gr71W-4TnSJPfYQ-LZmyMIA5dU1WXrPgl8ZarlwdjlEly1jvJfq1BTR1hXkorozsGX2kZD9QQj7sZpxRMAk6TF0SksbnoXBmYIXz75VE_ikZ-v7OTmxXU/s530/3.Bombardment.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwETrhtkfmlQ6yccpDK8iAqPMNNfyfBwkg5prFL2tla5JSz-bcN_0FWjHbOfErJaFzi4RUTO3Gr71W-4TnSJPfYQ-LZmyMIA5dU1WXrPgl8ZarlwdjlEly1jvJfq1BTR1hXkorozsGX2kZD9QQj7sZpxRMAk6TF0SksbnoXBmYIXz75VE_ikZ-v7OTmxXU/s16000/3.Bombardment.jpeg" /></a></div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><i>’Bombardment’ </i>(1937, above) is Guston’s <i>’Guernica’.</i> Literally so, like the more famous Picasso work it was painted in immediate response to the fascist bombing of that town. The unusual roundel design is used to create a vertiginous effect, explosion placed dead centre, figures flung out at you from it. War’s presented as a kind of ‘big bang’ event, gestating the world we live in.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOYNuyWUpoSsmJvaVcAfzVSygJHy5R9XRZhDCFUeP7dXOSDJzXDK4ZlWvoCBbTaYt3Ct-CGBGzNDkMzDCh-ZjOP1d_I-9z9azoaqDdvxIDCzDeOMponY7dgXC0oNzZtKbhFx30GDDe89YbbJ8uwmloxHpuu9Pljbd8ht4Wjp0IlCtnT1c5fI4LH23mQp1d/s474/4.The%20Gladiators.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOYNuyWUpoSsmJvaVcAfzVSygJHy5R9XRZhDCFUeP7dXOSDJzXDK4ZlWvoCBbTaYt3Ct-CGBGzNDkMzDCh-ZjOP1d_I-9z9azoaqDdvxIDCzDeOMponY7dgXC0oNzZtKbhFx30GDDe89YbbJ8uwmloxHpuu9Pljbd8ht4Wjp0IlCtnT1c5fI4LH23mQp1d/s16000/4.The%20Gladiators.jpg" /></a></div><br /><i>’Gladiators’ </i>(1940, above) is similarly war-based, only this time it’s not happening to but embodied by the figures, who look inseparable from their masks. The composition’s a swirl of ceaseless combat, your eye never coming to a focus point but forever rolling round. Particularly with the blue angle, the frame seems to be moving down on them. The violence feels menacingly real, but at the same time the weapons are toys, a dustbin shield, a wooden sword. And it's another tableau. The upper left figure outsizes the others, but in so symbolic a work it takes you a while to notice.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEdz5PbyanqX5omEBl6r8AXOuTcBpofmfuUShbqcCmBD_w806VaX3USPCpzoiyOKbSkjQrysX8yhrkWZGDd8fySpzAOD513i9CjQNzxWUNB3NLrQupqhwJNoRfRiZSSmFpDDrKIolzWtcqQUm9WY-MfkCyhC1EcRJhyCO58unbd4B2zpwsCZM_eg1_AOEz/s450/5.MartialMemory.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEdz5PbyanqX5omEBl6r8AXOuTcBpofmfuUShbqcCmBD_w806VaX3USPCpzoiyOKbSkjQrysX8yhrkWZGDd8fySpzAOD513i9CjQNzxWUNB3NLrQupqhwJNoRfRiZSSmFpDDrKIolzWtcqQUm9WY-MfkCyhC1EcRJhyCO58unbd4B2zpwsCZM_eg1_AOEz/s16000/5.MartialMemory.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><i>’Martial Memory’</i> (1941, above) is in many ways a successor work, incorporating many of the same elements. (“Guston and the dustbin lid motif, in this talk I will…”) But its a more static composition, working out from the central triangle of the main figure. It’s thing isn’t motion but density. It features, as the indicia puts it, “forms overlapping one another in a very dense manner”. The result is that it neither resolves to either a literal or allegorical reading, inhabiting a kind of ‘between’ space similar to <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/11/paula-rego.html" target="_blank">Paula Rego.</a><br /><br />In this work the figures have become children, who frequently appear in this period. It’s reminiscent of the way children will repeat back to you what’s on your mind. Inevitably, their response to a world of war is street games of battle. Which easily tip over into true fights of their own.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXOJuRM6lE_VCUoz1vKdwHOX7XGIpolSkcFuJvTVqEXtcd4gA1Wl4KpR9ZFganud6K_vdf8T6lZdbgEvDUeSXngO5ajK_6rxKKI0t2nzPu_XSbhfsKT-juZjnb8M0y6tsdLbVaxk3BKtsYZXsMigV5aUtfkAjxYbwoU2tG-ykqfvhKLR_cIpyYOtDVmozL/s600/6.ThePorch.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="438" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXOJuRM6lE_VCUoz1vKdwHOX7XGIpolSkcFuJvTVqEXtcd4gA1Wl4KpR9ZFganud6K_vdf8T6lZdbgEvDUeSXngO5ajK_6rxKKI0t2nzPu_XSbhfsKT-juZjnb8M0y6tsdLbVaxk3BKtsYZXsMigV5aUtfkAjxYbwoU2tG-ykqfvhKLR_cIpyYOtDVmozL/s16000/6.ThePorch.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><i>’The Porch'</i> (1947, above) seems a transitional work into his later abstraction. There’s still some suggestion of pictorial space, but with a cruciform shape imposed upon it. And the figures are stretched, the way a scream is an elongated note.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU2faRX1Bpug1sUsrwVB7RKTVkLYByl8iYIci1BP_82LD8Qdko5s8PEJqPQFVYKBwt5HVX5OaPS6Cx8pk4ZVfS03r3pXIFyZS_cEEuDgNpTEleaayO3FVUnYiOx1Zdrjm8lMySJlpC0rsOtOOTWP_ZES9J5pT_jHWS_6P87xVflYT_QjltqTdmLSfNCZy5/s528/7.TheTormentors.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU2faRX1Bpug1sUsrwVB7RKTVkLYByl8iYIci1BP_82LD8Qdko5s8PEJqPQFVYKBwt5HVX5OaPS6Cx8pk4ZVfS03r3pXIFyZS_cEEuDgNpTEleaayO3FVUnYiOx1Zdrjm8lMySJlpC0rsOtOOTWP_ZES9J5pT_jHWS_6P87xVflYT_QjltqTdmLSfNCZy5/s16000/7.TheTormentors.jpeg" /></a></div><br />And <i>'The Tormentors’</i> (1947/8) seems almost the next step along in a timeline, the foreground figures fading into inscribed lines, the red-and-black background darkening to dominate the composition. Yet those shapes look not just like they might oncer have been things, they retain some sense of anthropomorphism. (The title suggests we should look for pre-Klan figures.) Perhaps because there’s something primal about the work, as if made from some pre-verbal urge. <br /><br />All would seem to bode well for Guston’s future abstraction… <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”The Process of Creation”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />…alas not. <br /><br />Guston's reasons for turning to abstraction are textbook and exemplary, both the right ones and the best expressed. Briefly, it allowed him to just paint. He made a point of never stepping back from his canvases never pausing work to check on the overall composition, lest that interrupt the flow of paint. “I am not concerned with making pictures,” he commented, “but only the process of creation.” The action of painting the painting is the painting.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-rVWCDarflYafBkvRw1z-Gw_EWfTHuLssl5stIlXiXUQP4y7Z9Sgq2-KvkGyuKpNUpaiuYZ38-o3pPlOfnxjQtM4UnSrLg3A5LeY7Mtpmg7P93cv56ZCMUbK0DMIkru-N7mvZ3ocmkS0mbg9rZevft5QKppbEeDZK22uZSedd_g9aX-37NiiKDuUm8Qeh/s468/8.BeggarsJoys.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="468" data-original-width="440" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-rVWCDarflYafBkvRw1z-Gw_EWfTHuLssl5stIlXiXUQP4y7Z9Sgq2-KvkGyuKpNUpaiuYZ38-o3pPlOfnxjQtM4UnSrLg3A5LeY7Mtpmg7P93cv56ZCMUbK0DMIkru-N7mvZ3ocmkS0mbg9rZevft5QKppbEeDZK22uZSedd_g9aX-37NiiKDuUm8Qeh/w602-h640/8.BeggarsJoys.jpeg" width="602" /></a></div><br />But the results don’t particularly honour that noble intent. <i>’Beggars Joys’ </i>(1954/5, above, is quite typical, with the de-centred cluster of brighter strokes against a paler background. In fact its one of the better works, with its shimmering quality. But this is art for aesthetes. <br /><br />At the time, with Ab Ex ascendent, these cemented his reputation. He represented America at the Venice Biennale in 1960, aged 47 (a neophyte in painting circles), followed by a Guggenheim retrospective two years later. But the truth is, in the New York School he was but one enrolment among many. There’s no suggestion he broke away for this reason, but the fact remains - if he was going to be Head Boy, he needed to found his own establishment. <br /><br />The impression’s often given that his return to imagery was some sort of Damascene convention. Like he sat up in bed one morning and went, “hey, everybody - things!” This show demonstrates how slow and tortuous it really was.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnem_nsurSa3HnrW51SpaiUciBtJhqgBZ9SwM3s8gKMZ7AOqy6zjB13oh_p9Nsy5UPK97kusFEJNAm1zAmMyCCxlXrVD7xhr7xYSh0v22FhBIS98Aujaak_giCDIXB7Bx9ECrzd5wvD2No6_H2MrTb6zdyGl0Fw3p1V0mmtlJvkA0k6jUksSgRFxJhPghn/s528/9.Painteriii.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnem_nsurSa3HnrW51SpaiUciBtJhqgBZ9SwM3s8gKMZ7AOqy6zjB13oh_p9Nsy5UPK97kusFEJNAm1zAmMyCCxlXrVD7xhr7xYSh0v22FhBIS98Aujaak_giCDIXB7Bx9ECrzd5wvD2No6_H2MrTb6zdyGl0Fw3p1V0mmtlJvkA0k6jUksSgRFxJhPghn/s16000/9.Painteriii.jpeg" /></a></div><br />In the early-to-mid Sixties black heads started appearing in his work, floating Zardoz-like over clouds of brushy grey.<i> ’Painter III’ </i>(1963, above) is one of the more developed examples, with a brush-sporting arm appended, even reflected in the title. It’s scarcely a great work, and in a room of essentially similar efforts it becomes both repetitive and unfinished. But its significance is in his timeline. <br /><br />Did those heads just keep arising, unbidden, in his work? And did he break off when he saw what he’d done, alarmed at the forbidden imagery, only to do the same again? It seems a bit too romanticised. Plus these works were apparently shown at the time, not hidden away. Nevertheless, surely something of this sort happened. <br /><br />From 1966 he then took an eighteen-month break from painting. (“You have to die for a rebirth”, he commented later.) And when he started again, it was with lines. Just lines. Over time these became simple doodles. Blown up to the size of small paintings, but still simple doodles of single objects. As basic as basic can be. But, like the heads, their significance is as steps on his timeline. <br /><br />The phrase often used for Guston is ‘return to figuration’. Yet he started off painting things, and that’s significant. The first object we see here is a book. And, from an artist’s perspective, what does a book ‘mean’? It’s a repository of words, the alternative to images. If an artist paints a head, he must find a specific head. Even if he doesn’t model the work on a real head, if one comes from his imagination, it becomes a specific head once its painted. While in four letters the word ‘head’ can stand for all heads. <br /><br />And the stripped-down, iconic way they’re painted is surely to circumvent this problem. A chair or a shoe is designed to represent chairs and shoes as directly as the word would. Significantly, he called these works a ‘visual alphabet’. And a great many items from this alphabet then reappear in his paintings. At the same time there’s something cartoony about them, which makes them least a little anthropomorphised. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Amid Idiot Evil</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />By 1970, he had fully worked up paintings which were shown at New York’s Marlborough gallery. And this is where the legend starts. Critics raged, former Ab Ex soulmates never spoke to him again, leading to him feeling like he’d been excommunicated. No less than John Cage was dismissive, only de Kooning positive. From that point on, and significantly, his main associates became not artists but writers and poets. <br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Okay, about time we looked at some…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeZDlA7fuzIxrdBWQhpA79WMlpxf_kSMIErEmtr6AJToP6yXcLkiU6yBdclF-8ieSLxQtnpieh02gpyStzBZRXNz88fYSDu8oZx9tzeB4ZAJtHBVCrvcP7vIzL9u9HpMMP7kCu_lLg8XNZMMJPfLMPaoszN0LiKj8Lj7lGgrsQABNvc45Zau-i3P-9aKIF/s528/10.OpenWindow.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="423" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeZDlA7fuzIxrdBWQhpA79WMlpxf_kSMIErEmtr6AJToP6yXcLkiU6yBdclF-8ieSLxQtnpieh02gpyStzBZRXNz88fYSDu8oZx9tzeB4ZAJtHBVCrvcP7vIzL9u9HpMMP7kCu_lLg8XNZMMJPfLMPaoszN0LiKj8Lj7lGgrsQABNvc45Zau-i3P-9aKIF/s16000/10.OpenWindow.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><i>’Open Window’ </i>(1969, above) recursively hangs some of those 'visual alphabet’ pictures inside a larger work, works-within-a-work. But the window of the title makes them fairly accurate descriptions of a stripped-back urban environment. (And this the New York that classic Modernists were so rhapsodic about!) Downward strokes predominate, suggesting dumbed-down art as a response to a dumbed-down world. It’s reminiscent of the Matisse quote, that the build environment does to our eyes what prejudice does to our intelligence. And we’ll see that stripped-back colour scheme recur again and again, off-whites, chewing-gum-pinks, muddy reds and deep greens, lurid and cheap. <br /><br />In a similar vein <i>’City’ </i>(also 1969) reworks city buildings as Klan hoods, narrow windows doubling as eyeslits. As if the city itself was a product of, or perhaps producing, Klan ideology. And speaking of which…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzHSmTUa-MLQ2WKd5ME3KEmn2xz1noEqPlHGJlqnvj18KAI1DNJRmnyZe4objBIS8V0wgaXkpj4T-8m-OLD4yeNCAPrJ3pNrk1LngIet7uE2x-ttYkQvURjoNbD_13ly6pWbddS1toWu7bodappvi53s9KkAq04bw7Gh3KwZg2FXzmdaWfxvmP4JPVYtTc/s528/11.CityLimits.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzHSmTUa-MLQ2WKd5ME3KEmn2xz1noEqPlHGJlqnvj18KAI1DNJRmnyZe4objBIS8V0wgaXkpj4T-8m-OLD4yeNCAPrJ3pNrk1LngIet7uE2x-ttYkQvURjoNbD_13ly6pWbddS1toWu7bodappvi53s9KkAq04bw7Gh3KwZg2FXzmdaWfxvmP4JPVYtTc/s16000/11.CityLimits.jpeg" /></a></div><br />The first room contained a 1924 photo of Klansmen in a car, publicising a white power lecture. An image which reappears in <i>’City Limits'</i> (1969, above). Guston may not have ever seen it but he must have seen similar things, perhaps in person. <br /><br />But what’s significant is that they are not depicted in the same way as the Klan of old, as in <i>’Drawing For Conspirators'.</i> Their appearance, with those sinister costumes, had been designed to strike dread into their victims. But their role as racism boogeymen had waned over time. Racism clearly remained, but it was less embodied in the Klan. And so those pointy hoods started to look a little absurd. <br /><br />If his personal image bank was filled up in those inter-war years, as he started to draw from it he knew he was spending old money to a changed world. So he paints not malevolent fascist entities but knuckleheads, goons, bozos, neighbourhood bullies. In fact they become a more generalised symbol <i>for</i> knuckleheads, goons and bozos. Their car has gargantuan wheels, yet three figures are crammed into a tiny bubble cab, complete with fag smoke. (You could read that giant car as their externalised self-image, and the diminutive figures as their actuality. If you wanted.) <br /><br />Adrian Searle describes them as exuding “idiot evil”, and indeed they seem like henchmen without a criminal mastermind, wandering this way and that, often pointing forwards like they wouldn’t know which way to go otherwise. Their nearest comparison in contemporary art would be Crumb’s White Man, with his mantra “I must maintain this rigid position or all is lost.” <br /><br />Ands the style they’re painted in is as different. Guston had once painted children reflecting adult concerns. Now he’s effectively doing the reverse, depictions of adults in a childlike manner which makes them essentially children. With those huge hoods, the Klan’s heads vanish into their toros, the way child art won’t differentiate head from body. They’re often depicted oversize, both from the child’s habit of ascribing size to significance and as a way of portraying their grasping nature. The banality of evil via the cartoonification of evil. <br /><br />As is well known, this retrospective was originally planned a few years ago. Then, after the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art in suddenly got cold feet over these images. Whereas of course when they’re relevant is precisely the time to show them! How could anyone get something so spectacularly wrong? <br /><br />The answer is that the privileged forever mistake their status for smarts, when in fact it’s the reverse. Cushioned from the world’s sharp edges, they cannot see what we see. So they assume that they, the enlightened few, might be able to perceive these were anti-racist images, but what about us, the bewildered herd? As if someone could confuse Guston with DW Griffiths! <br /><br />The only time either artists or black advocacy groups seem to have been involved in this is to complain it was un-necessary. Plus, all the furore when these works were first shown seems to have been over their representational form and their deliberately crude style. No-one then thought they were Klan-sympathetic. They were wrong - very wrong - about Guston’s art, but that didn’t make them cretins. <br /><br />Further, the fact that galleries would worry then but go ahead now proves it wasn’t even the images being misinterpreted that worried them but the direction of social media trends. Potential flack coming down upon their own heads was a bigger deal to them than the knee on Floyd’s neck. Now black lives mattering is no longer this year’s thing, it’s safe to go ahead. <br /><br />(Disclaimer: The Tate seem to have been more caught up in this delay than willing accomplices. And even then co-curator Mark Godfrey resigned from them in disappointment.) <br /><br />And there another, equally important, dimension to this… <br /><br /><b>Klan Am I </b><br /><br />The Royal Academy show included a 1971 caricature of Nixon, skipped over here. Which may well be wise, as it can be played on too hard. Guston wasn't a 'political cartoonist'. More significant is all the self-portraits…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij3jUmanDmYh-HBsgimUQdtOi6IlKsg_IXLpIEbrbcOCxOMwP26I7b6KeX6M2cAa2UdhNvdmeiOR6ArEmnW2OkGJ__jdrZQJdsn-7qjEfZAa3QIto9B7vc_KCYq9f8fRs36RIu1ujPCCUDlHVc3Zi16VC8U60s2r3oZOLB1K2dlhzixconkgsJJrk_qCw4/s595/12.TheStudio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij3jUmanDmYh-HBsgimUQdtOi6IlKsg_IXLpIEbrbcOCxOMwP26I7b6KeX6M2cAa2UdhNvdmeiOR6ArEmnW2OkGJ__jdrZQJdsn-7qjEfZAa3QIto9B7vc_KCYq9f8fRs36RIu1ujPCCUDlHVc3Zi16VC8U60s2r3oZOLB1K2dlhzixconkgsJJrk_qCw4/s16000/12.TheStudio.jpg" /></a></div><br />…such as <i>'The Studio’ </i>(1969, above). It’s a painting of a Klansman painting a Klansman, brushes pushed to the foreground to emphasise this is a kind of self-portrait. Because as soon as Klansmen step from the sinister shadows and become regular bozos, we need to accept we are all part-Klansman. They’re our enemy, but not necessarily our external enemy. Guston said “it could be all of us. We’re all heels.” Or at another point, “I am the subject”. He’s shown smoking as he works in the accompanying filmshow, and I’d soon decided that any smoking Klansman was tagged as a self-portrait. (Which means that was also Guston in <i>’City Limits’.) </i><br /><br />By being a painting of someone painting, this foregrounds the graphic style, Guston painting himself as a Klansman in the way he depicts Klansmen. Klan men in a klan world in a klan style. And as Adrian Searle said, they “look exactly like they were painted by the kind of people they depict… some heavy, slow, intractable goon.” <br /><br />Further, its significant the way the image is stacked - paint brushes before raised fingers before drawing hand before canvas. It’s not as dense as <i>'Martial Memory’, </i>but it it feels crammed, claustrophobic, as if depicting an inescapable situation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR3nj9sfeaE6l8w2kj7tCv_-9g2LT2wKArlK5mUplXqm2xMUSIJdiRDsTKh8T1E7AuN6PLYl-hiuwJWqpQ09TJ-TrYAhQ8vxsjCn-4iYmSfhbY5puVjSfQHRLj3CR0itBRBL3FEkwKzYEzLrbAcb2VhAl_Imlj3I_-mgP5RRPzuwLHkMlwu5tM7tySggzo/s528/13.Painting,%20Smoking,%20Eating.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR3nj9sfeaE6l8w2kj7tCv_-9g2LT2wKArlK5mUplXqm2xMUSIJdiRDsTKh8T1E7AuN6PLYl-hiuwJWqpQ09TJ-TrYAhQ8vxsjCn-4iYmSfhbY5puVjSfQHRLj3CR0itBRBL3FEkwKzYEzLrbAcb2VhAl_Imlj3I_-mgP5RRPzuwLHkMlwu5tM7tySggzo/s16000/13.Painting,%20Smoking,%20Eating.jpeg" /></a></div><br />And this is enhanced further in <i>’Painting, Smoking, Eating’ </i>(1973, above), by which point Guston was habitually painting himself as a one-eyed testicle. The horizontal figure actually only has a plate of food on him, the accumulation of objects is behind. But it's painted as if they weigh on him, accentuated by the flatness of the figure under the bedclothes. Guston called this stuff crapola, the detritus of life. And while critics’ claims to find Holocaust references in his work normally feels fanciful, the mass of discarded shoes here may well echo those photos of abandoned belongings in piles.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeGzo0X_aeLRgN8cukbVdf5ae3NzD5AFI8eX0F7FnG6Vh0lc9mQSU13fD4BBrgoB_PHcS9FoitJIzf64KblFSvSi41ymJtq_1-zc0NUpAA_aXwwM65tO4qqs1jy0AMC40pVn5znlDn4poQPCFQYp95ZGbZrRgb0Gl_F95R3wJfsEUFCdQ1iYQbMrF-tdnw/s528/14.Monument.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeGzo0X_aeLRgN8cukbVdf5ae3NzD5AFI8eX0F7FnG6Vh0lc9mQSU13fD4BBrgoB_PHcS9FoitJIzf64KblFSvSi41ymJtq_1-zc0NUpAA_aXwwM65tO4qqs1jy0AMC40pVn5znlDn4poQPCFQYp95ZGbZrRgb0Gl_F95R3wJfsEUFCdQ1iYQbMrF-tdnw/s16000/14.Monument.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><i>’Monument’</i> (1976, above) is like the antonym of those studio paintings, what Guston scuttled past on his forays out to buy more fags and tubs of off-pink. We grant a common identity to the crowd, simply by thinking of it as “the crowd”, while knowing at the same time it has none, its just an agglomeration of individuals. And so we get an apparition such as this, an assemblage of stamping feet without guiding heads, its bestial nature accentuated by the comparison of shoes to horse’s hooves. <br /><br />There’s a famous quote from Guston: “what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” It’s blown up on the gallery wall, it takes up a page in the booklet. But it’s widely misinterpreted. <br /><br />Guston was not such a fool as to imagine adjusting a red to an off-pink was a different matter. He wasn’t trying to recapture his politically committed youth, as if you could just transpose from one era to another, and from public walls to a gallery setting. He was using his work to ask himself just that question - what kind of man am I? If you didn’t care about the brutality, you weren’t a human being. On the other hand, if you didn’t care about your art, you weren’t an artist. So the artist cannot help but respond to world events, but at the same time cannot help but feel isolated from them. This art grapples with that conundrum. <br /><br />Further, its now generally agreed that the New York School retained their leftist beliefs (apart from the occasions where they retained their anarchist beliefs), even when it wasn’t evident in their art. They would have all been aghast at what was happening in America. Which suggests Guston’s motivations were a combination of inner and outer, political outrage and a dissatisfaction with Ab Ex methods. And in saying this we don’t need to place one above the other. <br /><br />Where did this new style come from? Robert Crumb, mentioned earlier, was soon complaining it had all been stolen from him. Yet he never really missed a chance to be vexatious. Both are really borrowing from the same source, the old American newspaper strips. It’s like arguing my band sounded like the Stones before yours did. <br /><br />The show refers to this but, as is standard, insists that means George Herriman. Yet Herriman’s fluid, sketchy line could not be further from the blocky things stuck to these walls. Guston is borrowing from lesser-known but more regular newspaper artists, such as Bud Fisher. And he’s not even taking directly from Fisher or from any one of them. He’s taking from them on aggregate, the general way they depicted things, picking up on the common slang. Rather than trying to raise the comics style, Guston lowers himself to its base level. He’s more interested in their crudity, their scuzzy printing, their reduction of objects down to signs. And that’s why his pictures work. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Life After Klan</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Though Guston is now defined by the crapola paintings, the style lasted less than a decade and the Klan had disappeared from them well before that. Laster works are more metaphysical, larger in scale and more spacious in content. They’re less fraught and frenzied, more contemplative. Expansive and calm oceans appear, as in <i>’The Ladder’ </i>(1971, below.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNecnkmIuXher-i-tWRip2NVmLqXJoBM3TiX0wfJaAqBiRcc3Fq9VCSosLNZUp0FWJzcppCMhCZQlEA-GUTQzLjEWv9y-LoHDMHOoEquFOzXKLedIwIT7blRjxNSp-F_Mhh0iSAI_0soE8yoJ4cP7v0h8-RypuIn9R0NkbXzsesE1cL367ZlpSXj3NiiVL/s528/15.TheLadder.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNecnkmIuXher-i-tWRip2NVmLqXJoBM3TiX0wfJaAqBiRcc3Fq9VCSosLNZUp0FWJzcppCMhCZQlEA-GUTQzLjEWv9y-LoHDMHOoEquFOzXKLedIwIT7blRjxNSp-F_Mhh0iSAI_0soE8yoJ4cP7v0h8-RypuIn9R0NkbXzsesE1cL367ZlpSXj3NiiVL/s16000/15.TheLadder.jpeg" /></a></div><br />They’re perhaps best summed up by his comment “there’s nothing to do now but paint my life.” Guston said at the time that while he’s painting something he has no idea what it will be, and he didn’t see why that process should stop just because he’d stopped painting it. He quoted approvingly from Paul Valery, “a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” He wanted back some of the inscrutability abstraction had afforded him.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3xPc_hdAb2D6cpPgu9LyIbonviIRGD8XiO6Cm4zc6NJ42qc2815zwDFaDaC5r7JadnVZGgqODwwXSkCvUw0uPpuo3zCrxg3Tv1ETXsLaD3VIstJCMjP2uWi698rnQfYLgdzYMITYy-x5ny_nzxpe6689oJuYw51HvBazsLkveTekn-qn8vELvtkoLwz7I/s528/16.Web.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3xPc_hdAb2D6cpPgu9LyIbonviIRGD8XiO6Cm4zc6NJ42qc2815zwDFaDaC5r7JadnVZGgqODwwXSkCvUw0uPpuo3zCrxg3Tv1ETXsLaD3VIstJCMjP2uWi698rnQfYLgdzYMITYy-x5ny_nzxpe6689oJuYw51HvBazsLkveTekn-qn8vELvtkoLwz7I/s16000/16.Web.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Still later works swap off-white for much darker and more sombre hues, often full black. The motive for these is mortality, as both himself and his wife dealt with illness. <i>’Web’ </i>(1975, above) is a particularly nightmarish image, the spiders dominating the horizon, their distance only emphasising how trapped the figure is. Whether his death is near or not, it remains inescapable. The reflections of two of his key colours, muddy red and green, might suggest it’s his art he’s trapped in. <br /><br />Should we see this as a good exhibition? As you may have guessed from above, it presents a compelling timeline of Guston’s career. But that may be a better thing to write about than walk round, as it gives greater weight to lesser works when we could have had more Klan paintings. (Not something to quote out of context!) The Royal Academy show of 2004 effectively did the opposite, sweeping through his early years, encouraging us only to look for emergent symbols, in order to bring on the crapola. Neither porridge is quite right. And Guston would surely have exulted in remaining hard to pin down.</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-73939983096169260862023-12-02T11:40:00.003+00:002023-12-09T11:06:02.569+00:00ANTI-SEMITISM VS. ‘ANTI-SEMITISM’ <span style="font-family: verdana;">Okay, so I promised there wouldn’t be another politics post. And that has turned out to be a Tory promise. But then the so-called ‘March Against Anti-Semitism’ happened (ably analysed <a href="https://vashtimedia.com/2023/12/01/formats/opinion/a-long-way-from-cable-street-antisemitism-march-palestine/" target="_blank">by Vashi Media here)</a> and this seemed too timely to wait… <br /><br />Remember when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader? Now back in 2015. It was pretty clear that a black propaganda campaign would be unleashed against him. But most of us (including me) assumed it would continue in the vein it had before, merely more concentrated. Which had chiefly been to accuse him of supporting the IRA. Instead, they almost entirely pivoted to accusations of anti-semitism. Which at first seemed odd. They had one script already written. Why switch to another? <br /><br />Does this distinction matter much? After all, both serve the same purpose – which is really not much more than a heckle. What the heckler is saying is secondary, the point is what he prevents the speaker saying. The heckler’s role is to sidetrack them. <br /><br />But treat this as a clue… Since then, it’s only become more widespread. It’s not just that the accusations against Corbyn are now taken as fact, including by the supposedly ‘liberal’ media. (I’m not bothering to debunk it all here. That stuff is easy enough to find if you want to read it.) It’s that it became their default brand of mud to sling against anyone they want to paint dirty. Partly they may just be building on success, of course. <br /><br />But more is afoot… <br /><br />It’s origins are easy enough to find. Criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestine had been painted as anti-semitic for some time, and with some success in making mud stick. (We have had rather a lot of that lately, as it happens.) That worked over there. Why not try it over here? <br /><br />But more is afoot… <br /><br />Rare… perhaps even alone among racisms, modern anti-semitism isn’t linked to material deprivation. Jewish people living in Britain aren’t, on average, worse off than white folk. This doesn’t mean they don’t encounter prejudice, or that this prejudice is somehow without significance. (Anyone saying there are acceptable forms or degrees of racism is now being escorted to one of the exits.) But it makes it something distinct from anti black or Asian racism. <br /><br />In short it takes institutional racism out of the equation, leaving individual prejudice. And individual prejudice is the definition of racism they like to push, because it lets them off the hook. Racism becomes a problem with a few retrograde types, usually portrayed as ‘uneducated’ or working class. To which the solution is performative public statements, or progressive educational campaigns. (Anti-racist slideshows and the like.) In this way the source of the problem dresses itself up as the solution, it even sells itself as the expert who can heal our poor contaminated souls. <br /><br />(This is of course how they tried to portray Black Lives Matter. But then there was a conflict between a ground-level movement and its twisted official reflection. A slogan widely used by BLM demonstrators was “white supremacy is the enemy.” While corporations used “black lives matter” as a buzz term to slap beneath their logos. Post a black square on Twitter, job done, racism defeated.) <br /><br />But more is afoot… <br /><br />Depicting anti-capitalism as anti-semitic is of course an old trick. But this brings a new dimension to it. The demise of Corbyn was the last hurrah of social democracy in Britain. Those who had been allowed to inhabit the leftmost fringes of Labour, provided they didn’t try to actually influence anything, are now to be (in that delightful phrase) shaken off like fleas. <br /><br />Neoliberalism is now to be presented not just as the dominant strand of capitalism but <i>as</i> capitalism. Earlier, more pluralist forms have been memory-holed. And those who try to criticise or ameliorate it are to be painted the same way us anti-capitalists always were, as dangerous hate-ridden extremists. <br /><br />In essence, it works like this… You are by your own admission against capitalism, which of course means you are against money. Money is of course to do with the Jews. Therefore you are against the Jews. In short the accusation is itself anti-semitic, as it actively recycles anti-semitic tropes. <br /><br />It’s sometimes suggested that these smear tactics may at times get over-excessive in their zeal, but they’re coming from a good place, the desire to combat racism. They’re really not. They’re an instruction to look out for anti-semitism where it isn’t, leaving it alone where it is. <br /><br />Further, it is a worrying but undeniable fact that anti-semitism is growing. But that needs to be seen in context, of racism in general growing overall. Those on the receiving end of other forms of racism often feel there’s a hierarchy of racisms in supposedly ‘centrist’ political culture, with them on the bottom. They’re excluded by racists, and also by supposed anti-racists. <br /><br />The main incubator of anti-semitism today is conspiracy theories. In fact anti-semitism at root <i>is</i> a conspiracy theory, in a way other forms of racism aren’t. Conspiracy theories always end up saying “because of <i>them</i>”, and while "them” doesn’t necessarily has to be "the Jews" a whole lot of working out has already been done for you once you accept that. Abbie Richards coined the term ‘anti-semitic point of no return’, for the point where you cross the event horizon of lunacy and QAnon shreds your capacity for reason forever more. <br /><br />White supremacy is a material fact about the world. You could pretty much prove it by looking out the window. So anti-semitism, the pretence of Jewish supremacism, is required to let whiteness off the hook, in fact absurdly claim victim status for white people. Claiming there’s something inherently strange and suspicious about George Soros having all that money is a way of saying it’s perfectly normal for Elon Musk to have even more money. <br /><br />And precisely because there’s no material basis to the claim it's magnified to a ludicrous degree, where “the Jews” are supposed to direct everything that happens. Lack of evidence is presented as proof of how clever the sinister forces have been in covering their tracks. Hence the common tropes of the trapping web, the puppeteer’s strings and all that crap. <br /><br />The widespread use of money was the inevitable consequence of the rise of commodity production. When we use the word ‘capitalism’, we essentially mean the expression of commodity production across society. But in the conspiracy theory it becomes a malevolent magic force, a kind of sinister spell cast by “the Jews” to disrupt the natural order of things. We have been calling this stuff “the socialism of fools” for nearly a hundred and fifty years now. <br /><br />(There is of course a more convoluted relationship between conspiracy theories and power than that. Right-wing governments react by trying to pin their anti-semitism on us. But they also indulge aspects of it, such as the ‘white replacement’ conspiracy. But let’s leave that aside for now.) <br /><br />Reader’s voice: “Well that’s all very clever, Gavin. But what should we actually do to deal with this?” <br /><br />For one thing, we should ensure we never entertain conspiracy theories in any form. It’s not enough to just state that we don’t. Any more than you get to shower once in your life and be clean forever after. We need to stay perpetually watchful. <br /><br />But of course that’s not an answer to the question. Even if we were to get a completely clean bill of health, the accusations would persist. They are not being made in good faith, but out of opportunism. <br /><br />There isn’t a magic bullet answer here. But the short answer is to look at everything Corbyn did. And then do the opposite. Some will not want to hear this, but his response to the attacks against him was hopelessly naïve, a how-not-to guide. Explaining patiently one more time just what his position was and how they must have misunderstood it, that didn’t really work too well for him. <br /><br />The answer was given earlier on. We should avoid all forms of anti-semitism, but that’s because we don’t want to be anti-semitic. We should deny all conspiracy theories, but that’s because they’re all wrong. And we should regard these charges not as tests of our resolve, but as smears, as heckles, as derailments - and treat them as such. We should not let our enemies set the terms of debate.</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Next time, not more politics. Would I lie to you, guv?</i></span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-19690123122039145332023-11-25T11:41:00.001+00:002023-11-25T11:41:06.441+00:00BRITISH POLITICS IS A SOAP OPERA (AND A RUBBISH ONE AT THAT) <span style="font-family: verdana;">The return of Call-Me-Dave Cameron has proved something. British politics really is like a soap opera which knows it only has causal viewers, so it can get away with recycling plotlines. The old villains can even come back with fanfare. Cameron is the Nick Cotton of parliament. <br /><br />Anyone remember the mid Nineties much? Hard to think of it now really, but back then a well-and-truly scuppered Tory government was busily trying to pretend its days were un-numbered. While an incoming Labour administration, looking forward to a thumping majority, was assuring the nervous that to avoid inconvenience they didn’t actually intend changing anything. <br /><br />Watching this all over again, it’s amusing to hear once more that this approach is pragmatic and statesmanlike. Of course a political party wants to win, and win with a working majority. Guys, this news has reached us thanks. Ever thought about what you might want this majority <i>for? </i><br /><br />But party machines don’t actually work like that. In the same way the rich can never think of themselves as rich enough, they’re fixated on vote maximalisation. And in what’s essentially a two-party system, that means Labour taking votes from the Tories. By any means. Those other voters, already signed up with you, they’ve no other home to go to after all. So it hardly matters if they complain about the décor. <br /><br />While the Tories didn’t counter by becoming more centrist, but by what they called “clear blue water”, by tacking further to the right. At least initially, this was electoral stupidity. But they were bounced into it, a prisoner of their ever-narrowing base. Like a constantly stumbling drunk, they’d then pretend they were intentionally acting that way. Then Labour, still guided to follow them by spreadsheet wonks, continued to step right after them. They carried on shadowing the Tories even when in power. <br /><br />This doesn’t mean the parties become identical. In fact that notion obscures what happens. Instead the small and trivial differences between the two become everyone’s focus, become what politics <i>was</i>. ‘Responsible’ and ‘mainstream’ politics, at any rate. In political trainspotter speak, this is called the shrinking of the Overton window. Which is already too narrow to fire an arrow through, and shrinking daily. <br /><br />Further, public anger with the Tories was not to do with their policies but individual cases of corruption and ineptitude. Which to be fair, there was an abundant supply of. But it allows them to be depicted as being at odds with our free and fair democratic system, with no thought given as to exactly how they were able to get away with being so at odds for so long. <br /><br />And it overlooks that things like (to choose a more recent case) the crony contracts given out over Covid are what free market politics look like, and will always look like, when actually applied. And it means that the Tories can kick a few wrong ‘uns offstage, bring forward a few unknown backbenchers and be back in business. Sunak initially had a mini-bounce for precisely this reason, though without it happening across the board it didn’t (and couldn’t) last. <br /><br />But the Tories coming back out the wilderness, of course that took a while to happen. <br /><br />It won’t this time. <br /><br />Smarter Blairites soon gave up trying to defend the Iraq war. It being, you know, indefensible. Instead they chalked it up as a one-off, a unique situation unlikely to recur. And grossly simplified and distorted history by making out that criticisms of the Blair years were solely down to that debacle. In fact Labour even went on to win the next election, their majority reduced but still workable. Nevertheless the Gulf War was like a lightning rod, galvanising opposition. <br /><br />Whereas Starmer is having his Gulf War moment right now, over Gaza. Before he even gets to meet the Downing Street cat. The still-further-right Tories, with Braverman The Barmy or someone interchangeably fanatical at the helm, will return the sooner and Labour will then shift to shadow them. (“Yes we support the chopping the arms off for anyone caught attending a demonstration, to stop them holding any more troublesome placards. But this new policy of them losing their legs too… oh alright then, off with the legs as well.”) That thing which worked so terribly last time, let’s do it all again. <br /><br />So we’re screwed, right? <br /><br />Possibly, yes. But there’s also a slower and more seismic shift going on. Both parties are busily chasing one narrow demographic, which will most likely not be here in a few years. And you can tell how significant it is by the way they’re both ignoring it. <br /><br />Tories are losing the youth vote, to a magnified degree, with signs they’re now failing to gain the Fortysomethings. To adapt an old Sixties phrase, the young get old, but they don’t go Tory. You can see how this has happened. Their generation crept rightwards over time, so they assume this is some universal law at work, people growing up and getting sensible. The fact that their generation had economic inducements to do so (you know, property, savings, stuff like that) eludes them. <br /><br />And when they don’t just expect voters to turn their way, their main tactic is to make it harder for youth to vote. Voter ID was largely seen as creating obstacles against the poorer voter, but that overlaps with the younger voter quite considerably. <br /><br />The classic case would be immigration. The Tories always act as though this is their populist trick, a scare-word which needs only to be mentioned (“smaaaaal booooats, whoooooo!!!”), and the fear-stricken will flock to them. Whereas the majority now have positive views on immigration. <br /><br />(It was rarely mentioned that, while Corbyn was quite popular among the youth, his policies read a different way to them. To my generation they meant a return to the social democracy of the Seventies. But that was a world the youth had no experience of. To them it was something excitingly new.) <br /><br />But by also ignoring this vote Labour risk being in turn ignored by them. They lose the Youth wall. Which could turn to a rise in support for a smaller parties, or a general disenchantment with Parliamentary politics. Politicians are just people who ignore you, so just ignore them. The vote becomes something like landlines, perhaps it had once a purpose for those oldies but no more, not for us. <br /><br />Could this take us to to a more autonomous, ground-level style of politics? Which mainstream politicians are stuck with being responsive to. We act, then they are forced to answer. Possibly. <br /><br />But it could also take the form of an internet-generated activism. This doesn’t necessarily mean mere clicktivism. Things already look too much like a series of single-issue campaigns which come in waves, each replacing the last. We’ve already seen some of this. Black Lives Matter gets replaced by Me Too, which is replaced by pro-Palestine, and so on. Everyone updating their forever-provisional social media bios in order to keep up. Nothing is ever built on, ever consolidated. Which may not be in a dynamic with mainstream politics, but still is with the news cycle. <br /><br />Anyway, apologies to Nick Cotton for comparing him to David Cameron. I now promise to shut up about politics. For a bit, anyway.</span>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-52431383942702138092023-11-18T12:36:00.007+00:002023-11-18T12:36:57.768+00:00ON GAZA (OR WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COLONIALISM) <span style="font-family: verdana;">On a recent<i> ‘Question Time’</i>, seeking to defend the military targeting of hospitals in Gaza, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg ensured he repeatedly referred to Israel “the Jewish state”. <br /><br />The ploy may seem obvious enough. In Europe we’re used to associating Jewishness with victimhood, so pressing that button might bounce us into the assumption “the Jewish state” must be the victim again. <br /><br />As we seem to keep being asked, opposition to the bombing of Gaza has nothing to do with anti-semitism. But in itself that’s insufficient. It also needs to be said that the bombing of Gaza has nothing to do with Jewishness. Because the insinuation is also misdirection. <br /><br />Let’s creep on this sideways… <br /><br />Conspiracy theorist crank David Icke, when seeking to slip (much deserved) accusations of anti-semitism, came up with a novel defence - he can’t be anti-Jewish because there’s no such thing to be against. What we call ‘Jewish’ is just a polyglot agglomeration of people, an arbitrarily defined category. <br /><br />And, at least insofar as that goes, he’s right. Except the thing he isn’t telling you is that the same applies to every other racial group. <br /><br />As more and more scientific evidence has been gathered, it has pointed to the fact that racial distinctions have no basis in biology. It’s not even that there’s no significant distinctions between races, there’s not even any meaningful distinctions. <br /><br />Race is, and always has been, a social and political construct. The racial categories we’re lumbered with today were largely devised in the era of colonialism, and precisely to justify colonialism, to legitimise one group of people colonising another. Most people seem to imagine something like the slave trade was a product of racism. Whereas it was the other way around, it was its existence which made racism necessary. Race, as it’s commonly thought of, was an invention of racists in order to be racist. <br /><br />Does any of that let Icke off the hook? Nope. What he says is true, but that’s somewhat over-ruled by it being irrelevant. By comparison, national borders are political constructs. They don’t exist in nature, infrastructure has to be built to enable them. But realising this isn’t the same thing as denying it. Try explaining this as a means to get into another country, you’ll find passports work better. Those barriers and border cops may have been built, but that doesn’t stop them stopping you. Built things are still things. <br /><br />Take Icke’s argument to its natural conclusion and the Holocaust is suddenly no longer a problem, because the Nazis may have <i>thought</i> they were murdering Jewish people in the millions, but they weren’t really, were they? If anyone thinks this, I hope I never meet them. <br /><br />But it does point to a vital way in which racism works <i>in actuality.</i> Racism professes to be a ‘common sense’ doctrine, dealing with immutable facts. Racists sometimes adopt the name “race realists”, playing this up. Whereas in practise it can be bent whichever way you twist it, so it becomes an ever-shifting product of alliances being forged and breaking down. This combination is precisely what makes it useful. <br /><br />Similarly, what groups do and don’t get included in ‘whiteness’ has varied greatly over time. As colonisers of Ireland, the Victorians were near-obsessed with the notion that the native folk were really black, even if they unsportingly refused to sport black skin. Yet the Irish who emigrated to America were often employed as cops, in order to keep the still-less-white Southern and Eastern European immigrants down. <br /><br />And so on Armistice Day the far right chanted at the Police “you’re not English any more”. They see ‘Englishness’, by which of course they mean whiteness, as their natural birthright. They imagine others are inherently jealous of this, and so scheme to undermine it. But it’s there inscribed on you, literally, like a genetic family heirloom. Yet when it suits them, ‘Englishness’ suddenly becomes a political alignment, which some will betray and so lose. The Police are English because they’re predominantly white. But they also stopbeing ‘English’ as soon as they bar the far right’s way. <br /><br />As well as rallying that mob, far-right thug Tommy Robinson has also attended more orthodox pro-Israel marches. In fact, most of the British far right have now turned to embrace Israel. Because it fights against ‘the Muslims’, their current hate group of choice. And they imagine that by associating themselves so readily with Jews this lets them off the Holocaust hook. Which of course means the ‘real Jews’, not those not-Jews but the most far right elements of Jewish society. <br /><br />And this works more broadly. It would have been hard to not to hear that mantra phrase, so trotted out by British politicians of both main parties in defence of each successive atrocity - “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Ask not whether the Palestinians have a similar right, you’d be met by an outpouring of manufactured outrage. <br /><br />Which might seem a little backwards, when it is after all Palestine which is the one being occupied. But that is precisely why this has to be so insisted on. Palestinian actions are inherently tainted, not to be trusted. What might look like hospitals, refugee camps or even UN relief workers to the innocent might turn at any moment into terrorist cells. While Israeli actions are inherently defensive, carried out reluctantly, any civilian casualties held to hang on their noble souls. <br /><br />And that's because Palestinian <i>existence</i> is seen as inherently problematic. This is classic colonialism. They must be subjugated, expelled or removed, because while we have decided their lands should be ours the awkward buggers aren’t playing along. They’re the natives, the Aboriginals, the Native Americans. <br /><br />And this is Rees-Mogg’s trick. The “Jewish state” angle has to be stressed precisely because Israel doesn’t represent “the Jews” any longer but the whites, the West, the civilised world… it doesn’t matter which term you use, they’re all polite euphemisms for colonisers. And at the same time the violations of international law are obvious and clear-cut, all the old colonial powers have allied with them in this. As have the media, from the far-right shock jocks to the liberal ‘centrists’. <br /><br />Plus, those of us minded to oppose war crimes soon found we were subject to the same framing. We’d chant “we are all Palestinian”, and they were happy to take us up on it. Like the cops with the far right, in their eyes we have chosen to not be English any more, we have chosen to side with the enemy. So our demonstrations are held to be inherently problematic and threatening, never framed in terms of their demands but their potential for trouble. I think we can assume hours have been sacrificed raking over demo footage for angles, with next to no results. And yet the eye of suspicion still hovers over us. <br /><br />With nothing more concrete, this often takes the form of mere insinuation, the claim some <i>might</i> feel intimidated by our protests. And somehow not by pro-Israel rallies. Or Conservative Party conferences. Or pretty much anything else really. <br /><br />In short, Israel isn’t colonising a weaker neighbour because it’s a Jewish state, but because it’s a state. It’s acting the way colonial states have always acted. Don’t let liars and apologists such as Rees-Mogg red-herring you.</span>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-59931465634881585762023-11-11T11:23:00.005+00:002023-11-11T15:39:14.251+00:00‘THE WHEEL IN SPACE’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>First broadcast: Apr/June ’68 <br />Written by David Whitaker <br />(From a story by Kit Pedlar)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl7HvBkjfwelCi76t6-ZbK4rp1Gm4ZN5I-2oYjB3A0TsTaEXBFGGM0DAxb7ZI3E49ZAn3Q1EQpbKM48UYMvY3tpdfbpFmxpoiLMp-cOYGKxH7_-ql5IUA5nIipVsaiAYIcoJ7mxgY20tOWn5DNgZJXoPkuwjiDQvv5FkuDQAblwmGQ4m9J1CBXMWZB33bq/s528/1.Robot.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl7HvBkjfwelCi76t6-ZbK4rp1Gm4ZN5I-2oYjB3A0TsTaEXBFGGM0DAxb7ZI3E49ZAn3Q1EQpbKM48UYMvY3tpdfbpFmxpoiLMp-cOYGKxH7_-ql5IUA5nIipVsaiAYIcoJ7mxgY20tOWn5DNgZJXoPkuwjiDQvv5FkuDQAblwmGQ4m9J1CBXMWZB33bq/s16000/1.Robot.jpeg" /></a></div><br /></i><br /><i>“Everything’s so… dead, isn’t it?” <br />-Jamie </i><br /><br /><b>Sticking To The Plan</b><br /><br />“Our plans are anticipated,” complain the Cybermen. And you can see how that might have happened. In fact, you picture the pitch meeting as going something like… <br /><br />“Well, Dr. Pedlar, thats a good idea. But an Antarctic base being infiltrated by the Cybermen, with an international crew who initially distrust the Doctor then come to work with him… <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-tenth-planet-william-hartnells.html" target="_blank">it does seem rather familiar.</a>”<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Do you think? Okay, let’s say it’s not an Antarctic base. Instead, let’s set it on… the moon!” </span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />“There was that one called… uh… what was it now... <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-moonbase-patrick-troughtons-doctor.html" target="_blank">’The Moonbase’</a>.”<br /><br />“So there was. Okay, then let’s really think outside the box this time. How about… a space station!” <br /><br />“Capital! Six episodes, first draft by end of the month. Oh, and write the Doctor out of the second one. Patrick’s after another holiday.”<br /><br />…and by serving up <i>just</i> the formula, like something assembled from kit parts by a committee, this loses almost everything which made the earlier Cyber-stories appealing. From ’<i>Tenth Planet’</i> to <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/01/tomb-of-cybermen-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘Tomb of the Cybermen’,</a> each had built chronologically on the one before. The Cybermen pimp up both their plans and their design, and try again. Significantly, though this story is surely set later in the same chronology, no-one on the Wheel has even heard of the silver darlings. <br /><br />Worse, the Cybermen had always <i>stood</i> for something. True, this could change completely from one story to the next. But in a way that kept things fresh. This time they’re a merely generic menace, aiming to invade the Earth because that’s the sort of thing they’d do. They most resemble the sneaky scheming Cybermen of <i>’The Moonbase’. </i>But there’s little connection. <br /><br />Let’s face it, this story’s no good. But that’s not the problem with it. In truth <i>’Doctor Who’ </i>was frequently no good, even if our rose-tinted memories shy from saying it. The problem with it is that it’s not <i>mad</i>. And it is the business of <i>’Doctor Who’</i> to be mad. <br /><br />You couldn’t claim <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/05/william-hartnells-doctor-who-web-planet.html" target="_blank">‘Web Planet’</a> or <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-space-museum-william-hartnells.html" target="_blank">‘The Space Museum’</a> as any good. But, to pick up on a phrase used when we looked at them, there was a deranged imagination at work. The brief was to fill a half-hour hole in the schedule, watchable enough for viewers to keep paying their license fee, while sticking to the budget. And from that they came up with <i>’The Web Planet’.</i> It’s the sort of left-field, out-there thing the show’s chief character would have made, if tempted from his travels and enlisted to programme TV shows.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiZC9BO8KVvsRSucRtOZiqxuheFrBTT8BsPsHlAoIy2gQ4BhN1LE0zBPDvpN9jWpshjykAGrAslrj7oXLfQ1t3W742RF5qifi0cFi-oWX_68q5fwNXnzTP-IG4ZtR6n-4Rwrag4sIJFK0-CQomIbM5P3KYiaNp7_GqOaR9SU5h5u3CTAt0Y0JM3WeK1s7Y/s450/2.WheelInSpace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="257" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiZC9BO8KVvsRSucRtOZiqxuheFrBTT8BsPsHlAoIy2gQ4BhN1LE0zBPDvpN9jWpshjykAGrAslrj7oXLfQ1t3W742RF5qifi0cFi-oWX_68q5fwNXnzTP-IG4ZtR6n-4Rwrag4sIJFK0-CQomIbM5P3KYiaNp7_GqOaR9SU5h5u3CTAt0Y0JM3WeK1s7Y/s16000/2.WheelInSpace.jpg" /></a></div><br />The Hartnell era had effectively been the antithesis of formula. More because no-one had hammered one out yet than out of any kind of principle, but it remained the case regardless. Even when Hartnell was dull, <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-sensorites-william-hartnells-doctor.html" target="_blank">as it often was,</a> it wasn’t formulaic. If anything it had the opposite problem, it was hard to credit this wildly varying material was all part of the same series even if it had the same actors in it calling each other the same names. It flew without a safety net, leaving you obliged to accept falls. <br /><br />But Troughton marked the time when formula came in, which proved tighter bonds than any captor foe. And from then that tension would never really go away, between going wilfully mad and voluntarily donning a straight-jacket.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Though this is true, it does need qualifying. It may be that the show required some sort of formula, if it was to have any kind of longevity. And it should be said there are stories aplenty which are ‘formula-plus’, which follow the formula but manage to go mad anyway, such as <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-macra-terror-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘The Macra Terror’</a>. But then there are also stories like this. We’ve gone from flying without a safety net to six episodes of being tangled up in one. <br /><br />True, there are flickers still of that deranged invention. And not a whole lot of citation seems required to attribute them to David Whitaker. The pod things the Cybermen first burst from are entirely unexplained and equally memorable. Jamie’s sabotage… well, getting him accused of being a saboteur would seem enough. Instead there’s reference to a Back to Earth campaign. (Whose slogan is what? ‘Just Stop Space’ or ’Leave Means Leave’?) <br /><br />Had it been up to me, I’d have set the Wheel spinning in tension before the Cybermen arrive to exploit this, a relief ship delayed by months because of reasons. Instead of a couple taking six episodes to get together, have them already split up but with one unable to move out given the circumstances. <br /><br />As it is, the lack of anything resembling drama becomes a drawback. There’s corridors aplenty, but instead of running through them there’s just sort of hanging around. On the other hand, the wilful avoidance of jump scares, and their replacement by an inexorable inevitability, is a rare strength. Most evident in the moment when the Doctor finally faces off the Cybermen. He turns around to find them already in the room, and calmly states “I imagine you have orders to destroy me.”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6fNSlAoqXz95hKLx3fNZVzFzwlhOzeV1GWTIogjJu51e0dVP2UXO2kQo-DY7Ts3G-V_QqCZgsq7j_YjUnDqNVWkH11jn3a9MOAcpcrMHYWSoUOB32r2xCuWz4aoyLwmbU_TtPUrMrJX10eVn55_Yv9-JFhngh5qWHsodnwEEasI5lXz1EES9sp7RjlJWp/s450/3.CybermenBehindDoctor.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="319" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6fNSlAoqXz95hKLx3fNZVzFzwlhOzeV1GWTIogjJu51e0dVP2UXO2kQo-DY7Ts3G-V_QqCZgsq7j_YjUnDqNVWkH11jn3a9MOAcpcrMHYWSoUOB32r2xCuWz4aoyLwmbU_TtPUrMrJX10eVn55_Yv9-JFhngh5qWHsodnwEEasI5lXz1EES9sp7RjlJWp/s16000/3.CybermenBehindDoctor.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Some say the problem is is Pedlar’s science fiction approach clashing with Whitaker’s more classic-<i>’Who’</i> sense of telling a story through symbols. They may be onto something. But this means that the absurd ignorance of science, for a story set on a space station, is often given as an ancillary weakness. <br /><br />Certainly its there. Distance in space is measured in miles, even though space has rather a lot of those. The Cybermen (somehow) cause a sun to go nova, which is (somehow) near enough to affect the Wheel straight away. Which is does by “deflecting” meteorites at it, though they can handily be shot out of the not-air. (You suspect this is just a relabelling of the debris which would be caused by an earth explosion.) </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">But rather than weakness this is a strength, adding to the quirky charm. Of course Whitaker’s not purposefully getting it wrong, he’s just not bothering to look that stuff up. But that tells you where his interests lie. It encourages us to see everything not literally but in terms of symbols, as he intends. <br /><br /><b>Meet The Cast</b><br /><br />Whitaker has said his chief goal was to humanise the characters. He does make Gemma (the slightly more competent deputy) likeable. But the only one you could claim as characterised is Zoe. Who is clearly being signposted as the next companion. We see the others at work in the Operations room before the end of the first episode. Then we’re not told about her until the second, before finally meeting her. And she seems semi-removed from the immediate story, mostly hanging out with Jamie, barely encountering the Cybermen. (That widely reproduced shot of them menacing her is a publicity photo, not a still.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwrYRVn0CJCTI6BfQKs9GnHJK0GlEQCUBVixN9F07YG1-Rjvc83huzo7FvZWQnFko_WUiMrlLMn_qt-KCrVk-ucUFLSZs2TY3OiZQJpi6_Pz1F9fSGNxwFZVZpMphXS3mBDKISvQ1DD-5-XdUiOr6k9ItMr7tw4vVJtfVVgVspNpvJqD4tVhFMOJArBYRN/s528/4.CybermenBehindZoe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwrYRVn0CJCTI6BfQKs9GnHJK0GlEQCUBVixN9F07YG1-Rjvc83huzo7FvZWQnFko_WUiMrlLMn_qt-KCrVk-ucUFLSZs2TY3OiZQJpi6_Pz1F9fSGNxwFZVZpMphXS3mBDKISvQ1DD-5-XdUiOr6k9ItMr7tw4vVJtfVVgVspNpvJqD4tVhFMOJArBYRN/s16000/4.CybermenBehindZoe.jpeg" /></a></div><br />As Pinocchio was a puppet who wanted to be a boy, this maths prodigy is like the calculator who’d sooner be a girl. In a story where the antagonist is essentially killer robots, she’s told she’s “just like a robot… all brains and no heart.” Causing her to reflect “but I want to feel things as well.” <br /><br />(Fun fact! Originally ‘computer’ was not a machine but a job, for calculations which then needed to be made manually. Tedious work, it was often assigned to women. Though more often found working in teams, like typing pools, than a single teenager. <i>’Wheel’</i> seems to assume that in a space-age future there’ll be more need for this sort of work, with some even bred for it.) <br /><br />Her precocious nature, manifested as a tendency to reel off facts and numbers on any pretext, is shown to be annoying to the other crew. Which makes you wonder if Zoe’s more popular than the later Adric simply because fans are more likely to fancy Wendy Padbury than Matthew Waterhouse. Nevertheless, in order to see more of life than log books she stows away on the Tardis. An improvement on the adopted waifs that were Vikki and Victoria. <br /><br />It wasn’t great scheduling for this to come out after the already un-good <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/10/fury-from-deep-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">’Fury From the Deep’</a>. It’s not just worse, it’s worse in all the same ways. If only Troughton’s second season could have ended on the high of <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-web-of-fear-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">'Web of Fear’.</a> But it never seems to work that way...</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-42465693308896516742023-10-28T10:57:00.001+01:002023-10-28T10:58:53.035+01:00‘FURY FROM THE DEEP’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>First broadcast Mar/Apr ’68 <br />Written by Victor Pemberton <br />PLOT SPOILERS scream from the depths of this review</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD15tn0_xqHKtDYbCMqD1lPZrNDCncH1iIm69ncnqSIZcIuRK-ygZMobTcL86Wv2VbelmCyG1byM8IGkOowEUg9UY39TLHZHxv0O2LPxKtJhif09XycdneXBdvr_HTuz7PNcaUrWtS7szueTnHMNJzHc4lP5ZEsMEj4mhCInge8MGEfCB1LvASf7UZM600/s528/1.FuryfromtheDeep.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD15tn0_xqHKtDYbCMqD1lPZrNDCncH1iIm69ncnqSIZcIuRK-ygZMobTcL86Wv2VbelmCyG1byM8IGkOowEUg9UY39TLHZHxv0O2LPxKtJhif09XycdneXBdvr_HTuz7PNcaUrWtS7szueTnHMNJzHc4lP5ZEsMEj4mhCInge8MGEfCB1LvASf7UZM600/s16000/1.FuryfromtheDeep.jpeg" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>"It's down there, in the darkness, in the pipeline, waiting!"</i></span></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: #d5d5d5;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”Weeeeeeeeed!”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Google-image this story, and see what you see. Admittedly, as we’re on another lost one, the options are limited to the surviving stills. But most hits are of that grotesque gurn (coming later) or the Doctor using a stethoscope on a piece of pipe (above). Both gloriously absurd, the sort of thing we love this show for. From them, I’d always imagined this would be at very least a <i>good</i> episode. <br /><br />Alas not. <br /><br />It's clearly another direct lift from Quatermass, though this time by a circuitous route. Hammer had intended <i>’X The Unknown’ </i>(1956) as a sequel to their <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2007/09/quatermass-xperiment.html" target="_blank">’Quatermass Xperiment’</a> from the previous year. Ever-irascible, Nigel Kneale refused use of his character. But they just substituted a different name and used another ‘X’ in the title as the connecting element. <br /><br />The threat this time was animate earth on the rampage. Which Victor Pemberton borrowed, tried to pitch it as a <i>’Who’ </i>script, failed and so turned it into the radio drama <i>’The Slide’ </i>(broadcast 1966). Through reasons unclear the rejection was then reconsidered, but with animate earth now used goods it was switched to sentient seaweed. <br /><br />Now, seaweed and foam are not, at the end of the day, particularly blood-curdling things. In fact, when rooms start to fill with foam, your first response is to wonder if this is turning into an Ibiza-style party. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />But none of these are in themselves reasons to fail. In fact the show has already got away with worse. (David Whitaker apparently rejected it for the recycling, which is a little like the miner calling the steelworker red.) <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-moonbase-patrick-troughtons-doctor.html" target="_blank">’The Moonbase’</a> was barely any less generic but made use of its story type and, at least in its first half, generated a genuine air of menace and mystery. This is more like repeating something by rote, knowing you already know it. It’s not, by a strict definition, bad. It’s more flat, devoid of fizz. <br /><br />Similarly <i>’X The Unknown’ </i>had worked a whole lot better before the big bad was revealed to be not terribly big or bad, but did stir up an effective air of foreboding till then. With this, you spend a long time waiting for stuff to happen, then when it finally does it scarcely seems worth the wait.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1uwRhTCdHIkulYNuVlYdN-xVGoUGaOyqSbq5ILmcOH7Y_ZDhp2aQalp9mM9S2wHIsCgr_CJrAiQ0qYpdYO2abEOyj4tVx1-TZyCGdxfJlQac3klePva1ALrZgSY6AOGvep1ogY_IGcF2uoCSSss8cPaWAklA3j9P8gc3LOcbBn6KgFdDGqypgjna5XVM/s528/2.Fury_from_the_Deep.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1uwRhTCdHIkulYNuVlYdN-xVGoUGaOyqSbq5ILmcOH7Y_ZDhp2aQalp9mM9S2wHIsCgr_CJrAiQ0qYpdYO2abEOyj4tVx1-TZyCGdxfJlQac3klePva1ALrZgSY6AOGvep1ogY_IGcF2uoCSSss8cPaWAklA3j9P8gc3LOcbBn6KgFdDGqypgjna5XVM/s16000/2.Fury_from_the_Deep.JPG" /></a></div><br />Yes the stethoscope thing is brilliantly bonkers, but it’s gone within seconds. When the sinister Oak and Quill show up in the second episode things definitely perk up. (Helped by their scenes surviving. They were clipped out by Australian censors, and are now ironically all that remains.) Their menace is effective through being laced with comedy, and vice versa. <br /><br />Quill’s open-wide gurn verges on cartoony. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/sep/14/doctor-who-fury-from-the-deep-review-a-solid-slice-of-60s-who" target="_blank">Yet this Guardian review of the animated reconstruction</a> (which I’ve not seen) makes the interesting point that when he’s actually rendered as a cartoon the effect is diminished. It needs that uncanny valley. <br /><br />But they don’t seem to have much in common with the other taken-over characters, who act more… well, taken over. And, as if there’s no way to resolve this, they get successively marginalised from later episodes and disappear before the end. Yet if they don’t make any sense, they do <i>work</i> – which kind of feels more important. And there’ll be more of that. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Against Vegetable Malevolence</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The seaweed is forever taking over people, but only speaks at a couple of points. One of which is to insist: “The mind does not exist. It is tired. It is dead. It is obsolete. Only our new masters can offer us life. The body does not exist. Soon we shall all be one.” <br /><br />Rather than standing for Those Darn Commies (like people are wont to claim), the weed does function as actual seaweed. Its a nature’s revenge story, stirred into retaliation at its abode being trespassed on by that intrusive oil drilling. And the point is how unlike us its vegetable malevolence is. Even with the Cybermen, becoming like them means becoming another iteration of them, another unit in the ranks. This is a step beyond that, we’ll all merge together in one vast undifferentiated blob. The earlier line “come over to us, come over to us” is perhaps repeated for both its literal and underlying meaning. <br /><br />Now there’s an obvious objection here, which would run something like… <br /><br />“Give up on this consciousness business. It’s no good, you know.” <br /><br />“If you don’t have consciousness, how come you’re able to tell us to give up on it?” <br /><br />“What? To advance the plot, fool!” <br /><br />But then again, it does need conveying in some way and about the only means available back then was dialogue. In fact there should be more of it. “I have existed for millennia, you mayfly creatures must succumb to my enduring truth, soon all will be as it was before”… that sort of thing. Perhaps with several taken-over humans talking in unison. It would have been more involving than the endless “let’s do something”/”no let’s not” debates which take up most of the time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilwcjQ1o9ZObo3tu_CT-3EP5-kKKiQ7rkoD0zeuTGKrkHf_9k-zelwYOqKrm5yREkE6-jteVfFKE9_Tbv1UHB5mXIwUI40pVz3yISyCkUTS3_tijn7uYBcxZLP6rKDte-c2_p9TXZHUCG98MzwToPOCoPjnXUorKnfZ7YuzeOE6GCp651IMDft9WRMVXum/s528/3.FuryFromDeepbeach.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilwcjQ1o9ZObo3tu_CT-3EP5-kKKiQ7rkoD0zeuTGKrkHf_9k-zelwYOqKrm5yREkE6-jteVfFKE9_Tbv1UHB5mXIwUI40pVz3yISyCkUTS3_tijn7uYBcxZLP6rKDte-c2_p9TXZHUCG98MzwToPOCoPjnXUorKnfZ7YuzeOE6GCp651IMDft9WRMVXum/s16000/3.FuryFromDeepbeach.jpg" /></a></div><br />Similarly, when the taken-over Maggie and Robson meet on the beach they speak more like… well, like they’re two people that the manifestations of one entity. Maggie walking into the waves makes no story sense. But it’s a good representation of de-evolution, a more sinister version of the Reggie Perrin opening. <br /><br />And in offering an end to separation, a way to rejoin the all, the seaweed represents something at least partly attractive. We could be back where we belong, never confused or isolated again. All truly horrific things are also part enticing. <br /><br />Interestingly, there are those who see this as another classic story. Some may simply want more <i>’Doctor Who’, </i>and the more like more <i>*’Doctor Who’*</i> it is the better. But others may seize upon these few hints and suggestions and construct a whole story out of them, their minds overpainting all the generic features with something more colourful. A story which, had it just been served them, wouldn’t have been as involving as the one they felt invited to create. <br /><br />This is always going to be the case to some degree, for watching or reading is never a purely passive act. But <i>’Doctor Who’ </i>seems to invite it more than other things. Which is surely a large part of the reason why it came to have such a large fandom. We may even have a preference for an incomplete experience such as this, as it gives us gaps we can fill in as we choose. <br /><br />And to say I can be sympathetic to this view would be an understatement. That’s exactly what I did over <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-celestial-toymaker-william.html" target="_blank">‘The Celestial Toymaker’</a>, at the very least. It’s what I tried to do here, though this time with more limited success. But there’s got to be some collaboration between you and the text, or you’re just daydreaming with the TV on. And this marks my limit. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Always a Base Chief, Always a Companion</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl3b9-ILsEp1W0FpbzZARPEFzqWLWP7mSZ6aR7B9n0FU4qX9ZN9KkF2qPQJchk6YkoagItPyzs6UeAQC7wf-Oz6b6RNwMyRZe3ZHxgF6IqtnNDgnyQx8kZM6I2E10bp3FauI1RK4psI2AtotV8ouzlncNAkRSFhRdrpax6e19zzXEjZXYVwmANKbxUNkTn/s528/4.FuryFromtheDeepRobson.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl3b9-ILsEp1W0FpbzZARPEFzqWLWP7mSZ6aR7B9n0FU4qX9ZN9KkF2qPQJchk6YkoagItPyzs6UeAQC7wf-Oz6b6RNwMyRZe3ZHxgF6IqtnNDgnyQx8kZM6I2E10bp3FauI1RK4psI2AtotV8ouzlncNAkRSFhRdrpax6e19zzXEjZXYVwmANKbxUNkTn/s16000/4.FuryFromtheDeepRobson.jpeg" /></a></div></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />As always, there’s the base chief who stubbornly distrusts the Doctor up to at least episode four. He’s been given other names, this time its Robson. At the same time, everything unique about this instance makes it worse. He’s worked his way up through the ranks and so has retained a shopkeeper’s shillings-and-pence brain, fixated upon production quotas. This leads him to thunderingly shout down the plummy voices of the boffins who try to talk more educated sense to him, the endlessly repeated set-piece arguments setting their different accents at odds. He seems so defensive as to be actively paranoid. <br /><br />It’s not as extreme as the scheming Bragen in <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/power-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html " target="_blank">‘Power of the Daleks’</a> but there’s a strong sense of power being placed in the wrong hands, inverting natural class hierarchies. There are those who will rightly raise the alarm when the show becomes racist, but show no concern over this sort of thing. <br /><br />It’s true that time is put into Victoria’s send-off, rather than it just being tagged onto the end. And many celebrate this story for that. But assigning time isn’t the same thing as using it. <br /><br />Companions tend to start well but degenerate into screamers, like Susan. Or some go the other way, starting out as tedious simperers then inexplicably gaining some gumption in their very last story, like Vicki. (Some don’t do either, like Dodo. Who should really have been called Don’tdon’t.) <br /><br />Curiously, in her last story Victoria seems to go for both. She suddenly gains the ability to get out of locked rooms with a hairpin, but also perpetually blubs about all the danger like she’s only just noticed its there. Susan went off to get married, Vicki to have adventures with her new-found boyfriend. Victoria gets doled out substitute parents. Ho hum. <br /><br />The weed being susceptible to her screaming is a good meta gag, even if it gets scant intra-story explanation. (It’s the “particular pattern of sound” is all we’re told. Is seaweed supposed to have ears?) God only knows whether this makes her more or less pro-active, but you can’t help but think for the weed to </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">really be in trouble its</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> weakness would have been whingeing.</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-19539128195981657602023-10-14T11:58:00.000+01:002023-10-14T11:58:24.217+01:00‘THE WEB OF FEAR’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>First broadcast Feb/Mar 1968<br />Written by Mervyn Haisman + Henry Lincoln </i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>PLOT SPOILERS lie ahead, as likely as line delays! </i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXUJlemkCOmewzq9T3qacXyw57tF3qEhiRwgRf1HFHMbM0Nt2Zg7Exd6tT8YPyhE0uNxg8ujGIxP2SKvUswea1gJN82Z0Uf-Wt1Fe9lBWXUBKabhS3YhM5tUrhJHSV9TABEaseOuzbBtytJQE_9AElkDZoVSGNKw6WQQeRpvB6iEbGA_D00mrUACOqs3Lb/s528/1.WebOfFear.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXUJlemkCOmewzq9T3qacXyw57tF3qEhiRwgRf1HFHMbM0Nt2Zg7Exd6tT8YPyhE0uNxg8ujGIxP2SKvUswea1gJN82Z0Uf-Wt1Fe9lBWXUBKabhS3YhM5tUrhJHSV9TABEaseOuzbBtytJQE_9AElkDZoVSGNKw6WQQeRpvB6iEbGA_D00mrUACOqs3Lb/s16000/1.WebOfFear.jpeg" /></a></div><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“It’s like a spider's web, ain't it?”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /> “Yes. And we're the flies, all right. But where is the spider?”</i><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Yeti on the Circle Line</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />A mere three stories after <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-abominable-snowmen-patrick.html" target="_blank">‘The Abominable Snowmen’</a>… this is the fastest reappearance so far. Which takes us to a poser. As we’ve seen before, <i>’Doctor Who’</i> is often torn between the requirement of individual stories to do their own thing and the imperative to build up a rogue’s gallery of monsters. Repeat performances can lead to diminished returns. And yet the Yeti… <br /><br />Their first appearance was, if not bad, not better than okay. While this, their second, is widely regarded as a classic. Despite retaining the original writers, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. What can have caused this uptick in quality? <br /><br />One answer is setting. Classic <i>’Who’ </i>spends so much time hanging round the same few sets, getting those sets right is significant. And this is of course the one where they decided to take the Tube. Which makes a virtue out of the necessity for limited and confined spaces. And of then throwing everything into semi-darkness so you don’t see quite how limited and confined they are. <br /><br />Even the one above-ground sequence in the fourth episode, though shot at least partially in the streets, is normally made up of close-cropped shots - rarely including any sky, keeping things claustrophobic. (Taking the Yeti out of the shadows, alas, works less well.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm42-3JD7Tmt-fh3BMv6-RsXdxrlkRq2879DaPTLGr2buqG-tUDehO6erSFkAftP-QNCYd9tFKx33doXrR_Ig7HwguEBwSzCA7hAwx4ki0f9Bl5MRpcC8VoEnHV94DybuSKj2ZT8FFAwJ6IXDnWJ0_LI5T1yrtV2h0sG9-2sORgQOGbI747zMZcrip9XPg/s528/2a.WebOfFeartunnels.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm42-3JD7Tmt-fh3BMv6-RsXdxrlkRq2879DaPTLGr2buqG-tUDehO6erSFkAftP-QNCYd9tFKx33doXrR_Ig7HwguEBwSzCA7hAwx4ki0f9Bl5MRpcC8VoEnHV94DybuSKj2ZT8FFAwJ6IXDnWJ0_LI5T1yrtV2h0sG9-2sORgQOGbI747zMZcrip9XPg/s16000/2a.WebOfFeartunnels.jpeg" /></a></div><br />But there’s an extra element… At first, the travellers don’t know they’re in the Underground. And while of course we watch with hindsight, surely even contemporary viewers would have recognised it before them. Or at the very least Londoners would, at a time the Beeb was London-centric. And they were supposed to. The original plan, after all, had been to shoot on location. <br /><br />So familiar names like ‘Holborn’ and Charing Cross’ have been taken over by this alien entity, it’s remorseless progress displayed on the regular Tube map. <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-words-we-used-to-use-john-wyndhams.html" target="_blank">(Wyndham does something similar with above-ground place names in ‘Day Of the Triffids’.)</a> This may be so widely seen as a classic story because it does such a classic <i>’Who’ </i>thing - defamiliarise the familiar, turn it into something sinister.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHCxzr2dhzHP_J1C1WCuLGoyuLo_XVHH1DqSi380mcS0B0jp-YDzhVyP1GIyloW_D8E_TX-dH22rlIgZYpU9hFy1dQM4YUz_8nWS-BLvYreAN7sod9bZcFc25H3aGJgnU1DlovZWK5RofYT45Ke_uE43gNyP0NaJU-Vq_5QIGzCIIrYEfc9wMCx2CKJ36u/s528/2b.WebOfFearTubemap.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHCxzr2dhzHP_J1C1WCuLGoyuLo_XVHH1DqSi380mcS0B0jp-YDzhVyP1GIyloW_D8E_TX-dH22rlIgZYpU9hFy1dQM4YUz_8nWS-BLvYreAN7sod9bZcFc25H3aGJgnU1DlovZWK5RofYT45Ke_uE43gNyP0NaJU-Vq_5QIGzCIIrYEfc9wMCx2CKJ36u/s16000/2b.WebOfFearTubemap.jpeg" /></a></div><br />And, whether the setting inspired, whether new script editor Derrick Sherwin had a hand in it, or whether it was just a case of second time lucky… Haisman and Lincoln also turn out a significantly better script this time round. <br /><br />In the big scheme of things this may follow in the wake of <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-war-machines-william-hartnells.html" target="_blank">‘The War Machines’</a> in establishing the ‘aliens head for the Home Counties’ story type. But it’s eerily empty settings are actually a more similar experience to <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-dalek-invasion-of-earth-william.html" target="_blank">‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’. </a>And like that story only more so, everything is stripped down for action, pressed into service. It feels less meandering, more compelling. <br /><br />As is not unusual, very little makes sense. (If what the Great Intelligence wants is the Doctor, who go to so much trouble to take over the whole of London?) But pressing questions are constantly thrown at you, to snatch your attention from this. <br /><br />As has happened before now, the Doctor couldn’t be in an episode because Troughton had gone on holiday. Normally, everyone else keeps talking and hopes you don’t notice. This time his absence is foregrounded. The first episode cliffhanger essentially tells you itself how he escapes, even if we were likely to conceive he might be killed off. But with everyone constantly talking about him, you cannot help but wonder where he is or what he’s up to.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGIB5HKbMVgQKDYwwRr3FBZU9jf8X6WulvLUJZK8b1rk9qy9TYyH_82OJ1jUvImfa40esn1XVEB1C2FvPt4MkfseBRl9qepp7aa5wPBiibQzklE5O4OaDyPTAwaSxdQFToPmzHifhlkersukzgOoPZqwxhOCMuTkV-hKk8buyLUqs9ZGdzDB6b-YU3IFh-/s528/3.WebofFearColonel.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGIB5HKbMVgQKDYwwRr3FBZU9jf8X6WulvLUJZK8b1rk9qy9TYyH_82OJ1jUvImfa40esn1XVEB1C2FvPt4MkfseBRl9qepp7aa5wPBiibQzklE5O4OaDyPTAwaSxdQFToPmzHifhlkersukzgOoPZqwxhOCMuTkV-hKk8buyLUqs9ZGdzDB6b-YU3IFh-/s16000/3.WebofFearColonel.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Though the overriding question, who is the traitor, suffers from hindsight. We all now know it can’t be the main suspect, because it’s the Brigadier. (Here still a Colonel.) Which, unfortunately, it mostly seems to be set up for. The eventual reveal seems both arbitrary and guessable. The Staff Sergeant dies then gets better again, even when the Private who died with him doesn’t? Mmm. <br /><br />(There are admittedly set-ups. When Driver Evans, the comedy Welshman, gives the Doctor a Yeti figure which brings their bigger brethren to your door, he says this is on the Staff Sergeant’s order. Yet how he steals the web sample from the tobacco tin remains a mystery. And the most useful takeover for the Intelligence would be one person the Doctor never seems to suspect, the scientist Anne Travers. That way he’d know the lab findings straight away, without waiting for them to be passed on to the military.) <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>All-Out For the Otherly</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEpsfZ7cveDKaebJdiAUDiST0pyAgz-cX5b2vO_pjSTiM8WATsmr8tkUtt0SBJiUkVND_EqcaqTUwElfPUI5tlQ13fXPWPmRnzBgNaV4YYBESmXoGcp7Sh5gyFRB2JhWi_fVLBS1ZeG9M8UWf2u6inFJAhoeD3Qr30aNvIAwnRXaH0gS34YpzYaToMAHMb/s528/4.WebofFearParanoia.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEpsfZ7cveDKaebJdiAUDiST0pyAgz-cX5b2vO_pjSTiM8WATsmr8tkUtt0SBJiUkVND_EqcaqTUwElfPUI5tlQ13fXPWPmRnzBgNaV4YYBESmXoGcp7Sh5gyFRB2JhWi_fVLBS1ZeG9M8UWf2u6inFJAhoeD3Qr30aNvIAwnRXaH0gS34YpzYaToMAHMb/s16000/4.WebofFearParanoia.jpeg" /></a></div></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />More than most of the Troughton era, this story is saturated in the Cold War era, marinaded in paranoia. In the tradition of spy movies, what the Great Intelligence is after is intelligence. Intelligence inside the Doctor’s head rather than encrypted onto microfilm, but still intelligence. <br /><br />Then there’s the deliberately inconclusive ending, when the Doctor’s rather Doctorly and Jamie’s more action-packed solutions conflict - allowing the Intelligence to escape. This of course sets it up to come back and be bad another day. But that was never so foregrounded with either the Daleks or the Cybermen. The lack of triumphalism is striking, and does suggest the way the Cold War didn’t just mean war, but war without end. (Early publicity shots of Jon Pertwee involved Yeti, so sure were they of a third outing. As it happened, quarrels over the rights ensured they never came back.) <br /><br />Yet at the same time, again more than most of the Troughton era, looking for exact Cold War analogies won’t get you all that far. The Cybermen, as we’ve already seen, were a bad fit for stand-on Reds. The Great intelligence would be an even worse one. For that matter, it doesn’t really lead to any kind of analogies. <i>’The Abominable Snowmen’, </i>as we saw, led naturally to talk of psychology and Buddhism. This story is so tightly woven it seems impervious to that sort of thing. Analogies bounce off like bullets from a Yeti’s hide.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAmzBGQexvrF_3Vo7iCapkwZ0d7VsuiOTCQgP6a3Pcr4BLOABqSOoxY5X8NVM5eluTxFmnwvIS6-oKhpwpGARtvXHdnUt22EcC2AtuAPQUDvLr3KsYYWqp15OOvkOIeEIDsCfcv3cRp3R4XceU3BjAWZlNeV-mh-j2S9Ax89SpSgiJ28yd94FPV-2Rj3m7/s500/5.WebOfFearFungus2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAmzBGQexvrF_3Vo7iCapkwZ0d7VsuiOTCQgP6a3Pcr4BLOABqSOoxY5X8NVM5eluTxFmnwvIS6-oKhpwpGARtvXHdnUt22EcC2AtuAPQUDvLr3KsYYWqp15OOvkOIeEIDsCfcv3cRp3R4XceU3BjAWZlNeV-mh-j2S9Ax89SpSgiJ28yd94FPV-2Rj3m7/s16000/5.WebOfFearFungus2.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Instead… Yes the Yeti are back, but this is the story which goes all-out for the otherly, <i>’Doctor Who’ </i>as <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2018/08/mark-fishers-weird-eerie.html" target="_blank">(capitalised) Weird fiction, if ever there was.</a> But that Weirdness is conveyed through reference to things to be found here but which still feel otherworldly, on the borderline between being tangible and nebulous – webs, fog, pulsing fungus. The Intelligence is described as “a formless, shapeless thing, floating about in space like a cloud of mist.” The last story was titled <i>’The Abominable Snowmen’.</i> Whereas this time that non-stuff even takes over the name. And not content with that it reappears in the end credits. <br /><br />The vanishing fungus sample, however awkward a part of the whodunnit, fits neatly into this, as if the stuff is inherently ungraspable. Compared to them the Ice Warriors and Cybermen are solid, material things. They may well beat you in a fight. But at least you’ll recognise what’s going on while it happens. <br /><br />In fact the image which will most likely will stay with me isn’t a rearing Yeti in a dark tunnel, even if that’s where Google searches go. In fact it’s Jamie and the Colonel opening a door. They fear there might be Yeti lurking the other side, as happened earlier. Instead they come across the pulsing fungus. It doesn’t look like the next room has something strange in it, it looks like the door opens to strangeness itself, one reality system invading another. It’s not entering our reality to enact some plan against us, the mere act of it entering our reality is inherently destructive. <br /><br /><a href="http://wearecontrollingtransmission.blogspot.com/2011/02/spotlight-on-production-and-decay-of.html" target="_blank">Writing about an ‘Outer Limits’ episode he doesn’t even like,</a> Mark Holcomb hits on the term “clinical weirdness”. And much of <i>‘Web Of Fear’s</i> atmosphere comes from the matter-of-fact military mindset being held up against the all-out weird. <br /><br />Moving the action forward a few decades, formally speaking this follows on from <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/01/tomb-of-cybermen-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’.</a> Yet because of this sheer otherly business, it’s perhaps more akin to <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/05/william-hartnells-doctor-who-web-planet.html" target="_blank">’Web Planet’,</a> even if the style is less interpretative dance and more Expressionist sketch. Count the ways - all a plot to trap the Tardis/Doctor (delete as appropriate), drones mysteriously carrying out the will of an alien intelligence, whose voice we don’t hear for some while. Not to mention the re-use of webs! <br /><br />The Troughton era has a reputation for being formulaic. And it’s true that foes recur more frequently than with Hartnell. But just as the Cybermen were reworked in order tell new stories about them, so here is the Great Intelligence. <br /><br /><b>Yetis On the Loo In Tooting Bec</b><br /><br />Among many other things, this is the story which establishes the meta gag “all these tunnels look the same to me.” You could perhaps argue for a long time over whether this is iconic and so became an establishing story in the show’s history, or it was establishing so now feels iconic. So let’s not. <br /><br />Let’s note instead it doesn’t start in the standard way, with the Tardis landing somewhere new and their crew finding their way about. They’re travellers, after all, not secret agents. Instead the Intelligence makes a grab for the Doctor. There’s nothing that automatically associates that with repeat foes. In fact, <i>’Web Planet’ </i>used it for an entirely new adversary. And <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-celestial-toymaker-william.html" target="_blank">‘Celestial Toymaker’ </a>for a retconned one. But it was also used with the Daleks, in both <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-chase-william-hartnells-doctor-who.html" target="_blank">‘The Chase’ </a>and <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/06/evil-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘The Evil Of the Daleks’</a>. And a rise in repeat foes made it more likely.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsbDXWI9rcnFAXKsJFw9S7xhjQPEAzIyr9lpyErsAs3C4MVk6sgNP1Jj8F-03g-eCW77Pix6VyuF5RFpiD3Xw1yOYpyIiCVh1QPuLpAA4Dl779oL4cos-MtKJq2V2hMp5VhlQM-RKZWj-It0rKnkzZAgZzPI_P7ItBFejO9Uubi0Sc8IrHFskPu5oT3xsf/s648/6.WebofFearpertwee.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsbDXWI9rcnFAXKsJFw9S7xhjQPEAzIyr9lpyErsAs3C4MVk6sgNP1Jj8F-03g-eCW77Pix6VyuF5RFpiD3Xw1yOYpyIiCVh1QPuLpAA4Dl779oL4cos-MtKJq2V2hMp5VhlQM-RKZWj-It0rKnkzZAgZzPI_P7ItBFejO9Uubi0Sc8IrHFskPu5oT3xsf/s16000/6.WebofFearpertwee.jpeg" /></a></div><br />But it’s generally agreed that more was being established here than ‘rogues gallery on rota’. It was also a prototype for stories set on contemporary Earth.(Well, England. Well, London. Well, North London.) Which came into their own with the next Doctor. (Even if they made full use of colour, while this is in every inch a black-and-white story.) <br /><br />And so we inevitably head to that well-known Jon Pertwee comment: “All the threats should come to Earth… There’s nothing more alarming than coming home and finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec.” (And I would indeed be alarmed at that thought. My loo being in Tooting Bec, that’s going to get inconvenient.) <br /><br />An idea which Wood and Miles, in their <i>’About Time’ </i>guide, pillory as “the worst idea ever.” They make one valid point, that incongruity is primarily a visual motif and less a a story idea. (You see much of it in Surrealist art, for example.) But <i>’Who’ </i>is often bog-standard plots set on repeat, enlivened by some iconic visuals. <br /><br />And how do we respond when we get that? Firstly children often perceive ‘imagistically’, taking in a cascade of images, rather than try to follow involved plots. I for one, if looking at old TV shows or comics from my youth, often stumble on an image embedded but isolated in my brain, and think “oh, that’s where that came from.” <br /><br />Further, memory is primarily visual and highly selective, more a still camera than a CCTV recorder. Where <i>’Doctor Who’ </i>remained alive, before re-releases were even conceived of, was in people’s memories. The disappointment some feel when re-united with those classic stories may be that their association was only ever with a few images, but became misattributed to the surrounding three hours. <br /><br />But more importantly, both sides in this debate suppose the link between creating incongruity and Earth-set stories. Which isn’t necessarily the case. What we need is the juxataposition of familiar and unfamiliar, which is quite distinct from saying that we’re English so can only relate to English settings. The important feature in the example above is that the ordinary-looking door opens from an ordinary-looking room. And for that to happen things don’t need to be set on Earth. The earlier story <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-macra-terror-patrick-troughtons.html " target="_blank">'The Macra Terror’</a> worked in a very similar way, despite being set on an unspecified colony which was quite unlike everyday Earth.</span></div></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-47088698272695650852023-09-30T11:35:00.002+01:002023-09-30T11:35:38.551+01:00‘THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO) <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>First broadcast Dec ’67/ Jan ’68 <br />Written by David Whitaker <br />Beware the standard PLOT SPOILERS</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHBSaWLgL1CkpDw3O027zuoj9laxXrNhaKx2KJ6ViXMk_W4uszpzBCiiilI7up0obiWPECO5FsK2Zmd9HMoopCitLVEPJ_Ko7SrvpUj-lxfwAHlLk3xskaxTPPO5F7pCz_cjh5Ukl6qznm9jod3O4wdZfk_eLEqL5qfZmc_eyve16NhN_UPZAPDIe_E6hx/s528/11a.Enemy%20of%20the%20World.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="395" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHBSaWLgL1CkpDw3O027zuoj9laxXrNhaKx2KJ6ViXMk_W4uszpzBCiiilI7up0obiWPECO5FsK2Zmd9HMoopCitLVEPJ_Ko7SrvpUj-lxfwAHlLk3xskaxTPPO5F7pCz_cjh5Ukl6qznm9jod3O4wdZfk_eLEqL5qfZmc_eyve16NhN_UPZAPDIe_E6hx/s16000/11a.Enemy%20of%20the%20World.jpeg" /></a></div><br />DOCTOR: But isn't there another way out of this? <br /> KENT: Only one. Be Salamander.<br /></i><br /><b>The Doctor Doubled (Twice)</b><br /><br />In the distant year of 2018, Salamander poses as a public benefactor. But his plot is to set off volcanoes (and the like) around the world, blame the Governor of that region for not doing anything about them, depose him and replace him with his own man. Perhaps closely followed by laughing cruelly. And by coincidence he happens to look exactly like you-know-Who… <br /><br />The initial impetus for this story was the same as for <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-massacre-william-hartnells-doctor.html" target="_blank">‘The Massacre’</a>. Feeling confined by always playing the same role, the lead actor asked if he could also do a villainous double. (And unless I miss my guess Troughton’s next words were “and I’d like to try an Italian accent… no wait, Mexican.”) <br /><br />With <i>’The Massacre’,</i> this was turned into an existential drama about the meaninglessness of identity and futility of existence. Mostly conveyed by making no sense whatsoever. This time its taken it as an excuse for a rip-roaring adventure story, with action babes in helicopter chases. Things had changed, it seemed, over those last few years… <br /><br />This has come to be known as the ‘*Who’* does Bond story. But patented Bond motifs don’t appear - the over-elaborate execution attempt, the steady supply of gadgets, the penetrating of the villain’s secret lair and so on. It’s more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy-fi_(subgenre)" target="_blank">Spy-Fi in general</a>, which was after all a very Sixties genre.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0TrWv6-AyH-MOOvSY7V_pSJF5o45brTv77NXiLX1v6VEMfmt08CmCKflHK67yj4D_Bkm1b_XSMnsaN9uhhKXKjYzCZ805uRxy_ECaSxhMrDIbq5JAbQL9owKEHi5zH1Z-2DPB5cMSM2R6Oqz2GBihQaHdZoYf6RLCtOCZ8cdFTiTWiR29biqpwend48UB/s528/11b.Astrid.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0TrWv6-AyH-MOOvSY7V_pSJF5o45brTv77NXiLX1v6VEMfmt08CmCKflHK67yj4D_Bkm1b_XSMnsaN9uhhKXKjYzCZ805uRxy_ECaSxhMrDIbq5JAbQL9owKEHi5zH1Z-2DPB5cMSM2R6Oqz2GBihQaHdZoYf6RLCtOCZ8cdFTiTWiR29biqpwend48UB/s16000/11b.Astrid.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Take for example rebel agent Astrid. She’s more Avengers woman than Bond girl, to the point you’re not surprised to hear Mary Peach subsequently auditioned for the show. Dressed throughout like a principal boy from a panto, she somehow refrains from slapping her thighs. It’s notable that she has relatively minimal screen time with the Doctor, and least of all when she’s being at her most kickass. <br /><br />(Though the Guards seem graduates of Incompetent College even more than usual, perhaps even rivalling those of <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-space-museum-william-hartnells.html" target="_blank">‘The Space Museum’.</a> No wonder she kicks her way through them with such impunity.) <br /><br />The Bond comparison may be because that’s the best-known example of the genre. Or perhaps because some explosion footage is filched from <i>’From Russia With Love’.</i> But it leads to this story’s reputation as the one that broke from the base-under-siege rule. <br /><br />And indeed, sometimes it seems to exult in doing this. There doesn’t seem any real reason to relocate the action from Australia to Hungary other than to say that they’ve done it. Or more accurately, to say that they did it via rocket ship in under two hours. (Maybe Astrid knows a short-cut around Polynesia.) <br /><br />And there’s the strangely unusual feature that the cliffhangers aren’t actually cliffhangers, and more like chapter endings. Episode four even picks up elsewhere from episode three’s ending. With all the running and shooting going on, it sometimes feels like everything that happens is a cliffhanger bar the episode endings themselves. (Bizarrely, another point of similarity to <i>’The Massacre’.)</i> <br /><br />Okay, Bond to Spy-Fi, it might not sound so much of a shift. But once made you realise the Troughton era has been here before. With <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-faceless-ones-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘The Faceless Ones’</a>, <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/06/evil-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">’The Evil of The Daleks’</a> and (perhaps to a lesser degree) <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/power-of-daleks-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘The Power Of the Daleks’ </a>were all stuffed with espionage, treachery and surveillance. (<a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-highlanders-patrick-troughtons.html" target="_blank">‘The Highlanders’</a> is the notable exception, and that was essentially imposed upon the production team.) <br /><br />But let’s take the bait and say the brief was ‘Bond on a budget’. The problem here’s the obvious one. It’s a bit like saying “pyramids, but small”. Remember the most recent Bond film when this was broadcast hadn’t been<i> ’From Russia With Love’,</i> but the somewhat more lavish <i>’You Only Live Twice’. </i>Even ’<i>The Avengers’, </i>though another TV show, was granted a higher budget by commercial rival ITV. <br /><br />The first episode gets going quickly, and soon turns into a chase involving hovercraft and helicopters. Okay, one hovercraft and one helicopter, still one more than you might expect. But you start to suspect the budget was spent on luring us in. Episodes two and three feature, among other delights, a display of villainy by smashing the good guys’ crockery, not quite on a league with killer lasers. <br /><br />We’re all now used to the show staple of running round corridors as a way of filling time. Here someone sits down in a corridor and has a bite to eat. When Salamander exultantly tells a rumbled Jamie “ingenuity requires a constant stream of new ideas”, it seems almost an auto-critique. <br /><br />Plus, it soon becomes obvious that showing two Troughtons is a logistical challenge that has to be saved for the final episode. And the solution’s to keep the Doctor out of the action. He keeps demanding proof of Salamander’s no-good nature. Whether for his own benefit or to show the world who their enemy is, that isn’t made terribly clear. But, seen from our ‘post-truth’ era, it all seems somewhat naive. <br /><br />(I’d have been tempted to introduce a farce scenario, where the Doctor and Salamander keep narrowly missing one another. So one orders his men to all stand on their heads and leaves the room, only for another to enter and demand to know what they’re up to.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Nj4fQBqc0c1aIE7A5ITKd8g5Qwtf38Z0SitTbuhuSqQeb7A34OlEm9bU2hBIsch23eAmrJ0BW1peoa4ZCBZXM1pjJP3yRvYijVW5N3F2PhUp3GNEH2AkdJGL1x1mA8tJZweXtTvTvu2JyfaA8eeEw3jIP6KQt4OxVQ7GDxzw0ZRqdcQy8f5emxyJUIbA/s500/11c.salamander.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="377" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Nj4fQBqc0c1aIE7A5ITKd8g5Qwtf38Z0SitTbuhuSqQeb7A34OlEm9bU2hBIsch23eAmrJ0BW1peoa4ZCBZXM1pjJP3yRvYijVW5N3F2PhUp3GNEH2AkdJGL1x1mA8tJZweXtTvTvu2JyfaA8eeEw3jIP6KQt4OxVQ7GDxzw0ZRqdcQy8f5emxyJUIbA/s16000/11c.salamander.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>For Evil to Exist, Good Men Must Be Credulous</b><br /><br />And we’ve grown wearily used to this. An episode of set-up, and episode of resolution, and a whole bunch of running round in the middle. But just when we’re sunk into this, in episode four… yes, four… Whitaker throws in a curve ball. <br /><br />Admittedly this answers a narrative question no-one’s been asking. Salamander’s power comes largely from his ability to manipulate the weather, like a one-man form of climate change. But we’ve been told he’s a diabolic mastermind, a type we’ve grown used to, and besides this is all futuristic stuff with rockets anyway. So no-one, within the tale or without, has wondered just how he achieves this. (Weather control seems a feature of this era. It has already appeared in<a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-moonbase-patrick-troughtons-doctor.html" target="_blank"> ‘The Moonbase’</a>, and shows up in the Avengers episode <i>’A Surfeit of H20’, </i>1965, and the Spy-Fi film <i>’Our Man Flynt’, </i>1966.) <br /><br />It turns out Salamander has a team of patsies, who he’s hidden in an underground bunker for years, telling them nuclear war rages up above and they need to stoke up the weather against imagined foes. He’s a Devilish figure, more often seen manipulating or disposing of others than doing stuff himself. But the surface Salamander mostly worked by blackmail. While this Salamander, someone who brings out the good in people but then twists it for his own nefarious ends, seems more narratively interesting. <br /><br />But more, the evil doppelganger trope is widely thought to be about the elements you most repress in yourself coming back in the guise of another person. And this is more the stuff an evil un-Doctor would do. There’s something almost Christ versus Anti-Christ about it. Against the Doctor who was the most quiet and unassuming, Salamander is a charismatic public figure who has the world idolising him. <br /><br />For much of the time, he exists in a kind of double vision. We’re prompted to see him as a set of villainous signifiers, all scheming, swarthy and foreign. (And Not At All Racist, Just of Its Time.) Whereas the great world public all see him as a kind of saviour. (“A public benefactor. Quite a speaker too.”) So the bunker becomes a correlative to being trapped inside Salamander’s concocted worldview. <br /><br />In the end there’s precisely one shot of the two Troughtons, the thing we came here for. But Salamander almost immediately then getting thrown out the Tardis, there is something satisfying to that - like they’re two magnetic poles which repel one another. <br /><br />Moreover it turns out that, when it didn’t look like he was up to much, Whitaker’s been adept with some smart set-up. First a question mark is thrown over Giles Kent, leader of the rebels, who tips off Salamander’s guards to force the Doctor into impersonating him.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzBzvECO_RlCjE8ZCtAHUVekMSyqnQVxdAnIP-q2R31xEgV2wtHqVcnLVxEt10C-HPjyGBGrr4FulFiC4GwUZBJ1FzOLBCnPXSjDQpEb4Fu3M6CIT2UdAKsBTlH3rARTaQTXkw9QsudUSsXbUSuimvglnz8cTm5B6Awj_9bEIFHpc_uA7QQ0FJpiRsAjaL/s528/11d.Salamander+Bruce.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzBzvECO_RlCjE8ZCtAHUVekMSyqnQVxdAnIP-q2R31xEgV2wtHqVcnLVxEt10C-HPjyGBGrr4FulFiC4GwUZBJ1FzOLBCnPXSjDQpEb4Fu3M6CIT2UdAKsBTlH3rARTaQTXkw9QsudUSsXbUSuimvglnz8cTm5B6Awj_9bEIFHpc_uA7QQ0FJpiRsAjaL/s16000/11d.Salamander+Bruce.jpeg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpFSB-OCDKGz9wDSBrMPLHQMhSr7stQYdFYMoqTfUwAr_pzkOq6zf0dvxzrTsOf4pH7hbTuLjlYZ1Re4UBmuqB2eLVTmmCuDVuijR8HSXBhkwnfBXvYjXTo-mg9g1ivYbvkfSp6exM9MK91l3iMnEfjZNpBmQE6kuLjbMvO1rZXKxtbANJ6qdB0YG1Ms-x/s528/11e.Benik.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpFSB-OCDKGz9wDSBrMPLHQMhSr7stQYdFYMoqTfUwAr_pzkOq6zf0dvxzrTsOf4pH7hbTuLjlYZ1Re4UBmuqB2eLVTmmCuDVuijR8HSXBhkwnfBXvYjXTo-mg9g1ivYbvkfSp6exM9MK91l3iMnEfjZNpBmQE6kuLjbMvO1rZXKxtbANJ6qdB0YG1Ms-x/s16000/11e.Benik.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>We then meet black-clad, stern and abrasive Donald Bruce, who looks to be Salamander’s right-hand man. But this is followed by supercilious Benik, who manages to be unpopular even among his own men. (There’s multiple good performances, but Milton Johns excels in the love-to-hate-him department.). And Bruce turns out to be the ‘good German’, the one good man stuck in a bad system, willing to turn against his boss. (Apologies to any German readers. It’s the term popular use has stuck us with.) <br /><br />As much as James Bond has a moral, it would be an anti-moral, that it takes a killer to kill a killer. Whitaker instead brings back a classic <i>’Who’ </i>moral, that power will destroy itself. Benik orders his men to shoot to kill, then is laughingly told by a dying woman he’ll never be able to get the needed information from her now. Salamander is the one who dematerialises the Tardis, hoping for escape, instead extruding himself. <br /><br />All in all, there is much to enjoy in this story. You just need to get over the hump of the second and third episodes. (Small wonder it’s reputation increased from the time when only the third was available.) But it’s also an odd mixture of protracted with bumpily elliptical, the latter particularly a problem in the last episode. Salamander meets his demise so late its as if he was trying to hang on for the final bell. Which means, after the absence of cliffhangers throughout, the final episode has one. Go figure!</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-14868596990249174262023-09-23T10:52:00.001+01:002023-09-23T10:56:39.925+01:00“AS FAR AS WE CAN FLY”: ’SPACE RITUAL’ BY HAWKWIND <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>(Top 50 Albums)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-0EF3T38jrJGt70XaccoxWSh0vX2zMwx782S3pLih5eP-9ioW1DjcG_d7RRsBoo_hPqxOa9MShpQFWlrX4aQQGq3_3kx37eaJsuLYz8KG2_Z2CygZqzYA0fWV7FeUBdtUHX4H17qFJlEg2laqidIRSOH0mKep7jEPNlCRrFBZD2jGl4rikvrQRDid_uxS/s528/1.Space%20Ritual.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="489" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-0EF3T38jrJGt70XaccoxWSh0vX2zMwx782S3pLih5eP-9ioW1DjcG_d7RRsBoo_hPqxOa9MShpQFWlrX4aQQGq3_3kx37eaJsuLYz8KG2_Z2CygZqzYA0fWV7FeUBdtUHX4H17qFJlEg2laqidIRSOH0mKep7jEPNlCRrFBZD2jGl4rikvrQRDid_uxS/s16000/1.Space%20Ritual.jpeg" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Originally we just wanted to freak people out but now we’re just interested in sound. For instance, if a monotonous sound like a chanting goes on long enough, it can really alter people's minds.… We try to create an environment where people can lose their inhibitions. We also want to keep clear of the music business as much as possible - just play for the people. It's like a ship that has to steer around rocks, we have to steer round the industry.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />- Dave Brock, <i>’NME’</i> (Jan ’71) <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>”Everything exists for itself, yet everything is part of something else.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /> - <i>’Space Ritual’ </i>sleevenote <br /><br /><i>“You couldn't overstate the importance of Hawkwind if you tried. They're a credible candidate for the most important band in the history of everything, ever.</i>” - <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-sixties-underground-in-uk.html" target="_blank">Me</a><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”Waiting For Take-off”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>’Space Ritual’</i> (known by pedants as <i>’The Space Ritual Alive In Liverpool and London', </i>1973) is the finale and cumulation of Hawkwind’s classic space trilogy - following from and building on <i>’In Search Of Space’ </i>(1971) and <i>’Doremi Farso Latido’</i> (1972). Citation does not seem needed. So what led to such an outpouring of awesomeness as this? <br /><br />We have something of a clue in an earlier release, their eponymous debut. Which stated in the liner notes “by now we will be past this album”, suggesting they regarded it as something of a staging post. (It was after all released in April 1970, by a band who had only played their first gig in November 1969.) And I’m going to suggest that it lacks four vital elements… <br /><br />First, though Nik Turner plays on the debut, he sang no lead vocals. Now, Dave Brock was the founder and band leader. (And sole constant member, up til today.) Who sang, frequently. But the founder felt no inclination to be the front man. Turner, whose initial involvement had been as a roadie, fell into that role but once there took to it with some relish. <br /><br />They were described by frequent collaborator Michael Moorcock as, respectively, the band’s backbone and spirit. Brock was the tent pole, keeping the band up. But Turner was the carney character who called the punters in. (Though he sometimes shared, sometimes alternated that role with Robert Calvert. No-one has ever said Hawkwind’s history is insufficiently confusing.) <br /><br />Second, though Dik Mik contributed electronics for the first album he didn’t team up with Del Dettmar till the second. (Dettmar was credited for synths, Dik Mik for “audio generator”. I have no idea what that is.) Now this was a time when bands often turned to electronic music. But the new instruments were mostly played in the old way, as if a concert pianist had his Steinway swapped for a synth at the last minute. Whereas with Hawkwind… <br /><br />The first ever electronic film soundtrack, by Louis and Bebe Barron for <i>’Forbidden Planet’ </i>(1956), had been credited as “electronic tonalities” rather than music. (Largely to circumvent their non-membership of the Musician’s Union. But it’s still a good description.) And Dik Mik and Dettmar worked in a similar way. They’d surge unpredictably, their sound barely controllable, like even the player isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next. And as both were more tinkering boffins than proper musicians that’s not altogether surprising. They saw their role as to “add atmospherics”. And electronics from this early era often has this quality, as if the preserve of haphazardly gifted amateurs, the Doctor in the Tardis rather than Jean Luc Picard aboard the Enterprise. More the Silver Apples than Rick Wakeman. <br /><br />But the main giveaway is that it lacks the brilliant ‘cosmic hieroglyph’ cover designs Barney Bubbles would provide for the space trilogy. These were complete and integrated works of design, rather than just a logo slapped atop an image of the band. See for example <i>’In Search of Space'</i> below. (Just about visible is the way the gatefold had a jagged centre opening.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIT9BXk87njGlUiuAWCbkE5tBXPK3UKNaK_jVRJ097Ba9EDILQf-W2KaJICEtp5YkH_0WPjhhUemnOHi1kQHIbPC89c3qtAOlRFlLqNPIRPYz9YP4jC8xT-03BTeBJNLJCQ0UQkqstyGZV8vo1a1_lpJhHv2j2kXh1g9ZW0msHR6-SaiGJumKwd-2N2TWz/s528/2.InSearchofSpace.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIT9BXk87njGlUiuAWCbkE5tBXPK3UKNaK_jVRJ097Ba9EDILQf-W2KaJICEtp5YkH_0WPjhhUemnOHi1kQHIbPC89c3qtAOlRFlLqNPIRPYz9YP4jC8xT-03BTeBJNLJCQ0UQkqstyGZV8vo1a1_lpJhHv2j2kXh1g9ZW0msHR6-SaiGJumKwd-2N2TWz/s16000/2.InSearchofSpace.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><b>”Space is one solution”</b><br /><br />Finally, and perhaps the cherry to place on the top of all this, the first album containing no references to space. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkwind_(album)#Sleeve" target="_blank">Though adverts for it still proclaimed “Hawkwind Is Space Rock”.</a><br /><br />Now mention Hawkwind and most will say ‘Space Rock’ straight back at you. But then mention Space Rock and most will say ‘Hawkwind’. Pink Floyd’s early years notwithstanding, they pretty much define the genre. (As much as ex-member Lemmy’s next band, Motorhead, would do for Heavy Metal.) Partly because having had one… precisely one… hit single they fell into the strange situation of being the underground band the overground has heard of. <br /><br />Okay, but Space Rock… was ‘space’ any more than just a euphemism for the verboten subject of drugs? Well partly, yes. ‘Acid rock’ often had the more mainstream-friendly (not to mention law-abiding) monicker substituted for it. And the lyrics to classic Hawkwind tracks such as <i>’Master of the Universe’ </i>and<i> ’Orgone Accumulator’</i> are respectively cosmological or Reichean, but those are fairly transparent metaphors for the real subject. (“It’s no social integrator/ It’s a one-man isolator”… hmm.) <br /><br />Acid rock originally meant whatever soundtrack was added to Acid Trip parties. (Which early on was just regular rock music.) But Hawkwind weren’t just a setting to take drugs to, their music was a slightly different means to the same end. They nailed the notion of music as drug, music whose primary purpose was to alter the perceptions of the audience. Band members liked to tell the anecdote that they hid their drugs in their equipment, then kept prying police dogs away by playing sub lows at them. Which sounds a bit too good to actually be true. But there’s a symbolic kind of truth to it. <br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doremi_Fasol_Latido#Critical_reaction" target="_blank">As Andrew Means said of them,</a> “the listener is just as much a traveller as the musician”. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/aug/27/hawkwind-dave-brock" target="_blank">Dave Brock cheerily conceded</a> “it was basically freak-out music.” <br /><br />And <i>this</i> is where space comes in, as a handy a metaphor for sonic exploration. It was a way of framing music which defied the confines of convention just like space transcends gravity. John Weinzierl of Amon Duul, more or less Hawkwind’s German cousins, summed up what it was to be radical youth at odds with all around you: “We had to come up with something new… Space is one solution.” <br /><br />But space also stood for both the beyond and the imagination, the outer and inner realms, inasmuch as they’re different things. Robert Calvert commented “we can hypnotise the audience into exploring their own space. Space is the last unexplored terrain, it’s all that’s left, it’s where man’s future is.” <br /><br />While Brock said: ”We were all reading science fiction and after the first moon landing, exploring the idea that everything could change. We were taking LSD, and the journey outward was also an inner journey, I suppose.” (Which was exactly what drew me to Science Fiction as a youth. And a huge part of the initial importance of Hawkwind to my young self was that you could get your music and your Science Fiction in one serving.) <br /><br />Ken Kesey was ever-keen to point out that it was a CIA weapons programme which had given hippies LSD to take, initially literally. So it’s fitting that the other great product of the Cold War, the Space Race, provided the other escape route. <br /><br />One route to sonic exploration was free jazz. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nik_Turner#1940–1969:_Early_years" target="_blank">Nik Turner described his aim as to</a> “play free jazz in a rock band.” He’d hung out with free jazz players while travelling through Berlin, who were key in persuading him that expression was more important than technical ability. This was more to do with the approach than the sound. Though some of his sax playing can be <i>very</i> free jazz, particularly on <i>’You Shouldn’t Do That’.</i><br /><br />But overall, their biggest free jazz inheritance was less direct. It was the way the band played in the moment and proved themselves so adept at improvisation. In the BBC documentary <i>’This Is Hawkwind, Do Not Panic’</i> Lemmy recalled: “It was a real rapport. We could be facing different ways and change at the same time during a jam… I’ve never had that since. I’ve never had it before that, come to that.” <br /><br />This was the Sixties era, where collectivism held sway. (The line from <i>’Sonic Attack'</i> “think only of yourself” is clearly intended as the Devil talking.) <a href="https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2013/06/29/hawkwind-1970-1975/" target="_blank">As Murray Ewing notes</a> “how much the lyrics are about ‘we’ and ‘us’, ‘Deep in our minds’, ‘we shall be as one’, ‘So that we might learn to see/The foolishness that lives in us’. Consciously tribal, Hawkwind were seeking to create a communal experience.” Added to which vocals are often chanty and choral-sounding, even with a whiff of folk to them. (This was perhaps only true for Brock. But then Brock contributed so many of the vocals.) <br /><br />Yet Turner’s squalling sax is on the same track as some of the most intense riffing you’re likely to hear. <i>’You Shouldn’t Do That’, </i>a sixteen-minute epic, audaciously opened their second album<i> ’X In Search Of Space’ </i>(1971). Repetition and sensory overload should surely be contrary forces, yet here they’re combined into one heady brew. It may well be the band’s finest studio moment. <br /><br /><a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/13222-space-ritual-hawkwind-review-anniversary" target="_blank">Joe Banks tried to capture their recipe:</a>“Hawkwind took the heavier end of the 60s underground sound as a starting point and created a monolithic concoction of garage rock, primitive electronics and free jazz, with the power of repetition and the riff always to the fore.” And he’s right about the riffs. Hawkwind’s USP was to combine the earthiness of hard rock with the spaciness of… well, <i>space</i> without losing the benefits of either. <br /><br />Pink Floyd, then still darlings of the UFO club rather than arena fillers, were an early influence. But, as so often, it’s the differences which are significant. On <i>’Interstellar Overdrive’, </i>aesthetes and post-graduates, Floyd dispense with the riff almost as soon as they can. They just needed a countdown routine, a hand-hold to hook the listener, before dumping them deep in zero gravity. Whereas Hawkwind, deranged freaks, pile on the riff with the zeal of young lovers. <br /><br />Banks again: “Hawkwind’s willingness to let the music splurge messily outside the lines - to overwhelm a song’s structure without destroying it - is what sets them apart from the rest of the British rock scene….In a scene dominated by music that values technical flash over visceral noise, Hawkwind are travelling in the opposite direction by unlearning the rules of traditional blues-based rock.” <br /><br />Well, yes and no. There was a whole period where clueless music journos noted Hawkwind had synths and sang about space, and so labelled them Prog. (Partly because of the bozo assumption that anything early Seventies that didn’t look like Glam must by definition be Prog.) Despite them not having anything like the flamboyant approach to musicianship or the ‘clean’ sound of the genre. Rightly reacting against this, we tended to veer too far the other way and insist on their absolute originality. <br /><br />Whereas, in truth, their genesis came amid an era of heavy riffing. ‘Hard rock’, a term which now sounds more like a tautology than something that needs inventing, came into common use around this time. Iron Butterfly’s <i>’In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’,</i> released in 1968, had done much to trailblaze this. Hawkwind’s first album was released a mere two months after the Black Sabbath’s debut. (Who weren’t yet associated with a metalhead scene which was only starting to exist, but thought of as a “people’s band” much in the same way as Hawkwind. They may not have played as many counter-cultural benefits. But then who did?.) <br /><br /><b>”Perhaps The Dying Has Begun”</b><br /><br />And this part-explains an often-asked question. In wider culture, they’re the British Grateful Dead, the symbol of a counter-culture which hadn’t died just because the media had announced it was time to move on. (Assisted by the way both bands has such vivid iconography, and such fanatical fans so given to networking.) <br /><br />But the Grateful Dead had started in 1965, so it made some sense to see them as the emblem of an enduring Sixties. Hawkwind’s first gig wasn’t until 1969… until <i>November</i> 1969, barely scraping their way into the decade which supposedly defined them. And their first album didn’t appear until 1970, when the dream had been deemed over. Rob Chapman’s magnum opus <i>’Psychedelia and Other Colours’ </i>(2015) mentions them not once. It seems a conundrum. How can you come so late to the party, and be its soundtrack? The answer to this is to turn the question the other way up. <br /><br />It’s easy enough to portray hippies as blissed-out innocents, without a single salient idea beneath their headbands. Yet Hawkwind’s conception of space was one sometimes found in Science Fiction, where <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-feeling-inside-of-me-on-perpetual.html" target="_blank">the Romantic notion of the Sublime</a> was enhanced , extended and projected out onto the vastness of the cosmos. It’s where we must be, but at the same time it may well destroy us without even noticing. Think of the lyrics to <i>’Space Is Deep’: </i><br /><br /><i>“Space is dark, it is so endless <br />“When you're lost it's so relentless <br />“It is so big, it is so small <br />“Why does man try to act so tall?”</i> <br /><br />Or a couplet from <i>’Lord of Light’,</i> which captures the perennial dualism: “A day shall come, we shall be as one/ Perhaps the dying has begun.” Or the way <i>’Brainstorm’ </i>is simultaneously escape route from Earth, space rocket as one step up from teenage wheels (“Can’t get no peace till I get into motion/ Sign my release from this planet’s erosion”) and one-man suicide trip (“I’m breaking up, I’m falling apart/ I’m floating away.”). <br /><br />True, psychedelic music hadn’t all been twee and pastoral. (However it was later caricatured.) Something like Pink Floyd’s <i>’Careful With That Axe Eugene’</i> was exquisitely sinister. But they were never so relentless, never so deranged, never bit into the brown acid as deeply as Hawkwind.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcYtg-f1XCTsAf1JHx-wcvVIu36Pt6Xh1KXwZvOJODoojzRYcMDR7UXbONjOcVxu7ijN-8R0U8zNfez_vGMLW0ICJSZqn1jaQDPm_LL_eccVh712OHvuKv_KBPHzg8wx6KDdq8AT6nbJ-jPuiZdVrdoDp4nRr2nPEvmimQOhhaVOC8Hy7wQ0UL-rSrE9q-/s528/3.SpaceRitualBack.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="489" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcYtg-f1XCTsAf1JHx-wcvVIu36Pt6Xh1KXwZvOJODoojzRYcMDR7UXbONjOcVxu7ijN-8R0U8zNfez_vGMLW0ICJSZqn1jaQDPm_LL_eccVh712OHvuKv_KBPHzg8wx6KDdq8AT6nbJ-jPuiZdVrdoDp4nRr2nPEvmimQOhhaVOC8Hy7wQ0UL-rSrE9q-/s16000/3.SpaceRitualBack.jpg" /></a></div><br />And where better to experience all of this than live? Live albums normally signify a band at an impasse. The label are on at them to put out something but they’re too coked up. Whereas Hawkwind were always primarily a live band. Their studio albums were often recorded in as close to live conditions as possible, sometimes containing live tracks regardless. But it was the all-live <i>’Space Ritual'</i> where they really reached the stars. (Let’s see how many other entries in this top fifty are live albums. Not expecting a high number.) <br /><br />And around this time they were gigging ceaselessly. Gigs organised like (in the album title) a ritual or (in the parlance of the time) a trip, rather than a live-action jukebox. And though culled from two separate shows, and requiring editing even to fit on a double LP, the album seeks to document that trip as much as possible. The three new tracks <i>(‘Born To Go’, ‘Upside Down’</i> and <i>’Orgone Accumulator’) </i>weren’t released on any subsequent studio album, confirming this was intended as a ‘proper’ release. <br /><br />Brock… and it seems it mostly was Brock… had a gift for dynamics, both within and between tracks. He’d segue between the rocket-propelled heavy riffing tracks and the more lyrical numbers with finesse. For example from <i>’Born to Go’</i> into <i>’Down Through The Night’. </i>These were often sung respectively by Turner and Brock, a similar dynamic to Waters and Gilmour in Pink Floyd from this era. (Most notably in <i>’Brain Damage’ </i>where they trade vocals within one track.) And <i>’Space Ritual’ </i>segues all the way through, not breaking for applause till the finale. <br /><br />However, while it’s great we get to hear it, it’s shame we can’t <i>see</i> any of it. The band had ploughed the profits from their one hit single into creating an audio-visual experience. But filming, especially under stage lights, was a more expensive and technically challenging prospect in those far-flung days. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”World Turned Upside Down Now”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>’Orgone Accumulator’</i> proved to be the pointer towards the next era of Hawkwind - not spacey but sleazy, low-down and rumbling. Rather than the riff just being the touch-paper to the sonic derangement, the track sticks unrelentingly with the riff like a pair of tight-fitting jeans, all rocket propulsion with no zero gravity. It’s described by Joe Banks (in the Quietus) as “brilliantly moronic”. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /><a href="https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2013/08/10/hawkwind-1976-1979-the-calvert-years/" target="_blank">To quote Murray Ewing again:</a> “A community-binding collective of tribal shamans no more, Hawkwind became something like a normal band.” In the clearest sign of a changing of the guard, Dik Mik was replaced by the classically trained Simon House. (Though Del Dettmar stayed for one more album.) <br /><br />Tracks became more like songs. Lyrics, which had been concerned with evoking the sense of something, more took up scenarios or even mini-narratives. Sleeves went for a more regular fantasy look. See for example the next release, 1974’s <i>’Hall of the Mountain Grill’ </i>below. (The front cover, if not the back, is still by Barney Bubbles. But it’s an SF image adorned by band logo and album title, unlike the integrated design of earlier.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMK5DDzm4x-dElUdzXH3JcxlFb9YC96CRVlCn1bi_aNGqvO21ysgtVvJtnZKvzBVaxjT_G71Q5pDnfbmeNIpLZgAW_BzqN25kqrb13LJqpg3hJ1XjJJNBJ2dxRrTmmctGNzwnAgZTZE2DBM6_cST0CRujK0Lx6hiWxdhw6sygW7AQBNX72pR1s-61-GpZA/s450/4.HallOftheMountainGrill.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMK5DDzm4x-dElUdzXH3JcxlFb9YC96CRVlCn1bi_aNGqvO21ysgtVvJtnZKvzBVaxjT_G71Q5pDnfbmeNIpLZgAW_BzqN25kqrb13LJqpg3hJ1XjJJNBJ2dxRrTmmctGNzwnAgZTZE2DBM6_cST0CRujK0Lx6hiWxdhw6sygW7AQBNX72pR1s-61-GpZA/s16000/4.HallOftheMountainGrill.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><br />But if they were now less space more rock, this was still a pretty good seam of rock. If they were no longer astral travellers, they were finding some pretty good places to visit on the ground. Though naysayers portray Hawkwind as something stuck in the Sixties it would be truer to say the very opposite, that they acted as a barometer of change. Their late Seventies era was full of dystopian grandeur, befitting the sourer times. The classic line was from<i> ’High Rise’ </i>– “He was just like you might have been/ On the ninety-ninth floor of a suicide machine”. It’s all that communal “we” chanting inverted. Now we all succumb to the same fate. Just one at a time. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”We Turned All This Noise On”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The winged shadow of Hawkwind is cast far and wide. Like <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2021/10/all-bear-my-seal-in-praise-of-black.html" target="_blank">Black Sabbath</a> they may have stamped their identity on a genre, but their influence went way beyond that. John Lydon (ostensibly the default anti-hippy) has recounted buying their first album, and played no less than <i>’You Shouldn’t Do That’ </i>when given a BBC radio show, while the reformed Pistols covered <i>’Silver Machine’.</i> Joe Strummer was a fan, as were Black Flag's Henry Rollins and Dez Cadena. Crass' original mission statement was to be to the Pistols what Hawkwind were to the Beatles. <br /><br />…and we’re not done yet, that was just the punks! Conrad Schnitzler, founder member of Kluster and Tangerine Dream, called them his favourite band. When Joy Division turned into New Order and took up electronics, they emulated Hawkwind. The Orb recorded a tribute called Orbwind. <br /><br />Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions saw Hawkwind as the primary influence on Industrial and Noise music: “This is something that they rarely mention in the press, as Hawkwind have this reputation as a British ‘hippie band’… Whereas if they were a German hippie band… Zoviet France have told me they were very keen on Hawkwind. SPK were well into Hawkwind back in Australia… Hawkwind were the first band I was aware of to popularise the idea of sonic attack - infra and ultra sound as a weapon… Whenever I saw Throbbing Gristle I thought ‘Hawkwind without the lights and without the tunes’.” <i>(‘Sound Projector’ </i>7, 2000) <br /><br />In fact Throbbing Gristle, then trading as COUM Transmissions, played their first gig supporting Hawkwind. Even after becoming TG, they traded under the description “post-psychedelic trash”, while Simon Reynolds describes their sound (quite accurately) as “psychedelia inverted”. <br /><br />Want to experience the vastness of space? Don’t hand over your savings to Branson or Bezos. Just get hold of these three albums, and you’ll be out there in no time. <br /><br /><i>“The streets were our oyster, <br />“We smoked urban poison, <br />“And we turned all this noise on, <br />“We knew how to fight. <br />“We dropped out and tuned in, <br />“Spoke secret jargon, <br />“And we would not bargain, <br />“For what we had found, <br />“In the days of the underground” </i><br />- <i>‘Days Of The Underground’</i><br /><br /><i>Otherwise unattributed quotes are from Joe Banks’ ‘</i>Hawkwind: Days Of the Underground’<i> (Strange Attractor Press), which is a labour of love - with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.</i></span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-53950711653184776772023-08-19T10:42:00.005+01:002023-08-19T10:42:46.384+01:00THOSE DEAD MAN’S BLUES (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)<br /><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9PxEn0OaiwDTLBSCVonJoMZJouxYNncN6eWbCDxqYe5AJLJ3fSJiba6a7Q-LonEd5xNDfdKffMqsXpMlJ0hfP9PONSTPJnqLUyf-rKPhM1Aesm9G-cwr8RI4YolBfgy1XXs3-DJMeiaVcEgTqUfSnP8HgLtL-ba2OaqphQUZJTHul7FzlwyE3onH3IRt/s528/7.ThoseDeadMan'sBluesJoseGuadalupePosada2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="303" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9PxEn0OaiwDTLBSCVonJoMZJouxYNncN6eWbCDxqYe5AJLJ3fSJiba6a7Q-LonEd5xNDfdKffMqsXpMlJ0hfP9PONSTPJnqLUyf-rKPhM1Aesm9G-cwr8RI4YolBfgy1XXs3-DJMeiaVcEgTqUfSnP8HgLtL-ba2OaqphQUZJTHul7FzlwyE3onH3IRt/s16000/7.ThoseDeadMan'sBluesJoseGuadalupePosada2.png" /></a></div><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6JMFdkPs5f9YG2e0tiuilw?si=435fa271bb25492c" target="_blank">Another Spotify playlist</a> now up for your amusement and delicitation. With a suitable illo from Mexican printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada. They’re developing more and more of a death theme, it seems. Well, that’s life. </div><br />John Cale: If You Were Still Around <br />Mclusky: Whiteliberalonwhiteliberalaction <br />Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger: Aikendrum <br />Tunng: These Winds <br />Judy Dunlop + Ashley Hutchings: The Oak <br />Richard & Linda Thompson: Beat The Retreat <br />Bert Jansch: Poison <br />R.E.M.: Old Man Kensey <br />Robert Plant: Monkey <br />PJ Harvey: The Glorious Land <br />The Angels Of Light: Sunset Park <br />CAN: Soul Desert <br />The Waterboys: Medicine Jack <br />Julian Cope: Ain’t No Gettin' Round Gettin' Round <br />Faust: Tell The Bitch To Go Home <br /><br /><i>"Well here's the truth about Medicine Jack, <br />He painted his face and his whole shack black, <br />He went up in the woods and he never came back, <br />He must have got too close to the railroad track." </i><br /><br />See y’all sometime in September… <br /></span><br /></div></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-29058423941332301862023-08-12T11:02:00.002+01:002023-10-10T18:01:44.916+01:00'THE INHERITORS’ BY WILLIAM GOLDING<span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>(The final instalment of <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/p/mutants-are-our-future.html" target="_blank">Pariah Elites</a>. Beware, prehistoric PLOT SPOILERS lie below!)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8LDjL8HW8-h2xMCqIGKqGhrahF9KI1glHXQkIuEL63jLSPxLsGWy7HtdU6TtwQnMN5mF9bD0Py-7HyanGQSo-SfvmQxusBLzEaxptrMFq4e4IlqkDNTVjZ5twiQn0_uLfR7i3OoRPen3yG6CWlgrpBoY7X63oYNgd7x-83SwdNSbAuAfaEupOCreyObNK/s804/1.Inheritors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8LDjL8HW8-h2xMCqIGKqGhrahF9KI1glHXQkIuEL63jLSPxLsGWy7HtdU6TtwQnMN5mF9bD0Py-7HyanGQSo-SfvmQxusBLzEaxptrMFq4e4IlqkDNTVjZ5twiQn0_uLfR7i3OoRPen3yG6CWlgrpBoY7X63oYNgd7x-83SwdNSbAuAfaEupOCreyObNK/s16000/1.Inheritors.jpg" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Here is a picture. Someone is - other. Not one of the people.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Seeing The Picture</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />William Golding always cited his second novel, <i>’The Inheritors’, </i>(1955) as his favourite, even it it never achieved the recognition awarded its predecessor <i>’Lord Of the Flies’.</i> It’s centred on the people, a pre-human group from stone age times. And tells of their encounter with the new people, modern humans. Now surely such a thing cannot belong in a series on pariah elites, alongside van Vogt potboilers? Don’t be so fast… <br /><br />Its distinction is to be written not just from the perspective of the people, but in an approximation of the language they would have used. Or, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/16/the-inheritors-william-golding-neanderthal-novel-60-years" target="_blank">as Golding’s daughter Judy more accurately put it</a>: “my father uses our language to show the lives of people who don’t really have it.” And accordingly every sentence, whether prose or dialogue, deepens our understanding of the people. <br /><br />The language is therefore simple and direct, at points almost reading like stage directions. But still with something evocative to it: <br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“The red creature turned to the right and trotted slowly towards the far end of the terrace. Water was cascading down the rocks beyond the terrace from the melting ice in the mountains. The river was high and flat and drowned the edge of the terrace.”</i><br /><br />And they speak so simply and directly, of course, because they lead a simple and direct life, chiefly based around foraging. <br /><br /><i>“Life was fulfilled, there was no need to look farther for food, to-morrow was secure and the day after that was so remote that no one would bother to think of it.”</i><br /><br />Their perspective is in many ways child-like, including ascribing sentience to objects if they’re seen moving. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />But the best-known aspect of this is their communicating via ‘pictures’, as in their phrase “I see/ do not see that picture.” This suggests two things, that they have not ventured far into abstract thought, and that idea and memory are not separated. Stuck with a problem they assume it must have been encountered before, so the answer will lie in the past. While “this is a new thing” is said like a curse. Though we casually use phrases such as “I see what you mean”, there is something transportive about this. I first heard it decades ago, in a TV documentary on Golding, and found it has remained in my head ever since. <br /><br />At the same time, their other senses are so acute they are described as having their own autonomy. For example, Lok’s feet are “clever” in dodging obstacles as he runs, while at another point “Lok’s ears spoke to Lok” but he doesn’t hear them as he’s asleep. They follow a trail less by visual clues than by scent, and can become so locked into the task their other senses barely register with them. <br /><br />And speaking of Lok… His name is literally the first word of the novel and we stay with him right up until the penultimate chapter. The slowest-witted of the adult people, often in a state of “obedient dumbness”, he therefore becomes an unreliable narrator. Events are described through him faithfully but not always comprehendingly. We’re often required to read past his words to understand what’s actually going on. At points, others in the group are required to explain to him, and thereby us, what’s really happening. <br /><br />But also, what he doesn’t perceive is as important as what he does. For example, when he first sees the new people he assumes they have “bone faces”. Which turns out to be their skin, but in the hitherto unfamiliar shade of white. <br /><br />He hears the new people’s chatter, of course incomprehensible to him. But he continues to assume they can understand him. And he’s similarly unable to comprehend their hostility, like a schoolboy unable to take in that he’s being bullied, let alone do something about it. When they fire an arrow at him, he first assumes they must be sending him a gift. <br /><br />But let’s ask an awkward question. If written through him so comprehensively, why isn’t it written as if <i>by</i> him, in the first person? Instead the novel opens more cinematically, the members of the tribe as brought into view one by one as they enter a setting. And at this point, emotions are given visual indicators. (“The grin faded and his mouth opened till the lower lip hung down.”) Though internal states do creep in as it progresses. (“Quite suddenly he was swept up by a tide of happiness and exultation.”) <br /><br />The answer is this novel can’t be too centred on an individual, because it’s about a collective. Lok would not have seen himself as a discrete being, but as a part of the people. In one passage, heading on an errand, he looks back on the rest of the group from a vantage point where he’s no longer visible to them: <br /><br /><i>“All at once Lok was frightened because she had not seen him. The old woman knew so much; yet she had not seen him. He was cut off and no longer one of the people; as though his communion with the other had changed him. He was different from them and they could not see him. He had no words to formulate these thoughts but he felt his difference and invisibility as a cold wind that blew on his skin.”</i><br /><br />And this is not in reaction to being lost or exiled, just temporarily separate. Later when he first sees the others he recoils into the comforting sense of being one of the people: <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“They came in, closer and closer, not as they would come into the overhang, recognising home and being free of the whole space; they drove in until they were being joined to him, body to body. They shared a body as they shared a picture. Lok was safe.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Then, right at the end of the novel, one section switches over to impersonal narration. For the first time we see Lok rather than see through him. (“A strange creature, smallish and bowed.”) At this point he’s the only one of his people left, bar a stolen baby. And, as he cannot exist alone, he’s effectively already dead. He’s described objectively because he’s become an object. When the root they’ve made the totem of their deity, Oa, is described simply as a tree root its heartbreaking, but heartbreaking precisely because its an unarguable truth. <br /><br />There’s a section in Wyndham’s <i>’Day Of the Triffids’ </i>(1951) which parallels this: <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole: a freak without a place…no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.”</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPqppEnjclRhkmCoOV-RSFLXOHMxIPqV8anbQ7dUwyMCWyBEV-NU2euEN3AKxgNltSdQjHIauu-1Pk2zPE7ptu49jW1x3SeS83NRCvO1riRYySI9_EzG62rovdHCvMiFOTWllUpYlTQWm9ooMJZSpbu6TTd1lKBIb5MoZ5fWf3cOjosQ7wGL9gcaNR5aNX/s816/4.Inheritors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPqppEnjclRhkmCoOV-RSFLXOHMxIPqV8anbQ7dUwyMCWyBEV-NU2euEN3AKxgNltSdQjHIauu-1Pk2zPE7ptu49jW1x3SeS83NRCvO1riRYySI9_EzG62rovdHCvMiFOTWllUpYlTQWm9ooMJZSpbu6TTd1lKBIb5MoZ5fWf3cOjosQ7wGL9gcaNR5aNX/s16000/4.Inheritors.jpg" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">This communion also manifests in a profound empathy. When the old man of the group falls in the freezing river “the group of people crouched round Mal and shared his shivers.” They’re doing more than warming him with their body heat. They see no particular distinction from if they had fallen into the river. ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ isn’t a credo to aspire to, it’s a functional feature of their lives. <br /><br />Their ‘telepathy’ must be seen as stemming from here. Though that’s the term commonly used by commentators, and it would best suit this series, I’m not sure it’s quite right. Certainly not in the sense of a phoneless phone call. There’s a sense shared between them which is a combination of suggestibility and empathy. They share the same experiences which frame their thought, so share much the same thought, so can project their ‘pictures’ between brows. And the suggestion can travel because it is non-verbal, akin to the way a simple phrase can get communicated across a bad connection. <br /><br />And what’s crucial here is that the people do not lose something nebulous such as ‘innocence’, even if that’s how the book is often described. They lose tangible things, a group bond and a perspective on the world perhaps beyond what we can imagine. <br /><br />None of this is to suggest they lack individuality, or fail to see any sense of it in each other. Fa is clearly more acute than Lok. She not only works out before him the threat the new people pose, she hides from him her own realisation that they’ve killed a child. It’s that they don’t see the significance in individuality that we do. <br /><br />The people are in an interchange between tribe and family group, from grandparents/elders down to infants. This was perhaps partly to make the cast list manageable, and partly to make them more sympathetic to Fifties audiences. (Golding’s daughter has suggested they were based on his own family.) Lineage is an unimportant question to them, subservient to if not overridden by the sense they are the people. Inferred from his actions, Liku must be Lok’s child, but he never refers to her as such.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVn9Mtx9L0oP2PsEiWl9XYSSn4X_iVhwrgSZqaH_QcbEvqhWtQdnLY6OWvDZsRHMjogs1ZhndhO_Hev6xNeo-3JviFVAWQJXxVpqyrgRyI4Aqpr0etILo3mDZAl2VlMGxw71HtuABLHiryRF8n0GsYKBxmk92IDu5vxtntRIT6JEMeehPNHCnLtH5y3uVV/s812/2.Inheritors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="812" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVn9Mtx9L0oP2PsEiWl9XYSSn4X_iVhwrgSZqaH_QcbEvqhWtQdnLY6OWvDZsRHMjogs1ZhndhO_Hev6xNeo-3JviFVAWQJXxVpqyrgRyI4Aqpr0etILo3mDZAl2VlMGxw71HtuABLHiryRF8n0GsYKBxmk92IDu5vxtntRIT6JEMeehPNHCnLtH5y3uVV/s16000/2.Inheritors.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>Are We the Baddies?</b><br /><br />How accurate is any of this? Golding seems to have told different tales over the years about the level of research he did. But we know he wrote the book quickly, and in the covering note originally sent to his publisher he confessed to doing little. Most likely, he simply relied on the knowledge he’d already absorbed and concentrated on writing. <br /><br />I’ve done no great deal of research either, but some seems solid enough. Contrary to a common error, the people are nomadic rather than itinerant. As the novel opens they’re travelling from their winter to their summer quarters, and on reaching there act like coming home. It’s explained in some detail how they’re able to harvest fire but not make it, so carefully carry embers around with them embedded in clay. <br /><br />We also discover they see it as sinful to hunt and kill, but acceptable to snatch already-dead prey from predators. Yet not only do we now know Neanderthals hunted, I’d not sure this mode of subsistence has existed anywhere. (Please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong!) <br /><br />In Golding’s day it was still accepted that Neanderthals lacked the culture and communication skills of the Cro-Magnons, and so were if not eliminated then out-competed by their more innovative cousins. The discoveries of subsequent years have not exactly been kind to these easy notions. It would seem truer to say they did things differently, rather than not at all. <br /><br />But then again, was this written as an exercise in scholarly accuracy? I do not see that picture. The Bible story of Cain slaying Abel is a kind of secondary Fall myth, where man turned against man and so became marked forever. It’s often regarded now as a mythologised retelling of hunting versus farming. This could be seen the same way, save that the stages represented are hunting versus gathering. We are better off reading it as a myth or fable than as a history of pre-history. <br /><br />So it doesn’t make much literal sense that Lok looks uncomprehendingly upon the new people bonking, when he’s almost certainly a father himself. Or that the new people are white, when as more recent arrivals from Africa they’d more likely have been darker skinned than the natives. But this is a work of fiction, which affects us via symbols. Lok looks upon the new people as a child would upon adults. And the new people need to remind us of us, at a time when Golding’s readers would have been almost entirely white. So white they are. <br /><br />How many times have you seen this trope in films? An exploratory mission is crossing a landscape, which seems devoid of life but turns out to contain hostile natives. The camera pans to their narrowed eyes, peering sinisterly from behind foliage. Golding reverses this, keeping the Cro-Magnons at a distance for almost the first half of the book. It progresses almost schematically, we see them first as distant murky shapes, very slowly getting closer to them. A whole chapter is given over to Lok and Fa observing their camp from hiding, literally reversing the standard perspective. <br /><br />And their lurking at the periphery of the people’s vision is highly effective dramatically. This book is as compelling a read as anything else in this series, despite the relative lack of gaudy pulp covers, rocket ships and missile strikes. <br /><br />The new people are compared to “when the fire flew away and ate up all the trees,” a collective trauma. But everyone instinctively runs from a fire, while they have something compelling about them. At one point Lok finds a flagon of their beer. Fa warns him off it, but he feels compelled to drink. “It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves.” Soon, intoxicated by it, he cries out he now <i>is</i> the new people. It’s like Pandora’s Box as a liquid. <br /><br />But of course all this raises the further question - why would we need such a fall myth be told? Despite what almost every writer in this series has assumed, evolution is not about linear progress but branching. Following one branch precludes the others, but that doesn’t make one branch objectively better. <br /><br />In which case, why does this persist? Why, if that ’out-competed’ theory about the Neanderthals was so baseless, was it so widespread for so long? Of course, because people wanted it to be true. A capitalist society will forever try to divide us up into two groups, the entrepreneurs and forward thinkers versus the passive non-adaptors, who need to be dragged along the march of progress. (As one example, in Britain the Tories currently favour the term “the blob” for any and all of their adversaries, with its connotations of an inert blocking mass.) It seems to make sense to us, and so we project it back through time. <br /><br />We serve ourselves up a fait accompli. The Cro-Magnons must surely have been innovators because they survived to become us. The Neanderthals cannot have been, because they died out. It’s a cross between doing down the neighbours and dissing the dead, in order to big ourselves up. And, in so doing, bestowing upon us an abundance of the things we regard as important. <br /><br />So stone age dramas most commonly become a version of the Robinson Crusoe myth. They set brutishness up against an embryonic form of civilisation, smarts trumping strength, as if this was the era we struggled to rid ourselves of alternately our childhood or our ‘animal-ness’. (With the two often lazily elided together.) <br /><br /><a href="https://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/8295/1/SM Inheritors Paper.pdf" target="_blank">As Susan Mandala has said:</a> “Scientific and fictional accounts of human evolution share the same basic structure and elements as fairy tales, with humans emerging as transcendent after overcoming a series of obstacles.” <br /><br />Meanwhile, over the other side of the fence, I have sometimes been treated to a hippie theory that spiritual, creative people (such as the Irish) were descended from Neanderthals and grasping, possessive types (aka the English) from Cro-Magnons. You may already be able to guess how accurate that is. As so often, the supposedly ‘alternative’ theory retains the mainstream concepts while somehow trying to invert the value system between them. <br /><br />Golding is not, of course, as foolish as that. The people don’t lead some Edenic life, but one periodically plagued by hunger. Fa, the brains of the outfit, is firmly told to stop having ideas because girls don’t do that sort of thing. But like the hippies he retains the concepts. Except in his case he asks what downside those advances might have brought with them, and devises a scenario which best demonstrates his concerns. <br /><br />The people live as part of the landscape. Lok’s reaction to returning to their summer camp is: “The river had not gone away either or the mountains. The overhang had waited for them. Everything had waited for them; Oa had waited for them. Even now she was pushing up the spikes of the bulbs, fattening the grubs, reeking the smells out of the earth, bulging the fat buds out of every crevice and bough.” <br /><br />While the new people impose themselves upon the landscape, chopping down trees, broadening paths to carry their canoes. Tools become cursed objects, functionally useful but separating their wielder from the world, imposing upon them a utilitarian mindset. What makes them more civilised also makes them more savage. (Disclaimer: the people will use rocks and sticks as tools, in an impromptu manner, but do little to fashion them and don’t hang on to them after their immediate function is served. The only exception seems to be the thorn bushes they hold onto as defensive weapons.) <br /><br /><a href="https://ellethinks.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/the-inheritors-by-william-golding/" target="_blank">Ellethinks saw the distinctive thing about the new people as their use of abstract language,</a> focusing on a scene where their onset stimulates linguistic concepts even in Lok. (And, though she doesn’t say so, to a greater degree in the smarter Fa, who’s able to devise a pincer assault on the new people.) This is a valuable point, but in itself insufficient. There must have been a means by which the new people were able to develop this enhanced language, it can’t by itself have instigated their difference from the people. It must be effect, not cause. <br /><br />The final chapter switches to follow Tuami, one of the new people. They have taken the people’s baby. (Though I don’t think it was known then that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals interbred.) He whittles at a knife he is making, whose handle will be half of the baby and half one of his own people. When it’s finished he intends to kill the group leader and usurp his role. The last line is “he could not see if the line of darkness had an ending.”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieOJKWYkLNJBEytDyR7IjwtsfBVWJfw6xTngMYM3-YeIRTsg4Gp7p4NcRF7vC9I7MnUniSFGS_glDrHNR7usbw-Fd7Oskx1OlWxW9TMmjM81tKoHJjL0CDqsz36te9Qwsq1J9vMaQqG5R1Eo7AQOGO2PKZDYaivDyLndE1pOTSMk8K4lcJiLcss0AusmVY/s873/3.Inheritors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="873" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieOJKWYkLNJBEytDyR7IjwtsfBVWJfw6xTngMYM3-YeIRTsg4Gp7p4NcRF7vC9I7MnUniSFGS_glDrHNR7usbw-Fd7Oskx1OlWxW9TMmjM81tKoHJjL0CDqsz36te9Qwsq1J9vMaQqG5R1Eo7AQOGO2PKZDYaivDyLndE1pOTSMk8K4lcJiLcss0AusmVY/s16000/3.Inheritors.jpg" /></a></div><br /></span><b style="font-family: verdana;">The Yesterday People</b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />So to return to the initial question, does this belong? There’s one obvious similarity to other Pariah Elite novels. If in varying degrees, they try to capture in prose how the world would look to a differently working mind. But that’s a partial likeness at best. And Golding’s pessimism seems entirely at odds with the teleological optimism of something like <i>’The Tomorrow People’. </i><br /><br />And yet for all that they’re remarkably similar. Not just in their nascent form of telepathy, but their collective identity (that shared use of “people” is scarcely a co-incidence) which is enough of an erosion of the self/other distinction to turn them from violence. <a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2022/04/yesterday-came-suddenly.html" target="_blank">Andrew Rilstone smartly said</a> that for all their jaunting and telekinesis “the Tomorrow People's main power is that they are <i>nice</i>.” <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>’The Tomorrow People’</i> portrays us in a state of becoming, for the nice will inherit the earth. While the people are effectively the Yesterday People, the last of the nice. But Golding’s pessimism isn’t absolute. He doesn’t say the line of darkness had no ending, only that Tuami could not at that point see it. The knife he makes is dualistic, and Neanderthal DNA still lies within us. We may see that picture yet.</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-51478867724245596532023-08-05T10:39:00.001+01:002023-08-05T10:39:57.527+01:00‘THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS’ BY JOHN WYNDHAM <span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><i>(The latest in our look at Pariah Elites in fiction. Again with PLOT SPOILERS. First instalment <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-future-rulers-of-world-ae-van-vogts.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i> Full list <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/p/mutants-are-our-future.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgodk66vrICgEx6b_MLGSgDpk6VqeX9_AQONSfAlReNuHb4iFrFM4oaJcL3L8h4Gu638bPd7PW7Ottoz_HsZ_oDR6yBivVYfg5vEOSY2ROao7BhzCBbUq5wGla2RtdnPpIxLDA8E6Y1nyyNhN0BPxtazK1LVMYHoCWTNuO_QT-IpWViANHLoZZ_bdP09Fye/s724/1.the-midwich-cuckoos-john-wyndham-penguin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgodk66vrICgEx6b_MLGSgDpk6VqeX9_AQONSfAlReNuHb4iFrFM4oaJcL3L8h4Gu638bPd7PW7Ottoz_HsZ_oDR6yBivVYfg5vEOSY2ROao7BhzCBbUq5wGla2RtdnPpIxLDA8E6Y1nyyNhN0BPxtazK1LVMYHoCWTNuO_QT-IpWViANHLoZZ_bdP09Fye/s16000/1.the-midwich-cuckoos-john-wyndham-penguin.jpg" /></a></div><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Who are these children? There’s something about the way they look at one with those curious eyes. They are - strangers, you know.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”In Arcadian Indistinction”</b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />So John Wyndham wrote <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-chrysalids-by-john-wyndham.html" target="_blank">‘The Chrysalids’</a>, a commentary on the generation gap via the metaphor of psi powers. Which could be summed up a one-nil to youth. But, fifty-two when this was published and not necessarily down with the kids, he essentially played out the scenario again - and in reverse. <i>’The Midwich Cuckoos’ </i>(1957) was to take on the perspective of the parents. <br /><br />Should you not know the plot… everyone in the rustic village of Midwich is struck asleep at once. And when they awake, all the women have become pregnant. (Even the virgins, in what cannot feel other than a twist on immaculate conception.) And the children they carry turn out to be cuckoo-like aliens, sporting.. you may be ahead here… enhanced mental powers. If <i>'The Chrysalids’ </i>could be reduced to the line “they cannot tolerate our rise”, this would be ‘Adults come from Earth, children from Venus.’ <br /><br />Brecht’s plays <i>‘He Who Says Yes’ </i>and <i>‘He Who Says No’ </i>(both 1930) rehearse twin arguments, whether a child should or should not be left behind for the greater good. But he rigs the odds each time, introducing different criteria which determine each of the courses of action, undermining any actual comparisons. And this is essentially what Wyndham does in these two books. <br /><br />(I rather like the idea of two novels looking at the same events, one from one side’s perspective, the other from the norms. As if such divergent views couldn’t be contained within one cover. But that’s not at all what Wyndham has done.) <br /><br />First and most obviously, we have the change in setting to <i>’The Chrysalids’</i> - back to more familiar territory in about every way. As we’ve looked at before on this blog, as one of the first countries to urbanise Britain developed a culture which venerated rural life. More than Big Ben or Saint Pauls, the Post Office and the bicycled bobby were our symbols. Wartime films such as <i>’Went The Day Well?’</i> (1942) showed rustic villages being taken over by foreign invaders not as some staging-post to London, but as if the heart of the nation was already seized. <br /><br />And Wyndham does something similar with his more alien disturbing of Midwich’s restive calm. The first chapter reads like one of those spotters’ guides to English villages, pointing out the age of the apse in the local Church, so beloved to my parents. (He wrote much of the novel in the Hampshire village of Steep, as if gazing out the window for location information. The nearby, and similar-sounding, Midhurst has also been suggested as a source.) <br /><br />Had none of the events in <i>’The Chrysalids’ </i>happened, it would still have been a dystopia. Not just for the powered children, objectively a dystopia. Instead it’s their telepathy which offers a route out of the situation. Whereas, had none of the events in <i>’Midwich Cuckoos’ </i>happened, had none of the Children arrived, English villagers would have led lives of, in Wyndham’s phrase, “Arcadian indistinction”. <br /><br /><a href="https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2013/12/22/the-chrysalids-and-the-midwich-cuckoos-by-john-wyndham/" target="_blank">Murray Ewing describes Wyndham’s writing style as “analgesic”. </a>But its in Midwich where he goes into analgesic overdrive. The horror of the situation doesn’t rear up, it creeps up on you, slowly and remorselessly. <br /><br /><i>’Day of The Triffids’ </i>had a weight of backstory to convey, but front loaded action before filling us in. This book devotes much time to explaining what happened in Midwich before the incident, which boil down to “nothing much”. Which may lay it on a little. The first six chapters, the first quarter of the book, tellingly have Midwich in their name. And only in the last of these do the mass pregnancies even happen. Though, inevitably, we now know what comes next and are in a hurry to get there. Wyndham’s intended reader didn’t, and so quite possibly wasn’t.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmE37jcWo0bhntVviUhVgnDuNuLovwnBXyl35DRJ6qFL53q1nwgo31HQGE6VOTRgRUvN2hB7_C1y4JP-bHcesM3A_SlW-yARcuiZhDEY-hDbbZlw6Lk8O5FZ3q-wqZYOxfivvNn-6WqaE3c1I3HgSOctgAWKhy4q1h7niK1tLystT9GhxjRS0BfbbE1j-S/s728/2.wyndham_midwich_cuckoos.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmE37jcWo0bhntVviUhVgnDuNuLovwnBXyl35DRJ6qFL53q1nwgo31HQGE6VOTRgRUvN2hB7_C1y4JP-bHcesM3A_SlW-yARcuiZhDEY-hDbbZlw6Lk8O5FZ3q-wqZYOxfivvNn-6WqaE3c1I3HgSOctgAWKhy4q1h7niK1tLystT9GhxjRS0BfbbE1j-S/s16000/2.wyndham_midwich_cuckoos.jpg" /></a></div><br />Further, <i>’Triffids’ </i>stuck rigidly to its narrator’s perspective. For around half the book, he’s trying to find his love interest and we don’t know where she is because he doesn’t. <i>’Chrysalids’ </i>isn’t so rigid because of the telepathy conceit, but has times when other characters fall out of contact with the narrator. <br /><br />This book has a first-person narrator too. But there’s whole chapters he’s not present for, sections which go on so long you forget about him until he’s back. (There’s a brief ‘explanation’ he’s recounting events he was told of later.) At times, you’d be forgiven for thinking his presence was some sort of contractual obligation, which only required honouring formally. <br /><br />Why the difference? If narrated by a Midwich local, this book has the village’s voice. Because this is not one person’s story, its the village’s story. With the assumption Midwich stands for the Home Counties, which stand for England, which stand for Britain. While we may react with derision to such a notion now, readers at the time would have taken this for granted. And its done because this is a story about our species encountering another. There needs to be a way this is conveyed collectively. <br /><br />But things are taken further than that, and for their own reasons… <br /><br />Mostly, one character relays events to some of the others, which they then discuss which something not far from philosophical detachment. Throughout, events occur at a distance - reported on, or sometimes elided over. Both <i>’Triffids’ </i>and <i>’Chrysalids’ </i>are rip-roaring action-adventures by comparison. <br /><br />Advice is dispatched by Zellaby, some sort of public intellectual, the pipe-puffing equivalent of Dr. Vorless from <i>’Triffids’. </i>(It’s surprising how many relate him to Coker, it’s definitely Vorless.) However, Vorless’ authority is effectively conveyed by his only appearing once, giving us our instructions and going. Whereas here its not the narrator but Zellaby’s perspective which dominates, which is of interested, detached contemplation But as we see him through the narrator this distances him further. We’re told: “as so often with Zellaby, the gap between theory and practical circumstances seemed too inadequately bridged.” <br /><br />To use a term Graham Greene was fond of, this is a story of an involvement. The whole book can often feel like one of his many discourses, speculating and ruminating. At first he sees the changed Children purely as a fascinating object for study. But in the end… quite literally at the end he has to take himself out of his former existence, pontificating in studies before the dinner gong goes off, and get to grips with events. From thought to deed. <br /><br /><b>But Won’t Somebody Please Worry About the Children?</b><br /><br />Zellaby is given to saying such things as “the desirability of intermittent periods of social rigidity for the purpose of curbing the subversive energies of a new generation.” Presumably to be brought about by the power of polysllabery alone. Or, at another point… <br /><br /><i>“The true fruit of this century has little interest in coming to living-terms with innovations; it just greedily grabs them all as they come along. Only when it encounters something really big does it become aware of a social problem at all, and then, rather than make concessions, it yammers for the impossibly easy way out, uninvention, suppression - as in the matter of The Bomb.”</i><br /><br />(And we should note all of this gets settled by means of a bomb.) <br /><br />The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed the year this book was published. And Midwich’s, and therefore the novel’s, resident intellectual is here to tell us how foolish the demands of those ban-the-bombers are. Though to be clear, they aren’t being compared to the Children. Instead, they’re part of the problem the Children are able to exploit. Lives of post-war ease and comfort have left them ill-equipped for this struggle. <br /><br />Why this desire to dunk on the new generation? One barometer of this would be the increase in higher education. Though the rise would curve up more steeply in the Sixties, the trend had already begun. And higher education offered youth something much closer to a space of their own than the parental home or workplace. The era where your children simply grew to replace you as you wore out, new parts to be slipped in the same mechanism, that was was coming to a close.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhedkkfLtfrAmJWLAMQLZxAWlELjrvS0uk-VVFOLTY8W8wDXlW2KThQRTwN8cPYPFHSq0l09yMmgr_rR5fBqr4yZH0IZor-OkpGnQ0ISrNKde1Zf87zQZ6NqbXR8C-RcpzvpYOzc965p3VwyWQjzCTKls64jzphPh7rpjxTp2NZrwGaowov9cb3S5cnXgT2/s528/3a.Filmstill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhedkkfLtfrAmJWLAMQLZxAWlELjrvS0uk-VVFOLTY8W8wDXlW2KThQRTwN8cPYPFHSq0l09yMmgr_rR5fBqr4yZH0IZor-OkpGnQ0ISrNKde1Zf87zQZ6NqbXR8C-RcpzvpYOzc965p3VwyWQjzCTKls64jzphPh7rpjxTp2NZrwGaowov9cb3S5cnXgT2/s16000/3a.Filmstill.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitx5t5GU3cdXxDL1-3VgaVMekqSOhyq25fSTi8_o6q9eFdgnojLiAfDL4p_zUMVpBKh3dJ_fUG0tj5KBHrS-jV4CkzEhugs3XZDc6peFg_TjlygURUpXgL6-dSVnPCRxBwBSuHtubMCFww0VqteDcd5N9Fg6wkJQdw8Vdq2Bslyz8VC1WYfMKiWrCXs5-T/s515/3b.An%20Unearthly%20Child.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="515" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitx5t5GU3cdXxDL1-3VgaVMekqSOhyq25fSTi8_o6q9eFdgnojLiAfDL4p_zUMVpBKh3dJ_fUG0tj5KBHrS-jV4CkzEhugs3XZDc6peFg_TjlygURUpXgL6-dSVnPCRxBwBSuHtubMCFww0VqteDcd5N9Fg6wkJQdw8Vdq2Bslyz8VC1WYfMKiWrCXs5-T/s16000/3b.An%20Unearthly%20Child.jpg" /></a></div><br /></div>As an example, compare a still from the film (more of which anon) to another teacher-and-pupil image, from <i>’An Unearthly Child’, </i>the first ever episode of <i>’Doctor Who’.</i> <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2013/11/william-hartnells-doctor-who-unearthly.html" target="_blank">About which I once said:</a> “The focus is less on Susan than the fascination she exerts over her teachers… [they] stand behind, looking to her. But she gazes out of the frame as if it’s a world which doesn’t contain her… expression inscrutable.” (As also said at the time, her mystery is beguiling not threatening, a significant difference. But the similarity between the images is still striking.) <br /><br />While one Penguin cover frames a single Child in the foreground, again looking away from his environment, in the all-black outfit stereotypical to Beatniks.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-EmxcKEg3iXGK1riTnVg7b4GrzUTisQZ_a4yYoN7yYFWXh44Dq5UtKomP7MNhpvatt2pMVQ5p_6UmfYl3Uoydg09pSqOfxdGkbSfh_gIi8AaS_B9Qzr7hMDk4aWfVWMsji8721mMxtrzfj9haDYkNHPtn4nKPWAKtwUDl2rJQIiIq75DhV0h59Rc27l8I/s831/4.Midwich%20Cuckoos%20Beatnik.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="831" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-EmxcKEg3iXGK1riTnVg7b4GrzUTisQZ_a4yYoN7yYFWXh44Dq5UtKomP7MNhpvatt2pMVQ5p_6UmfYl3Uoydg09pSqOfxdGkbSfh_gIi8AaS_B9Qzr7hMDk4aWfVWMsji8721mMxtrzfj9haDYkNHPtn4nKPWAKtwUDl2rJQIiIq75DhV0h59Rc27l8I/s16000/4.Midwich%20Cuckoos%20Beatnik.jpeg" /></a></div><br />However, <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-future-rulers-of-world-ae-van-vogts.html" target="_blank">as with van Vogt’s slans</a>, the Children develop faster than regular kids and so are of indeterminate age. In some, this leads to a tendency to take their oldest age and go into moral panics about the teenager, juvenile delinquency and so on. But this tendency shouldn’t be over-indulged. Much of the book is about the disturbing effect of them being simultaneously the Children and regular children. <br /><br />Some themes are era-specific, others universal. And for something that’s universal, try this. You have a child. You created them from yourself, and yet they’re someone else. They arrive as a stranger to you. You cannot simply impose your will on them like they’re a remote limb of yours. Changeling stories unsurprisingly go back into folklore. (And get referenced here.) <br /><br />Yet, as is often, this universal theme had an era-specific context. Dr. Spock’s manual <i>’Baby and Child Care’</i> had been influential on post-war attitudes. He asked parents to take their cues from children rather than impose a routine on them, ‘demand feeding’ becoming almost a byword for his school of thought. This was based on the idea that a child’s actions should be seen as natural and normal. And the inevitable phobia which came from this reassuring voice was an ‘otherly’ child, who was not and could not be explicable to you. <br /><br />And yet who is missing from this perspective? Who is definitely not detached, and from the off? <br /><br /><i>“It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way - so what sort of an idea can he have of this? - Of how it feels to like awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? - As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator…. And then to go on wondering… what, just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels - how could you? It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall.”</i><br /><br />Which seems so central to the main conceit that surely the whole thing would have been much more effective if our central character had been a woman. Yet of course here this is effectively a short-term plot obstacle, an attack of the vapours by Zellaby’s wife, to be overcome by reassuring male voices. And - par for the course - even this isn’t actually said by a woman, it’s Zellaby reporting his wife’s words. <br /><br />The narrator has a wife too, but she is un-induced due to a plot device. While the child of Zellaby’s wife, despite the outburst above, turns out to be normal. His daughter does have a changed child, but he succeeds in sending her away from Midwich and thereby out of the novel. In short Wyndham seems to signpost this road, then baulk at the prospect and instead detour around it. So if analysts don’t seem to talk about this theme much, its submerged in the book itself. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>”The Eyes That Shine"</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTImVciVYB6aVOaouE7Ss8qrR7OfA9b8JOfZY9Oo4bpCDWbPwljtMSxc3QBKr7vwtNd-lIs2CYFp2gZMuqmBPr-h7vVmqyvzjicW-5-JJ-yGOdvIvVpyZ3IEHYeJKhMTP2dtclGdV14mC8cDLWkzFy9hAkWNPrrHUkZQcaJ2Cicoc3yekZNrHnLjuE2g98/s845/5.MidiwchCuckoosFilmCover.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="845" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTImVciVYB6aVOaouE7Ss8qrR7OfA9b8JOfZY9Oo4bpCDWbPwljtMSxc3QBKr7vwtNd-lIs2CYFp2gZMuqmBPr-h7vVmqyvzjicW-5-JJ-yGOdvIvVpyZ3IEHYeJKhMTP2dtclGdV14mC8cDLWkzFy9hAkWNPrrHUkZQcaJ2Cicoc3yekZNrHnLjuE2g98/s16000/5.MidiwchCuckoosFilmCover.jpeg" /></a></div></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />The book was the first work of Wyndham’s to be filmed, in 1960. A film about as successful as the later adaptation of <i>’Triffids' </i>was a failure. But that success may have led to it over-imprinting itself on the book in our minds. One edition used a film still on the cover, not something ever done with <i>’Triffids’.</i> (And yes, it’s the image we looked at earlier.) <br /><br />In general the differences are effectively conveyed by the change in title, to <i>’Village of the Damned’.</i> The film’s much more dramatic and suspenseful, a streamlining of the sometimes languid novel. And if that sounds like a good thing, it probably is. It demonstrates how much of the book can be cut without losing anything essential, how much the analgesia was over-applied. The problem is, the film’s success is largely on its own terms.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVz3Re6r8HRfy5k9lt5qwI0-f2JHDWEGzlxOfXpM-0R2xKMoYIvONg8_yjLWj_TRvr_OpVTX0EHj9HOdBN0OjIjSf8btePRUNmRyozHu1Ez2VAs72jhJZisQZE5slAtd7PFp-eSKNS6zsNL8x-gsac17BhS-mLcrCFAKMEqbwqQys8sAolrhQtp6MoeOId/s792/6.VillageOftheDamnedposter.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="792" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVz3Re6r8HRfy5k9lt5qwI0-f2JHDWEGzlxOfXpM-0R2xKMoYIvONg8_yjLWj_TRvr_OpVTX0EHj9HOdBN0OjIjSf8btePRUNmRyozHu1Ez2VAs72jhJZisQZE5slAtd7PFp-eSKNS6zsNL8x-gsac17BhS-mLcrCFAKMEqbwqQys8sAolrhQtp6MoeOId/s16000/6.VillageOftheDamnedposter.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Google Image ‘Village of the Damned 1960’ (to cut out the later version) and what dominates is those malevolent glowing eyes, lighting up whenever the Children use their sinister powers. <a href="https://youtu.be/-AUBlW5EWnI" target="_blank">The trailer opened with them</a> and they were spelt out on the film poster. (“Beware the stare that will paralyse the will of the world!”) <br /><br />In the book, in a not unusual motif, their strangeness also lies in their eyes. Yet in a characteristically quieter way, their eyes don’t light up but their irises are gold. (There are perhaps two phrases from the book which the film built on - “they had a quality of glowing gold” and “The… boy turned, and looked at us. His golden eyes were hard, and bright.”) Yet this film invention is present on almost all the later book covers. Only the 2000 Penguin edition keeps to the gold original.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTTnXVbRvBJxWPuLIegt1bg3iO4xVLYspz8-O7d2fKKha-i453GvzfCbSId5G4gW7Eb0LPtrsFx7j127gS7q-M8j05VIe7CzqC4gJpNCCeVuvzOsN_nAcKv9vXyg4gmzYbM9NCHIv9DTF2uE_diz1vfvaDpPi1uVMOQumuhDWOxvuaxUoeWULWahyxLMWt/s864/7a.Midwich_Cuckoos.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTTnXVbRvBJxWPuLIegt1bg3iO4xVLYspz8-O7d2fKKha-i453GvzfCbSId5G4gW7Eb0LPtrsFx7j127gS7q-M8j05VIe7CzqC4gJpNCCeVuvzOsN_nAcKv9vXyg4gmzYbM9NCHIv9DTF2uE_diz1vfvaDpPi1uVMOQumuhDWOxvuaxUoeWULWahyxLMWt/s16000/7a.Midwich_Cuckoos.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4JMxFdPI0zGMvFsMB1SNLm-SxT9JM2-oyycb1FnZWNq2ZJUBWcVSQIPaKLIuBMSj4ARiWGsE1MhZDH8Xms7iWW0pzhZkFWtkG0NaSZFNK_1915xgycat0SRQaah0k-M73ZVPeduxjUXz2JWGTVT4ToFI2l5J52effu1brdddumBjodjD-sZtNmFehhQbX/s683/7b.midwich+cuckoos+cover+final.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4JMxFdPI0zGMvFsMB1SNLm-SxT9JM2-oyycb1FnZWNq2ZJUBWcVSQIPaKLIuBMSj4ARiWGsE1MhZDH8Xms7iWW0pzhZkFWtkG0NaSZFNK_1915xgycat0SRQaah0k-M73ZVPeduxjUXz2JWGTVT4ToFI2l5J52effu1brdddumBjodjD-sZtNmFehhQbX/s16000/7b.midwich+cuckoos+cover+final.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMerG7zYw1G8TRkykK5AKQvlZQKTEAyMOoTblv-fQ7jpfEgKNSzF3W8wgwWWxe2qRTaGOXS-WJDFLsNvq-EuGR6pla23rwnTewGsPXMvjoo2PGPWvH4rWQTE8xKbn1j15SPmIBasxeX3O04HclCTsPE8HLBCpQVTOcKD3uipsqKp-zJbVOaaXZUvzudxuB/s796/7c.MidwichCuckoos2000.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMerG7zYw1G8TRkykK5AKQvlZQKTEAyMOoTblv-fQ7jpfEgKNSzF3W8wgwWWxe2qRTaGOXS-WJDFLsNvq-EuGR6pla23rwnTewGsPXMvjoo2PGPWvH4rWQTE8xKbn1j15SPmIBasxeX3O04HclCTsPE8HLBCpQVTOcKD3uipsqKp-zJbVOaaXZUvzudxuB/s16000/7c.MidwichCuckoos2000.jpeg" /></a></div><br /></div></div>Further, in the book they look alike. Not similar, not even like identical twins, more like clones, unrecognisable even by their birth mothers. There’s way more of them than in the film, in fact there’s fifty-eight. It becomes evident they share one mind. (“It will not be an individual who answers me, or performs what I ask, it will be an item of the group.”) <br /><br />They mostly wander Midwich in an undifferentiated mass, neither spoken to by nor speaking to anyone. Direct, sustained conversation with them doesn’t happen until more than two-thirds in. (And they influence us with a thought. Why would they bother to talk to us much?) And when they do speak they neither try to conceal their nature, not exult in their success. (“He spoke simply, and without innuendo, as one stating a fact.”) <br /><br />The film may well improve things by upping the stakes in giving Zellaby a changed son of his own. Amusingly called David, the same as the lead in <i>’The Chrysalids’. </i>(Though most likely only by coincidence.) Yet this takes away even as it gives, assigning the Children a natural leader and spokesman, undercutting their collective otherness. <br /><br />And if the dominant image of the film is the shiny eyes, the best-known scene is the final showdown - with the “I-must-think-of-a-brick-wall” business. Zellaby first wishes to break through the wall surrounding their minds and ends up building one to defend his own, his character arc in microcosm. (Its the briefcase, badge of his academic authority, that conceals the bomb.) <br /><br />But this is played entirely differently in the book. There, as the narrator phrases it, the Children become children again, trustingly carrying in what they believe is part of his film projector equipment. It becomes almost a variant of the “could you kill baby Hitler?” quandary. <br /><br />A dog reacts against baby David, as animals would in the later and more clear-cut horror <i>’The Omen’</i> (1976). Some versions of the film poster called them “Child-demons”. We’re explicitly told, in a actual dialogue quote, “these children are bad.” While Wyndham said, in a 1960 BBC interview, “they aren’t so evil in the original story”. <br /><br />In the film the children are invaders, if with a slightly different strategy to the usual march across Westminster Bridge. But in the book they have less a strategy than an assumption - their superiority and therefore their success are taken as self-evident, they just need to await victory. And in this way the parallels actually function, they are like <i>’The Chrysalids’, </i>in particular the Sealand woman who said “we cannot tolerate their obstruction”. As they say… <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“This is not a civilised matter, it is a primitive matter. If we exist, we shall dominate you — that is clear and inevitable. Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle?”</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /></i>While Zellaby comes to understand… <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“We, like the other lords of creation before us, will one day be replaced. There are two ways in which it can happen: either through ourselves, by our self-destruction, or by the incursion of some species which we lack the equipment to subdue. Well, here we are now.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The triffids may gesture towards weird fiction. Their way of being is wholly incomprehensible to us, even as they’re garden plants come to get us. While the Children, however strange and however powerful, have more explicable motivations. While still infants they punish their parents for accidentally harming them, ascribing motive to happenstance as children will. (One mother accidentally jabs her child with a safety pin while changing him, and he causes her to repeatedly jab her own arm.) <br /><br />Even when older, they tolerate us insofar as we don’t get in their way. They stretch our terms of reference, but they don’t lie wholly outside of them. And this is necessary for the theme of evolution to apply. The Children come next after us. <br /><br />Evolution was Wyndham’s theme, running (as we’ve seen) through all three of his main books. And there’s an odd paradox at the heart of this, for this “primitive matter” is simultaneously about who is the most evolved. In one sense, cosy Midwich is too evolved to deal with the problem of the Children, in that it’s too removed from the harsh imperatives of life. With nothing to threaten us, we’ve grown languid. The Children arrive to reassert the law of the jungle. (And Midwich’s civility is specifically posed as the problem. Children colonies are set up elsewhere but, foreign being a less well-behaved place, they’re soon wiped out.) <br /><br />And yet at the same time the Children are more evolved. Evolution is an advance, and they look down at us norms from the next step up the ladder. And yet (again), at the immediate level evolution presents itself as a kind of trial by combat, victors surviving from one day to the next. Evolution is simultaneously a gladiatorial contest, decided in the cut-and-thrust of the arena, and a foregone conclusion. <br /><br />Notably, both notions are widely considered part of evolution. Yet they’re pretty close to mutually exclusive. What’s more, if the first is true then the Children’s rise is inevitable. It would be like asking about the outcome of a knife fight where one brings a sharpened stone and the other a long-range missile. (And note Zellaby’s arc is not despair at the impossibility of resisting such a powerful foe, it’s about accepting his involvement in the battle of survival.) <br /><br />Yet if Wyndham was aware of this paradox, there’s no sign of it in the book. His theme is the effect of evolution on popular culture. Yet by definition that means the effect of popular notions of evolution. The fears and dreams it led to didn’t come from it, at least not directly, they were fears and dreams we conjured up ourselves then assigned to it. <br /><br />And speaking of winners and loser of evolution… well more of that in our final instalment…</span></div></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4202625234167413814.post-6415666337362682392023-07-29T12:08:00.000+01:002023-07-29T12:08:44.121+01:00'THE CHRYSALIDS’ BY JOHN WYNDHAM <span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>(Another look at Pariah Elites, with more PLOT SPOILERS.)</i></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrNMvherXFT92MDIwLg4QDXFIY9Al-zr39yah9tCNoE7hoLhBktMelofniTbsXh8lRb6DOyHgU9wT6SnG95DinzJpWwiPPnYwRkwZwVuw_yg6Mogvlxua16IXG1RYKwGD44zeP-Op1LoaxGAUAqUgj40yQjbtLjWl0wWyIEETVAcxyUnC4c1uNFp2illb5/s849/1.thechrysalidshand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="849" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrNMvherXFT92MDIwLg4QDXFIY9Al-zr39yah9tCNoE7hoLhBktMelofniTbsXh8lRb6DOyHgU9wT6SnG95DinzJpWwiPPnYwRkwZwVuw_yg6Mogvlxua16IXG1RYKwGD44zeP-Op1LoaxGAUAqUgj40yQjbtLjWl0wWyIEETVAcxyUnC4c1uNFp2illb5/s16000/1.thechrysalidshand.jpg" /></a></div><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>”Blessed is the norm! Watch thou for the mutant!”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br /><b>Deviation and Progress </b><br /><br />Brian Aldiss, not always Wyndham’s greatest fan, described <i>’The Chrysalids’ </i>(1955) as his best book. About which he may well be right. But in a more unarguable point, it’s about a pariah elite possessed of mutant powers. So it fits into our series like a six-fingered glove. <a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/p/mutants-are-our-future.html" target="_blank">(See here for list so far.)</a><br /><br />Then on the other hand... The original Penguin version of his breakthrough novel, <i>’Day of the Triffids’,</i> had described it as “a modified version of what is unhappily known as ‘science fiction’,” his earlier career in American pulps politely elided over. For his writings were now aimed squarely at the regular reader. Which means what has been our standard model, that mutant powers act as a metaphor to big up science fiction fans’ self-image, no longer applies. <br /><br />But that other hand may be six-fingered too. It only needs a little tweaking… <br /><br /><a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-words-we-used-to-use-john-wyndhams.html" target="_blank">As we saw last time,</a> <i>’Day of the Triffids’</i> essentially came from the culture of the Forties, even if it was published early in the next decade. But much of what makes a good popular writer is the ability to act as an antennae for the zeitgeizt. And this mid-Fifties book, conversely, looked forwards. If van Vogt’s credo was in essence “fans are slans” (even if he didn’t devise that phrase himself), Wyndham’s is “kids become butterflies, adults just stay grubs”. <br /><br />The conceit is similar enough to<a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-x-men-vs-tomorrow-people.html" target="_blank"> ‘The Tomorrow People’</a> for two different covers to use the same splayed-hand image as it had in its opening credits. But when that specified puberty as the point your powers manifested, here its a more general youth. And that wider range makes it a coming-of-age story. Powers increase with age and, significantly, its the youngest who is the most powerful. While even the older sister of protagonist David lacks them. <br /><br />In a later introduction, M. John Harrison commented on its appeal to the post-war generation: “They had more in common with each other than with their parents. Their social expectations were raised… they were in possession of a new language… the generation gap was opening up.” <br /><br />(Wyndham had gone to the ‘progressive’ public school Bedales, which a couple of generations later would be pretty much the type of background the leaders of the Sixties counter-culture came from.) <br /><br />This being post-nuclear world where only the margins remain inhabitable it’s set in Labrador, Northern Canada. Or a version of it. Much is made of this being Wyndham’s only work to have a fantasy setting. But what that really means is that it’s not set in contemporary South-East England. If strictly speaking it has no real-world equivalent it’s a setting we quickly recognise from elsewhere. It’s a Western, just one where the past-the-border badlands is populated by mutants rather than outlaws. Strictly speaking, it’s Western crossed with a pioneer town of devout Puritans as in <i>’The Crucible’ </i>(1953). But the two mingle easily enough, especially to us British readers. <br /><br />Labrador is more Kanas than Oz. And the abnormal, after all, only has meaning in relation to the normal, the mutation to the standard. <br /><br />Now, you may be about to say that Science Fiction is almost always relabelled Westerns. But this isn’t Flash Gordon, shootouts against a more exotic backdrop. It’s very much set in a material world where people till their own soil, fix their own carts, and hunt with bows and arrows (plus the occasional primitive gun). <br /><br />And this makes the introduction of telepathy juxtapositional, as strange an interruption to this world as it would be to ours. The adults are obsessed with rooting out ‘deviation’ (as they call mutation) but spend much of the novel looking for it in the wrong place, outer rather than inner, getting all het up over an extra toe. (The novel is somewhat fuzzy over when the young folk first recognise their powers will count as deviation.) <br /><br />Added to which, telepathy is the only one of the Tomorrow People’s three T’s to be incorporated. And here it means just mind-talk, no mental control or powers of suggestion. There’s a narrowing of unbelievable things, until there’s only one asking to be believed. Which is itself subject to material constraints, a point reiterated even if they’re hazily defined.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh68deAKBf2uBB3VkerPyDsjcf7cHwb6zOsK3a-QpYP_nN0YPkjLuZrncjfemJTBdlcaSc6wveglhcUEVE1bqULh14ktb0V4eECcR9J311IxUwiVi4txodm15GGRHTosOOeJgojXe0nZL7ISMyHXO20vwanwcI6BeHtxngdaad_NnPs6giFAkgZ-YGhzr4c/s807/2.ChrysalidsTree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="807" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh68deAKBf2uBB3VkerPyDsjcf7cHwb6zOsK3a-QpYP_nN0YPkjLuZrncjfemJTBdlcaSc6wveglhcUEVE1bqULh14ktb0V4eECcR9J311IxUwiVi4txodm15GGRHTosOOeJgojXe0nZL7ISMyHXO20vwanwcI6BeHtxngdaad_NnPs6giFAkgZ-YGhzr4c/s16000/2.ChrysalidsTree.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>”The Shortcomings Of Words"</b><br /><br />At the same time telepathy isn’t just phone calls without phones. Telepathy is qualitatively different, a higher form of communication… <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Even some of the things he did not understand properly himself became clearer when we all thought about them.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />Unlike all those other Ts, telepathy only works as a group power. Telepaths can only contact other telepaths. And this ‘thinking-together’ is about the young folk’s ability to immediately put their heads together, similar to Brian Eno’s dictum “everyone is smarter than anyone.” <br /><br />But it’s more than that… <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“I don’t suppose ‘normals’, who can never share their thoughts, can understand how we are so much more part of one another. What comprehension can they have..? Wwe don’t have to flounder among the shortcomings of words; it is difficult for us to falsify or pretend a thought even if we want to: on the other hand, it is almost impossible for us to misunderstand one another.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />We’re told that pre-apocalypse people "were shut off by different languages and different beliefs”, suggesting telepathy is a universal language that will by its nature overcome such divisions. True, there’s limits to this. We’re also told no-one can know David’s love interest Rosalind as well as him, even the other telepaths. But its simultaneously suggests that telepathy enables them to achieve a higher form of love, much as van Vogt did in <i>’Slan’.</i><br /><br />Wyndham’s ‘big three’ novels are surely this, <i>’Triffids’ </i>and (coming up) '<i>The Midwich Cuckoos’.</i> Yet while the others have been adapted multiple times, this has only had a 1981 radio version. And surely a main reason is the difficulty of visualising this ‘thinking-together’. <br /><br /><a href="https://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2022/02/from-monsters-to-mutants-x-men-vs.html" target="_blank">As with ‘The X-Men’,</a> their powers are essentially given a double explanation. Ostensibly they’re mutations due to post-nuclear radiation. But it would be hard not to see teleological evolution’s hand here too. And, as with the X-Men, these two explanations seem rather shoehorned together. In something closer to a ‘serious novel’ than a four-colour comic, where we might expect better. <br /><br />But they perform different tasks. The first is diegetic and plot-functional, to give the adults a reason to fear the children. The second is more symbolic, closer to a metaphor even within the story. To quote Harrison again: “Telepathy in fiction is often a metaphor for communication, for empathy, for an open style of human relationship.” <br /><br />For ‘thinking-together’ is set against a society predicated on conformity. (“The more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different.”) Labrador becomes a caricature of the ordered, rule-bound world of the Fifties, of strictly enforced dress codes and table manners, where the over-riding requirement is to fit in. <br /><br />And further to Harrison telepathy is also something of a metaphor for the reading experience, symbols placed in your head across a distance, showing you things as others see them, accessing what can feel like a higher level of space. And it can feel that others who don’t seem to get the same experience from reading as we do are in some way missing a sense, are mere norms.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpnKUwmb12BN9tFR3IIbS4tRh9rIIPffv1Y2vTuwuncZ1WZ3nzoTs0lr00ahfzBW5N-TKYFFSWN-06h313uXYDz3-XgXgt3uQHFokVMobO-rpMJfeB6WgKM-9V5duMujMtSL5V_WiE3uYsUPdKFu8aR3SytFZCq0tr79q0DlX_kSwRX7pYBRUiKIp3L4JP/s861/3.ChrysalidsHeads.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="861" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpnKUwmb12BN9tFR3IIbS4tRh9rIIPffv1Y2vTuwuncZ1WZ3nzoTs0lr00ahfzBW5N-TKYFFSWN-06h313uXYDz3-XgXgt3uQHFokVMobO-rpMJfeB6WgKM-9V5duMujMtSL5V_WiE3uYsUPdKFu8aR3SytFZCq0tr79q0DlX_kSwRX7pYBRUiKIp3L4JP/s16000/3.ChrysalidsHeads.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>”Condemned to negatives”</b><br /><br />As with <i>’Slan’,</i> the narrator occupies different ages as the novel progresses, giving different ages groups their own opportunity to plug in. And the notion that <i>they</i> equalled stasis while <i>we</i> represented change, that went on to become a very counter-culture concept. The Jefferson Airplane song <i>’Crown Of Creation’</i> (1968) wasn’t just inspired by the book, most of its lyrics were barely modified quotes from it. To them it meant generation-war militancy. While its argument may boil down to a credo coined by Frank Zappa: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” <br /><br />But other readings were available. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/10/chrysalids-john-wyndham-review-sf" target="_blank">Philip Womack, writing in the Guardian, said:</a><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“I first read ‘The Chrysalids’ when I was 12, an age when any child is beginning to wonder about where he or she fits into the world…. Wyndham's evocation of David's ability… left me reeling with envy and desire; I remember sitting in the library, ‘sending out’ thoughts in the hope that someone, somewhere might catch them.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The novel’s predicated on breaking away from your elders and their narrow world. David’s parents are the wicked step-parents of fairy tales, in every way apart from them literally being step-parents. They beat him if he’s bad, and lecture him not to be bad if he’s not currently being bad. In general, bar one kindly Uncle, the adult characters only exist insofar as they intrude on the young’s lives, a sense enhanced by the first-person narrative. Which may well be the way you do view adult authority figures when young. <br /><br />Plus the Fringes provide an evil Uncle, effectively giving us two versions of ‘bad Dad’. They make up the types of Abraham and Cronos, the authoritarian unyielding rule-giver and the malevolent monster who’d destroy his son to steal his girlfriend from him. At twelve we might be more wary of Abraham, feeling these confines are strictures are there to mould us into his own image, prevent us growing into our own person. And notably it’s the older David who encounters the evil Uncle. <br /><br />Further, when young we often do lead a double life which in a way makes us two selves, acting differently at home with our parents to out with our peers. And it can be easy to imagine one is your true unsullied self, the other an act. <br /><br />So life in Labrador is in upshot presented as entirely and explicitly negative, a place to flee: <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“We had a gift, a sense which should have been a blessing but which was little more than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not we had no positive - we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we know, to not being found out - to a life of perpetual deception, concealment and lying. The prospect of continued negativeness stretching out ahead.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The early section of the novel read like a ticking clock, a countdown to when they’ll need to go on the run. Whereupon they have to stay ahead of pursuers while awaiting the arrival of Sealand, a telepathic community they’ve managed to make contact with. So Sealand give regular status updates on their rescue, a cross between the Seventh Cavalry and Deliveroo. And in these communications it’s specified how superior Sealand feel to mere norms. <br /><br />When they do show up, inevitably for the finale, it’s effectively in the form of a UFO. Which again seems uncannily prescient of imagery running through hippie culture, the “silver spaceships” of Neil Young’s <i>’After The Gold Rush’, </i>the tall Venusians of David Bowie’s <i>’Memory of a Free Festival’ </i>or (them again) Jefferson Airplane’s <i>’Have You Seen the Saucers?’ </i>(all 1970). <br /><br />Their weapon to subdue the norms is a petrifying web, surely a metaphor for the rigidities of their stifling culture. Which might at first appear a mere incapacitant, the humane method of a superior culture. The equivalent of the Tomorrow People’s stun guns, weapons without violence. But this seems done just to later inform us its effects are fatal. <br /><br />The final chapter’s then given over to the Sealand woman justifying this, in a not dissimilar way to Dr. Vorless calling time on morality in <i>’Triffids’.</i> Her argument seems to boil down to “it’s okay to kill a thing already dying”. In one of the passages quoted by Jefferson Airplane, she says: “in loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.” The seemingly tangential ‘fighting cocks’ cover, not a thing which appears in the book, is presumably designed to represent this. And notably, the one good Norm - kindly Uncle Axel, who would make a more inconvenient corpse, disappears from the narrative before his point.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9rb-vbceQDU-YfKL9_ZZmMzuCpxnM4v2Sl1Rqa6jUiKtwKtCv0DIGaF9Y_xIiHynK2xsGZwcYBFVIrqWrm_tewQ66iV1foFFb8HJW5iqWHRy-nfG0Ocp2ScGtmSKeBvEi5kxfkLEObReJyofp_zwGtROeK2TlvrqnZqy-ptY2BbiR3y3fq38rpzcY_gP0/s874/4.ChrysalidsFight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="874" data-original-width="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9rb-vbceQDU-YfKL9_ZZmMzuCpxnM4v2Sl1Rqa6jUiKtwKtCv0DIGaF9Y_xIiHynK2xsGZwcYBFVIrqWrm_tewQ66iV1foFFb8HJW5iqWHRy-nfG0Ocp2ScGtmSKeBvEi5kxfkLEObReJyofp_zwGtROeK2TlvrqnZqy-ptY2BbiR3y3fq38rpzcY_gP0/s16000/4.ChrysalidsFight.jpg" /></a></div><br />And, as we may be used to by now, this homo superior business is justified by reference to teleological evolution: <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>“Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away.”</i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />The argument is not “there was conflict, the situation became them or us”. The argument is, and quite specifically, “this evolutionary path ain’t big enough for the both of us.” Which, frankly, seems less evolution than eugenics. For one thing, the dinosaurs most likely died as a result of a cosmic accident rather than some grand plan, and besides some reptiles - including fairly big ones - survived to this day. Life on Earth is made of a combination of ancient and more recent species, like you’d expect. For deviation from the norm does not in fact necessitate killing the norm. But the unspoken element of her argument is “we get to say what is dying.” <br /><br />Which is not something unusual with the Pariah Elites trope. As we saw, <a href="http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2023/07/more-than-human-by-theodore-sturgeon.html" target="_blank">in Sturgeon’s ‘More Than Human’,</a> a human character who serves a similarly thwarting plot function is casually killed just to sweep her off-stage. But here the dead don’t even get counted. It’s not the most fannish but the most mainstream instance of this trope which is the most indifferent to loss of life, as soon as it can be labelled ‘norm’ or ’old’. <br /><br />This sense of generational conflict as something perpetual and innate in human society, it’s very reminiscent of <a href="https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manifesto_futurista.pdf" target="_blank">the Futurist manifesto.</a> The Sealand woman’s explanation that one day they too will be replaced finds it’s fore-echo in 1909: <br /><br /><i>“When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts..! They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and… will hurl themselves forward to kill us. ...And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.”</i><br /><br />And like the Futurist manifesto you can’t deny the heady excitement of the appeal. While being at the same time aware that this is Social Darwinism speaking. <br /><br />This was the bullet <i>’The Tomorrow People’</i> had wished away through a conspicuous display of performative niceness. ("We're superior, we just don't like to say so.") <i>’The Chrysalids’ </i>takes it head-on, effectively painting a target on its own chest. And it doesn’t help in the slightest. We just move straight on, as if it hadn't happened, to get to the happy ending. <br /><br />The very concept of ‘thinking-together’, which binds the book, bakes this in. We can communicate at a higher level, go on to create a better form of living. But not with <i>you</i>. It seems likely that one of the main reasons to give this book its foreign setting was to avoid showing the menfolk of a quaint English village getting it in the neck. The counter-culture notion that we can frolic off into a perfect future, just as soon as we’ve bumped off those troublesome squares, that was already there in 1955.</span></div>Gavin Burrowshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.com0