DOCTOR WHO IN A STRANGE ADVENTURE WITH UNCANNY FORCES

Rarely is the question asked - would Sigmund Freud have been a ’Doctor Who’ Fan?

Martin Belam, writing in the Guardian,recently complained: “Just as 70s ‘Doctor Who’ looked cheap and wobbly beside blockbusters such as ‘Star Wars’, the show now suffers by comparison with Marvel TV shows.” (20/7/21) ’Who’ fans have all heard this over-familiar jeer, condensible to “wobbly sets”. Our natural tendency is to respond defensively - “they really only wobbled every now and then, you know”. But instinctively we know that the accusation makes a category error.

It’s tempting to invert the accusation, to say we love the show for such things, which lend it a quirky charm which money can’t buy. Which is, in itself, true. But that’s not really it either. What we need to do is examine the accusation.

The assumption the detractors are making is that science fiction is inherently about scale and spectacle. But were the script-writers forever conceiving of imaginative realms, only for a weary special effects department to sigh as they once more reached for the used washing up bottles and spray paint? The short answer is no. ’Doctor Who’ is not ’Star Wars’ done on the cheap. ’Doctor Who’ is ’Doctor Who’. 

You can see this clear as day in the different ways they open. ’Star Wars’ with a huge spaceship taking time to rumble across a cinema screen, followed by an even huger one. ’Who’ with a police box in a junkyard that emits strange sounds.

For one thing, those scriptwriters clearly knew the constraints. This was a series made from bakelite and sticky-back plastic, with episodes expected to be filmed on a nine-bob note and come back with change. The avoidance of “large and elaborate” settings was a rule established in pre-production. Original script editor David Whitaker once had to write a story in a weekend that used neither new sets nor characters. (‘Edge of Destruction’, but you knew that already.)

Yet when he came to write the spin-off comic strip ’The Daleks’ (in 'TV21', from 1965 to '67) he took a quite different approach. The Doctor wasn’t to appear. And rather than replace him with a surrogate protagonist he effectively abandoned human scale to tell an epic history of the Daleks, with no continuing characters bar the pepperpots themselves. With the only special effects budget to draw on being the imagination of the artists, the strip lit up with some pretty eye-popping spectacle indeed. And soon became so removed from the TV show that it widely contradicted established Dalek history.

Because why try to do something you couldn’t, when you could do something you could? Like most British TV of its day, production limitations steered the show towards theatre conventions, in what’s often called a filmed play. Confined to that single set, ’Edge of Destruction’ must be the paramount example, but of a general rule. Think of ’Web Planet’, a frequent target of critics, and even some fans. Imagine coming across stills from it out of context, would not the first thing you thought of be theatre? Quiz nay-sayers and, while they will say “wobbly sets” a lot, it’s often these conventions they’re thinking of.

And what lies behind those theatre conventions? Where a ludicrously superficial disguise still functions as a disguise, where a person hiding from another will naturally find a place where they’re still visible to the audience and so on. It’s representation, the thing we see is there to stand for something else. That swapped hat and sunglasses is only there to represent the concept of disguise. You might watch a theatre production where umbrellas stand in for swords and, provided they are used consistently, get used to the device quite quickly. After which, Police Boxes which double as time machines don’t seem such a step further.

The point here isn’t so much that these conventions were commonly adopted by TV of the time, though they were. The point is that this way of working necessitated an aesthetic. One which, through the show’s long history and still-longer list of creators, it stuck to remarkably closely. How might we try to define it? There’s two ways…

Mark Fisher, writing under his blogging alias K-Punk, argued the show demonstrates Freud’s concept of the Uncanny. Go to Freud’s essay and it can feel littered with show staples - doppelgangers, remotely animate body parts and so on. But on the other hand….

Keen to home in something more specific than such catch-all terms as ‘frightening’ or ‘creepy’, Freud insists what might be unfamiliar to the audience can’t be considered uncanny if it’s consistent within the world of the drama. (“Many things that would be uncanny if they occurred in real life are not uncanny in literature, and in literature there are many opportunities to achieve uncanny effects that are absent in real life.”) He gives the example of ghosts in Shakespeare. And surely aliens in ’Dr Who’, a science fiction show at least of some kind, fulfil just the same role as the Bard’s spirits. But let’s stick with it…

When some claim to favour Freud’s original German term, unheimlich, they may sound a little pretentious, nicht warr? Yet, like zeitgeist, it may be a term for which we’ve no adequate translation. It means less the strange (as in coming from outside our frame of reference, the UFO showing up in Central Park) but the strangely familiar, something which should be parseable by us – yet somehow isn’t. Freud himself said: “the word Heimlich… belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight.”

Fisher elucidates: “The uncanny, that species of dread evoked by the strangely familiar, what is here but which should not be....“ The example he gives is the Autons, one of Freud’s examples made manifest, the lifeless become animate. “Children were mortified when these everyday objects - objects which any way evoked a frisson of uneasiness - came to life.”

We’ll look more closely at activating Autons when we reach that episode. For now, our focus is something mores specific. The intra-story explanation is sentient plastic. Yet were the plastic to actually plasticate, in a CGI-fest like ’Terminator 2’, the effect would be quite different. More vivid, perhaps more arresting, but less uncanny. These shop-window dummies need to just start walking the streets as they are, simultaneously just as we do and not like us at all.

Fisher refers to children and this might seem more a childhood phenomenon, based in a lack of experience about the world. But this was a family viewing show, so we must also ask how the adult audience responded. Think of more ‘adult’ horrors. Were there really a maniac in a ski mask running amok with a cleaver, that would be enough to scare most of us. But that would be a fear with a rational basis.

Whereas Freud speaks of the unheimlich as the re-rearing of repressed notions: “This uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed… something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open… We once regarded such things as real possibilities… Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of thought. Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation.”

In short the uncanny comes out of that marginal space you send things when you tell yourself they’re banished from your mind, yet you never quite have. The strange sense of recognition you feel when they return is its essence. And in that instant all our convictions about our adulthood seem undermined. Uncanny fears strip away our adult rationalisations and reduce us to childhood uncertainties.

But overall let’s take a slightly wider definition than Freud’s, which is after all psychological rather than aesthetic. Let’s take the uncanny as when the sinister is found within the domestic. In this sense ’Who’ wasn’t about making the incredible seem convincing, like ’Star Wars’, but twisting the seemingly everyday into something strange.

Which would mean that, just as spectacle requires the cinema screen to bombastically fill, the uncanny is at home on TV - the strange transporting box which sits in the corner of the living room. The Tardis is compared to television in the first story, it can take you to foreign places, screw with your senses of big and small, and so on. And as a child I always associated the ‘time vortex’ opening sequence with the white static that TV would then go into between channels. And we should remember that for about the first decade of the show Police Boxes were still a common sight in the street, almost as familiar as televisions.

But there’s a bigger example than the Tardis. As Fisher says “more even than any of the monsters, it was the Doctor himself, the familiar stranger, who was uncanny.” As our protagonist, the Doctor’s role is to subject the incomprehensible horrors to a scientific explanation. (Or at least a science-fictional one which passes for the same, demons turning out to really be aliens and so on.) These stranger worlds are not traversable without a stranger as a guide, a local to show us around, someone at home among the unhomely.

And the other side of this is that the Doctor must remain alien to us. Quite literally, in fact. For a protagonist we know very little about him, the tidbits and tales he feeds us are most likely lies. The title character, the one onstage the most is also the most inscrutable.

Perhaps, in ’Star Wars’, Obi-Wan played a roughly similar role as the guardian of magic knowledge, with Luke as his ‘companion’. Yet it was clearly Luke who was the protagonist. In the prequels, when Obi-Wan took on this role his personality shifted. Similarly Luke, always more initiate than companion, took on the Jedi master role for the sequels.

Whereas in ’Who’, we identify with a companion who is often as beguiled by the Doctor as us. To return to Whitaker, in his novelisation of ‘The Crusades’ he has Vicki “staring fascinated at the lights that flashed and the wheels that spun” as the Doctor pilots the Tardis, “a constant source of never-ending delight to her.” Which are of course a metonym for the foreign workings of his mind. Highly unusually, the protagonist and audience identification figure are split.

It couldn’t be emphasised too much how much that aesthetic was driven by necessity. Andew Hickey has commented how we’ve come to hold a kind of displaced folk memory of ’Doctor Who’ which actually belongs somewhere else - to ’Sapphire and Steel’ (1979 to 1982), a memory which then attached itself when ’Who’ was relaunched. But it might be closer to say that ’Sapphire and Steel’ chose the uncanny, while ’Doctor Who’ had it’s uncanniness thrust upon it. Perhaps its lesser longevity is partly down to this. It cleaved firmly to its chosen aesthetic, while ’Doctor Who’ was freer to wander, reinvent itself from era to era.

Yet there’s more. Remember the fundamental theatrical rule that things are there to stand for other things. That rule took us here, and yet the uncanny isn’t the only destination on this route. Those same theatre rules also take us to the symbolic, and within the show we see the two in constant tension. There’s a perpetual battle where order attempts to impose itself on the strange, with neither ever really winning out. This can happen diegetically, within the stories, but at the same time it’s wider - as if the two are tussling for the show’s soul.

For classic case, let’s go back to ’The Web Planet’. On one level it was an attempt to go all-out and show a truly alien planet, where none of the life we encountered was humanoid. Yet on another it’s a quite transparent analogy for the Nazi occupation of France, with insect types representing the sides much as you might devise for a political cartoon. (The Nazis as a regimented hive-mind, the free French as flamboyant individualists who unfortunately aren’t terribly good in a fight, and so on.) So the Animus is simultaneously a sinister outside force, not native even to Vortis, and a transparent stand-in for Hitler and his supposed swaying powers of oratory.

Yet, of all the debates and differences of opinion you’ve heard among ’Who’ fans, how often does that one come up? There’s no uncanny devotees at odds with symbolic-show fans, sitting on rival sides at conventions. Neither could you divide the stories up into the two categories, most likely because their combination is so deep-rooted. But this seeming contradiction isn’t a spanner in the works but an engine. Rather than ripping the show apart it powers it, grants its longevity. Who knows? It might even be the force that’s making the sets wobble…