Jack Kirby had pretty much created Marvel Comics in the 1960s. But the organisation has and had deeply ambivalent attitude to its founding father. On the one hand, they obsessively emulated him: to draw in "Marvel Style" was to mimic Jack Kirby; to use "The Marvel Method" was to collaborate as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby collaborated; the "Marvel Universe" was and is an ill-fitting patchwork of Kirby Koncepts. On the other hand, the company tried very hard to pretend that Kirby didn't exist. Every single Marvel comic bore a copy of Stan Lee's signature, but Kirby's name was hardly ever mentioned. When the company changed hands in 1968, the new owners were led to believe that Kirby had been a hired illustrator of concepts wholly originated by Stan Lee. There is a persistent oral tradition that staff in the Marvel archive were required to destroy priceless pages of Kirby artwork as an initiation rite. Kirby had been a mainstay of Marvel Comics when Stan Lee was only an office boy – in a classic parapraxis in his book Origins of Marvel Comics Lee actually refers to Kirby as "my boss". Little Stanley Lieber clearly felt that in order to grow up, he had to slay and thereby become the founding Father of the company which would soon become an extension of his own ego. But the grown up Stan Lee knew only too well the punishment for Patricide. So he overcompensated. He insisted on always being photographed with a cigar. And his cigar was bigger than Jack's! He obsessively signed himself Stan "the man". Stan Lee's castration complex was
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When Jack Kirby returned to Marvel Comics in 1976 after a self-imposed exile at DC he worked on half-a-dozen new series including Captain America, the Black Panther, Devil Dinosaur and the Eternals. He, of course, believed in every one of them absolutely: but none of them were terribly good.
People like me are prone to say that since Kirby created the Black Panther and Captain America, he couldn't really be expected to know or care about the sophomoric literary edifices that others had erected on his foundations. (Who reads Steve Englehart or Don McGregor nowadays?) He had a prefect right to clear the ground, go back to basics, and do his characters his way. Unfortunately, "his way" turned out to involve time travelling frogs and evil royalist mind control bombs. And rocket powered skateboards. "Kirby's way" at this time in his career, was to treat all characters as men in superhero suits and throw whacky Kirby stuff at them. I happen to like whacky Kirby stuff. But I can't deny that Kirby's heroes were increasingly interchangeable. The Panther could have been Captain America and Captain America could have been the Panther and Ikaris was clearly Orion.
Possibly, that was the point.
During his years at the Distinguished Competition, Jack Kirby had created a mythological comic called the New Gods, a work of insane genius from which the American comic book industry has never recovered. The New Gods pointedly begins with an "epilog". The Old Gods – which a lot of people assume must mean Thor and his Marvel buddies – are wiped out in one of those Ragnorak Gotterdamerung thingies, and a new race of hippy superheroes emerge from the ashes. Some of them are good and some of them are bad, and they have fights.
Back at Marvel, the Eternals was a new take on some very similar material. But if the New Gods was an epilogue or sequel to all the mythology that there had ever been, the Eternals was more in the nature of a prologue or a prequel. The New Gods had been derived from the Gods of Olympus and Asgard: the Eternals were what those gods had been derived from.
You remember the set-up. In the Fantastic Four, Kirby had created the inscrutable Galactus to fill the God-shaped hole in the Marvel Universe. In the Eternals, he proposed a whole race of Galactii, giant faceless aliens who were the secret originators and manipulators of all human history. A gadzillion years ago, they had performed genetic experiments on primitive ape-men and turned a few of them into immortal super-heroes (the eponymous "Eternals"). Their first experiment went wrong and produced a race of hideous mutants (the "Deviants").
The concept that this is the mythology which lies behind every mythology was hugely compelling. But the concept was a whole lot stronger than the actual comic book. After the mythos is established (by the end of issue 3) the series grinds to a halt. The New Gods was really only ever one big extended fight scene: the warring planets of New Genesis and Apokolips primarily existed so that an endless stream of superheroes and super villains could flow into Metropolis and have big battles without exposition or explanation. But Kirby seemed to be actually interested in his Fourth Host and his City of the Deviants: the back story matters more than the one at the front. Once you've grasped that all human legends about gods and demons are based on the doings of the beautiful Eternals, the ugly Deviants and the cosmically cosmic Celestials you've really experienced all the Sense of Wonder which the series has to offer. It isn't clear where, left to himself, Kirby would have taken it. (I'm guessing not a three issue long fight with a robot replica of the Incredible Hulk.)
In issue 13, the Eternals bugger off to perform the ritual of Unimind (you don't need to know) leaving only Sprite, the Eternal child, behind. While they're away, the Deviants decide to nuke the Celestial's mothership, which Sprite feels is a bad idea. So he elicits the aid of "the forgotten one"; who is "like an ancient myth no longer remembered".
"Once," explains the Forgotten One "I roamed the world among the humans and shook it to improve their lot. I toppled the palaces of tyrants and slew the beasts they could not conquer. The humans knew me by many names, but here I have none."
So the hero (or very possibly the Hero) goes off on one final adventure. The last we see of him he is being taken on board the Top Celestial's starship. Kirby had a genius for turning up the volume: the Eternals are the gods; the Celestials are the gods who the Eternals look up to; so the One Above All is the gods' gods' god. The Forgotten One was – literally was – Hercules and Samson and Gilgamesh and every other hero in history; but compared with the top Celestial, he is only a flea.
But (all together now) "he is a flea who has proven worthy of the gods."
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When I got to college, I discovered that this sort of thing was a positive menace. It kept sprouting up in out of date academic lit crit textbooks, particularly in the Medieval Studies department. It kept turning out that the legends of King Arthur made total sense once you spotted that the Maimed King (or Arthur, or Merlin) was really a representation of the Corn which dies each winter and comes back to life each spring.
Well. It isn't too much of a stretch to say that The Green Knight (as in "Sir Gawain and the") is a John Barleycorn figure. Gawain chops the Green Knight's head off one Christmas, and by the next solstice he (the green chap) has grown another one and is demanding the right to decapitate the king's nephew in recompense. And he's, like, green. But this insight ("the Green Knight is one of those dying and rising Nature Gods") doesn't tell you anything at all about the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – which is about courage and honour and promise-keeping and the tactful procedure if your host's wife comes into your bedroom while you're in the nude. And in the poem, the Green Knight is emphatically not a god of any kind – he's a knight named Sir Bercilak, under one of Morgana Le Fey's encosrcellments. The poem certainly leaves you with all sorts of unanswerable questions: did Gawain fail in his quest because he lied to Bercilak about the Girdle of Invulnerability? Or is the Round Table right to welcome him home as a hero? Surely the message can't be "It's all right to tell fibs when it's a matter of life and death"? (And anyway, why does Gawain's knightly honour compel him to keep his appointment with the Green Knight but permit him to lie about the magic item?) None of these questions are particularly clarified by the insight "Ah, well, you see, the Green Knight is a Corn God."
And that's precisely why these kinds of theories are so attractive to students. They enable them to discover all sorts of erudite hidden meanings in literary texts without actually bothering to read them. Once you know the Great Secret – that all literature is really about Corn Gods – then you don't need to study any actual books. Just skim through them, say "Ooo, look a Corn God!" and your work is done. In fact, the actual text can be a bit of a distraction. One critic (his name may have been "Zimmerman", but don't write in) went so far as to complain that the anonymous Gawain-poet had added a lot of extraneous baggage about the Round Table, honour and chivalry to a story which was "really" about the annual death and rebirth of nature. So don't waste your time on the medieval story – go back to the source. And when there is no extant source, make one up. The original poem must have been about a Corn God, so the bits of the poem which aren't about Corn Gods must be later additions. So take the poem we have and delete everything that doesn't look like a Corn God and – hey presto! – what you are left with looks exactly like a Corn God.
Or take Hamlet. Unfortunately, Shakespeare carelessly added lots of extraneous digressions about ghosts and vengeance and madness to his version of the play. But if you cross all that out, you will see that the heart of the story is the moment when Hamlet jumps into Ophelia's grave (symbolic death); fights with her brother (like Hiawatha); and jumps out again (symbolic rebirth). Everything else in the play is a more or less redundant superstructure to provide a rationalisation for this crypto-ritualistic scene. Hamlet is about crops dying in the winter and coming back to life in the spring.
Even if this were true, which it plainly isn't, it's hard to see what it helps us with. Why spend twenty pages proving that Hamlet is a corn god if you already know, a priori, that a corn god is what every character in literature is?
Not that students studying literary theory in the 1980s were expected to pay much attention to the Golden Bough. And I never got my head round proper 1960s structuralism. I expect I once knew what post-structuralism was, but I have forgotten. No, my personal vice was Sigmund Freud. He had long ago been kicked out of psychology departments but remained very popular with literary theorists. It's not hard to see why. The "talk cure" involved patients telling Dr Freud about their lives and then telling him what they dreamed about last night. He then revealed the secret pattern which made sense of both their lives and their dreams. So it isn't too far fetched to say that Freud's theory of the mind was really a theory of story-telling: what stories are, where they come from, what they mean. And – astonishingly – Freud discovered that all the stories his patients told him followed a very similar plot. But his One Big Story wasn't about John Barleycorn being killed and coming back to life. Freud's One Story was old and scarier and ruder:
"Once, there was a King; and when his son was born it was prophecies that when he grew up he would kill his father and marry his mother. So the king ordered his huntsman to take the baby into the woods and kill it. But the huntsman let the baby live. And so it never knew who its real parents were. And as a result, in an unexpected twist of fate..."
Once I had skimmed through those multi-coloured Pelican editions of Sigmund's non-technical works, there was no stopping me. I raced through Chaucer and Malory with my Spotters Guide to the Unconscious at my side. I drew circles around phalluses and underlined Oedipus Complexes. For half an hour in 1985, I believed I understood what Lacan was going on about.
Once you realise that Shakespeare had also studied Freud there is really no limit to what you can prove. Sir Laurence Olivier believed that Freud provided the resolution to all the obscurities in Hamlet – and it's hard to deny that there could have been a teeny tiny Oedipus complex going on in Elsinor. But you can apply it to less promising texts as well. You probably think that when Viola fetches up on Illyria she disguises herself as a boy. In fact (Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 2 line 56) she disguises herself as a eunuch. And everyone knows that in Shakespeare's theatre, girls were played by boys. So what you have is not so much a girl dressed up as a boy, but more a boy dressed up as a girl dressed up as a boy with no willy. There's also a comic duel in which neither side is prepared to pick up a sword, which is finally stopped by the intervention of a homosexual male. How big a castration complex is that?
And what about Macbeth? He can't tell if the witches who tells him that someone is going to rob him of his "sceptre"are girl-witches or boy-witches and spends the play grabbing at invisible "daggers" which slip right through his fingers. Prithee, unsex me here! What, quite unmanned with folly? I am a man again! Come, let me clutch thee.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
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The other thing that Freud taught us to do is pay attention to the thing which is not mentioned or left unsaid. That's probably the most important thing of all.
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When I was in the lower sixth form, I accidentally invented structuralism.
I was writing one of those lit crit essays you had to do for English A level, on a gloomy Ted Hughes poem about Thistles.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking
"Aha!" I thought. "He's making an Allusion." In the Lower Sixth, allusions are good things to find. Teachers underline them and put red ticks in the margin. "He's Alluding to Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha," I thought. "The thistles growing out of the body of the dead Viking are sort of kind of like the corn which grew out of the body of the youth who Hiawatha wrestled with."
My teacher said that it was indeed a Good Thing for me to have stuck my neck out, but that when spotting Allusions, one should ask oneself: "Is this Allusion likely to have been in the head of the writer when he wrote it?"
Nowadays I would say that it doesn't matter a thinker's cuss what was or wasn't in the writer's head since it is currently buried in a pretty church yard in North Tawton and inaccessible. Hughes may or may not have been thinking of Hiawatha's Fasting when he wrote Thistles. But a connection between the dead Viking and the dead demi-god there most certainly is.
Mr Martin Carthy, who I may have mentioned before, sings a folk song called John Barleycorn. Mr Chris Wood, who I may also have alluded to, sings the same song, rather more slowly. You remember how it goes?
There were three men come from the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow:
"John Barleycorn must die."
They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
'Til these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead.
They let him lie for a very long time,
'Til the rains from heaven did fall,
When little Sir John raised up his head
And so amazed them all...
Anyone can see that this song is about beer. What's being buried alive, beheaded with a scythe and crushed between stones isn't a person called Sir John, but the actual barley. Sir John isn't being executed: he's being harvested and brewed. You don't particularly need to decode or interpret the song to spot this. It isn't a metaphor or an allegory: it's just a way of speaking.
In Hiawatha's Fasting the process of personification has gone quite a bit further. The mysterious youth who comes to fight the hero (or, very possibly, The Hero) can walk and talk and fight like a man – we aren't supposed to imagine Hiawatha wrestling with a tin of sweetcorn. Longfellow says that our hero fights with the mysterious stranger on two consecutive nights, and kills him on the third. After he has buried his opponent, Hiawatha keeps watch over his grave:
Till at length a small green feather
From the earth shot slowly upward
Then another and another
And before the summer ended
Stood the maize in all its beauty...
And in rapture Hiawatha
Cried aloud: "It is Mondamin!
Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin!"
It doesn't need any clever insight to work out that the Mondamin "is" the corn, just as much as John Barleycorn "is" the barley. But suppose Hiawatha had returned to the grave in the spring and found, not sprouts of sweetcorn, but Mondamin himself, returned to life? I think that most people would still have spotted that the youth –
dressed in garments green and yellow
plumes of green bent o'er his forehead
and his hair was soft and golden
-- who dies and is buried in the winter, but who comes to life and and steps out of his grave in the spring is a personification of the maize.
Extend the line a bit further and you will find that any hero (or, indeed, Hero) who dies (or apparently dies) and comes back to life can be seen as the personification of the Corn or the Grapes or the Maize or the Barley or the Rhubarb. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and the Turkish Knight are all equally personifications of Nature. And characters like Orpheus and Theseus and Alice in Wonderland and Bilbo Baggins who go down into the earth and come up again are obviously undergoing symbolic death and rebirth, so they are vegetables too. And even that "going down" and "coming up" doesn't need to be literal. If I get knocked down but get up again – or just go through a period of bad luck and then improve – you can be pretty sure I'm re-enacting the annual death and rebirth of Nature. And since it's pretty hard to imagine a literature character who doesn't go through some kind of literal, symbolic or metaphorical death and rebirth, it follows that all stories are the same story and that story is the story of John Barleycorn.
This theory was extremely popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was one of the principle causes of T.S. Eliot. Whatever my English teacher thought, I am pretty certain that Ted Hughes would have come across it.
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"I know that astrology isn't a science...of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better."
Douglas Adams
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If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of George and Joe and Jack and Bob >which contains all of my essays on Star Wars (going right back to the opening night of the Phantom Menace!) and related subjects.
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could? I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you've made will never buy back your soul.
Bob Dylan 'Masters of War'
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Blogger has spam filter. Comment moderation off again. Not that you care.
If anyone with Blogger-Fu can tell me how to make the posts pop up here by posting not more than three lines of HTML, could they let me know? Otherwise it will probably all migrate en masse at the end of the week.
No, I didn't see Sherlock, but I've ordered the boxed set.
The expression "not a dry eye in the house" gets massively overused, and Interplay's musical drama about the life of Woody Guthrie deserves better than to be summed up with a cliché. I, at any rate, did not cry all the way through this performance. I didn't so much as sniffle until Woody started singing about the big ol' sign sayin' "Private Property" at the beginning of Act Two. And I'd calmed down within an hour or two of leaving the theatre. You know how sometimes at the end of a gig or an opera everyone stands up and claps because, dammit, this is the kind of gig or opera where everyone stands up and claps at the end? This was the kind of gig where about a third of the audience stood up and clapped spontaneously because they couldn't help it.
So far as I can tell, the play is constructed entirely out of actual quotes from Woody Guthrie and all the good people who travelled with him. The programme implies that the writer had access to the (vast) archive of unpublished writings; but a lot of the vignettes were based around fairly familiar scenes and quotations. We get a convincing re-creation of Alan Lomax talking over Woody's guitar improvisation at the beginning of the Library of Congress tapes. The cast perfectly capture the contrast between Guthrie's oakie dialect and the cut-glass elucution of the BBC announcer when he appears on Children's Hour during the war ("Mr Guthrie is a very well known singer of folk songs in the United States of America" "Yes ma'am, but now I'm washin' dishes on the good ship Liberty..."). We see Woody learning harmonica from the black hobo by the railway ("just about the lonesomest music I ever did hear" ); and there's a big round of applause (from me at any rate) when he tells the audience that his songs are protected under U.S copyright and anyone caught singing them without permission "will be mighty good friends of ourn, cos we don't give a durn."
It's one of those non-naturalistic bits of total theatre, in which six actors play Guthrie at different times in his life, leaving the one woman in the cast to be all the mothers, sisters, daughters and wives who come into his story. The action starts with the dying Woody in Brooklyn State Hospital, and for the rest of the production the metal frame hospital bed is dragged around the stage to represent doors, tractors, automobiles (with en-gyne trouble) and trains (which are bound for glory). For the first half of the first act, I thought things were going to be maybe a little bit precious, like one of those over-earnest student drama groups. Maybe the show did linger too long over the shocking story of Guthrie's childhood -- his sister and father die in house fires, and his mother ends her life in an insane asylum. Things lift notably when the teenage Woody teaches himself to play guitar while selling bootleg whisky ("I thought it sounded awful purty") and really take off when Dan Wheeler takes over the role of the adult Woody during his career as performer, recording artists and left wing agitator. I didn't know the story about him tearing up a copy of a song called "Nigger Blues" on live radio and promising never to sing it again: the naiveté of not realising that the title would give offence, and the unselfconscious apology when this is pointed out to him speaks volumes about the man. The famous songs aren't milked: we only hear a couple of verses of "This Land" ; if anything the climax of the production is a set-piece "Union Maid" on a stage suddenly full of Stars and Stripes banners. I could probably have done without "Jesus Christ" being presented as a bit of a Gospel number, complete with a "hallelujahs" – it's clearly a Communist Jesus, not a Christian one, that Woody is celebrating. But I loved the moment when Woody, faced with the terrible possibility that he's inherited Huntington's Cholera from his mother, says that he is a religious man, but can't decide which one he likes the best. "Either Jesus Christ or Will Rogers" he suggests.)
Because the text is based on documentary sources, there is perhaps an absence of drama: we are shown what happened but there can't be any playwright's speculation about the man's off-stage or interior life. It stops short of being mawkish, but apart from a very brief reprise of "This Land" before the curtain call, there's no attempt to soften of create an upbeat ending for what's actually an appallingly sad story. The impact of the show depends heavily on the manner of the production: the choice of vignettes, the appropriate incorporation of songs into the action, the playful use of the hospital bed; the way in which all the famous and less famous people who cross Woody's path are briefly channelled by members of the cast. The production is going to go on tour (if it doesn't it will be a crime against theatre and music) so I don't want to reveal how too many of its theatrical conjuring tricks are done. Let's just say that in the final moments, Woody -- so crippled with Huntington's disease that he can only communicate by moving his eyes -- is visited in hospital by a certain young man with mussed up hair and a harmonica, who starts to sing "I'm out here, a thousand miles from my home..." It's one of the most affecting dramatic moments I've seen this year. Or, indeed, ever.
I didn't quite believe the review linked to from the WYP's website, which complained the production was little more than a tribute act for the benefit of fans. The clever construction of the show and its perpetual theatrical inventiveness makes it far more than that: it not only tells the life-story clearly and powerfully, but gives the audience the sense that they've spent the evening in the company of a living personality – about the best tribute you could pay to a musical biography.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Fortune Cookie say: Time to switch on comment moderation.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
TEENAGER (armed with MP3 phone): What do you fink of this song?
ME: Oooo, if it isn't Bob Dylan, I probably wont like it.
TEENAGER: Bob who?
ME: Oh, come on, you must have heard of Bob Dylan...
TEENAGER: Is he from the 80s?
ME: A bit before that, actually.
TEENAGER: Before the 80s....!!?? But you can't be that old!
Monday, July 26, 2010
Readers who can tolerate sustained exposure to this kind of thing may like to know that The Viewer's Tale is now available from Amazon, where it's already in the top 350, 000 best sellers. (Which suggests that it's sold more copies than Where Dawkins Went Wrong. Possibly even double figures.)
Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five minutes, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve minutes.
I went for a walk.
I listened to my I-Pod.
I realized that Visions of Joanna is the best six minutes of anything ever recorded by anyone ever. In fact, I am pretty sure that the lyrics of Visions of Joanna contain everything there is to be known.
I used to think that it was the opening bars of Parsifal, but now I'm pretty sure that it's Visions of Joanna.
And while I was walking and listening I saw what it was that I've been trying, and failing, to say about Doctor Who for the past three months.
Years ago, after Sylvester but before Paul, I read a fanzine article about growing up as a Doctor Who fan in the 1970s. Most of the people in DWAS still wrote about growing up as a Doctor Who fan in the 1960s. This one was written by someone my own age. The writer of the article told a lot of embarrassing stories against himself: about stealing another boys underwear during a swimming lesson because he desperately needed some Doctor Who knickers for his collection; about working the Doctor's dialogue into his own conversation. His fellow pupils thought he was a bit of a nerd, and he got the cane when he tried out a choice Tom Baker one-liner on the headmaster. I forget if there was a point to the article.
It would increase my confidence in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things if some forum contributor could step forward and say "I was that soldier" at this point.
This reminded me of a lad in my class in the top juniors (year six in decimal money) who was a serious Doctor Who fan long before I was, and by serious I mean "a fan of the books more than a fan of the series". He had a slightly posh accent and read real books about real science and was on Isaac Asimov when I was still on Blast Off at Woomera.
I remember being slightly perplexed that even after the One With The Spiders he continued religiously to watch Whodunnit on ITV and even wore a sort of frock coat arrangement to the end of term fancy dress party when everybody else was wearing scarves and hats that didn't fit. Whodunnit was a game show in which "celebrities" watched a dramatized murder-mystery, were allowed to interview the survivors "in character", and then had to guess who the murderer was. Hosting it was Jon Pertwee's job in between the Police Box and the Scarecrow. Watching ITV at all was pretty daring in those days.
But, of course, it made perfect sense. My friend wasn't a Doctor Who fan: he was a Third Doctor fan; a Jon Pertwee fan. He liked to spend hours pottering around with his chemistry set, just like Doctor Who liked to potter for endless hours in the TARDIS. To the extent that eleven-year-olds have mannerisms he patterned his mannerisms on Jon Pertwee's. Fortunately for him, the Third Doctor was rather polite and courteous and would never have said "You're a classic example of the inverse relationship between size of mouth and size of brain" to the headmaster.
Bob Dylan fans talk a lot of rubbish. There are 1960s interviews where people ask him what his songs mean, and he says, "Huh, hmm, I can't remember". The daftest are the Dylanologists who think there's a consistent code behind the lyrics, that the one-eye midget shouting the word "Now!" is the same character as the one-eyed undertaker who blew a futile horn, and if only Bob could be persuaded to declare unto them this parable they would thereby know all parables. I myself have been tempted to wonder if "Joanna" is "Marijuana". But anyone who thinks that a code-book, a cypher, a "turn to page 54 for solution" could elucidate see the primitive wall flowers freeze while the jelly-faced women all sneeze and the one with moustache says "Jeeze! I can't find my knees!" will never, ever know what this poem, or any poem means: because they don't understand what poetry is.
And that's what I've been trying to say about Doctor Who.
You remember when John Byrne was about twelve months into his run on the Fantastic Four, after he'd worked out what he was doing, but before he got too up himself – about the time he did an issue that was half Galactus and half Doctor Doom the F.F themselves weren't in? You'd been reading the Fantastic Four for years because it sort of reminded you of the Fantastic Four and suddenly, this new guy was writing it and drawing it and you weren't so much reading it as swimming in it?
That's what I've been trying to say about Doctor Who.
The Tenth Doctor was dramatic and moody and funny, particularly when he went off on one; and the Ninth Doctor was like a tough working man with the Doctor hidden inside him; and the Seventh Doctor was like a jester carrying the whole universe on his shoulders; and the Sixth Doctor was scary and nasty and mad and fascinating; and the Fifth Doctor was played by Peter Davison. And
I liked watching all of them, even Sylvester.
And that's what's different. Since 1981 there have been a long succession of Doctors who I really, really liked to watch. Matt Smith is the first Doctor since Tom Baker who I have wanted to be.
Christopher Robin came down the forest to the bridge, feeling all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit, as it didn't on such a happy afternoon, and he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known, and he would be able to tell Pooh, who wasn't quite sure about some of it.
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The real adventure in Moby Dick is the one that happens inside Ahab. The rest is a fishing trip.Salman Rushdie
So. I am watching The Big Bang.
And I realise: this is not "The Eleventh Doctor". This is "The Doctor". There have been other Doctors in the past. There will be other Doctors in the future. There will come a time when there weren't "three Doctors" or "five Doctors", but merely "Doctors". A time when Bill Hartnell and even Tom Baker will be forgotten and a series of pictures of every actor to have played the role will be as obscure and meaningless as a list of every artist to have drawn Superman.
This isn't Doctor Who. This is Doctor Who. This isn't Doctor Who. This is Doctor Who.
You know, in retrospect, the really big change that happened during this season? At the beginning of The Lodger, which I may have mentioned that I rather liked, it's mentioned that Craig has a spare room because his previous flatmate inherited a fortune from an uncle he didn't even know he had. "How convenient," says the Doctor. And at the very end, so off-hand and in passing that I missed it, the Doctor says "Must remember to go back and alter that will."
Always before, there have been stern warnings, or at the very least, payment of lip service to gobbledegook rules which say that the Doctor can't change established history. But now we have a Doctor who messes around with Time in a cavalier way. The show is about Time Travel in a way that it just never was before. Time of the Angels showed us a River Song who can step out of a space ship in the certain knowledge that one day, maybe a million years from now, the Doctor will hear of her predicament and come back and rescue her. In one sense, this is a very logical answer to the question: "What would the universe be like if it contained just one man with a Time Machine?" River's invulnerability is a logical consequence of taking Doctor Who literally: just as much as Mickey having excrement put through his letterbox by neighbours who think he's murdered Rose was a logical consequence of taking Doctor Who literally. But it's much more fun.
The audacious first scene of The Pandorica Opens kicks Doctor Who into the realms of Time Bandits. All of time and space is now just a playground across which "stuff" can happen. Time Travel is what Doctor Who is about: so why shouldn't it be happening in four or five time periods at once? Why shouldn't Van Gogh paint a message to the Doctor and know, for certain, that it will eventually come into his hands? Why shouldn't Winston Churchill have a phone which connects to 3,000 years in the future? (The idea that Churchill can just phone up the Doctor feels so right. Winston and the Queen and Mummy and Daddy and Father Christmas and Doctor Who are all in a grown ups club and you aren't a member.) But the Doctor's manipulation of Time in The Big Bang – popping from a point after he's been rescued to tell Rory how to rescue him – is pure Bill and Ted.
I loved Bill and Ted. "An amiable enough pair of cretins" Barry Norman called them. I could never take the Matrix seriously. I so wanted Neo to say "How's it hanging Morpheus dude?" I'd never seen a story in which Time Travel was used so irresponsibly. Of course it was okay to muck around with history so that a particular future that you happen to like comes into being. Of course, if you were confronted with a locked room and had a time machine, the sensible thing to do would be to tell yourself that at some point in the future you would come back in time and put the keys in a place where you would be bound to find them.
The Pandorica Opens ends on the most over-the-top cliffhanger in the history of Doctor Who. The Doctor is in an impregnable prison, the TARDIS has been destroyed, the universe is about to be destroyed. It is solved, almost literally, by the Doctor going back in time and bribing the architect to put in an escape hatch.
Waters of Mars was about the only story from the second half of the Russell T Davies regime that I had any time for. But I was disappointed that the very, very dark climax – where the Doctor realises that he is the only Time Lord in the universe and therefore free to do whatever he likes – was not followed through. I had suspected that this new, hubristic Doctor would become the much threatened Dark Doctor and that the season climax would involve his previous companions banding together to defeat him. I speculated that this Doctor-turned-evil might be the terrible thing hidden in the Pandorica.
But now we see that it was followed through. Up to now, the Doctor has always felt, at some level, bound by the Laws of Time. Now the Laws of Time no longer exist, he can do what he wants. But what he wants is to have fun: not an evil Doctor, but a happy, impish, joyful Doctor, a Doctor who, in the face of the total destruction of everything that ever existed or ever will exist and his own death...decides that fezzes are cool. This is what the Time Lord Triumphant looks like.
Davies' penchant for over-the-top season climaxes never sat very easily with me. If there is an essence of Doctor Who, which there plainly isn't, it's little small scale stories, half a dozen scientists on a space ship being picked off by two or three Cybermen. Horror of Fang Rock and Ark in Space are the archetypal (not necessarily the best) Doctor Who stories. Doctor Who can, indeed, do "epic", but epic Who has usually been a matter of width, not volume. DalekMasterplan and Frontier In Space felt "big" because the Doctor trekked through lots and lots of different environments in the course of the adventure: not because a hundred billion million Zulus coming over the hill.
So, yes, it is sort of fun for there to be an armada of every Doctor Who baddie converging on Stonehenge and it is certainly sort of fun when they all surround the Doctor in the catacomb. But this kind of thing always feels to me like Disneyland or, worse, like Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars. Snow White lives next to Winnie-the-Pooh, not because we've imagined a fun fairy tale world in which they might peacefully co-exist, but because they are both Trade Marks of the Disney Corporation. I suppose it is possible to picture a Doctor Who universe such that Daleks, Cybermen and Sontaransmight come together in an alliance. But one feels that what's really linking them together is simply that they are all "Doctor Who monsters".
But under all the noise, Moffat is actually writing very, very small. The real action in The Pandorica Opens episode 1 takes place in a series of catacombs under Stonehenge: about as old Who a setting as you could want – corridors for goodness sake. And a large chunk of the action consists of Amy being menaced not by an army of Cybermen, not by one Cybermen, but by the dismembered head of one Cyberman – a scene which plays on peoples fear of spiders and snakes and skulls and is as genuinely scary as anything I can remember in Who Old or New.
Be honest: you jumped when the mask snapped open to reveal the skull.
Charles Dickens said that people complained that Our Mutual Friend was spoiled because they guessed the true identity of Rokesmith too easily. He found this odd because he thought he had been going out of his way to make it obvious. I thought I was being terribly smart, stroking my beard and saying sagely "Ah. The most dangerous being in the universe, imprisoned in the Pandorica. Who could it be but the Doctor!" The first episode carried a punch that it arguably didn't earn because all the way through I was waiting for find out what was in the box – but the only reason I cared about what was in the box was because "what is in the box?" had been set up in advance as "something which is going to surprise you". But the twist is an absolute classic: yes, the Pandorica opens, yes, the thing in the box is the Doctor – you were meant to get that – but the box isn't opening to let him OUT, but to put him IN, you dunderhead.
Some people (for example, me) complained about the extensive use of "plot devices" in Old New Who. Some of those people haven't minded the equally shameless use of the "plot devices" in New New Who nearly as much.
There are two reasons for this.
1: We are so pleased that RTD is gone that we will forgive Moffat anything.
2: When lots of other fun stuff is happening, you can forgive the occasional, or, let's be honest, frequent, hand-wave. Yes, in the cold light of day the whole of Flesh and Stone was a sequence of arbitrary manoeuvres in which the baddy developed a new power and the hero developed a new circumstance which would counteract the new power. But the "running around getting captured and escaping" part was so clearly nothing more than a net in which to catch the relationship between the Doctor, Amy and River it really didn't matter.
3: Moffat does it so much much better than RTD.
That's three reasons.
The typical RTD plot device when something like this.
ASSISTANT: Oh my god! Cosmic bibbles!
DOCTOR: Nothing in the universe can destroy cosmic bibbles.
ASSISTANT: We are doomed.
DOCTOR: Unless...unless this Cosmic Bibble Repellent I happen to have in pocket repels cosmic Bibbles.
ASSISTANT Whew – that was close!
The typical SM plot device goes more like this
DOCTOR: Have you seen my Wibble? It tastes nice, but Cosmic Bibbles find it repulsive.
(Later...)
DOCTOR: Careful, mustn't drop my Wibble. That would really repel any Cosmic Bibbles who happened to be passing.
(Later...)
ASSISTANT: Oh my God! Cosmic Bibbles!
DOCTOR: We're doomed!
ASSISTANT: But didn't you mention three episodes ago that you had something called, I forget...
DOCTOR: Brilliant! We can use my Wibble. It repels Cosmic Bibbles, you know.
The notion of "rebooting the universe" is beyond ridiculous. However, we had already been told, over a number of weeks.
a: That mysterious cracks existed in every part of the universe simultaneously
b: That they were caused by the TARDIS exploding in every part of the universe simultaneously
c: That things that go into the Cracks cease to exist retrospectively
d: That light from the Pandorica brings things that have disappeared through the Crack back into existence.
Ergo – when the whole universe is destroyed, the Doctor collides the TARDIS (explodes everywhere at once) with the Pandorica (magic bringy things back light) and brings the whole universe back. I wouldn't go so far as to say "perfectly logical", but...
It really all depends on the audacity of the telling. The stuff which is going on in the foreground is such fun that we are disinclined to complain, or notice, lapses in logic. I don't think anyone actually expected Amy to be properly dead; but we did expect that the Doctor would have to do something incredibly clever to save her. So far as I can tell, the actual explanation is that she's only mostly dead, and that the inescapable prison which the Doctor has just escaped from also functions as a resurrection chamber.
Obviously.
But this isn't what we see. What we see is pretty much a classic bit of conjurer's misdirection. We know that the Doctor is in the box. We know that the Doctor has to get out of the box. We know that the box with the Doctor in it is in the museum. We know that a mysterious stranger is sending messages to Little Amelia telling her to go to the museum and open the box (with the Doctor in it.) Little Amelia goes to the museum and opens the box (with the Doctor in it). And out of the box (with the Doctor in it) steps...the adult, and supposedly dead, Amy.
Does it "make sense?" We're so delighted that we really don't care.
Or, at any rate, I don't. I think this is why New New Who elicits such a Marmite reaction. It is visceral. It talks to our gut. It speaks to people who feel what Moffat feels about dreams and stories and childhood; who agree with him that dreams and stories and childhood and fairy tales are all inextricably bound up with a crazy little thing called Doctor Who. Mr Lawrence Miles may be an arse, but his remark that Doctor Who is his native mythology may be the truest thing that anyone has ever said. [*]
Fantasy and fairy tales (and mythology and religion and poetry) very largely bypass the conscious, rational mind and address the emotions. That's why proper serious science fiction fans like them so little. Proper serious science fiction fans are logical and rational and love to build things with Mecanno. Ursula La Guin [**] as we know, talks about "the language of the night" as opposed to "the language of the day." Good stories, she thinks, are both descriptions of things that happened in the real world, and collections of symbols which only make sense according to dream logic. If you read the Lord of the Rings logically, then Gollum is an avaricious, greedy hobbit who's lived a long time because of a magic item. But if you read it by dream logic, then you can easily see that Frodo and Gollum are one character split into two figures. Or three if you count Sam. Some people can't, or won't understand that a story can be dream-like and conclude that the Lord of the Rings is morally simplistic. And Moby Dick is only a fishing story. Some people are revolted, actually revolted, by the whole idea of fantasy. Lewis says it's like a phobia. Le Guin thinks it's about repression. If fantasy tells the truth about the unconscious mind in dream language, then of course some people can't bear to read fantasy. Why would they want to delve into the soully unconsciousy things? Some people who were quite happy to agree to disagree with me about the Phantom Menace have got positively angry with me for liking New New Who.
But it's probably just a matter of taste, like putting sugar in coffee or spreading salty yeast extract on your crumpets. A while back, on RPG.net or somewhere, someone said that he liked almost every kind of booze but had never enjoyed whisky. Should he try a more expensive brand? Try it with ice, or without ice? With a mixer? Go to a tutored tasting? After all, everyone says that a good single malt is about the finest liquor money (and its often quite a lot of money) can buy.
"Maybe," said a sensible correspondent "You just don't like whisky."
At the very very beginning, this season functioned perfectly well according to daylight logic. It was merest coincidence that the Doctor arrived in Amy's garden when she was asking Santa to send her a helper. The Doctor is very definitely real: the vagaries of Time Travel mean he disappears for a few years. We see it from his point of view: Amy is a little girl one minute and grown woman the next. That must be what the world looks like it to him all the time. But we also see it from Amy's point of view: the Doctor is a man who turned up from nowhere and disappeared again. Her family THINK he was only ever an "imaginary friend". When he comes back, it's AS IF her imaginary friend became real.
But this isn't enough for Moffat. Oh, no, no, no, no. He can't just say "The Doctor is like an imaginary friend who came to life." He has to say "The Doctor actually is an imaginary friend who came to life." The whole season plays around with ideas about dreams and memories. Braceman the android can become a human being (and therefore not a Dalek controlled bomb) if he embraces and feels and holds onto his artificial memories. Amy must choose which of the Dream Lord's realities is real, which is to say, which one she wants to be real. And over and over and over we are told that things which fall through cracks in space cease to exist – retrospectively wiped from existence – but at some level carry on existing if people remember them.
It's popular for the more dippy kind of book about death and bereavement to assure you that death is a state of being where you "continue to exist in the memory of others." Well, yes. I have a real memory of my grandmother in my mind: it is subjective and real to me, but I can't pass the qualia of that memory on to you. The most I can do is describe her to you, in words: but what you'll then have is not a memory of my grandmother, but a memory of me describing my grandmother to you. So a "story" in the sense of a work of fiction is like the memory of a person who never lived, or an event which never happened. When the Doctor falls out of the universe he become, in Amy's world, exactly what he always has been in ours. We are all stories in the end.
I don't understand, according to the Language of the Day why the Doctor comes back into the universe simply because Amy's remembers him. But we've been told so frequently, through the series that there is a magical connection between remembering things and things returning from the Crack that it really, really, really doesn't matter. By this point, you are either in the poetical fairy tale dream logical world that Moffat has built, or you aren't. You are either laughing and crying at the same time when Amy recites "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" or you aren't. Maybe the universe couldn't bear to be without the Doctor.
The wind back through time is stunning: the kind of thing poor Russell was completely failing to do at the end of the End of Time. I did of course, spot that the Doctor in Flesh and Stone (the one who tells Amy that she must remember what he told her when she was a little girl) was wearing a jacket, even though that jacket had been pointedly left in the hands of a Weeing Angel. Or at any rate, I noticed it once it had been pointed out to me. But I assumed that it was a mere production error, one of those little lacunae that asexual bus-spotters read far too much into. When it turned out the jacketed Doctor was indeed, a Doctor from the future travelling backwards through time, my jaw literally dropped. But the real point of the "rewind" scene was Doctor's monologue to the sleeping child. The Doctor was little Amy's imaginary friend; Amy's imaginary friend has now created, or recreated, the universe; the person who created the universe is watching over Amy while she sleeps. If you absolutely insist on turning the Doctor into God, this is the way to do it.
Is this "fetishising" the Doctor? Yes and no. The Doctor created the universe, and died to save it, and watches over little children while they sleep; but this only works if they believe in him. But he's only a story, but that doesn't matter, because stories are important. It's not a subtle message. But it is, at least, a message. If the Doctor is now God, it's because the script has presented him to us as godlike: not simply because he has stolen some of Jesus' kudos by sticking his arms out in a cruciform pose.
Davies used the Doctor simply as an iconic figure. He was important because he was wearing an "I am important" badge. In Last of the Time Lords everyone worships him; in Next Doctor, everyone applauds him; in Planet of the Dead, everyone loves him; in Fear Her...No, let's not even talk about Fear Her. They love, worship and applaud him simply because he has the title of Doctor. Nothing in the episodes have earned that love.
Amy doesn't love the Doctor because he's got Jesus symbols attached to him, or because it's the appropriate thing to do to the star of the show, or even because he's saved the universe. She loves him because he's himself. Very old and very kind. Weird. Fun. Grumpy. And for the first time since the re-launch, that's why I'm watching the programme. Not because it has a label which says "this has a sort of connection with a programme you liked when you are a kid". Not because I would be an ungrateful fan if I didn't boost the ratings. Not because any Who – CD, American, comic book, cartoon – is better than no Who. I'm watching because the Doctor is old and kind and weird and fun and grumpy. I'm watching it because the programme is itself and would be even if there had never been a programme called Doctor Who ever before.
When you ask the wrong kind of fan to explain what Doctor Who is all about, they are apt to say "He's the reincarnation of the Other Time Lord. You see, after the Pythian curse, Rassilon created knitting machines which..." When you ask the wrong kind of American, he says "..A Time Lord has 13 lives, and the Master had already used all of his..." But when Moffat needs a line which sums up Doctor Who, he writes "A daft old man who stole a magic box." That, in a nutshell, is why Season 5 works at and Seasons 1 - 4 didn't. Because it's being produced by someone who, at a deep level, gets what Doctor Who is all about.
It's about time.
[*] "If you read, say, the work of Salman Rushdie... .there's a lot of material in there that comes from traditional Indian culture, there are lots of links to Indian mythology. Which doesn't mean he has to believe in gods with the heads of elephants, obviously. It's just part of his background, those are the symbols he grew up with. That's more or less the way I feel about Doctor Who. I've got a pretty low opinion of a lot of the original episodes, but it's still my home territory. "
[**] As proper and serious a science fiction writer as one could hope to meet, so don't pay any attention to anything I say.
to be concluded
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