Nothing At The End of the Lane (2)

This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my Patreon.

Patreon: A way of supporting web writers who you like. You promise to pay me a small amount, typically a $1/£1 each time I write an article. You can set a maximum, so if I am unexpectedly prolific one month you won't get stung by a bigger than expected bill.

It's my Patreon supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing. 

It would be very cool if you joined them. 

1963

0.0 - 0.28
The wavy line; like a rocket trail or an oscilloscope.

What is surprising is how consistent the title sequence remained for so long. The words “Doctor Who” forming as if from the ripples in a space-pond. The diamond shaped waves; the lava-lamp shapes; the coffee cup-swirl: these were part and parcel of the show until the big blue space tunnel came along in Jon Pertwee’s last-but-one season. That was also when the coloured triangular logo came in, replacing the words Doctor and Who in plain white-on-black type-face. A show that had long since lost its high seriousness.

It’s the boom dubba bom/boom dubba bom over the vapour trail that gives us notice that this is not a normal theme tune and this is not a normal TV show. Each subsequent version made the tune grander and louder and less unearthly. Some versions want it to be a march. They give undue prominence to the “bom-diddy/bom diddy-bom” that plays over the closing credits—the one part which sounds like normal, human, hum-able music. That is not the sound which defines the show.

0.28-2.00
The music continues to play over the first scene: intrusively, surprisingly. In the seventies, there was a clear demarcation between the opening credits and the story itself. Doctor Who. Death To The Daleks. By Terry Nation. Part One. The boundary was marked by a whoosh or a howl or a budda-budda-budda. But in the ancient black and white universe the title of the episode and the name of the writer appear over the action in plain, ordinary, white on black writing. Like any episode of Crossroads or Blue Peter. As if Doctor Who doesn’t yet know it is Doctor Who.

It was supposed to be transmitted at 5.15pm. It was followed by the Goons and Juke Box Jury and then, at about 6.30, by Dixon of Dock Green. “The story of a London policeman on his beat.” The very first person to appear in Doctor Who, as everyone knows, is Reg Cranfield. Unnamed and uncredited. A London policeman. On his beat.

A coincidence, probably. But as a matter of fact, ownership of Saturday night was about to move on. Jack Warner must decrease while William Hartnell must increase.

We move from the abstract title sequences to a point of view shot. Someone is looking at the policeman, and we are looking through their eyes. That someone opens the gates, and walks through the junk yard to the police box. It’s a standard horror trope; one that Doctor Who will use many, many times. Show us what the monster or the murderer sees without showing us the monster or the murderer.

But it means we open with a question. Who has just waited for the policeman to leave and entered the dark junk yard?

The unearthly music has stopped. The title card appears on the screen. An Unearthly Child by....some writer whose name escapes me.

A child? What child? We haven’t seen a child?

The viewpoint character advances to the door: looks at it.

Is presumably about to go through it.

And dissolve to:


2.00 - 4.36
A noticeboard: Coal Hill School; very much the kind of place where you would expect to find children, unearthly or otherwise. It’s a modern school. There is a bell and a blackboard and a house system, but the children aren’t wearing uniforms, although the boys seem to have jackets and ties.

The first audible words identify the eponymous character: “You can wait in there, Susan” says an older woman, obviously a teacher. But in fact, if we strain, the first words may actually be “Goodnight, Miss Wright.”

Television is artifice; but it has ways of conveying “realism”. Terry Nation’s Survivors (for example) doesn’t depict a plague attacking modern England so much as a plague attacking the world of BBC situation comedies. Safe, suburban, C&A blouses and Peter Bowles. The opening moments of Doctor Who don’t feel like Doctor Who because there is no Doctor Who for them to feel like. But they don’t feel like children’s TV. No-one is talking down to anyone else. Almost, slightly, they feel like a documentary. It’s not a school-story, but an actual school. Reality as mediated by BBC drama. It’s not Saint Trinians or Tom Browns Schooldays or Whacko. It’s certainly not Grange Hill. I would say it felt like Play For Today if I had ever seen an episode of Play For Today.

Sydney Newman understood television. His first series for ITV laid out the new medium’s credentials very succinctly: Armchair Theatre. Unearthly Child is best thought of as a stage-piece: very deftly and skilfully constructed. We meet the characters in reverse order of importance. First, we meet Barbara; Barbara goes to see Ian. Ian and Barbara talk about Susan and then they talk about the Doctor. And then they have a scene with Susan; and then they have a scene with the Doctor; and then the four principles come together for the big final scene.

I am not knocking it. It is very well done. The classic rep theatre mystery begins with the Butler standing upstage and telling the Housekeeper that he supposes it all started with the reading of the late master’s will. Doctor Who begins with two teachers. The male teacher is worried because a student seems cleverer than he is. The female teacher is worried because the same student’s guardian won’t allow her to have extra tuition at home; and because the home address seems not to exist. We, watching from our armchairs, were given the solution on our way in: the child will turn out to be unearthly. It’s a set up, an info dump, bringing us up to speed about the basic situation. But it very skilfully and delightfully sets up the characters of the teachers. I wonder if any two characters have ever been more economically introduced than in those first lines of Doctor Who.

MAN: Not left yet?

WOMAN: Obviously not!

MAN: Ask a silly question...

WOMAN: I’m sorry.

MAN: That’s all right. I’ll forgive you this time.

The woman talks in a severe “teacher voice” all the time: if anything, she is more informal with her pupil than with her colleague. The man is light-hearted and ironic; but relapses into schoolmaster mode when in the presence of the girl. The woman is Miss Wright first and only subsequently Barbara; the man is introduced as Ian but then called Mr Chesterton. Ian washes his hands carefully at the end of the day (he teaches chemistry); Barbara tells him to pay attention; he indicates that he has been.

Who are the two girls in the school corridor? What is the paper they are looking at? Who is the boy? Why does he tease them? What impact does their acquaintance with Susan have on the rest of their lives? Spin-offs have been built on flimsier questions.

4:36 - 6.20
Why is Susan so clever? Why won’t her grandfather allow her history teacher to give her extra home tuition? Why does her address not exist?

In the second scene we meet the mysterious girl. And she doesn’t seem very mysterious at all, which is the most mysterious thing about her. She has a posh accent and likes pop music. She prefers to walk home than take a lift with her teachers. And she spots a mistake in her teacher’s history book.

She is listening to the music on her own. She is not pretending to be normal for Ian and Barbara’s benefit. Maybe the hand-jive is meant to seem a little bit alien; I think it is just meant to look “with-it”. I have heard it said that she looks elfin; that she looks like a younger Audrey Hepburn. But most people would surely look at her hair and think of John, Paul, Ringo and George.

With the Beatles, with the monochrome Hamburg portraits on the cover came out the day before An Unearthly Child, November 22nd 1963. The date was overshadowed by another event. A month before, in October, Bob Dylan had told the straights that their sons and their daughters were beyond their command.

Susan is an alien teenager; but all teenagers are alien. It is 1963 and children are by definition unearthly.

6:20 - 9:38
Scene 3: Ian and Barbara have followed Susan to her mysterious home, and they continue to talk about her. The three flashbacks don’t take us very far. Ian is astonished by her advanced knowledge of chemistry; Barbara is astonished that she doesn’t understand the English currency system; Ian manages to confuse her with a very simple geometry question. “You can’t solve the problem using only three of the dimensions!” sums up the tone of the show about as well as anything could.

Barbara snaps “don’t be silly”. Ian ironically breaths “with time being the fourth, I suppose?” The past is a foreign country. Sarcasm in the classroom will not be stopped for a few years yet.

“I feel frightened” says Barbara “As though we were interfering with something that is best left alone”. Not, perhaps, the subtlest lines ever written. And suddenly, we get a glimpse of Susan; already in the junk yard. She pops something into her mouth. (A gobstopper? A jelly baby? An alien food tablet?) And we catch a glimpse of a manikin; possibly a shop window dummy. It’s head is smashed in, and it is hanging by what can only be described as a noose. And we flash back to Ian and Barbara. “Lets get it over with” says Ian, as if he were about to ingest some unpleasant medicine, or maybe punish one of his pupils.


9:38-11.38Scene 4. Ian and Barbara walk around the junkyard. We see the hanged manikin again. We see the police box. It is humming: buzzing. It has never hummed or buzzed since. The humming and the buzzing clues us in that it is perhaps an unearthly police box. And (this is a little clunky) it provides a pretext for Ian to walk around it.

11:39-12:07
“A little more than kin, and less than kind.”

“I perceive that you have been in Afghanistan.”

“Gosh, uncle Ben, you're worse than a room full of alarm clocks.”

A world historical moment. An old man appears. He is coughing. We don’t know his name, and we never will.

“What are you doing here...What do you want?”

He has come on to the stage, and will never vacate it.

12:07-14:30
When George Lucas first shows us Yoda, he is an annoying sprite who knocks things over. If we were one of the very few people who saw Empire Strikes Back without spoilers, there would be a fairy tale unmasking. The smurf who won’t tell Luke where Yoda is turns out Yoda himself to be.

Ian and Barbara have followed Susan home. They encounter an annoying, patronising, condescending old man. He is Susan’s grandfather; and Susan’s grandfather is the Doctor Who of the title. But Ian and Barbara somehow do not make this connection; they somehow imagine that the old man has locked the young girl in the police box—slightly kinky for Saturday night, but not remotely meeting the facts as they know them. Susan comes to school every day, well dressed and well fed, so she can hardly be spending the evenings locked in a cell.

If there wasn’t sixty years of Doctor Who lore weighing us down; we might think that the junk yard was part of the mystery: that the old man collected junk and the police box emerged from his collection of hanged manikins and dusty picture frames. At any moment Prof Yaffle might step down from his bookend and we will put the police box in the shop window in case whoever lost it should happen to pass by.

It is a scene rich with potential. It is the last time we don’t know.

The mystery narrows. “Who is Susan?” has contracted to “what is the police box?” The old man is the answer to both questions, but his very name is a riddle. A riddle that will never be answered.

14:30
And suddenly, the universe changed.

This is the scene I remember from Panopticon. This is I suppose the scene which made me get up out of my seat and go to the front and kneel down and give my life to Doctor Who.

You can’t fit a skyscraper in a sitting room; but you can fit a TV into a sitting room and you can show a skyscraper on a TV screen. So you can fit a skyscraper in a sitting room after all.

How does this help? Those sheep are small; but those sheep are far away.

What does the Doctor suppose he is saying? Is the idea that when you step through the doors of the police box what you perceive is merely an image of the interior, transmitted from somewhere else, like the image of Dallas, Texas watched on a screen in Barnet, Hertfordshire? The early pitch documents speak of a ship which projects the characters into other modes of being.

Or is he saying that when you watch TV, you don’t perceive William Hartnell to be a Lilliputian figure barely six inches tall: your imagination turns him into a full sized man. So perhaps the TARDIS interior is very small, and Ian and Barbara’s imagination is making it seem enormous.

There is a TV in the TARDIS. We see London; and then we see the Stone Age. On the TV on the TV. And then the doors of the TARDIS open, and we see the image and the screen through the doors. And Ian and Barbara step through the doors, into the image.

We are watching Doctor Who, on TV. From the armchair, or maybe even from behind the armchair, in one of our smaller sitting rooms. TV can take us anywhere. The TARDIS is a metaphor.

By 1978 it was an in-joke. Bigger on the inside than the outside. Why is a mouse when it spins? What colour is the square root of Wednesday?

Why is it bigger on the inside?


Because it is dimensionally transcendental.

What does dimensionally transcendental mean?


It means it’s bigger on the inside.

It has become a proverb. Used by people who had never even seen Doctor Who. The oppositions motion is like the TARDIS. My granny’s cupboards were like the TARDIS.


Barbara walks through the police box door. The camera is behind her. We see her walking away from us.

Barbara walks through the TARDIS doors. The camera is in front of her. We see her walking towards us.

A reaction shot: a close up of her face.

Ian stumbles in after her: looking confused.

A quick pan around the TARDIS interior.

And pull back to see the four characters assembled in the large control room.

In my head, I was convinced that I had gone through the doors and seen them expand, and experienced knowledge-by-acquaintance of the TARDIS interior dimensions. I now see that the magic was achieved with a very quick cut. But the scene grew in my mind. It defined the magic of Doctor Who. It was bigger in the inside of my head than it was outside on the big screen.

But that was 1978, not 1963. I was not, in fact, surprised that the TARDIS was b.o.t.i.t.t.o.

But I was surprised that it was surprising. I was surprised that it had once been surprising. And I believed, for many years, that that surprising-ness was a thing that could have remained; that should have remained; that the TARDIS ceased to be surprising because later writers did not respect The Magic and that The Magic could, in theory, be brought back.

14:44 - 20:26
Scene 5. The cast is assembled. And there is nothing, in fact, left to happen.

The premise of the show is that Biddy and Cliff and Miss McGovern and Dr Who should travel through time and space and have adventures. Sidney Newman described a first episode in which two teachers walk their student home through the fog; are surprised to find that home is a police box, and are invited inside by a confused, lost, possibly quote senile unquote old man. Another early internal pitch says that once the teachers are inside the Doctor’s ship, someone accidentally presses a button and causes the ship to “slip its moorings”. This is very much what happens in the Peter Cushing Dalek movie, in fact.

But Unearthly Child, as we have it, offers a much more interesting set up. It generates actual hostility between the principles. Not only between Ian and Barbara and the Doctor, but between the Doctor and Susan.

Ian and Barbara are convinced that the TARDIS is an illusion. “A game you and your grandfather are playing, if you like”, says Barbara. The Doctor says the box can travel in space and time; Ian has a moment of wonder but rejects it as ludicrous. The Doctor retains some of the attributes of the old man in the junkyard: he fusses over a broken clock in the same way he fussed over an ornate picture frame. But he is largely in control: dominant, a wizard in his magic domain. Ian and Barbara decide to leave; but the Doctor won’t let then. He says that if they leave, the TARDIS will have to leave as well. Susan says that if the Doctor leaves earth, she will stay there. There is a brief fractional moment which should have defined her character for ever afterwards, when she is torn between her grandfather and her teachers. The Doctor over-rides her choice. He pretends to open the door, but in fact he sends the TARDIS travelling in Time. Susan is at that moment as unwilling a traveller as the two humans; although that will soon be forgotten.

In the untransmitted pilot version of the story, there is a science fictional motivation. The Doctor thinks that mere knowledge of the TARDIS will change history or violate the timelines. Barbara in particular is dangerous because she seems to believe. “My dear child, you know very well we cannot let them possess even one idea that such a ship as the TARDIS might be possible” he says to Susan. “I can’t let you go” he says to Ian. “You and your companion would be footprints in a time where you were not supposed to have walked.”

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

But this idea more or less drops out of the transmitted version. The Doctor is simply worried about being made into “a public spectacle”. The dialogue about giving humans anachronistic knowledge (which makes the Doctor and Susan one smidgeon more alien) is replaced by Susan asserting her love of 20th century England. A canny move: a theoretical argument has been replaced by a very human piece of drama.

20:26 -23.00
We see an image on the TARDIS monitor—on the TV within the TV. A London scene: but it is clearly not a view of Totters Lane. Could it be—could it possibly be—the BBC television centre?

It shrinks and recedes and is replaced by the wibbly wobbly wavy lines we saw in the opening seconds. The whirling line, the ripples; super-imposed over each characters face in turn. It takes more than a minute. For a second, there is jaunty electronic music, giving the unfortunate effect that the characters are dancing; but rapidly an extended dematerialisation sound effect kicks in. The same sound effect would be in use sixty years later. That and the police box and the word TARDIS are the only things which survive.

Ian and Barbara are unconscious. The Doctor looks uncertain. We see a sandy desert through the TV within a TV; and then we go outside. The viewpoint has changed: we are seeing what the characters cannot yet see. The police box is in the middle of a desert; and a shadow of something unpleasant falls across it.

In 1978, Time Travel was entirely ordinary: the Doctor lounged in his ship playing chess or chatting about going on holiday and then typed coordinates into the console. In this first story, Time Traveller is scary and awesome and surreal. A bit of a wrench. I read this back into the future of the series. Every TARDIS trip should have been like the first TARDIS trip and someone had somehow allowed the Magic to lapse.

And yet it was clearly the mundanity and silliness of Tom Baker that had won my heart.


Next Episode: The Cave of Skulls

Some people find the cavemen dull; some people even advise newbies to skip episodes 2-4 and rush on to the Daleks. But I think that the cavemen are an intrinsic component of the emerging myth. No-one planned them as such. But I don’t think you can experience the full joy of the scary alien robots if you haven’t followed Ian and Barbara through the primordial desert.

The end of Unearthly Child changes the viewpoint; we are outside the TARDIS, looking at a shadow falling across it. The Cave of Skulls continues this counter intuitive narrative strategy. We don’t go back to our heroes in the strange chrome room. We go first to a cave, where a modern stone age family talk articulately about losing the secret of fire and choosing a new leader before we return to the action of the first instalment. It ratchets up the dramatic irony in the next scene. Ian obstinately refuses to believe that they have travelled in time, but we, in our armchairs, in our smaller sitting rooms, know that they have.

The Doctor says that year-o-meter is broken: not calculating properly—because it says that they have gone back to Year Zero.

But Year Zero is exactly where they have gone. Before the decade was out, another science fiction epic would be opening with the Dawn of Man.

if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here 

Nothing at the End of the Lane (3)

Nothing at the End of the Lane (4)
Children in Need Special
Tales From the TARDIS
The Star Beast
Giggle
Honest To Doctor Who

The Key To Time

Ribos Operation (1)

Nothing At The End of the Lane (1)

This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my Patreon.

Patreon: A way of supporting web writers who you like. You promise to pay me a small amount, typically a $1/£1 each time I write an article. You can set a maximum, so if I am unexpectedly prolific one month you won't get stung by a bigger than expected bill.

It's my Patreon supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing. 

It would be very cool if you joined them. 

1978

Time worked differently in those days. The world had only recently changed to colour and pictures from the previous decade came from a different dimension. They still called it the generation gap. Teenagers grew up in a different world from their parents. I don't know if the Beatles were literally bigger than Jesus, but history was certainly divided into Before Beatles and After Beatles.

I measured out my life in annuals. I could wind back through 1977, 1976, 1975 by looking at increasingly dog-eared Blue Peter presenters. Time stopped in 1968, Book 5. Peter Purves topless and Valarie Singleton wrapped up like an eskimo. Before that there was only Magic Roundabout and Pippin Fort.

So, in August 1978, it seemed like a very big deal. Panopticon Two, the second ever Doctor Who convention. The centrepiece: the very first episode of Doctor Who. Unseen since 1963. Fifteen whole years.

The very first episode of Doctor Who. I came on board at the same time Jon Pertwee left. The Sugar Puffs Doctor turned into the One With the Scarf. Oh, it is such a cliche to talk about "my Doctor". I think Colin Baker started it. Tom Baker was the Doctor, the only Doctor I properly knew. Jon Pertwee was a huge foundational myth from the primeval junior school era. The First and Second Doctors were as remote and mysterious as the Garden of Eden and Uncle Mac.

It was 1978 and Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be. The special magic had departed and even the president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society didn't know what had happened to it.

Facebook insists I look at forums about old television programmes. There is a widespread agreement that television ceased to be funny when It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Robin's Nest came to an end. There is no excuse to ever watch anything apart from reruns of Fawlty Towers. We have moved from an age of gold into an age of brass. When King Arthur comes again, Wagon Wheels will return to their proper size and comedians will appear on television in black make up. Women will smoke during pregnancy. There will be lots of beatings.

Everyone's age is a golden age; but it is factually true that the middle 1970s produced a lot of very funny TV shows. Older comedians who had learned their trade in the last days of variety and rep were still working; but the alternative circuit hadn't yet made comedy the new rock and roll. No, we can't have Carry On back because Carry On came out of a particular moment in time and time doesn't go round and round in circles but just moves on.

I was lucky enough to have been twelve when Star Wars happened. I don't know if I'd swap that for being a generation younger and living through Beatlemania and the second folk revival.

The very first episode of Doctor Who. The BBC didn't do repeats. Not what they called "out of Doctor" repeats, anyway: when Baker assumed the throne they were reluctant to show old Pertwee episodes and certainly nothing earlier.

When this newfangled idea of showing pictures on the radio first came in, actors and writers were worried. If we're not careful, they said, the BBC will build up a library of plays and comedians and jugglers and never need to employ another one ever again. What chance for a young actor who wants to essay the Dane if the BBC already has a definitive version of Hamlet in their magic box? So agreements were made with trades unions and Actors Equity. The BBC had to go on making new TV; and very, very little old TV could be shown each year; and then not without the original actors' and writers' permission.

The Beeb was surprisingly sportsmanlike about this. They took it for granted that they had to check with Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln each time the Brigadier appeared on screen, because the Brigadier first appeared in a story wot they wrote. I suppose the DWAS had to get clearance from Equity and the Beeb. Or maybe a few hundred people at a con counted as a private showing.

An episode of Doctor Who, on the big screen. A black and white episode: the very first.

Some people can't separate Doctor Who from the night John Kennedy died. Some people can't separate it from that unseasonably cold winter. I believe my Mum and Dad were already living in the family home, two years before I materialised. They owned a black and white TV. I was the Doctor Who fan but they had actually watched Doctor Who on their TV when the world was black and white and cold and foggy.

But to me the alpha version of An Unearthly Child -- and therefore the primary experience of Doctor Who -- is the great hall at Imperial College looking at a life sized TARDIS and a life sized Dalek with a packed lunch and a tube ticket clasped to my breast. Your mileage may vary.

I don't know how many times I have watched it in the intervening decades. I saw it the following year, at Panopticon 3. I saw it in the Five Faces Of Doctor Who season on BBC 2 during the Baker-Davison interregnum. I saw it on my own TV when VHS tapes first became affordable. I saw it a few years back when I tried to watch right through the whole canon. I watched the first dozen episodes on Britbox with Sofa-Buddy during lockdown.

I know it as well as I know anything.

Someone from Sons of the Desert once said that he'd seen all the Laurel and Hardy films so many times that he no longer laughed at them: but he still watched them because he wanted to spend time with Stan and Olly. What is left of the first two seasons of Doctor Who aren't as scary as they used to be; they very probably never were. But they have that quality that CS Lewis probably did not call Donegality. The sense of time-and-place.

The ship. The stone age. The radiation needle turning to critical. A vanishing EnglandLondonBritain that had flown forgotten as a dream before I drew my first breath. An umbilical chord back to my thirteenth year; when testcard, ad-break and Radio Time were still apparelled in celestial light. Just barely.

I knew that Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster. I knew that Doctor Who was the name of the series, not the character. Having seen Unearthly Child gave me one more thing to be a purist about.

Nineteen sixty three. Fifteen years ago. As far removed from me then as Blink and Last of the Time Lords is from me today.

Nineteen seventy eight. Forty seven years ago. As far removed from me now as Charlie Chaplain was from me then.

What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?

It came true. You're looking at it.

if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here 

Nothing at the End of the Lane (3)

Nothing at the End of the Lane (4)
Children in Need Special
Tales From the TARDIS
The Star Beast
Giggle
Honest To Doctor Who

The Key To Time

Ribos Operation (1)

The Ribos Operation (Cont)

 

Read more

Doctor Who Season 16: The Ribos Operation

 

 

read more

Doctor Who Season 16: The Key To Time

 

read more...

Obligatory Church on Ruby Road Review

Obligatory Church on Ruby Road Review

Honest To Doctor Who

 

Honest To Doctor Who

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Doctor Who: The Terrible Thing Which Happened On Saturday

The Terrible Thing Which Happened On Saturday

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Doctor Who: The Star Beast

Review: The Star Beast

Subscribers to my Patreon have already read this essay, along with other Sixtieth Anniversary related essays. 

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The Matrix Revisited

Everybody knows that this reality's not real

So raise a glass to all things past

And celebrate how good it feels

                Fishermen's Friends

Just seen the Matrix on the big screen. For the first time in very probably twenty four years. I was rather astonished. It's actually a darn good film.

I think it had been overwritten in my mind, first, by the very bad sequel and second by the very, very bad third instalment; and, thirdly, by a certain irritating Matrix-chic that infested geek circles in the opening years of the third millennium. I had a friend who literally wore a long black leather coat and mirror shades in the streets. Even in Tescos. He swore he was doing it before the Matrix came out; but even so.

It's like Star Wars. You can't recover a sense of the film as a film; because its originality and tropes have been part of the language of cult cinema for twenty years. I don't think it necessarily invented "bullet time" but it certainly made it popular. At one level, it's plugged into a very specific pre-millennial moment; but at another it defined how we think about computers so definitively that it doesn't feel particularly dated.

Flash Gordon and Star Trek still dominate our thinking about space travel: space ships are still pointy missiles with fins and Beam Me Up Scottie is still code for the last word in futurism or impenetrable geekery. Space fiction conceptually froze at a moment when space travel didn't quite exist but felt as if it should. The Matrix freezes computers on the cusp of their ubiquity: when Usenet was still a thing and the Web had not quite been mainstreamed; when cellphones were cool but it was no longer irredeemably pretentious to own one.

The world has moved on. Computers no longer have green screens and strange >: symbols. Coders no longer exist in stylishly unkempt bedsits. Computer discs are no longer traded like hard drugs. Legendary individuals don't have mysterious handles. Computers live on kitchen tables and commuters pockets and are used to play angry birds and order groceries. Artificial intelligence is a predictive text system which kids use to cheat on their homework. But the Matrix still dominates our sense of what a computer is, in the same way that Big Ben dominates conceptual London. We quote it without knowing that we're quoting it. Red Pill. Blue Pill. Rabbit Hole. Glitch.

The Matrix feels like it has always existed. I very nearly found myself talking about its 80s vibe. I could swear it was part of the lingua franca of the role playing club at college. As a matter of historical fact it only came out in 1999, the same year as Phantom Menace. Neil Gaiman's Sandman (which still feels quite contemporary) had finished its initial run in '96. "Morpheus" is referenced in the same way that the Prisoner, the Wizard of Oz and above all Alice in Wonderland are referenced: as cultural touch-stones that Everybody Knows. Was it cool to have read Sandman in 1999, or was it already a bit passe, grandad?

I had stored the Matrix in my brain as a syle-over-substance movie which packaged the cool bits of Descartes for people who had never read Phillip K Dick. Or possibly vice versa. But I was only remembering two sequences. There's the conspiracy stuff in the beginning, when Neo gets weird messages about white rabbits, meets strangers who know things they couldn't possibly know, and has liaisons with improbably cool people under improbably rainy bridges. And there's the Bruce Lee stuff at the end, where Neo takes on Agent Smith in an American tube station and establishes that he is the Chosen One. Enlightenment through extreme violence.

It was real funny when it turned out that Elrond was being played by the guy in the black suit who says Miss TAH AND Er SUN. Fellowship of the Ring was only a couple of years after the Matrix.

But I'd pretty much forgotten everything that comes in between. The excellent characterisation of Morpheus's team. It's pretty unusual for characters who exist mainly to be killed off to be so individualised and likeable and funny. (How much easier Aliens would have been to take if all the space marine action figures had had personalities.) The quite sophisticated explication of the mind body duality and John Stewart Mills contented porcine, particularly around the subplot of Cypher's treachery. I did remember that there was No Spoon; but I'd forgotten how cleverly the oracle-in-a-kitchen uses the ideas of fate and prophecy to set up some genuine moral jeopardy.

It's astonishingly clever that the mysticism, the action and the idea of virtual reality are unified into a single concept. We kind of get that Morpheus can run up walls and karate chop bullets because he's a character in a film: the rules of the real world don't apply because up there on the big screen everything is a special effect. And we definitely get that he can bend spoons because he's in a computer programme and the spoon isn't real. But we also get the idea that we could bend spoons and run up walls in the real world if we believed we could. The oracle and Neo are doing the kinds of things that Jesus and Buddha and Uri Geller could literally do. So "realising that the world is a computer game that you could manipulate" (in a story where the world literally is a computer game that you could manipulate) stands as a metaphor for "the kinds of things you could do in the real world if you believed you could."

It's bothersome that the Matrix has been appropriated by actual fascists. But everything gets appropriated by actual fascists. I don't know how far it's the movies fault. There is a school of thought that says that Wagner's Nordic fantasies are in and of themselves perfectly innocent: they only become evil when a lunatic with a silly moustache starts to pretend they are literally true, or could possibly be made so. And there is another school of thought that says that blonde-haired blue-eyed kids beheading hook-nosed avaricious midgets was as Nazi as fuck even before Nazism even existed. I might go down the "syntactical potential" root: the Nazi appropriation of Wagner occurred because Wagner contained material that was capable of being appropriated. Aeschylus didn't write a story about a scientist collecting body parts in a graveyard; and he certainly didn't write a story about Romantic poets rebelling against the constraints of Victorian literature. But his Prometheus was definitely a rebel rebelling against the kinds of things that rebels always rebel against. 

The Matrix doesn't say that we literally live, or might live, in a computer simulation. It doesn't even say that your boss or the policeman is, or might be, an Agent of the System and that everyone else probably isn't an actual human being at all. But it certainly has the potential for actual fascists to read it that way.

I don't think it is about conspiracy theories. It isn't even about computers. It's certainly not about Kung Fu, except in so far as Kung Fu is a spiritual practice which attunes your mind to Higher Things. It's a rare example of someone having read Joseph Campbell and then done something interesting with him. George Lucas read Hero With a Thousand faces after completing Star Wars and retrofitted his B movie to the scam monomyth: a catastrophic error of judgement the repercussions of which we are still living with today. I think it is quite likely that the Wachowskis had got as far as the opening chapters of Masks of God.

The first layer of the movie certainly uses conspiratorial tropes: everything you think you know is a lie; the lie is being perpetuated by an all-powerful group that secretly controls everything; but a tiny group know what is really going on; and you (that is to say, me) by virtue of being really good with computers, are THE CHOSEN ONE who is going to free the drones from the Illuminati or the Woke Mob the Jews or whoever it is this week. Neo's final speech, after he has achieved Enlightenment, is couched in political language and could have emanated from anyone on the far left or the far right at any time in the last quarter century. I'll show the people what YOU don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without YOU. A world without rules or controls. A world without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.

But the world without rules or control isn't about free love and tearing up your draft card and not having to go to school. Nor is it about abolishing political correctness and wokery and calling a spade a spade as opposed to an earth turning utensil and being once more proud to be white. What Neo experiences is a Gnostic revelation: this reality is not real and there is a higher, realer, truer world he can reach. The computers and the politics are a metaphor for the spiritual, not the other way round.

The mechanics are purely scientific: Neo and everyone else exists in what we'd now call Virtual Reality. The implications are philosophical: if our sense of taste is only happening in our head, the result of brain cells firing, then there is no difference between a virtual steak in the matrix and an actual steak. Particularly when the real world you awaken into doesn't contain steak, but only tasteless nutritious porridge. How can a tree continue to be when there's no-one about in the quad?

The visualisation of the "brain in a box" conundrum -- millions upon millions of womb-like tanks containing frozen humans in their virtual dream-state -- is genuinely arresting. Inside the Matrix is a world of obsolete cutting-edge cellphones and wires and oscilloscopes only one level up from the paraphernalia of Victor Frankenstein and computer screens that were looking dated even in 1999. Outside the Matrix -- in the "real" world -- George Lucas's shabby future has been taken to an extreme, with a touch of Ridley Scott in the mix, as if the Millennium Falcon had been occupied by undergraduate squatters for a decade. The mirror shades and shiny guns and black leather are part of the illusion: in the real world everyone wears badly knitted grey sweaters. Anyone who adopts Matrix chic as a fashion statement has seriously missed the point.

But that's what conspiracy theory does. Flips reality on it's head: tells us that the archaeologists who have studied the pyramids for decades are, just for that exact reason, unreliable, and the real truth about Egyptology is to be found in a shabby paperback or a mimeographed fanzine. There are increasing numbers of people who believe, or affect to believe, that the world is flat, not because they are ignorant about geography and gravity, but because their politics requires them reject all form of authority. I love Jesus more than you do, because I believe there were Tyrannosaurus at the court of Elizabeth I but you won't find that taught in mainstream schools.

The choice of the red pill over the blue pill, of grey jumpers over black leather jackets, is couched politically. But there is no implicit critique of the social order. Neo is the Chosen One because he has faith: faith in the fact that he is the Chosen One. He learns martial arts -- outside the Matrix, but inside a VR -- but is repeatedly told that he can't beat his dream-mentor because he doesn't believe he can. Neo's journey (like that of the nine hundred and ninety eight other heroes) is the same as that of Luke Skywalker. You don't win martial arts bouts by learning the moves. You don't become a guitarist by practising the chord shapes. You don't destroy armoured battle stations by going through a meticulous aeronautics course. You have to believe that you can do it; switch off your conscious self; sell your soul to Satan at the crossroads. The perfect marksman is the one who shuts his eyes and doesn't bother to aim.

Which, is admittedly and in itself, a right-wing trope. I think we've all heard quite enough from experts. Donald Trump will save us, not because he is a skilful and experienced politician, but because he quite definitely isn't.

Unless I have this wrong. Unless the movie does not intend to use politics as a metaphor for enlightenment but wants us to use enlightenment as a metaphor for politics. You can't really take on six men with guns in bullet time and then leap into the sky like Superman. But you can stick it to the man and make America great again, and that is what living without limits means.

Richard Bach's not-much-better followup to Jonathan Livingstone Seagull admitted that the little sea-bird who could was not Jesus. On the contrary, everyone is Jesus, or at any rate, Jesus is a metaphor for that which everyone is. Which may be very bad theology; but is really the only way to approach Chosen One myths. Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi and so are you; Harry Potter is the boy who lived and so am I. We are all Neo if we believe in ourselves; we can all bend the spoon once we realise it isn't there.

If we literally believe that there is a conspiracy and that "we" can reject "you" and live without limits, the Matrix is toxic. But not if what we take away from it is that we are all potential Siegfrieds who can go to the mountain top and slay our dragon.

So. There was clearly more to this film than I ever gave it credit for. That's mildly disconcerting. What would be severely disconcerting if I were to now see The Matrix Reloaded and realise that that's a perfectly decent film as well. Heck, if this goes on, it might turn out that there are redeeming features in Highlander 2.

Or perhaps that's just what they want me to think?

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25: Answers To Readers Questions

1: Fascist

Kind of the whole point of this sequence of articles was that words mean different things depending on who you are, where you are, and when you last had lunch with Zaphod Beeblebrox. We are now debating the definition of fascist. I wonder if everyone missed the point; or if in fact they exactly got it.

I agreed with Orwell that "fascist" is frequently nothing more than a term of abuse; but that we generally have a pretty good idea what kind of things the cuss-word could be applied to. I do slightly think that Gavin is more inclined than I would be to use it as a synonym for "bigotry" or "hatefulness". I would prefer definitions around populism, nostalgia, and the back-stab myth.

Some time ago a clip was circulating on the interwebs, possibly from the West Wing, in which three nice American politicians were asked why America was the greatest country in the world, and a liberal sounding chap said, more in sorrow than in anger, that America used to be the greatest country in the world, but due to things which unspecified people had done, it no longer was. The people who were forwarding it to me were largely liberals types, but it felt fascist-adjacent to me.

In practice, it means "Right wing person, and by the way, I think right wing things are generally bad."

Which brings us back to: 

2: Woke

Woke (1) A set of beliefs about how white, male, heterosexual 'Christians' structured language and social structures to make sure that white, male 'Christians" were always in charge.

Woke (2) The theory that wokeness (sense 1) is propagated by a malign entity with a malicious intent -- the Frankfurt Group, the Alien Space Lizards, the SJWs, the Jews etc.

Woke (3) i: Any text or action which shows black, female, gay, non-Christians in a good light 

ii: Any text or action which doesn't treat black, female, gay, non-Christians as a deviation from the norm 

iii: Any text or action which depicts or acknowledges the existence of black, female, gay, non-Christians unnecessarily 

iv: Any movie or comic book with black, gay, non-Christian people in it.

Some people sincerely believe that all instances of woke (sense 3) are caused by woke (sense 1): "The reason Disney made The Marvels is that they wanted to dismantle the white, straight, male, Christian hegemony".

Some people sincerely believe that all instances of woke (sense 3) are caused by woke (sense 2): "Russell T Davies cast Ncuti Gawa as Doctor Who because the BBC is communist and therefore wants to bring down western civilisation."

But very many people use the word in sense 3 without any clear ideas about senses 1 or 2: "woke" is simply the word they use to describe a TV show with a black actor in it or a book written by a gay author. "Apparently there was a gay character in the new Doctor Who. Sounds woke to me."

Andrew's "translation" exercise largely assumed that "woke" was being used in sense (3) ("anything which has a trans person in it or suggests that being trans is okay"). G's translation effectively stone-manned Musk by showing how a sophisticated reading of woke in sense (1) could plausibly lead to some of his conclusions (you could conceivably think that a belief in structural inequality will result in the extermination of the human species.)

Andrew acknowledges that he focussed entirely on the anti-trans element. It would have been better if he had focussed on the racial definition ("If we do not prevent people from thinking that white people have advantages over black people, we will never travel to Mars") or on inequality in general ("Unless people stop looking at the various ways in which society is set up to give certain groups advantages over others, humans will become extinct.") or even economically ("The only important thing is to prevent people believing that resources should be shared out fairly.") He may in fact re-write the passage to reflect this. But G's extensive mini-essays went rather beyond what Andrew's "translations" were intended to be doing.

3: Translation

G correctly spots that Andrew was riffing on the end of Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet in which the Christian philologist has to translate Wellsian philosophy into the language of the angels, so "Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute" comes out as "Living creatures are stronger than the question of whether an act is bent or good...it is better to be alive and bent than dead..." Translation was a thing Lewis was interested in, of course. He saw his job as a Christian writer as translating difficult theological ideas into the language of ordinary people, and has some interesting things to say about how ordinary language differs from that of the academic. ("I do not say that this woman is immoral but I do say that she is a thief" means "She is chaste but dishonest.")

Let's consider a couple of examples.

"He had a strict Calvinist upbringing."

Literal gloss: "His parents were disciples of the sixteenth century Swiss theologian, John Calvin."

Idiomatic gloss: "His parents were devout Christians who believed that God rewards hard work and punishes laziness (and by the way, they were probably Scottish.)"

Explanatory gloss: "Until the 1500s, most Christians believed that you went to heaven by regularly saying sorry for your bad deeds and paying for them with charitable giving or self-imposed punishments, but a Swiss priest started to teach that God knew in advance who was going to heaven. When these ideas spread to Scotland, they gave rise to a culture which was often perceived as joyless, austere and unkind to children..."

"Jeremy Corbyn supports free wi-fi because he is a Trot."

Literal Gloss: "Jeremy Corbyn believes the state should supply free internet access because he is a supporter of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky."

Idiomatic Gloss: "Jeremy Corbyn believes that the world should consist of single state in which the government owns all the wealth and shares it among the people: this explains why he thinks internet access should be free." 

This would lead to absurd conclusions: "Support for free wi-fi is evidence of support for world-wide communist revolution", "Worldwide communist revolution is undesirable; therefore there must always be a charge for internet use." But in fact, it is clear that "Trot" is being used, not to refer to Trotsky or Trotskyitism, but as a swearword meaning "left-wing", so the accurate translation would be: 

"Jeremy Corbyn's belief in free wi fi is left wing, and therefore bad."

or, if we have to gloss "left wing"

"Excessive sharing of resources is bad; providing citizens with free wi fi would involve the excessive sharing of resources; therefore providing citizens with free wi-fi would be bad."

An explanatory gloss would go on for pages, and go far beyond what I was aiming at in the translation exercise. I'll have a go if you like:

"Trotsky believed in world communist revolution; Lenin and his successors that it could be achieved in the Soviet Union alone. The British Labour Party was an alliance between Trades Unionists, Marxists and Social Democrats. British Marxists who supported Russian and Marxist-Leninism tended to join the British Communist Party; the ones who resigned from Party in 1956 and joined Labour were largely Trotskyites. They were far to the left politically of the Trades Unions and the Social Democrats, so members of the Labour party who were not Marxists tended to use Trotskyite descriptively, and then as a term of abuse. By 2020, "Trot" was simply a word used to denote a left wing party member who the speaker disapproved of. Moderates in the Labour Party felt that Jeremy Corbyn was too left wing, and therefore denoted him as a Trot: the free internet access plan was one example of his supposedly excessive left-wing thinking." 

4: Virus

If someone says that "The drugs trade is Satanic" they might mean different things --

A: "Drugs are very, very, very, very bad"

B: "Drugs are very bad and I believe that bad things are ultimately caused by a malign spiritual power"

C: "Drugs are very bad, and I believe that the perpetrators of this particular bad thing are under the direct control of a malign spiritual force, and that prayer and exorcism could form part of their rehabilitation"

D: "I believe that the big boss of the cartel selling weed in Brixton literally has cloven hooves, a tail and smells of sulphur."

(I understand that when members of the Republican Party say that Hillary Clinton is Satanic, some of them at least are using the term in sense D!)

If your local vicar says the drug trade is Satanic, there is very little point in pretending that you think he is talking in sense D ("No, I've met one of the local dealers and he is definitely a normal human, albeit not a very nice one") when he was obviously using the word in sense A (that he disapproves of drugs very strongly indeed.) 

We have accepted, I think, that Political Correctness sometimes means "A Jewish (cultural Marxist) conspiracy to destroy the West" but very frequently only means "the prevailing orthodoxy". Woke sometimes means "A Jewish (cultural Marxist) conspiracy to destroy the West" but very frequently only means "liberal beliefs" or "beliefs the speaker thinks are too left wing."

Another Christian writer once told C.S Lewis that it was the job of Christian literary critics to reveal the false values underlying much contemporary literature. Lewis asked if that meant "to reveal what the values underlying contemporary literature in fact are (and, by the way, as a Christian, I personally believe those values are false)" or if it meant "to reveal the falsity of the values." Lewis approved the first and disapproved the second, because he felt that critics were experts in showing underlying assumptions in literature, but only amateurs in talking about which values were good and which values were bad.

I have said that Political Correctness may mean nothing more than "prevailing orthodoxy". Similarly, Mind Virus might mean no more than "widespread and prevalent idea". And Woke may mean no more than "liberal ideas {which incidentally I think are bad}". But this creates a problem for the translator. Does "the woke mind virus will destroy civilisation" mean "liberal ideas {which, by the way, are very prevalent} will destroy civilisation". Or does it mean "the widespreadness and prevalence of liberal ideas will destroy civilisation". Or even "any widespread and prevalent idea will destroy civilisation, and at present, liberal ideas happen to be the widespread ones."

Hence:

“The woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide.”

Many people who make movies have liberal ideas -- which are very widespread and prevalent at present -- and because of this, everyone in the world is likely to kill themselves."

or

Many people who make movies follow the most widespread and prevalent ideas (which, at the moment, are liberal ones) and as a result, everyone in the world is likely to kill themselves.

“That the mind virus is pushing humanity towards extinction is not hyperbole.”

It would be no exaggeration to say that liberal ideas (which are, at the moment, widespread and prevalent) are likely to result in everyone in the whole world dying.

OR

It would be no exaggeration to say that the widespread prevalence of a particular idea (in this case, liberal ones) are likely to result in everyone in the whole world dying.

“The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters”

The only thing of importance is that liberal ideas are shown to be wrong, even though they are prevalent and widespread at present.

OR

The only thing of importance is that liberal ideas cease to be prevalent and widespread.

“Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multi-planetary.”

If you have liberal ideas, then you probably believe that humans can't learn about the world through objective and systematic study, or that even if they can, they shouldn't. If you have liberal ideas, you probably don't think that the cleverest and most talented people should have the most money; you may even think that it's bad to be talented and clever. If you have liberal ideas, you probably don't like people at all and would rather they become extinct. As long as liberal ideas are widespread and prevalent, no-one will ever send a spaceship to Mars.

OR

When a particular idea becomes widespread and prevalent, it becomes impossible to learn about the world through systematic and objective study. When a particular idea becomes widespread and prevalent, the cleverest and most talented people are not given the most money, and perhaps there will be no clever or talented people at all. When a particular idea becomes widespread and prevalent, ??human beings start dying ??there is a risk of human extinction ??it is bad for people in general. If this happens we will never send spaceships to Mars. At the moment, the idea which is widespread and prevalent is liberalism, so we need to talk about conservative ideas instead.

5: Other Things I Learned From This Exercise

Abstract terms like "the human race"; "humanity" and "civilisation" are almost impossible to turn into meaningful concrete ones: once you replace them with "everybody" or "people" you turn out to to be talking nonsense.

"Society" has a meaning in terms of "what sociologists study": the way-that-people-behave-in-groups. You might, of course, think that human beings don't behave in any particular way in groups, and sociology is therefore snake-oil. 

C.S Lewis said he didn't like the term "society", but noted that it mostly just meant "all of us". But when Mrs Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as society" she didn't, presumably, mean that groups of people didn't exist or that groups of people didn't behave in particular ways and she certainly didn't think that "there is no such thing as all of us." What she was reacting against was the idea of Society as a thing with agency.

"Society is to blame for crime" can easily be translated into statements which are not actually nonsensical although Mrs Thatcher presumably disagreed with them. ("Everyone is to blame for crime, not just the people who actually commit it." "If everyone behaved differently, there would be less crime".) I can't come up with sensible glosses for words like "humanity" and "civilisation" which don't lead to absurd conclusions. 

I think it was Simon Hoggart who said that you should test an advertising or political slogan by asking what the opposite would be. ("It's a pedestrians car: so push it" was a memorable example.)

Woke and Virus equivocate around concepts of agency and intention. Does "the woke mind virus is anti-science" mean "one of the beliefs of people who identify as woke is that science is a bad thing" or "as a matter of fact the belief in woke ideas will have negative consequences for scientific research" or even "people who identify as woke believe in things which cannot be scientifically proven." Does "eradicating the woke mind virus" mean "eradicating all liberal ideas"; or "making liberal ideas less widespread"; or, indeed "killing all the liberals."

I think that when an evangelical clergyman says that the drug trade is satanic, he does in fact have a picture in his head of a fiery, fallen angel directly manipulating criminals to do bad things; but that if challenged, he would readily admit that that picture is a metaphor or a myth, and he really means that crime is sinful and sin is in the long run the result of Satan's power. But the fact that he thinks in terms of that metaphor probably influences the ways in which he thinks the problem might be solved (e.g that exploitation is an inevitable result of fallen human nature and therefore insoluble, as opposed to the result of temporary and alterable social conditions.) Unless, of course, "Satanic" turns out merely to be his word for poor housing, inadequate mental health provision, under-resource education etc etc etc in which case the metaphor is completely empty and the clergyman can probably get a column in the Guardian.

Similarly, it may be that some people who talk about the Woke Mind Virus are perfectly aware that they are using a figure of speech. But the fact that they have chosen that figure of speech is significant; and it will affect how they act. 

There is also the question of how "my daughter believes that some people's gender identity is different from their physical sex at birth, and that she is one of those people" and "my daughter believes that we should share out money and resources more equally and not concentrate them in the hands of a super-rich minority" or even "my daughter believes that all rich people are evil" are in any way iterations of the same thing. You might as well say "Andrew is infected with the liking-folk-music-and-anchovies virus" or "Since he took up jogging, Trevor believes we should defund the police."

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