k-punk

As I nervously anticipate the new Doctor Who (although after McCoy, after McGann, what more than there to be fear?) , it is worth thinking again about the appeal of the series, and also, more generally, about the unique importance of what I will call ‘uncanny fiction’.

A piece by Rachel Cooke in the Observer two weeks ago brought these questions into sharp relief. Cooke’s article was more than an account of a television series; it was a story about the way broadcasting, family, and the uncanny were webbed together through Doctor Who. Cooke writes powerfully about how her family’s watching of the programme was literally ritualized: she had to be on the sofa, hair washed, before the continuity announcer even said the words, ‘And now….’ She understands that, at its best, Dr Who’s appeal consisted in the charge of the uncanny – the strangely familiar, the familiar estranged: cybermen on the steps of St Pauls, yeti at Goodge Street (a place whose name will forever be associated with the Troughton adventure, ‘The Web of Fear’, for Scanshifts, who saw it whilst living in New Zealand).
Inevitably, however, she ends the piece on a melancholy note.
Cooke has been to a screening of the first episode of the new series. She enjoys its expensive production values, its ‘sinister moments’, its use of the Millennium Wheel. ‘But it is not – how shall I put this? – Doctor Who.’ Faced with an ‘overwhelming sense of loss’, she turns to a DVD of the Baker story Robots of Death for a taste of the ‘real’ stuff, the authentic experience that the new series cannot provide. But this proves, if anything, to be even more of a disappointment. ‘How slow the whole thing seems, and how silly the robots look in their Camilla Parker-Bowles-style green quilted jackets. … Good grief.’
Let’s leave aside, for a moment, all the post-post-structuralist questions about the ontological status of the text ‘itself’, and consider the glum anecdote with which the article concludes: ‘Before Christmas, when it became clear that my father’s cancer was in its final stages, my brother went out and bought a DVD for us all to watch together. Dad was too ill, and box went unopened. At the time, I cried about this; yet another injustice. Now I know better. Some things in life can’t ever be retrieved – an enjoyment of green robots in sequins and pedal pushers being one of them.’
This narrative of disillusionment belongs to a genre that has become familiar: the postmodern parable. To look at the old Dr Who is not only to fail to recover a lost moment; it is to discover, with a deflating quotidian horror, that this moment never existed in the first place. An experience of awe and wonder dissolves into a pile of dressing up clothes and cheap special effects. The postmodernist is then left with two options: disavowal of the enthusiasm, i.e. what is called ‘growing up’, or else keeping faith with it, i.e. what is called ‘not growing up’. Two fates, therefore, await the no longer media-mesmerised child: depressive realism or geek fanaticism.
The intensity (with) which Cooke invested in Doctor Who is typical of so many of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies. I, slightly younger than her, remember a time when those twenty-five minutes were indeed the most sacralised of the week. Scanshifts, slightly older than me, remembers a period when he didn’t have a functioning television at home, so he would watch the new episode furtively at a department store in Christchurch, silently at first, until, delighted, he found the means of increasing the volume.
The most obvious explanation for such fervour – childhood enthusiasm and naivete – can also be supplemented by thinking of the specific technological and cultural conditions that obtained then. Freud’s analysis of the ‘unheimlich’, the ‘unhomely’, is very well known, but it is worth linking his account of the uncanniness of the domestic to television. Television was itself both familar and alien, and a series which was about the alien in the familiar was bound to have particularly easy route to the child’s unconscious. In a time of cultural rationing, of modernist broadcasting, a time, that is, in which there were no endless reruns, no VCRs, the programmes had a precious evanescence. They were translated into memory and dream at the very moment they were being seen for the first time. This is quite different from the instant – and increasingly pre-emptive – monumentalization of postmodern media productions through ‘makings of’ documentaries and interviews. So many of these productions enjoy the odd fate of being stillborn into perfect archivization, forgotten by the culture while immaculately memorialised by the technology.

But were the conditions for Dr Who’s colonizing presence in the unconscious of a generation merely scarcity and the ‘innocence’ of a ‘less sophisticated’ time? Does its magic, as Cooke implies, crumble like a vampire seducer in bright sunlight when exposed to the unbeguiled, unforgiving eyes of the adult?
According to Freud’s famous arguments in ‘Totem and Taboo’ and ‘The Uncanny’, we moderns recapitulate in our individual psychological development the ‘progress’ from narcissistic animism to the reality principle undergone by the species as a whole. Children, like ‘savages’, remain at the level of narcissistic auto-eroticism, subject to the animistic delusion that their thoughts are ‘omnipotent’; that what they think can directly affect the world.
But is it the case that children ever ‘really believed’ in Doctor Who? Zizek has pointed out that when people from ‘primitive’ societies are asked about their myths, their response is actually indirect. They say ‘some people believe….’ Belief is always the belief of the other. In any case, what adults and moderns have lost is not the capacity to uncritically believe, but the art of using the series as triggers for producing inhabitable fictional playzones.

The model for such practices is the Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Homesick offworld colonists are able to project themselves into Ken and Barbie-like dolls who inhabit a mock-up of the earthly environment. But in order to occupy this set they need a drug. In effect, all the drug does is restore in the adult what comes easily to a child: the ability not to believe, but to act in spite of the lack of belief.
In a sense, though, to say this is already going too far. It implies that adults really have given up a narcissistic fantasy and adjusted to the harsh banality of the disenchanted-empirical. In fact, all they have done is substituted one fantasy for another. The point is that to be an adult in consumer capitalism IS to occupy the Perky Pat world of drably bright soap opera domesticity. What is eliminated in the mediocre melodrama we are invited to call adult reality is not fantasy, but the uncanny – the sense that all is not as it seems, that the kitchen-sink everyday is a front for the machinations of parasites and alien forces which either possess, control or have designs upon us. In other words, the suppressed wisdom of uncanny fiction is that it is THIS world, the world of liberal-capitalist commonsense, that is a stage set with wobbly walls. As Scanshifts and I hope to demonstrate in our upcoming audiomentary london under london on Resonance FM, the Real of the London Underground is better described by pulp and modernism (which in any case have a suitably uncanny complicity) than by postmodern drearealism. Everyone knows that, once the wafer-thin veneer of ‘persons’ is stripped away, the population on the Tube are zombies under the control of sinister extra-terrestrial corporations.
The rise of Fantasy as a genre over the last twenty-five years can be directly correlative with the collapse of any effective alternative reality structure outside capitalism in the same period. Watching something like Star Wars, you immediately think two things. Its fictional world is BOTH impossibly remote, too far-distant to care about, AND too much like this world, too similar to our own to be fascinated by. If the uncanny is about an irreducible anomalousness in anything that comes to count as the familiar, then Fantasy is about the production of a seamless world in which all the gaps have been monofilled. It is no accident that the rise of Fantasy has gone alongside the development of digital FX. The curious hollowness and depthlessness of CGI arises not from any failure of fidelity, but, quite the opposite, from its photoshopping out of the Discrepant as such.

The Fantasy structure of Family, Nation and Heroism thus functions, not in any sense as a representation, false or otherwise, but as a model to live up to. The inevitable failure of our own lives to match up to the digital Ideal is one of the motors of capitalism’s worker-consumer passivity, the docile pursuit of what will always be elusive, a world free of fissures and discontinuities. And you only have to read one of Mark Steyn’s preppy phallic fables (which need to be ranked alongside the mummy’s boystories of someone like Robert E Howard) to see how Fantasy’s pathetically imbelic manichean oppositions between Good and Evil, Us and (a foreign, contagious) Them are effective on the largest possible geopolitical stage.