Green Death: Dr Who and ecological politics.

Science fiction under commercial pressure is morphying into a vehicle for playstation two games, witness the Star Wars trilogy, however at its best it provides an arena for flagging up all sorts of moral, political and philosophical problems. Mary Shelley's Frakenstein as I guess most of us know was about the ethics of science, of genetic modification. Godzilla anti-nuclear tale....

Popular culture shapes ideas and practices and is shaped by them, Greens often forget culture...another green world demands a culture shift around lots of practices from compost toilets to scepticism about cash to localisation.....the battle for ideological hegemony, the struggle between different ideas and practices is profoundly political...the kind of success Greens get electorally rests not just on fighting good campaigns, on political circumstances (Labour's move to the right, may be far right...Conservative legtimation of environmentalism) but upon a mountain of cultural change, everything from Greenpeace adds, to free festivals, to youth cultures from punk to hippie, to green strainst in religion (Rastafarianism, Matthew Fox, Zen).....science fiction is one avenue of popular culture, so with 8 million watching last weeks opening episode Dr Who has to have an influence.

The new Dr Who is consistently political and has some good sexual politics, no surprise as it is put together by the man who wrote 'Queer as Folk', never much explicit sexually reference in Dr Who 1963-1990, now we have much gender bending and sexual ambiguity and celebration of sex. It also deals with the big ethical issues, last weeks episode saw a return to Frankenstein's real theme, the big theme of animal liberation in medicince....is it ethical to use humans or others instrumentaly what ever the benefits. As we all know the scripts are good, the acting solid, special effects which are beautiful rather than just a come on to buy more electronic violence stimulators....there is plenty of right wing sf think Heinlein (social credit and Ayn Rand, aargh!) Zizek argues that Rand, incidentally, is a parody which is so right wing it erodes the free market....

Dr Who though has a pretty proud political history much of it dealing with green issues, non violence and justice. The Daleks were a parody of the Nazis, the Dr's assistant Ace comment that they disliked racial impurity, the cyberman were invented by Dr Kit Pedler whose quest for Gaia book is a green tome, episodes like the Green Death (yes the one with the giant maggots) were inspired according to Barry Letts by The Ecologist magazine. The Mutants dealt with anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, the Sun Makers borrowed from Marx to show how capitalism run by the Usurians was exploitative.

Well, I suppose the popular culture Marxist classic is Spartacus, Marx noted he was his favourite hero....but Dr Who has its moments, well are we going to have a republican look at Queen Victoria or a deep ecology take on werewolfs (already had that in genesis of the Daleks, were are hero is reluctant to kill a species even a constructed one which is the ultimate evil) in tonights episode, probably not but you never know.

Any way all good fun, anti-gulf war stuff was strong in the last series and the Christmas special saw the Dr bring down a new labour prime minister with six little words.

More on Brecht and Bakhtin another day....


here are some plot details from Vincent Wall (12)

Tooth and fang

Last night doctor who was on. The episode was called tooth and fang. It was about a manor house in Victorian Scotland.. The house is called torch wood and has a strange story about a man who can change into wolf and monks who worship him. The story begins with the people who live in the house {apart from the lord} being put in the cellar by the monks. In the cellar there a strange man in a cage that they find very scary. Then we see the doctor and rose in the tardis talking about 1979 because they are going to have a short stay there