CHIBSHOW: 02. Ghost in the Monument

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1. The Ambient Televisual Phantom
2. CATEGORY: Visual Big Finish
3. CATEGORY: Faux-Woke
4. CATEGORY: Nostalgia
5. CATEGORY: Whittaker Wasting
6. CATEGORY: Writers’ Room

I’m inside my TV/Where everyone but I can see me/(Why are you here?)

Politically Charged Image

Spearhead from Space. See Jack Graham’s ‘The Empire of Vanilla‘.

NEO: What do you think the most political image is in both RTD and Moffat’s era?

I don’t know. All of the “politically charged images” in NuWho are disappointing somehow. There is absolutely nothing in NuWho that is remotely on the level of the Spearhead screencap, probably because NuWho so rarely shows us scenes of workers engaged in the business of production, or looks at the inherent juxtapositions within global society, let alone stacks multiple on top of each other within one shot.

The Zygon Invasion [approx. 21:17]

This is one of the stronger ones, however, specifically because it gives us the drone operator’s (not just the drone’s) point of view; it gives us a screen within a screen, implicating us in the act of watching Doctor Who for ‘political images’ of developing countries in the first place; we get the environment rendered in the estranging monochrome of a computer’s eye rather than the realistic colour range of a human’s; we get a wide sweep of the ruin and poverty of the area juxtaposed with the inserted well-off-looking white father and son (who are also separated from the environment by a rectangle); we get the two of them acknowledging the drone operator(/us) directly through the screen; all of this bundles together into a host of barbed implications about imperialist wars and our capacity for empathy towards their victims.

When I was screencapping it I recall looking to see if there was a shot that included both a good view of the screen and the back of the drone operator’s head, but no luck.

Further notes

• The screen-within-a-screen is a recurring motif in this story, returning at the beginning of Inversion inside Clara’s dream pod. Probably something to be said about that, no idea what though.
• For a blink-and-you-miss it 7-frame interval, the larger rectangle surrounding the Zygons is replaced with two smaller ones highlighting their faces.The software is expressly designed to identify human beings, presumably as targets.
• Like the story it’s part of, what frustrates about this image and moment is what’s not said; the people who have been airbrushed from this imaginary developing nation to make way for the substitution of the Zygons; the processes that have actually brought it to this state of ‘developing’-ness in the first place – but by mirroring the drone operator’s family, the Zygons take this whitewashing to the next level, which is fascinating. Their ability to take images from the minds of those who view them, newly granted for this story, effectively turns them into canvases (or television screens) for familiarity…obscuring the more Otherised and less palatable reality.
  Corporate media like Doctor Who relies on this very same occlusion of the truth and it’s arguably what gives rise to a brief like “ISIS, but with Zygons instead of brown people” in the first place. Or the fictitious nation of ‘Turmezistan’, orphaned, without history or even life, an aesthetic cluster of contextless war photography. On one hand, if we keep ‘places like this’ as vague and unrepresentable wastelands, we can continue to rationalise waging war on them. On the other hand, if we strip out the context of what’s happened to them and aggressively sanitise the people who live there for Western consumption, perhaps throwing in a white presenter or two, we can scrounge up some donations to charity… Paradoxically the same apparatus is used both to humanise and dehumanise. (It’s almost like there’s only one force at work here, really.)
  By far the most compelling act of rebellion the Zygons achieve in this story is to turn this logic against itself, taking it to its endpoint by disguising themselves as that which is so familiar that we could never do anything to harm it. That’s enough for this tangent.

Bonus: A politically charged image from The Beast Below.