Reversing the Polarity of the Gender Flow: on reactions to Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor

This short blog post reflects on immediate reactions to the announcement of Jodie Whittaker's casting as the Doctor in BBC television's long-running science fiction drama Doctor Who, the first female actor to be given the role. It discusses the context for both the announcement and the reactions, and speculates on the possibilities that Whittaker's arrival opens up for the show. The post was subsequently developed and expanded to form part of the concluding chapter of my book Once Upon A Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

'Revolution is like Saturn' : children as metaphors of unsettlement

The eponymous hero’s description of revolution in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death (1835) – ‘he devours his own children’ – is richly suggestive. Evoking the paranoiac consumption of his offspring by Cronos (Saturn), it offers a figure for the complex relationship between children and media – not least, the ways in which this relationship, characterised by tropes of absorption, authority and sequence, might correspond to patterns of evolution within media culture itself. Rhea saves Zeus from his father by substituting a swaddled rock for the child. Significantly, swaddling cloths – incunabula – have often been used as metaphors for emergent media, initially in relation to the printing press. This paper is part of a wider project proposing a theoretical model of media development based around the idea of ‘unsettlement’. This contends that all media undergo an incunabulaic period of unsettlement or radical instability (typified by formal self-consciousness and experimentation) which is followed by assimilation within a ‘mythic’ world-view (typified by more settled processes of narration, representation, reception). Once a medium has been integrated, the restless energies of its inception are diverted into marginal practices that nevertheless inform and at times challenge the mainstream. Childhood is our common period of unsettlement and, not suprisingly, its representation in media reflects a sense of profound instability. The child, idealised and demonised, embodiment of innocence and vehicle for evil, both the apotheosis of hope and the epitome of vulnerability, has been depicted with increasing prominence and edginess throughout modernity. Considering portrayals in the art and literature of the nascent mass media age (from the mid-1700s), the aim here is to begin to trace extended patterns of unsettlement via recurrent concerns about the effects of media on children (the Lady Chatterley trial, the James Bulger killing, the Byron Review) to contemporary fantasies of childhood (His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, Doctor Who).Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

In Praise Of The Moff: On The Legacy Of Doctor Who's Departing Showrunner

Steven Moffat, creator of BBC's Sherlock and showrunner of Doctor Who from 2010 to 2017, is a controversial figure whose work - although extremely popular - tends to divide both fans and academics, not to mention aca-fans (fan scholars) and casual viewers. Criticised for, among other things, his (mis)representation of women and the complexity of his plotting, he has also been praised for taking risks and for writing some of the most acclaimed episodes in Doctor Who history, including the 50th anniversary special of 2013, 'The Day of the Doctor'. This short article reflects on Moffat's achievements as he prepares to leave the showrunner role

Erik's Effects : The Phantom, the 'gesamtkunstwerk', and the monstrosity of spectacle

Erik, who is a real monster … is also, in certain respects, a regular child, vain and self-conceited and there is nothing he loves so much as, after astonishing people, to prove the really miraculous ingenuity of his mind’ (Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera) Virginia Woolf famously dated the origins of the modern sensibility to December 1910. This paper, using the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’ as its theoretical starting point, argues that Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, published in the same year, represents a distinct product of this sensibility. Enacting a compelling narrative of ‘monstrous’ unsettlement within mass culture, the novel — which continues to be critically neglected compared to similar literary horror classics — is one of the iconic monster fictions of the last century. The Opera Ghost, Erik, a grotesque social outcast, is a special effects artist on a grand scale, a fairground magician and inspired architect, as well as a torturer, assassin, and psychotic obsessive. Beneath the Palais Garnier ‘his artistic, fantastic, wizard nature’ creates a world of trapdoors, pulleys and costumes, of smoke and mirrors, of flame effects and water, creating a gesamtkunstwerk within a gesamtkunstwerk. His legacy is a troubled, prophetic and inexhaustible allegory of emergent modernity, in particular of mass media spectacle and shared popular fantasy. As charismatic as he is terrifying, as tragic as he is cruel, this beast in search of beauty — ‘built up of death from head to foot’ — seems to embody both the fear and the fascination of a complex mediated environment. Ultimately, perhaps, the spaces he inhabits offer singular perspectives from which to explore the conditions of the digital present, conditions in which – according to Douglas Kellner – ‘spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life’.Peer reviewe

'All This Fizzing Inside': Watching the return of Doctor Who

This short blog article is a response to the debut of episode of Jodie Whittaker in the role of the Doctor in BBC television's long-running science fiction drama Doctor Who. As the first female actor to be given the role of the Doctor in the 55-year-old show, Whittaker's arrival in the role has been the subject of intense speculation and a high level of both excited anticipation and furious resentment (far more of the former, it should be said). Reviewing her first full performance in the role, in the Chris Chibnall-scripted 'The Woman Who Fell To Earth', the post considers the impact of her arrival and speculates on the possible way forward for her depiction of the character. Note: since publication in the blog, that article has been developed and expanded as part of the concluding chapter of my book Once Upon A Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

CP Violating Observables in e−e+→W−W+e^-e^+ \to W^-W^+

We consider various integrated lepton charge-energy asymmetries and azimuthal asymmetries as tests of CP violation in the process $e^-e^+ \to W^-W^+$. These asymmetries are sensitive to different linear combinations of the CP violating form factors in the three gauge boson $W^-W^+$ production vertex, and can distinguish dispersive and absorptive parts of the form factors. It makes use of purely hadronic and purely leptonic modes of $W$'s decays as well as the mixed modes. The techniques of using the kinematics of jets or missing momentum to construct CP--odd observables are also employed. These CP violating observables are illustrated in the generalized Left-Right Model and the Charged Higgs Model.Comment: 23 pages, plus 11 postscript graphs not posted befor

CP violation in top pair production at an e^+e^- collider

We investigate a possible CP violating effect in $e^+e^-$ annihilation into $t\bar t$ top quark pairs. As an illustrative example, we assume the source of the CP nonconservation is in the Yukawa couplings of a neutral Higgs boson which contain both scalar and pseudoscalar pieces. One of the interesting observable effects is the difference in production rates between the two CP conjugate polarized $t\bar t$ states.Comment: 9 pages, 3 postscript figures not included but availabel upon request, CERN-TH.6658/9

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Vorticists : popular fantasy and the cultural inheritance of BLAST

Given the perceived anti-popular temperament of Wyndham Lewis’s work – his satire of ‘the herd’ and antipathy to ‘group rhythms’ – it might seem perverse to trace links between the avant-garde insurgency of the Vorticist moment and the mainstream endurance of the BBC’s Doctor Who franchise. An exploration beginning with the shared metaphor of the vortex, however, is suggestive of some of the ways in which the philosophical and aesthetic legacy of BLAST has permeated the popular myths of the succeeding century. Marshall McLuhan seems to have sensed this as early as 1951 when, in The Mechanical Bride, he made oblique reference to Vorticism by invoking Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘A Descent in the Maelstrom’ as an allegory of his own critical methodology. The image of the sailor who survives the violent whirlpool by ‘understanding’ it has parallels with both Lewis declaring ‘Long Live the Vortex!’ and the Doctor ‘staring at the raw power of time and space’. The Vortex of BLAST is used to figure a distinctly polemical approach to questions of time and flux, a conceptual possibility that is intrinsic to the narratives of Doctor Who. Beyond this, the dramatic enactment of Vorticism in The Enemy of the Stars invents a ‘junkyard’ setting that can be found not only in the foundational mise-en-scene of the Doctor Who series, but also as a recurrent and emblematic trope throughout its fifty year history. Indeed, it becomes tempting to glimpse in the quarries, sandpits and gleaming citadels so beloved of classic Who, the celestial desert and Magnetic City of Lewis’s Human Age series.Peer reviewe

A Vital Little BLAST : The War Number as a Key to Wyndham Lewis’s Thought

A hundred years after its publication, the second and final edition of BLAST continues to be viewed as the poor relation, or at least the quiet relation, to its brashly confident predecessor. The editor himself no doubt suspected that this would be the case when he noted that the magazine ‘[found] itself surrounded by a multitude of other Blasts of all sizes and descriptions’. Then again, a wry recognition of comparative scale can be turned into a declaration of self-assurance when it is written by Wyndham Lewis: even as he indicates that his radical publication might now be drowned out by the tumult of the world war that had broken out only a month after its first issue, he offers a tacit assertion that its blunt, explosive, monosyllabic title – loaded with the metaphorical payload of Vorticist energy and prophetic intent – had been the right one for the age. The second issue is known as the ‘War Number’, of course, and it was not content to simply be lost to the noise and trauma of the conflict raging across the channel: it was also engaged, crucially and complicatedly, with that conflict. The distinct nature of the second BLAST, and much of its subsequent reputation, are inextricably bound in with its primary function as a device for calibrating the cultural phenomenon of Vorticism – or perhaps, more accurately, the cultural phenomenon of Lewis – with the cultural phenomenon of the war.Peer reviewe

Is the end of time in sight for Doctor Who?

In the universe of Doctor Who, silence rarely signifies a lack of activity. When the 2016 Christmas Special, ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’, airs among mince pies and mistletoe on 25th December, it will have been over a year since the last broadcast episode of the 53-year-old series. Long-standing fans of the show will know, however, that just because silence falls, it doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. Indeed, they will remember that silence often coincides with periods of crisis and radical change. The hiatus of 1985 marked, it has been argued, the point at which the fate of the ‘classic’ series was sealed; it was cancelled finally (and silently, of course) in 1989. The wilderness years of the 1990s, broken by a solitary TV movie, was actually a period of frenetic and prodigious production in which fandom, via the Virgin novels and Big Finish audio dramas, created the conditions for the triumphant return of the series in 2005. This article will take a look at the wellbeing of Doctor Who as it approaches the final year of Steven Moffat’s time as show-runner and lead writer. With a slump in viewing figures over recent series, a decline in associated merchandise and rumours that the BBC is requiring incoming show-runner Chris Chibnall to adopt a ‘new broom’ approach for his debut season in 2018, is the Doctor approaching the kind of quiet crisis that led to his demise at the end of the 1980s? Or is he simply undergoing one the periodic regenerations that has enabled him to survive for so long as one of the great mythic heroes of modern times