Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  A creature that can’t be understood within the framework of science, however—something that obeys no known physical laws—is something against which we are likely to be powerless. Bullets can’t stop a zombie, nuclear attacks only empower Godzilla. How can we defeat the Blob? Monsters in horror fiction are impenetrable by our scientific understanding and methods. That’s no minor matter, as Carroll’s account might suggest. It’s at the core of our feeling of impotence when entertaining the thought of them. This also explains the prevalence of disgust in the examples of horror that Carroll provides. Disgust is a response to something impure, and Carroll provides a possible explanation for what makes something impure. But what’s the emotional importance of impurity? An answer emerges when considering what happens, psychologically, when one feels disgust, and that answer ultimately bolsters our account of horror as fear and impotency.

  In “Disgust: The Body and Soul Emotion,” Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley argue that disgust began as a response to poor food, and the core notion of disgust “can be thought of as a gatekeeper for the mouth, guarding against oral incorporation of improper substances.” When we eat something, it becomes a part of us, and our capacity to experience disgust is derived from the important task of keeping things rotten or toxic from becoming part of ourselves. Central to the notion of disgust is the idea of contagion, that we can become harmed in some way through contact with a disgusting thing. As humans evolved, however, disgust, “a mechanism for avoiding harm to the body became a mechanism for avoiding harm to the soul.”148

  As Haidt explains, the experience of disgust correlates with a particular “dimension of social space”: the “purity versus pollution” dimension. 149 How this dimension of social space is understood is “somewhat similar across widely disparate cultures, religions, and eras. The basic logic seems to be that people vary in their level of spiritual purity as a trait ... and as a state. Purity and pollution practices seem designed to insure that people interact with each other, and with sacred objects and spaces, in ways that keep the impure (low) from contaminating the pure (high)” (p. 3). This dimension of social space is most obvious in cultures like that of Hindu India and is almost invisible in the United States—we operate often along this dimension, but we’re less likely to recognize it (p. 4).

  Central to this idea of pollution is that a thing already polluted is capable of polluting whatever comes into contact with it, whether through digestion or other forms of contact. Zombies, being far more polluted or impure than the rest of us, can contaminate us, making us less pure, less human, and disgust is the reactive attitude to such contamination. Nothing can wash away the disgusting touch of a zombie: “once in contact, always in contact.”150 But, while physical contact with a disgusting thing yields a strong disgust response, that same response is there even when simply seeing or smelling a disgusting thing. We’re left feeling contaminated, polluted, or impure when we physically touch a disgusting thing, and we’re left feeling the same way if the impure image of the thing enters us through our eyes or its scent through our nostrils. Any contact, not just tactile, but also visual, aural, or olfactory, leaves one feeling disgust—that sense of having been polluted.

  It’s clear why disgust figures so often in horror stories, as Carroll notes: disgust is a basic human emotion, with strong affect, that’s felt in response to having been contaminated in some way, and contamination is something very hard to control. Once you’ve spotted the zombie, his vile stench and rotting visage is with you, polluting you—you can’t scour that image from your mind. Once the zombies have surrounded you, there’s nothing that can be done to stop them from touching you, polluting you further. Impurity is contagious, and out of the infected’s control. The cases in which disgust figures centrally in a horror story’s plot are cases in which the heroes are incapable of avoiding the disgusting monster, impotent to keep themselves from becoming impure through association with it. And we, the audience, through having seen those images on the screen, or read the description on the page, have also experienced the disgust, the pollution that comes from viewing a disgusting thing, and thus share the sense of impotency to avoid the impurity. If we’re correct that the feeling of horror is a mixture of fear and impotency, then an obvious way to ramp up the feeling of impotency is to make the monster something that’s disgusting, something humans are powerless to stop from affecting them negatively, from polluting them, turning them into zombies or vampires or werewolves.

  It’s easy to produce a feeling of horror through the use of disgust, but “Blink” doesn’t take the easy, tried and true, route. We don’t feel disgust, but the writers of “Blink” found a different way to produce the feeling of powerlessness in the viewer, one that’s interwoven into the very essence of the plot. The feeling of impotence is inherent in the way the Weeping Angels succeed in claiming their victims.

  “Blink” surely isn’t the only case where Carroll’s disgust requirement isn’t met by monsters in what’s generally seen as a work of horror. Another example may be Hitchcock’s The Birds, in which flocks of birds terrorize the inhabitants of a small town. No single bird in the movie is particularly disgusting, and the flocks are no more disgusting than their members. It can’t even be said that the size of the flocks is disgusting, given that flocks of such size are unlikely to provoke disgust in real life. Such a sizable flock, however, means that we can’t keep track of all its members, can’t protect ourselves from them. Without any explanation for how the birds could have developed such murderous intent or keen intelligence, we’re incapable of gauging which birds will attack, when, or how—we’re powerless against them. The birds are horrifying, because we’ve no means to stopping their attacks.

  We agree with Carroll that horror requires a threatening monster that defies, contradicts, or crosses what we take to be natural categories. We disagree that feeling horror in response to the monster implies we must feel disgust. We maintain instead that the required emotional reactive response is, for want of a better term, the feeling of impotence in a deadly threatening situation, and that feeling can be activated by the thought of what monsters do and how they do it. The disgust that Carroll recognizes in many horror films is a means of activating the sense of impotence or powerlessness. But, monsters that turn the vulnerabilities and inadequacies of their victims against themselves, making their survival depend on their accomplishing an impossible task, directly linking the sense of impotency to the monster’s ability to harm, are truly horrific. The Weeping Angels clearly belong in that class.

  One More Thing, Don’t Blink!

  The Weeping Angels threaten personhood, not bodies or minds. The fate the Weeping Angels inflict may keep their victims physically and mentally unchanged while shattering their identity as the persons they were, their sense of self that is spatially- and temporally-indexed. After all, virtually no one’s identity-defining cares are ahistorical. We invest ourselves contextually, and the Weeping Angels have the power to pluck us from our contexts and deposit us elsewhere where we’re out of context, where we have no footing, where we have to begin again to create our personal identities, to “write” our personal narratives. Some people may welcome that; most will find it terrifying.

  It’s horrific that the only way we can protect our personal identity from the Weeping Angels is unnatural, unpleasant, and ultimately impossible. Should we find ourselves in the presence of a Weeping Angel, if we do what we physiologically can’t prevent ourselves from doing for more than mere seconds, namely, blink, everything we care about that’s related to who we are in a certain time and place will be lost to us. We’ll not continue to be the persons we were, and we have no capacity to save ourselves from this fate. Thinking about that prospect, for most people, is horror.

  27

  Beauty Is Not in the Eye-Stalk of the Beholder

  CLIVE CAZEAUX

  The Daleks are beautiful, aren’t they? Their casings, I mean. Not the squid-like creatures inside. It’s the
ir shape, their combination of forms: lines, curves, domes, the semi-spherical head, and the way they glide. And the sound of the voice: while I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “beautiful,” it nevertheless has a beauty to it. It is striking; it embodies their character, and does the job perfectly of telling us “here is an alien life form.” But isn’t beauty applicable only to a narrow range of things: people, animals, landscapes, and certain works of art? Can it be applied to a monster from a science-fiction television series: an over-sized, elaborate pepper-pot, with a few grills, slats, and semi-spheres?

  Beauty—that delight or pleasure we experience when looking at an artwork or a person or listening to a piece of music—is a complex phenomenon. It’s occupied philosophy since Pythagoras and the pre-Socratic philosophers. Because perceptual delight stands out against the routine flow of experience, it poses a challenge to theories of experience. A phrase which frequently comes to mind when talking of beauty is that it lies “in the eye of the beholder,” which is taken to mean that beauty is subjective; what one person finds pleasing, another may not.

  If we take this approach, then I’m on safe ground: I can call the Daleks beautiful because what I find pleasing is determined by me. But this is just one particular historical understanding of beauty from the eighteenth century when taste, as something which discerning people might possess, comes into being as a concept. If we return to the time of Pythagoras though, beauty isn’t a subjective idea but a facet of the numerical structure of the universe. If we move towards the present day, the question of whether beauty is subjective or objective is in fact part of a revolution in eighteenth-century philosophy, initiated by Immanuel Kant. Kant’s philosophy requires us to consider that mind and reality are linked in a fundamental way, with beauty being one of the experiences where this link is evident.

  Part of this debate includes the idea that any judgment of beauty has both a subjective and an objective component. In calling something “beautiful,” I’m not just expressing an opinion, not just making a casual remark which I’m happy for my friend to disregard. Calling something “beautiful” is an expression of passion, and I want my claim to hold for everyone. I find the Daleks beautiful, and I want the rest of the world to agree with me.

  My interest is in the philosophical issues surrounding the idea that the Daleks are beautiful. Philosophy can help us understand the ideas responsible for a conceptual problem. It also has a history of theories regarding the nature of beauty. The two combined will take the seemingly odd notion of the beauty of the Daleks and show that it draws on and implies some of philosophy’s central ideas, ideas that aren’t just to do with beauty but with the nature of reality itself. From the complex and contested nature of beauty, the idea of the beautiful Dalek forces us to examine the definition of beauty, and the place beauty occupies in the history of Western metaphysics (theories of the nature of reality)—a territory where the Daleks and Doctor Who are very much at home.

  Earth Versus Skaro

  If we’re to get to grips (or should that be “suckers”) with the beauty of the Daleks, then we need to address the fact that they occupy two worlds: the Doctor Who universe and our world. Why? Because it affects how we assess their alleged beauty. In the Doctor Who universe, the Daleks took refuge in 1930s New York, fought (each other) for the Hand of Omega in London in 1963, and attempted to invade Earth in the year 2150. For the beings who share this universe and know the Daleks, or know of them, they’re afraid. Cross a Dalek and you’ll die.

  Why am I pointing this out? Because in the Who universe, the Daleks aren’t creatures of beauty. Even on the two occasions when a Dalek becomes an exhibit—in “The Space Museum” (1965) and in “Dalek” (2005)—it’s because of its scientific curiosity-value and not for its appearance. When van Statten introduces the Ninth Doctor to the “Metaltron,” as he’s named the Dalek, at no point does he describe it as beautiful. He’s more interested in it as a creature, as something with which he might communicate.

  When I call the Daleks “beautiful,” I’m not speaking from the perspective of the Doctor Who universe; I’m not regarding them as real creatures. I’m viewing them from the point of view of the everyday world in which Doctor Who is a television program and the Daleks are a race of fictional beings created as enemies for the Doctor by Terry Nation and Raymond Cusick in 1963. They’re only real to the extent that they appear on television screens, photographs, posters, pencil cases, or duvets. There’s a genuine philosophical reason for making the point.

  A key distinction in modern aesthetics is between beauty in art and beauty in nature. There’s a big difference between seeing beauty in a human-made object, such as a painting, and seeing it in the natural world, as in the case of an animal or a range of mountains. In our terms, this is the difference between seeing the Dalek as a “work of art” by Nation and Cusick (in our world) and seeing it as a part of Skaro’s natural environment (in the Who universe). The difference is due to the fact that modern aesthetics explains beauty in terms of the relationship between the human mind and the world. Immanuel Kant, the founder of modern aesthetics, argues that the perception of beauty in nature is higher than the perception of beauty in art because beauty, as he understands it, is about our becoming aware of the fit between the human mind and reality. But with beauty in art, our experience of it is indirect, due to the fact that what we perceive has been mediated by human design; that’s to say, it hasn’t come directly from nature.

  Georg Hegel, Kant’s critic, has an entirely different world-view, and one which leads him to argue the opposite. Hegel asserts that mind and reality aren’t just interconnected but actually one and the same thing. Life is the process whereby we come to realize this. Beauty, for Hegel, is our becoming aware of this oneness through the recognition of thought in matter.151 On this basis, beauty in art is higher than beauty in nature because art involves perceiving ideas through sensory form, for example, through clay, paint, or sound, whereas nature simply involves the perception of matter.

  The Embodiment of Evil

  What this disagreement shows is that competing theories and values are at stake when assessing natural and human-made objects of beauty. Because beauty is seen as something involving the relation between mind and world, it becomes significant whether or not an object of beauty is natural or something which is the product of a mind. I’m looking at the Dalek primarily as a human artifact, a “work of art.” If I were to conduct this study from the point of view of a member of the Doctor Who universe, I would be talking about natural beauty, the beauty of another creature, and a specific set of questions would arise.

  Although Kant places nature higher than art, he also warns against “dependent” beauty, where something is admired for being a perfect example of a particular form. So I might be sitting having a coffee with a friend, and we see a Dalek glide by. I might exclaim “Wow, that’s one good-looking Dalek,” if I thought it was a particularly fine specimen. This would be a limited form of beauty for Kant, since beauty which is dependent on a template, on a concept of what something should look like, isn’t free to experience the purposive fit between the human mind and reality. The same point covers the fact that the Daleks are in Davros-designed casings. I might say to the Dalek (at my peril), “Nice bumps! Where’d you get them?” But as far as Kant is concerned, this beauty is limited, is “dependent,” because the Daleks’ casings have been designed with a purpose: to make the creatures inside the supreme beings in terms of survival and power over others.

  Hegel’s take on the situation would be somewhat muted. Following his claim that beauty is the perception of thought manifest in matter, comes the idea that the perfect form for thought is the human body. As he argues, the human body is the form it is because it has evolved “as the one and only sensuous appearance appropriate to spirit” (p. 86). This is part of his account of the ancient Greek and Renaissance interest in the human form: classical art is beautiful because it displays the harmony between our inner, mental being
and our outer, physical appearance. Strictly speaking, while the human body is the appropriate form for thought, it’s only at its most beautiful when it’s celebrated in sculpture. (In this regard, the Weeping Angels from “Blink” (2007) are an interesting creation. With their basis in classical sculpture, they aren’t so much a case of the beauty of monsters, but more a matter of being monsters of beauty.)

  So Hegel can’t help us, as occupants of the Doctor Who universe, in appreciating the “natural beauty” of the Daleks. However, we can question him as to whether or not the human body is “the one and only sensuous appearance appropriate” to thought. Hegel’s history of beauty is based on the varying degrees to which matter is appropriate to thought, with the classical human form as a point of harmony at which mind and matter are balanced. But this account leaves room for the possibility that there may be different modes of consciousness, different ways of thinking which manifest themselves perfectly in different forms. From the Daleks’ point of view, who’s to say that their modified, squid-like nature, housed in an individual tank, isn’t the perfect expression of their mental life of hatred and universe-domination? Although the Daleks are living creatures and not works of art in the Doctor Who universe, if someone were to produce a sculpture of a Dalek, perhaps the sculptor on Necros who made that very good likeness of the Sixth Doctor in “Revelation of the Daleks” (1985), then we might have a Dalek sculpture that would be judged “beautiful.”