So I watched The Face of Evil again. It may be my favourite Doctor Who story, I don't know. I feel it's likely the most relevant to the times we currently live in, anyway. Even the name, "Face of Evil", recalls the Washington Post's libellous headline about Nick Sandmann--The Washington Post and CNN ended up settling their lawsuits with Sandmann, by the way. The terms of the settlements weren't publicly disclosed--one lawsuit was for 275 million and the other was for 250 million. Either one sounds fair considering the publications may have ruined Sandmann's reputation for the rest of his life for a hat he chose to wear as a teenager. Of course, news of these settlements weren't prominently reported in left wing media, which is one example of how people are living in different realities now. I'm not sure if the Doctor's trouble was better or worse--he shows up on a planet where he's recognised as the "Evil One" on sight, a name that's been attached to his likeness for generations among a small hunter gatherer society called the Sevateem.
The Doctor (Tom Baker) finds his new companion, Leela (Louise Jameson), on the planet. Leela, incidentally, was named after terrorist Leila Khalad, who was just recently in the news because a Jewish coalition group successfully lobbied Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook to prevent her appearing at a virtual conference at San Francisco State University this year. Khalad hijacked an airplane in 1969 when she was a fresh faced little lass of 26. A pretty face works wonders for a terrorist's PR. To the credit of Chris Boucher, writer of The Face of Evil, his Leela is portrayed as initially naive until the Doctor starts instructing her in a more pacifist philosophy.
The Doctor extemporises nicely with a few lines.
LEELA: Xoanon!
DOCTOR: Xoanon? What's those?
LEELA: He's worshiped by the tribe.
DOCTOR: What, he's a god?
LEELA: Yes. I was cast out for speaking against him.
DOCTOR: Really.
LEELA: It's said he's held captive.
DOCTOR: By whom?
LEELA: By the Evil One and his followers, the Tesh. Maybe there is a holy purpose. I don't know what to believe anymore.
DOCTOR: Well, that sounds healthy anyway, Leela. Never be certain of anything. It's a sign of weakness. Now, where's this Xoanon held?
Definitely good advice since everyone seems to be wrong about everything. Though, on the other hand, Leela's a basically decent young lady (terrorist inspiration not withstanding) and she owes part of her upbringing to stories of Xoanon and the Evil One. This version of reality made her who she is, I suppose it's her own inner resources that allow her to be intellectually flexible enough to change when the Doctor brings her new information.
I love how we settle in with the idea of the Doctor's face representing evil to these people long before we find out that he implanted a copy of his personality into the computer that's gone insane, hidden behind the mountains. First we play with the idea of how a symbol can be dramatically repurposed for a different context, then we have a sort of metaphor for how a symbol can take on an unstable but viciously powerful life. In the first parts of the serial, it's not just the Doctor's face but various terms and artefacts that have been repurposed from the long forgotten crashed spaceship--the "survey team" becomes the "Sevateem", etc. And now Leela and her comrades are ready to kill or perish for names whose meanings have been distorted by time and who knows how many different rhetorical appropriations. I think about this when I talk to someone and realise that whatever particular collection of media they're voluntarily or--more often--involuntarily being exposed to has slowly given them a thorough and detailed basket of misinformation. I bet there are thousands of tribes of Sevateem on Facebook alone, nevermind Reddit. The Face of Evil also offers a sobering reminder that, within the context of their realities, people who might seem cruel or savage to me might in fact be perfectly decent.
No comments:
Post a Comment