I wrote the following about a year ago for a project that never ended up happening and it seems like a shame for it to never have really found a home anywhere.
This is the article that got my the job at WhatCulture, for those interested in such things.
So, let's open the vaults...
As Observed by Yours
Faithfully, Steven Moffat
Or
To Be is To Be
Perceived on BBC1 on Saturday Evenings
It's
an interesting truth that the act of writing inevitably causes the writer to
reveal information about themselves to the reader. Often information that they themselves may not
know. Phrasing, word choice, the way the
lines follow one another, all of these inevitably contain a kernel of the writer’s
worldview. And so, not unlike those
situations where you get halfway through telling a coworker about the dream you
had where you were riding a gigantic train through a donut before you realize
what the implications of that are, any decently told story (and most indecent
ones as well) can tell you more than a little about the teller’s point of view..
Which leads me to the conclusion that there is something
working away in Steven Moffat’s subconscious about the relationship of
existence and perception.
He may well be aware of it.
I couldn’t say for certain that he’s read the work of George Berkely,
but I’d probably bet a finger or two that he has. At the very least, we can be certain that he
did a little research back in the day to find out what the hell Peter Davison
was talking about in Timeflight. But whatever the level of research or even
interest he has in the subject, it is demonstrably there in just about all of
his work. For the sake of this
discussion I’ll keep the examples Who-related, but it’s there in Sherlock as well. Probably also in Coupling and Press Gang,
if I had them available to review, but that’s neither here nor there.
Putting it very, very simply- and as Peter mentioned in
Timeflight- the basic premise is that To
Be is To Be Perceived, i.e. the existence of any being or phenomena is entirely
dependent on its being observed by another.
This is what all those pale theater undergraduates were talking about
when they discussed the play
Salome,
albeit in far more pretentious terms and with clove cigarettes.
Of course, George
Berkely squaredthe
circle by bringing God into the issue and thus concluded more or less that
since God was perceiving all things we could be reasonably comfortable that we
weren’t about to vanish in a puff of universal indifference.
(This
is, of course, oversimplifying not just one but several branches of study to
the point of nonsense,but
I stand behind it on the grounds that:
A: Things are interesting and complicated enough without
bringing God into the discussion at this stage, and so for the moment He can happily
remain watching the tree on the quad while we get on with things.
And
B: George Berkely was
a student of John Locke, which means that you are totally allowed to throw his
name around in online discussions of Lost
and then bask in the glow of your superiority)
But to go further than that, it seems that what’s worrying
away at Mr. Moffat’s creative processes isn’t so much the fear of things only
existing when we perceive them. Indeed,
he seems – as I’ll discuss in a bit – to find that the natural order of
things. What really seems to worry him
is the profound wrongness of things
that don’t fit into that category. The
things that only exist when we can’t perceive them. The things under the bed. The things that actively keep us from perceiving them.
But yet keep existing anyway.
Are You My Mummy?
Back in the Halcyon days of 2005, as we devoured The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, we could have been excused for missing the
theme. In fact, there were three very
distinct examples of Mr. Moffat working away at the issue in the script, but at
that time, in that first series, this looked as much like a theme of the story
as it did a recurring hobby horse of the writer.
The Boy
– What’s really terrifying about the boy himself is the gasmask, as most of us
have observed before. But what is less
commonly remarked upon is why the gasmask is terrifying. And the reason why the image of a little boy in a gasmask is terrifying is
precisely the point. It’s a little boy,
and they’ve removed his face. We can perceive that he’s there, but we can’t
really see him. And that’s why gasmasks are unnerving. As the contagion spreads, he takes away the
personal identities of everyone he infects.
He takes away our ability to see them and in doing so removes the soul
of who they are. This is, incidentally,
the exact same concern that is at the heart of most of the sci-fi output of the
‘50s and ‘60s; the fear of individuality and personality being stolen or
removed. But to top that-
Where
is Mummy? – Ask any child and they… well, they won’t actually tell you because
they probably wouldn’t be able to verbalize it properly, BUT… any child’s
greatest fear is that Mummy will simply disappear. No understanding, no explanation, simply
Mummy Is Gone. The real fear for
children watching these episodes isn’t based on identifying with the grownups
being menaced by this strange figure.
It’s that it’s all too easy to associate with the child.
The
Nanites- Now, it’s true that it’s possible to trace to one specific day in late
autumn in the mid ‘90s the exact moment when ‘nanotechnology is responsible for
everything’ became the rule of thumb.
And so, true, it would have been remarkable if nanotechnology hadn’t made an appearance in new-Who,
even if they were fashionably late.
However, the real point is this: the entire twist of the story relies on
Captain Jack mistaking a ship to be empty, just because he can’t see anything
in it. i.e that he assumed lack of
perceiving to automatically mean absence of being. That something can exist without being
perceived is what causes the entire situation to occur. And even though the Nanites are benign, and
‘everybody lives’, it is the subversion
of the natural order of perception=being that caused the problem.
Hey, isn’t that Madame De Pompedour over there?
In The Girl in the Fireplace, there is an
entire spaceship devoted to having windows through which you can watch a young
girl live out all the significant events in her life. Seriously, think about that. Even leaving aside the ‘monsters are lurking
under your bed where you can’t see them’ scenes, this couldn’t be a clearer
example of someone’s existence being defined by being watched by others. They even go whole hog and mention that there’s
a ‘fast path’ by which you can jump over the boring, non-perceived bits. Forget Salome,
this is the ultimate example of ‘woman only existing by virtue of The
Gaze’ (No, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to
googleit).
The Weeping Angels
It’s not,
however, until we get to Blink that Mr. Moffat’s writing seems to address the
point directly through the introduction of the Weeping Angels: an enemy
entirely defined by their being the opposite of what the author’s assumed
natural order should be. Not that I think
Stephen Moffat thinks of them that way.
I’m quite certain that he merely thinks of them as something that’s
really scary to kids, and good on him, because they are, and that is after all
at least partly what the show is here for.
But at
the end of the day, the Angels’ logline is still this – they
exist
only when they
aren’t being perceived.
And
that’s terrifying.
Because it’s the
opposite of how things should be.
When we first meet them in Blink the angels are living in an old forgotten, UNobserved
house. Sally Sparrow encounters them
specifically because she chooses to go looking at things that other people don’t. In the Blink
version, when the Angels get you they throw you back in time, out of sight of
all of your friends and family. They
essentially remove you from being perceived as well and in doing so use up the
rest of your life. Indeed, according to
The Doctor, they ‘feed’ on this energy.
Now, there’s a fair bit to say at this juncture about
collapsing waveforms, and Heisenberg, and cats in boxes and all that. And that’s all well and good, I hope there’s
another essay in here somewhere that goes into that in depth, because it’s a
rich field of discussion that I’m going to gloss right over and boil it all
down to one word – ‘Potential’.
Before you’ve looked at something, it has the potential to
be anything. Once you’ve looked at it,
you essentially eliminate all other possibilities except the one that you’re
observing. That’s more or less the reality
that we’ve all learned to live with.
It’s at the heart of what quantum physicists are getting at, and it’s
why so many of us don’t open reply letters from colleges we applied to right
away. (NOTE: This is an almost
unforgivable oversimplification. If you
are a theoretical physicist reading this I totally owe you a drink.)
Before you look, the thing you haven’t observed yet could be
anything.
But the Angels do it differently. They cheat.
They make all the choices when we’re not looking. They steal the potential while our backs are
turned, and then they eat all the potential of what our lives could have
been. In essence, they get to make the
final move before we even open the game.
They embody To Be Perceived=To not exist. To that extent they are the embodiment of
loneliness simply because they are not defined
by their ability to be perceived by others.
The Lonely Assassins.
By the Time of Flesh
and Stone they’ve upped the ante.
We’ve ditched the ‘sending people to the past’ bit and settled for just
snapping necks (which I can only assume means that they no longer need to eat
the energy of collapsing waveforms what with all that yummy radiation on hand),
but that’s not really the important part.
The important part is that now, by the very act of perceiving them, you become one of them. This is fundamentally a combination of the
angels as the embodiment of unseen loneliness with the primal fear embodied in
the contagious gasmask. They only exist
when you’re not looking at them, during which time they can be doing anything,
and if you do look at them you become
like them. “That which holds the image
of an angel, becomes an angel.” That
might be the most genuinely unsettling concept ever introduced in a children’s
television program.
The Vashta Nerada Make Terrible Babysitters
The
Vashta Nerada ARE the darkness. Sure,
there’s the fig leaf explanation in the dialogue about how they live in
shadows, not every shadow, but any shadow, blah blah blah. But at the end of the day its clear; they are
the darkness itself. The shadows. The thing that blots out our ability to see. While the Angels represent the opposite of
our accepted way of things, the Vashta Nerada represent forces that attempt to prevent us
from accomplishing the fairly straightforward task of perceiving things so that
they can exist. And indeed, as poor Ms.
Evangelista discovered – once you wander into the shadows where you can’t be
seen, you do indeed stop existing pretty damn forthwith.
But on
top of that, we also get the… oh lets just be bold and actually call it virtual
reality (the other great hobby horse of ‘90s science fiction making its guest
appearance). A world defined entirely by
perception in which there is no reality.
So in the real world of the library, we have one half of the equation
(existing without perceiving thanks to the animate darkness) while in the
non-real world of the virtual reality we have the other half of the equation
(perceiving without existing.) And look
at what we discover- that there’s no way forward for either world without
combining the two so that you have the full equation. Those who exist can only do so in the real
world where they can be perceived, and those who have died can only exists in
the false world where perceiving doesn’t equal reality. Interestingly enough, Steven Moffat, who
doesn’t believe in the afterlife (for the sake of full disclosure, neither do
I. ) refers to this existence of being
able to be perceived without existing – or perhaps more accurately, existing entirely by being perceived – as being
as close to heaven as he can envision.
Which is a point worth pondering.
And
then there are the children.
‘When
you stop looking at us we don’t exist.’
For my
money, this is the most heartbreaking scene of the entirety of the new series:
Donna, desperately trying to reassure her nonexistent children that she will observe
them into reality forever and then
failing. And then losing them. And then… ‘Am I real…?” Everything Berkely questioned, wrapped up in
one scene.
Spoilers
And
then there was River Song. Now, I’m not
so concerned with River Song as a character – indeed, it’s an interesting story
arc to have a character whose life is running chronologically opposed to the Doctor’s
and actually pull it off over the length of time that they have without
contradicting themselves or having it run completely off the rails. But that’s really just a matter of
craftsmanship and forward planning. Laudable,
but not relevant to the discussion at hand.
No, I want to talk about her diary.
Her diary, which sits there as a
physical manifestation of one’s personal future – the thing that no one can
know until they experience it. It comes
to exist as it is perceived. Or does
it….? Because clearly it HAS happened
from River’s perspective, which means that it exists as she has perceived
it. Except that for the Doctor it
hasn’t. And round and round in circles.
The important thing to remember
here is that it’s all about perception, at some level, in the Moffat
brain. River CAN see what’s in the
journal. And the Doctor can’t. For her it is perceived and exists. For him it isn’t, and doesn’t. Yet.
Again, it’s all back to the collapsing waveforms and potential and those
other bits of quantum physics that I chose not to go into earlier. But at its simplest form, it still comes down
to what you perceive yourself is real for
you, which is an interesting change from the earlier discussion because it defines
the act of perception itself as a choice.
I can look at the Angels, but you might not. They still won’t move. Whereas you can read the diary and the things
in it are fixed, but I choose not to and my future is still unwritten. It’s a far more active and self-directed form
of determinism.
And this is why I feel like the
issue is something that Mr. Moffat is working out subconsciously in his
writing. Because he keeps approaching
the same territory from different angles.
Looking at it, wrestling with it, making it part of his plot structure,
but never actually addressing it directly.
Prisoner Zero Will Vacate the
Human Residence
It’s The Eleventh Hour. Look. Where you never want to look. In the corner of your eye. Again, the transgression on Prisoner Zero’s part
seems to be not so much that he’s moved into a young girls house and watched
the crack in her wall eat her entire family, as much as that he has deliberately removed himself from being
perceived and yet still exists. And it’s
by The Doctor’s act of making someone actually notice him that he ends up being destroyed. By an enormous eyeball. It would be hard to think of a less subtle
visual metaphor than that. Again, a
reversal of the To Be Perceived is To Be paradigm, and I think deliberately so.
Silence Will Fall
When we finally do meet the Silence
properly, we learn that they are defined by one thing – that you forget them
the moment you stop looking at them (which, once you pass the age of 40 and
start forgetting things on a daily basis, is a terrifying thought). But the interesting thing about it is that
they are also the purest example in the Moffat canon of the rule being
completely and utterly adhered to. They
exist when you perceive them. And when
you stop perceiving them, they don’t. At
least not for you.
They are in many ways the mirror
image of the Angels in that one stops existing if you perceive them; whereas
the other only exists when you perceive them.
Except of course that the Silents do
continue existing, and happily wander around doing unspeakable things to otherwise
amiable orphanage caretakers while
you’ve forgotten about them. Which means
we’ve opened up the question – Do things only exist if I perceive them? If I’m
unaware of 6 million people in China (for an example) does that mean they don’t
exist? Obviously it doesn’t, but the
question has now been opened. Whose
perception is it that matters? And if my
perception can be rewritten as easily as all that, is it really that good a
determiner of what’s real?
Again, this feels like someone
wrestling with an idea, rather than someone trying to espouse a clear vision of
how the world works.
A Few Other Notable Mentions
The titular Beast Below survives in
its present (tormented) state specifically because everyone chooses to not see it.
The Daleks can’t open their race bank because it doesn’t recognize them. (Yes, I know, not his script,
but under his watch so I’m calling it fair game.) The Pandorica is a trap for a wizard or a
trickster, who can say which until they see him. The
Doctor is dead because They Saw Him Die,
except did they see what they thought they saw?
Doors can pretend to be walls. Mirrors can pretend to be windows. Is what we see what is reality? Do we see it because it is reality, or does
it become reality because we perceive it to be?
Ultimately, it comes down to River. More specifically it comes down to the End of
River. We end where we begin with the
River story: with her death and placement in the virtual reality world. And it occurs to me that we’ve had the answer
to the question all along, because of one interesting thing
There really, fundamentally, isn’t
any difference between a puddle of River-data in the sonic screwdriver and a
puddle of River-data in the CAL network.
Except for one thing.
Her Friends are there in the CAL
network. She wakes up in the virtual
world (where existence is entirely a matter of perception), and she is
surrounded by her friends. Forever. And maybe that’s the point. We look at the equation of To Be=To Bo
Perceived, and we think that it refers to what we perceive and make real. But maybe, perhaps, we’ve got it the wrong
way around. Maybe that’s what’s important.
Maybe it’s how we’re perceived by
other people that matters. And more than
that, maybe it’s simply that we’re
perceived by others that, in Moffat’s subconscious worldview, gives our lives
shape and meaning, making us real. That
puts us as near to Heaven as he can imagine.
Maybe it’s that simple.
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