Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  Fearing Angels

  Are the Weeping Angels frightening? Going on Carroll’s theory, the Daleks should be frightening because Daleks threaten not only our lives but also our entire civilization. Similarly, the Cybermen should be frightening because they threaten to destroy our bodies with the worst perversions of surgical equipment in order to convert us into unthinking automatons. Thus, Carroll’s theory persuasively explains why viewers might be frightened by both types of monsters. But can we explain fear of the Weeping Angels in the same way? What feelings do they conjure up once we grasp what their touch does to humans?

  Victims of the Weeping Angels have their lives up to the point of contact and their planned-for futures stolen from them. They’re transported to another time and place where they have to start anew. They also report experiencing a bit of nausea when being transported into the past—certainly unpleasant. However, being transported back in time is a far cry from being torn to pieces or having one’s brain stuffed into a metallic shell. Being forced, against one’s will, to begin life anew in a different time and place is nothing at all like having alien enemies overtake your planet, exterminating everyone in their way, and performing experiments on the rest. Compared to the threat of either the Cybermen or the Daleks, the Weeping Angels seem tame, almost benign. While we can’t imagine anyone actively wishing for the fate the Cybermen140 and Daleks provide, it’s possible to imagine some people thinking the fate inflicted by the Weeping Angels is desirable and exciting, a welcome change. When compared to the other Doctor Who monsters, what they do seems relatively unthreatening.

  But while they may not threaten our bodies or our civilization, they threaten us in another sense: as particular persons. It is the threat to us as particular persons that the Doctor warns us about.

  There’s more to a person than just a physical body that can be annihilated or mutilated. What it means to be a person has much to do with how one thinks, feels, plans, and lives, and where and when one does all of that. It matters, in other words, that a person cares. Persons care about other persons and things surrounding them and ideas and plans they have, and that distinguish them from other persons. To make this point, we help ourselves to a well-known position of Harry Frankfurt.141 You only care, in the sense of “give a damn about,” what’s important to you, and for something to be important to you, you must give a damn about it. If you “really give a damn”—really care—about something, then it’s very important to you. It’s an element in defining the specific person you are. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t care so much about it. Such cares are irreducible, thick cognitive and non-cognitive complex states that constitute what’s important to persons and central to their identities. Care, used this way, is a scalar concept. A person may care about something a great deal, a bit, somewhat, or hardly at all. The amount of care tracks the amount of importance the object of care has for the person doing the caring. Caring is trying to guide your actions in a certain way, along a specific course, intentionally avoiding other courses. Frankfurt writes, “A person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it. He identifies himself with what he cares about in a sense that he makes himself vulnerable to loses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced” (p. 83). Really caring about something involves structuring your life in a certain way and that, in large measure, makes you the person you are.

  Your cares have “inherent persistence” (p. 84). To care about something, you must conceive of yourself as a being that casts itself into a future—not just any future, but one in which you further what you care about in the present. Bernard Williams argues that an important aspect of our moral lives is the value each of us places on our personal projects and commitments .142 What makes the premature termination of personal projects morally significant, even frightening, is the fact that people identify themselves through the aims and means of projects they find ultimately worthy of fulfillment.

  Frankfurt argues that “caring, insofar as it consists in guiding oneself along a distinctive course or in a particular manner, presupposes both agency and self-consciousness” (Frankfurt, p. 83). Peter French and Mitchell Haney write:Insofar as agents have cares, they have choices to make and reflection on the options become necessary. An agent without cares would be no agent at all. Such a person would have no choices to make and nothing worthy of reflection.... Insofar as people care about the fruition or continuation of a project, they will personally identify with the objects and activities of that project, and they will be personally harmed or benefited by the fates of their objects of care. (“Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” pp. 127-28)

  Frankfurt maintains: “the outlook of a person who cares about something is inherently prospective, that is, he necessarily considers himself as having a future.”143 A person’s objects of care, to a significant degree, determine which features are relevant both for interpolating a person’s foreseeable future and interpreting a person’s actual past. Alasdair MacIntyre offers a related view when he maintains that persons construct their identities via coherent narratives. People, MacIntyre claims, integrate the various facts and roles of their lives together into meaningful, continuous timelines by filtering relevant from irrelevant features followed by foregrounding the most relevant elements and allowing the rest to fade into the background. This means that a person is a “story-telling animal,” whose ability to understand herself depends on her ability to understand what narratives are available through her life.144 Our personal identities depend, at least in part, on there being a comprehensive thread of narrative in our lives, but such “lived narratives” require “a certain teleological character. We live out our lives, both individually and in our relationships with each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us.” In effect, we create the particular persons we are from and by what we care about.

  When the Weeping Angels rip Kathy out of her location in space and time, depositing her in another point in time, they’re tearing Kathy away from everything she cares about. Her family, friends, livelihood, plans for the future, and hobbies are suddenly, irrevocably lost to her future. She finds herself, instantly, in a land as foreign to her as another country, without any access to those things she cared about, that were important to her. If, as we maintain, our personal identities are composed of, probably in large part, what we care about, then, by ripping her away from all those things that mattered to her, the Weeping Angels have demolished a significant part of Kathy’s identity. She no longer can be who she used to be, because she no longer has the capacity to live her life and plan her future, focused on those things that were important to her. Though she continues to be alive, and though her physical body and mental capacities are mostly unchanged, there’s an important sense in which Kathy is no longer herself. By removing Kathy from her own place and time, and therefore from the things that held importance for her in her life, the Weeping Angels remove Kathy from herself. Their actions force her to build a new life in which the memories and plans of her previous life will become incoherent, disjointed, and conceptually unintelligible.

  The Weeping Angels do significant harm to their victims insofar as their victims are time- and place-bound persons. They rob their victims of their sense of who they are.145 One might call this fate a form of “death,” as the Doctor does, albeit one that allows for a kind of “rebirth,” because most victims will begin caring for aspects of their new surroundings. Persons care, only wantons do not. When Sally receives the letter Kathy has written, she asks confusedly, “Kathy? My Kathy?” In one sense, the letter’s author is indeed her Kathy, in that the same physical body wrote it. In another sense, however—and this is the sense in which the Weeping Angels causes viewers to fear them—she’s wrong; her Kathy was replaced with a different Kathy, one that had to build anew an identity, beginning in 1918 and ending before Sally was born.

&
nbsp; Adopting what we believe is a credible theory of a significant constituent of personal identity, what we care most about, reveals why the Weeping Angels are terrifying monsters. On a conception of personal identity that, in large measure, reflects Frankfurt’s cares and MacIntyre’s narratives, one that maintains that a person’s identity is, in part, shaped by plans for the future, projects, and cares, contemplating what the Weeping Angels do to their victims can be really terrifying for viewers. Being involuntarily transported to another time and place, on such an account, threatens the dissolution of one’s personal identity. If, as we believe, a person’s identity isn’t just that of a persistent physical body or a particular mind, but also consists in projects with trajectories into the future that the person cares about and around which the person has built a sense of self, the fate inflicted on their victims by the Weeping Angels is a reasonable cause for fear. Death, of course, terminates all cares and most plans, and short-circuits narratives. But there may be a sense that most of us ascertain that experiencing the same sort of termination but living on and having to find new cares and make new plans while haunted by the remnants of the old memories is a fate worse than death. In the strange world into which one is thrown by the Weeping Angels, one is also a stranger to oneself, a person with an incoherent past in search of an identity.

  We’ve suggested an explanation for why the Weeping Angels, who don’t physically harm their victims, are frightening. Carroll doesn’t explicitly mention the sort of threat the Weeping Angels pose, but it fits comfortably within his broad account of what it means for a monster’s abilities to provoke fear in the viewer. We turn to the emotion that is the second half of Carroll’s formula for horror: disgust.

  Disgust and Blinking

  Disgust is a visceral response to something gross, icky, abhorrent, repugnant, nauseating. The Daleks or the Cybermen are disgusting in the visual sense and in what they do to their victims. The Daleks, for instance, look like octopuses when removed from their metallic casings—they’re wrinkly, blubbery, and the color of unhealthy flesh. The Cybermen are the brains and tissues of humans, butchered and contorted into a robotic shell. The sight of an unmasked Dalek is repugnant. Just the sound of the tools used to make people into Cybermen can be nauseating.

  What about the Weeping Angels? Are they disgusting? They’re transcategory monsters in a number of ways. They’re both living and inanimate, human-looking and stone. They also reside in an old, dilapidated, decaying, and overgrown house at the edge of town. On Carroll’s account we should expect the Weeping Angels to disgust us. However, they’re not disgusting, per se. They have nothing like the distasteful appearance of zombies. Maybe the viewers of Doctor Who are wrong; maybe “Blink” isn’t horror after all.

  When we first notice a Weeping Angel, it appears to be nothing more than a beautiful statue. After Sally has learned of Kathy’s disappearance and faces several Weeping Angels, we fear for her as she moves closer to them, and we may even describe ourselves as uneasy or uncomfortable, but not because they disgust us. It’s precisely because they’re not disgusting that the episode “works” as a horror story. It’s a natural thing for a person to run her hands over a statue, feeling its texture, the contours of the stone. It’s a typical tactile aesthetic experience. The experience wouldn’t be like confronting a zombie. No matter how many categories they cross, no matter how many features they have that should arouse disgust, the appearance of a Weeping Angel simply isn’t disgusting; they’re attractive, pleasing to the eye. There’s no reason to turn one’s eyes away from them in disgust. They can’t be horrific monsters on Carroll’s theory.

  Yet, given what we learn about what they do, and especially how it’s done, the Weeping Angels are horrific monsters and it’s no wonder so many viewers report feeling horror in response to them. Something’s got to give: either we (and the viewers themselves) are mislabeling viewers’ emotional reactions to “Blink” or Carroll’s theory needs revision. Carroll claims that his theory is based on observations of what is generally accepted to be horrific, and that the way to test his conditions of fear and disgust is “to see if they apply to the reactions we find to the monsters indigenous to works of horror.” “Blink” is our test case. We don’t propose to toss it out of the category of horror just to preserve Carroll’s theory. We propose an emendation to that theory to accommodate it and, we believe, to include a fairly large number of other monster tales in film, television programs, and fictional literature in the horror genre.

  At the beginning of “Blink,” the viewer doesn’t know what the statues are. She may be curious about them, but certainly not horrified. As more of the pieces of the plot fall into place—as Kathy disappears and the Doctor’s message is discovered—the viewer may begin to feel frightened for Sally, but not horrified. The horror creeps into the viewer rather late into the episode. It’s provoked once the Doctor explains the importance of not blinking. The horror sneaks up on viewers, culminating when Larry is left alone with a Weeping Angel directly in front of him, his eyes forced as wide as possible, his head starting to shake, his brow starting to sweat, as he tries, as hard as he can, to complete that impossible task, to not blink.

  The fact that the monsters work their evil by using that natural process, blinking, in order to attack humans makes the Weeping Angels horrific and not just frightening. If it weren’t blinking but, say, the intended victim merely turning her head in another direction, the episode wouldn’t be horrific. It’s not blinking, specifically, that makes the viewer’s skin crawl, as opposed to the appearance or even the thought of the Weeping Angels; what leaves the viewer disquieted is the task that burdens their potential victims if they’re to save themselves. There’s nothing particularly disgusting about being required to not blink, but there’s something very unsettling in contemplating having to do so for an interminable period of time to save your identity. To understand how “Blink” is horrific, reflect on enduring the rising discomfort, while watching Larry’s eyelids as he struggles not to blink. Blinking is controllable (at least for a certain period of time), but eventually everyone, (except zombies), blinks. We’ve no real hope of preventing ourselves from doing it over an extended period of time. Against our own blinking, we’re ultimately powerless, impotent.

  Learning that our survival as the persons we are and hope to be when confronted by a Weeping Angel depends on not blinking is tantamount to learning that we can be saved only by performing an impossible, unnatural task. “Blink” reminds viewers of the anxiety most humans feel about controlling their bodily functions and extends it unnaturally over something we know we never can wholly control.

  The entire plot of the episode turns from merely frightening to downright horrific because of how important it is to not blink and how devastating the consequences are when one fails at this impossible task. One’s identity lost in a blink of an eye, but not with the relief of total amnesia! Alice’s perplexing question in Wonderland, “Was I the same when I got up this morning?” has only an ambiguous answer in “Blink,” as it does in Wonderland. But in “Blink,” as opposed to Wonderland, one doesn’t have the luxury of a slow decent into confusion and a strange world. Blinking, so slight we often don’t even notice it, is all it takes: one moment we’re comfortable in a familiar place; the next, without witnessing the scenery change, we’re somewhere far away and incomprehensible.

  A fragment of a second is all it takes for Kathy to be deposited where the identity she has constructed of, and for herself, can’t survive. That bodily movement that most of the time we barely even register performing, is all that separates her past life, where she understood who she was and how her actions fit into a longer narrative, and her strange new circumstances, where ultimately her memories of her old identity must be suppressed if she’s to rebuild a coherent sense of self. It’s not the thought of losing one’s identity alone that’s horrific; it’s the way the episode forces the viewer to conceive of losing it: by the victim failing to perform an impossib
le task, exposing our impotence vis-à-vis the monsters.

  There’s little dispute in the philosophical and psychological literature about the crucial importance the sense of control is to a person’s conception of themselves and their identity. Frankfurt, for example, argues persuasively that loss of second-order volitions is equivalent to loss of personhood.146 Losing control of one’s identity because one hasn’t the ability to make one’s desires effectual, is a form of torture.147 Many argue that what makes rape horrible isn’t just unwanted sexual contact but losing autonomy over one’s own body and sexuality. The feeling of powerlessness, helplessness, gives rise to resentment, shame, loss of a sense of dignity and self-esteem, and panic.

  The feeling of impotence, powerlessness, to prevent what the monsters do, is distinct from fear. It augments the fear. “Blink” is horrific because it causes viewers to feel both fear and impotency. In contrast to Carroll’s fear and disgust account of the horrific, we maintain that the recipe for horror is a monster we should fear and the exposure of our powerlessness to defeat the monster. Our account of horror, we believe, has more explanatory power than the one offered by Carroll.

  Consider the first criterion Carroll lists for the creation of a monster: it must be something that transcends our knowledge of the world. Carroll’s account never fully explains the need for this criterion. Why is it so important for a monster to be something scientifically inexplicable? There’re real creatures that are both frightening and disgusting—why aren’t they monsters, except, perhaps metaphorically? On our account of horror, that old saw, ‘knowledge is power’, provides an answer. If one can understand the nature of a thing in the usual investigative way, then one is closer to being able to control and overpower it. That’s a plot turning point in many of the horror and science-fiction films of the Cold War period and especially in the 1950s.