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The Black Archive #28
Love & Monsters
- GenresDoctor WhoNonfiction
180 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2019
28 people want to read
About the author
Niki Haringsma
13 books10 followersNiki Haringsma is a Dutch artist, writer, editor and emdash fancier.
You can find Niki's artwork at https://nikiharingsma.wordpress.com/a....
You can find Niki's artwork at https://nikiharingsma.wordpress.com/a....
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 22, 2019
The Black Archive is a series of book-length critiques of single televised Doctor Who stories – and Niki Haringsma’s entry focuses on Russell T. Davies’s divisive ‘Love & Monsters’. The 2006 episode introduces everyday characters that have formed a fan group, LINDA, where they share their experiences of the Doctor with one another. They have only witnessed the impact of some of his Earthbound adventures over the preceding two series from the margins of the narrative. Haringsma primarily analyses this through the lens of Brecht’s estrangement effect, arguing that sidestepping the expected further adventures of the Doctor and Rose is comparable to the techniques employed by Brecht’s epic theatre, such as direct audience address and drawing attention to the artifice of production, which strove to break immersion and encourage more critical and politically engaged observation.
Davies’s approach to Doctor Who was broadly one of demythologising (compared to the overtly mythmaking angle of Steven Moffat’s metatextual fairy tales), where mythic narrative and their representative figures like the Doctor are held up against more relatable, mundane characters and found to be dangerous and damaging to those who find them desirable. A Brechtian reading of Davies’s work is therefore synchronous with this process of demythologising – although Haringsma acknowledges that Davies probably didn’t have any intention of creating a Marxist parable. In ‘Love & Monsters’, the audience is invited to question their enjoyment of the drama and to question the figure of the Doctor and his actions directly.
The book’s strength lies in paying particular attention to the representation of fan communities – and the highlight on this count is chapter four. Here, Haringsma offers an interpretation of Peter Kay’s monster, the Abzorbaloff, as standing in for Russell T. Davies himself. The Abzorbaloff is widely understood to represent gatekeeper super-fans who hope to use their status to influence and control fellow fans, shape fan culture, and even impose a ‘correct’ interpretation of what the show should represent; a single vision in accord with their own personal tastes. Haringsma points out the conflation of the role of fans and producers in the post-2005 revival of the series. As much as Davies and many other members of the lead creative staff might have once been fans like us, in terms of the sway they now hold over fandom at large, they have become a much more successful version of the hubristic super-fan figure, even if they are less personally noxious, petty, and embarrassing.
Haringsma extends this analogy to suggest that the differences between the Abzorbaloff and LINDA represent a distinction between single-vision gatekeepers and larger fan groups. Fans play a key role in interpreting and reinterpreting the texts to create a multitude of possibilities, where all are accepted and there isn’t necessarily a single ‘correct’ reading. This is privileged above the status of the single super-fan or showrunner. It’s a very liberating reading of the episode, portraying Davies’s role as a selfless and generous one in leading its production so early in the revived run of the show. This is not to negate the apparent contradictions of his creative lead status. It’s also a useful reminder to be more wary of critiques that close down the possibilities presented by a narrative, rather than opening up the texts.
The multiple contradictory states therefore occupied by Davies as the writer of this episode are emphasised – and made particular to Doctor Who – with a reading of the Doctor as a narrative figure that also exists in multiple contradictory states at once. For instance, the Doctor is presented as a renegade of his/her people, a rebel, and a simple traveller exploring the universe – while simultaneously an ultimate authority figure, pompously asserting moral authority over other peoples throughout many timelines. Haringsma points to the sonic screwdriver as being the perfect symbol of what’s going on here. It is used to constantly grant access to areas deemed out-of-bounds by authority figures, and is a tool that connotes working class. But when the Doctor is seen as an authority figure, the implications can shift to the encroachment of space in a more invasive, even colonialist manner.
I would have liked to see Haringsma go further with Brechtian theory. Brecht’s theatre was speaking to general audiences of the early 20th century, whereas in today’s culture of mass produced television, shows like Doctor Who speak to more clearly delineated fan audiences. Any radical messages the show can produce might therefore be limited to fan readings. If fans don’t take these ideas and apply them to their lives outside fan circles, any radicalism will ultimately have been in service of encouraging the consumption of more media and therefore become a component of reproducing capitalism. As far as I know, Doctor Who has not directly led to socioeconomic upheaval, as much as fans might be moved to affect changes within their own fan community spaces. By applying Brechtian theory to this trend, Haringsma could have opened up even wider criticism of these political limitations and the capacity for drama to affect real sociopolitical change. There also could have been greater scope to question the relevance of Brecht’s theories of drama in today’s very different entertainment climate.
The contradiction of being both ruler and rebel embodied by the Doctor has an echo in Davies’s status as a regular fan and someone who holds authority over the series with his celebrity status as lead writer. Haringsma does touch on how this is encoded within the show but there is potential for a deeper sociopolitical critique here. Despite Davies’s demythologising, the figure of the Doctor remains uncritically a highly desirable one for many fans. So too does the role of executive producer and lead writer, indicated by the plethora of ‘if I were showrunner’ memes in fan circles. For all that its narratives might oppose dictatorial figures and trouble notions of moral authority, the appeal of power and influence over others is still nurtured and made desirable by Doctor Who.
However, in the spirit of decentring such authority, Haringsma’s approach considers the creative contributions of the director, set designers, and actors as significant aspects of the final product, instead of the traditional attribution of everything to the executive producer/lead writer as auteur.
Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding texts is used to destablise this authority still further. Hall described an audience’s experience of art and narrative as not being the receiving of a one-way transmission of ideas and meaning, but a communication process based on shared understanding between the work itself, the creators, the distribution method, and the audience. From this perspective, Doctor Who, which lacks an overall single auteur or even creator, becomes a kind of communal mythmaking. Haringsma applies this to the nebulous status between fans and fan-producers, which implies that it becomes something much more communally owned than the average show. The creative leads chop and change comparatively rapidly, so this dialogue between fans and fan-producers becomes highly fragmented.
With an insurmountable quantity of content, new fans approaching Doctor Who will be assembling pieces of an incomplete bricolage – and all these disparate creative visions of what Doctor Who is will always be in conflict with one another. The (perceived) persona of the celebrity writer will become a small aspect of the overall picture. An interesting aspect of the current Chris Chibnall-produced era is that with the ‘writers room’ that has been adopted, the production process is slightly democratised among more writers. Individual episodes no longer build to a narratively and thematically unifying series finale. The closing episodes of the most recent series were constructed as a bookend to pair with the opening episode, rather than the grand statement finales of the past. The series was clearly not without its failings but the disappointment with this aspect of the production in particular suggests an adjustment has not yet been made to this difference. The programme makers would also be well served to lean harder into the democratisation angle. Vinay Patel, writer of the very well-received series 11 episode ‘Demons of the Punjab’ posted a list of his inspirations and references to other partition stories outside Doctor Who on his Twitter account. In terms of its narrative construction, the episode was not radically out of step with what had gone before on the series, but its thematic and cultural-historical content was very fresh simply by virtue of coming from a British Indian perspective totally unrepresented on the show previously. Haringsma’s approach of looking at the construction of meaning as something determined by a broader authorship, fan reception, and multiple perspectives could be a waymarker for more expansive and progressive critiques in the future.
Haringsma’s Black Archive is a generous reading that opens its subject up for the widest and most democratic possible range of reinterpretations. Constructing such a critique while avoiding the imposition of individual critical authority is a difficult thing to pull off. I’ve always absolutely adored ‘Love & Monsters’ and this is the reading it deserves. Fans who feel more negatively toward the episode will undoubtedly find it much easier to open their hearts to its liberating pleasures on reading Haringsma’s book. It’s no small achievement.
Davies’s approach to Doctor Who was broadly one of demythologising (compared to the overtly mythmaking angle of Steven Moffat’s metatextual fairy tales), where mythic narrative and their representative figures like the Doctor are held up against more relatable, mundane characters and found to be dangerous and damaging to those who find them desirable. A Brechtian reading of Davies’s work is therefore synchronous with this process of demythologising – although Haringsma acknowledges that Davies probably didn’t have any intention of creating a Marxist parable. In ‘Love & Monsters’, the audience is invited to question their enjoyment of the drama and to question the figure of the Doctor and his actions directly.
The book’s strength lies in paying particular attention to the representation of fan communities – and the highlight on this count is chapter four. Here, Haringsma offers an interpretation of Peter Kay’s monster, the Abzorbaloff, as standing in for Russell T. Davies himself. The Abzorbaloff is widely understood to represent gatekeeper super-fans who hope to use their status to influence and control fellow fans, shape fan culture, and even impose a ‘correct’ interpretation of what the show should represent; a single vision in accord with their own personal tastes. Haringsma points out the conflation of the role of fans and producers in the post-2005 revival of the series. As much as Davies and many other members of the lead creative staff might have once been fans like us, in terms of the sway they now hold over fandom at large, they have become a much more successful version of the hubristic super-fan figure, even if they are less personally noxious, petty, and embarrassing.
Haringsma extends this analogy to suggest that the differences between the Abzorbaloff and LINDA represent a distinction between single-vision gatekeepers and larger fan groups. Fans play a key role in interpreting and reinterpreting the texts to create a multitude of possibilities, where all are accepted and there isn’t necessarily a single ‘correct’ reading. This is privileged above the status of the single super-fan or showrunner. It’s a very liberating reading of the episode, portraying Davies’s role as a selfless and generous one in leading its production so early in the revived run of the show. This is not to negate the apparent contradictions of his creative lead status. It’s also a useful reminder to be more wary of critiques that close down the possibilities presented by a narrative, rather than opening up the texts.
The multiple contradictory states therefore occupied by Davies as the writer of this episode are emphasised – and made particular to Doctor Who – with a reading of the Doctor as a narrative figure that also exists in multiple contradictory states at once. For instance, the Doctor is presented as a renegade of his/her people, a rebel, and a simple traveller exploring the universe – while simultaneously an ultimate authority figure, pompously asserting moral authority over other peoples throughout many timelines. Haringsma points to the sonic screwdriver as being the perfect symbol of what’s going on here. It is used to constantly grant access to areas deemed out-of-bounds by authority figures, and is a tool that connotes working class. But when the Doctor is seen as an authority figure, the implications can shift to the encroachment of space in a more invasive, even colonialist manner.
I would have liked to see Haringsma go further with Brechtian theory. Brecht’s theatre was speaking to general audiences of the early 20th century, whereas in today’s culture of mass produced television, shows like Doctor Who speak to more clearly delineated fan audiences. Any radical messages the show can produce might therefore be limited to fan readings. If fans don’t take these ideas and apply them to their lives outside fan circles, any radicalism will ultimately have been in service of encouraging the consumption of more media and therefore become a component of reproducing capitalism. As far as I know, Doctor Who has not directly led to socioeconomic upheaval, as much as fans might be moved to affect changes within their own fan community spaces. By applying Brechtian theory to this trend, Haringsma could have opened up even wider criticism of these political limitations and the capacity for drama to affect real sociopolitical change. There also could have been greater scope to question the relevance of Brecht’s theories of drama in today’s very different entertainment climate.
The contradiction of being both ruler and rebel embodied by the Doctor has an echo in Davies’s status as a regular fan and someone who holds authority over the series with his celebrity status as lead writer. Haringsma does touch on how this is encoded within the show but there is potential for a deeper sociopolitical critique here. Despite Davies’s demythologising, the figure of the Doctor remains uncritically a highly desirable one for many fans. So too does the role of executive producer and lead writer, indicated by the plethora of ‘if I were showrunner’ memes in fan circles. For all that its narratives might oppose dictatorial figures and trouble notions of moral authority, the appeal of power and influence over others is still nurtured and made desirable by Doctor Who.
However, in the spirit of decentring such authority, Haringsma’s approach considers the creative contributions of the director, set designers, and actors as significant aspects of the final product, instead of the traditional attribution of everything to the executive producer/lead writer as auteur.
Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding texts is used to destablise this authority still further. Hall described an audience’s experience of art and narrative as not being the receiving of a one-way transmission of ideas and meaning, but a communication process based on shared understanding between the work itself, the creators, the distribution method, and the audience. From this perspective, Doctor Who, which lacks an overall single auteur or even creator, becomes a kind of communal mythmaking. Haringsma applies this to the nebulous status between fans and fan-producers, which implies that it becomes something much more communally owned than the average show. The creative leads chop and change comparatively rapidly, so this dialogue between fans and fan-producers becomes highly fragmented.
With an insurmountable quantity of content, new fans approaching Doctor Who will be assembling pieces of an incomplete bricolage – and all these disparate creative visions of what Doctor Who is will always be in conflict with one another. The (perceived) persona of the celebrity writer will become a small aspect of the overall picture. An interesting aspect of the current Chris Chibnall-produced era is that with the ‘writers room’ that has been adopted, the production process is slightly democratised among more writers. Individual episodes no longer build to a narratively and thematically unifying series finale. The closing episodes of the most recent series were constructed as a bookend to pair with the opening episode, rather than the grand statement finales of the past. The series was clearly not without its failings but the disappointment with this aspect of the production in particular suggests an adjustment has not yet been made to this difference. The programme makers would also be well served to lean harder into the democratisation angle. Vinay Patel, writer of the very well-received series 11 episode ‘Demons of the Punjab’ posted a list of his inspirations and references to other partition stories outside Doctor Who on his Twitter account. In terms of its narrative construction, the episode was not radically out of step with what had gone before on the series, but its thematic and cultural-historical content was very fresh simply by virtue of coming from a British Indian perspective totally unrepresented on the show previously. Haringsma’s approach of looking at the construction of meaning as something determined by a broader authorship, fan reception, and multiple perspectives could be a waymarker for more expansive and progressive critiques in the future.
Haringsma’s Black Archive is a generous reading that opens its subject up for the widest and most democratic possible range of reinterpretations. Constructing such a critique while avoiding the imposition of individual critical authority is a difficult thing to pull off. I’ve always absolutely adored ‘Love & Monsters’ and this is the reading it deserves. Fans who feel more negatively toward the episode will undoubtedly find it much easier to open their hearts to its liberating pleasures on reading Haringsma’s book. It’s no small achievement.
December 30, 2019
This book is a ride you shouldn't miss!
For my first time reading a BA, I'm absolutely delighted to have my eyes opened to appreciate Love & Monsters in whole new ways. The book is approachable, entertaining, sharp with its sources and intellectual ideas, kind, thoughtful, and deeply, deeply nerdy.
For my first time reading a BA, I'm absolutely delighted to have my eyes opened to appreciate Love & Monsters in whole new ways. The book is approachable, entertaining, sharp with its sources and intellectual ideas, kind, thoughtful, and deeply, deeply nerdy.
May 31, 2019
Love & Monsters provides an in-depth reading of the iconic Who episode. By using the theory from Brecht, Haringsma details its tropes and metafictional aspects, and positions the ep in the wider Who canon. This book is an engaging critical read and answers many questions - What does the villain represent? How does the episode reference and depict fandom? Why is it simply so good? I really recommend this book to Whovians who long for a deep dive into a beloved episode!
December 26, 2022
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/love-monsters-by-niki-haringsma/
One of the first Belgian conventions I attended, the 2014 Antwerp Convention, included a guest appearance by Colin Baker. As I made myself comfortable for his presentation, I got into conversation with the fan sitting beside me; we found that our tastes were aligned on a number of points regarding Doctor Who, and have stayed in touch ever since, though I think that is the only time we have actually met. I was delighted when he got the commission to write this book, drawing on his literary studies and fan-writing experience.
Here’s Niki’s own blogpost introduction to the book. He says up front that he loved the episode from the first time he saw it, but also recognises that this is not a universal view. Writing the book helped to work through the reasons for both love and hate, but especially love.
"I found a wonderful community while writing this Black Archive. So many people came up to me to say how much they loved the episode. Sure, they could all see the awkwardness and camp, the disgusting rubber-suit monster, the fan characters becoming creepy stalkers, but they still adored the whole thing because it spoke to them. I made so many new friends who helped me with my investigation ‘n’ detection, and my book became a love letter to the comradery of Doctor Who fandom itself."
The first chapter, “I had to invent this rudimentary pulley system”, looks at the production reasons why the story was made in the first place, and why it had such a tight budget. It identifies “The Zeppo”, one of my favourite Buffy episodes, as partial inspiration.
The second chapter, “Spaceships and lasers and everything”, looks at how the viewer is estranged from the action by the way the story is told, invoking Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of oстраннение (often translated as “defamiliarisation”, but here as “estrangement”) and its implementation in the works of Bertold Brecht, especially The Threepenny Opera. I am not familiar with either, but I found this tremendously interesting. He also looks at the queerness of Elton’s relationship with Ursula after her transformation, and how the dynamics of fandom are portrayed in LINDA.
The third chapter, “This isn’t, you know, my whole life”, looks briefly at Elton as a character, and the unreliability of his narration.
The fourth chapter, “Great big absorbing creature from Outer Space”, looks at the Absorbaloff, about the role of fans in creativity around Doctor Who (including the fact that Davies and Tennant were both long-term fans themselves), culminating in the idea for the monster coming from a nine-year-old fan, and finishes with more analysis of what the Absorbaloff really stands for.
The fifth chapter, “We’ve got the place to ourselves”, looks in depth at Jackie, but reminds us that there are two other mothers in the story as well – Elton’s own mother, whose death is linked with the Doctor, and Bridget, the LINDA member who is looking for her own daughter and is one of the first to be absorbed.
The sixth chapter, “Fetch a Spade!”, examines how the story hints at the darker side of the Doctor’s personality, and quotes Jon Arnold on Amy Pond, before going back to Shklovsky’s oстраннение and also Itō Gō’s concept of キャラ (kyara), instantly recognisable archetypes. as manifested in the characters of Love & Monsters and then meditating on the nature of fandom and the character of the Tenth Doctor.
The seventh chapter, “What he never won’t represent”, starts by asking the reader, “Am I a good fan?” But we are reassured. “If you’re reading this book, chances are you’re not satisfied with just taking Doctor Who at face value. You probably want to dive in a little, poke it, look at it from different angles and see what’s hidden inside. Luckily, there are endless ways to do so.” Haringsma invokes Barthes’ Death of the Author, and goes on to unpack Ursula as a paving slab and romantic partner, taking us in some surprising directions.
A brief conclusion invokes Brecht again, and leaves us with these thoughts:
"Maybe as you’re reading this, a text-only Target Love & Monsters novelisation will have seen the light of day as well. And maybe Ursula’s transformation will be obviously queer this time around, or maybe the Abzorbaloff will remind us a bit more of some particularly obnoxious fan. Or maybe not. Because the world is changing and transforming too, making room for new lessons that can be taught, new fannish circles of new geeks hungry to seize the reins. Maybe this strange adventure that’s been absorbed into fandom’s consciousness can be re-imagined to tell another story altogether. But it will always have been this wonderful little side-step in the Doctor’s life. And as fans, we have the opportunity to look beyond the episode’s awkwardness and camp – and to celebrate Love & Monsters for all that it is. Because it’s so much darker…
…and so much madder…
…and, y’know, it’s got a blowjob joke and everything."
It’s always nice when someone I like writes a book I like about a subject I like. Niki is a friend, the book took me to some very interesting places that I had not really considered, and while I’m still not completely sure if I like Love & Monsters, I love Doctor Who.
One of the first Belgian conventions I attended, the 2014 Antwerp Convention, included a guest appearance by Colin Baker. As I made myself comfortable for his presentation, I got into conversation with the fan sitting beside me; we found that our tastes were aligned on a number of points regarding Doctor Who, and have stayed in touch ever since, though I think that is the only time we have actually met. I was delighted when he got the commission to write this book, drawing on his literary studies and fan-writing experience.
Here’s Niki’s own blogpost introduction to the book. He says up front that he loved the episode from the first time he saw it, but also recognises that this is not a universal view. Writing the book helped to work through the reasons for both love and hate, but especially love.
"I found a wonderful community while writing this Black Archive. So many people came up to me to say how much they loved the episode. Sure, they could all see the awkwardness and camp, the disgusting rubber-suit monster, the fan characters becoming creepy stalkers, but they still adored the whole thing because it spoke to them. I made so many new friends who helped me with my investigation ‘n’ detection, and my book became a love letter to the comradery of Doctor Who fandom itself."
The first chapter, “I had to invent this rudimentary pulley system”, looks at the production reasons why the story was made in the first place, and why it had such a tight budget. It identifies “The Zeppo”, one of my favourite Buffy episodes, as partial inspiration.
The second chapter, “Spaceships and lasers and everything”, looks at how the viewer is estranged from the action by the way the story is told, invoking Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of oстраннение (often translated as “defamiliarisation”, but here as “estrangement”) and its implementation in the works of Bertold Brecht, especially The Threepenny Opera. I am not familiar with either, but I found this tremendously interesting. He also looks at the queerness of Elton’s relationship with Ursula after her transformation, and how the dynamics of fandom are portrayed in LINDA.
The third chapter, “This isn’t, you know, my whole life”, looks briefly at Elton as a character, and the unreliability of his narration.
The fourth chapter, “Great big absorbing creature from Outer Space”, looks at the Absorbaloff, about the role of fans in creativity around Doctor Who (including the fact that Davies and Tennant were both long-term fans themselves), culminating in the idea for the monster coming from a nine-year-old fan, and finishes with more analysis of what the Absorbaloff really stands for.
The fifth chapter, “We’ve got the place to ourselves”, looks in depth at Jackie, but reminds us that there are two other mothers in the story as well – Elton’s own mother, whose death is linked with the Doctor, and Bridget, the LINDA member who is looking for her own daughter and is one of the first to be absorbed.
The sixth chapter, “Fetch a Spade!”, examines how the story hints at the darker side of the Doctor’s personality, and quotes Jon Arnold on Amy Pond, before going back to Shklovsky’s oстраннение and also Itō Gō’s concept of キャラ (kyara), instantly recognisable archetypes. as manifested in the characters of Love & Monsters and then meditating on the nature of fandom and the character of the Tenth Doctor.
The seventh chapter, “What he never won’t represent”, starts by asking the reader, “Am I a good fan?” But we are reassured. “If you’re reading this book, chances are you’re not satisfied with just taking Doctor Who at face value. You probably want to dive in a little, poke it, look at it from different angles and see what’s hidden inside. Luckily, there are endless ways to do so.” Haringsma invokes Barthes’ Death of the Author, and goes on to unpack Ursula as a paving slab and romantic partner, taking us in some surprising directions.
A brief conclusion invokes Brecht again, and leaves us with these thoughts:
"Maybe as you’re reading this, a text-only Target Love & Monsters novelisation will have seen the light of day as well. And maybe Ursula’s transformation will be obviously queer this time around, or maybe the Abzorbaloff will remind us a bit more of some particularly obnoxious fan. Or maybe not. Because the world is changing and transforming too, making room for new lessons that can be taught, new fannish circles of new geeks hungry to seize the reins. Maybe this strange adventure that’s been absorbed into fandom’s consciousness can be re-imagined to tell another story altogether. But it will always have been this wonderful little side-step in the Doctor’s life. And as fans, we have the opportunity to look beyond the episode’s awkwardness and camp – and to celebrate Love & Monsters for all that it is. Because it’s so much darker…
…and so much madder…
…and, y’know, it’s got a blowjob joke and everything."
It’s always nice when someone I like writes a book I like about a subject I like. Niki is a friend, the book took me to some very interesting places that I had not really considered, and while I’m still not completely sure if I like Love & Monsters, I love Doctor Who.
May 11, 2019
Really interesting and in-depth analysis of one of the most controvertial episodes since Doctor Who came back to television. By examining an unusual episode, the author holds up a mirror to what Doctor Who is, why it is that way, and what happens when it isn't. Definitely worth your time if you're a fan of this era of the show.
Read
April 27, 2020It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artist. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
– Alan Moore
I read this book in a sort of breathless rush: it's dense and full of information, but also fizzles with energy. Occasionally (but very rarely), this can create the impression of skimming over the surface of a topic; mostly it feels like being carried along by a rapid stream. I think it will lend itself very well to a slower re-read now that I am familiar with the main thrust of tge argument.
Haringsma analyses a widely-maligned (and beloved by a small but devoted group of fans) episode Love & Monsters – a fourth-wall breaking look at Doctor Who fandom that most people remember only because of one small sex joke. The primary critical lens used to analyse it are Bertold Brecht's concept of dialectical theatre and Viktor Shklovsky's theory of estrangement on one hand – creative approaches that alienate the audience, drawing attention to the fictionality of what they experience – and fandom studies on the other. In this approach, Love & Monsters is a look at both oppressive and liberatory fandom practices; a look that is conflicted and possibly compromised (since it's produced by people in a position of power, with creative and financial control over Doctor Who) that could galvanise the fans to take creative ownership of the text. Haringsma is perhaps the perfect person to talk about this given his writings in fan anthologies and Doctor Who spin-off media – you can certainly feel that he is full of enthusiasm for fan works and wants to empower other fans to express themselves in this way as well.
The Brechtian angle was what fascinated me the most in the book. I think that at its best the Black Archive series works as a two-way torch: it uses theoretical concepts to shine a light on Doctor Who, but it also uses Doctor Who to introduce readers to schools of thought they weren't previously familiar with. Shklovsky is a mainstay of university lit theory courses and I had a passing familiarity with 'estrangement', but now I want to delve deeper into his writings; Brecht is very new to me. I found his conceptualisation of dialectical theatre very instructive and potentially useful for creative practice (there is a side-by-side comparison of features of dialectical and traditional, or dramatic theatre that I will be going back to). Occasionally, and that was particularly interesting, this framework introduced at the very start suggested answers to questions that Haringsma leaves open-ended in the course of the book. I'm thinking in particular of why the audience didn't seem to warm to LI'N'DA as a positive depiction of fandom – I felt there was a clash between their depiction as straightforward audience-identification figures and the alienating techniques of dialectical theatre, a sort of inverse of the reaction to Brecht's The Threepenny Opera that led to his writing The Threepenny Novel.
A section of the book is devoted to matters of representation and inclusivity. Haringsma provides a good overview of the problems surrounding the infamous 'blowjob joke' while rightfully pointing out that the heated reaction against it serves as a demonstration of the prejudice and stigma surrounding the sexuality of people with disabilities. Analysis of Elton and Ursula as queer figures was likewise fascinating, though I agree that even if the intention was there, it doesn't quite come across in the episode. It's wrapped in too many layers of metaphor.
The most interesting insight in this regard was for me the analysis of the racial components in the design of Absorbaloff. I hadn't encountered this reading before, and while it probably wasn't intended by the production team (or the child who originally designed Absorbaloff for the Blue Peter competition), it's a useful reminder for creators to be careful when designing fantastical monsters. It's very easy to fall into racial caricatures. If there was a missed aspect to this analysis, I'd say it's fatness – I think it's a significant component of what makes Absorbaloff grotesque (and that's an important category in Haringsma's analysis of the monster), and indeed something of a recurring thread in some of the Davies era most recognisable monsters (Slitheen and Adipose), but how those elements play into a widespread fatphobic prejudice is not mentioned at all.
Overall, though, it's a stellar book, analysing an episode I love with depth, enthusiasm, and nuance that I think it absolutely deserves, while also bringing in very interesting and fruitful critical tools. If you loved Love & Monsters, you owe it to yourself to read this book and find even more to appreciate it. If you hated Love & Monsters – why not read it to try and see if there isn't something to love in it after all?
– Alan Moore
I read this book in a sort of breathless rush: it's dense and full of information, but also fizzles with energy. Occasionally (but very rarely), this can create the impression of skimming over the surface of a topic; mostly it feels like being carried along by a rapid stream. I think it will lend itself very well to a slower re-read now that I am familiar with the main thrust of tge argument.
Haringsma analyses a widely-maligned (and beloved by a small but devoted group of fans) episode Love & Monsters – a fourth-wall breaking look at Doctor Who fandom that most people remember only because of one small sex joke. The primary critical lens used to analyse it are Bertold Brecht's concept of dialectical theatre and Viktor Shklovsky's theory of estrangement on one hand – creative approaches that alienate the audience, drawing attention to the fictionality of what they experience – and fandom studies on the other. In this approach, Love & Monsters is a look at both oppressive and liberatory fandom practices; a look that is conflicted and possibly compromised (since it's produced by people in a position of power, with creative and financial control over Doctor Who) that could galvanise the fans to take creative ownership of the text. Haringsma is perhaps the perfect person to talk about this given his writings in fan anthologies and Doctor Who spin-off media – you can certainly feel that he is full of enthusiasm for fan works and wants to empower other fans to express themselves in this way as well.
The Brechtian angle was what fascinated me the most in the book. I think that at its best the Black Archive series works as a two-way torch: it uses theoretical concepts to shine a light on Doctor Who, but it also uses Doctor Who to introduce readers to schools of thought they weren't previously familiar with. Shklovsky is a mainstay of university lit theory courses and I had a passing familiarity with 'estrangement', but now I want to delve deeper into his writings; Brecht is very new to me. I found his conceptualisation of dialectical theatre very instructive and potentially useful for creative practice (there is a side-by-side comparison of features of dialectical and traditional, or dramatic theatre that I will be going back to). Occasionally, and that was particularly interesting, this framework introduced at the very start suggested answers to questions that Haringsma leaves open-ended in the course of the book. I'm thinking in particular of why the audience didn't seem to warm to LI'N'DA as a positive depiction of fandom – I felt there was a clash between their depiction as straightforward audience-identification figures and the alienating techniques of dialectical theatre, a sort of inverse of the reaction to Brecht's The Threepenny Opera that led to his writing The Threepenny Novel.
A section of the book is devoted to matters of representation and inclusivity. Haringsma provides a good overview of the problems surrounding the infamous 'blowjob joke' while rightfully pointing out that the heated reaction against it serves as a demonstration of the prejudice and stigma surrounding the sexuality of people with disabilities. Analysis of Elton and Ursula as queer figures was likewise fascinating, though I agree that even if the intention was there, it doesn't quite come across in the episode. It's wrapped in too many layers of metaphor.
The most interesting insight in this regard was for me the analysis of the racial components in the design of Absorbaloff. I hadn't encountered this reading before, and while it probably wasn't intended by the production team (or the child who originally designed Absorbaloff for the Blue Peter competition), it's a useful reminder for creators to be careful when designing fantastical monsters. It's very easy to fall into racial caricatures. If there was a missed aspect to this analysis, I'd say it's fatness – I think it's a significant component of what makes Absorbaloff grotesque (and that's an important category in Haringsma's analysis of the monster), and indeed something of a recurring thread in some of the Davies era most recognisable monsters (Slitheen and Adipose), but how those elements play into a widespread fatphobic prejudice is not mentioned at all.
Overall, though, it's a stellar book, analysing an episode I love with depth, enthusiasm, and nuance that I think it absolutely deserves, while also bringing in very interesting and fruitful critical tools. If you loved Love & Monsters, you owe it to yourself to read this book and find even more to appreciate it. If you hated Love & Monsters – why not read it to try and see if there isn't something to love in it after all?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 24, 2021
A better book than the episode it analyses.
I really enjoyed the Brechtian comparisons.
I really enjoyed the Brechtian comparisons.
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