Of Luddites and Lothlórien

For me the Luddites are ultimately just as misguided as the technologists. Recalling one's Tolkien, the Elves' greatest desire (which is perfectly understandable) is that things stay the same - but that is the very way that Sauron ensnares them. The Elvish refuges in Middle-earth - to wit the Grey Havens, Rivendell and Lothlórien - are protected by the Three Rings, but the Three Rings themselves depend for their power on the power of the One Ring. So there may very well be modern "environmentalists" (including the modern, Cameronite "crunchy conservative" Tory Party) who think they're on the side of the Shire, but really they're just doing the will of Mordor.

Of course the real purpose of environmentalism (and all the so-called politically correct lifestyle movements - from vegetarianism to "sexual health", etc.), as a friend writes from America, is to transfer moral paradigms to purely trivial issues. To my mind this is "scapegoating" in its clearest form. In the same way as politicians are keen to plant trees in public so that they can get on with destroying the English countryside so condemnation of "bogus asylum seekers" allows for unprecedented legal immigration, and blood-curdling punishments for "paedophiles" allow for classroom sex-ed that is ever more grotesque and abusive. Standard innoculation theory!

But recycling unfortunately is not just morally indifferent. It's positively vicious, in that it's wasteful and deceitful. And it's not just a case of removing personal conduct from the moral sphere. It's a case of replacing real virtues with completely imaginary ones.

Misconceived Wolverine?

Young, gorgeous, delightful, stunningly talented! Troye Sivan was a preteen YouTube breakout hit when Dan Hannan had hardly been heard of.

So WTF was he doing in half-arsed rubbish like X-Men Origins: Wolverine? It's hard to imagine a take on Wolverine more misconceived.

Apart from possibly this, that is!

The Boorman Kids

The other thing about Excalibur is the Uther-Igrayne shagging scene at the beginning. What with the grinding and tit-sucking and all, as a kid it used to turn me on and freak me out in equal measure. (Dude, this is King Arthur. But I shouldn't be watching this! Etc.) Uther, it just so happens, was played by the aforementioned Gabriel Byrne. But it's only when one bears in mind that the Igrayne in question was actually Boorman's daughter that the real freakiness of the scene starts to emerge.

And just to, er, top that, here's beautiful Charley Boorman (who appears in Excalibur in his undies, being oiled up by Helen Mirren) in The Emerald Forest.

It's a fairly recognisable syndrome - doting dad decides that his kid (female or male) is the most gorgeous thing in the world and gets her or him a plum part in some little remembered movie (or, in the case of Excalibur, in a well remembered one). Danny the Champion of the World, for example, is actually a sweet enough film, but it's still little more than an Irons family home movie.

Boorman's home movies would presumably have been along the lines of not just Hope and Glory (which really is glorious) but also I Dreamt I Woke Up (which is weird and interesting, but not quite as interesting as I wanted it to be). Taken together though, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest make Robby seem positively normal.

Flashes of Mythos

Well the Chrimbo Doctor Who was pretty rubbish even by the low standards of the new series. The Ood used to be really exciting and scary. Now they're boring. Bernard Cribbins used to be embarrassing. Now he's boring and embarrassing. The John Simms Master used be entertaining in a camp sort of way. Now he's just boringly embarrassing in a camp sort of way. Even David Tennant looks as if he's just going through the motions.

In fact I was asleep long before the climax, and only really woke up at the end when Timothy Dalton announced, in camp, spittle-flecked, un-Time-Lordly tones, that the Time Lords were back. Well, whoop-de-doo! Unfortunately if their return is anything like most of the revivals we've seen so far - the Master, Davros, the Daleks most of the time and even the Cybermen some of the time - then let's not get our hopes up. There'll be a few special effects shots. A bit of campness from David Tennant. And that'll be more or less it.

I always sigh when fans seek to transcend their innate "fan-wank" tendency by condemning the series' mythology. It is true enough that any series that's only interested in its own imaginary universe is always bound to disappear up its own rear end. But that's exactly what the new series started doing in its second episode, when Rose gives her mum a 'phone call from the space station at the end of the world. And besides, as with The X-Files, it's frequently the case that it's the "mythology" episodes of a series that are the best ones. (OK, this isn't actually true for the new Doctor Who series. None of the Dalek stories could possibly touch Steven Moffat's stuff, for example. And as for dodgy Sontarans vs. UNIT, drivel - let's not even go there! But I think the point is generally true.)

In the old days, however much quality and even character motivation (and all that) might have varied from serial to serial, at least each new serial was new and imaginative (and this even when, towards the end, there were only four serials to a season). Story arcs were minimal, and only popped up when they actually added to the excitement of a story (e.g. in the case of Fenric, where the villain's implicit revelations about a handful of the Doctor's recent adventures add to the thrill of his confrontation with the Doctor instead of distracting from it). Nowadays though almost every episode has be knitted into some sort of tight but silly narrative involving prophecies and Ood and Time Lords and, quite probably, Daleks and Cybermen and the Slytheen as well.

Well bollocks to the lot of it! The only times when the new series actually sounds half-way decent nowadays is when there's some occasional dip into the mythos - by which I mean the old mythos, of Gallifrey and Skaro and so on. So in yesterday's episode it was the Master's wittering on about his father's estates on Gallifrey that made my ears briefly prick up. It didn't add much to the plot. But it did for a moment suggest that there might be more to the new series than just chavs and modern TV cliches.

More importantly, there's always been a sense with the series' mythos throughout the show's history that when the individual writers refer to it - and, hopefully, expand it - they're dipping into the show's "collective unconscious". To take one fairly obvious example, although it was never written down or publicly announced that the Doctor should be "a bit like a Buddhist holy man", or indeed that he was really 750 years old, these things very much in the characterisation that William Hartnell had in mind when he played the Doctor back in the early 1960s, and to a certain extent they were still there as part of the Pertwee and Tom Baker characterisation(s) in the late '70s.

The point here is that it's this mythology, and indeed his Doctor Who collective unconscious, that really holds Doctor Who together - that somehow connects Totters Lane junkyard with whatever bollocks the BBC are putting on in the New Year. So really it's these occasional flashes of mythos that give the viewer a sense that the show will actually carry on - and indeed that there is some scope out there for it to be if not quite as good as it used to be then at least better than this s**t!

The Psychology of Harry Potter

For the last couple of months I've been reading M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled. I've been "deliberately" reading it slowly and thinking a great deal about it as I've been going along. In fact I've mostly been reading it on trains and 'buses, not to mention whilst waiting for them. And whether deliberately or not I have probably assimilated more of it than I woud have if I'd just sat down and read it straight through. And perhaps too I've benefited from reading it this way!

Most of what Peck has to say is actually very good. As a highly decorated military psychiatrist, his interest is very much on the "real world" rather than with fanciful theorising. Almost all of what he has to say is very interesting. There are only one or two bum notes, such as when he refers to himself and his own experience of "growing up" by funking prep school. His take on religion is somewhat disappointing - though according to his website he has taken a good deal more interest in his own religion (he's a sort of non-denominational, C S Lewis-type "Christian") since he wrote the book back in the 1970s. And there are one or two claims he tries to make that are just plain wrong. (For example, western society is not psychologically healthier now than it was in the 1950s, or, one imagines, than it was in the '70s, when he was writing. Quite the reverse, in fact, as Oliver James, for example, has been at pains to point out.) But all-in-all it is well worth reading.

I think I would particularly recommend this book for any "non-religious" person who is nevertheless still interested in spiritual growth - and indeed for anyone who has been let down by the modern Catholic Church (Ahem!) or who is simply ready to accept that "religion" only provides the tools and the starting point for spiritual growth and does not in and of itself cause the soul to open and expand. Prayer and the Sacraments, after all, are essential, but spiritual combat can only take place in the real world. If one confines one's spiritual efforts to the chapel and the confessional then either one must stay there twenty-four hours a day or one is lost.

I think it would be fair to say Peck takes a Jungian attitude to myth. His own, slightly idiosyncratic reinterpretations of Biblical passages are fairly grating. But he does make use of Buddhist and indeed classical myths in a way that is intelligent and engaging.

Perhaps the most important myth in his thesaurus is that of Orestes, which he refers to in the book's final chapter. A few years ago, various corners of the Internet were buzzing with all sorts of views about what the Harry Potter books were really all about. One of the most delightfully dotty theories I came across was that the Harry Potter stories were actually based on the Oresteia (of Aeschylus and, more generally, others as well). According to this theory, the character of Harry Potter himself was based on the hero Orestes, Ron was Pylades, and Hermione was, well, Hermione. This, by the way, was round about the time when one could find slashy fanfic out there (and some of it really was and is very "out there") for just about any coupling between any two characters in the Harry Potter universe one could think of. And it was said that J K Rowling herself, who was certainly no slouch at engaging with Internet-based fandom, was not a little perturbed by some of what was, er, "coming out".

For me the most wonderful thing about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when it finally hit the shelves was discovering all the little scores that Rowling settles with her readers (not to mention her critics) in its pages. The book opens with a thank-you message to the fans who have been following Harry's adventures from the beginning - written, with not a little charm, in a "Carolingian" "mouse-tail" meter copied from Alice. Although officially the eponymous Deathly Hallows themselves are Voldemort's horcruxes, the thematic crux of the book is Harry's visit, long foreseen by fans, to his parents' "hallows" on Christmas Eve in Godric's Hollow. The inscriptions on their graves act as a gentle but powerful riposte to those who over the years have accused the Harry Potter books of being un-Christian. So too, in fact, is the scene with the Sword of Godric Gryffindor, guiding Harry to one of the horcruxes by its light in the shape of a cross. (Funnily enough, the hug that Harry gives Ron after the horcrux is destroyed rather suggests that even the slash-fic writers were not entirely missed from Rowling's thank-you list.)

The thematic significance of the scene in Godric's Hollow though is perhaps really brought out by the book's frontispiece quotation from The Libation Bearers (the only such frontispiece in any of the books, thus giving this one, the last in the series, a definite sense of being more "grown-up" than its precursors). The conclusion, that the scene in Godric's Hollow is Rowling's own version of the scene the quotation is taken from, and that Harry really is Rowling's Orestes, is hard to avoid. Harry and Hermione aren't actually carrying libations, nor are they actually brother and sister - though, as Harry later confesses to Ron, that is very much the nature of their relationship. But in general terms the two scenes are analagous. Moreover it is also hard to avoid the probability that J K Rowling, herself a classicist by education, knew exactly what she was doing.

Is the real point then of the Harry Potter books a psychological one - that it is only when we confront our demons and take responsbility for ourselves that we can conquer them, at the same time, nay at the very instant that we finally achieve full spiritual adulthood? It is when Orestes takes responsibility for his own actions, rather than blaming them on the curse that has been placed on his family the House of Atreus, that the gods take pity on him and revoke their curse. The Furies then become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, and the hero is spiritually healed. Similarly it is only when Harry finally takes up his personal responsibility for destroying the Dark Lord, and indeed when he stops being merely a pawn in Albus Dumbledore's (somewhat obscure) masterplan, that Voldemort, himself very much the embodiment of schizophrenic mental illness, is defeated and banished forever.

Obviously there's always a danger that one can read too much into popular stories, not to mention popular children's books and indeed all myths and fairy-stories. But it's just as possible, and more unfortunate, to read too little into these things, and given the huge success of the Harry Potter franchise it is probably worthwhile giving the boy-wizard and his world at least a passing thought along the way.