Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat has create some of the serial ’ most frightening monsters , include the Weeping Angel aliens in “ Blink ” who cringe up when you glance away . This season , the Edvard Munch - inspired alien called The Silence have a strange but potent superpower : the instant they leave the skeleton of your vision , you forget they be . No wonder they ’ve lurked hidden on Earth for so many thousands of eld .
Moffat has an uncanny path of making heart and vision into a source of terror . Though the Weeping Angels and The secrecy are monster that Moffat formulate just for Doctor Who , they embody an ancient shape of terror identified in the 20th century by philosophers fascinated by the power of the human regard .
In 1956 , famed existentialist and French opposition belligerent Jean - Paul Sartre published his heroic employment Being and Nothingness . One of the most influential parts of the book comes from his ideas about how imagination help us recrudesce a sense of self . To grossly simplify his argument , which he makes in a chapter called “ The Look , ” being catch by somebody else is blood-related to being recognize by them . So we make a psychological connexion between the act of seeing a person with glasses , and the more complicated enactment of recognizing the mortal as a piece named Jean - Paul who is French , white , nerdy , and likes to compose about metaphysics . To add together up , your sensory faculty of self and your sense of others is touch base well with your ability to see them – and their ability to see you .
The Big OtherSartre point out that this situation can lead to a lot of terrific situations . First of all , it means we trust on others for a sense of ego , and thus for a sentiency of stability and mental coherence . Even creepier , it mean ( for model ) I basically would n’t have any sense of self at all if it were n’t for some Big Other having add up along at some point when I was a tiny little not - yet - self and saying , “ You are Annalee . You are female and white and Judaic and you live in America in a middle - class suburb . ” Yes , it voice unearthly , but parents and teacher and other adults actually say matter that more or less boil down to sentences like that .
wreak at the park with my niece , I ’ve heard adults excuse to their kidskin , “ She ’s a girl and you are a boy . ” That ’s a major Big Other import , where two little selves are made to understand that they are genders , and not just blobs of desire to dally in the George Sand . Similarly , I can commend my parents telling me things like , “ You are Jewish , which is why you do n’t have to draw flick of Santa like the other Thomas Kid in Kindergarten . ” And now , decades later , I still feel Jewish as a result . Those Big Others inject a piece of self into me , without my permit , and now I ca n’t get it out . chilling !
The Big BadsBut there ’s something even scarier . Which takes us back to Doctor Who , and Steven Moffat . We all , somewhere in the back of our minds , recollect those moment when a Big Other looked upon us and declare what our self would be . And therefore in fancied tarradiddle , the gaze can take on an extra metaphorical significance . It is the thing that makes us who we are . It is also the affair we use to confer acknowledgement on others – the thing that makes them who they are .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFKa9tQqzrs
And that ’s what makes “ Blink ” such a totally eat - your - undies terrifying concept . It plays into our sensation that we control the world with our gazes . The Weeping Angels are monsters who attack only when we avert our eyes . We must remain count at them , unblinking , if we want to keep ourselves from being consumed by the vast nothingness of death . ( Yeah , Sartre would have been a fan of that idea . ) But there ’s something more going on here . These monsters aggress from a blank space we can not look . read that into philosophical terms , and they are n’t really others because we ca n’t see or recognize them . And do you know what pass when you are look upon by an something that is n’t an other ? The emptiness look at you ! Your sense of self is shatter into a million bits , in the metaphysical equivalent of a setting from digital scanner . And that shit go beyond uncanny , into staring gibbering repugnance .
Moffat exploits this whole shatter self idea in a more obvious way with the secretiveness . These alien do the interrogation that a lot of post - Sartrean philosopher would ask if they were n’t all terribly cultured : What if we conform to somebody who could totally fuck up the way of life we look at them ? Like the Weeping Angels , the secrecy can only be recognized when someone else is expect directly at them . The moment River , for instance , looks away ? Memory erasure . A little minute of her self , her memory , has been rive out . And of course this little routine of self that the Silence remove reverse out to be jolly important , since it ’s the only thing standing between human exemption and enslavement .
Both the Weeping Angels and the secretiveness take away our ability to see things , and therefore to ascertain them . As a result , they mess with our basic horse sense of ego at a fundamental level . I suppose what I ’m say is that Moffat is the master of existential horror . Or perhaps all horror is , at its ascendent , about lose a sense of who we are for a little while .
Want to know more about the regard ? I recommend Slavoj Zizek ’s book look Awry , Kaja Silverman ’s The Threshold of the Visible World , Jacques Lacan ’s essay “ The Mirror Stage , ” and ( of row ) Jean - Paul Sartre ’s Being and Nothingness .
I write my editor ’s column while hunting madly for the cock-a-hoop affair and desiring little object . You canread past columns here .
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