The Union of the Snake
Snakedance on DVD
While Snakedance may not contain the sheer breadth of ideas as in Kinda, it nevertheless remains, along with Enlightenment, as the best of a less than effective season in 1983. As pointed out by Christopher Bailey in the DVD documentary Snake Charmer, his agent was at first reluctant to commit him to another Doctor Who after his experience with Kinda but he persisted and undertook Snakedance understanding more about the nature of writing for such a series and how to work within the limitations of budget, production and format.
The story that emerges is certainly more comfortable within its own skin and works better as a Doctor Who serial than Kinda itself. Kinda might have the intellectual ideas and Grimwade’s energetic direction at its disposal but Snakedance is a much subtler, character driven piece that further explores a number of Bailey’s concepts for Kinda.
The world building, as crucial to the success of science fiction drama as the creation of fully rounded characters to inhabit that world, is achieved superbly here. There are no disappointing attempts to convey a jungle planet and the culture and history of Manussa is palpably realised. Instead of a paradise world of the enlightened who manage the flux of time and the cyclic resurgence of evil here we get a developed society that has lost touch with its own history and culture, cynically exploiting it through their own decadent attitudes to the myths and stories about the Mara that once dominated the planet.
Bailey once again parallels the British in India and the themes often have some affinity to those presented in either The Jewel in the Crown or A Passage to India. In Snakedance, Manussa is a culture created after an uncivilised society has been civilised by a galactic Federation. The savage, unpredictable nature of the id has been tamed by intolerant rationalism. This is the Deva Loka of Kinda colonised by a self-satisfied imperialist phallocracy. That self-satisfaction is, however, based on a search for knowledge and a greed that threatens to re-create the Mara, those monsters from the inside, and where the wisdom of the past must eventually be remythologised within the present. Like Forbidden Planet (1956) a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and before long you’ve found “fear in a handful of dust” and released the id, the Mara.
This cynicism emerges as an empty jingoism about Manussa’s past and ironically the recording blocks for Snakedance coincided with the Falklands War and the then wave of sentimental and ritualistic patriotism about British history and colonial conquest that swept through the country. The snake parade and the Punch and Judy show in the Manussan anniversary festival provide the same function but it is the Mara possessed Lon who can see beyond these gestures and decides the wheel of time must turn again. Snakedance is at its heart about generational and cultural differences within the same society.
This reflects a particular time in British culture of the 1980s where ‘heritage’ was key to its definition and many television programmes and films were concerned with re-enacting past British glories, including colonialist and imperialist history, to present an idealised image of Britain. Manussa’s past is seen as culturally homegenous and fundamentally false whether it involves the showman Dugdale, the fortuneteller, the idle, bored Lon and his mother Tanha or Ambril and the upper-class, rather decadent non-entities that he socialises with. Ambril, in particular, sees the past as something to be ransacked without attaching any real meaning to it.
Into this mix appear the Doctor and his companions and they know the true power of the Mara and the danger it poses to Manussa. Part of the delight of Snakedance is seeing the Doctor’s frustrated attempts to convince Ambril that his excavations of the past are about to be given real purpose. The artifacts over which he pores and to which he grants interpretation go on to fulfill their role as instruments of the Mara’s power and its prophecy of return.
This story once again goes to great lengths to build an environment that becomes readily accepted by the audience. Bailey layers the script with a history and mythology pertaining to the Manussan society that adds greatly to the atmosphere of the narrative and the motivations of the characters. This leaner script still has the telltale Buddhist parallels that permeated Kinda. There director Peter Grimwade was aggressive in his determination to downplay the Buddhist symbolism and yet here director Fiona Cumming allows them to naturally inform the narrative without them being too obvious. The Buddhist themes are there if you choose to let them influence your reading of the story. Like Grimwade, she imbues the story with surreal and nightmarish images and her attention to the lighting of particular scenes gives them the quality of a vivid dream.
At the heart of the cave in Snakedance is an entity that not only represents negative human emotions but also seeks to generate and amplify them in order to perpetuate a 600 year rule of tyranny and evil. Bailey again emphasises the idea that the Mara is generated by us and by our own failings, our own lust for power. The solution to defeat the Mara is not simply to admit that we all have a dark side but to understand it and find the balance, the still point within yourself to control it.
Again, the design (many of Jan Spoczynski’s sets have a very theatrical, German Expressionist feel to them) and use of sound are crucial to giving the story’s symbolism a tangibility that many other stories of this era lack. It boasts a superb soundtrack that merges Peter Howell’s music and the Radiophonic Workshop’s effects together in the tradition of much earlier periods of Doctor Who. All this is fed through the surrounding details too – the Punch and Judy sideshow, the snake dancers and Howell’s ‘Janissary Band’ musical motifs.
Puppets are dotted all around the story and provide a cathartic effect on both the audiences in the story and those watching television. They offer traditional dramatic mechanisms that allow the release of our unconscious selves. In the end the snakedance, the Punch and Judy show, and the hall of mirrors, are all about the abdication of the will, allowing expression of the darkness from the inside.
It’s also a story about foolishness too. The tables are completely turned on the Doctor and it is very interesting to see the Doctor as a babbling outsider shooed away from the dinner parties of the Manussan chattering classes. Bailey is reflecting back to Karuna’s classification of him as a fool in Kinda. We see him as the Manussans see him – a deluded fool who believes in children’s fairytales. Davison is given a great script and he grabs it, recognising it as a way of playing the Doctor from a different perspective. He’s such a fool that for at least two episodes he ends up behind bars.
But Davison’s performance is riveting and it neatly parallels the Buddhist folk-take of Planet of the Spiders with the fool understanding that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing and that you should face your own fears. Snakedance even uses the motif of the blue crystals that manifest everyone’s inner demons. The other key image that visually summarises this theme here is the moment when Ambril demonstrates the use of the Six Faces of Delusion, observing that there only five faces on the object. When the Doctor points out that the object is to be worn on the head, and as Ambril demonstrates its use, he concludes that “The sixth face of delusion is the wearer’s own. That was the whole idea, don’t you think?” This and John Carson’s great performance helps convey the narrow minded, self satisfaction of the man and his lack of in any spiritual understanding of the artifacts he covets.
The spiritless phallocentricism of Manussa is echoed in the roles of men and women in its society. Tanha, the Federator’s wife (played with exquisite nonchalance by Colette O’Neil), basks in the former glories of her husband’s rule while Ambril is arrogant enough to feel that mythology and the sacred power of the snakedance has no place in their culture. He is concerned only with greed. The former Director of Historical Research, Dojjen has retreated to the wilderness, aware that the Mara is about to return and that only the power of ritual and myth can defeat it. It is interesting to note that both Chela, one of the most unassuming but important characters in the story (he is an exemplar of the balance between past and present, superstition and rationalism), and Lon are ‘feminised’ men when the story opens.
Chela is humble and passive and has enough intelligence to reconcile the two contradictory spheres of science and mythology. Lon is feminised through his relationship with his mother. This Oedipal ‘mummy’s boy’ reflects visually and culturally, whether intentionally or not, 1980s pop-culture’s obsession with gender-bending and the fluidity of sexuality. Dressed as an approximation of the New Romantic male, Lon sets out to prove he isn’t just a lazy, bored and effete sidekick to his ignorant, social climbing mother. So you have Chela, a man capable of integrating the masculine and feminine, the rational and the mystical and Lon, a boy out to prove himself to the dominating figure of his mother by unleashing the dark forces from the inside.
Both actors, Martin Clunes and Jonathon Morris in their earliest television appearances, are very good in this. It’s always irritated me that Clunes’ appearance is regularly trotted out on vapid TV shows in an attempt to embarrass him and us. At the end of the day Ken Trew’s costumes are highly stylised and, as ridiculous as some of them are, they do feel appropriate to the way this society has gaudily embroidered what it sees as empty ritual. His designs aren’t completely successful but they capture the sense that surface is more important than depth on Manussa.
In discussing the male and female roles of the story then we also have to look to both Tegan and Nyssa. Both have had a make-over. Tegan is all boob tube and coulottes now, her décolletage perhaps a suitable indication of the Mara’s possession turning her into the more lascivious, sexualised version of herself in the story. Nyssa unfortunately looks like she’s dressed in a deck chair throughout most of this and this particular costume was deemed unsuccessful and does not reappear in the series. However, both characters are well used here, being symbolic of female passivity and aggression – Nyssa perhaps the yin to Chela’s yang and Tegan the aggressive female antithesis of Lon’s passive masculinity. Again, Janet Fielding gets the lion’s share of the script and turns in another effective performance.
The last thing I need to mention is that Snakedance is that rare story where meditation, stillness, reconciliation and humility are preferable solutions to violent conflict in defeating evil. It’s non-violent, Zen like approach to diminishing the effect of the Mara makes a lovely change from what would become a series more interested in cynical body counts, aggression and a penchant for things blowing up, melting, rotting and being disfigured. It’s perhaps indicative of the differences between Eastern and Western philosophies that Bailey discusses throughout Snakedance and Kinda.
Extras
Commentary – With Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton. Very little of this irreverent banter actually relates to what is on screen. It’s funny but after a while the joke wears thin. The production text and documentaries shed better light on the themes if that’s what you’re after.
Snake Charmer (dur. 24′ 37″) – cast and crew look back at the making of the story. With actors Peter Davison and Janet Fielding, director Fiona Cumming, writer Christopher Bailey, script editor Eric Saward, designer Jan Spoczynski, and new series writer Robert Shearman.
Deleted Scenes (dur. 3′ 05″) – scenes from the original ending of episode four, courtesy of a timecoded recording kept by producer John Nathan-Turner.
In Studio (dur. 6′ 12″) – a rare glimpse inside the studio during recording of effects sequences for the story, including the infamous ‘farting Mara’!
Saturday Superstore (dur. 14′ 16″) – Peter Davison guests on the Saturday morning children’s show, plays cricket with Mike Read and John Craven and takes questions from callers.
Photo Gallery (dur. 5′ 21″) – production, design and publicity photos from the story.
Isolated Music – option to watch the story with the isolated music score by Peter Howell.
Snakedance is released on Monday 7th March in the UK as part of the Mara Tales Boxset. You can read Frank’s review of Kinda here
