Please Don't Feed the Ego

“I’d like to thank you all for coming to my wedding - but first I’d better go in there and propose to the girl.”

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Which Disney villain is most sympathetic? Thus asks a very entertaining video by Cracked: After Hours.¹ Jafar, Ursula and Scar are all considered, but the villain ultimately awarded the Most Sympathetic title is Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

♫I use antlers in all of my deeeeecoraaaaating♫ ... thanks to De Disney on Disney Wikia for the picture.

It is, perhaps, an unexpected choice: Gaston is not an interestingly-developed character, nor is he particularly likeable: his personality is more or less defined by his extreme arrogance. However, the conclusion was not based on either of these criteria, but the idea that according to his own perspective, Gaston acted justifiably. If Gaston is still to be cast as the villain of the film, therefore, it must be assumed that there is something wrong with his perspective. There are probably many more flaws in it than those I outline below; still, I chose them because I think they illustrate especially strikingly that the beliefs that fuel Gaston’s ludicrously exaggerated arrogance aren’t so different to some I can be tempted to hold myself.²

1)      My value is based on the extent to which I excel in the role that I expect, or am expected, to fulfil.

Gaston’s entire self-worth (that is, his idea of his own value) is rooted in the fact that he is extremely good at a range of macho activities like shooting, wrestling, spitting, being brawny, being hairy, and tromping around wearing boots. To what extent the society around him imposed these criteria, or Gaston assumed them for himself, isn’t really the point here: what matters is that Gaston has an idea of what he ought to be like, and, for as long as he fulfils it – or, more specifically, surpasses everyone else he knows in fulfilling it – his arrogance (that is, a disproportionately high idea of his own value, and resultant superior behaviour) is intact. He’s content that he’s the best.

When, therefore, Belle turns down Gaston’s marriage proposal, he has two reactions. Firstly, he is overly upset and disheartened – not out of any genuine love for Belle, but rather because her rejection of him has undermined the entire structure of how he values himself. For Gaston, being unable to get his own way amounts to dismal failure. “No one says ‘no’ to Gaston!” he exclaims. “Dismissed! Rejected! Publicly humiliated! Why, it’s more than I can bear.” Secondly, he is angry, because he feels deprived of a right. He is the best, therefore he is entitled to Belle’s affections. In fact, this feeling of deprivation is the only way he can retain his sense of self-worth: the fault must be Belle’s. It is not that he is insufficient, but that Belle, in rejecting him, has wronged him, and defied what ought to be.³

Maybe I don’t measure myself according to quite the same criteria that Gaston does, but it’s still all too easy to ground my self-worth in how good I am at what I do. For instance, I am prone to setting up Being Really Good at Ancient Languages as a pillar on which some aspect of my value rests. If I know the correct answer to a question about a Greek or Latin plural or etymology, I feel quite smug; if I don’t, I feel a pang of failure. Nevertheless, the fact is, even if I genuinely am really good at something, I’m not going to succeed at it all the time without exception. The arrogance that results from my success is necessarily doomed to fall along with its foundations, since arrogance is, by definition, thinking more of myself than is realistic. For as long as I derive my sense of value from my ability to excel, I will either end up feeling worthless because of my failures, or desperately blaming others when things go wrong, out of a sense of entitlement to whatever I define as success.

2)     Other people’s compliments are an affirmation of my belief that my value comes from what I do.

Gaston is brought out of his sulking about the rejected proposal by an entire pub full of people literally singing his praises. “For there’s no man in town half as manly,” declares his minion LeFou,⁴ for example, “perfect, a pure paragon.” Gaston soon perks up and starts once again to believe that he is the best (and the rest is all drips), because that’s precisely what everyone else is telling him.

Surely everyone likes receiving compliments. I know I do, particularly when those compliments pertain to those things I do in which I invest quite a lot of myself: this blog would be a prime example. I have received some very kind feedback about my weekly online musings, and I’m not lying when I say that these comments means a lot to me. I feel sure any content creator would say the same, that it’s absolutely lovely to be told that what you do is of value to someone.

Still, I find receiving compliments somewhat problematic, because the way I am prone to basing my worth on the success of what I do means that these compliments can quickly become fuel for my arrogance – just like the compliments of Gaston’s various groupies were fuel for his. Now my self-worth is based not only on how good I am at what I do, but also how good other people say I am at what I do. Perhaps I should just refuse to accept compliments – stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly if anyone tries to give me positive feedback and, to reduce the risk of it ever happening, carry round a large sign emblazoned with the command: ‘Please don’t feed the ego – it may bite’.

I don’t much like the sound of that. It’s a good thing to compliment people: it shows that you care about them, you value them, you notice the things they do. It’s loving. It builds and strengthens relationships. The issue is not whether we should compliment one another, but how we can avoid those compliments contributing to arrogance.

3)     I am the hero of the story in which I feature.

It is, as is pointed out at the end of the Cracked video I mentioned, pretty much the entire point of Beauty and the Beast that Gaston isn’t the good guy just because he’s handsome – but, of course, Gaston himself didn’t get that memo. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the best, everyone loves him, and he’s obviously the hero. His job is therefore to slay the monster and get the girl.⁵ Ultimately, stubbornly continuing to attempt this is what gets him killed.

In the same way, I often cast myself as the hero of my own story. I place myself at the centre of the plotline. Sometimes that manifests as a determination to get my own way, because my priorities are the most important; sometimes it can be more subtle, for instance, as the idea that it depends entirely on me to solve a particular problem. It’s essentially a case of thinking I’m more important than other people – arrogance just like Gaston’s.

From here, it’s easy to see how the first two attitudes I mentioned arise. If I am the hero, if everything depends on me, then a failure to fulfil that role – however I might be defining it – means I’m not what I thought I was and tried to be; in fact, I’m not really anything at all. Therefore, of course my worth is tied up in my success. And, since I am bound to fail in some way or other, I use other people’s compliments to bolster the foundations of my tottering arrogance – and a sense of self-worth that relies on me being the hero of my story is necessarily arrogant, because, the truth is, I’m not. I’m not even the talking teapot. I am the helpless victim and, at the same time, the villain.

The entire story can be gleaned from one verse – or actually, half a verse is quite sufficient – which I expect you rarely come across outside Advent. An angel is explaining to a rather perplexed Joseph that the child in his fiancée’s womb was conceived by the Holy Spirit: “She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1: 21)⁶

It’s a straightforward enough plotline. There is a victim, the one who needs to be saved – us. There is a villain, the one keeping the victim captive – again, us, by means of our sin. There is a hero, the one doing the saving – not us. Jesus.

This casting correction has some pretty hefty implications for my arrogant attitude. I am not the most important person, the one on whom everything depends: Jesus is. My worth is not defined by my success at being the hero, but by Jesus’ success at being the hero, since he both rescues me (as victim) and justifies⁷ me (as villain): the happy ending is his responsibility, and, although we haven’t reached that point yet, he has already established everything necessary for it to happen; we’re living in the last chapter.⁸ Therefore, my self-worth is not grounded in my own unreliable ability, but in Jesus’ perfect ability, which both stabilises it and removes the possibility of arrogance, since to be arrogant is to have an exaggerated view of my own ability. And as for those compliments, they are redirected to God’s glory instead of my own: he is responsible for anything about me that’s worth complimenting, and I can’t do anything of value without him.⁹

So, if you’ve found anything valuable in this post, then God be praised that he could use me to communicate it. If not, it’s OK: my worth is defined by Jesus’ redeeming me, not by my talent for blogging.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiGhALxbtK4. If you’re into elaborate criticism of film storylines (and, let’s be honest here, who isn’t?), Cracked has plenty of videos worth checking out.

² If you haven’t seen the film, don’t worry: you don’t need to have done so in order to understand the rest of the post. It would, however, probably be worth watching the scene containing the song ‘Gaston’, which is largely the source of my points, and can be found in roughly the first three minutes of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK3x2DOoJIc.  I will also freely admit that I haven’t seen Beauty and the Beast in some years and am quite happy to be called out on any mistakes: the reason the film has been on my mind this week is because it has featured in Disney Society’s most recent a cappella session, for which I arranged the song ‘Belle’, and probably drove my housemates crazy in the process with my endless singing through possible parts.

³ I think that’s a pretty disturbing way to think about another human being, but the idea of male entitlement to female affection is all over the place. This article is a very effective examination of its role in nerd culture: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html.

⁴ It’s French for ‘the mad’.

⁵ Yes, yes, it’s a cringingly awful definition of what it means to be a hero, but the point is that it’s the way heroes are frequently portrayed in popular culture. In subverting the pattern, I think Beauty and the Beast criticises it.

⁶ I know I said we only need half a verse, but the whole chapter’s worth reading anyway: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+1&version=ESVUK. There’s even some quite interesting stuff to be drawn out of the lengthy genealogy.

⁷ Here used in its theological sense, to declare guiltless. It’s a big theme in Paul’s letter to the Romans; Romans 5 is my go-to scripture when I need reminding of my having been justified: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+5&version=ESVUK.

⁸ That’s why Jesus said, “It is finished,” when he died (John 19:30): https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+19%3A28-30&version=ESVUK. The word used in the Greek is τετελεσται (tetelestai), which is a passive, perfect-tense form of the verb τελεω (teleō). This means ‘finish’ not just in the sense of being over, but being fulfilled, and the perfect tense indicates something that happened in the past but still has an impact in the present, so another possible translation might be something like ‘it has been accomplished’. Essentially, the point is that there’s nothing more that needs to be done. Amazing stuff.

⁹ “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5) is one of those Biblical phrases that I think we hear a lot and have become a bit desensitised to. It actually makes an incredibly radical and challenging statement about the extent to which we should be relying on God: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15&version=ESVUK.

Things I Would Like Steven Moffat to Please Stop Doing

Amy:   You think you’ll just come back to life.

Rory:   When don’t I?

Doctor Who S7 E6, ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ (2012)

I refer, more, specifically, to things I would like Steven Moffat to please stop doing in his capacity as head writer of Doctor Who, a programme for which, you may or may not know, I have a great fondness, but one which has declined in recent years – almost exactly, in fact, since Moffat was put in charge.1

Thanks to Cirt on Wikimedia Commons for this picture of Steven Moffat at the 72nd Annual Peabody Awards Luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 20th May 2013. I have no idea what a Peabody Award is, but I hope everyone had a lovely time.

By the time you read this, the moment of truth will have arrived: the first episode of Series Nine will have been broadcast, and Moffat will have set the tone for the rest of the series.² I shall probably keep watching Doctor Who for as long as anybody is prepared to keep making it, out of the loyalty I developed during the Russell T Davies era and a stubborn optimism that sooner or later it surely must re-attain to the superb quality which caused me to develop that loyalty in the first place. Still, I would feel a lot happier about my continued viewing if Moffat were to correct three of what I feel have been the biggest problems with Doctor Who during his tenure as head writer.

1)      Making everything ginormous.

I’m talking in terms of plotline, rather than any physical aspect. Cast your mind back, if you will, to the end of Series One of Doctor Who (that is, in its relaunched version – I’m not expecting anyone to cast his or her mind back as far as 1963). In the finale episode, ‘The Parting of the Ways’, the Doctor wrestles with himself over whether to kill all the Daleks with a wave of brain-frying energy, considering that the whole of planet earth will also be within the range of the wave. That was what at stake: everyone on the earth. That sounds big enough for a series finale to me.

Moffat, however, seems to feel a need to go ever bigger, ever more significant, with ever more at stake. Series Five ended with a second big bang that reset the entire universe, Series Six with all of time collapsing because the Doctor had simultaneously died and not died, Series Seven with Clara stepping into the Doctor’s time-stream and scattering copies of herself throughout his entire life. Perhaps that last one doesn’t seem to demonstrate my point very well, but I think part of Making Everything Ginormous is a disregard for pre-established canon:³ the real issue is that under Moffat, whatever is happening to the Doctor right now is the most important thing that has ever happened to him.

There a few problems with this approach. Firstly, it quickly dulls interest: if everything matters so very much all the time, it actually becomes quite hard to really care about any of it. Secondly, it unceremoniously dismisses canon. I appreciate that a programme as long-running and timey-wimey as Doctor Who is bound to have some plot holes and inconsistencies, but being repeatedly told that some key event in a previous series never actually happened at all feels rather like being robbed: I was invested in those storylines. Thirdly, it’s hard to move away from the Making Everything Ginormous approach once it’s been set as the precedent for making the programme exciting: surely it would look anticlimactic and, frankly, a bit lame, to go from resetting the universe one series to the fate of perhaps one planet the next. Nevertheless, I think that’s exactly what Moffat ought to do. Bring the adventures back into a graspable, relatable sphere; make us care about minor characters; let the Doctor once again be a traveller, a mad man in a box, romping enthusiastically through space and time, instead of the lynchpin of every event that has ever occurred. After all, perhaps I missed an important memo at some stage, but I was under the impression that an alien romping enthusiastically through space and time in a box was pretty much the premise of the programme.

2)     Writing the female companions badly.

Perhaps you’ve seen the fascinating infographic put together by a certain Rebecca Moore for a university project about whether claims of sexism in Moffat’s Doctor Who scripting are well founded.⁴ The statistics certainly provide food for thought, but Moore also notes: “As I watched these episodes again with a fine tooth comb, I noticed many things that were not included with this study, as they were not quantifiable, which was the purpose of this research.” And indeed, the main problem I have with the way Moffat writes women isn’t quantifiable – the problem being, he doesn’t really write women: he writes puzzles for the Doctor to solve.

Look, a puzzle purporting to be a woman! It’s surely as appropriate a visual metaphor as one could hope to find in a stock photo.

The three main women of the Steven Moffat era thus far have been Amy Pond, River Song, and Clara Oswald. Amy was a puzzle because the crack in her bedroom wall (a fault-line caused by the explosion of the TARDIS, ultimately resulting in the second big bang I mentioned earlier – no, I didn’t really understand it, either) meant that her life didn’t make sense. River was a puzzle because the Doctor kept meeting her in the opposite order to that in which she was meeting him, meaning her identity and past were very obscure and she continually answered questions by saying, “Spoilers.” Clara was perhaps the biggest puzzle of them all: she had a habit of turning up in random times and places, saving the Doctor’s life and then promptly dying, hence her nickname, the Impossible Girl.

Frankly, it makes me long for the days when the Doctor’s companions were actually characters, when they were ordinary people who happened to run into him, when he thought they were brilliant because of who they were and not because their lives had some great cosmic significance he was desperate to discover. Here we link back into my first point.

Being a puzzle for the Doctor to solve also results in Amy, River and Clara being hugely defined by their relationship with the Doctor. Granted, spending time as a space-time traveller would have a big impact on anyone’s life, but the Davies-era companions (Rose, Martha and Donna) all retained their own lives, concerns and story arcs. They were relatable humans; one could picture oneself in their place, and to do so has always been one of the major thrills of watching Doctor Who. Moffat’s women, on the other hand, frequently feel to me to be less like humans and more like devices. Plotline carriers. Puzzles.

3)     Messing around with death.

I already mentioned Clara’s repeatedly dying and then not being dead, but this is far from Moffat’s only foray into killing characters only to promptly resurrect them. We already know that Osgood (played by the wonderful Ingrid Oliver⁵) is set to return this series despite having been killed by Missy last series finale.⁶ The death but-not-actually of the Doctor himself is the major component of the overarching plotline for Series Six and then again, in a separate instance, for Series Seven. In fact, it’s got to the stage where Moffat isn’t even trying to explain his characters’ failure to remain dead. Daleks, Cybermen and the Master have all reappeared to do battle with the Doctor with no information as to how they survived being respectively blown up, sucked into the Void or killed when the Time Lords got blasted back into the Time Lock containing the Time War (well, Time does feature pretty heavily in the programme). I expect that various of these events are supposed to not have happened now, thanks to the second big bang, the fact that the Doctor never destroyed Gallifrey after all (‘The Day of the Doctor’), and other timey-wimey business, but we the viewers never actually have this explained to us – and besides, it still amounts to messing around with death.

Probably the most famous example of Moffat’s playing with death is the series of fatal ordeals to which he subjected Rory Williams. YouTuber Josh Sundquist points out in his excellent video ‘Doctor Who for Math Nerds’⁷ that Rory died and came back to life no fewer than seven times – six more than Jesus.

And here we hit the heart of the problem. Oddly enough, it was kind of a big deal when Jesus rose from the dead, because – oh, let me think – people don’t usually do that. Yet in Moffat’s Whoniverse, people do it left, right, and centre. If a dead character is important or interesting or popular enough to warrant a role in another episode, he or she will be back regardless. Life and death become meaningless. I suppose I should have seen the seeds being sown as early as Moffat’s Series One episode ‘The Doctor Dances’, in which the Doctor says, “What’s life? Life’s easy. A quirk of matter. Nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.”

Only life and death aren’t really like that, are they? According to the normal human experience, the dead stay dead and are lost to the living. We grieve when our loved ones die and rejoice if they narrowly escape death. We know that life and death do actually matter, very much, in fact. Moffat’s insistence to the contrary is wearying; it belittles the very real and significant impact of actual bereavement, and it once again makes Doctor Who as a programme less relatable, less heartfelt, less human.

And I suppose that, in the end, is common to all three problems I have outlined. Doctor Who may be about an alien who spends much of his time fighting other aliens, but at its greatest, it comments profoundly on very, very human matters. So, if only Moffat can recapture some of that humanity for the coming series – bring his plotlines down to a more human level, write companions as actual humans, and have a bit of respect for the importance of what is famously the one certainty of human life other than taxes⁸ – we might just be in for a good one.

^Footnotes

¹ It’s not that Moffat is a bad writer. I have very much enjoyed his work on Sherlock, and he wrote some excellent standalone episodes while Russell T Davies was head writer: ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘Blink’ spring to mind. Somehow, being made head writer just seemed to ruin him. Power corrupts?

² That said, I’m not sure that much can be judged from the first episode of a series any more, since Series 8, in my opinion, swung rapidly between being really rather good (for example, ‘Deep Breath’ – the opening episode itself – ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’, and especially the utterly marvellous ‘Time Heist’) and being frankly awful (for example, ‘Into the Dalek’ and, above all, ‘Kill the Moon’).

³ Even when Moffat doesn’t directly contradict canon, he casts it into insignificance by such means as causing the Doctor to age hundreds of years within the course of one episode (I have in mind ‘The Time of the Doctor’), so that it emerges that the entire course of his ninth and tenth regenerations took up only a tiny fraction of the time his eleventh did.

⁴ If you haven’t, or have but would enjoy a reminder, here it is: http://rebeccaamoore.com/2014/05/29/university-study-on-sexism-in-bbcs-doctor-who-infographic/. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bechdel Test, Anita Sarkeesian is happy to explain it to you: http://feministfrequency.com/2009/12/07/the-bechdel-test-for-women-in-movies/.  

⁵ I urge you to check out the delights of Ingrid Oliver and Lorna Watson’s sketch show, imaginatively named Watson and Oliver. It’s not particularly well known, and the humour probably isn’t what you’d call laugh-out-loud, but something about it just ticks all the right boxes and I think it’s an absolute gem. Here’s a small taster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTr-hNTSIhA.

⁶ If you don’t believe me, believe the Radio Times: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-05-08/osgood-returns-from-the-dead-for-doctor-who-series-9.

⁷ It’s entertaining whether or not you’re actually a maths nerd. I’m not a maths nerd and I enjoyed it a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLH6GprKhsc.

⁸ The relevant quote is usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but it always puts me in mind of a track on Relient K’s 2004 album MMHMM, called ‘Life After Death and Taxes (Failure II)’, which is as lyrically brilliant as many of their songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnkFHjc8vs.  “After all the stupid things I did, there’s nothing left that you’d forgive, because you already forgave me,” is a particular favourite line of mine, but the song ends with, “Death and decay can’t touch us now.” Death matters, but Jesus broke its power when he rose from it, and he offers us resurrection not back into our current, fragile, sin-stained existence, but into a perfect eternity with him, where death really can’t touch us any more (for the details, 1 Corinthians 15 is a good place to start: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+15&version=ESVUK). So Jesus may only have had one resurrection, as opposed to the multiple ones of Moffat’s Doctor Who characters, but, at least as far as I’m concerned, Jesus’ definitely seems like the better deal.