promethia_tenk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
promethia_tenk) wrote2011-11-16 03:18 pm
promethia_tenk) wrote2011-11-16 03:18 pm
Entry tags:
Fear is the Mind-Killer
Hello, flist! Long time, no see. In answer to your questions: yes, I have been avoiding you. Have also been avoiding Doctor Who and watching Fringe at a frankly unhealthy rate (Mini rxn: Fringe! <3 <3 <3). I have lots of lovely posts queued up for reading, though, and shall be trying to catch up with you all as soon as possible.
I'm back, though, because I have finally had a eureka moment on a question that's been eating at me ever since Let's Kill Hitler: What the frak did they do to Melody? And I know I'm not the only one who had a hard time seeing any River in Mels or who was dissatisfied with Moffat slapping a "psychopath" label on her and counting that as explanation enough. So here's my theory:
Basically, it's all about fear: I think the essence of what the Silence did to her is to make her terrified of the Doctor (He's gonna get me! Gonna eat me!) and leave her with no tools for recognizing it or expressing it or addressing it but to kill him. The sort of omnipresent fear that shadows everything else, clouds judgment, makes every moment about trying to manage the fear, somehow . . . So, the end of LKH wasn't about letting go of anger, or a vendetta of some sort, but about facing a fear, which is why the turn-around seems so sudden. And fear, not hatred, is a catalyst for love (chemically, this is true: falling in love involves massive quantities of anxiety hormones--hence the butterflies. Also where Stockholm Syndrome comes from).
I think it's basically an Occam's Razor kind of thing. They didn't have to make a psychopath--they just had to make her irrationally afraid of the Doctor. It's like what they talk about in Inception: to plant an idea in someone's head and make them accept it as their own, you have to reduce that idea to its simplest emotional form and let them build it themselves from there. Why does she want to kill the Doctor? Because she's afraid of him (The Silence may be the stuff of nightmares, but young Melody didn't actually run away until the Doctor showed up . . .). They plant the fear . . . they use the Silence to do it . . . which means she can't remember why she's afraid of him . . . which is like a perpetual motion machine for crazy. And from there she'll pretty much do all the work for them: learn everything she can about him, soak up any skill that might help her neutralize him, think about him all the time because she doesn't know why she's afraid of him and doesn't know how to stop it. She can't feel anything else because she's afraid all the time, but she can't be afraid because she doesn't have a reason to be afraid . . . so she won't be afraid. She'll test herself against every scary, dangerous thing she can find to prove to herself that she's not afraid. She'll come up with flimsy alternate excuses for everything she does (psychopath?) because she's certainly not motivated in everything by fear. She'll go over everything about it over and over to try to come to grips with it. She'll basically tear herself apart at the seams trying to cope with a fear that she can't feel because it doesn't have a reason.
But then, as they also point out in Inception, negative emotions are less potent and less durable than positive ones. And fear is not so different from falling in love. So how do you "trick" programming like that? Love is a more stable, more desirable state than perpetual fear. And of course she fell in love too quickly. What holds people back from falling in love? Ultimately, it's fear. And she'd already spent her whole life afraid.
I think this explanation also makes more sense of how quickly she seems to recover all her normal faculties as River than if you assume she had much more involved brainwashing: once she faces her fear, all the parts of her that had been misdirected trying fruitlessly to manage that fear would be freed up to do what they were meant to.
ETA: All y'all should probably go read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaffyr's lovely meta River Song is Not a Psychopath, which I would say helped get my head moving on this.
I'm back, though, because I have finally had a eureka moment on a question that's been eating at me ever since Let's Kill Hitler: What the frak did they do to Melody? And I know I'm not the only one who had a hard time seeing any River in Mels or who was dissatisfied with Moffat slapping a "psychopath" label on her and counting that as explanation enough. So here's my theory:
Basically, it's all about fear: I think the essence of what the Silence did to her is to make her terrified of the Doctor (He's gonna get me! Gonna eat me!) and leave her with no tools for recognizing it or expressing it or addressing it but to kill him. The sort of omnipresent fear that shadows everything else, clouds judgment, makes every moment about trying to manage the fear, somehow . . . So, the end of LKH wasn't about letting go of anger, or a vendetta of some sort, but about facing a fear, which is why the turn-around seems so sudden. And fear, not hatred, is a catalyst for love (chemically, this is true: falling in love involves massive quantities of anxiety hormones--hence the butterflies. Also where Stockholm Syndrome comes from).
I think it's basically an Occam's Razor kind of thing. They didn't have to make a psychopath--they just had to make her irrationally afraid of the Doctor. It's like what they talk about in Inception: to plant an idea in someone's head and make them accept it as their own, you have to reduce that idea to its simplest emotional form and let them build it themselves from there. Why does she want to kill the Doctor? Because she's afraid of him (The Silence may be the stuff of nightmares, but young Melody didn't actually run away until the Doctor showed up . . .). They plant the fear . . . they use the Silence to do it . . . which means she can't remember why she's afraid of him . . . which is like a perpetual motion machine for crazy. And from there she'll pretty much do all the work for them: learn everything she can about him, soak up any skill that might help her neutralize him, think about him all the time because she doesn't know why she's afraid of him and doesn't know how to stop it. She can't feel anything else because she's afraid all the time, but she can't be afraid because she doesn't have a reason to be afraid . . . so she won't be afraid. She'll test herself against every scary, dangerous thing she can find to prove to herself that she's not afraid. She'll come up with flimsy alternate excuses for everything she does (psychopath?) because she's certainly not motivated in everything by fear. She'll go over everything about it over and over to try to come to grips with it. She'll basically tear herself apart at the seams trying to cope with a fear that she can't feel because it doesn't have a reason.
But then, as they also point out in Inception, negative emotions are less potent and less durable than positive ones. And fear is not so different from falling in love. So how do you "trick" programming like that? Love is a more stable, more desirable state than perpetual fear. And of course she fell in love too quickly. What holds people back from falling in love? Ultimately, it's fear. And she'd already spent her whole life afraid.
I think this explanation also makes more sense of how quickly she seems to recover all her normal faculties as River than if you assume she had much more involved brainwashing: once she faces her fear, all the parts of her that had been misdirected trying fruitlessly to manage that fear would be freed up to do what they were meant to.
ETA: All y'all should probably go read
kaffyr's lovely meta River Song is Not a Psychopath, which I would say helped get my head moving on this.
no subject
In fact, one of the things that attracts me to Doctor Who is the scary wondrousness of trusting onesself to a person who is mysterious and unknowable and sometimes spooky and on occassion as scary as all hell—while still being deeply and truly good. I like Moffat's Who on a level below analysis, and I think part of it is that he keeps reaffirming that trust can be beautiful, that you can trust the alien, whether the alien is the Doctor or the Star Whale or your own child. There are amazing landscapes, there's love and friendship and excitement, beyond that leap of faith. That's a good message for a fairy tale, every bit as good as the traditional, Of course there are monsters. But monsters can be beaten.
This theory also might well explain why River seems so totally fearless in the face of danger; she got so used to fear when she was young that she can utterly dismiss it as meaningless background noise.
(Oh, and n+1 on the idea that "Let's Kill Hitler" needed to be a two-parter. People will hate me for this opinion, but part of me thinks that losing Confidential might be good for Moffat as a writer, because he'll have to stuff everything he wants to say into the show proper or else leave it out. Not that that's a consolation for fans who've lost the show, of course.)
no subject
Yes! Which, I think, is where the image of River jumping really takes its arresting power: she, in essence, re-enacts her initial leap of faith over and over in their relationship. And I'm not sure that fandom would agree with me on this, but I find the most affecting aspect of the timey-wimey structure of their lives to be not the in-built tragedy of them forgetting each other, but that aspect of choice. They don't have the luxury (or curse) of inertia that most couples have: they have to take that risk of choosing each other over and over, not quite knowing who they are going to find each time they come back but trusting that the essentials will be there.
I like Moffat's Who on a level below analysis, and I think part of it is that he keeps reaffirming that trust can be beautiful, that you can trust the alien, whether the alien is the Doctor or the Star Whale or your own child.
Lovely, this whole paragraph.
Very much agree with you about adult River's fearlessness. And when she faced the overriding fear of her life head-on, she came out better on the other side--that's a powerful lesson in itself.
Hmmm, I hope you are right about Confidential. I myself am going to miss it, and I do usually enjoy hearing Moff talk about his writing. But there is something to be said for forcing the work to stand on its own, and I think he definitely needs something to reign him back from some of the extremes of this year.