Fear is the Mind-Killer

[promethia_tenk]

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 kaffyr's lovely meta River Song is Not a Psychopath, which I would say helped get my head moving on this.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

This is brilliantly to the point when it comes to the way in which River could have been - and probably was - programmed.

I think sometimes people forget that the best "programming" is either fear- or love-based, because it's simple and efficient (so many times we make the mistake of thinking that brainwashing and programming has to be some variegated multifaceted sophisticated thing when it not only doesn't have to be that way, but probably never ever was that way.) Mental torturers (which is exactly what any brainwasher is) are like physical torturers: brutal and to the point. We make the mistake of believing all the crap in Bond movies and Batman comics; that such people want to go for indirect showiness. Nope. As my Best Beloved just said, "I don't really think there are a lot of Manchurian Candidates out there."

Also, I nodded when I saw the title: "Fear is the Mind Killer," which took me right back to the first time I read Dune and the scene in which Paul has to deal with the gom jabbar. Fear is the mind killer, as you so cogently point out. You can be so afraid of something, so frightened of something that the fear itself becomes a creature of which you're afraid. Not for nothing did Franklin Delano Roosevelt say "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."

(And I am happily gobsmacked if my ramblings were of help to you.)

[promethia_tenk]

Thank you very much--I'm glad this is resonating with other people too.

That's a very good point about the efficacy of brute tactics--the things that most stick with us tend to be very primal. And there continues to be something very primal in River's relationship with the Doctor through the rest of her life. These aren't subtle forces Moff is writing about and in River they are extremely focused on the Doctor.

It's been long enough since I've read Dune that I don't particularly recall the scene you're referring to, but I like that idea of fear being its own creature.

(You laid out so much about River in your post and put up a very good argument against the psychopath label . . . I just found myself itching at the sense that some key point was missing in the middle of all of it, and it's been a feeling that's been annoying me with my own thoughts about the character and often when I read fic that tries to get a handle on Melody.)

[kaffy_r]

This is long delayed, but I wanted to say that "Fear is the Mindkiller" is the first line of the mantra Paul Atriedes chants to himself to keep himself alive when he's being subjected to an unbelievably painful test by the Bene Gesseret (sic?) Reverend Mother. It's part of a mantra he's learned at his mother's knee, which allows him not to the fail the test by being so afraid of the pain that he flinches (which would have resulted in his immediate death.)

Signed, your completist-obsessive-nerd LJ buddy.

[promethia_tenk]

Lol--no worries. I am horribly, horribly bad at getting back to comments in a timely manner. Cue much procrastinator's guilt *g*

Ah, thanks for the reminder. I have read the whole Dune series once, but how I know it best is actually the Children of Dune miniseries, which an old roommate and I treated as a two-person cult favorite. So, yeah, most of my Dune knowledge is bastardized and incomplete . . .