Vincent and the Doctor, Together Alone
(This be another one of those posts in which I “[feign] some kind of cultural superiority … even though [my] opinions and tastes are largely shite of the first water [that force most commenters to] make an effort to shaddup when [I] want to wax long and philosophical about some mainstream film [I'm] content to call art.”)
I covered the palette of “Vincent and the Doctor” in my post about the Leverage episode “The Van Gogh Job,” so I’ll save some time and just say the wheat:
The wheat:
The wheat:
The wheat may not seem that important—though damn do I love it—but it calls to mind Woody Allen’s famous parody of Ingmar Bergman in Love & Death, which is relevant because “Vincent and the Doctor” is an episode devoted to the consequences of loneliness (felt or otherwise). The Doctor’s alone because he’s the Doctor; Amy’s alone because (unbeknownst to her) Rory’s been unwritten from existence; Vincent’s alone because Vincent’s always been alone; and the Krafayis is alone because it’s been abandoned by its fellows. This is a story that’s fundamentally about lonely people “coming together,” only director Jonny Campbell doesn’t shoot it that way. I bring up the visual punning on the wheat because the shots it parodies are relevant. To wit:
All they’re saying there is “wheat.” They’re together but alone—speaking but not communicating. I’m referencing the parody instead of the original because of the punned wheat, but it bears remembering that Bergman’s use of this technique is equally ironic: he alienates his characters by going against the grain (ahem) of film convention (as discussed here) and including characters whose isolation is destroying them in the same frame. They’re made to look more alone by being shot together. Campbell employs a similar shot at the end of “Vincent and the Doctor”:
It’s staged like a Bergman shot, and although there’s no mention of wheat in it, the moment Campbell chooses to go full-Bergman is significant: these three lonely souls have just dispatched the fourth mentioned above, but they can’t come together either in victory or mourning. Their loneliness is too fundamental to their character. The can (and do) share a moment shortly thereafter, lying in the grass and seeing the night’s sky as Van Gogh does:
But even this moment is purely compensatory: Amy’s still lost Rory; the Doctor’s still the Doctor; Vincent’s still going to commit suicide; and the Krafayis is now that different kind of alone we call dead. My evidence for this together-alone dynamic is, as I’d hope you’d expect, more substantial than a pun and a parody. Unlike the other episodes this season (linked above), “Vincent and the Doctor” includes more reverse shot sequences in which single characters inhabit a frame. Consider a few stills from a conversation between the Doctor, Amy, and Vincent:
There’s a moment when the Doctor and Vincent occupy the same frame, but the overarching structure of Campbell’s direction is visible nonetheless: instead of framing these characters in a way that encourages audiences to forge connections between them, Campbell shoots a sequence of reverse shots that isolate these characters. As regards Vincent, that’s to be expected: he’s the episode’s designated loner. As regards Amy and the Doctor, this shot selection is something new. It’s almost as if the husband who’s now never existed has finally managed to come between them, and this separation’s manifesting itself onscreen by their isolation in close-ups and Campbell’s homages to Bergman.
There’s more to be said about this episode—in particular, its use of shadows as proxies for the people who create them—but in the interest of brevity I’ll leave that for the comments.
Oh, come on, it’s a BBC television program that involves Van Gogh and multiple bow-tie-wearing intellectuals. It even takes place partly in an art gallery. It doesn’t get much more hoity-toity highbrow than that. Why, I’ll bet you don’t even quaff your oh-so-exclusive microbrews, but sip them daintily while paging idly through Flowers of Evil … Sorry, what was the post about again?
Ingmar Bergman.
Ingmar Bergman was great in Casablanca.
She’s still big in Japan.
and as heavyweight champion of the world. he toonder and lightning in der right. Also ingo’s bingo
She was pretty good starring in and directing Autumn Sonata, too.
Anyway, this was an episode much liked by my spouse and myself, despite (because of?) the giant invisible chicken. The loneliness was part of it, and the way that and the Doctor’s comments to Amy about not magically making Vincent non-suicidal dovetail with “You mourn, and you live” from the non-genocidal exchange in “Vampires of Venice.” Yet again, I do wish someone had turned down the “background” music, though.
We’re going to have to agree to disagree on the genocide issue, but as to the “You mourn, and you live” sentiment, keep in mind that Amy jumps out of the TARDIS and declares “Time can be rewritten!” immediately before learning that it wasn’t. For most of the season, it can’t. The Doctor insists as much … until he decides otherwise, that it’s worth rewriting at certain times. What’s compelled him to make so drastic a decision? I’m not saying it’s necessarily genocide, but it’s definitely something. (Especially given that he swore off trying to rewrite time after “The Waters of Mars.”)
So, wait, what are you referring to? The causality taunting he does in “The Big Bang” after the universe has been destroyed? Cheating by telling Amelia a bedtime story to get himself unwritten? Because there’s rewriting and rewriting. “Fixed points,” Blinovitch Limitation Factor, a metric ton of handwavium, etc.
And I shouldn’t really tweak about the genocide thing, since it is yet another race condemned to death, albeit largely by someone else’s hand. I guess it’s more that I don’t see him being any more blithe and unconcerned than the median Doctor about “doing what it takes” to stop a threat to Earth. Perhaps he might have been willing to work out a solution that saves Venice and the aliens if Rosanna had indicated that she gave even the slightest shit about offing Isabella. But that’s just pie-in-the-sky hypothesizing, I’ll admit.
Frank Norris, will you never stop reminding me of my qualifying exams?
“Vincent and the Doctor” was one of my favorite episodes from Series 5. I would have never analyzed it this much… but you’re doing a wondrous job.
Another thing about the episode you didn’t mention, SEK. A lot of the episode’s action (at least initially) happens to just one character at a time, forcing characters to have their sanity questioned (a situation that is very alienating). The whole “invisible monster” thing sort of helps move along the theme.
That’s not the only thing I didn’t mention. By no means are my posts meant to be comprehensive. (And I’m also always happy to
stealborrow ideas you might have that I haven’t though of.) You’re right, though, about the dispensation of roles in the episode, I just hadn’t thought of that. Consider itstolenborrowed!That scene from Love and Death is one of the ones I remember most vividly from any Woody Allen movie. I couldn’t begin to tell you why. I hadn’t even seen a Bergman movie the first time I saw Love and Death, so I had no idea what it was referencing, but it just cracked me up. Thinking about it still makes me laugh.
Everybody knows the bun is the lowest form of wheat.
[...] Paint can be important in this series, I think to myself, so I scribble “H. op w/ c-u paint & brushes.” (That’s “Haynes opens with a close-up of paint and brushes” for those who can’t read my ideoletic shorthand.) I pause here because I want to remember what could be at play. Clearly there is a reason Haynes introduces the Sixth Season via the artistic tools the audience most closely associates with Vincent Van Gogh, but given that Gogh met his beastly death shortly after drawing an exploding TARDIS in the penultimate episode of Season Five (“The Pandorica Opens”), this likely has nothing to do with him. Then it occurs to me that Haynes directed and Steven Moffat wrote “The Pandorica Opens,” “The Big Bang,” and “The Impossible Astronaut,” so the presence of meaningful continuity–even if that’s not what I spy here–is more likely than not. I take a note to remind myself to take similar notes later and move on to the next frame: [...]