Me Clavdivs, you Sejanus
BBC4’s reshowing of I, Claudius concluded last Thursday with an extraordinary, oneiric death-scene, in which Derek Jacobi’s Claudius conversed posthumously with a giant, floating golden mask of the Sybil. The scene called to mind accounts of the experience of sleep paralysis in which the sufferer lies unable to move or breathe while an alien presence hovers at the foot of the bed: it seemed to suggest that Claudius’s transition to the land of the dead was a kind of alien abduction, possibly the culminating moment of his becoming-a-god.
No less unsettling was the becoming-a-clod of Brian Blessed’s Caesar Augustus: the camera settling on a close-up of the grey-green, bloated death mask of the poisoned emperor, holding the shot for what seemed like minutes while the voice of Livia bantered away in the background as if lulling a child to sleep. At the end, Livia moved back into the shot to close the eyelids of the corpse, which had been staring unblinkingly at the camera throughout.
The effect could only have been achieved by freeze-framing the image while running the sound uninterrupted: no living actor could have kept his eyes open without blinking for so long. But the shot was held for much longer than was necessary for the viewer to realize that Augustus must be dead, so that it became a static image of death itself, arresting the visual flow of the narrative. This then was death as “cold obstruction”, the arrest of motion, rather than as the extinction of consciousness (conventionally symbolised on television by the shrinking of the visual field to the fading white dot that used to appear when the viewer switched the appliance off).
The freeze-framing was an unobtrusive use of what the BBC liked at the time to refer to as “television trickery”, in the context of a production almost any single scene of which could have been transferred unmodified to the stage. I, Claudius significantly predates the current vogue for televisual naturalism: it is not radically anti-naturalist, in the manner of Dennis Potter, but it is theatrical – to the point of hamminess in places – throughout, and this preserves a degree of distance from the spectacle. By contrast, televisual naturalism aims to approximate as closely as possible not “reality” but “reality TV”, where the (hand-held or surveillance) camera is simply embedded in the already-real: what is occluded is the unreality of the television studio, the stage-within-the-stage whose fantastic apparatus produces alternative worlds.
A comparison of recent with “vintage” Doctor Who brings the distinction into focus. The “other worlds” visited by the new Doctor are no more unreal or estranged than Holby City: they are sets indistinguishable from locations. “Doctor Who Confidential”, in which it is revealed week after week that filming took place in Cardiff and the monsters were constructed by an expert team of computer programmers, does not “demystify” the program in any way: what it reveals – or, rather, confirms with supercilious banality – is rather the complete absence of any secret.
Just as Tom Baker’s Doctor’s alienness exonerated him from having to exhibit the customary signifiers of “psychological depth” (the 17 pieces of emotional flair pinned onto fictional characters so as to make them appear well-rounded), so the factitious of the sets produced a dislocating effect far more unsettling than any accomplished spectacle of otherworldliness: the Earth to which Tom Pertwee was confined for an entire series was an eldritch Earth, infested with eeriness.
I, Claudius played in a different register, but succeeded as a broad political parable illuminated by supernatural mania, faithful in its excesses. A contemporary remake would no doubt strive for the closest possible stylistic equivalence with The West Wing.