Two quotes, an ethos, and a headcanon
"What we have is the here and now, and what we have is each other, and let’s find a way to deal truthfully with each other." -Christopher Eccleston, in an interview on the program “Heaven and Earth"
"This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me." -The Doctor, as written by Russell T. Davies, in “The End of the World"
I was struck by the similarity between these two lines, and wondered whether there was any connection between them.
The “Heaven and Earth" interview aired on April 3, 2005; presumably it was taped sometime between the end of the filming of Series 1 (March 23) and the air date. (I had a moment of American confusion when I was trying to confirm the date of the show, because I’d seen it written as 3/4/05, which to me means March 4th. Duh.)
So, it was quite a while after he’d said that line as the Doctor, but maybe those words were just kicking around in his head. I’ve heard him quote his own movie lines in interviews other times, and the interviewer doesn’t always realize it. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
The Doctor’s line is an outburst at Rose, warning her to back off when she tries to ask questions about his background. Nine is wounded, hurting; he craves contact but is afraid to let anyone get too close. It’s a one-way admonition, telling her how to relate to him, but not necessarily offering anything in return.
The quote from the interview stresses mutuality, and it sounds like something he’s thought about a lot about how to articulate. “Heaven and Earth" was a program about religion. Eccleston is an atheist, but he made a point of saying that he can still be spiritual, and his spirituality expresses itself in his relations with other people.
Here’s a fuller excerpt from the interview:
Host: When did you decide that there was no God for you?
CE: It’s just been a growing thing, really. I didn’t have one moment of rejection. Just from my experiences in the world, the way I feel about my own personal development, the good things I’ve done, the bad things I’ve done, I always feel that they are within my own control. What we have is the here and now, and what we have is each other, and let’s find a way to deal truthfully with each other.
Host: So do you use that then to sort of live for the moment and make the most of every moment, as though you don’t know what’s beyond the …
CE [cuts her off a bit, anxious to get his point in]: Yeah, but not just for myself, which is what the work’s about. I mean, I have a spiritual life, and it resides in things like “Flesh and Blood" and “Hillsborough" and “Second Coming", and I get tremendous spiritual sustenance from what we grandly call Art.
What are these acting roles that he considers a part of his spiritual life?
Flesh and Blood is a drama in which Eccleston plays an adoptee looking for his birth parents. When he finds them, he discovers that they both lived in an institution for the mentally handicapped, and have no real understanding that they created a child. (Note: the BBC page that I linked to uses the phrase “learning disabled". If you’re American, you need to know that that description means something more extreme in Britain than it does in the U.S.)
The film uses mentally handicapped actors, and Eccleston maintained a relationship with them after the filming, and became a patron of their theatre group. Making the film was a profound experience for him, and it’s the only project he’s ever done a DVD commentary for.
Hillsborough is a docu-drama about the 1989 stadium disaster in Britain. Eccleston plays Trevor Hicks, who lost his two daughters in the disaster and later led the Hillsborough Family Support Group. He became good friends with the real Trevor Hicks, and in fact was best man at his wedding when he remarried in 2009. (Trevor and Jenny Hicks broke up 15 months after Hillsborough, and the stress of the event was a large part of the reason for their divorce.)
While writing this, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about Hillsborough, and it’s really upsetting. So is the film. There was first a massive failure of crowd-management and communication that led to the development of a dangerous crush in which people were suffocated; then after it was over, the authorities and the press tried to shift blame onto the victims, portraying them as drunken hooligans who refused to cooperate with police.
Jimmy McGovern wrote the script based on extensive interviews with the families of victims and other people who were at the stadium that day. For many Britons, seeing the film when it aired on television in 1996 was the first time they heard the other side of the story.
This is an excellent interview in which Chris talks about the making of the film and says “Hillsborough is the most important piece of work I’ve ever done and ever will do.” The article came out just before a 2010 screening of the film, followed by a Q & A session. The Q & A session is available on YouTube and is well worth watching.
Both Flesh and Blood and Hillsborough deal with real issues in the world, and both allowed Eccleston to develop important relationships with particular individuals. “What we have is the here and now, and what we have is each other, and let’s find a way to deal truthfully with each other" is a good summation of what he accomplished in those two films.
The third film he mentions as being relevant to his spirituality is The Second Coming, which was I believe the first time he worked with Russell T. Davies (although he probably knew him already, having been considered for a part in Davies’ Queer as Folk a few years earlier).
The Second Coming is a parable about religion and society. Interestingly, for a film written by an avowed atheist, it starts with the assumption that God is real, and so are devils. Its final message (at least the message I take from it) is that when you remove God from the equation, people have to take responsibility for their own actions - which sounds a whole lot like “the good things I’ve done, the bad things I’ve done, I always feel that they are within my own control."
While it doesn’t have an obvious and immediate social justice angle like the other two films, it certainly provides viewers an opportunity to discuss the issues of faith and meaning and purpose in their lives.
That’s where the headcanon I mentioned in the title of this piece comes in. RTD was the writer, not the director, of The Second Coming, but according to his DVD commentary, he was very much involved in the filming and was around the set most of the time.
I imagine Chris and Russell sitting around talking during lulls in the filming, discussing their philosophies of life. I imagine Chris explaining how his spirituality is manifested in some of the acting jobs he’s done, and how our ultimate purpose lies in the here and now and our relations with one another. I imagine Russell being impressed with how well thought-out Chris’s position is, and filing it away in his mind. I imagine it coming back out when he is writing lines for the Doctor to use as he and Rose tentatively get to know one another, though he realizes that the Doctor is too broken to have a reciprocal relationship, and can only focus on what he needs from Rose. I think about how Eccleston has said that the role of the Doctor is the closest he’s ever come to playing himself, and it all fits together.
That’s my headcanon and I’m sticking to it.
"This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me." -The Doctor, as written by Russell T. Davies, in “The End of the World"
I was struck by the similarity between these two lines, and wondered whether there was any connection between them.
The “Heaven and Earth" interview aired on April 3, 2005; presumably it was taped sometime between the end of the filming of Series 1 (March 23) and the air date. (I had a moment of American confusion when I was trying to confirm the date of the show, because I’d seen it written as 3/4/05, which to me means March 4th. Duh.)
So, it was quite a while after he’d said that line as the Doctor, but maybe those words were just kicking around in his head. I’ve heard him quote his own movie lines in interviews other times, and the interviewer doesn’t always realize it. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
The Doctor’s line is an outburst at Rose, warning her to back off when she tries to ask questions about his background. Nine is wounded, hurting; he craves contact but is afraid to let anyone get too close. It’s a one-way admonition, telling her how to relate to him, but not necessarily offering anything in return.
The quote from the interview stresses mutuality, and it sounds like something he’s thought about a lot about how to articulate. “Heaven and Earth" was a program about religion. Eccleston is an atheist, but he made a point of saying that he can still be spiritual, and his spirituality expresses itself in his relations with other people.
Here’s a fuller excerpt from the interview:
Host: When did you decide that there was no God for you?
CE: It’s just been a growing thing, really. I didn’t have one moment of rejection. Just from my experiences in the world, the way I feel about my own personal development, the good things I’ve done, the bad things I’ve done, I always feel that they are within my own control. What we have is the here and now, and what we have is each other, and let’s find a way to deal truthfully with each other.
Host: So do you use that then to sort of live for the moment and make the most of every moment, as though you don’t know what’s beyond the …
CE [cuts her off a bit, anxious to get his point in]: Yeah, but not just for myself, which is what the work’s about. I mean, I have a spiritual life, and it resides in things like “Flesh and Blood" and “Hillsborough" and “Second Coming", and I get tremendous spiritual sustenance from what we grandly call Art.
What are these acting roles that he considers a part of his spiritual life?
Flesh and Blood is a drama in which Eccleston plays an adoptee looking for his birth parents. When he finds them, he discovers that they both lived in an institution for the mentally handicapped, and have no real understanding that they created a child. (Note: the BBC page that I linked to uses the phrase “learning disabled". If you’re American, you need to know that that description means something more extreme in Britain than it does in the U.S.)
The film uses mentally handicapped actors, and Eccleston maintained a relationship with them after the filming, and became a patron of their theatre group. Making the film was a profound experience for him, and it’s the only project he’s ever done a DVD commentary for.
Hillsborough is a docu-drama about the 1989 stadium disaster in Britain. Eccleston plays Trevor Hicks, who lost his two daughters in the disaster and later led the Hillsborough Family Support Group. He became good friends with the real Trevor Hicks, and in fact was best man at his wedding when he remarried in 2009. (Trevor and Jenny Hicks broke up 15 months after Hillsborough, and the stress of the event was a large part of the reason for their divorce.)
While writing this, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about Hillsborough, and it’s really upsetting. So is the film. There was first a massive failure of crowd-management and communication that led to the development of a dangerous crush in which people were suffocated; then after it was over, the authorities and the press tried to shift blame onto the victims, portraying them as drunken hooligans who refused to cooperate with police.
Jimmy McGovern wrote the script based on extensive interviews with the families of victims and other people who were at the stadium that day. For many Britons, seeing the film when it aired on television in 1996 was the first time they heard the other side of the story.
This is an excellent interview in which Chris talks about the making of the film and says “Hillsborough is the most important piece of work I’ve ever done and ever will do.” The article came out just before a 2010 screening of the film, followed by a Q & A session. The Q & A session is available on YouTube and is well worth watching.
Both Flesh and Blood and Hillsborough deal with real issues in the world, and both allowed Eccleston to develop important relationships with particular individuals. “What we have is the here and now, and what we have is each other, and let’s find a way to deal truthfully with each other" is a good summation of what he accomplished in those two films.
The third film he mentions as being relevant to his spirituality is The Second Coming, which was I believe the first time he worked with Russell T. Davies (although he probably knew him already, having been considered for a part in Davies’ Queer as Folk a few years earlier).
The Second Coming is a parable about religion and society. Interestingly, for a film written by an avowed atheist, it starts with the assumption that God is real, and so are devils. Its final message (at least the message I take from it) is that when you remove God from the equation, people have to take responsibility for their own actions - which sounds a whole lot like “the good things I’ve done, the bad things I’ve done, I always feel that they are within my own control."
While it doesn’t have an obvious and immediate social justice angle like the other two films, it certainly provides viewers an opportunity to discuss the issues of faith and meaning and purpose in their lives.
That’s where the headcanon I mentioned in the title of this piece comes in. RTD was the writer, not the director, of The Second Coming, but according to his DVD commentary, he was very much involved in the filming and was around the set most of the time.
I imagine Chris and Russell sitting around talking during lulls in the filming, discussing their philosophies of life. I imagine Chris explaining how his spirituality is manifested in some of the acting jobs he’s done, and how our ultimate purpose lies in the here and now and our relations with one another. I imagine Russell being impressed with how well thought-out Chris’s position is, and filing it away in his mind. I imagine it coming back out when he is writing lines for the Doctor to use as he and Rose tentatively get to know one another, though he realizes that the Doctor is too broken to have a reciprocal relationship, and can only focus on what he needs from Rose. I think about how Eccleston has said that the role of the Doctor is the closest he’s ever come to playing himself, and it all fits together.
That’s my headcanon and I’m sticking to it.