Review: Escaping the Dollhouse

POSTED BY: scruggs48
UPDATED: Thursday, May 14, 2009 14:51
VIEWED: 3522
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SCRUGGS48

Thursday, May 14, 2009 7:02 AM

http://socialistworker.org/2009/05/14/escaping-the-dollhouse

Comment: Adam Turl

Escaping the Dollhouse

Adam Turl looks at a new television series, Dollhouse, from Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy and Firefly.

May 14, 2009

"THERE'S NOTHING good or bad but thinking makes it so." That's the world according to Topher Brink (played by Fran Kranz)--the fictional scientist that programs the brains (of only semi-willing subjects) in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.

Last Friday, Fox aired the season finale of Dollhouse--which stars Eliza Dushku as Echo, one of dozens of brainwashed and programmable human "dolls" or "actives" hired out to the wealthy and powerful by the secretive corporate cabal that runs the "Dollhouse."

The Dollhouse is a gilded cage (that looks like an upscale spa) hidden beneath a high-rise office building in Los Angeles. Actives are assigned names based on the alphabet, such as Alpha and Echo and Whiskey. Their minds are wiped clean in between their assignments--which frequently involve sex (prostitution) and violence (sometimes assassination).

They are nominally "contracted" employees (who have signed over five years of their lives to the Dollhouse). Their new personalities, dreams and talents are controlled by the house (while their real personalities and memories are stored in computer files called "wedges" until their bonded servitude is over). The Dollhouse is illegal and "underground" (figuratively and literally).

I usually love Joss Whedon's work, and Dollhouse is one of few shows on television that successfully goes beyond mere entertainment--but with a Friday night time slot (a notoriously bad time for new shows) and with a "difficult" underlying theme (to say the least), ratings have been low. The show might be canceled.

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WHEDON, A third-generation television writer, is known for his fantastic premises (ranging from fighting demons to spaceship-piloting bandits with hearts of gold) in classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and the brilliant web-only Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog--that nevertheless put "real-life human" drama at the center.

That is not to say that his shows are simply soap operas with amazing settings. They have a particular outlook on what it "means" to be human. Whedon is certainly no socialist or radical, but he describes himself a humanist, a feminist and has repeatedly professed his atheism--saying that he doesn't believe in the "sky bully," i.e. God. With Whedon, the old axiom "nothing human is alien to me" comes to mind.

His shows are often unique because the viewer is led to understand and, on occasion, empathize with the "bad guys" and because Whedon's "heroes" sometimes make horrible mistakes. In other words, his characters act like real people who develop and change due to their actual circumstances (however fantastic these may be).

This is refreshing with a "popular culture" where "bad guys" are often one-dimensional cartoons and where the "good guys" are largely infallible and unflappable.

In Buffy, Angel is a vampire with a "soul" trying to make up for his past crimes. In Buffy's sixth season, Willow (Buffy's friend and a powerful "witch") becomes so distraught when her girlfriend Tara is murdered that she tries to destroy the world. Some of the worst villains in Firefly are flesh-eating "reevers"--but in Whedon's film adaptation of the show, Serenity, we learn that they were created in a botched government experiment in behavioral control. They become victims instead of villains.

Dollhouse takes this theme farther. As the "dolls" are reprogrammed with new personalities and memories, every week the question is: who are these characters really? In particular, this is the case with Dushku's character Echo (her real name is Caroline before she becomes a "doll"). The dolls are victims of the Dollhouse and, at the same time, its pre-programmed defenders.

Whedon got inspiration for the show from an episode of This American Life. "Guys had found a way to block a memory stream on mice,"

PIRATENEWS

Thursday, May 14, 2009 10:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by scruggs48:

Dollhouse should be renewed--and folks should watch it. For all Whedon's wild plots, his stories are some of the few on television that really resemble the complications and conflict of life as it is actually lived. But here's to hoping that as the show progresses, its characters will start picking sides--and ultimately that they "burn" the Dollhouse to the ground.

That's what Buffy would do. "Martha the Immortal Waitress" is nobody's slave.

Good article, ironically by Socialist Worker (i.e. Communist Slave), where Big Brother is God, and genocide is God's Plan.

Censorship of CIA's Real World dollhouse program in MKULTRA and Project Monarch (based on Communist brainwashing), which Cathy O'Brien and Johnny Gosch's (Jeff Gannon's) mom did burn down to the ground, figuratively. Guess Cathy didn't appreciate being hunted nekked by Dick Cheney in The Most Dangerous Game. Plenty to google, before Google Video censors all videos this year.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=cathy+obrien&emb=0&aq=f#
www.trance-formation.com

Too bad zero reviews mention this obvious connection, which already got millions of views on web video.

BYTEMITE

Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:51 PM

I agree completely with this review.

Right down to the "prostitution is NOT empowering" comment. I do think Joss tries to be feminist with his portrayal of women, a lot more than other people. But prostitution is still largely a field of work where men pay for sex with women, sometimes in a demeaning and degrading fashion, and the act of paying for these women still renders them mere sexual objects.

However... I don't think Joss ever intended to try to show prostitution in a positive light. We have three examples of Joss exploring this theme: We have Inara and her career, we have the prostitutes in Heart of Gold, and now we have Dollhouse. Inara's career and the motivations of the people who hire her, the lie behind her star in the eye "the guild is so great and so is being a companion!" outlook is deconstructed at least three times. The Heart of Gold prostitutes are hardly empowered, not just sex but even their reproductive potential is something objectified that can be bought. Heart of Gold was about fighting off that oppression. And Dollhouse, while sometimes ambiguous, while sleazy characters ask questions like "is this really so wrong?" and actually almost convince us, does anyone think Ballard did the right thing when he slept with Mellie, knowing she was a doll? That was intended to drive the point home.

And the other parts this review addresses, about the themes, that's what I mean when I've talked about Dollhouse being "quality." The ideas explored and meanings are more like something you'd expect from one of those HBO shows that get showered with awards. But, unfortunately, it's also true that the concept of mind wiped people devoid of personality until programmed with one is a difficult one to portray, difficult to grab the interest of viewers, and that likely crippled the show early on.