Boyd:What you're doing could have consequences you can't predict or control. Some people are not ready to wake up.
Echo:I don't care. Something bad is coming, like a storm, and I want everyone to survive it. They need to wake up.
Last week, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse had a particularly telling episode, that spoke to me on two big, broad issues--maybe even meta-issues, one might argue. First is the issue of moral accountability & the awakening of conscience where it has previously been absent. Second is the issue of awakening awareness & power, that was addressed by tremayne earlier this week in a really perceptive dairy, "On Reality-Based Optimism". For those of you not familiar with Dollhouse, what's wrong with you? TV doesn't get any better than this. As good as, here and there. But not better.
Anyway, it's contemporary science fiction. And to get you up to speed, Wikipedia will do rather well:
The story follows Echo, a "doll" or "Active" for the Dollhouse, an organisation which hires out reprogrammable human beings to wealthy clients who use them for a range of purposes, such as sexual encounters and high-risk illegal activities. Echo, like her fellow dolls Victor and Sierra, exists in a child-like blank state [tabula rasa], until the programmer uploads her with the skills and memories to make her a whole other human being. Actives such as Echo are ostensibly volunteers who surrender their bodies to the organisation for five years in exchange for a vast amount of money and a solution to any other extenuating circumstances in their lives. Echo, however, is unique in remembering small amounts even after personality "wipes", and gradually develops an increasingly cognizant self-awareness and personality. This emerging personality is even distinct in some ways from that of her original identity, college graduate Caroline Farrell. This concept allows the series to examine concepts of identity and personhood.
As Echo continues to evolve, and learn to work beyond the limits of her current personality imprint or default programming, she runs the risk of going to "the Attic", a place for broken dolls. She is an object of fascination for the escaped doll Alpha (a genius and serial killer who sees Echo as a potential mate) and FBI Agent Paul Ballard, whose obsession with the urban legend that is the Dollhouse costs him his career, before he comes to work for the organisation as Echo's bodyguard or "handler". Ballard sees the Dollhouse's activities as immoral and illegal, but becomes increasingly complicit in the business which he equates with murder and sex traffic. Within the house, opinions are divided; director Adelle DeWitt sees her role as honourable, programmer Topher Brink's view is entirely scientific and amoral, and handler-turned-head of security Boyd Langton, like Ballard, is more concerned with the ethical and theological implications of the Dollhouse's technology.
From the beginning, there've always been some fundamental mysteries. Like WTF is going on here, anyway? The purpose of the Dollhouse is unknown. It's a business, but it has a purpose beyond just making money. How do we know? Well, we've been told several times. And even though we know very well not to trust anything, this admission of a hidden purpose is just about the only thing you can trust.
But a little more basic is the question of how the dolls came to be there in the first place. Which is sort of a big deal, since they're essentially slaves--albeit "only" for five years. We're told that it was "voluntary," but this is where the whole "not trusting anything" ethos really kicks in. We've seen bits and pieces of Echo's "voluntary" process--she was in some really serious trouble, though big pieces of the story are missing. We know that another doll had lost a daughter, and probably was suicidal. That kind of thing. But we've never been "fully briefed" as they say in the trade. And this most recent episode was as close to a linear accounting of how one doll--Sierra--came to the dollhouse as we're ever likely to get (told entirely in flashbacks, of course). And in the telling of this tale, a good deal more is both revealed, and altered.
I really hate spoilers, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. I'll leave most of it vague. But Echo starts things going by discerning something disturbing in paintings by Sierra, another active who arrived at the Dollhouse almost at the same time as she did. And she brings it to the attention of one of the main characters who works at the Dollhouse--the programmer, Topher Brink. In turn, Topher and the director, Adelle DeWitt are really disturbed to discover that Sierra didn't come to them in the way that she appeared to. Yes, she was mad. But not really. Not in the way that she seemed. There was a whole backstory they were entirely unaware of. And the reason this resonated for me is two-fold--one within the fictional world, the other in ours.
In the fictional world, this resonated because the Dollhouse is so blatantly immoral, yet the people working there are not. They all have forms of morality, however compromised, damaged, or incomplete. The Wikipedia entry calls Topher "amoral," and he's identified as such within the show as well. Yet, he's always had a strong teen geek's arrested development sort of morality, the sort born of aesthetic judgment concerning the way that things work. Nor does Adelle simply 'see her role as honourable'--she sees it as honourable at least partly because she's knows it could well be otherwise. She knows it's a contestable view that she herself might even come to doubt (even if she doesn't quite let herself think about that). What happens in this episode is that Sierra's true story shakes both of them up--badly. And the very fact that they can be shaken up shows that they're capable of being much more moral than they have been heretofore. Whether they will or not, only time will tell. But there's a moral capacity in both of them that's been largely dormant in Topher's case, and "compromised" or "flawed" in Adelle's. This has both made them suitable to work at the Dollhouse in the first place, and it has been reinforced by working there.
War on terror, anyone? Or, more broadly, all of post-Vietnam America? This is the second way in which this episode resonated. It spoke to the possibility that broken people can find ways to heal themselves, even those who might seem to have no interest in being healed. But to do so, they have to face up to the nature of what they are actually doing. And here I thought specifically of how Obama has staunchly refused to hold anyone accountable for anything, and how he somehow thinks he's doing them all a favor. And I thought of how blind his thinking this was. To be sure, virtually no one who's done really reprehensible things wants to be held accountable for them. And yet, without facing up to what they have done, there is no possibility of redemption.
This is why we need a national truth and reconciliation process, at the very least. It may seem rather late in the game to be bringing this up, but hey, Clinton failed to do this in 1993, and I was still bringing it up last year, and earlier this year, too. In fact, I'm bringing it up right now. This is perhaps the most fundamental way in which Obama thinks like Bush and Cheney. Like them, he sees accountability in terms of punishment--and only those lacking in establishment connections will ever face any kind of accountability. And needless to say, the accountability they will face will mostly be perverse and perverted, like the millions of homeowners facing foreclosure for little or no real fault of their own, aside from trusting a system that never intended them anything but ill.
That is the issue of moral accountability & the awakening of conscience. Long story short: Obama is opposed to both, without even realizing it.
Issue #2: The issue of awakening awareness & power. This was represented in the Dollhouse episode by Boyd Langton's discovery that Echo is far more conscious than he had realized, and far more intent on saving those around her from an ominous danger she is certain is coming. Boyd is a deep enigma, overtly skeptical of the Dollhouse, but inhrently trustworthy, in a Samurai-code kind of way. Echo's consciousness and continuity of memory when she is supposed to be in the tabula rasa state has been growing continuously since the beginning of the show, along with her sense of protectiveness for those around her, her fellow dolls. In one episode, a clever attempt was made by DeWitt to let Echo's desire play itself out, and thus subside. In this episode, however, we suddenly learn how totally that earlier attempt to reign Echo in has failed. Not only is she still determined to save those around her, she's discovered ways to accumulate and remember information. She communicates with herself across the memory wipes she still is subject to. And we discover this in the only episode so far in which Echo plays a relatively minor role.
I immediately flashed back to this aspect of this last episode, reading tremayne's diary this week, "On Reality-Based Optimism". For it seemed that he was writing about the same thing--a struggling toward awareness from a state of deep and unrecognized sleep. He wrote:
The bulk of your "A list" progessive bloggers are now between the ages of 30 and 50. Many blog readers also fall into this age range. Those of us in this demographic are too young to have personal memories of progressive political power. There was some of that in the 1960s according to what I've seen on the History Channel and in books but I've never felt it.
This age group is also too old for unfettered idealism. Our political memories include the dark Bush-Cheney years, the "pragmatic" Clinton years (and an impeachment) and, for some, the Reagan-Bush years and the less-than-successful Carter years. There may be some idealism still lurking inside but it's, well, fettered idealism.
And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, your thinking can become limited by what has been rather than what could be. I think that, in part, explains the persistence of voices, even in Democratic circles, underestimating the chances for real progressive change. Today Nate Silver is acknowledging his error on the chances of success for the public option (though he noted, presciently, that is wasn't a done deal yet). As usual, Nate is trying to be reality-based when making predictions. He has not been alone is expressing pessimism on the public option's chances.
To me, this is a spot-on explanation for why so many in the blogosphere seem to share the low expectations that pervade Versailles, even when we openly scorn the Versailles rationales. This is why I think it's very important for progressives to start picking fights--because winning fights you pick is key to actual political power, as opposed to merely looking like you have political power. I also think it's important to have a broader sense of history, both what we're up against, and what winds are at our backs--or could be, if we align ourselves properly. And this is what Echo was found to be doing in this episode:
Boyd:Are you looking for this? It's a bookmark.
Echo:It's a leaf. It's pretty.
Boyd:Is the book pretty? There aren't any pictures.
Echo:I can make out some of the words. It's fun. Exercising our brains makes us our best.
Boyd:Echo, when did you learn how to lie?
Echo:Am I in trouble?
Boyd:Not from me. But there are people who would be very upset if they knew what you were doing.
Echo:Reading?
Boyd:You brought the painting to Topher. You're pushing. The actives, the staff. What you're doing could have consequences you can't predict or control. Some people are not ready to wake up.
Echo:I don't care.
Something bad is coming, like a storm, and I want everyone to survive it. They need to wake up.
Boyd:Echo, you've stirred things up, You might bring on the storm yourself.
Later, however, without words, without explanation, with only music, we see Echo finding a different sort of bookmark. A gift from Boyd:
If she can struggle out of the pit of total annihilation of her self, and take it upon her to save those around her who haven't an inkling of their state, then what excuse do we have, with all the self-awareness we posses?
Oh, sure, it's "only a story." A story remarkably reminiscent of the slave rebellions lead by men like Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner--rebellious slaves who centuries after their deaths remade America in their image. And what is history, then, but a story we write in our own blood, sweat and tears?
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