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After a torturous November hiatus, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse returned for a double episode on Friday with a timing that was downright eerie in my book. The really sucky news is that Fox used the hiatus to announce it was canceling the show after the end of the season. I never did understand why Joss went with Fox again after the way they shafted Firefly, but alas, such is life. Someone just give him his own cable channel already. He could oversee a full lineup with the crew of writers and showrunners he's mentored over the years.
His first series, Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, was first incarnated as a movie that began with fairly simple premise, a classic tale of the young hero's calling, but with a twist-the hero is a cheerleader in Southern California high school. It was also an overt response to a decade of reactionary slasher movies. Buffy turned the tables. She was the one doing the most serious slashing. The series then expanded from this premise.
Dollhouse is in many ways an opposite to Buffy. Its protagonist-Echo--is the most un-agenty person imaginable-not really a person at all. A blank slate. An empty body, wiped clean of memory, personality, self. A "doll". While Buffy discovered herself to be embedded in an institutional structure of good fighting evil-which she increasingly rebelled against-Echo does not discover anything, at least for quite some time, but we discover her to be embedded in what looks to be the most extreme fantasy version of a slavery ring...even though it's "only" for a limited five-year period. The "dollhouse" she lives in is revealed to be but one of many in different cities, all covert properties of a very public and powerful biomedical company, Rossum Corporation. (The term "robot" first appeared in a 1921 play by Czech science fiction writer Karel Capek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)--although the robots were more like what would become known androids.)
Usually when writing about tv, I try to avoid spoilers, even writing about old shows, but there's no way to write about what mattered to me most here without writing about spoilers-so you have been warned!
So, that out of the way, where to begin?
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| With Daniel Perrin, the relatively new character, a third-generation US Senator who suddenly leaps to the center of the action, with a smattering of characteristics that remind one of Barack Obama, despite being quite white and quite old money? Nah, too sudden, and lacking in context.
So, first off, let's just note that Whedon is a political writer in the same way that most great writers are-because politics is part of who we are as social critters. Our personal lives are lived within larger webs of shared meaning, purpose, conflict and struggle. And Whedon doesn't just write about personal lives, he's a creator of worlds, a moral fantasist who creates imagined realities that partly mimic, and partly contrast with our own. And that tension of mimicry and contrast interacts with the personal stories he tells to create tales of unusual complexity while retaining a surface simplicity that makes them enjoyable and appreciable to younger viewers as well.
From the very beginning we're presented with a contradictory world. The blatantly immoral, much less illegal enterprise is peopled by a mix of characters, several of whom clearly have some sort of moral sense, and are presented as appealing, if conflicted characters, including Boyd Langton, Echo's "handler", who watches over her during her "missions" and Adelle DeWitt, the head of the Los Angeles dollhouse. With Buffy, the initially black-and-white good-vs-evil world is progressively blurred. With Dollhouse, it's more the other way around-the murkiness is gradually somewhat clarified into more distinct elements of good and evil, even as new forms of murkiness are introduced. One major form of murkiness lurks in the background, as we're told various times by Dewitt that the Dollhouse is a business, but that it has a purpose beyond being a business, a purpose never explained beyond that-and possibly one that Dewitt has been mislead about.
Which brings us to Perrin and this week's double episode. On the very same week that Obama's Afghanistan War speech strips away the last vestiges of "change we can believe," Perrin-heretofore a marginal character seen only on tv as a crusading politician vaguely threatening Rossum Corporation-now bursts center stage, threatening to expose the Dollhouse, having found a former doll willing to testify.
What makes him reminiscent of Obama is what's revealed toward the end of the first of two episodes that aired this week. It turns out that Perrin himself is a doll. While most dolls are rented for brief episodes, typically less than a day, but occasionally for several days in a row, and sometimes recurrently to the same person, though this is discouraged, we have been introduced to at least one "sleeper" doll who lives like a normal person for months without being activated for a particular purpose. But Perrin is much more than this. He's been a doll for three years-and the person he's impersonating is himself. He was a wealthy family's black sheep, but Rossum made him over to be a moral crusader (more Bush than Obama there, but Obama, don't forget, had his dope-smoking phase, and a much more focused sense of being a crusader). And-in a plot twist revealed near the very end of the second hour this week-his ultimate purpose is to protect Rossum by casting it as the target of an elaborate plot against it by truly sinister forces.
But that's only part of what happens in this double episode. Another major development is that we finally see into another dollhouse, and thus see the LA Dollhouse in contrast with others, as well as a much more definitive picture of Rossum Corp that begins to emerge. One plausible reading-as Mark Matson noted in a comment-is that the LA Dollhouse is somewhat analogous to the Democratic Party. What's less debatable is that Adelle DeWitt has an increasingly strong sense of loyalty and protectiveness over her dollhouse and those associated with it, coupled with an awakening suspicion of Rossum Corp.
I don't for a moment claim that the connections I've drawn here are intentionally pre-planed political messages devised by Whedon. His intentions are much more abstracted from everyday life. But because he is tuned into the gestalt of modern politics, his work is overcharged with the potential for associations. Indeed, it's precisely because of this that it not just invites us into such reflections--if we are political engaged or even just politically attentive in our daily lives, it virtually goads us into such speculations, and thereby deepens our questioning of what things really mean, what significance they truly have.
And so, it's not that I think Obama was nefariously pre-programmed to snare a nation of followers in one direction only to turn 1800 degrees on them-though it is sort of creepy that these two episodes would air the same week that Obama gave his Afghanistan speech. No, it's just that I can see how that narrative might work. After all, I've just seen it on tv. And not incidentally, it seems quite clear that the real Perrin is not that enamored with what's been planned for him. For all his flaws in his raw state, there was something... authentic about him. And that's quite another read on Obama, one perhaps best supported by his book writing, which in this world, where the real person and the doll are not two separate people, suggests a more sympathetic read on Obama, rather than a more paranoid cynical one.
That, my friends is what art does. It answers our most profound questions...with even deeper questions. |
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