So in a few hours Dollhouse will air in the US, sometime after that I will get my hands on the pilot and review that. But I thought, before I did that, I would review the premise of the dollhouse, bec. There are no plot spoilers here for any of the episodes.
For those who aren’t crazy obsessed with Joss Whedon (what’s wrong with you?) the idea of the Dollhouse is that an evil corporation (see I’m with them already) has people who can be programmed with any personality and ability. The actives (as the imprintable people are known) spend any time when they’re not being someone else living in the dollhouse, a very controlled spa. They are supposed to remember nothing of who they are or what they’ve done. The actives may or may not have volunteered (and in what sense their volunteering involves meaning consent is left very open).
I’ll have to admit that when I first heard of the premise I was very sceptical. Why would you care about the dolls? The whole point of television is that you grow to care, love and massively over-identify with characters. If Echo is a new person each week then why do I care
I think there are a couple of reasons I’m no longer worried about that. The minor one is that the non-doll characters seem interesting and engaging. The major one is that I’ve seen the metaphor – and I’m not sure how I missed it at first.
Joss has described the sort of questions he is asking as about identity, what makes us who we are, what is imprinted by society. And, of course, the main plotline is that Echo (Eliza Dushku’s character) is starting to become aware, not as blank as she seems.
And that, though I imagine it will have to be reasonably slow for there still to be a show, is fascinating. So while I remain unconvinced that I’ll be that into the procedural episodes of the week aspect of it (this week Eliza Dushku has ninja skills in a circus, but something goes wrong), I think there will be enough else that I love to make me stick around (apparently the episodes start quite stand-alone about engagements and eventually become much more about the dollhouse itself).
The other big question, that has got some attention, about the dollhouse, is the politics of the thing. Or more specifically the gender politics of the thing. The people who were always praising Joss for writing strong female characters, are now criticising him for writing a woman who is powerless in an absolute kind of way. In an article on npr dollhouse was called the anti-Buffy.
Now my love for Joss has never been that he wrote female characters that could beat people up. I love Joss because he wrote female characters that had relationships with each other and who fought misogyny in various forms.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing about women who have no power, because there are lots of women have no power. In fact I think it’s anti-feminist to write as if it’s all happy and awesome and women are free and equal, because that’s dishonest. I worry that some of the sorts of criticisms that get dished out on-line, like criticising battlestar for the number of women who die. Women die because of misogyny all the time, and to engage with and depict that is a feminist choice.
Clearly, the point of showing someone so powerless is so that she can come to a realisation of her own power. The point of showing someone so controlled by others is that she can take control. And I think that’s an important story to tell.
The final hesitation, is that a chunk of what the dolls are doing is sex, and sex that is quite clearly non-consensual. I have no problems with TV depicting non-concensual sex as long as they let it be creepy. And I think the dollhouse is supposed to be creepy. But that’s not necessarily enough. Nothing Joss Whedon’s done before about prostitution or non-concensual sex fills me with confidence in his ability to do this.* But the way he has been talking about it has made me feel that there’s some hope, and he may have thought this through more than the things I found objectionable in Buffy and Firefly. Apparently Fox wanted him to tone down the sexual themes:
“My problem has always been, what happens is that you get the corporations basically enjoying the titillation of the thing instead of wanting to baldly talk about it,” he says. “We really wanted to hit it in the face and say, well, what does it mean? Is it wrong to pay somebody to have sex? How wrong is it to try to create your own perfect experience? When is it appalling? And when is it a part of people becoming increasingly incapable of dealing with other people and living these incredibly insular lives?”
I’m really excited about the show, anyway. I think it’s going to be fantastic, the ideas are interesting, the cast seems great, and it’s Joss. Watch it tonight if you’re in America, I’ll let you know what I think of the pilot as soon as I get to see it.
*Clearly there is not time in this post for the problems with how ill thought through Inara’s character’s position was. There is also not time in this lifetime to describe all the problems of Buffy/Spike in season seven.
The premise for this series sounds really reminiscent of Joe Haldeman’s classic SF novel “All My Sins Remembered”, substituting sex in Dollhouse for assassination in AMSR. That was a great read–I am almost intrigued enough to add Dollhouse to our “rent me asap” list. (Alas, no TV and no Netflix of Hulu in Canada).
Pingback: Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » First Impressions of Dollhouse
Well, I think it is going to work.
When it started I thought -oh no not alias no no- but then halfway through it got interesting- to me not obvious but interesting.
I give the first show a B+.
I disagree with you here. If one were writing a situation in which women were still stuffed into problematic, stereotypical roles and were pretending that it was all awesome and happy, then yes, that’s anti-feminist. But I think it can be really interesting and empowering (even if in an indirect way) to simply present a fictional world in which gender boundaries are erased and let that speak for itself. I’m thinking, for example, of Kara in BSG – if I remember correctly, the show hasn’t mentioned any obstacles she’s encountered in her career because she’s a woman, but the statement is still very strong. You could argue that it sets up an unrealistic expectation among real women who want to enter male-dominated fields, but I suspect that presenting a woman in that role does play a part in making it feel more plausible to the general public. Whereas presenting too many women in positions of powerlessness may help cement the idea of women as powerless.
I can’t go above a “D”. The script was flat, uninspired and devoid not only of humor or wit, but of any sort of believable human interaction. Parts of the script were so bad that we laughed out loud. Although it was beautifully shot, it was poorly directed.
It was, as the Fox trailers advertised, and as the Glau/Dushku promos reminded us, the “Hot, Naked Eliza Dushku Show.” Full of a background straight from the mind of Aaron Spelling. Now I’ve heard that Fox forced the pilot to be rewritten a bunch of times to match Fox tastes (if there really is such a thing), so I’m willing to give it 3 or 4 episodes to show something worth my time.
Had I not suffered through a week of trailers for the show, I would have been disappointed. Here’s hoping that the upcoming shows are a vast improvement.
Apart from a brief shot in a montage, when we saw Dushku’s back for about a second, I don’t recall Dushku being naked in this episode. To describe it as the “Hot, Naked Eliza Dushku Show” is patently unfair.
It was un-Aaron-Spelling like, as Elkins pointed out to me, in that the character Dushku took one wasn’t a physical fighter, nor was she a seductress.
I’d give the first episode a B. I wasn’t thrilled by it, but I thought it was pretty good, and I’m interested enough to keep watching.
Julie, I agree with you in general that a fictional world without gender boundaries can be a very feminist approach to writing fiction (although it’s just one of many possible approaches). But I definitely don’t think BSG depicts a “fictional world in which gender boundaries are erased!” The gender boundaries are different than they are in the US — women are clearly accepted as fighter pilots — but they still exist.
Sorry, my comment was really unclear. I was using the example of Kara’s job specifically, not BSG in general.
Okay, so Dushku starts out motorcycle racing (which was laughably cliched, itself), arrives at the party, removes her leathers & dances in something that is shorter than my dress shirts. That entire scene got endless comments about the “dress” she was wearing from my group throughout that part. Then Echo gets her next assignment… dressed as the Sexy Librarian(tm). That broke us all up. Complete w/ sexy librarian glasses and the highest of high heels. The whole thing was shot to show off her body, which is understandable given the flatness of the dialogue and performances throughout.
Then there were the Glau/Dushku promos (there were at least 3) w/ the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue type photo of Dushku taking up 1/6 of the picture.
The background people in pretty much any scene were right out of Aaron Spelling. Beautiful young women wearing backless tops or dresses. (which is what my Spelling reference was about – not the episode itself, rather the extras in any given scene)
So, okay, she wasn’t naked, but it was as close as primetime Fox gets and lacked any subtlety. It was promoted as T&A and it delivered on its promise of lots and lots of skin. At least the unnecessary shower bit provided male skin, as well. I suppose that’s an advance of sorts.
The premise of the show is interesting, it has a cast of which nearly all of the actors I’ve seen before have been good, it’s created and produced by someone with a very good track record and it was beautifully shot. That is enough to get me to give it 3 or 4 episodes to find itself. But the script was very weak and the episode made good on Fox’s promise of T&A. Overall, the episode was nearly as dreadful as the trailers made me fear.
Does anybody want to opine that the script was good? To explain the subtleties in the scene when Echo first goes to kidnap victim’s dad’s home? You know, the scene in which neither actor shows the vaguest hint of acting? Not that I blame them given the dialogue for that scene. Or explain why kidnap victim’s dad wants to break Echo’s overlay? Everything up to that point for that character was about doing whatever was necessary to get his daughter back. Why would he do that? And then, given that he had, for some unknown reason, decided to try to crack her overlay, why stop when he was achieving his goal? And, since he seems to find the whole idea of Dollhouse distasteful or immoral, why has he been a client?
And then we get the FBI (or whoever) meeting. Stiff, stiff and flat. It was so bad that it made suspension of disbelief very, very difficult. It was the worst of at least 3 cliches of screen law enforcement. Everything about wildcard agent & the agency was so poorly done that I began to actively root against him.
The only thing about the whole episode that stood out in a good way for me was the way that the kidnapping itself was shot & edited. That and the really nice cinematography.