Why Dollhouse should be put in the attic

13 min read

Deviation Actions

MilesCochran's avatar
By
Published:
3K Views
Dollhouse is gearing up for the season finale and so the Whedonites gather to debate if Season 2 will happen or even should happen.  SciFi Wire has an interesting story with both sides <a href=”scifiwire.com/2009/05/why-we-l…> HERE

I don’t think I need to express my Whedon credentials but I will say I’ve walked away from Joss before.  I still won’t watch Angel after he killed off Doyle and gave super powers to Cordelia.  I don’t give a shit if that was “always the plan” it sucked and it hurt and when I tried to go back to the show they had a reformed gang banger, Westley and a disco demon.  It was like they took all the bad ideas that never made Buffy and jammed them together.  Anyway, I love Joss but not blindly, I won’t follow a show I disagree with.

Dollhouse should die this season and Joss should apologize for it.  I not only think it’s a bad idea to keep going I think it’s irresponsible sci-fi at best and socially damaging at worst.  I think this for a number of reasons:

1) The entire show promotes a sort of misogynistic abuse of women.
2) The show promotes meat puppeting (I’ll explain later for those who o_O)
3) The show pushes a technocratic ideal
4) The show is poorly written

Alright let’s get the weakest argument out of the way.  I say weakest because there are reasonable counters to it.  It is however a vital argument to consider given that Joss Whedon is the author.  Of the shows 4 rape victims 3 of them are women and all three of the women have been put into sexually unrcontionable situations.  One of them has literally been raped while in her blank state and the others have been grudge fucked or put into situations with sexual sadists.  The only sexual situation for the male doll is one where he sleeps with the boss, and while this is prostitution as simply as any of the situations are, it’s less about humiliation and degradation or pain as the situations the women find themselves in.

The women in the show are generally mistreated, even in their programmed situations they are seldom taken seriously or they are so overplayed that the audience can’t think of them as anything but a caricature.  Seeing the “I think I’ll swim now” girls from the dollhouse as badass CDC or FBI agents looks ridiculous and the performances are so 2D that you can’t get into it.  Whereas the male doll we meet as a russian gangster getting strong armed by a cop.  So we meet him as a sort of badass who get progressively weaker as things go on.

However I will admit the existence of a male doll makes things less obvious but I think anyone watching the show will see what I mean even without me pointing it out.  You feel these women are being hurt regularly.  And that hurt brings us to our second point, meat puppeting.  Meat Puppets are an idea introduced (as far as I know) in William Gibson’s book Neuromancer.  They are a human being who has had a part of their brain removed and replaced with a computer to allow them to be programmed to act as a sexual slave.  This is pretty much the only use for such things in the book though the term has grown to mean the ability to computer control a person.

The main idea, the wiping of old personality to install new personae into a person is inherently rape.  The show sidesteps this through the consent forms the characters sign but the footage in the show where Caroline signs is clearly coercive.  There isn’t anyone we know of in the dollhouse who was recruited because they were a model and the agency wanted them.  The people we see getting the contracts are people who tried to stop the dollhouse or their scientific operations and got caught.  when put in the dichotomy of prison or five years of unconsciousness while we use your body is not okay.

Every time they wipe these dolls they also forcibly rape the person they have made the doll into.  The person echo becomes never signed a goddamn thing and yet they are being removed from existence because they need to rinse her out and send her to the next john.  By not allowing her to collect memories and live freely this is a systematic abuse of a human being beyond comparison.  The argument goes to the very heart of the Cartesian “cogito, ergo sum” argument.  Okay I geeked out a bit there...  sorry.

I think therefore I am is one of the hallmarks of western thought.  Even if we don’t believe that it is in fact a proof of existence (the critiques of it are very strong) we have to understand the vital importance of “I” in our lives.  Søren Kierkegaard puts it best when he talks about it not as a logical proof but as how a human being needs and presupposes that there is a self.  The idea that a thinking “thing” must have something which exists to have those thoughts.  But enough philosophy for now...

If we understand how important “being” is to us then every time someone is wiped out of the doll we are committing murder.  Because we cannot assume there is a soul apart from the personae given that Caroline is in a hard drive somewhere.  Better yet assume there is a soul, then that soul is what stitches things together from the partially wiped blackboard of Echo’s brain.  Imagine being that soul, trapped in a meat suit for years as you feel the continuity of all these people who exist and then are destroyed.  The soul then must be in some kind of agony watching every personality live, be abused, and then die.  So either we are nazi level butchers learning to kill with gross efficiency, or we are monsters who are wracking the souls of these dolls either by ignorance or sheer terrible will.  There is NO moral ground for this Dollhouse.

The idea of the soul pushes us to our third problem, the technocratic ideal.  It’s clear no one on the show is aware of a soul or any part of the person that remains after the wipe.  Whenever they see the dolls act in a way other than a blank slate they assume the wipe has gone wrong and re-do it.  This indicates that there is no soul, that people are nothing more than a unique set of electro chemical reactions that can be reproduced with “perfect” accuracy, and indeed unique people can be created by balancing out some equation.

The implication here is something they touched on in the Matrix movies but never fully dealt with.  If I can manufacture you, literally if I Miles can plug information about your personality and history into a computer and put you into a body...  who are you really?  If I can scan your brain pattern on Wednesday and then implant you into a new body Friday (as has happened in the show explicitly) then you are not a soul but a brain map.  How then can we have abstract ideals like hope or love or justice?  If cognition does not prove a unified spiritual whole then what good is our existence?

We fall into another philosophical argument again here and while I realize that may bore some it is a real problem when the story doesn’t seem to answer the questions it raises.  Science fiction is well known for asking questions about artificial intelligence and asking if Androids dream of electric sheep, but Dollhouse has stumbled into the territory and not even hinted at any real thought. Dollhouse takes the question of “why am I on this earth?” and answers it with “no reason, you are a randomly occurring set of chemical reactions to your bodies given stimulus.”  There is no soul if I can reproduce you, you’re not a snowflake you’re just so much snow that if we want we can create at any time to improve skiing conditions.

Alright those are the philosophical complaints.  You may not look to television for moral authority so let me then deal with the nuts and bolts of the storytelling...

A lot of this blends together but I’ll try to discern between the three problems as best I can.  I’ll start with the one most linked to my philosophical arguments so we can get it out of the way.  There are no “good guys” in this story.  Now I can hear the Whedonites bemoaning the fact that Mal and his crew were outlaws, that Buffy and Angel broke the law, that lawfulness is not akin to goodness.  Okay all you CGers (role playing joke)  I will give you that law ≠ good.  However the dollhouse is guilty of rape and murder, these are not crimes because of their legal status they are moral imperatives.  Even the people in the dollhouse recognize the moral problems with what they are doing.  They have to treat the dolls as less than human in order to do their jobs.  Because if these were human beings you would have a moral imperative to save them.

Which brings us to the person trying to save the dolls, our FBI agent.  Some of you might have seen past his strongarm tactics because he’s trying to save Caroline.  I see how the ends might justify the means at some point though I would argue that is not a very moral standpoint.  But assuming that he is forgiven his abuses because he is aiming at a noble goal.  In the episode before the finale “Briar Rose” he gets into the dollhouse and refuses to save a doll, one he has had sex with and formed a relationship with, because she is dangerous.  He refused to save an innocent because she might be used against him.  While this is pragmatic, it is NOT heroic.  The white knight now chooses who he saves and he didn’t even think about saving anyone other than Echo.   We haven’t actually seen him do anything nice for anyone, he abuses his friendships, abuses his lovers, and willingly plays along with the dollhouse in order not to get caught.  This means abusing a doll.  I don’t think we’ve seen him so much as pull a cat out of a tree.

Then there is Echo’s once handler, now head of security.  He has explicitly challenged the morality of the dollhouse, yay!  But he also cashed the checks, boo!  But he’s in it to “protect echo”, YAY!  But he left that job to more vigorously protect the Dollhouse’s secrets, BOO!  In my book he’s even worse than most because while he clearly recognizes the moral problems he continues to rationalize them.  When he first rationalized them by being the protector of the innocent girl, now he protects a system that engages in this behavior.  He’s no longer protecting the innocent, he’s protecting their abusers.  If someone wanted to plead ignorance one might understand, the dollhouse is good at PR.  But he KNOWS the wrongs of the dollhouse and still participates.  He’s like a Vegetarian working as legal counsel for Foster Farms.

I don’t think there is anyone else that we could possibly call the “good guy” unless you want to talk about Alpha...  no?  Okay.

Since we don’t have a hero who is it that we can relate to in order to put ourselves in the story?  The FBI guy, his zealotry and loose morals seem to rule him out.  Maybe the geek, I mean I am writing a blog about a TV show here right?  Nope, he gets waaay too much pleasure out of the mind wiping and creating new people for me to want to have a redbull and a forum war with him.  The stuffy headmistress of the dollhouse?  No thanks.  Maybe the handler who is looking at all this going “wow, this is bad”  He might have done for a few episodes in the middle, but now he’s a suit.  What about the former suit who was a badd ass security guy?  No he was an asshole even when he got caught working for the NSA.  Though I respect him more now.

How about the dolls?  I’ve heard people say they sympathize with them, maybe their innocence is what makes them our link into the show.  Then it must suck ass every time your connection to the show gets mind wiped or implanted with some personality that isn’t theirs.  How many times can our protagonist or even our character hook be molested or raped before we lose heart?  Rooting for echo is like rooting for the scrappy kid in a schoolyard fight, you’re rooting for someone who the big kid just keeps putting on their ass.  If anyone has the moral high ground it’s Echo, too bad they will just mind wipe her every time she gets uppity.

Then who do we relate to?  The only person I can relate to at all is the asian assistant girl for the genius.  And that’s likely because I haven’t seen her do anything evil, yet.

In a show where the most important charcter (Echo) is never allowed to have a character arc, who drives the story?  Well the problem is that Dollhouse is little more than a connected series of one shot stories.  Buffy season 1 was similar to this but it used the initial stories to develop who these people were, because those people could arc.  Firefly was a lot of one shot stuff but the people there grew in the serial format of the show, they learned from adventure to adventure and eventually it became them we wanted to see, not the individual stories.

The characters who can arc in Dollhouse really haven’t, Ballard the FBI agent has only become more creepy and weird as the show goes on, really hitting a downward spiral more than a character arc. Boyd, the handler turned security specialist only arced deeper into the Dollhouse, becoming less morally agreeable and more part of the system.  The doctor is too secondary to arc, the geek got an episode of “hey he’s lovable” but he did so by implanting a doll with the memories of someone who likes him, which is all kinds of sad and pathetic when you have to mind wipe a girl to play Tetris with you.  There was an episode with the headmistress that almost showed growth but it was creepy and sad again which means we still don’t care about her.  The security chief got put in the attic (another incredibly horrifying practice).

Really all we have is Echo and her “glitches” where she strings together random memories in order to make her a useful plot device.  This is never much of an arc, unless we call the escape episode an arc... too bad she doesn’t remember any of it. Why is that?  Because they caught her and mind wiped her at the end of it... oops.

If you watch and enjoy Dollhouse I would love to hear why.  I want to love it but I have these massive problems that I can’t get around.  If you’ve found a way around them please leave me comments.
© 2009 - 2024 MilesCochran
Comments4
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
snowpatrol89's avatar
Thank god someone finally tackled Dollhouse's issues. I'm disappointed that Whedon would be in charge of such a degrading show.