The Dollhouse
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on April 26th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
This may not be a popular opinion. There is actually a lot of hate directed at this show from some quarters, and a lot of it is coming specifically from Joss Whedon fans. The core complaint, besides the segment who feel that Eliza Dushku's acting abilities aren't up for the job, seems to be that Dollhouse is not like Joss Whedon's previous work.
And it isn't. It's not like Firefly, it's not like Angel (thank God - this is just a purely personal opinion, but I felt that the series Angel was just unnecessary and I lost interest in it after the first season) and it's certainly not like Buffy.
I have the advantage that I just watched the first eight episodes more or less all at once and this was my introduction to the show. Having watched it up to this point, I think it's brilliant and engaging, representing a departure and an evolutionary step for Whedon.
Dollhouse is fundamentally about the question, what makes us who we are? Is it just the sum of our memories and experience (are we a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which could, with the right technology, be scraped and written on again), or do we contain a deeper, fundamental imprint? It's the old nature versus nurture debate, a classic philosophical question, and the proprietors of Whedon's Dollhouse believe they have definitive proof of the answer - that the human spirit can simply be wiped and people can be programmed to be anything at all.
As stated at several times in the series, any technology people can invent will be used, so positing the technology behind the dollhouse exists guarantees someone will use it. The mysterious backers of the dollhouse have created a world-wide network of dollhouses, and as has been hinted, while the business of the dollhouse is pleasure, its creators have a deeper and more sinister purpose.
The creators of the dollouses, in their arrogance, think they have the ultimate ability to control human personality and that they can basically use people as robots... but as the series progresses, it becomes apparent that each doll, or "active," possesses a fundamental personality which survives wipe after wipe and informs the doll's actions and reactions even under the totalitarian influence of the imprint. The human spirit, it appears, is not as easy to crush as the would-be Big Brother thinks, and despite what the dollhouse is supposedly capable of, the dolls exhibit actual progression as time goes on.
The characters on the front lines of the dollhouse, Adele, Topher and the various doctors and handlers, seem to be coming to the gradual realization that they are playing with forces they can't control after all, but not fully believing the implications, try various increasingly heterodox means (even acknowledging that some residual self is surviving the imprinting process and restoring a version of the dolls' original personalities in one episode to allow them to find a sort of self-directed "closure") to control the situation. Faced with facts that don't fit their orthodoxy, the staff are becoming shaped by their struggle to maintain the dollhouse in the face of the mysterious forces at work.
This is an incredibly interesting and subtle series, and I think will be remembered as some of Whedon's greatest work. It directly attacks great philosophical questions and charts people's reactions to a world which is not what any of them thinks it is. The Dollhouse is not as powerful or as knowing as it thinks it is, despite its enormous arrogance. Through science fiction, the show explores the consequences of our increasing ability to interfere in the natural world on our very humanity. Ultimately, the fundamental humanity of the supposedly wiped dolls is progressively affirmed despite the most massive and ambitious oppression ever devised by man.
I hope Whedon has a good wrap-up, because I would bet any money that this series will not go into a second season. The style of Dollhouse has alienated many of his fans, who are looking for a certain kind of show from Whedon, specifically, a second coming of the cruelly denied and undeniably brilliant Firefly, whose cancellation fans have not been able to accept. It will take people a while to digest the show and see it for its own considerable merits, but while the Whedon fans initially chew on it for a couple of episodes and spit it out, the rest of the world is likely to be be no more receptive. I think Dollhouse is probably a little too smart for television.
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