Tear This Dollhouse Down
Last Friday marked the end of the line for Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's low-rated melodrama about human trafficking in the digital age. The usual suspects have been up in arms about the show getting cancelled, saying it just proves that, hey, Whedon's a genius:
Dollhouse has been cancelled right on schedule, i.e. just when Joss Whedon was getting to the point. It is (soon: was) not a show about sex or human trafficking or prostitution. It’s about identity. For the first 20 episodes, we’re meant to believe that Echo is merely a cipher masking Caroline, fighting to regain the identity she sold away. But now, as she struggles to integrate the various identities that the dollhouse has “imprinted” on her brain, we see that it was about Echo all along. And this, of course, is everyone’s struggle: integrating the various identities the world thrusts upon us: consumer, spouse, parent, worker, thinker, artist, daughter, son. And, particularly in the modern world, the tearing pain of choosing among them when we’re told that the freedom of self-definition is the thing we should value most. Whedon is fast becoming one of the great tragic figures in popular culture, a man of huge talent, vision and integrity whose work keeps getting killed before its time.
Meh. It's an interesting analysis, but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
I generally like Whedon's writing, but I disagree that his shows tend to get cancelled before they've had a fair chance.
Firefly was a brilliant show that was famously killed by a gaggle of numbnuts Fox execs. But that was the exception. Buffy The Vampire Slayer ran a total of seven seasons on two networks; its spinoff Angel ran five. Dollhouse was renewed for a second season despite its dismal ratings; that the show only began to find its narrative feet at the last minute is the fault of Whedon himself, not the network.
I've complained about the Dollhouse concept's biggest flaw before: we are asked to believe that a large corporation has secretly developed technology that allows the mind of any person to be "imprinted" into the body of any other, as easily as swapping out computer hard drives. I suspect this would require developing several Nobel prize-worthy technologies all at once, but has the corporation in question even patented any of these fantastic processes?
Nah, apparently not.
Anyway, as the series starts, a pretty young woman named Caroline has signed away five years of her life to become a "doll", a person whose mind will be wiped clean and replaced each week with a new personality for a new purpose.
So one week she's a dominatrix, the next week she's a biker chick, the next week an outdoorswoman, etc. Occasionally she is implanted with skill sets that could be more easily (and more cheaply) obtained elsewhere: hostage negotiator or super-spy or backup singer / dancer for a Beyonce-esque diva. Most often, though, she is just rented out to high-class johns to give the man who has everything what he most desires: a hooker who believes in the fantasy even more than he does. Or something.
As a business model, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Like Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (and its antecedent Westworld), once the questions start, they never stop: how much would each client have to pay each day to keep this operation afloat? How long could such a business be kept secret? How much would you have to pay to maintain that secrecy -- assuming that it could be maintained at all? How could you possibly handle the legal and liability issues? And wouldn't the ability to transfer human minds from one body to another have much bigger implications than renting out bimbos to rich playboys?
To his credit, Whedon eventually quit dancing around these questions and attacked them head-on, building an elaborate conspiracy backstory that retconned the Dollhouse into a sideline operation to a much larger global enterprise. And since this is Joss Whedon, a much larger sinister global enterprise.
Yet in spite of his efforts to bring his story to a slam-bang conclusion, Dollhouse ended as something less than the sum of its parts. Its many, many moving parts. Come for the clunky metaphor, America, stay for the spectacular mess. Too often, that's Whedon. But everyone is pretty, and the dialogue is quick, and the fights are merciless. That has to count for something.
