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quinaraIt was going to happen sooner or later... Yes, I spent the evening writing Dollhouse meta. Quite long Dollhouse meta, that may or may not make sense and has a rather general feminist chat as it's opening. And it doesn't cover nearly as much as I would like to one day.
Unfortuately it has spoilers for pretty much all the first series (apologies to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shapinglight, whose comments are part of what made me want to write this; I'm sorry you can't read it yet - er, if you would even want to, that is...). I'm very sorry my style is so bombastic - feel free to comment with snark, rants, queries and any other form of communication.
So!
Ready to Rinse and Spit: Dollhouse and Cultural Narratives.
Dollhouse is a show about identity. We already knew that – we can all see the way it breaks apart the building blocks of our existence in order to better define them. Through themagic science of the chair we’re asking how do mind, body and soul(?) interact.
The thing is, these aren’t the only things that make us who we are. For a start our ‘selves’ are constantly in flux, mind and body changing from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. More than that we are none of us isolated beings, but always interacting with our environment and other people, redefining ourselves in response to the cultures we live in. And Dollhouse cares about those things as well.
Because this story, it’s about stories. Cultural narratives to get wanky or fairy tales to keep it simple. The stories everyone already knows. For example, if you want a prince to marry you, you know you’d better make like Cinderella and put on a pretty dress. You know that, if you go into the woods, you’re doomed to fall prey to a Big Bad Wolf (and better hope there’s a handsome woodcutter to save you).
Those examples are, of course, dependent on You being female (and more on that in a moment), but just to emphasise that these stories are confirmed and cemented every day, in everything from advertising to the news. Because of course if you buy X (= shiny thing) you’ll be the belle of the ball, at the pub instead of home with thrush. And you can guess exactly what happened when that woman dared go running in the park.
Despite this, however, there is a tension between fairy tales and reality, because we all claim to know that fairy tales aren’t true. No one would argue that once there really was a Little Red Riding Hood who had a conversation with a nasty wolf but was able to be cut from his stomach still alive. At the same time, the shape of this story necessarily informs the way we think about things, because it is so ingrained within us that going-into-woods-and-getting-eaten seems like natural, unavoidable logic. That’s why you don’t go into the woods alone. Little Red Riding Hood never happened (don’t be silly), but, uh, there are always going to berapists wolves in the woods.
My not so subtle introduction of the cultural narratives surrounding rape brings me back to the point about being female. Because I’m not sure I’d be wrong to say that some of the strongest, most pernicious stories are those that affect women and girls. The necessity of beauty, ie. Cinderella, is so greatly emphasised that practically every commercially-produced image of her peers that a woman might see is retouched.
I watched this video a few months ago, in which two photo-retouchers are interviewd. I’m not sure the video’s still live, but there’s a complete transcript on Shakesville. I thought the most interesting comment was the following:
In other words, we live in a world where beauty is not only a commodity, but a fantasy. We are told that beauty is necessary at the same time we are told that beauty is impossible. I’d quibble with Jesse Epstein (the journalist for this piece) that maintaining distance from painted/drawn artwork is as easy as all that, but I think it is worth mentioning that the more the these images ‘look like us’ the more extreme they become in terms of ‘perfection’. Every step we make closer to the images around us causes the images to make one step further away. Perfection must always remain a fantasy – such is the nature of Cinderella's magical clothes.
Which brings me, after that long preamble, to the Dollhouse. The Dollhouse, I would say, is the very embodiment of a cultural narrative, in what it does and the way that people treat it.
Because people don’t believe in the Dollhouse, except for when they do. It is repeatedly referred to as a fairy tale, explicitly by Paul Ballard’s boss in Ghost (1x01), implicitly by his colleagues in The Target (1x02), explicitly again by Lubov (who’s even part of the system) in Stage Fright (1x03). But, as many people who don’t believe in the Dollhouse and who believe that its existence would destroy the world as we know it (see the Professor Guy in Man on the Street (1x06): “If that technology exists... It'll be used. It'll be abused. It'll be global. And we will be over. As a species we will cease to matter.”), it has built enough awareness that everyone with the power knows where to go for their “needs”. As Paul says in A Spy in the House of Love (1x10): “The Dollhouse is way bigger than I ever thought it was. Every time I look deeper, I find more clients, larger amounts of money and a web of financial and political connections all over the world to corporations, the government, even inside the FBI.”
As a concept, it is not far-fetched, neither ideologically nor technologically. People replacing/changing their personalities so they can become a perfect date? That happens already: the “object” of a first date is “to hide your flaws”, as DeWitt says in A Spy in the House of Love (1x10). And, in this world, “somebody made a monkey tango”, or so Lubov says in Stage Fright (1x03). As much as the Dollhouse is stupidly sci-fi it is also a natural progression of this world’s rules. There is no real reason for people not to believe in its existence, but funnily enough it is most definitely in the Dollhouse’s interests. Not only to escape legal ramifications, but also because the more fantastic they are, the greater the perfection seems that they are offering. Our fantasy is perfection, which we know must be fantasy, as with retouching.
What does the Dollhouse offer? What does it ‘do’? Well, it creates identities. It creates people.
In my reaction post/review for True Believer (1x05), I found myself rambling the following (broken into two paragraphs for readability):
I still agree with this and now that I have my hands on the subtitles I can quote DeWitt’s speech properly:
It seems clear that the Dollhouse controls all. It is what informs the dolls’ lives and moulds them as people, playing with the mind/body/soul building blocks and taking them from ‘innocent’ children into adulthood. It does the work of a cultural narrative as well as being treated like one.
So we have a central metaphor. Faboo. But where do we go from there? Once we get into the realm of metatelevision and telling a story about telling stories (spinning a fantasy about fantasies?) this metaphor is surely going to crash rather violently into reality. Characters aren’t only going to be interacting with narratives as a concept, but living them, incapable of complaining, “Oi, Dollhouse! I don’t want to be endangered/rescued/abused!” (The italics are dreadfully important here.)
As the audience, though, we can. We can look at Dollhouse the way its characters look at the unitalicised Dollhouse and make judgements about whether we like what it’s doing. I would claim that the very story of Echo rebelling against the Dollhouse’s control invites and encourages us to do that.
The show, after all, seems rather consciously constructed as Not Real Life But Television. One of my very first reactions was that “it feels like it fits in with the world of TV as we know it very well”. I’ve seen “generic” as a description more than once. The cast on one level is very much like a collection of stock characters – the hard-nosed British woman (who does have feelings really), the geeky near-sociopath (with the hubris to make the whole world fall apart), the anti-authority hunky male lead...
And talking of that hunky male lead, he even breaks the realism of the show, with that stylistic flash-out to a boxing match in the first episode, emphasising his ‘struggle’. We are told in no uncertain terms that he is a character, not a person whose meeting we happen to be a fly on the wall for. And, as the story goes on, we are forced to question the very nature of this character. He thinks he’s the prince in Sleeping Beauty – his status as the hunky male lead certainly implied to me that was going to be his role – yet we come to realise through his interactions with Joel Mynor (in Man on the Street – 1x06) and treatment of Mellie that he actually has the potential to be something far darker. We are forced to wonder what it means when he eventually mounts his rescue-attempt and whether the prince from Sleeping Beauty could ever even have existed.
More than Ballard though, we have Echo. We have Eliza Dushku in ridiculously short skirts. Remember what I argued earlier about the most pernicious cultural narratives working against women? Well, Echo certainly seems to do pretty badly when it comes to her treatment by the Dollhouse and indeed Dollhouse itself. She is given stories week on week, a large number of which seem pointless and floundering. (Why is she a midwife randomly at the beginning of Gray Hour – 1x04? That’s what I want to know, Joss! Why would Alpha imprint her as a background singer unless he was starting an evil band?) She is sexualised, objectified and used, for no clear “reason”.
It’s not only by the story, however, it’s by us the audience, in such a way that we don’t just want to watch her as a character, we want merch with herboobs face on, marketing campaigns, the lot. This is how TV works. The Dollhouse marketing is over-the-top (but not actually that different than everything else), I think, purposely to emphasise that the system is one of objectifying women wholesale.
As a specific example I find the opening credits for Dollhouse remarkably interesting, because they are constructed from moments which mostly could be in the show, but aren’t. And most of them aren’t from the unaired pilot either. This is at odds at least with the way the BtVS and AtS credits were constructed and the result is that the sequences aren’t glimpses into her story, but gratuitously created shots of Echo'slegs face.
There is one moment when Echo is looking in the mirror, clearly on the Dollhouse set. One of her images is undressing and we can see her naked back, the other faces us still clothed. This moment seems to me like a direct challenge: which Echo do we look at? The one getting naked or the one showing us her emotions? Are we going to conform to the cultural narrative that states that naked female flesh is there formen us to look at, that it is the most interesting thing in any scene, that this is what marketing should be? Or are we going to demand the credits tell us something about her character and look for answers in her eyes?
To me that seems like the ultimate question of Dollhouse. Within the confines of the show’s fictional world all the characters question and interact with the Dollhouse. On a meta level they have their own storylines, both literal and perhaps guessable from their stereotypes – we are asked whether we accept them. And, finally, we are forced to question whether we will even question things at all. Will we simply allow Dollhouse to parade Eliza in front of us, scantily-clad? Will we accept that this is how TV works, that the male gaze is to be satisfied? Or will we refuse to be distracted and demand to know more about the nature of the Dollhouse’s human trafficking?
As I said above, it is to the Dollhouse’s advantage to be seen as a fantasy: perfect and unrealistic. Dollhouse the show on some level seems to me like it tries to create the same facade. It’s a show about prostitution, about rape, about the pursuit of beauty and the mutability of identity – but it’s a show mainly from the villains’ perspective, without any voice that isn’t morally grey. As in life, the viewer has to look past ubiquitous perfection (brought about in part by dissenting voices being discredited) to understand what’s really going on. Otherwise you end up commenting like Charlie Brooker of the Guardian (emphasis mine):
Because let us not forget the cultural narrative that states, as much as we should crave beauty and perfection, whoever has them? Should be shunned.
Unfortuately it has spoilers for pretty much all the first series (apologies to
shapinglight, whose comments are part of what made me want to write this; I'm sorry you can't read it yet - er, if you would even want to, that is...). I'm very sorry my style is so bombastic - feel free to comment with snark, rants, queries and any other form of communication.So!
Ready to Rinse and Spit: Dollhouse and Cultural Narratives.
”It's a myth, okay? It's an urban legend! Young people having their personalities replaced so that they could be the perfect date? It's – it's alligators in the sewers!” – Lubov in Stage Fright (1x03)
Dollhouse is a show about identity. We already knew that – we can all see the way it breaks apart the building blocks of our existence in order to better define them. Through the
The thing is, these aren’t the only things that make us who we are. For a start our ‘selves’ are constantly in flux, mind and body changing from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. More than that we are none of us isolated beings, but always interacting with our environment and other people, redefining ourselves in response to the cultures we live in. And Dollhouse cares about those things as well.
Because this story, it’s about stories. Cultural narratives to get wanky or fairy tales to keep it simple. The stories everyone already knows. For example, if you want a prince to marry you, you know you’d better make like Cinderella and put on a pretty dress. You know that, if you go into the woods, you’re doomed to fall prey to a Big Bad Wolf (and better hope there’s a handsome woodcutter to save you).
Those examples are, of course, dependent on You being female (and more on that in a moment), but just to emphasise that these stories are confirmed and cemented every day, in everything from advertising to the news. Because of course if you buy X (= shiny thing) you’ll be the belle of the ball, at the pub instead of home with thrush. And you can guess exactly what happened when that woman dared go running in the park.
Despite this, however, there is a tension between fairy tales and reality, because we all claim to know that fairy tales aren’t true. No one would argue that once there really was a Little Red Riding Hood who had a conversation with a nasty wolf but was able to be cut from his stomach still alive. At the same time, the shape of this story necessarily informs the way we think about things, because it is so ingrained within us that going-into-woods-and-getting-eaten seems like natural, unavoidable logic. That’s why you don’t go into the woods alone. Little Red Riding Hood never happened (don’t be silly), but, uh, there are always going to be
My not so subtle introduction of the cultural narratives surrounding rape brings me back to the point about being female. Because I’m not sure I’d be wrong to say that some of the strongest, most pernicious stories are those that affect women and girls. The necessity of beauty, ie. Cinderella, is so greatly emphasised that practically every commercially-produced image of her peers that a woman might see is retouched.
I watched this video a few months ago, in which two photo-retouchers are interviewd. I’m not sure the video’s still live, but there’s a complete transcript on Shakesville. I thought the most interesting comment was the following:
When we're looking at a painting, it's easy to think of it as a work of art, as something abstract, something constructed. With a picture, it's harder to tell what's been done to it. With all the effort that goes into making these images look the way they do, they're also fantasies; they're also works of art. Whatever's being advertised to us—a cream or a soap or a stretch-mark potion or a diet pill—will never actually make anyone perfect. Because perfect beauty can only be achieved with an airbrush.
In other words, we live in a world where beauty is not only a commodity, but a fantasy. We are told that beauty is necessary at the same time we are told that beauty is impossible. I’d quibble with Jesse Epstein (the journalist for this piece) that maintaining distance from painted/drawn artwork is as easy as all that, but I think it is worth mentioning that the more the these images ‘look like us’ the more extreme they become in terms of ‘perfection’. Every step we make closer to the images around us causes the images to make one step further away. Perfection must always remain a fantasy – such is the nature of Cinderella's magical clothes.
Which brings me, after that long preamble, to the Dollhouse. The Dollhouse, I would say, is the very embodiment of a cultural narrative, in what it does and the way that people treat it.
Because people don’t believe in the Dollhouse, except for when they do. It is repeatedly referred to as a fairy tale, explicitly by Paul Ballard’s boss in Ghost (1x01), implicitly by his colleagues in The Target (1x02), explicitly again by Lubov (who’s even part of the system) in Stage Fright (1x03). But, as many people who don’t believe in the Dollhouse and who believe that its existence would destroy the world as we know it (see the Professor Guy in Man on the Street (1x06): “If that technology exists... It'll be used. It'll be abused. It'll be global. And we will be over. As a species we will cease to matter.”), it has built enough awareness that everyone with the power knows where to go for their “needs”. As Paul says in A Spy in the House of Love (1x10): “The Dollhouse is way bigger than I ever thought it was. Every time I look deeper, I find more clients, larger amounts of money and a web of financial and political connections all over the world to corporations, the government, even inside the FBI.”
As a concept, it is not far-fetched, neither ideologically nor technologically. People replacing/changing their personalities so they can become a perfect date? That happens already: the “object” of a first date is “to hide your flaws”, as DeWitt says in A Spy in the House of Love (1x10). And, in this world, “somebody made a monkey tango”, or so Lubov says in Stage Fright (1x03). As much as the Dollhouse is stupidly sci-fi it is also a natural progression of this world’s rules. There is no real reason for people not to believe in its existence, but funnily enough it is most definitely in the Dollhouse’s interests. Not only to escape legal ramifications, but also because the more fantastic they are, the greater the perfection seems that they are offering. Our fantasy is perfection, which we know must be fantasy, as with retouching.
What does the Dollhouse offer? What does it ‘do’? Well, it creates identities. It creates people.
In my reaction post/review for True Believer (1x05), I found myself rambling the following (broken into two paragraphs for readability):
Victor's 'man reactions'... Thankfully not played overly for laughs - Dr. Saunders' straightwoman to [Topher’s] flapping about was amusing, but in a controlled suppressed-snort way. I'm glad about that, because if things progress darkly Sierra could get in a mess. I'm also glad because I can see why it's not gratuitous - it tells us so much about the dolls. They are supposed to be innocent/like children, but it seems to me now as though it's more like they're on the edge of puberty, all of them together. They are all still children, but always on the edge of being given imprints and experience, which take them into the adult world before they are forced back again to that point on the precipice. DeWitt's comments about Victor, that he should be 'scrubbed' etc. (I don't fully remember), that generally all temptation should be removed from the dolls lest it spread like some sort of disease was both interesting and horrifying.
I think this is what the Dollhouse presents us with, better than an image of human trafficking in and of itself: the Carrie-like suppression of pubescent children, an allowance of limited experience before enforced return to childhood. In Alpha we see someone who took experience for himself, seized on his maturity and he is hated. Echo risks doing the same - she's like the ten-year-old beauty queen realising what all the make-up and hair extensions mean and deciding for herself what she wants from them (and whether she's willing to take them all off when she comes back from the pageant). 'The Attic', which she is threatened with, suddenly reminds me of the Red Room in Jane Eyre, in general of the Victorian bad place where children should go when they decide they want to be not only seen but heard as well.
I still agree with this and now that I have my hands on the subtitles I can quote DeWitt’s speech properly:
A place of safety, of untroubled certainty, of purity. This is the world we must maintain. It is imperative that nothing disturb the innocence of life here. Once any temptation is introduced, it will spread, like a cancer, and all will be infected. Victor must be scrubbed and monitored closely.
It seems clear that the Dollhouse controls all. It is what informs the dolls’ lives and moulds them as people, playing with the mind/body/soul building blocks and taking them from ‘innocent’ children into adulthood. It does the work of a cultural narrative as well as being treated like one.
So we have a central metaphor. Faboo. But where do we go from there? Once we get into the realm of metatelevision and telling a story about telling stories (spinning a fantasy about fantasies?) this metaphor is surely going to crash rather violently into reality. Characters aren’t only going to be interacting with narratives as a concept, but living them, incapable of complaining, “Oi, Dollhouse! I don’t want to be endangered/rescued/abused!” (The italics are dreadfully important here.)
As the audience, though, we can. We can look at Dollhouse the way its characters look at the unitalicised Dollhouse and make judgements about whether we like what it’s doing. I would claim that the very story of Echo rebelling against the Dollhouse’s control invites and encourages us to do that.
The show, after all, seems rather consciously constructed as Not Real Life But Television. One of my very first reactions was that “it feels like it fits in with the world of TV as we know it very well”. I’ve seen “generic” as a description more than once. The cast on one level is very much like a collection of stock characters – the hard-nosed British woman (who does have feelings really), the geeky near-sociopath (with the hubris to make the whole world fall apart), the anti-authority hunky male lead...
And talking of that hunky male lead, he even breaks the realism of the show, with that stylistic flash-out to a boxing match in the first episode, emphasising his ‘struggle’. We are told in no uncertain terms that he is a character, not a person whose meeting we happen to be a fly on the wall for. And, as the story goes on, we are forced to question the very nature of this character. He thinks he’s the prince in Sleeping Beauty – his status as the hunky male lead certainly implied to me that was going to be his role – yet we come to realise through his interactions with Joel Mynor (in Man on the Street – 1x06) and treatment of Mellie that he actually has the potential to be something far darker. We are forced to wonder what it means when he eventually mounts his rescue-attempt and whether the prince from Sleeping Beauty could ever even have existed.
More than Ballard though, we have Echo. We have Eliza Dushku in ridiculously short skirts. Remember what I argued earlier about the most pernicious cultural narratives working against women? Well, Echo certainly seems to do pretty badly when it comes to her treatment by the Dollhouse and indeed Dollhouse itself. She is given stories week on week, a large number of which seem pointless and floundering. (Why is she a midwife randomly at the beginning of Gray Hour – 1x04? That’s what I want to know, Joss! Why would Alpha imprint her as a background singer unless he was starting an evil band?) She is sexualised, objectified and used, for no clear “reason”.
It’s not only by the story, however, it’s by us the audience, in such a way that we don’t just want to watch her as a character, we want merch with her
As a specific example I find the opening credits for Dollhouse remarkably interesting, because they are constructed from moments which mostly could be in the show, but aren’t. And most of them aren’t from the unaired pilot either. This is at odds at least with the way the BtVS and AtS credits were constructed and the result is that the sequences aren’t glimpses into her story, but gratuitously created shots of Echo's
There is one moment when Echo is looking in the mirror, clearly on the Dollhouse set. One of her images is undressing and we can see her naked back, the other faces us still clothed. This moment seems to me like a direct challenge: which Echo do we look at? The one getting naked or the one showing us her emotions? Are we going to conform to the cultural narrative that states that naked female flesh is there for
To me that seems like the ultimate question of Dollhouse. Within the confines of the show’s fictional world all the characters question and interact with the Dollhouse. On a meta level they have their own storylines, both literal and perhaps guessable from their stereotypes – we are asked whether we accept them. And, finally, we are forced to question whether we will even question things at all. Will we simply allow Dollhouse to parade Eliza in front of us, scantily-clad? Will we accept that this is how TV works, that the male gaze is to be satisfied? Or will we refuse to be distracted and demand to know more about the nature of the Dollhouse’s human trafficking?
As I said above, it is to the Dollhouse’s advantage to be seen as a fantasy: perfect and unrealistic. Dollhouse the show on some level seems to me like it tries to create the same facade. It’s a show about prostitution, about rape, about the pursuit of beauty and the mutability of identity – but it’s a show mainly from the villains’ perspective, without any voice that isn’t morally grey. As in life, the viewer has to look past ubiquitous perfection (brought about in part by dissenting voices being discredited) to understand what’s really going on. Otherwise you end up commenting like Charlie Brooker of the Guardian (emphasis mine):
It's just nonsense. And nonsense is fine when it consists of a small kernel of nonsense surrounded by something either plausible or interesting. Dollhouse has neither and, crucially, there's too much emphasis on empty prettiness, from the set design to the faces of all involved. Everyone's so improbably gorgeous you won't give a shit whether they live or die.
Because let us not forget the cultural narrative that states, as much as we should crave beauty and perfection, whoever has them? Should be shunned.
(no subject)
Date: 16/09/2009 18:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16/09/2009 18:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/09/2009 01:39 (UTC)Anyway, this is really interesting. I'm especially grateful for your thoughts on the opening credits, because they have been bugging me for so long, and this is really the first time I've seen any real analysis. I'll be watching the new credits with re-newed interest!
(no subject)
Date: 19/09/2009 12:14 (UTC)I hadn't twigged the Alice in Wonderland references at all - but, of course, yes! What an interesting comment on today's word, where the (only?) time we find someone as openly 'childlike' as Alice is in a sex-game... (Though I suppose that could be a slight dig at Lewis Carrol too.)
As for Paul, I do wonder whether the realisation that 'saving' Caroline was actually catching a wedge (maybe as the summation of what 'Caroline' is?) was meant to be more momentous than it was. I agree with you that I thought the conclusion to that story should be that he didn't do any sort of 'saving' at all, but oh well... I hope he doesn't stop being deconstructed when the new season starts! I was starting to like him for being ripped apart...