If you missed the premiere of Glee, Ryan Murphy’s new Fox offering set to return Sept. 16, you can see it on the Fox Web site or on Hulu, and you really should, despite its confusing and empty first ten minutes. It’s often risky to judge an hour-long serial too much by its pilot episode, because a show often needs several episodes or more to find its dramatic rhythm, a sense of its characters, and a coherent style and tone. Yet I think we can dispense with much of that caution in this case, for Glee is both a comedy and a musical, and it’s clear already that it succeeds abundantly in both genres. Despite some underdeveloped characters and an odd focus, it seems likely to feature enough humor and exuberance to make it a pleasure even if we are forced to enjoy its episodes as stand-alone pieces more than as increments in semi-serious character arcs. (Every show about adolescents should try to achieve at least a little seriousness, or poignancy, or something of the sort; the subject demands it.)
A show with an intense, quirky ensemble cast set in a high school will inevitably have its soapy elements, of course, yet if these transcend cliché, I’ll be surprised (and thrilled). For starters, the kids seem like stock characters. Consider born-to-sing Rachel (Lea Michele) — obsessive and demanding about the glee club, ostensibly an outsider — who seems troubled by her ostracized-artist status for all of a minute. Given her conventionally gorgeous looks and considerable talent, it seems unclear why she would be unpopular in the first place, except for her frantic need to prove herself, which itself, alas seems inexplicable. While teenagers with popularity, beauty, and talent to burn have their share of insecurities, we aren’t shown the context for hers, which leaves them seeming like comedic devices rather than humanizing qualities. Her peers on the team haven’t emerged enough as individuals yet to comment on, except for Finn (Cory Hudson), who is given the delightful dual role of being simultaneously a star football player and a newly discovered singing talent. His clueless jock observations, equally earnest and oblivious (dad “died in Iraq when we were fighting Osama bin Laden the first time”), are funny but make him more than a little ridiculous.
Then there’s the fact that these troubled kids — variously described or describing themselves as invisible, anonymous, hated — are scarcely shown in the rest of their allegedly difficult lives, only onstage. Oddly, the adult stories have more texture — Jayma Mays is a standout as a fellow teacher infatuated with Will (Matthew Morrison), the earnest coach. These subplots are great, but a show about high school probably needs to have successful portrayals of its students to feel fully realized.
So — it seems like it will be hard to invest emotionally in the struggles of the young singers. But with comedic lines (“I reek of management potential,” “Dr. Phil said that people could change”) and joyous performances of a wide and weird amalgam of songs (“Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Rehab,” etc.) following in quick succession, we will be happy viewers anyway. Then there’s the fact that the very appearance of a musical on network TV is such a change from the melodramatic formulas that typify coming-of-age series, and Glee deserves a healthy chance for this reason alone.
Note: lightly edited May 31 for clarity, syntax, and emphasis.
2009-05-31
2009-05-14
The Taboo on Technological Optimism: A Dollhouse Retrospective
[Spoilers for Dollhouse, season 1; Angel, season 4; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6]
JOSS WHEDON ALWAYS makes interesting television, and Dollhouse is no exception. How sad, then, that this complicated show, boasting an unusual, daring narrative style, in some ways also turned out to be so conventional.
I. The Wrong Kind of Villain (and What He Crowds Out)
The Dollhouse finale, “Omega,” focuses on the goals of a person whom we already know to be quite crazy. After all the buzz about this episode, its main revelation is that his goals turn out to be … crazy. (This sort of underwhelming parallelism was not inevitable. People who are troubled or even crazy can have goals that are interesting, ambiguous, layered, even redemptive.) When Echo turns against Alpha, the moment feels predictable and uninspiring. (You can’t help but think anyone, even a doll, would have to recoil from such plans.) Echo’s assertive and thoroughly sane attitude throughout the rest of the episode merely duplicates a trend we’d seen throughout the season, and with increasing depth in several episodes of the second half. Although it also included a few touching moments that deserved more elaboration, the continued focus on an Active-gone-bad makes this last hour melodramatic and shallow, undermining the show’s intermittent efforts at thematic reach.
Notwithstanding his complex origins, Alpha — a technologically induced being, an unplanned composite of dozens of identities — is actually quite simple; he essentially wants … power. This kind of grandiosity certainly exists in many people, yet the choice to focus the last two episodes on such a character, rather than on the motives and machinations of the puppetmasters, amounts to a counterproductive reductionism. Dollhouse, after all, is a television series self-consciously seeking complex moral inquiry rather than relying on Manichean formula. It aims to explore the complexity of our enmeshment within corrupt but valuable social institutions. While some elements of the show suggest questions along these lines, more often this exploration is avoided, and the season culminates in a use of the mad-scientist motif that amounts to a catastrophic repudiation of this whole moral project. Alpha’s cartoon-like, megalomaniacal fantasies — which seem clearly to be Whedon et al.’s amplified commentary on the dollhouse technology itself — allow us, in a facile way, to feel safely superior not only to him but to the organization that created him. To put the point another way, Alpha’s characterization and especially the way it reflects on the dollhouse (about which more later) violate what ought to be a major rule of genre fiction — that it feature interesting villains — a rule that the show had previously tried to respect.
There’s a glaring contrast between the anticlimactic finale, with its convenient, essentially inhuman enemy epitomizing the deranged vision of his creators, and the intriguing original premise. We had been led to entertain the counterintuitive and upsetting possibility that the dollhouse organization and its operatives had made a complex, rather than absurd, moral calculation in acting against core human attributes — memory and selfhood. One suspected they were pursuing a larger (social? political? medical?) mission that our ordinary, and vital, moral categories somehow neglect. Rather than being sidelined for the killer-on-the-run finale, a part of that mission could have been revealed — an exciting prospect which would have invited debate. Similarly, Actives might have been designed to retain some subjectivity rather than as blank slates, so that we might be able to feel ambivalent about, even tempted by, their altered state of being. Perhaps the primary clients of the dollhouse could have been the actives themselves, rather than merely wealthy outsiders. The famous statement from the pilot — An active is the truest soul among us — might then have become a plausible claim, even a partial truth, rather than a risible piece of corporate propaganda.
The squandered possibilities for raising challenging philosophical questions abound. One might even have hoped for a creative re-imagining of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov. One instructive template for this possibility is found elsewhere in Whedon’s own work, in the haunting climax of Angel, season four. A mysterious deity called Jasmine arrives in Los Angeles, providing all who encounter her a peace that surpasses understanding, at the cost of their ability to form independent judgments about her or their deepest values. In the end, free will is returned to the citizens of Los Angeles (and Jasmine’s television viewers elsewhere) — and it comes with a horrible price. While most viewers no doubt agree with Angel that some sort of free will is essential to human dignity and that Jasmine had to be defeated, it is a victory that leaves one feeling relief mingled with dread; this victory will leave unknowable torment, innumerable victims, in its wake.
The duality of her power is striking almost from the moment of her arrival. Jasmine clearly had perpetrated a terrifying spiritual violation on everyone around her, silently and irresistibly inducing a state of obedient worship — a clear and chilling metaphor for religious indoctrination. This form of worship, however, is mingled with an equally apparent state of blissful trust and inner harmony. At the conclusion, everyone’s selfhood is returned, and, like Buffy Summers ripped from heaven, many seem broken by the change. One senses they will not easily find anything resembling the peace or goodwill they had enjoyed under Jasmine’s influence. This arc of faith found and lost is simultaneously a trenchant critique of organized religion and a subtler statement about the deficiencies of the belief in self-sufficiency that does so much, for better and worse, to define the American character.
In “Man on the Street,” the challenge an eerily appropriated Echo (herself, of course, already an altered form of another appropriated self) had posed — that Agent Ballard should find out why the dollhouse exists — had suggested that the series would explore similar domains of moral complexity. We were led to wonder: Might that purpose have redeeming features? The possibility of such layering was suggested by numerous character subtleties, such as Adele DeWitt’s former profession of medical research and Boyd Langdon’s anomalous, pervasively compassionate presence in the organization. Increasingly, however, in its second half — even before the troubled digression into the Alpha subplot — the series had begun to focus more narrowly on providing thrilling, innovative twists on the suspense genre.
II. Questions of Power
These twists, admittedly, were not entirely without thematic content. They showed us, powerfully, that divided loyalties and hidden identities abound in an organization that wields so much power with so little oversight or dialogue. The hierarchical model of the corporation serves as a frightening repository for the management of such power. Laurence Dominic, you will recall, made this claim, briefly, in “A Spy in the House of Love” — to my mind the single most compelling episode.
But even these political messages — already narrower and less interesting than the show’s presumed philosophical interests in ethics, phenomenology, identity, and the like — were expressed too briefly. The question of how memory- and personality-altering technology might be managed with more accountability is not explored. Instead, we are left to conclude simply that the uncertain, inconsistent benevolence of those in power ought not be trusted. Insofar as the show is musing metaphorically about authority, or (as an interesting essay posted on io9.com suggested), about how we all misuse it, Dollhouse would have had to say far more before its exploration in this area could be said to be interesting, let alone challenging. In a post-George W. Bush era (with all due respect to his supporters), not to mention the legacies of Watergate, the Vietnam War, communism, and fascism, does anyone need fiction to understand that power can be abused?
(As for the claim that the show critiques our own tendencies to use other people — which I think could be a compelling message — this idea, I think, falters on the sheer extremity of the technology as depicted. If most of us regularly manipulate people, we hardly can be said to do so as directly and deeply as dollhouse clients do. An interesting variant of this we-are-all-akin-to-dollhouse-clients claim might be made about the harm of certain practices associated with globalization, which arguably has produced plenty of unseen victims, partly for the benefit of stockholders and consumers in wealthy countries. Ultimately, however, the parallel doesn’t work very well. The dollhouse relies on individual transactions, while the most important economic decisions are made by corporate and bureaucratic elites.)
The reality of everyday life, despite our awareness of its abuses, is that power is a pervasive, if often implicit, aspect of our social worlds; it is sometimes used for good and sometimes for ill. This is the moral reality we want explored with respect for its ambiguities. Instead, even the nascent critique of power imbalances the later episodes do achieve is cut short by the Alpha narrative, which in its pessimism proves too much. After all, why bother to contemplate who should control the power of this technology if it’s inherently corrupting? Alpha’s story really serves as a kind of Luddite warning about the dangers of science and technology and, implicitly, the quest for transcendence. It confirms the cliched message that experimentation equals hubris equals doom. Serious moral complexity is sacrificed; Ballard joins the ranks of the dollhouse with no enthusiasm or moral conversion to some larger mission, but purely for instrumental purposes (to secure November’s release). Echo — whose rebellion throughout had at least suggested technology cannot kill the human spirit very easily — returns meekly to the fold (as if to say, repeating the lesson of Alpha’s example, that you can’t trust technology after all).
III. The Taboo on Positive Futures
Of course, the dollhouse concept as literally presented is indeed morally unacceptable, in fact horrifying; at one level we are relieved that Ballard apparently retains his moral outrage about it. But we already know that slavery is wrong, and selfhood precious. We might have expected from Whedon’s curious mind a thematic focus on a different sort of conversation. Dollhouse could have explored the idea that selfhood is not only precious, but also, in some ways, problematic, and it could have explored how technology and a collective effort to manage it (in less objectionable form) might help salve the horrors we face in life.
The quandaries that led volunteers to sign contracts to join the dollhouse hint at this sort of open-minded inquiry. We see some of the traumas of life-as-it-was for these “volunteers.” These tentative acknowledgments of human desperation, however, finally cannot serve as even partial vindication for the dollhouse concept. Notice that the incentives and remedies DeWitt offers these vulnerable people are thoroughly mundane — money, assistance in avoiding prosecution — that is, forms of payment for participating in the technology, not a promise of deliverance or support via applications of the technology itself. In consequence, a host of other interesting questions are not explored:
At times, Dollhouse showed a more curious, ambiguous perspective. It showed signs of political and existential curiosity — more, certainly, than we tend to encounter on network television. But insofar as the dictates of network executives for conventional suspense-genre trappings and the specter of Alpha’s horrific project define the series, it’s something of a paean to paternalistic authority: Will the dollhouse be brought down, and the natural order restored? The show could have asked whether undeniably dangerous experiments with our scientific and social arrangements could be refashioned in collaborative ways. Or suppose instead that we reject altogether this drive to experiment, to learn more, to feel better and freer, as the show seems to prefer. This choice may leave us safer (or more sheltered); but will we be safer, freer, more sane in the long run? Or will we remain stuck with the sources of anomie, despair, and mistrust that already confront us every day?
No doubt subsequent seasons of Dollhouse would explore broader questions and provide more ambiguous, interesting answers. “Epitaph One,” the final episode of the season, which has yet to air*, sounds promising. But as I have suggested, the trajectory of this season as aired and the form of the memory-erasing premise the show employed are already problems insofar as that season is considered on its own terms. In the end, one cannot blame the creators of the show for being more skeptical of personality-altering technology than some of its viewers; it’s invigorating to take in art with a sharp point of view. But one must blame them for constructing the show on terms that force us to agree with them, and (so far) for only grazing the questions that might really expand our imaginations.
*Originally I wrote that it would be available on DVD, but apparently it may yet air. This post has also been edited for spelling and to clean up code. -May 18
JOSS WHEDON ALWAYS makes interesting television, and Dollhouse is no exception. How sad, then, that this complicated show, boasting an unusual, daring narrative style, in some ways also turned out to be so conventional.
I. The Wrong Kind of Villain (and What He Crowds Out)
The Dollhouse finale, “Omega,” focuses on the goals of a person whom we already know to be quite crazy. After all the buzz about this episode, its main revelation is that his goals turn out to be … crazy. (This sort of underwhelming parallelism was not inevitable. People who are troubled or even crazy can have goals that are interesting, ambiguous, layered, even redemptive.) When Echo turns against Alpha, the moment feels predictable and uninspiring. (You can’t help but think anyone, even a doll, would have to recoil from such plans.) Echo’s assertive and thoroughly sane attitude throughout the rest of the episode merely duplicates a trend we’d seen throughout the season, and with increasing depth in several episodes of the second half. Although it also included a few touching moments that deserved more elaboration, the continued focus on an Active-gone-bad makes this last hour melodramatic and shallow, undermining the show’s intermittent efforts at thematic reach.
Notwithstanding his complex origins, Alpha — a technologically induced being, an unplanned composite of dozens of identities — is actually quite simple; he essentially wants … power. This kind of grandiosity certainly exists in many people, yet the choice to focus the last two episodes on such a character, rather than on the motives and machinations of the puppetmasters, amounts to a counterproductive reductionism. Dollhouse, after all, is a television series self-consciously seeking complex moral inquiry rather than relying on Manichean formula. It aims to explore the complexity of our enmeshment within corrupt but valuable social institutions. While some elements of the show suggest questions along these lines, more often this exploration is avoided, and the season culminates in a use of the mad-scientist motif that amounts to a catastrophic repudiation of this whole moral project. Alpha’s cartoon-like, megalomaniacal fantasies — which seem clearly to be Whedon et al.’s amplified commentary on the dollhouse technology itself — allow us, in a facile way, to feel safely superior not only to him but to the organization that created him. To put the point another way, Alpha’s characterization and especially the way it reflects on the dollhouse (about which more later) violate what ought to be a major rule of genre fiction — that it feature interesting villains — a rule that the show had previously tried to respect.
There’s a glaring contrast between the anticlimactic finale, with its convenient, essentially inhuman enemy epitomizing the deranged vision of his creators, and the intriguing original premise. We had been led to entertain the counterintuitive and upsetting possibility that the dollhouse organization and its operatives had made a complex, rather than absurd, moral calculation in acting against core human attributes — memory and selfhood. One suspected they were pursuing a larger (social? political? medical?) mission that our ordinary, and vital, moral categories somehow neglect. Rather than being sidelined for the killer-on-the-run finale, a part of that mission could have been revealed — an exciting prospect which would have invited debate. Similarly, Actives might have been designed to retain some subjectivity rather than as blank slates, so that we might be able to feel ambivalent about, even tempted by, their altered state of being. Perhaps the primary clients of the dollhouse could have been the actives themselves, rather than merely wealthy outsiders. The famous statement from the pilot — An active is the truest soul among us — might then have become a plausible claim, even a partial truth, rather than a risible piece of corporate propaganda.
The squandered possibilities for raising challenging philosophical questions abound. One might even have hoped for a creative re-imagining of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov. One instructive template for this possibility is found elsewhere in Whedon’s own work, in the haunting climax of Angel, season four. A mysterious deity called Jasmine arrives in Los Angeles, providing all who encounter her a peace that surpasses understanding, at the cost of their ability to form independent judgments about her or their deepest values. In the end, free will is returned to the citizens of Los Angeles (and Jasmine’s television viewers elsewhere) — and it comes with a horrible price. While most viewers no doubt agree with Angel that some sort of free will is essential to human dignity and that Jasmine had to be defeated, it is a victory that leaves one feeling relief mingled with dread; this victory will leave unknowable torment, innumerable victims, in its wake.
The duality of her power is striking almost from the moment of her arrival. Jasmine clearly had perpetrated a terrifying spiritual violation on everyone around her, silently and irresistibly inducing a state of obedient worship — a clear and chilling metaphor for religious indoctrination. This form of worship, however, is mingled with an equally apparent state of blissful trust and inner harmony. At the conclusion, everyone’s selfhood is returned, and, like Buffy Summers ripped from heaven, many seem broken by the change. One senses they will not easily find anything resembling the peace or goodwill they had enjoyed under Jasmine’s influence. This arc of faith found and lost is simultaneously a trenchant critique of organized religion and a subtler statement about the deficiencies of the belief in self-sufficiency that does so much, for better and worse, to define the American character.
In “Man on the Street,” the challenge an eerily appropriated Echo (herself, of course, already an altered form of another appropriated self) had posed — that Agent Ballard should find out why the dollhouse exists — had suggested that the series would explore similar domains of moral complexity. We were led to wonder: Might that purpose have redeeming features? The possibility of such layering was suggested by numerous character subtleties, such as Adele DeWitt’s former profession of medical research and Boyd Langdon’s anomalous, pervasively compassionate presence in the organization. Increasingly, however, in its second half — even before the troubled digression into the Alpha subplot — the series had begun to focus more narrowly on providing thrilling, innovative twists on the suspense genre.
II. Questions of Power
These twists, admittedly, were not entirely without thematic content. They showed us, powerfully, that divided loyalties and hidden identities abound in an organization that wields so much power with so little oversight or dialogue. The hierarchical model of the corporation serves as a frightening repository for the management of such power. Laurence Dominic, you will recall, made this claim, briefly, in “A Spy in the House of Love” — to my mind the single most compelling episode.
But even these political messages — already narrower and less interesting than the show’s presumed philosophical interests in ethics, phenomenology, identity, and the like — were expressed too briefly. The question of how memory- and personality-altering technology might be managed with more accountability is not explored. Instead, we are left to conclude simply that the uncertain, inconsistent benevolence of those in power ought not be trusted. Insofar as the show is musing metaphorically about authority, or (as an interesting essay posted on io9.com suggested), about how we all misuse it, Dollhouse would have had to say far more before its exploration in this area could be said to be interesting, let alone challenging. In a post-George W. Bush era (with all due respect to his supporters), not to mention the legacies of Watergate, the Vietnam War, communism, and fascism, does anyone need fiction to understand that power can be abused?
(As for the claim that the show critiques our own tendencies to use other people — which I think could be a compelling message — this idea, I think, falters on the sheer extremity of the technology as depicted. If most of us regularly manipulate people, we hardly can be said to do so as directly and deeply as dollhouse clients do. An interesting variant of this we-are-all-akin-to-dollhouse-clients claim might be made about the harm of certain practices associated with globalization, which arguably has produced plenty of unseen victims, partly for the benefit of stockholders and consumers in wealthy countries. Ultimately, however, the parallel doesn’t work very well. The dollhouse relies on individual transactions, while the most important economic decisions are made by corporate and bureaucratic elites.)
The reality of everyday life, despite our awareness of its abuses, is that power is a pervasive, if often implicit, aspect of our social worlds; it is sometimes used for good and sometimes for ill. This is the moral reality we want explored with respect for its ambiguities. Instead, even the nascent critique of power imbalances the later episodes do achieve is cut short by the Alpha narrative, which in its pessimism proves too much. After all, why bother to contemplate who should control the power of this technology if it’s inherently corrupting? Alpha’s story really serves as a kind of Luddite warning about the dangers of science and technology and, implicitly, the quest for transcendence. It confirms the cliched message that experimentation equals hubris equals doom. Serious moral complexity is sacrificed; Ballard joins the ranks of the dollhouse with no enthusiasm or moral conversion to some larger mission, but purely for instrumental purposes (to secure November’s release). Echo — whose rebellion throughout had at least suggested technology cannot kill the human spirit very easily — returns meekly to the fold (as if to say, repeating the lesson of Alpha’s example, that you can’t trust technology after all).
III. The Taboo on Positive Futures
Of course, the dollhouse concept as literally presented is indeed morally unacceptable, in fact horrifying; at one level we are relieved that Ballard apparently retains his moral outrage about it. But we already know that slavery is wrong, and selfhood precious. We might have expected from Whedon’s curious mind a thematic focus on a different sort of conversation. Dollhouse could have explored the idea that selfhood is not only precious, but also, in some ways, problematic, and it could have explored how technology and a collective effort to manage it (in less objectionable form) might help salve the horrors we face in life.
The quandaries that led volunteers to sign contracts to join the dollhouse hint at this sort of open-minded inquiry. We see some of the traumas of life-as-it-was for these “volunteers.” These tentative acknowledgments of human desperation, however, finally cannot serve as even partial vindication for the dollhouse concept. Notice that the incentives and remedies DeWitt offers these vulnerable people are thoroughly mundane — money, assistance in avoiding prosecution — that is, forms of payment for participating in the technology, not a promise of deliverance or support via applications of the technology itself. In consequence, a host of other interesting questions are not explored:
- How might someone be helped by absorbing so many experiences, skills, perspectives?
- What new forms of empathy, connection, and creativity might be possible with this technology?
- Most of all, why does a person need to remain erased, rather than, say, restored to herself with memories of her imprints, between assignments?
At times, Dollhouse showed a more curious, ambiguous perspective. It showed signs of political and existential curiosity — more, certainly, than we tend to encounter on network television. But insofar as the dictates of network executives for conventional suspense-genre trappings and the specter of Alpha’s horrific project define the series, it’s something of a paean to paternalistic authority: Will the dollhouse be brought down, and the natural order restored? The show could have asked whether undeniably dangerous experiments with our scientific and social arrangements could be refashioned in collaborative ways. Or suppose instead that we reject altogether this drive to experiment, to learn more, to feel better and freer, as the show seems to prefer. This choice may leave us safer (or more sheltered); but will we be safer, freer, more sane in the long run? Or will we remain stuck with the sources of anomie, despair, and mistrust that already confront us every day?
No doubt subsequent seasons of Dollhouse would explore broader questions and provide more ambiguous, interesting answers. “Epitaph One,” the final episode of the season, which has yet to air*, sounds promising. But as I have suggested, the trajectory of this season as aired and the form of the memory-erasing premise the show employed are already problems insofar as that season is considered on its own terms. In the end, one cannot blame the creators of the show for being more skeptical of personality-altering technology than some of its viewers; it’s invigorating to take in art with a sharp point of view. But one must blame them for constructing the show on terms that force us to agree with them, and (so far) for only grazing the questions that might really expand our imaginations.
*Originally I wrote that it would be available on DVD, but apparently it may yet air. This post has also been edited for spelling and to clean up code. -May 18
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Look here for individual reviews and broader reflections on fiction and its possibilities, speculation on forthcoming works, links to interesting sources on the subject, and lots more. Television, short stories, novels, comics, movies—all these media will get some attention. Please visit often and share your comments. Spoilers will generally be avoided; warning will be provided before they are used.
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