Battlestar Galactica, with its dark meditations on prophecy, war and Cylon
identity, is the shining recent example, but seemingly cornier fare can also
provide candy-coated conundrums that bear rumination, and that almost
sneak up on you with their significance. Dollhouse, a Fox TV show created by
Joss Whedon — the cult-show-breeding mastermind behind Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, Angel and the too-briefly-seen Serenity — is a glossy, jiggly, fisticuffs
entertainment marked by many of the Whedon moves that made Buffy such
a success: playful banter, accessible smarts and a pleasing air of unreality.
At the same time, Dollhouse manages to sink its sexy teeth into some of the
core anxieties — and possibilities — of our neurological century.
The show, whose first season was released on DVD this summer and which has been renewed for its
second season despite mediocre ratings, centers on an illegal and quasi-mythical organization in Los
Angeles that uses a fantastic neurological technology to provide programmable human “dolls” to
wealthy clients for any number of tasks: sex, companionship, criminal deeds. Between assignments,
the dolls — whose original selves have contractually agreed to offload their personalities and serve
five-year terms of servitude before getting their selves back — live like contented lobotomy
patients in the “dollhouse,” an underground facility that resembles an Ayurvedic spa, Santa
Monica-style. A rogue cop is hunting the organization, which is also experiencing its own
technical difficulties — most notably the pesky tendency of some dolls to grow towards
self-awareness and occasionally explode with festivals of batsh*t mayhem.
On one level, Dollhouse is just the sort of goofy, cleavage-baring thriller you might
expect to see on Fox on a Friday night. Hotties and motorcycles abound, edits are
slick and fast, and the requisite chase scenes and bone-crunching ninja brawls are
often executed in high heels, for which the show has a considerable fetish. Despite
the intelligence and wit of many episodes, the narrative flow often feels more like
a roller-coaster than an organic story, with abrupt and needless twists and turns
that derive less from plot or character needs than the compulsion to yank the
audience around. The acting is so-so throughout, with few of the actors rising to
the challenge of embodying characters that are not really “characters” at all, but
flesh-bots who oscillate between innocuous zombiedom and a revolving door of
one-shot personalities.
Still, in spite of the show’s glaze of artificial popcorn butter — or perhaps,
given the loop-de-loop logic of sensationalist popular culture, precisely because
of its disarming layer of cheese — Dollhouse takes a reasonably meaty bite out
of one of the more ominous and potentially liberating conundrums of 21st century
life: the thoroughly constructed nature of human identity. The show frames this
conundrum in terms of neuroscience and the pervasive pop metaphor of the
mind as a programmable input-output device. Original personalities are “wiped”
and stored on cartridges that resemble old 8-track tapes; other “imprints” are not
only shuffled between the dolls but remixed into the perfect blend of characteristics
for any given job. The show’s ambivalence about such “posthuman” technologies is
captured by the character who does all the wiping and remixing: a smug, immature,
and charmingly nerdish wetware genius named Topher Brink, whose simultaneously
dopey and snarky incarnation by the actor Fran Kranz reflects the weird mix of arrogance
and creative exuberance that inform so much manipulative neuroscience.
For a science-fiction thriller, there is not much emphasis on gadgetry. In one episode,
the doll Echo, played by Buffy vet Eliza Dushku, is implanted with a “brain camera” that turns
her into a remote surveillance device that allows the ATF to spy on the creepy religious cult
she has been programmed to infiltrate (paradoxically — or perhaps allegorically — the device
temporarily blinds her). But overall, Dollhouse is much less concerned about posthuman technology
than it is about current social reality, or at least about how the late capitalist media culture that
saturates our lives will transform through posthuman technology into a dizzying scramble of identity and
desire.
That’s why Dollhouse can be read most basically as an ironic reflection of Hollywood itself, and especially
the peculiar fate of actors living in LA. When not
on assignment, the dolls, who are uniformly fit
and attractive, spend their time doing yoga,
swimming, sleeping, and eating five star
food — presumably with vegan and raw
options. “It’s important to exercise,” they
murmur like Stepford wives. “I try to be
my best.” This almost literally mindless
maintenance of happy leisure — the
ideal of SoCal’s hedonic “good life” — is
then contrasted with the caricatured and
often highly skilled roles these hardbody
blank slates are episodically compelled
to perform. The dollhouse can be seen as
a Hollywood house of mirrors. In one show,
we even glimpse the operation’s enormous
costume room, a museum of fabricated
identities that would be far more familiar to the
actors on the show than to the vast majority of the
punters watching the thing on TV.
On a deeper level, the business of the dollhouse
— which one staff member sardonically describes as being
“pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way” — simply literalizes
aspects of human power relationships that all of us are already familiar
with in the mundane, not-quite-Sci-Fi world that we already live in, and that
the show itself often self-consciously references. Lovers use one another to sustain
fantasies of dominance and submission, cult leaders enslave believers, military organizations
treat soldiers as pawns, and even the most successful pop music diva is — as one character proclaims — “a
factory girl.” All of us are dolls sometimes, and dollhouse engineers other times. Cleverly, Dollhouse incarnates this fundamental
split between masters and slaves in the panopticon-inspired architecture of the dollhouse set itself, which places the employees who
run the show on a balcony that looks down onto the dolls flexing their muscles or sleeping below. The space has an open, airy feel, with
few locked doors, and this deceptive informality disguises an invisible architecture of control.
The uncanniness of invisible control systems — whether in fictions of real life — helps motivate the paranoia that runs through the show.
This stretches from the “gigantic multipronged conspiracy” of the international dollhouse organization itself — captured in one episode in
the classic image of a wall covered with an octopus of documents, thumbtacks, and linking strings—to the fact that, in a BSG -like twist, we
don’t always know which new characters we meet are actually dolls on assignment. Occasionally, these paradoxes take us into pure Philip K.
Dick territory, particularly towards the end of the first season, when — spoiler alert — the cop pursuing the organization not only discovers
that his lover is a doll, but watches her concocted personality get momentarily over-ridden by a more mysterious persona whose covert
messages seemingly come from an unknown mole inside the organization.
39
www.hplusmagazine.comShadowy
international
conspiracies are
the bread-and-butter of
thrillers these days, but the
undertow of suspicion that runs
through Dollhouse ultimately turns on a
premise that hits pretty close to home: the
possibility that you yourself, dear TV fan, are
more of a construct than you suppose. In one
episode, a number of random people on the
street are asked for their opinions about the
dollhouse, which many discount as an urban
legend. One complains that the organization, if
it exists, takes away “everything that makes you
more than a cluster of neurons.” But isn’t this the
big question: what if we are just a cluster of neurons?
And what does that possibility do to our understanding
of morality and choice, fantasy and personality?
While Dollhouse mostly hints at the darker dimension of
the neuron cluster, it also hints at some of the upside — not
least of which is the functional immortality that might come with
replicating that pattern of neurons, a revolutionary possibility that the
show flirts with but, lamely, only barely explores. Many of the missions
the dolls undertake also heal far more than they harm, and there
are hints as well that the organization itself is not as nefarious as it
first appears. Even the dolls are not totally mindless slaves — as the
season progresses, a few begin to exhibit behaviors that go beyond
their programs, some of which reflect deeply hard-wired traces of their
original personalities and more interesting ones that suggest budding
forms of self-consciousness and moral agency.
In one episode, the doll Echo is hired out as an art thief, and has an
encounter with a Picasso painting whose cubist portraiture she interprets as
signs of a broken self. But Picasso’s fractured perspectives could equally be
seen as an attempt to expand beyond the conventional self and its “single vision”
into a wider embrace and affirmation of the many identities that potentially flow through
us — a flow that may soon become something more like a tsunami.
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Erik Davis regularly posts to
www.techgnosis.com. His most recent book was The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape.
