An Exploitive Show Vs. A Show Examining Exploitation

"I've had a relationship with the group Equality Now since its inception; and I was visiting the New York offices, which I hadn't been in, right after I had pitched the show. So I decided, just off the cuff, to sit everybody down and tell them what I was going to do, because I figured I would never have a tougher room than that. And I think the reactions were mixed. Some people thought there's a discussion going on there, and it's interesting and it's worthy. And some people thought it sounds just like glorifying human trafficking, which is something they particularly fight against. And so, you know, it was sort of a harbinger of what was to come, which is that this show is going to get some very mixed reactions, and I think it is going to make some people who are fans of my political stance probably angry; some others not, I think. But the idea was to open a discussion, and I think now there may be some shouting during it."

-Joss Whedon, on NPR's Fresh Air.

There's this thing floating around about Dollhouse, that it is somehow incongruent with Whedon's feminism, that it somehow detracts from his feminist cred card. It is there when Jacki Lyden, of NPR's All Things Considered, says, "I have to say looking at it, it looks to me and feels to me like the ultimate misogynistic male fantasy". I don't think that is entirely correct. If the show turns out to only be about the ultimate misogynistic male fantasy, if it is titillation and little else, then I think it would be a valid critique. However, just the first episode reflected some of the themes Whedon has penned before. When Paul says, "If the only way to imprint a human being with a new personality... ...is to remove their own, completely, we're talking about people walking around who may as well have been murdered. Which, to me, sounds pretty bad", it mirrors Simon telling the crew about what the government had done to River, and when he discovered they stripped her amygdala. When Topher tells Echo that Sierra is undergoing a treatment and that they are making her better, it conjures Mal's soliloquy about how the ruling body will "swing back to the belief that they can make people... Better. And I do not hold to that". When the allusion is made to human trafficking when discussing The Dollhouse operation, the misogynistic male fantasy side of the equation drops down a bit, I believe.

What seems to be overlooked in this particular criticism of Dollhouse is that there is a key difference between an exploitive show and a show examining exploitation. There is a key difference between a misogynistic show, and a show that examines misogyny.

The world Dollhouse inhabits may have misogynistic themes and tendencies; it may be a sexist world. But so is our own. The Dollhouse and the Actives that are housed within it may merely be exaggerations of this life we live. And by doing that, by exaggerating and making more prominent these parts of society that Whedon is disgusted by or intrigued by, and watching how he attempts to reconcile Echo's eventual reclaiming of her life and her autonomy, Whedon may further his feminist message. When Lyden asks, "She's not in any sense in control of her own life, so why present that type of main female character?" she is doing Dollhouse wrong. Because the show isn't about a Buffy character (who, incidentally, was trapped in the same basic premise as Echo is, being used by an organization larger than she who believed her to be a worthy object but not an actual autonomous being); Whedon has already given us a Buffy - and a Zoe, and a River, and a Willow, and a Kaylee, and a Cordelia and the list goes on and on. He has already purposefully created a feminist icon; several, in point of fact. But the question becomes who am I most like? Who are most women like? What do most women have to deal with? I'm not really a Buffy no matter how much I want to be, even though part of my philosophy is made up by the phrase "What Would Buffy Do?" to the point where I had it on a key chain in a town where the prevalent thought was "What Would Jesus Do?" I'm more of a Willow (circa seasons 1 through 3) than probably any other Whedon character. I have to be vigilant when alone; I am not a force the demons fear; I cannot take back the night on my own. But there is a part of Buffy in me; at least, I hope there is. And in Echo, we have the opposite of Buffy, because all of us are, in some way, Echo. All of us are - in some way and some more than others and some less, some all in some ways and some all in others - marginalized, voiceless, objectified, used, weak, powerless; just like all of us are - in some way and some more than others and some less, some all in some ways and some in others - strong, powerful, commanding, charismatic, self-assured, self-centered, autonomous, righteous, wonderful, capable, kind, in control. When Joss Whedon says about River that "She is the monster. She is the damsel. She is the action hero", he is describing all of us. And Buffy represents one track of who we are and what kind of life we can live. As a feminist icon, Buffy kicks ass. But while she is also "the monster" and "the damsel" and "the action hero", she is least often the damsel. Echo is for those of us who are often, even when we don't want to be, the damsel, taken to the extreme partially so she can fight back and become more fully actualized and partially to demonstrate how damaging this particular track actually is and what it does to every one of us.

This particular show isn't about giving us a heroine from the onset to root for and who is immediately awe-worthy. It is about us, and how we feel and what makes us sick. And while Whedon's focus of the show is on a woman, and while that may allow him to examine themes he finds most interesting and may bring to life what parts of the general culture he feels are most dangerous to women, the show as a whole seems to be about not just how society treats women but how we treat each other. Whedon apparently wants to examine "what we want from each other sexually, how much power we wanna have over each other". His primary focus is going to be a woman, possibly because tangentially, based on their position in society, women get hit with this sort of thing more often than men do (and also, Whedon seems drawn to exploring the lives and the trials and triumphs of women). But the overall theme of identity and how morally or ethically bad or good or indifferent an organization like The Dollhouse is goes beyond misogynistic fantasy and into how we interact and see other human beings - if we recognize, as Paul does, each human being's right to autonomy, or if we fall into the trap of using them as objects to fulfill our own pleasure without a care about them or their own.

That isn't to say that there isn't some valid criticisms of the way the show is going about portraying its eventual message about feminism or human trafficking or identity or autonomy or human worth. Aviva at Fourth Wave and Jaclyn at Bitch, Ph.D. asked some of those questions, and David BM Cooley on NPR's Fresh Air did as well; the most compelling question for me came from Aviva, when she asked,

"...doesn't the continued need for the Dollhouse as an element of narrative interest necessitate the continued exploitation of the "actives" for our viewing pleasure?"

That is, for my money, a great question. At what point does watching the exploitation of the Actives in the series become too much like the torture porn of the movie Captivity that Whedon himself railed against? At what point is there no intellectual value in watching the main premise of "these people are wiped and have to be a whole bunch of other people"? I don't have an answer for it. But I do have answers for some of the others, and those will be coming in a separate post on the subject.