The Land of Unlikeness

Belonging to this being, called Dasein, is the temporal particularity of an I, which is this being. When we ask about this entity, the Dasein, we must at least ask, Who is this entity? And not, What is this entity? …The answer to the question of the who of this entity, which we ourselves in each instance are, is Dasein.

- Martin Heidegger (History of the Concept of Time)

Episode 9 of “Dollhouse” aired four Fridays ago on the FOX Network and all hell broke loose. One of the top hours of television ever, that was. “A Spy in the House of Love” was the episode’s allusive title and it packed as much punch as “The X-Files” at the top of its game. Then it went ahead and did it again, four more times in the same episode.

Yet the series appears doomed. Its ratings are too low, although critics have been realizing something extraordinary is happening at the dollhouse during in recent episodes. If only…. Joss Whedon had a five-year story arc in mind for these fascinating and increasingly complex characters, within a universe that is now primed with explosive possibilities.

After watching episode 9, I just couldn’t let this series go. I felt agonized and driven then, and I still do now. I feel compelled to try to express why I feel such awe and admiration for “Dollhouse” and such a fear of losing it. I couldn’t let it die without “doing something” to help (besides pre-ordering Season One on DVD from Amazon, because FOX might factor DVD sales into their decision).

So right away I asked Dan and he said yes, that I could post a tribute to the show here, where TLOU’s cohort of catholic-Christian philosophers, artists, mothers (and fathers), theologians, teachers, and lovers of difficult causes might possibly be interested in the show and sympathetic to its plight (or mine).

Now it’s a month later and I’m still pondering and scribbling. The season finale is airing tonight! I thought I was crazy to spend so much time on this, but I kept being drawn back to it despite myself. Eventually I realized how much joy I’ve experienced, contemplating what I think is great about this series. It’s been as satisfying as the show itself. I realized I was simply indulging in a very old spiritual practice, one that gives us a means of spending time with what we love. At this point I don’t regret one minute of it. But I’ve really got to post something now, before the series has ended and FOX has made its final decision.

Here goes. This series is first of all an amazing piece of artistic daring. It shows what a “purse-proud opulence of innate power” is being displayed by its creator, Joss Whedon. (As Coleridge once said, regarding another genius.) If only FOX would look at the iTunes downloads, and views at hulu, and DVR viewing numbers posted by people who have lives and therefore other things to do on Friday nights, in contrast to old retired professors like me. If only they would, then there might still be a slim glimmer of hope for future seasons.

 It’s appalling to be held captive like this by any network, while fluff with canned laugh-tracks easily accrues the necessary Nielsen ratings. Why is it so appalling? Because as I see it – going out on a limb here – Joss Whedon is our William Shakespeare and “Dollhouse” is his “Measure For Measure.” We ought to be treasuring this stuff.

Scripted television is the closest thing we have in our own day to Elizabethan drama: popular, generic entertainment that reaches into every segment of society and provides a space in which we collectively moot the issues of our day – all of it wrapped in the hide of an entertainment but with a tiger’s heart. Such work educates and exercises us; it can effect deep changes in social attitudes by helping us to process change and broaden our experience all the time they are doing what they do best, entertaining us: think “West Wing,” “NYPD Blue,” or Whedon’s own “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” with all the ways it shaped and empowered a generation of young women.

So what I’m focusing on here is how William and Joss first spectacularly proved themselves in their respective media, by inventing intelligent, spell-binding, and deeply poignant popular comedies that exercised strong appeal in all social constituencies. (Okay, the Puritans hated it, but not all of them.) Whedon’s proving ground was of course “Buffy,” along with his incomparable and utterly irreplaceable sci-fi Western “Firefly,” prematurely canceled by FOX in 2005… to the eternal loss of everyone, everywhere. (Now that’s a DVD to die for.)

But now here’s “Dollhouse,” and there’s NO comedy in it. Well, almost none – in the first few episodes at least. But as soon as the essentially deadly-serious dollverse and its unforgettable characters have had a chance to take on palpability and weight, the trademark wit returns, and by episode 9 the show’s mythology is fully working and its telling ironies are being realized so sharply that we are gasping or laughing out loud in our living rooms. What we’re laughing at or gasping over is going to haunt us for days, weeks, maybe a lifetime.

Like “Measure for Measure,” “Dollhouse” is a calculated venture into “dark comedy” – if we mean very, very dark comedy indeed, like Dante’s “Comedy” in the deepest reaches of Hell, where the betrayers of trust are situated. Or it’s Whedon’s venture into “problem comedy” or “tragicomedy.” All of these are labels applied so uneasily to “Measure For Measure,” of course, because in it Shakespeare chooses to give us a noble brother in prison, facing execution for a sexual misdemeanor, who begs his devout little sister to leave her convent and give her body to the magistrate (a man obsessed with her virginity) in exchange for his own life.  To put it in the modern vernacular, “you only have to do it once and then you can forget it ever happened/act like it never happened.” This is the dollhouse protocol too, only it’s for a five-year contract and you do it over and over….

In each case, the result is truly disturbing dramatic masterwork, created by a writer who’s got talent to burn and who understands how to garner popular appeal but chooses to do something else instead. Will and Joss choose to bring their innate power to bear upon sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

What do we really believe a soul is worth? At what point are the stakes high enough that the sacrifice of innocence is acceptable? What considerations are “enough” to make this okay? The answer today is the same as in Shakespeare’s time. All it takes to “justify” it – or trivialize it, and that’s effectively the same thing – is simply power, exercised with a bland matter-of-factness.

Tragic dramatic comedies are precious because they keep on confronting us with the truth of Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the “banality of evil.” What a great opiate it is, finally, the way banality and mundaneness can obscure the nature of things, so long as they are happening everyday and all around us. Audiences are strangely shown an alien world they nevertheless recognize, because it is their own world, only with the veil of familiarity snatched away, and the audience draws back in horror. (The real world goes on as if nothing’s the matter.)

You may be aware that the “dollhouse” is an illicit underground organization willing to provide very special services to “the wealthy, the powerful, and the well connected.” Its “actives” (or dolls) can be strikingly physically beautiful, and they’ve “voluntarily” signed five-year contracts to have their own memories and personalities “wiped,” so they can be “imprinted” with whatever personalities and life histories and “skill-sets” will suit them best for the assignments or missions they’ll be sent on. “We prefer to call them engagements,” states Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams), the icy executive-in-charge of day-to-day operations at the dollhouse.

Some viewers right away objected that the dollhouse wasn’t credible to them as a business venture, because “people with that much money could get anyone or anything they wanted anyway, so why would they pay the dollhouse for it?” This line of reasoning beautifully re-enforces the killer point of the show, while it also exhibits a touching naïveté – or is it a blissful ignorance? – about the subtlest and most cruel erotic pleasures of sado-masochism.

Besides, the other reason you hire the dollhouse is so that there will be “no consequences” coming back to haunt you in the future. No tearful reproaches or paternity suits or worse. If no one remembers it, it didn’t happen, as the (non)history of genocide teaches us.

After their “engagements,” these super-hot dolls (some are female, some male) will return to their “wiped” states, and we will watch them wandering serenely around the dollhouse from their massages to their Yoga classes to the communal showers. (Wiped actives are sexually innocent.) At night they are put to bed like the precious commodities they are, in pristine little containers whose lids slide closed above them. This constitutes a significant “ick factor” and drives viewers away in droves. It’s also sort of the point.

But just in case you haven’t been watching (like everyone else, who hasn’t been watching either) and you think you’d like to watch the series, there’s something you really need to know before you view the first episode. (It’s at iTunes. Recent episodes only are at Hulu and fox.com, but you want to start from the beginning.)

To enjoy the pilot episode to the maximum extent, you need to know that the executives at FOX nixed the original pilot, which had all the back-story designed to make us care about the central characters. Like the wonderful pilot that Whedon shot for “Firefly,” FOX found this pilot “too dark.” They asked for less dark and less “talking about relationships.”  They requested more in the way of exciting action sequences. Whedon quipped that FOX “wants a chase – and cut to it.”

What about the show’s treatment of sexuality? Enhance the sexy visuals, please, but just slip them in without overtly drawing attention to them. Whedon says that all the networks started displaying this kind of “prurience” after the Janet Jackson event. “It’s hypocritical.”

So it’s the new episode 1 you’ll be viewing, and it throws the titillation factor right in our faces. We get to watch Eliza Dushku dancing in a mini-dress that’s cleverly designed (and filmed) to appear to have no “bottom.” But when we finally get a closer look, heck, there’s a quite respectable bottom there after all – nothing to be outraged about. (How very small that respectable difference is, too, in millimeters.)

 Even more ironically, if that’s possible, the new pilot opens with a brief scene from the original pilot, in which Dushku’s character is carrying on a mysterious and highly charged conversation with Adele DeWitt about signing the dollhouse contract. Then, abruptly, we cut to a chase.

It’s a motorcycle chase, no less, and it roars all across the city and right into the lobby of a very swanky establishment….

This upping of the sex, action, and glamour indices in the new pilot did not draw in the wider audience FOX hoped for, however. Viewers felt distinctly queasy. First they were shown a sensational “dream-girl” – Dushku’s “Echo” looking like every girl in America wishes she looked – out on a sensational jet-set weekend date with a fabulous guy. (“How much fun can we have in three days?” the two challenged each other. “No strings attached.”)

Then viewers have to watch Echo, still the gorgeous, enviably slender, and nubile American dream-girl, returning to the dollhouse with her “handler” in a company van, and confiding girlishly to everyone she meets that she’s met “this guy” who “couldn’t tell a lie to save his life.” She hopefully feels like “he’s really into me.” She’s wondering if maybe “he’s the one, you know?”

“It felt like she was being raped,” viewers complained.  Well, yes it did.

Other viewers failed the ethical litmus test here entirely. In online comment threads they endorsed the rationales offered by corporate facilitators in charge of the dollhouse. “I genuinely believe the dollhouse is doing good,” says Adelle DeWitt. For some her apparent “sincerity” settles the issue.

Then too, there’s Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), the insufferable young computer-geek and genius whiz-kid with the beautiful eyes and an unbearably unctuous manner toward the dolls who are his helpless subjects. Topher presides over the dollhouse memory banks like an impresario, or like the Duke in “Measure For Measure” who’s pulling the strings unseen, and he waves his cyber mastery about like it’s Prospero’s magical wand. He’s the one who imprints the actives and wipes them afterwards, and his character alone is worth the price of admission. Programming Echo as a counter-espionage expert, for instance, he gloats: “She reads body language, knows advanced interrogation techniques, and she’s rockin’ a little bit of Sherlock Holmes.”

So what is Topher’s verdict on Echo’s “dream date” in the first episode? “We gave two people a perfect weekend,” he tells Echo’s handler Boyd (Harry Lennix III). There’s just enough ironic self-awareness in his voice to make me want to throttle him. “We’re great humanitarians,” he adds, drolly. And Echo? “She’s livin’ the dream, man.”

Besides, Echo doesn’t remember the dream, so where’s the harm? For a programmed active, the “tapes” that Topher selects and artfully blends and then downloads into passively waiting brains and bodies constitute the only lives they remember. Someone else’s memories become the major template for the only life they remember ever having lived – until they are wiped again and go back to remembering no life at all.

The ugly fact remains – hidden in plain sight – that these highly intelligent, well educated, and competent people, Adele and Topher and all the rest of the dollhouse staff, are collectively responsible for other people being raped on a daily basis. Some viewers get this picture and resent it fiercely. “Who wants to watch a show about sympathetic rapists?” Besides, they say, “the show is misogynistic.” 

So Whedon was right to worry that maybe this time he was pressing out onto ground that was entirely too iffy. “I’m scared,” he admitted before the episodes aired. Even if he could succeed in making the show’s off-putting premise work the way he envisioned it – a big enough “if” in itself – he would still be taking a chance. People weren’t likely to “love him” for this show, the way they had always loved him in the past.

Why did Whdeon pursue the project? And why at FOX, the network that had been so blind to the merits of “Firefly” – a show that had everything going for it.

Whedon says doing “Dollhouse” appealed to him as a means of looking at human identity. Well, if this is the case, it’s a ball he hits out of the park. If we go along with Heidegger’s analysis that human identity depends upon “the temporal particularity of an I,” then an active on assignment is a “Dasein,” because the active possesses a unique temporal history of human formation. It’s just that to us, the bystanders, the “I” isn’t located in the right body. But if we privilege the body instead, then we’ve got the right body with an alien “temporal particularity” dwelling inside of it. These alternative accounts are both equally accurate – but they are united in one “person,” who is standing right in front of us, and it’s a person who “sincerely” believes in their own genuineness. The various shades of dramatic possibility here are endless, and who better to exploit them than Whedon & Crew? That explosiveness is already staring us in the face in Season One.

The result? We are compelled – and this is also an enormous gift – to experience viscerally just how curious and precious is this cocktail of ingredients that constitutes a human being. Again and again we watch Topher as he orchestrates a “being there,” a Dasein of sorts, into existence before our eyes. We know that later on he will take it apart again. The issues dealt with every time are different; we are examining the mode of being we assume we know so well and finding it increasingly strange and new. It’s mind-boggling and it’s art.

“Who” are these unwittingly deluded “actives on assignment’? Or “what” are they? And what, if anything, does the particularity of the blessed body itself contribute to this frighteningly fragile mix. Is there something more to “the union of a body with a soul” than what we are seeing here? Is there something deeper, some “kernel” of selfhood, and where might it reside? How can it be liberated? How are we to recognize it? How might it come to find and recognize itself, from within?

If this show itself is any evidence, then our bodies contribute a great deal to the “mix” that is human identity. For me, the most poignant result of watching the early episodes was realizing the irreducible role our bodies play in establishing any coherent identity at all. We are made to see this, because if we want to recognize “Echo” and “Sierra” and “Victor” then we must rely on their strikingly distinctive bodies, because they have no consistent personalities within an episode or from week to week. Those names of theirs, by the way, are eerily taken from the NATO phonetic alphabet, underlining their anonymity. Underlining also that each of them can be replaced. We will even come to see that they can be substituted one for another as well.

But they aren’t anonymous. Disgruntled viewers complain that they shouldn’t be expected to care about central characters who are blank and faceless and have no personalities of their own. But they aren’t blank after all and we can care. In fact, we can even get a huge charge out of seeing them come striding unexpectedly into the action, sent to the rescue by the dollhouse. They have a new persona and they’re are on a new mission, yet they are endearingly and recognizably themselves. These individuals, I mean, who have no memories of themselves.

Gradually it is borne in upon us – at least it took me quite a while to figure this out – that we are used to this already, because it is the way we always experience various actors, regardless of the roles they happen to be playing. We recognize actors by. their. bodies. We are convinced that we know these actors, and that we learn more about them from every role they play. Not just about their acting, but about who they are. If this is an illusion, it is one we cannot avoid. We recognize people by their bodies, and then from how they play the roles they are always engaged in, whenever we see them.

 So it’s wild and insane and uncanny and wonderful when we find ourselves going through the familiar and cumulative temporal process of getting acquainted with new actors (Tibetan-born Dichen Lachman as Sierra and Albanian Enver Gjokaj as Victor) at the same time that we are getting acquainted with the dollhouse actives that these actors are playing. Especially when these are actives who are so busy be-ing genuinely and sincerely the persons they assume themselves to be. We are the assessing actors, who are “real people,” as they are must skillfully play the actives, who are only characters engaged in playing various roles (as though they were actors themselves) , but they believe themselves to be real people.

This is a veritable crash-course on how human personalites are constructed over time and come to be recognized by the self and by others through particular temporal histories of interaction, and always ambiguously. It offends our Anglo-Saxon roots in individualism and personal authenticity, perhaps, but it might also alert us to our own gullibility because of the way we tend to take these qualities for granted when sometimes roles are being played for insidious purposes.

The importance of the body doesn’t end here. It is intriguingly explored in other ways, too. It may be that the dolls carry within their bodies certain unconscious needs from their pasts, crying out for resolution. “Have you ever tried to clean a slate?” Dushku’s character had asked Adele back in that mysterious conversation that opens episode 1. “Some of the stuff underneath always sticks.”

Besides, there’s the truth that may belong to the body as a body. “Victor is having a man reaction,” Topher ejaculates suddenly, after he’s been observing the dolls via the in-house security cameras. The dolls are taking their showers and Topher’s almost hysterical; this isn’t supposed to be happening. Upon review of the films, it’s evident that the “man reaction” occurs only when Sierra’s in his line of vision. Nobody else. And so issues of human identity lead seamlessly into questions about erotic (and personal) love.

Besides identity, Whedon wanted “Dollhouse” to deal with “sexual exploitation and human trafficking and how compromised we all are.” Dushku, a buddy of his from back in the “Buffy” and “Angel” days, was wrapped up inside an exclusive contract with FOX. (Think about that.) By doing “Dollhouse” for FOX, he’d be providing a challenging vehicle for Dushku to star in. This same exclusive contract, though, seems to precludes the series being rescued by moving to another network or onto cable, or even making some sort of inspired transition onto the internet. The only hope for a future, if FOX cancels the show, will be in comic books. Whedon loves them; all his shows have had comic-book afterlives.

 So here we’ve got a show with a high “ick factor” built into its premise, and it deals with sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and how compromised we all are. Can we really wonder why its Nielsen ratings – on Friday nights no less – haven’t been good?

But this is where the flabbergasting genius of Joss Whedon comes in, and earns him comparisons to Shakespeare. By episode 9 he’s got “Dollhouse” up and running on a level that’s simply astonishing, enough so to win and keep an audience all its own just for the sheer verve of the thing. It needs time, but it will find an audience. Just as soon as Whedon & Crew have got these fascinatingly ambiguous  and surprising characters in place, along with all the mythology, they can begin to turn the dollverse inside-out and upside-down. We are suddenly transported into Joss Whedon heaven, and the show finds its feet with a vengeance, delivering jolt after jolt of shock and realization, and placing us inextricably inside of some of the deepest and most intimate moral dilemmas humans ever face.

From episode 9 on, we’ll be forced to question our previous estimates of every character. We’ll experience viscerally what we know others have had to endure. But we’ll also find ourselves realizing that the scene we were innocently watching a moment ago has metamorphosed wrenchingly into something more terrible and yet something we ourselves have lived through – and we didn’t see it coming. We’re not bystanders. The epiphanies start arriving non-stop. It’s time to hold your breath for 60 minutes, week after week.

The dilemmas that will be the hardest for us are the ones faced by good characters, and faced only because they are trying so hard to live up to being good. This same kind of tragic ambiguity haunts “Measure For Measure,” especially when the good Duke finally comes out of hiding and imposes by fiat a destiny and a “resolution” upon each of the other characters in the play. We realize that no one is simply free, not even the Duke. We recognize that under the circumstances, he did what he had to do. We know he did what he did for everyone’s own good. But that still doesn’t mean that it is good.

There’s plenty in the earlier episodes to intrigue and exercise your moral emotions, too. The set-up is essential, so you want to watch in order, even when the early episodes are uneven or you can feel the writers and actors straining to find the right tenor. The end result is just too good to mess up, by trying to jump into it at the end. 

Whenever I used to give my students the gift of that genuinely adult love story contained in four of the “Lord Peter Wimsey” mystery novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, I would urge them not to get that sequence out of order either. There’s not much higher praise I can give. Some things are just too good to accidentally blunder into.

So I’ll bring this swansong to a quavering end here, hoping that the beautiful source of the song doesn’t have to die yet, after all. I’ve written and thought a lot more about “Dollhouse,” but this needs to post – it’s now or never.