(Non) Super (Non) Direction

Superheroes are supposed to be amazing. They can leap tall buildings, run faster than a speeding whoosh, and see sights that no sighter has ever sighted.

And yet, on film, superheroes are, visually, banal.
 

 
That’s a little documentary about Kurosawa’s use of movement. At about 4:30, the video compares scenes from Joss Whedon’s the Avengers —and shows pretty definitively that Whedon does basically nothing with the camera, with his actors, or with his composition. The Avengers might be the world’s most powerful mortals, but Whedon films them with the dynamism of grey, flatulent paint (though I’m sure Kurosawa would film flatulent paint with panache, if he felt like it.)

Whedon is an unusually blah director, but superhero films in general aren’t known for their visual distinctiveness. Look at this sequence from Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man.
 

 
There’s some effort to promote visual interest there. The camera beings moving away from Ant-Man, and then flips so you’re moving towards Henry Pym and Hope. Once your close to Pym and Hope, the door slams, and then there’s a zoom towards the keyhole, followed by a shot back to Ant-Man, who races towards the door. The back and forth of the camera, from Scott to Pym to Scott to Pym, could be seen as mirroring the (humorously) repetitious failed attempts. And there’s a nice comic moment when you see him racing towards the door, and then the shot on the other side as he smashes against it, leaving his impact to your imagination.

But while the sequence is workmanlike enough, it’s not exactly impressive or memorable. The back and forth of the camera doesn’t feel especially regulated or meaningful. Notice the last shot of Ant-Man before we switch back to the door closing, for example. The camera is stationary; it’s no longer pulling away from him. the sense of motion is frittered away; the shot doesn’t add to the tension or the sense of motion. It just reminds you that Ant-Man is still standing there. Similarly, the first run at the door doesn’t really use the camera pacing to create suspense. Instead, after all the build-up, there are just a bunch of shots: moving in on the keyhole, cut to Ant-Man closing his mask with a flourish, then running, then watching him run through the keyhole, then a flash of blue, then the sound of impact. It’s haphazard and disjointed; there isn’t a clear rhythm or build, which means that there isn’t a sense of anticipation or failure. As a result, most of the work of the scene is up to the Foley artist, for the thud-into-the-door sound effect.
 

 
In contrast, the scene from Hitchock’s The Birds uses orchestrates shot/reverse shot movement to build suspense throughout. The cuts come quicker and quicker throughout the scene as the inevitable disaster looms, culminating in what are essentially freeze frame snapshots of Tippi Hedren’s horrified face as the explosion rips through Bodega Bay. And then of course there’s that marvelous move upwards to the bird’s eye view, looking down on the flames forming a slash across the city, with the bird’s squawking in triumph before they swoosh down to do more damage.

It’s kind of cruel to compare a couple of random big-budget hacks to Kurosawa and Hitchcock, obviously. But, on the other hand, Hitchcock, at least, was a Hollywood hack too; The Birds was a suspense picture that was meant for box office success (and did fairly well at that.) Given the buckets of money the studios throw at the Marvel films, it seems like they could find a director with rudimentary visual skill, if they wanted to.
 

 
Guy Ritchie’s not one of the all time greats of cinema or anything, but The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has some visual flair. I like the sequence at about :45 where the camera rushes in for a close up at the first car, then pulls back and in the same (presumably digitally enhanced take) rushes forward for a close up of the trailing car. It provides a nice sense of speed and urgency—again, not breathtaking, but fun—which is more than can be said for the direction in Avengers or Ant-Man.

Of course, Man From U.N.C.L.E. bombed, while Avengers and Ant-Man were mega-hits. The sameness of the Marvel films (and the fact that Daredevil, on television, is somewhat more visually adventurous) suggests deliberation. Marvel could have hired Guy Ritchie to direct one of their properties; they haven’t bothered because they figure boring is best. The direction is meant to be bland, because they figure (rightly or wrongly) that audiences wants superheroes who are bland. We want heroes, apparently, who are not too interesting, or surprising, or exciting. We want superadventures that keep to the superconventions.

There Is No Joss Whedon

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Is that a person there?

 
Dollhouse could perhaps be seen as Joss Whedon’s most personal statement in that it’s about the absence of personality—or more precisely, about personality as almost-absent, but never fully destroyed, trace. In Dollhouse, Echo (the impressively unresponsive Eliza Dushku) is a shell, robbed of its original self, Caroline. Through the first season (all I could bare to watch) Caroline is mostly gone; we only see flashback glimpses of her as Echo is filled with various other personalities — a dominatrix, an outdoorswoman, a perfect girlfriend, another perfect girlfriend. The first season ends with a future vision of a world in which individual brains are erasable, plunging the world into dystopic chaos. Everyone is a replaceable cog. This provokes dramatic visible terror on the one hand, and the usual genre comforts on the other, as the main plot focuses on a group of entirely forgettable actors being picked off one by one in the usual manner of the post-apocalypse, complete with predictable tricky unpredictable betrayal and surprise reversal at the end.

Whedon famously had only sporadic control over Dollhouse; the network messed with and compromised his vision. But does that mean that Dollhouse isn’t Whedon? Or does that make it instead all the more Whedonesque? Reading through our lengthy Whedon roundtable, what’s most striking is how utterly generic, in every sense, Whedon’s output seems to be. Tim Jones identifies Whedon’s cardinal virtue/sin as cleverness—but the iconic line of dialogue he uses to illustrate that cleverness probably wasn’t Whedon’s at all, but a Robert Downey Jr. ad lib. Philippe Leblanc points out Whedon’s obsession with military conspiracies…but that’s an obsession he shares with every other media property ever (“Orphan Black” comes immediately to mind, as just one example.) Lisa Levy praises Whedon’s embrace of non-conformity, and Megan Purdy criticizes his unthinking racism. But enthusiasm for non-conformity and thoughtless racism are hardly unusual in pop-culture generally. Perhaps most tellingly, Ana Cabral Martins singles out Whedon’s ability to keep all the moving parts of the Avengers films moving. Whedon, Martins suggests, is most Whedon when he’s smoothly assembling corporate product. He’s the Mussolini of pop culture, making the nerd content run on time.

Again, whedon, like most people in television and film, always works in collaborative contexts. If there’s not one, distinct, Whedon vision, it’s probably in part because Whedon’s almost never working by himself to begin with. My single favorite Whedon project may be the last-season episode of Angel in which our hero is changed into a muppet—and how much did Whedon even contribute to that? He has a writer credit, but who knows what that does or doesn’t mean. Similarly, episode 3 of Dollhouse, in which a suicidal pop star is cured of depression by being told to suck it up, is one of the single worst episodes of television I’ve ever seen. But again, is that Whedon’s fault? Maybe he would have made an only moderately crappy episode if he’d had creative control. Who knows?

But Whedon’s selflessness goes beyond the usual difficulties of attribution in collaborative work, I think. David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino, even Jenji Kohan all seem to have distinctive interests, themes, visual styles, rhythms. Does Whedon? As I said, I don’t think the roundtable has unearthed any. Whedon likes strong female heroes, sticking it to the man, and playing with geek toys. These are not individual interests. Instead, they put him smack center in the mainstream. He’s into the same things everyone else is into. His success isn’t because he has an individual vision, but because he doesn’t—or more generously, perhaps, it’s because his individual vision is everybody’s individual vision. He sees what everyone sees, and everyone loves it.

That’s not to say I hate Whedon; I’m part of everyone, after all, I enjoy strong female heroes, clever dialogue, and Hulk smashing, at least intermittently. In fact, hating Whedon, or loving Whedon, seems largely beside the point. What’s there to hate or love, anyway? You might as well loathe the dolls in the Dollhouse, in all their interchangeable vacuity. There’s nothing there to hate or love. I’m forced to admit that Joss Whedon does exist, but even so, it seems odd that anyone bothered to take the time to invent him.
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This concludes our Joss Whedon roundtable…I think! Unless someone else sneaks in at the end. But it’s probably over. Click on the link to see all our posts! Thanks to everyone for contributing, commenting, and reading.

The ‘Avengers’ Films: The Maze of Continuity and Joss Whedon’s Voice

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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By the time Joss Whedon joined the Marvel wagon, there had already been four distinct movies set in that universe. He would have to continue characters arcs already established in previous movies as well as set up the following installments of the individual franchises going forward. The difficulty of his job lay in having to develop the paths of characters that started before his involvement and maintain a coherent relation with what came before, all the while setting up a end point from which other writers and directors can go off on.

In “‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ Is the Ultimate Joss Whedon Movie Whether You Like It or Not,” Jacob Hall argues that while Joss Whedon (known for television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly) was “adored by his small, passionate and often overeager fan base, Whedon was a niche talent”, both “too specific and too nerdy” for the mainstream taste. However, tackling the Avengers property ended up being a task Joss Whedon was particularly suited for precisely because he is specific and nerdy. He understood the core elements of the characters and the best way to provide each character with a moment-to-shine and an overall arc. His television work also demonstrated his ability to work with an ensemble cast and he was well known for his comics’ bona fides, having personally written Marvel comics (Astonishing X-Men).
 

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When Whedon comes on board, Iron Man/Tony Stark has, over the course of two movies, been traumatized by his kidnapping in the Middle East and has been using his suit as a form of protection while dealing with the ramifications and repercussions of a war-mongering past. Furthermore, although the suit brings out a heroic side of Tony and while he does make the initial change of not manufacturing more weapons at Stark Industries, his fights have mostly been personal in nature (Obadiah Stane, Justin Hammer, Ivan Vanko). Thor has journeyed from an arrogant soldier to a cast out son to a humbled champion, becoming unarguably worthy of his hammer Mjölnir. Captain America/Steve Rogers is, of all the Marvel heroes, the one with the subtlest arcs because Cap is such a pure hero that he affects the world without letting the world affect him. His sacrifice at the end of Captain America led to a 70-year slumber and meant he lost his place in the world and his girl as well.

Joss Whedon’s greater accomplishment with The Avengers, though, may have been taking the characters who didn’t have their own franchises and fleshing them out. Black Widow had what amounted to a glorified cameo in Iron Man 2, suggesting she was either a mysterious sex kitten or a deadly martial artist. In Thor, Hawkeye had a mere walk-on role and had even less to do than Black Widow. As for the Hulk, both his previous incarnations — Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s Hulk (2005) and Edward Norton in Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk (2008) — were defined by what Film Crit Hulk defines as “solipsistic detachment”, mistaking the “self-sacrifice” of the character for “relentless dourism”, which meant both iterations were insufferably “mopey”.

In The Avengers, Steve Rogers discovers a way to stay relevant in a world he doesn’t recognize (“Aren’t the star and stripes old-fashioned?”) as the captain of this unconventional team. Thor laments how he “courted war” in his youth, he’s much altered from Thor’s and becomes instrumental due to his relationship to Loki, his willingness to fight for Earth contrastig with the latter’s hubris. Tony Stark learns, via Steve Rogers’ chastisement, to “lay himself on the wire” instead of cutting the wire and going the easy (for him) way.

In The Avengers, Mark Ruffalo and Joss Whedon’s take on Bruce Banner/Hulk is the most successful yet. He is “gentle and dignified”, even if “impossibly weary and haggard”. To my chagrin, I realized the line that most encapsulated Banner’s arc in The Avengers was cut (“Are you a big guy that gets all little, or a little guy that sometimes blows up large?”), but the movie still managed to convey how Banner stops fearing the mindless rampage and uses the Hulk as a tool for purposeful fury — the “other guy” can actually help.

Clint Barton gets the short hand of the stick, and besides being “unmade” by Loki and wanting to put an arrow through his eye socket, Hawkeye has very little to do until Age of Ultron — and even then, it’s less an arc and more an apology from Joss Whedon to Jeremy Renner. Black Widow, however, starts a journey that continues in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and in Age of Ultron. She continues to use her skill set as a spy and precise combatant, but the righteousness of the side on which she is fighting on becomes gradually more important. By the time we reach Age of Ultron, she does the fighting not because she has “red on her ledger” but because fighting in the Avengers, protecting humanity, is the larger-than-life cause she wants to pursue.

The Avengers was a complicated movie, but even so it was a lot simpler than Avengers: Age of Ultron. By the time we reached that movie, not only did Joss Whedon have to respond to his own Avengers, but also to the following franchise installments (Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier). And beyond that he had to deal with the bigger characters arcs that have been underway since year one at Marvel Studios, along with handling storylines for Twins, Ultron, introducing Vision, allowing time to the dream sequences to matter 1. Amidst all this, it’s not surprising that someone’s story had to be shortchanged; Thor’s character is as sidelined in Ultron as Hawkeye was in the first film. All the Thunder God gets to do is further the Infinity Gems/War overarching (and undercooked) plotline, which suffered from severe and crippling cuts in the edit room that affect the movie as a whole.

In a very Joss Whedon move, in Age of Ultron, the writer/director continues his self-appointed task of paying more attention to the characters that don’t have franchises. Hawkeye gets the secret family that represents what the Avengers are fighting for, and Black Widow 2 and the Hulk get a choice: either run away from their responsibility to save the world (and towards personal happiness) or stay devoted to the cause. The Hulk is changed by Wanda’s interference and reverts to not trusting himself around people, only this time it’s The Other Guy that makes the decision.

Whether at the behest of the studio (although, in interviews, Joss Whedon says it came from him] or not, the inclusion of Wakanda and Klaue, as well as Steve Rogers’ and Iron Man’s conflicting ideologies seem like a set up to future Marvel films (the upcoming Black Panther and Captain America: Civil War), but they’re also symptoms, or rather, the results of two different things. Wakanda and Klaue, just like Vision, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch come from a very nerdy desire to play within the larger playground that is the Marvel Universe. That’s the reason I see for wanting to include Spider-Man and Captain Marvel at the very end 3.

Steve and Tony’s relationship is simply a continuation of both their interactions in The Avengers and their respective arcs within their franchises. Their differences are highlighted by the ways each of them responds to the fever dreams provoked by Wanda, as Tony unwittingly builds another war machine, and Steve accepts that while he will always be mournful of the time he didn’t spend with Peggy, he wouldn’t have done things any differently. They each have conflicting ways of viewing heroism, experiencing trauma and surrendering to sacrifice. Jacob Hall argued that Age of Ultron suffers from being an “overindulgent experience that’s far too mired in continuity and too desperate to set up the next 10 movies in Marvel’s ambitious “Phase 3” schedule”, but it is unmistakenly a Joss Whedon movie, above all else.

Where these are unarguably Joss Whedon movies is in the movies’ themes, witty banter and careful planning of each character. Whedon has won a reputation for telling “tales of personal responsibility” that often revolve around a normal person being appointed an unbearable responsibility given extraordinary circumstances. Both the Avengers movies focus on a team that features both gods and normal people — the normal alongside the exceptional — and argue that what matters are their actions: are they heroes despite their different characteristics, are they bound by a larger calling?

Whedon is also known for his penchant for deaths that matter because he understands the value of human life. The deaths of Phil Coulson (even if reversed) and Quicksilver matter to us as viewers. I’ve seen criticism concerning how Whedon’s decision to have the Avengers save every single person in Age of Ultron, but it certainly underlines the importance of human life. Even if we don’t know the Sokovia victims, they’re still not disposable because they might be someone’s Phil Coulson.

At this point, Marvel movies, or at least the Avengers movies, might function a lot better as part of a continuity than as standalone pieces of entertainment. The movies seem destined to be increasingly steeped in their own mythology.There is a chance, a very palpable one, that Marvel Studios’ movies will no longer be able to be viewed as simply standalone texts. Joss Whedon did a remarkable job, juggling the different plotlines, character arcs and allotting time for each character to have their own moment on screen. I’m curious to see if the Russo brothers, David Ayer or even Zach Snyder, are able to do as nuanced a job as Joss Whedon did.

Ana Cabral Martins (@rrruiva) is Portuguese and is currently finishing her PhD on contemporary Hollywood. She couldn’t think of anything witty to write here.
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1. Tony Stark’s PTSD, the grand theme of all Iron Man movies as Devin Faraci has so aptly referenced (See his piece “Earth’s Mightiest Monsters: The Character Arcs Of Avengers: Age of Ultron”), Steve Rogers heartbreak over Peggy.

2. The perceived un-feminism of Black Widow’s infertility is, in my eyes, absurd. She doesn’t say she is a monster because she can’t have children but because she was bred as a killing machine, devoid of choice. Why can’t a well-rounded female character — who is defined by her badass-ness — have feelings or opinions or even reference an inability to have children? Why would that hinder her heroism?

3. At this point, Whedon has been decried from both having played with too many characters and not having been given the free reign to play with many more at the end. His account of the Marvel/Sony deal make it sound like the character had been on the table when it hadn’t and I still don’t think introducing Captain Marvel out of the blue would have been the best way.

Avengers, Assemble

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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Introduction

“They’re trying to turn movies into comic books,” I lamented in the period of years, months and weeks leading up to the 2012 blockbuster The Avengers. My concern had been that, like superhero comic books, the Marvel Studios film franchise was beginning to focus on large events at the expense of the individual unit of storytelling.

In this day and age, and for many years prior, it has become less likely that an individual comic book would provide the reader with a complete narrative or even a fulfilling storytelling module. Entire comic books, even entire series would come and go and amount to essentially a chapter or even a paragraph in the big-picture narrative that had become priority for the publishers. More than selling comic books, Marvel (and DC) had begun pitching their full line of books to the audience as the end product. More than stories, Marvel had begun selling a lifestyle, a culture. When the films began under the Marvel Studios company, the references between the films felt cute and charming at first. And then when the Avengers project started to congeal into a reality, it stopped feeling cute and began feeling like bricklaying.

It turns out that bricklayers build sound structures, large buildings to exist inside of. I went to see 2012’s The Avengers film with three of my friends, comics people but not superhero fans. All four of us were impressed. Thrilled, tickled, impressed and thoroughly entertained. In addition, I was personally taken by surprise that Marvel’s scheme had truly worked out and paid off with a sound and entertaining film.

How did such a bizarre scheme work?

This is a film that is a sequel to several different films, which is something that to my knowledge hadn’t been attempted before. There have been previous near-attempts such as Kevin Smith’s linked New Jersey films and Quentin Tarantino’s interconnected film world. But those merely hinted at what Marvel’s The Avengers would eventually attempt and accomplish.

Character

This is a film with no single, fixed protagonist. Ensemble cast storytelling is not a common choice in popular narrative, most writers opting to lift one character above the others. While it can be argued that Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark functions as the protagonist of The Avengers, this character does not hold the primacy of position that he holds in the Iron Man films. While Tony Stark gets the most intimacy from the filmmaker Joss Whedon, his is not a point of view that the audience is necessarily tied to.

Each major character has his or her own narrative arc that from their perspective as characters, makes the narrative their own story. As an ensemble, The Avengers becomes the story of autonomous entities crossing paths and becoming a group. As such, the interplay between the characters feels human, lived-in and real. The reason it feels real is that just like people in real life, these characters are presented to the audience as idnividuals who have concrete histories, defined desires and motives. The characters do not appear in this narrative as storytelling props to support the story of one individual; rather they all seem important in themselves.

Scene Construction

The other achievement that Joss Whedon pulls off with 2012’s The Avengers is an unusual consistency in scene construction and weaving scenes and themes together. Admittedly, I don’t see enough movies to call myself a film expert but I know a thing or two about storytelling.

When watching (and rewatching) The Avengers, I felt that the film was built on an unusually firm structural foundation. The plot itself is not what I am referring to, the full plot of the film is fairly simple. It is the individual scenes that comprise the story which stand out in my mind. Each scene of The Avengers feels not only driven toward the plot and the underlying themes of the film but also feels like a small, neatly-constructed story in and of itself.

Every individual scene–from the establishment of conflict to the gathering of characters to the fight scenes–is built from the same conceptual engine. That engine is comedy. The scenes open with a setting and a premise, the characters go about their way to navigate their goals, personalities and compounding textual circumstances drive the scene toward its plot-relevant resolution and the scenes often punctuate with a joke.

As much as the action of this film is character-driven (essential since characters are the selling point of the film), it is the jokes that sell the film as a story and as a concept. Jokes, ironic reversals, physical comedy and sight-gags, miscellaneous scripting and directorial slights of hand. These are the rungs by which the narrative climbs up. Even the tip-tail end of the film is a punchline which loops back to a one-off reference to create a call-back.

The Avengers resonated with audiences because it took relatively simple themes, stacked them and juxtaposed them, looped them and returned to them at odd intervals, allowing the themes to move on different tracks, at different paces, which creates multiple effects: allowing the large cast to take turns reaching growth points in their individual character arcs as well as airing out a potentially dense story.

I mentioned above that even the fight scenes are constructed as character-driven, character-building, plot-relevant scenes rather than showy departures from the narrative. Thor’s stubbornness leading him to square off against Iron Man, Hulk’s rage which can only be matched by Thor’s clear-mindedness, Hulk sucker-punching Thor which called back the prior animosity. Everything from the punchlines to the literal punches operates in a dual function as comedy writing and character writing. The Avengers is an action film that doesn’t use wild or blurry action just for the sake of violence. Everything in the film is constructed to tell the story of how a small group of characters became friends.

The Eternal Frontier

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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The 2002 space Western Firefly is part of a long and grand tradition of Hollywood whitewashing. Although set in the distant future, with no mention of Earth, the show is an almost wholesale transplant of post Civil War American politics, and post WW2, Cold War fantasies about the “Cowboy Era.” The show debuted between waves of renewed enthusiasm for Westerns and doesn’t quite belong to either one: it displays neither Dances With Wolves or Unforgiven’s interest in the politics of justice, nor No Country for Old Men’s interest in the continued relevance of Western themes, tropes, and the genre’s long influence. Instead, Firefly wants to be a grand, apolitical adventure centering on the eternal struggle between authority and rebellion, with the political used for colour; a true throwback. But buried history doesn’t stay buried, and Firefly’s attempt to neutralize American history and reuse it as space history only makes its problematic racial politics the more obvious.

Firefly is set in a future star empire whose ruling class is culturally descended from white America and a still Han-dominated China. As the empire stretched across solar systems, pioneers set out into the stars, ahead of the empire’s armed forces and commercial powers, to settle in new systems and go their own way. The powerful Core worlds thrive on surveillance and control and settlers hoped to escape this. But naturally, as they proved their settlements, representatives of the Core followed, chasing tax revenue, valuable exports, and the expansion of their influence. Taxation without representation, economic domination by distant powers, and finally, rebellion by new non-Core powers, including a new merchant class and farmers alike. This is the recent past of Firefly: the show focuses on former Alliance rebels, now turned grifters, and their attempts to carve out a life in a period of post-war reconstruction.

They face ne’er do wells, Core military and police forces, vexatious local authorities, constantly failing equipment, and Reavers, the wild frontier cannibals who roam deep space and less-monitored shipping lanes in search of victims. The meta story of Firefly, both its core cast and the universe as a whole, is based on American Reconstruction literature and Westerns; the story of Alliance rebels is the story of Southern “rebels,” and the show’s creators have gone on record saying that the goal of Firefly was to write a Reconstruction Western absent the racism. The Chinese ancestry of this empire is used only for colour: there are no Asian characters in the core cast and non-black people of colour appear only sparingly as supporting characters. And although there are two black people in the core cast — second in command Zoe and mysterious Preacher Book — black people too are seldom seen in the backgrounds of daily life in the Core and Rebel worlds. The evidence of Firefly’s origin — as post-racial Western fantasy about race — lingers and its attempts at distance only emphasize the political: what does it mean to take race out of racist history and offer it up as neutral entertainment built around timeless values of freedom and exploration?

Westerns are primarily concerned with a tight cluster of themes: the frontier, the march of civilization, whiteness and otherness, manliness, self-reliance, and survival. The genre is diverse but these themes are common to most forms. Conservative Westerns pit underdog colonizers against the expansion of industrial civilization and against the native peoples they must wipe out. So-called dirty Westerns often pit misfits, cowboys, and criminals against placid colonizers, and often feature people of colour as sidekicks, co-travellers, or even heroes. Latter days critical Westerns more readily acknowledge the complicated and interconnected relationships of oppression that built The West, and more naturally bring women and people of colour to the fore. But even the Westerns of 2015 can’t sidestep race or racist history–of America and of the genre itself. Firefly, though, tries to do just that.

As a Reconstruction, conservative Western, Firefly draws on those early stories of colonizers fleeing technocratic civilization and meeting mysterious villains, deep in unmapped territory: namely, Native Americans. On Firefly, those “frontier” raiders are the Reavers, intended to be racially neutral. The show wants to use the racist trope of savage, Indian raiders, harassing wagon trains, and burning homesteads, while ejecting the racial element. “De-racialization” is achieved through blind casting and not calling the Reavers “natives.” Reavers are an ever-present threat to this new, more free civilization, who mutilate themselves and their victims – whom they also consume – an act that recalls fears of being “scalped” by Apaches. They are mindlessly violent, speak only in grunts and growls, and are beyond the reach of civilizing forces, Core and Rebel alike. They are the other who lurks in the dark spaces beyond the horizon, who can’t be reasoned with. In short, racism is denied, but not eliminated.

It’s eventually revealed in Serenity that Reavers aren’t natural to deep space, but manufactured: a product of pharmaceutical experimentation and institutional violence. Finding their authority threatened, Core powers ordered dissent on distant colony world Miranda to be put down. The solution of local representatives was to attempt to write out aggression and independence through some science fiction chemical treatment. The result was near genocidal, with 99% of the population wiped out and 1%, the most aggressive, weaponized in a permanent, cannibalistic psychosis. Vast swathes of valuable space and planets have since been written off as Reaver territory, space where they can run wild without threatening the good people of the Core worlds, and Rebel worlds that have been brought back into the fold. This is, effectively, a reservation for monsters. Reavers venture out of their territory sometimes in search of all-Rebel victims, and this serves as evidence of the importance of Core authorities, the only group powerful enough to meaningfully resist them. The Core, of course, has no interest in a permanent solution: Reaver rage, a symptom of Core violence, is expended on innocent homesteaders, who just happened to be in their way. Reavers are convenient for Core power, a deterrent to future rebellion that requires no upkeep or compensation, an ever-present argument for the expansion of Core control.

Side by side with obvious frontier themes are Firefly‘s debts to the American War of Independence and Civil War. Slavery is absent and economics is only shallowly depicted, so it’s difficult to tease out the political differences between Core and pioneer powers; freedom and representation are the key issues cited for why the rebellion began, but both camps have an essentially colonizing ideology – they seek to find new world-territories to “settle” and “civilize” and exploit as they wish. The theme song explains that “Earth was used up so we lit on out,” which recalls Huck Finn’s decision to head for the territories and avoid the cruel rules of “civilized” society.

In Firefly this rejection of society isn’t political, but a vague distaste for the fancy folk of the Core. Neither camp expresses a clear political philosophy outside of “domination” and “freedom” and “expansion.” It is in the interests of both that as their power and territory expands, the Reavers  are pushed ever outwards. Rebels desire freedom, but for whom? In constructing the Rebels greatest challenge in taming the space frontier, the Reavers, Firefly’s showrunners neatly sidestepped the issue of colonialism. Because they are “monsters” there is no need for the crew of the Serenity to regret killing Reavers by the bushel; there is no need for settlers to regret moving into Reaver territory and “civilizing” it. With no clear political or cultural distinction between the two camps, the settlers act as unknowing vanguard of the technocratic Core worlds — it’s all of a piece, this unchallenged white, settler-colonial expansion into the stars. Manifest space destiny.

This is a wholesale transplantation of Spaghetti Western politics, with Native American myth-ghosts — rarely fully embodied and realized in Westerns; more often appearing as representations of the savage Other — made into monstrous space cannibals. Consider: conservative Westerns don’t deal with the obvious politics of slavery, indentured Asian workers, or the ecological consequences of frontierism. They engage political questions solely through the rubric of simple, personal freedom: here is a man, going his own way.

Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Firefly’s lead character and captain of the show’s ragtag band of pirates and misfits, is quite a typical Western hero. He is by turns sullen and snarky, he has a dark, traumatizing past, he has an enduring grudge against those who would tell him what to do, and while he prefers to work alone, he has heart to spare for women in distress and trusted comrades. But he offers no alternative ideology or principle around which to build a community, and is an authority unto himself thanks to his military prowess and force of personality.
 

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Mal’s authority is challenged through moments of buffoonery and moral failing, but ultimately left unthreatened, and in  super-waif River Tam, a Core refugee, he finds a purpose. The close of Serenity, Firefly’s big screen wrap up, sees Mal vowing a kind of permanent rebellion alongside River, revealed to be, like the Reavers, a victim of Core experimentation. Mal and River are meant to be destabilizing, unconquerable figures – an ever-present challenge to settled authority. Their charm is mainly in their independent thought; their need to go their own way. But their challenge is insubstantial; their rallying cry merely, don’t go too far.

This indulgence in the tropes and visual signifiers of the Western genre was common to early, more conservative Westerns and to children’s Westerns; while Dirty Westerns and the films of the contemporary Western resurgence pack in the visual signifiers just as heavily, they problematize tropes like the mysterious wandering gunfighter and the grizzled sheriff. The aims of these films are varied but what they have in common is discomfort and unrest; the sense of things not being settled or sure. The archetypal Dirty Western anti-hero, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, isn’t a good man, but he’s generally a just one, and he moves through the West with purpose.
 

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The Man isn’t Eastwood’s only Western role — he started out in simpler, cheerier fare. Like Eastwood, John Wayne’s career followed the development of the genre that made him popular. Though he started out playing untroubled (and sometimes singing) cowboys, his roles, like the films he starred in, got more complex with time. In The Searchers he played a complicated Confederate veteran searching for his kidnapped niece. Like Mal, Ethan’s antagonists are authority and “savages,” in his case Comanche warriors. He resists them with equal fervour, no mercy for either.
 

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To be frank, Ethan is a terrible person. He kills people who get in his way, mutilates the bodies of his enemies, and would rather see his niece die than live with the Comanches. Mal’s character and Nathan Fillion’s performance borrow liberally from the Man With No Name and Ethan: Mal’s famous clothing, even down to colouring, bears striking resemblance to Ethan’s; the physicality of Fillion’s performance, posture, gesture and expression, combines the Man With No Name’s untouchability with Ethan’s intensity. To say that Mal is a melting pot of Western archetypes and tropes is too much: Wayne and Eastwood are two of the most famous Western stars. Ethan and the Man are still studied and talked about and, dare I say it, iconic. This is, in miniature, how Firefly borrows from and neutralizes Westerns of the past. Clothe Mal in Ethan’s shirt and give him the Man’s stance, let him share Ethan’s background and so many of the Man’s mannerisms — but do so without Ethan’s monstrosity or the Man’s coldness.

But this is not necessary for contemporary Westerns. Is a Western just a collection of funny clothes and tropes? The genre is inseparable from the time it aims to portray. Transplants of the Western genre into different times, places, and modes work best when they recreate some of the political tensions that drove Westward expansion and the national interest that still fuels fantasies of the frontier. Updates to the genre work best when they acknowledge and critically engage with the subject matter

The 2012 Western revenge fantasy, Django Unchained, centres on a similarly charismatic rebel, but unlike Mal, Django (Jamie Foxx) has clear purpose to match the power of his personality. Narrowly speaking, freed slave turned bounty hunter Django’s purpose is to find and rescue his wife Broomhilda, but broadly speaking, his goal is more radical: freedom for him and his people and the complete destruction of settler colonialism. Like Mal and most other Western leads, Django isn’t an ideologue or political activist; this broader goal isn’t expressed to us through speeches or organizing. Rather, it’s written into the very fabric of the character: from his posture, to his actions, to his speech. His existence and his humanity in and of themselves are challenges to American settler-colonialism; his continued and disruptive participation in polite, Southern society, though a ruse, is discomfitting too. Workers in the slave economy are disturbed by his confidence, self-possession, and competence. This is the shaky illogic on which the slave economy is built: complete denial of the humanity of slaves and all black people in America is necessary and must constantly be renewed and reified. Evidence of black humanity is disturbing. Evidence of black competence must be explained or absorbed into the slave economy. But here is Django, gun in hand, ready for anything. This is an image that cannot be absorbed; it must be destroyed.
 

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Like Mal, Django lives on the fringes of society (as all black people did in the slave-holding South). Also like Mal, much of Django’s dress and character are informed by Westerns that came before. But for Django, the consequences of rebellions minor and major are quite different. He’s clothed like any number of cowboy rebels and he stands like the Man, but Django isn’t a settler or an ex-Confederate. He’s not a rebel in search of a purpose, but is a man born to rebel against the racist logic of his society.

At the end of the film, he rides off into the sunset with Broomhilda. But we know that Django and Broomhilda will never be safe so long as the settler-colonial regime remains. It’s not only Django’s actions through the course of the film — freeing his wife and killing a major slave-owner and his employees — or his personality that make him a target, it’s his very existence as a free black man. Not even in the North, where slavery is no longer the engine of the American economy, would he and Broomhilda be safe: they will never have white privilege.

Let’s consider another modern Western, one where the lead has more purely personal motive, and is on more even stakes with Mal. The moral imperative in 1992’s Unforgiven is not on William Munny’s side. Or at least it’s not on the side of making your living off of violence. Munny (Clint Eastwood again) is a retired bandit. He made his stake off of violence and theft, then retired to marry and raise children and farm. He’s drawn back into a life of violence by old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who seeks his help in pursuing a large bounty. Two cowboys cheated and then disfigured a sex worker, and now her co-workers have put together a large pot for their heads. Complicating things is the local sheriff, who doesn’t allow vigilantism (or banditry) and is himself an imperfect embodiment of the law — but he tries. Munny and Logan need the money — Munny’s family is sick — and the sex workers deserve justice, but the sheriff is right that vigilantism and the breakdown of social order results in widespread and indiscriminate suffering. Munny and Logan’s rebellion, their unwillingness to bow to coercive settler authority, though, has merit too. That authority does not bring justice, whether economic, social, or legal; it too often protects the status quo even when that status quo requires great suffering. It’s the sheriff who gets the plot moving: his inadequate, unsatisfying judgement against the cowboys leaves the brothel workers feeling scorned.

Like Django, the brothel workers have some moral authority behind their demands for revenge. They have been done wrong and the status quo can only continue to do them wrong. And while Munny’s more or less comfortable retirement was a privilege of his whiteness and maleness, Ned Logan doesn’t have the same luck. As a black man, his retirement can only be more precarious; his freedoms to own property, love, move, and participate in society (polite or otherwise) are limited. Ned Logan  will never be truly safe in this world — he cannot simply put down stakes and join the settler class. Glad submission to the sheriff’s justice is not possible for the brothel workers or for Ned, only submission by necessity, for safety.
 

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Also important in Unforgiven are age and time. Munny, Logan and the sheriff are old. They’ve been doing this for some time, either rebelling against or maintaining the social order. The film is set in 1881, near the close of the frontier/settlement era, and the start of our time, the hyper-industrialized, globalized now. They are all aging out of their roles and out of their purposes — they are watching the end of their relevance to the world and the establishment of a new social order. Munny, of course, is played by Clint Eastwood, whose career was built on an older breed of Western. It’s interesting and ironic to see him come to this. Ultimately, Unforgiven is about consequences and endings — the collapse of the Western fantasy. Django Unchained’s ending, Django flirtatiously showing of his horsemanship for Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the couple escaping into an unbounded future, is of a more fantastical mode, but Django leaves the Western reconstituted; the Western hero reborn. Perhaps Munny is what happens when a Man With No Name takes one on and settles down, but he is not what happens when a Mal Reynolds finds his purpose: Firefly aims for the Western fantasy unquestioned and eternal.

Firefly and Serenity come down not on the side of revolution or transformation, but on the side of mischief. What is the fundamental challenge of the rebels or of the crew of the Serenity? That remains unclear. “I aim to misbehave,” is Mal’s best known catchphrase and the underlying drive of the crew — they are misfits and so they cannot conform; they are misfits and so they must rebel. And although this rebellion results in losses, both during the Rebellion proper and during the course of Serenity, there is no best before date set on their travels. It’s space, after all; there will always be a further frontier to flee to.

Firefly revels in this, seeking an adventure marked by timelessness; a Western romp without modernization to contend with; without thorny questions of displacement, racial exploitation, and nation building. What does Firefly have to say about power and authority? About the ethics of settlement? Mainly: that individual freedom should be maximized and that while the formal power of government is vast and usually corrupt, it’s not institutionalized in culture. That is, Firefly does not in any meaningful way engage with systems of power and inequality; rather, it obscures their existence in favour of a neutralized and eternal frontier. The darkness at the heart of this universe is not cultural, it’s merely government overreach and abuse; the Rebels are in no way complicit and their push for freedom is pure-hearted.

While other contemporary Westerns touch on the complex network of violence, power, and injustice that lies at the root of nation-building and frontier-settling — with varying levels of engagement and success — Firefly boils this down to one relationship: rebellion and authority. What is a frontier in Firefly? Merely space to breathe, to put down roots, to take whole worlds and make them your own. Destiny. What is oppression? Merely taxation without representation.

But Firefly’s attempt at sidestepping racial politics of Westerns and American history only make them more apparent: societies manufacture internal Others and underclasses — are Rebel and pirate really as low as it goes? The very absence of the dispossessed in so many Westerns, the wholesale erasure of Black and Chinese workers, of Native Americans either pushed onto reserves or protecting what land they have left, makes their propagandistic motives more apparent. Warm-hearted, adventurous Westerns work to reinforce the fiction of an America won by grit and gumption, not colonization, enslavement, and genocide. Firefly’s discomfort with these truths, its awkward reach toward post-racial fantasy, only serves to reinvigorate these racist fantasies: in the future American melting pot of Firefly, all cultural disjunctures, all power imbalances and dirty history have been melted away. But the melting is inexpert and ultimately unsuccessful: Firefly’s attempt at de-racialization and de-contextualization cannot succeed. The context and the history remain, never fully buried.
 

We Can Remember the Dollhouse for You

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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One of the core philosophical mysteries that Philip K Dick lingered over throughout his career was the fragility of identity (and, by extension, reality). In particular, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” twists a very knotty philosophical quandary into one of PKD’s more intense action stories. Typically, PKD is more concerned with perception of reality but “We Can Remember…” focuses more intimately on the mutability of memory and its relationship with identity. The protagonist, one Douglas Quaid, undergoes a procedure to gain a desired false memory, only to stumble onto buried memories that shatter his identity, replacing his mundane life with that of a government assassin.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve ever seen Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and aren’t already acquainted with the plot of PKD’s seminal work, also adapted into film twice now, you’ll be now quite aware that “We Can Remember…” is the foundation upon which the show is based. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a crude summary; a corporation erases people’s identities and replaces them with useful identities until their debts are paid off.

One of the reasons why “We Can Remember…” seemed worthy of modernization as a TV series wasn’t just the possible complexities of a world where identities can be manufactured but the subtle thread of dystopianism, one that predates William Gibson’s corporations-as-gods cyberpunkism. In both Dollhouse and “We Can Remember…”, the powerful corporations responsible for identity manipulation don’t serve as arms of a nameless government but act independently of them and at odds with them, even.

In “We Can Remember…” it’s REKALL, the corporation, who triggers Douglas Quaid’s memories of his job as a government assassin and it’s left to the government to deal with the problem, though it’s again REKALL who provides the final resolution, or at least an intended one. It’s dystopian in the whole sense; Quaid was a government assassin who, had things gone according to plan, would never have awoken to his former identity and it is actually his false identity in denial of this that leads to the central conflict. “Real” Quaid, the government he worked for and REKALL are all complicit.

Dollhouse, on the other hand, is openly anti-corporation and, in its implications, a cautionary tale whose formula is “corporations + technology = bad.” This starts with the implication that Rossum Corporation took an invention intended to alleviate neurological disorders and turned it to arguably nefarious ends, and ends with a near-apocalypse. The depiction of the creators of this technology, as well as most of the technologically-inclined characters, is of sociopaths. Whedon’s Dollhouse has little sympathy for scientists and barely touches on the humanitarian uses of the Dollhouse technology.

On the other hand, in Philip K Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” the existence of mind-altering technology is far more benign and pragmatic than Whedon’s. REKALL runs a business granting people the chance to have memories of experiences they never had or to take on an identity they wish they could be. There’s no apocalyptic endgame and, to that extend, Dick seems to acknowledge the mundanity of postmodern culture in which everything is changing but nothing is different. In fact, he’s not even concerned with it, instead punctuating his tale with a very PKD-ian twist from out of left field. Dick was telling a story and not running a simulation revolving around a theoretical technology, one in which the driving individuals are improbably corrupt, as those in Dollhouse seemed to be.

And therein lies the disconnect of Whedon’s riff on PKD; Philip K Dick was writing Weird science fiction, with a capital “W.” The universe he portrayed in his books, unlike Whedon’s Dollhouse (and, perhaps more tellingly, Firefly), was ultimately an irrational universe. PKD wasn’t really a science fiction author, not in the vein of Asimov or Clarke, but more a postmodern mutation of the old Weird, like Lovecraft for the hard disk era. The relationship between the two is even more stark if you consider Philip K Dick’s overriding affinity for “the beyond” and extrastellar and ungraspable entities. And, really, that’s what drives his dystopias; that what should seem patently absurd and surreal by our standards is rendered mundane by the plastic nature of his realities.

Whedon’s “dystopia” is of an increasingly common and wearying breed; one that doggedly tracks down a line of best fit, averse to outliers and designed not just to suspend disbelief but to lock the viewer into a meticulous and intricate conundrum. And Whedon’s solution to the whole thing is, bizarrely, a sort of anti-science deus ex machine; it turns out the secret to countering the mind-wiping technology is hidden away in a particular character’s DNA.

This last revelation feels like a loose thread that Whedon could’ve malevolently ripped clean from the scrupulously woven fabric of Dollhouse’s reality by implying that perhaps this miracle DNA isn’t of terrestrial origin. It certainly would’ve infused such an appallingly cynical story with some much needed weirdness, the kind of weird that made Philip K Dick’s works compelling.

Choosing the Dollhouse

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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“We make choices. I’m well aware there are forces beyond our control, even in the face of those forces we make choices.” – Adele, Dollhouse

Given the recent contention surrounding Joss Whedon’s brand of feminism, we immediately wanted to revisit Dollhouse for this roundtable because of how far it takes some of feminism’s central concerns (and also because of how much feminists seem to hate it). We decided to structure our analysis of the show as a dialogue for two reasons. The first was simply to approximate the feeling of an informal roundtable, and the second was to side-step the is-or-isn’t-this-show-feminist quagmire by modeling the ways in which feminism, like popular culture, is dynamic. All it can offer us a place from which to start—not settle—discussion.

Desirae: I suppose I’ll address the is-or-isn’t-Dollhouse-feminist thing by saying that there are many different types of feminisms, and they are all going to have a different take on the show. Dollhouse is fundamentally concerned with philosophical questions relating to freedom, choice, and the self, and different feminisms relate differently to these things. So when people say Dollhouse is a rape fantasy or glorifies sex work, my thing is that perspective specifically comes from liberal feminism, which has to believe in (and so wants to see reflected) this idea that women can be free and empowered with choice. This is why consent is such a huge part of liberal feminist rhetoric. But if you’re dealing with a system of complete control that sort of consent (Yes, I choose my choice) doesn’t make sense anymore because there’s no choice that isn’t coerced in some way. I think that’s the main premise of the show, and it’s exemplified by the Dollhouse itself… but it’s also meant to be a reflection of the world in which we live.
 

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Jade: Yeah, which is why it’s such a cool premise. The fact that in S1 E6, in the beginning stages of developing her own awareness and while imprinted with another consciousness, Echo chooses to complete her engagement after it had been interrupted by Paul’s white-knighting. Echo seems aware that her imprint didn’t experience resolution, and that the romantic engagement hadn’t been executed to completion. Does her choice not matter because Caroline (or her “soul”) isn’t present? I guess that’s a metaphor for intoxication or other forms of out-of-body-ness that liberal feminism would argue cannot be consent. Caroline consented to being a doll; she signed the papers…but liberal feminism wants Caroline’s consent in the moment. S1 E6 is the first moment where Echo asserts her will which forces us to ask, what the threshold that has to be crossed in order for something to count an authentic choice.

In another scene, Paul argues that you can’t erase a person’s soul. He later doubles down on that when he refuses to sleep with Echo because all her actions, desires, and sexuality are programmed. As a result, he thinks she cannot consent. This idea that we are only able to TRULY make a choice if there is a connection between our mind, our body, and our soul speaks to the “ghost of Christianity” that lurks in all Joss’s meditations on “the soul.” It fuels the critiques of Dollhouse as rape fantasy and completely ignores that we are all products of coercion. The systems we live within are deeply ingrained in the very nature of our bodies, minds, and souls, and taken to its most extreme conclusion: all sexuality is rooted in coercion, especially unexamined heterosexuality.

D: Right, and one way of looking at it is, how is our daily reality different from the dolls’? I think I can genuinely choose or consent to certain actions/relationships, but there is a larger structure of systemic coercion that doesn’t allow me the choice to not engage, you know. Adrienne Rich called it “compulsory heterosexuality,” where choosing to opt out isn’t really an available choice. Even if you’re a lesbian, you’re still acting within a system of compulsory heterosexuality. In this scenario, I feel like a doll.

J: I do too. We agreed to keep this focused on S1, but the fact that the first episode of S2 is about a long-term engagement where Echo gets MARRIED could be discussed at length. It’s just wonderful.

D: My body is coerced in various environments and ways, and there’s no way I can consent to some of what I choose to do. Like that is the literal definition of oppression.

J: Right. All the people in the Dollhouse were coerced, even those that chose it. Caroline, Madeline, and others are seen signing contracts and while they do, we hear Adele’s well-crafted explanation of the Dollhouse’s purpose (and its benefits). We’re to believe they understood the terms and accepted them. They’ll wake up in 5 years with a clean slate—selective memories removed, PTSD treated, and free of the guilt that they had before their residency. It isn’t until the S1 E8-where they are allowed to live out their “needs” as a way to correct the glitches each doll is experiencing that we discover that there’s an element of coercion to everyone’s decision to enter the Dollhouse. This exercise relies on the same idea Paul sells later, that you can’t completely remove the fundamental need of the original personality’s soul.

D: Which was itself a thing they were allowed to do by Dr. Saunders and the Dollhouse. There’s no real consent in the Dollhouse, but there’s no real consent anywhere else either. And that’s what the show problematizes, and I also think it’s a thing that a lot of mainstream feminism does not want to have to confront politically. No, your desire isn’t authentic. No, you are not free. But that’s just what it means to be a person in the world.

J: Well, and Priya is really the only character who didn’t consent to entering the Dollhouse. She’s the only one who was trafficked in. Her residency in the Dollhouse is painted very differently than Caroline, Madeline, and Anthony. While you can argue that Adele emotionally manipulated the others into joining, with Priya, it was Adele that was manipulated. Priya is drugged into an altered state and misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, which Topher thinks he could treat through the active architecture.

D: That’s interesting. There are a lot of instance in which people step on the autonomy of others, even if they have good intentions in doing so.

J: Yeah, Echo and Paul are trying to “save” everyone. In S1 E8 in the midst of Caroline’s rebellion against the Dollhouse Adele says to her, “You are free to leave. Who are you to decide for the others?” It’s like liberal feminists or white knights that try to save women from whatever “bad decisions” we make, whether it’s wearing make-up or engaging in sex work… And Adele, Caroline, and Paul are representative of different savior scenarios. Paul takes the patriarchal approach and asserts that there is only one way to be authentic. Adele is the champion of individual choice. She believes in a world where empowered choices can be made freely and she asserts and protects people’s ability to do so. Caroline is an animal rights activist who has good intentions but often can’t see how her actions hurt the people around her. Dollhouse stages these different types of problematic commitments to social justice and challenges us to question the idea that there is One Best Way to address oppression.

D: They all choose for other people; that’s what saviorism is. It’s also what rape is. Back in 2009, i09 ran an article that drew a direct line between rape and the dystopic future the Dollhouse’s technology creates. It’s not an accident that it all started with some savior impulse…
 

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J: Though, we do see instances of authentic and real decisions, like Victor/Anthony and Sierra/Priya. They develop a relationship in the doll state that isn’t consented to, but later Priya falls in love with Anthony. We’re meant to trust in and support their relationship.

D: Yes, but even that one is weird. Doll-state Sierra (who is Not Sierra) doesn’t consent to her relationship with Victor, but that love is cast as being the only authentic one in the show. It’s as though the Truth of their connection transcends the doll state and carries into their original personalities. I think that goes back to the idea of the soul that you keep bringing up. We want to think there are these hard kernels of the self that can survive all the coercion and the ideological programming that structure our daily lives; Victor and Sierra, apparently, have that kind of love. But is it really that different than the relationship between, for example, Adele and Roger (an Active)? Paul and Mellie (an Active)? Paul and Echo (an Active), and then later Echo (who has become a self) and Paul (who becomes an Active)?

J: So here’s a question: once Echo becomes self-aware, does Caroline have the right to essentially kill her by taking her body back? What about active imprints within Echo? What happens to consent then? We are to believe Caroline has that right as the “true owner” of her body. Toward the end of S1 and into S2 as each character becomes self-aware, we see another set of circumstances that pit informed consent against coerced choice, and the ways that the system forces everyone’s hand. This is most clear in Madeline’s case. She is released from her contract because Paul agrees to become Echo’s handler in order to play out his fantasy of “saving” Caroline. (Which is eerily similar to some of the Dollhouse’s clients’ paid engagements.) Later, when Madeline’s freedom is tested, she tells Paul that freedom means the ability to make choices even if they’re the wrong ones, and she asks if she is really free. Paul, who so desperately wants to believe in freedom beyond the Dollhouse, (again!) grants that freedom to her (which speaks to his patriarchal saviorism, he allows the “bad choices” to happen). And of course it’s the “wrong” choice and Madeline ends up back in the Dollhouse, this time as a prisoner—no consent. And then of course, Echo, who is being driven by Caroline’s savior soul, stays to fight. So you’re right, at the end of the day there is no choice that proves to be correct or any less coerced. Whether any of them chooses to stay or go, fight or comply, it’s all equally a matter of acting out what they are programed to do—whether literally by the Dollhouse or figuratively by an inborn sense of ethics, duty, or whatever.
 

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D: One of the ideas we’re touching on too is, what are the limits of capitalism? Can you, for example, sell yourself into slavery? That’s one of the show’s major questions. Is the self a thing that can be bought and sold? If so, who owns it? We were talking the other day about how saying that all choice is coerced can be deployed in super racist ways (see: Meghan Murphy’s take on Laverne Cox’s babely photo spread in Allure). So there is a way in which the conversation needs to be attuned to contemporary and historical differences in raced experience… because there is a difference between “selling oneself,” which is the term liberal feminists often use for sex work, and being sold as chattel by another. Think the difference between Dominatrix Echo and Priya being trafficked into the Dollhouse. In liberal feminist rhetoric, these are the same thing. But in Dollhouse, we are meant to see the difference between Caroline’s choice to become an Active, which was an abdication of responsibility, and Priya’s being trafficked into the Dollhouse, which was a violation of sovereignty. So all of this is to say, in my mind at least, that if all choice is coerced then no one choice can be better or worse than another. But at the same time, just because all choice is coerced doesn’t make all coercion equal. These are distinctions that I think are missing from feminist critiques like Meghan Murphy’s or those that reduce Dollhouse to a rape fantasy.
 

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JD: So, I like the idea of ending this with a quote from Boyd. I feel like it kinda brings everything home.

D: Yes, I agree, especially because of the role that he plays in the show, going from handler to arch villain.

J: If we had more time I’d go into detail about that ep because it’s a mirror of the Dollhouse, but it comes from S1 E5, “True Believer,” which I think is a self-contained examination of the entire premise. “No one asked to be saved—not by you.”

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Jade Degrio works in the fashion industry and is a freelance writer for various online and print publications. She specializes in yelling about things on the internet

Desirae Embree is a PhD student in English at Texas A&M University, where she has figured out how to make watching too much television a (somewhat) respectable profession.