Caution: Spoilers Ahead?

So I'm again inspired by Joss Whedon and the frustrating pleasures of Dollhouse to return to this blog. I've just watched the famous unaired final episode, and I'm unsure what to make of it. I'll do the standard caveat against spoilers here, but I'm not sure if it's even valid, since the episode both is and isn't part of the show's “official” arc. Whedon himself was, unsurprisingly perhaps, given his history in comics and tendency to play with canonical backstory, a little cagey about the canonical value of the episode in the Dollhouse panel at Comic-Con. His full response boils down to this: “Everything that happens is real, but they're memories, so not reliable.” In other words, the writers can change things if the story demands it or if they feel like it--everything is open to a possible reboot.

If I sound churlish, I don't mean to--I'm excited at the prospect of a changing definition of continuity, or at least I am if it's happening in the hands of Joss Whedon, who's particularly good at this kind of narrative innovation. I think the introduction of Dawn, for instance, was one of the most interesting and ballsiest moves he could have made, particularly considering that Buffy was on the air well before the massive popularity of LOST's twisty logic.

Anyway, here's what happens in the episode: it takes place in 2019, ten years after the events of the first season, and LA is a postapocalyptic nightmare. The dollhouse technology has spun out of control (surprise!), and it's impossible to tell if people are “actually” who they seem or if they've been wiped. On top of that, there are armies of “butchers”: people who seem to have been wiped and turned into mindless killers (shades of the long-term themes of Firefly). A group of Scrappy Survivors (featuring awesome girl geek Felicia Day) discovers the abandoned dollhouse, and goes there to take cover from the war above. So already, the show's ultimate endgame is revealed. Any reader who is familiar with the genre at all could see the catastrophic effects of the dollhouse technology coming, but the thing that became increasingly surprising to me as the show went on was the level of detail we get as to how everything fell apart.

Because it turns out that the postapocalyptic story is just the frame for a Cliff-Notes-style summary of how the world exploded. Whenever the shit came down, Dushku and Co. left a trail of bread crumbs in the form of stored memories that will tell any remaining survivors how to get to a mythic “Safe Haven” (and, more importantly, fill the reader in on all the important bits that we missed in getting from Here to There). So we learn, in five-minute bursts, that Echo/Caroline has learned to maintain a coherent personality, that Rossum expands the Dollhouse's services to giving “anatomical upgrades” to people, that Rossum has been secretly uploading memories every time anyone gets in an MRI, and that someone (Rossum, presumably) weaponizes the Dollhouse tech so that picking up a phone puts you at risk of becoming a mindless zombie.

It's all awesome SF, and cobbled together to make something new in a way that showcases Whedon's talent for generic pastiche. But here's the thing that gets me--what happens now to the kinds of pleasure that we assume serial reading is meant to provide? Why warn about spoilers when the show itself has already laid out its next five years of plot in a single hour? And will that information about the show's future be available to everyone, or just to people who care enough about the show to buy the DVDs? After watching it, I figured that the next season might even begin without any allusion to “Epitaph One” at all--it would be like an easter egg, only available to the devoted fan. Apparently, though, three of the characters from the apocalyptic future show up in the season two premiere, so casual viewers will at least have a taste of what the future of Dollhouse holds, but not the broad overview that the “real” fan now knows.

It's interesting to me, because the standing model so far for the distinction between the casual and devoted reader (at least with a show like Dollhouse) has been how committed that reader is to sorting out the show's central mystery. The one who's looking teleologically forward, obsessed with who killed Laura Palmer or what the numbers mean or who shot JR. But with Dollhouse, there's this assumption that readers are looking for a different kind of payoff--filling in the gaps, maybe? I'd say getting a deeper understanding of character, but that doesn't quite work with Dollhouse since the characters are by definition so empty...

Based on the little bit of internet stalking I've done so far around message boards and the like, it seems that people are mostly adopting this “we're in it for the journey, not the destination” angle. I'm curious as to how this will effect the show's direction in the coming year--but more importantly, if Joss Whedon has started another sea change in television like the one that began with Buffy. This time, though, instead of trusting readers to pay attention to longer and more complicated serial arcs, he's trusting readers to look for aesthetic rewards beyond What Happens Next--to think differently about their relationship with plot. Here's hoping.

That old, strange, sentimental feeling

So I watched what was probably the final episode of Dollhouse last night, refusing to go to the movies in my desire to be part of what felt like--to me at least--a watershed Nerd Moment. Critical opinion on this show seems to be divided, with a lot of the complaints revolving around the difficulty of becoming affectively attached to the central characters. Since their personalities have been wiped, the complaint goes, we can't relate to the characters enough to really care about the Big Reveals that are so central to the structure of any good serial. There are extradiegetic problems, too, in Fox's focus-group retooling of the show's first five episodes as well as Eliza Dushku's ... um ... “limited range” is the going euphemism.

I know this might sound like I'm doing that annoying academic trick of over-investing a narrative's mistake or flaw with too much meaning, but I think Dushku's limits as an actress actually play right into what makes Dollhouse most interesting--namely its engagement with the sentimental. In a lot of ways, all Whedon's work up to this point seems to be part of the tradition of Sentimental Social Change (especially the kind that's achieved through an affective link with sentimental characters). I'm thinking, for instance, of how Jo's death in Bleak House is meant to make bourgeois readers care about the plight of the urban underclass, or how Eliza's spectacular flight across the Ohio River in Uncle Tom's Cabin tries to convince white antebellum readers to oppose slavery. Since we spend so much time with these characters just in the process of reading serially, we feel like they're our friends, or at least people we know, and then their suffering as a result of social codes strikes mainstream readers (perhaps for the first time) as unfair. Willow's coming-out narrative over the course of Buffy is a great example of this strategy. By the season 4 episode “Family,” we side completely with the anti-homophobic stance of the Scooby Gang against the scary religiosity of Tara's family, not least because four years of faithful viewing have made us so attached to Willow as a character. Through sentimental identification, the reader is placed in a reading position that stands in contrast (but not too radically) with the dominant culture.

The thing about Dollhouse, and the key to its success and failure both, is how it plays with that process. The Dolls are obviously meant to be the object of our sentimental identification in the show--pity, desire, whatever--and the stand-alone episodes follow the spectacular logic of sentimental narratives to a T. As we see Echo put into dangerous situation after dangerous situation, we want to protect her (or at least I think we're meant to want this), and at the same time we're set up to desire her sexually. (Echo could get a few tips on how to deal with this gross child-bride situation from pretty much any 19th-century sentimental heroine: Little Nell, Little Eva, Little Dorrit, Anne Catherick) The thing that's interesting to me about all this is how Echo's wiping process makes us see the problems of sentimental identification so much more clearly. If we care about Echo, if we get pleasure from watching her in her different engagements, we're immediately in the position of a Dollhouse client. That's why I actually like the scenes with all the zombified dolls wandering around the Dollhouse--the connection you make to the characters in that state feels so much creepier, since it's so obviously about projecting my own narrative desires onto them. The “reader stand-in,” Ballard, is the grossest character of them all, hate-fucking his Doll girlfriend when he finds out that she works for the Dollhouse and smirking self-righteously at all the other characters the rest of the time. Echo's “handler” (read: pimp), on the other hand, is the show's Good Dad in the Giles mold, which (again) is ultimately profoundly unsettling.

Dushku's “limited” acting, then, works for the show rather than against it, in that it makes you have to try harder to care about her character, which in turn makes the sentimental machinery visible in a way it wouldn't be with a more talented actor at the show's core. When Dushku's good, though, she's really good, which is also fun--I find myself oscillating back and forth between caring about her character and seeing the machinery of “caring” about fictional characters laid bare. To complicate things even further, Olivia Williams, who plays the Dollhouse's icy manager Adele, is fantastic (as she's been in everything since Rushmore), giving the kind of nuanced performance that makes her a much more “real” (and thus identifiable) character than any of the others.

I doubt, sadly, that Whedon is going for anything as Brechtian as all this--the season (series?) finale was disappointingly straightforward, with Echo being captured by Alpha and getting seventeen personalities loaded into her at the same time. Because Echo's original personality is inherently good (she's a social activist, vegetarian, etc.), getting overfilled with multiple consciousness makes her endlessly empathetic, and this empathy is what marks her as different from the psychotic Alpha. She “is everyone,” as she tells Alpha. Combined with the (frankly unbelievable) inclusion of Ballard as one of the Dollhouse staff, the whole finale seemed to me to pretty definitively back off from this overarching critique of sentimental identification. I still haven't totally decided, and there's always the possibility that the mythic Final Unaired Episode will shift the show's focus yet again, but I do think there's possibility here for something exciting in the long run, and maybe a new way of thinking about how narratives try to gesture toward social change.

Feeling dissed...

So I'm deep in the zone right now, working on my dissertation, and frozen by terror in a way that surpasses all my school-related freakouts in recent memory. For those of you among my five readers who have done this before, any tips for pushing through the terror that comes with the first piece of writing you give your advisor?

On top of my general malaise, I've somehow misplaced the central theoretical text I'm using. I can only take comfort in the fact that the same thing happened to my blushing bride, and she managed to finish her prospectus. Thank god we don't have a baby, we'd probably just leave it on the T.

So here's my hope, put out into the wide, wide worldwide web:
I will be motivated by my love of serial reading, not my fear of failure;
I will commit myself wholeheartedly to the play of language;
I will refrain from making Grand Pronouncements;
I will treat my fellow writers and readers with respect;
I will remember always that the object of all interpretation is the process.

Wish me luck, friends.