Joss Whedon

Now that Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon’s music video for “Remains” has come out, I’ve been thinking and craving the tragically short Dollhouse again. I love the show, and I do believe it would have been better than Buffy if it had been given a chance to flesh out. But I also know there have been a lot of critics of the show – namely those who worried about the first season. “Doesn’t Joss know that this is just glorified prostitution? Isn’t he supposed to be a feminist?” Of course he knows. And that’s why I think that, in his feminist repertoire, Dollhouse gives us just as much fodder for thinking about gender, feminism, and power as Buffy, his most famously feminist work.

Buffy, as we know, was all about “female empowerment.” Joss’s entire premise for the show is roughly explained as, “Blonde girl goes into alley, meets a monster, and beats the living daylights out of it.” He went to great lengths to avoid making Buffy the perpetual “final girl”, who usually only beats the monster out of a combination of luck and not sleeping with people (because horror movies love punishing the girl who has sex). He also has a great deal of other empowered female characters, like Willow, who eventually becomes the most powerful witch ever; Cordelia, who, though lacking superpowers (in Buffy, at least), is rich, has a car and isn’t afraid to speak her mind; Anya, the vengeance demon, etc. But ultimately the show is more interested in exploring what having a lot of empowered women might be like (no, they don’t have to be hairy-legged feminist bitches. Yes they can be fashionable. No, they don’t have to be punished by sex. Yes, they can have kinky relationships.) and it really does do a great job revolutionizing gender relations in a way that promotes gender equity, rather than just a plain gender swap.

Sure, Buffy has its moments of exposing misogyny and female disempowerment. These are primarily explored through characters like Caleb and Warren, or through certain episodes like “Helpless”, where Buffy loses her Slayer strength briefly and is reduced to the terrified horror victim. Female empowerment is also problematized, too. For me, one of the ickiest things to contemplate about the show is the Slayer line itself, a perfect example of structural and systemic female oppression. While empowering a single girl seems all well and good for the purposes of Joss’s initial premise, why would the Shadow Men choose to give demon strength to a young adolescent girl? As we discover in “Get It Done” in Season 7, the creation of the First Slayer (and subsequently all Slayers, really) is an act of spiritual, psychological, and demonic rape. And why young women? Because they are more easily controlled (until Buffy and Faith proves the Watchers wrong, at least) – just look at Kendra, blindly submitting to the male authority of the Watcher Council. Also, the Shadow Men created a structure where women disproportionately suffer the cost of fighting evil (“You’re waging a war. She’s fighting it,” Giles admonishes Travers in “Helpless”), as most of the Slayers don’t manage to reach the age of 18 (also revealed in “Helpless”). So Buffy is just the next Slayer in a line of thousands of Slayers, and in return for her braving apocalypses (“It turns out I suddenly find the need to know the plural of apocalypse”, Riley says) all she can expect is a dramatically shortened life expectancy. But all of this history is overshadowed by the message that Joss chooses to end with – the empowerment of all potential Slayers (by a Goddess figure, not creepy Shadow Men), and more importantly, the choice on whether or not to fight. It’s a great, feel-good message. You go, girl(s)!

By the time Dollhouse rolled around, the conversations that Joss starts had become much more mature. It started to deviate from the monster-of-the-week, Big-Bad-of-the-season format. Angel, for example, is about the importance of fighting the good fight, and how difficult that might be (there wasn’t even a definite ending shown on TV – just the promise of continued struggle). Dr. Horrible showed us that the good guys might not always win, or even be all that good. And then there was Dollhouse. Dollhouse is not really about female empowerment. It’s actually strictly about disempowerment, both male and female (but still mainly female), and how everyone is complicit in that system. A lot of people criticized Echo as the “anti-Buffy”, who is used, abused, and doesn’t even know who she is. If people find the first few episodes of Dollhouse when it was still in a mission-of-the-week phase unnerving, that’s because they’re meant to be. Whedon engages in a careful discussion of who is disempowered, who does the disempowering, why and how power relations exist the way they do, and how we are all complicit in the system. In Dollhouse, Echo’s goal isn’t female triumph – it’s reclaiming basic human dignity and the right to choose your role and identity, a right that is consistently denied in the wiping process. In the end, Sierra/Priya, having experienced many supposedly empowered roles (sex kitten, kick-butt action girl, forensic investigator), is perfectly content to be a wife and mother (traditional female roles) because she chose them.

Disempowerment, then, is the inability to create your own identity and make your own choices. This extends beyond just the most obvious one in the show (the Dollhouse). It examines how patriarchal families are problematic, like Boyd’s dubious ethics even though he is the “father” – “You guys are my family!” he exclaims when his betrayal is revealed. Many romantic relationships are suspect too – Paul Ballard’s obsession with “saving” Caroline, his sleeping beauty, is also cast in a negative light because it, too, robs Echo of her capacity to define herself, even if Paul’s intentions are nothing but benevolent. A random “Angelino” in “Man on the Street” says it best: “You think it’s not happening? You think they’re not controlling you? Don’t worry about it. Just sit back and wait for them to tell you what to buy.” He’s probably talking about corporations (another institution that Whedon overtly criticizes), but he really could be just about anyone or anything – relationships between romantic partners, employers and employees, rapists and victims (Sierra’s background story is particularly heart-breaking and powerful), producer-consumer, parents and children, saviors and people who need saving, etc. Not even Echo is safe from criticism – her insistence on “freeing” the other dolls is morally problematic, because she too is robbing them of their free will (not that they had any to begin with) by forcing emancipation on them, with potentially drastic consequences. And what about people who choose to be disempowered? Mellie was always difficult for Paul to deal with ethically, until she decided that she was okay with identity that’s been imposed on her by the Dollhouse.

Taken from this standpoint, Dollhouse is a great starting point for feminist analysis. These instances of disempowerment often deal much with the intersections between gender, class, and power (although very rarely about race – a major shortcoming of Whedon that many have pointed out before). To borrow a quote from the show, the Dollhouse “deals in fantasy, but that is not their purpose.” Sure we can enjoy the scenes where Echo kicks ass or when Paul Ballard takes his shirt off (which is a lot), or the motorcycle racing and the cutesy romance between Sierra/Priya and Victor/Anthony, but ultimately, the Dollhouse is an extraordinary exposé on structural, systemic oppression and its implications for feminism. It is just as important to discuss the troubling implications and reality of robbed identities and sexual assault and other forms of disempowerment as it is to think about female empowerment. Giving people the wiggins about the dubious morals about the show is exactly what it’s all about. Joss Whedon has never been so feminist.