Dollhouse

Dollhouse is back tonight, and you can be sure that I’ll be in front of my television, worrying about Echo, sort of rooting for Adelle and sort of being ashamed of it, and hoping the ratings get better because Fran Kranz really doesn’t need something else he’s part of to be cancelled or not make enough money and I’d sort of like for him to continue having a career. But 9pm is a long time from now, you guys. And so, to keep you busy until then, I have a special post. Last March, Joss Whedon was kind enough to take some time out of shooting The Cabin in the Woods to email me some very entertaining and thoughtful answers to questions I had about the show, for a piece I was working on for The Atlantic (keep in mind, only a few episodes had aired, and I was largely pursuing the human trafficking metaphor). I didn’t get to use very much of his responses, but here they are, for your reading pleasure:

Alyssa: Human trafficking has become, for lack of a better word, a fairly popular subject for movies and documentaries in the past several years—and combating trafficking was a major priority of the Bush administration. How much did you consider you consider the politics surrounding trafficking when you designed Paul Ballard’s character?

Whedon: Trafficking is the lowest and most appalling crime perpetrated in any country not currently at war. So of course it makes popular fiction. Drugs are passé, murder is solved once a week on half the shows on TV… we always need to get more extreme. And here is a crime with classic foreign villains – with actual mustaches to twirl, desperate young female victims – the morality is genuinely simple and it’s a timeless American story: the captivity narrative. This is not to be callous, but the awful reality has a kind of fictional glamour to it. We can be outraged and moved but never feel it’s too close to home.

The people at Equality Now have been fighting human trafficking and sex tours for years without any real support. In fact, when I pitched Dollhouse to the staff there, one of them objected to the character of Ballard, saying a helpful FBI agent would be an unforgivable myth. For more stories to be told – for altruistic or sensationalist reasons – is to increase awareness and can only, I think, be helpful.

Alyssa: More broadly, can you talk about Dollhouse’s take on trafficking and prostitution? We know from the pilot that Caroline was in desperate when she signed up to become a Doll, but the episodes that have been aired so far show Echo enjoying her assignments. Is that ambiguity intentional, or will a clearer perspective emerge throughout the subsequent episodes?

Whedon: Now, having said the above, let me be clear that Dollhouse was never meant to be about trafficking. It was meant to be about power, desire, identity, and sexuality. I knew from the start that prostitution was part of the package, but that is something I was interested in exploring in a removed, fantastical setting. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with people paying for sex IN THEORY. And what I was interested in was the desires people would have if they could create a true sexual narrative for themselves, to give the act context. It wasn’t until later in the process that I woke up in the middle of the night and thought “this is trafficking”. My response to that was to try and show both sides – the reality of trafficking and the fantasy of the Dollhouse, to show their differences AND similarities. To come at it head on. The Dollhouse fantasy is a dark one, but the darkness is more about why people give up their lives and what people with control over them will do. It’s still a fantasy. To have Paul Ballard say “It’s the same as trafficking” and try to link it to actual criminals was deliberate – like so many others, I wanted to do some stories about actual trafficking. Partly as narrative inoculation: “We’re not them!” and partly for the same reasons as everyone else. We didn’t get as far into that as we’d hoped – there’s been a lot of adjusting.

Alyssa: Obviously, you’re skating around a raft of major political and moral issues in Dollhouse, but thus far, the show’s very much a piece of genre fiction. Do you contemplate doing episodes that have a greater sense of realism? Can you see doing an episode the examines the realities of prostitution, for example, more literally like you do with the social work system and low-wage service work in Season 6 of Buffy?

Whedon: Some. Not too much, because the moral gray areas in the show are already lacking in white, and the show would become depressing beyond repair if it was all about the seamy side of life. That’s what SVU is for. (I love SVU, by the way.)

Alyssa: One recurring theme I’ve noticed in some of your work is that women who resist coercion, whether it’s sexual or otherwise, have to be prepared to respond with violence. They’re usually competent at fighting back, but your female characters seem to be at risk a lot of the time. Is that just a function of the characters and the situations they’re in? Or is reflection of violence against women in society? Or an argument about how women should protect themselves?

Whedon: All of the above? I write primarily about women. I write primarily horror and adventure stories. At some point, the hero’s gotta be put down. But then there is an amazing amount of unbelievable shit happening to women all over the world every single day. A lot to cull from – and to fight against. I don’t write politically, but if any woman tells me she gained strength from or identified with a character of mine, I am going to be pretty screamingly chuffed.

Alyssa: One of the things I enjoyed most about Buffy was the fact that the show is deeply grounded in a community we get to know very well—at the end of the show, Sunnydale’s destruction feels like a major loss. Will we see an expansion of the world that Dollhouse is set in, beyond the house itself? I know you’ve been asked how viewers are supposed to get attached to Echo when she’s a different person every episode, but what role does setting play in grounding the show?

Whedon: The world will expand. Oh holy boy will the world expand. And then, unless our ratings tick up a bit, it will very suddenly contract.