Dollhouse perhaps not deserving of being sent to attic after all

Okay - "Man on the Street" was a very good episode, and the first to give me hope for the series as a whole. Many spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen the episode yet.

The ideas the episode explores are grounded in characters and relationships rather than in a bad, philosophy 101-esque allegory - in particular, I think this episode offered some thoughtful exploration of the question of whether or not people ever genuinely connect with/love one another or whether they just love/connect with what they want people to be. Pretty much any of the developing relationships on the show toyed with this issue in one way or another, with the romance between Ballard and Mellie being the most obvious.

Through the assignment in which Echo is engaged at the start of the show, the episode also invites consideration of fantasy, and whether or not there's any such thing as an innocent or victimless fantasy - and thank god the episode didn't offer a preachy answer at the end.

Plot-wise, the reveal of Mellie as a doll (it was obvious she was a doll) was much better than I thought it would be - first, Adelle pretending that Mellie was a normal civilian cast doubt on what seemed to me to be Mellie's obvious status as a doll, which made the reveal of Mellie as a doll more exciting than it otherwise would have been. Additionally, because Mellie had been set up at the start of the episode as the "real girl" that Ballard is missing out on as he pursues Caroline, it's satisfying to see that in reality, she's no more real than Caroline, which calls into question the very categories of fantasy and reality. Whedon did the same trick with the categories of "good" and "evil" in Buffy and Angel, and if Dollhouse also turns out to be a meditation on power, I won't be disappointed.

That an FBI agent would trust, shag, and confide in his pasta-baking neighbor all in one episode we shall overlook and forgive in light of the strength of the episode as a whole.

Finally, in terms of the potential of the series to go somewhere interesting with both plot and characters, it is excellent that we can't know if the "person on the inside" is an actual person, Adelle's creation, or Caroline/the emergent Echo herself. That is quite interesting - much more interesting than Alpha, though it's good to have him/it in the mix, too. The idea that the DollhouseS could have some larger purpose also has potential.

And of course, finally, the fact that this was actually a true ensemble episode helped it along a lot. Hope that trend continues.

For the first time since the series started, I am interested to see what happens next week.

enh.

Well, I can at least say that the pilot episode of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's new show, didn't disappoint me. After months of reading variations of the same interview and looking at two different reviews of the pilot before it aired, I figured what I would see was what happens when Joss Whedon does what he has to do to "bring in viewers." It's obvious that the first episode was created to beat potential non-Whedonites over the head with all the Mysteries! And Wonders! To Be Revealed! If You Please Please Tune In Next Week! Rather than a slow, intelligent, sexy rolling out of characters and issues, I felt like episode one was primarily written to get us all on board with the mystery of the main character's Mysterious Past, with almost no significant attention given to the more interesting mysteries clearly embedded in the show's concept, e.g., the question of what we are beyond the sum of our memories (which is so very Samkhya) and the potentially deeply satisfying critique of a consumer and self-help culture that encourages us to buy and think our way free of our horribly scarring or otherwise unsatisfying pasts. I do not feel seduced by the world or the characters of Dollhouse because they are all trying much too hard to tell me that they have interesting things to say, which, as we all know, is never sexy. Plus, the show was completely devoid of any redeeming humor. And Eliza Dushku is...well, very pretty, but I'm not alone in wondering if she was really the best choice for the lead.

I worry about Dollhouse only because historically Whedon has been at his best when developing interesting questions within the context of evolving relationships with fundamentally sympathetic characters, and he is at his worst when all the characters march relentlessly towards some supposedly great climax in the season finale (think Buffy season 7 or pretty much all of Angel).

But of course I will keep watching. I didn't really get Firefly when it aired (much of this had to do with the fact that Fox made Whedon et al air the episodes out of order in an ill-advised effort to hook viewers) and when episode 1 of Dr. Horrible aired the internet was full of moaning and groaning about how it wasn't "dark" enough, and then of course things were good and grim by the third episode. So let's keep our fingers crossed.

Dr. F!

I've been busy, but not with knitting (and not with several conference papers, either, but I digress). Rather, together with some friends and my clever composer husband, I have made my first and perhaps last amateur video.

Here's a bit of back story: Basically, during the Hollywood writer's strike Joss Whedon created a 45-minute piece called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog." It was distributed for free for about a week on a website and then it was moved to itunes, where you can go and download it for a nominal fee (I recommend you do so - it's pretty funny). Dr. Horrible is an aspiring villain seeking membership in the Evil League of Evil; the show is basically the story of his quest to get there; along the way, there' s a love story and lots of great musical numbers. Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog was also a not entirely veiled critique of the current power structure in Hollywood - so Dr. Horrible is clearly a symbol of Joss Whedon/writers and artists, and the "hero" (really the villain) Captain Hammer is clearly a symbol of studio executives, and corporate interests more generally.

The show did very well, and in preparation for an eventual release of DVD, Whedon and his people have created an internet-based contest where fans are invited to create a character who is seeking entry into the Evil League of Evil and a three minute maximum application video. The best ones will be included as DVD extras. I am of course a huge Whedon fan and the idea for this script came to me in a flash - I literally wrote it in an evening and wrote the song lyrics the next morning. Todd wrote the brilliant music for the song. Of course, with the number of entries, we have a snowball's chance in hell of winning - but I honestly wrote this because it came to me, I loved it, and I really wanted to see it done.

And now it is!

Campbell's Misogynistic Soup

For those of you who don't have time to do all the assigned reading before tomorrow's class because you are too busy cruising Facebook, I present my conclusion, which in some circles is also known as an abstract:

Buffy: Tasty humanism with feminism on the side. Delicious and good for you!
Heroes: Joesph Campbell with diarrhea. Certainly grabs your attention, but ultimately the same old sh*t.

Buffy and Heroes fans please note there are spoilers ahead.

Heroes looks cool, sporting a manga-inspired aesthetic with Actual Japanese Characters speaking Actual Japanese, and it sounds like it's saying something profound about fate, power and individual responsibility, particularly in the lamentable early-season monologues by (surprise) the Indian Character speaking Actual Queen's English. And yes, it's entertaining, primarily because it works the cliff-hanger element so effectively that when a four-episode installment arrives from Netflix I sit down on the sofa and hit "play all" and don't get up for the next three hours. Intellectually, however, Heroes is what happens when someone puts Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces in the blender and mixes it up with a generous dollop of good old fashioned Freudian-style misogyny. Which might also make it a lot like most Hindi film, come to think of it, but we can forgive Bollywood because Shah Rukh Khan is hot.

We'll just ride right on by anything we might want to say about the two Japanese characters attempting to save New York from a nuclear blast (it's either really trite or really offensive; possibly it's both) and get right to the disturbing heart of Heroes, which seems to be the idea that all the problems in the world are your mother's fault, or, perhaps, The Mother's fault.

Skylar, the Arch-Villain of season one, was a humble watchmaker who simply longed to be "special." Upon learning that in fact he is not special in exactly the way that he was initially led to believe, Skylar embarks upon a campaign to steal and incorporate into his DNA the DNA of all the emerging Heroes, a process which involves removing their brains but, remarkably, no lab or lab equipment. What could have made Skylar so bitter and needy? Well, we learn in episode nineteen the obvious answer to the question: his pushy, overbearing mother, of course! In the scene carefully crafted to lend a little last-minute humanity and tragic gravitas to Our Villain, Skylar, who has temporarily abandoned his quest for brains to visit his mother, pleadingly asks Mom why she can't just accept him as "ordinary;" her reply is, of course, that she knows he could be so much more! And so, deprived of that vital maternal love, our Villain gets into an unfortunate scuffle with his mother, accidentally-on-purpose driving a pair of scissors through her heart, after which he has no choice but to return to his brain collecting ways, seeking the brain that will give him the capacity to generate nuclear blasts with his bare hands.

And then we have Nathan Petrelli, the compromised NYC politician running for Senate, largely manipulated, it seems, by the billionaire gangster Linderman. But wait! Linderman is not working alone after all. In the pivotal episode where Nathan decides that allowing a nuclear blast in New York is the only way to unite the world against the obvious threat that the mutant DNA humans with superpowers comprise to law-abiding humanity, it is none other than his calculating, all-knowing, perfectly and coldly manipulative mother who in another pivotal scene pushes him forward, convincing him that allowing the blast to happen is the Only Way to Unite Humanity, and that the eventual series of "coincidences" that will lead him to the White House will give him the chance to lead humanity in its War on Heroes (here the blender-esque element of the manipulation of symbols is particularly in evidence).

And then there's the only mother of a young child in the series, the split personality sexy assassin Jessica/nurturing non-violent Nikki. Jessica/Nikki's superpower was precipitated by both mutant DNA and the sexual abuse and murder of her sister (named, duh, Jessica) by their Father. So her superpower is linked to her sexuality, which pretty much destroys any hope of developing her as a full character: she's not an integrated, full personality but rather, two highly distilled aspects of femininity. In a pivotal scene, Linderman explains to Jessica/Nikki, her husband DL, and viewers at home that all women really want is security, and for Jessica, security means money. So Linderman offers Jessica/Nikki a lot of money to kill DL. Jessica/Nikki refuses; DL gets shot, kills Linderman with his superpower, and then, with his dying breath, assures Jessica/Nikki and viewers at home that the real powerful one is Nikki, the loving mother, not Jessica, the bad-ass black leather pants-wearing assassin. So there is hope for Nikki and DL's young superpower-wielding boy - he may be the lucky one to have the perfect super-human love of The Mother, Nikki. The world may be saved. But shouldn't we be a little disturbed that the "ideal" woman, the one who may save the world by being an inhumanly perfect loving, nurturing mother, derives from one half of a bifurcated feminine personality? Yes, we should.

Buffy, on the other hand, a show which creator Joss Whedon pitched and developed as a story of a female hero, is not a smarter and better meditation on power just because it's all about girls kicking ass and all the facile girl-power associations that go along with that image. Rather, it's better in part because Buffy's power, and indeed the power of all the characters, does not derive from sexuality; sex is used by Whedon to move characters and plots forward; sexuality builds both narrative and personality. Buffy is a hero in the satisfyingly cliched sense of that word: a fully-developed character, set apart, driven, possessed of a fatal flaw.

Buffy also kicks Heroes' ass because in its otherwise shaky final season, it actually manages to suggest that the notion of a hero as "one" is, as Buffy put it "something a bunch of men made up," and to propose an alternative paradigm. An episode of the final season describes the creation of the first slayer as the process by which men seeking protection from demons harness a demon and merge it with an unwilling girl, forging the first slayer. When that girl dies, a new slayer is called and given the power of the demon, and so on, until Buffy becomes the slayer. And so, with the help of the recovered witch Willow, in the series finale Buffy conceives of and executes the plan of making all the potential slayers of the world actual slayers, with Willow performing the advanced white magic necessary to take that demon force and make it communal, wielded by all potential slayers. Thus we see that a hero need not act alone - there is no reason that it has to be that way just because that's how "a bunch of men" originally decided to protect themselves from demons.

There's a revolutionary meditation on gender and power here: when Buffy takes a mystical journey to see the men who made the first slayer, they offer Buffy an extra helping of demon power to make her capable of fighting the extremely bad legions of demons who threaten apocalypse in the final season of the show. Buffy correctly recognizes this as something that will make her "less human," and she rejects it for this reason. Here Buffy rightly concludes that while men very well may think they need one super-human female to protect them from demons (this would be the fantasy or archetype of the Mother, obviously), neither she nor any woman should sacrifice their full and fully-developed humanity to be what "a bunch of men" think they need for protection. And so, at the end of Buffy, there are many slayers, not One, each developing her heroism as part of her fully realized humanity. Compare this to Heroes' valorization of Nikki as The Mother, not human at all but rather one half of a bifurcated caricature of two common, sexuality-derived tropes of femininity and female power. We can only conclude that there is no comparison.

Plus, with the glaring exception of the leather pants Buffy breaks out in season 6 (not to be confused with the leather pants she wore in Season 3 when she went to kill Faith - those were worn for symbolism rather than fashion), Buffy has better fashion sense.

In the immortal words of Giles: "Actually, I feel quite well, except for the rage."

I went bra shopping earlier this week and I have some thoughts about it. Thoughts that have been building since the first humiliating 32AAA shopping experience of my early years. And developing bona fide breasts didn't make the shopping experience any less awful, probably because by the time I actually grew breasts worthy of support I was paying for my own bras (this is a little-noted disadvantage to being a very late bloomer, often overshadowed in the literature by the more obvious psychological scarring of being the flattest girl in one's grade, lacking a bra strap to be snapped by the cutest guy in the 8th grade, not even remotely filling out the top of one's junior year homecoming gown, etc, etc.)

But anyway, bra shopping: I hate it. Possibly the only thing I have ever hated more than bra shopping was my afternoon section of Anthro 1001 last semester, but those horrible children are happily gone from my life forever and bra shopping will torment me until I die or become too demented to do it on my own. Speaking of undergarments and terminal illness, I took my demented grandmother bra shopping a little over a year ago, and I have to say that while the prospect of contracting dementia is crushingly depressing, it is cheering to think that when I succumb to my genetic destiny, someone else will be charged with the task of pawing through rack upon rack of tangled brassieres only to discover after no less than 30 minutes that they are absolutely out of the necessary size. And I think that's the best I can do as far as having a good attitude about bra shopping is concerned, so back to complaining, which in this case, as is often the case, is more properly described as honesty, or even better, as satyakriya, literally, truth-act, which in classical Sanskrit literature is often a speech, usually uttered by a woman in great duress, that by virtue of its its power as spoken truth, changes lamentable situations - bra shopping, for example - for the better.

Ahem.

Bra makers have us. They SO have us. They have us in a capacity that is possibly only rivaled by manufacturers of the sinisterly-named family of "feminine hygiene" (or, worse, "feminine protection") products. A machine-crafted piece of nasty ugly itchy polyester lace-encrusted spandex made in a Chinese prison just down the barb-wired lane from a prison that produces claw machine stuffed animals retails for a minimum of $25; a less odious, vaguely wearable piece of spandex-laced polyester, often with the brand name emblazoned on it in places that, in both their capacity as private and sexy, should not be functioning as advertising mediums, retails for $50, minimum. Actually, the price point for mid-range bras is more like $48, but screw them, that's effectively fifty dollars, FIFTY DOLLARS, half of one hundred, and once you throw in a few pairs of matching panties, you are indeed at $100, or nearly.

And regarding Victoria's Secret bras, with their inch-plus padding, Barbie-esqe rigidly sculpted cups, unimaginatively slutty styling, and absolute crap quality (the Secret is possibly that they are sewn with water-soluble thread), I have nothing to say except that people who seem to enjoy shopping there tend to refer to the store as Victoria's Secrets, suggesting that they may be illiterate enough not to be distracted or otherwise dismayed by the Victoria's Secret logos that cover every exposed inch of the store's products. Lucky them.

And then there are the bras that I would buy if I were either an investment banker or getting paid in British pounds - lovely, sexy, wearable and, you know, $98 or so. Which is to say one hundred dollars. Which is a lot more than boys pay for their undies. And boys' undies are also machine washable. Which is why the rage.