Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 0: Echo (original pilot)

Disclaimers/subject position confessions, updated: in between the airing of Episode 12 and my viewing this pilot (and Episode 13) on DVD, I watched Firefly, Serenity, and Dr. Horrible. I’ve now seen all the Joss, and am a little better qualified, maybe, to analyze Dollhouse in the context of his other work.

The obvious continuity between Buffy/Angel and Firefly/Serenity was that both works were centered around big, unruly, loving conglomerations of misfits: Surrogate Families. Both works explored the dynamics of these families, and held these families up as shelters from the storm of the wide, wild world. You could have said, on the basis of those two works, that this was Joss’s Big Theme. It wasn’t much in evidence in Dr. Horrible (although you might observe that Dr. H’s longing to join the ELE was a reflection of the yearning to belong to a surrogate family), but maybe that was an outlier.

But when you include Dr. Horrible, and look at it, Buffy/Angel, and Firefly/Serenity together, then you (may) start to see something else emerge as a candidate for Joss’s Big Theme: the Dangerous Geek. He’s obviously got a soft spot for the geek, no doubt stemming in part from his own sense of himself as one (in the special features for Dollhouse, Joss as much as says “Topher – c’est moi”). Not to mention that a large swath of his audience probably self-identifies as Geekish. I do. But Joss’s love for the geek (and by “geek” I mean someone whose expertise at something is only matched by his pop culture knowledge, both of which are only trumped by his social awkwardness) is consistently tempered by a sense that the geek can be dangerous. In Buffy/Angel we got Andrew/Jonathan/Warren. In Dr. Horrible we got Dr. Horrible. In Firefly/Serenity, we didn’t really get much meditation on geekhood, although there was potential in the character of Mr. Universe that one can imagine Joss exploiting if there had been a second season.

How does this relate to Dollhouse? I think a lot of fans were expecting another surrogate-family show, when what Joss had in mind was another dangerous-geek show.

Dr. Horrible should have been the tip-off. As I say, we already got dangerous geeks in Buffy, but Dr. Horrible was different in one important way. Of the three geeks in Buffy, one was plainly dangerous and not at all charming (Warren), while one was pathetic/charming and not very dangerous (Jonathan), and one was so weak that you didn’t know which way he was going to go – and in the end he was redeemed. In Serenity, Mr. Universe was mostly cool and just a little bit creepy (the lovebot idea should have been very creepy, but the movie didn’t get time to develop it), and not at all dangerous except to the bad guys.

But Dr. Horrible – he’s truly horrible. At first we don’t think he is. This is the genius of the show (which I think is pretty genius; but not as genius as the commentary track on the DVD). He’s so cute in his pathetic little fantasies, and particularly in his attraction to The Girl, that you’re rooting for him all the way up until the moment he kills her. At this point he becomes truly horrible, joins the ELE, and commits lots more crimes. The end. A really sobering moment (besides being a great classic Superhero Origin Story). Cutesy scare-quote “evil” is still evil, dammit. Is what I take away from it.

Enter Topher (c’est moi).

But how does he enter? In the show as aired, Topher’s arc is a lot like Dr. Horrible’s: he’s charming in his geekiness, so cute that it takes a while to notice his creepy side, and even longer to notice that his creepy side indicates actual moral bankruptcy. When we do start to realize this, toward the end of the season, it’s a powerful thing, because we’ve at least sort of liked this guy all the way along.

The original pilot doesn’t play it like that. Topher comes in and right off the bat he’s giving this big speech about how it doesn’t matter if we program the dolls, because we’re all programmed ourselves – culminating in his big declaration of nihilism: “I don’t care – morality is programming, too.” Topher is defined for us right away as someone who has no moral qualms about what he’s doing, in fact seems to have no morals at all. It makes him a good deal less sympathetic: by the end of his first big scene, he’s as dislikable as Topher-as-aired was at the end of the season. His arc is done (as in, "stick a fork in it").

Now, I obviously have no idea what Joss would have done with the character had Fox allowed him to proceed with this pilot and launch the series from there. That’s alternate-universe stuff. What I do know is that in Dollhouse as it was made, Topher’s character arc, from cute to reprehensible – and I want to reiterate that it’s not really Topher’s arc, because he doesn’t change: it’s the arc of how we perceive Topher – has big ramifications for the story. Just as we come to realize how nasty Topher is (on one level), we come to realize just how dangerous the Dollhouse is (on many levels). In other words, this arc makes for a big payoff: dramatically, emotionally, intellectually.

The original pilot doesn’t seem to allow for that. We know right away that Topher’s not a good guy (so maybe Joss was planning to redeem him?), and we even get intimations of the Dollhouse’s dangerous side right up front, too. We’re starting so far into the concept that it’s hard to imagine how it would have developed.

So the Dangerous Geek theme is somewhat neutralized, in the original pilot: rather, it’s there in spades, but robbed of some of its power, because the geek is robbed of most of his charm. What do we get instead?

More nods toward the Surrogate Family theme. The original pilot makes a lot more of intra-Dollhouse relationships than the early as-aired episodes do. There’s Topher’s many scenes with Boyd, in which their man-friendship is repeatedly invoked and denied; there’s Topher’s odd antipathy to Dr. Saunders, and his fear of the higher-ups; and there’s the Echo/Sierra/Victor trio already getting together and setting off alarm bells. And, perhaps most significantly, we have Topher’s observation that anyone who lives in the Dollhouse, handlers included, is really a Doll; combined with DeWitt’s closing remark that “we’re all in this together,” I think it indicates that this pilot was working hard to convince us that these characters are a community whose relationships we’re going to be exploring.

That’s not there in the season as it aired. Instead, we got what seems like a willful exploding of the Surrogate Family idea, starting with Echo/Caroline herself. The early episodes hammer home how empty the dolls are, including Echo, and how dead they even are to each other. We got Boyd introduced as someone new to the Dollhouse, whose relationship to Topher is professional, not man-friendly. Topher’s relationship to Saunders, too, is recast as professional. Over the course of the season, clearly relationships form and become a focus of the show, but it’s not that way at first. At first, it’s all elaboration of the concept, the Dangerous Geek and All His Works.

All of this is by way of saying that I thought the original pilot is interesting, a great DVD special feature, but not superior to what Joss eventually came up with for the series as it aired. By now every Dollhouse fan has long known that Joss came up with this pilot for Fox, they shot it down, and he responded by turning the first five episodes of the season into standalone engagement-of-the-week episodes that everybody was encouraged to think of as five pilots. A lot of fans seem to have been disappointed in these first five episodes, and Joss himself in various interviews has essentially refused to defend them, but I will: I think they’re better than the original pilot.

I think “Echo” is too much telling, not enough showing. It explains how doll engagements work, through dialog and montage; but the aired episodes show how they work, through action. Much more effective. “Echo” lays a lot of the subtext out for you in some pretty talky scenes (not that I have anything against protracted dialogue); the aired episodes are still pretty on-the-nose, but sufficiently less so to allow the viewer to hit upon a lot of the subtext her/himself. Again, more effective. And, above all, I think the aired episodes do a much better job of building moral ambiguity into the Dollhouse.

Which is not to say the original pilot doesn’t have its moments. I like how openly it deals with the prostitution angle of the Dollhouse. Not only in DeWitt’s discussion with a potential client, but in the wonderful irony of seeing Echo scolding Danica (the girl from Crib Death, Iowa) for letting Eddy pimp her out, when in fact the Dollhouse is pimping Echo out.

There’s also the wonderful pivot from Victor saying he’d like to be a carefree doll, “Doris freaking Day,” to Sierra in a rather Doris Day-like outfit, her head bleeding, looking anything but carefree.

And most of all there’s Echo telling Danica, “I am you, dumbass.” This is awesome primarily for meta reasons, since the actress who played Iowa Girl, Ashley Johnson, reappears in the aired Episode 12 as Wendy, who becomes imprinted with Caroline’s personality. In other words, in the pilot, Eliza says to Ashley, “I am you.” In Episode 12, we have Ashley confronting Eliza, and essentially saying, “I am you.” But in both cases, it’s actually Caroline saying it. But it’s also, in both cases, a programmed girl confronting a non-programmed girl, a powerful girl confronting a weak girl, a self-aware girl confronting a deluded girl, an original confronting an echo: and which is which? It’s a neat little knot of confused identity. I don’t know if Whedon brought Johnson back for Episode 12 with this in mind, but it’s a brilliant piece of metanarrative. That right there: that’s Dollhouse.

Catwoman

No, not Halle Berry's Catwoman: that was, erm, disappointing. I'm talking about Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, in Batman Returns. Not as good a movie as Tim Burton's first Batman, but a more Tim Burton movie, and that's not a bad thing. To fill Jack Nicholson's shoes he had to have two villains; Penguin in all his mad tragedy and grotesque venality, and Catwoman. The result was confused drama (so of course they replicated the pattern in the next two movies in the franchise: talk about your diminishing returns).

I don't know much about the character of Catwoman in the comics. But Michelle Pfeiffer: this is silver screen immortality. She nails the sexy: "Meow," she says, and packs in the whole cinematic lineage of femmes fatales. She nails the mousy of the pre-Catwoman Selina Kyle: "Hi, honey - I'm home. Oh, I forgot, I'm not married." (I used to quote that to myself for years, until I got married.) And she nails the Working Girl-era feminist subtext beautifully. Forget all that Dasani mumbo-jumbo about mystic cat ladies. "Meow," indeed.

This Catwoman, now that I think about it, is an early version of the Tim Burton heroine: strong, sexy, and strange-bordering-on-macabre. Think Katrina Van Tassel, Ari, Emily the Corpse Bride, Mrs. Lovett.

Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan gets religion

So I saw Watchmen a couple of weeks ago. Was depressed when I saw it; good film to see when you're depressed. Lived up to the comic book, at least the comic book as it survived in my memory from reading it once back in '88 or so. The one thing that really nagged at me, though (and possibly my depression at the time exacerbated it), was Dr. Manhattan's decision to leave Mars and come back to Earth.

He hears Miss Jupiter's origin story and suddenly gets awestruck by the amazing coincidences that go into making each human being: the patterns this creates convince him of the miracle of life, and so he loses his nihilism and comes back to save humanity. Or something like that. I didn't buy it. All of those coincidences could be just that: coincidences. They only seem miraculous because he's starting from the reality of Miss Jupiter. But that's the wrong starting point: start with the coincidences and everything reverts to random. One of those coincidences doesn't happen and you just don't get Miss Jupiter, that's all. You get someone else, or no one at all. No big loss to the universe. Dr. Manhattan of all people should understand that.

I reread the comic book a few days later, and three things struck me that helped me make sense of that moment.

First, in the comic book the moment is set up better. I don't buy Dr. Manhattan's decision in the comic book, either, but at least there they do a little more groundwork for it, by having it follow Rorschach's origin story (which was curiously absent from the movie), and particularly his speech about why he chose the mask he did, and his relationship to morality. There's no absolute right or wrong, no meaning, just whatever pattern we choose to impose upon random events; but Rorschach chooses to impose. We get this discussion, then we get Dr. Manhattan's epiphany, which is also about seeing patterns.

Second, and related, is the awareness this creates that Dr. Manhattan might be wilfully imposing a pattern where he knows there is none. I.e., he wants to see meaning. He's intentionally starting from the wrong starting place (Miss Jupiter's existence). Maybe he's not as alienated from his original humanity as he thought. Maybe that's what the smiley face in the Martian sand means (and it's there in both comic book and movie): it's just a random product of rocks and shadows and whatnot, but we humans will anthropomorphize anything into a smiley face. Maybe this is a tip-off that we're not supposed to necessarily buy Dr. Manhattan's epiphany: he's lying to himself.

Third, and this is true in both movie and comic book, it doesn't matter. He has his epiphany, reembraces humanity, and comes back to save the world - and he doesn't. Nothing he does from that point forward makes any difference. He can't even stop Rorschach from posthumously spilling the beans. The big blue naked guy is a red herring.

Mr. Fantastic vs. Plastic Man

Uh, yeah. So in keeping with this site’s recent superhero theme I watched the Fantastic Four movies the other day, both of them. I don’t really have anything to say about them right now…maybe later. I never knew much about the Fantastic Four. In fact, right up until I watched the movies I think I always thought Plastic Man and Mr. Fantastic were the same person. (See, they’re not.)

That got me wondering, if Plastic Man and Mr. Fantastic fought, who’d win? Whoops—nothing original about that. See here, here, here, and here. The consensus seems to be that, maybe, Mr. F would win because he’s smarter.

Ah, but see, he doesn't have a chance. Because Ray Davies never wrote a song about Reed Richards. Check this out.
Now this is the genius of the Kinks. Maybe other songwriters could have explored in song the metaphorical possibilities of a superhero, but only the Kinks could have issued it as a single backed by an exploration-in-song of the metaphorical possibilities of one of the all-time great movie monsters. I mean, just contemplate that for a while. Has there ever been a more perfect a/b-side pairing? And then listen to the songs again and notice just how much they rock, dude.

Of course it was only a modest hit, and is forgotten today.

The Dark Knight

So we saw The Dark Knight last night—this is the kind of thing that gets to Japan right away (although we’re still waiting for Iron Man). In fact, one of my most vivid memories of arriving in Japan for the first time in August of ’89 is seeing Batman stuff everywhere, for the first Tim Burton film. Went to my first traditional Japanese summer festival, and they were passing out paper fans with the Batman logo on them. (Couldn’t find an image of one of those, but I found one for fans for the second Burton Batman.) Some kind of cultural commentary, I guess.

On the train on the way home, Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki and I had a conversation that I’ll try to summarize, because it gets at something I’ve been trying to articulate to myself about superhero movies for a long time.

We were talking about Harvey Dent/Two-Face, specifically his transition from one to the other. It’s finding the coin by his bedside that triggers his final psychotic break and turns him into Two-Face, right? The coin, which he had previously given to Rachel, reminds him in a graphic way that she was burned to death. But it means more than just that his fiancee is dead.

It was a two-headed coin, but now one side is defaced; before, it was a symbol of how he left nothing to chance, now it’s a symbol of how chance has asserted itself in his life. Up to this point, he’s been an operator, a manipulator, someone who’s understood the rules of the game and made them work for him—he’s fooled himself into thinking that he’s in control of his destiny. Now Joker—who self-identifies as Chaos (do we believe him?)—has intervened, and shown Dent once and for all that he’s not in control, that luck rules us all. It’s this that causes his break: not simply losing his girlfriend, not even just losing his looks, but losing his certainty about the world and his place in it.

Sure, Sgt. Mrs. Tanuki says, but is that really enough to turn him into this supervillain? I mean, come on. To which I reply, essentially: yeah, but it’s just a comic-book superhero movie.

There’s something wrong with this response. Right now there’s a big debate going on among cinephiles about whether or not the comic-book superhero genre is worth taking seriously (there’s a good summary of it here). Myself, I come down squarely on the side of taking it seriously: I think there’s a great potential within the genre for thoughtful, artistic, adult movies. But if this is true, then it’s hypocritical to give them a pass for flaws because “they’re comic book movies,” with the implication that we shouldn’t judge them too rigorously.

But I do think that comic-book superhero movies should be given a pass on questions of realism. Not because they shouldn’t be taken seriously, though: rather, because they should be taken seriously in a different way.

I think of superhero movies as working like a kind of surrealist art. Events in them happen solely because the artist has chosen to make them happen. Events may be presented in a realistic way, but that just means the artist has chosen to gesture toward realism as part of his/her surrealism, not that he/she is accepting a realistic framework overall. Think of Magritte’s Time Transfixed: the artist is employing realism within the painting (the look of the locomotive, the carefully rendered shadow it casts on the fireplace), but only in the service of a surreal image. It’s kind of pointless to judge the total image according to realism (“hey, a train’t can’t come out through somebody’s fireplace like that, at least not without tracks!”). The artist is up to something else.

With comic-book superhero movies, that something else, a lot of the time, is the presentation of an inherited end-result. This is one of the features of the genre that most intrigues me, and that I think is responsible for most of the really great stuff that’s happened in it. This is where the genre takes on the dimensions of myth, or rather of interpretation of myth. You’re making a Batman movie: you’ve got a ready-made set of attributes for Batman. Suit, night, bat imagery, gadgets, no actual super powers, Bruce Wayne identity, etc. You can modify these, but only to a certain degree: basically, what you’re doing is trying to figure out how you want to present these attributes. What you want to say with them, about them. What the myth means to you.

You can employ realism, gesture toward it, as part of your presentation of these attributes, but it will never change the fundamentally unrealistic nature of the attributes. This is what Nolan is doing with Dent: he’s given us a very careful portrait of the character, whereby (if we’re the kind of moviegoer who thinks about these things way too much) (hi!) we can figure out the kind of person he is, what drives him, how he sees himself. He’s a pretty realistic character. And to a certain point, we can understand his transformation in realistic terms. But in the end that’s never going to be quite sufficient—because dude, he turns into Two-Face! Nolan leads us logically from A to B to C, but that’s only going to take you so far when the endpoint is not Z but a fish.

And that’s okay because, like Magritte, the comic-book superhero movie, no matter how much it may employ realism, is not fundamentally realist. Nolan (if I might presume to speak for him) is not trying to say that if you’re a guy like Dent, and you go through the things Dent goes through, you’ll end up Two-Face. He’s trying to give us a picture of Two-Face—that’s the starting point, that set of attributes—and then connect it to certain recognizable, real-world ideas (illusion of control), using realism as a tool.

So: it’s not that we’re not supposed to take it seriously because it’s a comic-book superhero movie, but that we’re not supposed to take it realistically. Sure, all the stuff Dent goes through is insufficient, in realistic terms, to turn a guy into Two-Face. But for me, that’s not the point. The point is that we have Two-Face, and through the way he introduces and explains Two-Face’s mythical attributes, Nolan has helped us see them as relating to the illusion that we control our destiny. For example.

Anyway, that’s the best I can do with it right now. I’m sure I’ll revisit this, because I actually think the comic-book superhero genre is the most interesting one going in movies today. And this despite not being a comic-book fanboy—I’ve never read a single Batman comic.