Dollhouse:
The Man on the Street Interviews
The sixth installment of the short-lived FOX drama Dollhouse
was written by creator Joss Whedon and is considered the episode in
which the television series finally found its footing. Featuring a television
reporter conducting “man-on-the-street” style interviews,
the opening scene arguably describes the show’s concept better
than all of the previous episodes combined. “Seeming to crop up
first in the late ’80s, the Dollhouse is one of L.A.’s most
enduring urban legends,” the reporter begins. “The story
is simple: somewhere in the city is an illegal establishment that rents
out to the very rich and the very connected programmable people. People
who can take on any personality except their own.”
Such a
premise was a major sticking point for many critics and viewers, especially
during the early episodes when the series struggled to find its identity.
On the one hand, the concept sounded preposterous—if one was rich
enough to afford such services, why not just buy what already existed
at a significantly lower cost? On the other hand, the show sounded like
high-end prostitution and human trafficking, hardly the basis for an
enjoyable hour of television. But Whedon, after a brief tug-of-war with
FOX network executives over what the show should be about, was able
to transform Dollhouse into a technological conspiracy-thriller
that, despite its slow start, remained true to his initial vision and
evolved into a worthy companion to the previous television shows he
has created.
“Man
on the Street” sprinkles the interviews conducted by the fictional
reporter of the opening scene throughout the episode. Many of the responses
directly relate to the negative opinions of the show’s premise,
others justify its concept while still others offer the kind of replies
one would legitimately expect from a cross-section of the population.
Most, if not all, are also explored throughout Dollhouse’s
twenty-six episode run.
“Yeah,
everyone knows that. They got people programmed to do whatever. Could
be for sex or, you know, kill a guy. They’re out there. Dolls.”
The man
who speaks those words has an uneasy presence about himself, glancing
from side-to-side as if afraid of being caught. While he obviously believes
in the Dollhouse, he also feels its illicit nature makes it dangerous
to talk about, like the mob or a secret government experiment. One could
conclude he is the type who readily believes in whatever conspiracy
theory that he stumbles upon, and when he says “they’re
out there,” he could just as well be talking about aliens. In
some ways he’s a nut job, because only a nut job could believe
in something like the Dollhouse. Most of the co-workers of FBI Agent
Paul Ballard, the man charged with the task of finding the Dollhouse,
feel the same way about their colleague. “We got a call,”
one of them tells Ballard. “Couple of kids found a house in the
woods all made of candy and gingerbread. Thought that might be up your
alley.” No doubt many critics initially felt the same way about
Joss Whedon and Dollhouse.
“Oh,
it’s happening. There’s one thing people will always need
is slaves.”
The sentence
is spoken by an African-American woman, taking the eight-hundred pound
gorilla in the room and placing it center stage for all to see. The
Dollhouse is indeed about slavery after all—the organization erases
a person’s personality and free-will, then programs people in
any way in which it chooses. Employees of the Dollhouse, however, often
contend that actives are volunteers recruited into service, which the
reporter points out to the African-American woman he is interviewing.
“There’s
only one reason someone would volunteer to be a slave: if they is one
already”
The backgrounds
of only a few of the actives are made known during the series, and they
do indeed hint that the above comment is somewhat true. Two of them—November
and Victor—experienced emotional trauma in the outside world which
made them vulnerable to the allures of the Dollhouse. November had an
infant baby girl who died, for instance, while Victor was a soldier
stationed in Afghanistan. They were thus slaves to their mental anguish
and needed to ease that pain, to erase and forget the grief. Giving
the Dollhouse five years of their life in order to not have to deal
with the emotional torment thus seemed like a fair trade to them.
Two other
“volunteers,” the main character Caroline and a graduate
student named Sam, were recruited after committing criminal actions
against the Dollhouse’s parent company, the Rossum Corporation.
Faced with the threat of jail or even the death penalty, they chose
giving up their freedom to the Dollhouse for a limited time period instead.
But even if they hadn’t, their freedom would still have been taken
away due to their actions.
“You
mean if it was real? If I could hire a doll and he could be anyone and
do anything with no consequences, I would want him to... oh my God,
I’m so not going to tell you.”
We all
have fantasies deep inside that we might never feel comfortable sharing
with someone, no matter how well we may know a person. Some of those
fantasies may be sexual in nature, and Dollhouse does indeed
makes many passing reference to bondage and erotic French-film scenarios
during its episodes. But fantasies can take on all shapes and sizes—a
Dollhouse client nicknamed Tempura Joe, for instance, “wanted
to be rolled in eggs and flour and dipped.” During season one,
another client hired the Dollhouse to program two actives as romantically-doomed
criminals straight out of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
While critics and viewers questioned why anyone would utilize the Dollhouse
to fulfill a fantasy, the truth is that the ability to experience certain
desires in private, without any consequences, may be reason enough.
“If
you could have somebody be the perfect person, the moment you wish for
that you know you’re never going to get, and someone signed on
to do that, to help you... I think that could be OK. I think that could
be maybe beautiful.”
People
make compromises—it’s an unfortunate by-product of human
existence. We compromise in regards to where we live, what we do and
even who we love. Sometimes it is out of necessity, and sometimes it
is out of our control. The Dollhouse, however, offers the opportunity
to experience many of the dreams we inevitably leave behind in the most
perfect of ways. The prime example occurs in “Man on the Street”
when a rich Internet mogul, Joel Mynor, hires the Dollhouse to imprint
an active with the persona of his dead wife Rebecca. Rebecca had shouldered
the financial burden early in their marriage but died during an automobile
accident shortly after her husband found online success. “She
never got to see this house,” Joel Mynor explains of the surprise
present he intended for Rebecca, “and she never knew I made good.
So every year on this date, I pretend she does. I get to see that look
on her face and I get to show her our extraordinary home.” Because
of the Dollhouse, Mynor gets to experience that perfect moment he never
got to initially have, and while it may be perverse considering how
the Dollhouse is able to provide it, the scene is still both beautiful
and heart-breaking nonetheless.
“It’s
human trafficking, end of story. It’s repulsive.”
While Dollhouse
does contain poignantly sad narratives like the one involving Joel Mynor,
as well as “engagements” of the non-sexual variety, the
series does not shy away from the “repulsive” and “human
trafficking” elements of its premise. The most prominent example
involves a female active code-named Sierra who, unlike the other resident
dolls, was neither a recruit nor volunteer but someone literally sold
into slavery. She was originally an Australian artist named Priya Tsetsang
whose only mistake was rejecting the romantic overtures of a Rossum
Corporation scientist, Nolan Kinnard.
“Nobody
ever says no to me,” Kinnard declares during season one. In retaliation
for Priya’s rejection, he engages in a form of personal human
trafficking, pulling strings and calling in favors to have her forcibly
made part of the Dollhouse. “You’re programmed to give me
and anyone else whatever we want, whenever we want it,” he later
tells her, emphasizing the full impact of his immoral action. “Which
you do with pleasure, and sometimes you even beg.” Repulsive indeed.
“Forget
morality. Imagine it’s true. Imagine this technology being used.
Now imagine it being used on you. Everything you believe, gone. Everyone
you love, strangers. Maybe enemies. Every part of you that makes you
more than a walking cluster of neurons dissolved at someone else’s
whim. If that technology exists, it’ll be used. It’ll be
abused. It’ll be global. And we will be over as a species.”
Earlier
in the series, FBI Agent Paul Ballard makes a similar comment: “We
split the atom, we make a bomb. We come up with anything new the first
thing we do is destroy, manipulate, control. It’s human nature.”
The thirteenth episode of Dollhouse, entitled “Epitaph
One,” brings those two observations to fruition when it reveals
that the technology has indeed been used and abused on a massive level,
resulting in a post-apocalyptic world ten years in the future where
millions of people have had their personalities erased and replaced.
Cities and buildings are now hollowed-out shells—much like the
rest of civilization—and those not imprinted are left to fight
for their survival on a planet thrown into chaos.
The man-on-the-street
interviews conducted in Dollhouse effectively address the various
components of the series, as well as the initial complaints voiced by
both critics and fans of the show. While the first handful of episodes
were slow moving as the series tried to find its footing, and a few
of the final ones felt rushed due to cancellation by FOX, Dollhouse
was still able to take the long-list of emotions and sentiments it set
out to explore and weave them into its narrative. Just as our own personalities—the
essence of who we are as individuals—consists of competing and
contradictory elements, to say nothing of the conflicting fundamentals
that make up what we call “human nature,” the same can ultimately
be said of Dollhouse. Which, in the end, makes it one of the
most compelling examples of television storytelling ever created.
