Incarnational Horror

As I’ve been re-watching Joss Whedon’s short-lived Dollhouse, a very important thought has occurred to me:

I must have Adelle DeWitt’s wardrobe.

I mean, I know that, employed by the insidious Rossum Corporation, she runs the Los Angeles Dollhouse, where she persuades desperate people to sign their bodies over to her for five years so they can have their memories and personalities wiped and, as tabula rasa “Actives”, be imprinted with any identity that a client is willing to pay for.  I didn’t say I wanted her job.  Just her pencil skirts.

Joss Whedon is no friend to religion, but he is a writer, and a master of character, and that means he has an abiding interest in the soul.  He is also a master of philosophical horror: while he’s certainly not afraid of blood, it’s always the idea that really scares you.  And beneath the comedy - “We said we wouldn’t dwell on that.  He’s dwelling,” complains genius-geek Topher Brink when his experimental technology accidentally imprints an Active as a serial killer - Dollhouse is very definitely horror.

The show was created as a vehicle for Eliza Dushku, who plays the Active Echo.  Before she was Echo, she was Caroline, a crusading idealist determined to expose the Rossum Corporation.  (They whys and hows of her transformation are revealed - alas, very disappointingly - toward the end of the second season.)  And while Echo may not remember any of that, someone else has taken up the cause.  FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) has been chasing rumors about the Dollhouse, and when an anonymous source points him to Caroline, his investigation starts to worry Rossum.  Meanwhile, Adelle is seeing something develop in Echo that goes beyond her imprints.  Something that comes to look more and more like self-awareness.

(Spoiler alert: That’s the premise.  From here on out, I make no promises.  Everything is fair game.)

Dollhouse neatly turns Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum on its head and asks, “But who do I think I am?”  Its very structure questions our perceptions of reality: a supporting character introduced in episode one is revealed soon after to be an Active.  Then the show goes along nicely until episode six, in which a major character is revealed to be an Active.  And then in episode twelve, yup, you guessed it, a supporting character is revealed to be an Active.  This last case is particularly poignant, as the reveal is made not just to the audience, but to the character, who, despite having worked for the Dollhouse, had never once questioned whether she herself was “real.”

Which begs the question: What is real?  The imprints are complete to the last detail, and if a human being is just a mind and a collection of memories walking around in a body, then it should follow that an imprinted Active - say, Echo as brilliant hostage negotiator Eleanor Penn - is just as real as Caroline ever was before she signed up to become Echo.  The point is hammered home in a late first season episode, “Haunted,” in which a dear friend of Adelle’s uses Echo’s body to return from the grave and solve her own murder.  This is not a composite identity whipped up in Topher’s computer.  This person actually lived, and to all intents and purposes she is living now.  So why, in an exquisitely unsettling ending, does Adelle have to watch her friend “die” again as she leaves Echo?

With its constant focus on the search for Caroline, the show argues from the start that a particular personality belongs in a particular body.  And indeed, one of the turning points for Adelle is her discovery that Rossum intends to offer certain favored clients “upgrades”: permanent transfers to a “better” body.  She is adamant that they can’t do this to her Actives, who only signed up for five years and who are entitled to get their bodies back at the end of those years.  (Lest one doubt her sincerity, a second-season episode, “Stop-Loss”, deals with the end of a contract.)  Thus the show is, in a way, profoundly incarnational.

But then it takes things a step further.  One of the taglines was “You can wipe away a memory, but can you wipe away a soul?”  Is there something in us beyond memory, beyond character, that cannot be taken out of the body (except by death, of which more in a moment)?

The answer is slowly teased out in Echo’s growing self-awareness, and in the beautiful Victor-Sierra romance, but then receives a definitive confirmation at the end of the first season, when the rogue Active Alpha is revealed.  We have known from the start that Alpha escaped the Dollhouse after slicing up its resident doctor and several Actives.  The assumption was that he had simply gone insane when 40-odd (in some cases very odd) personalities were simultaneously dumped into his head in an equipment glitch.  But when he is brought onto the case, Paul Ballard doesn’t want to profile any of those personalities.  He wants to know who Alpha was before he was Alpha.  Despite all of Topher’s protests that it doesn’t matter, Adelle gives Paul the file: “Alpha” was a convicted criminal, in prison for attempted murder, and when Paul tracks down his victim, the scars on her face are an exact match to the scars inflicted on the Dollhouse’s physician.

As if all that weren’t enough, two further complications present themselves.  First, as Echo becomes self-aware, and as she joins forces with Paul to bring down the Dollhouse from within, she wonders what will happen if and when Caroline comes back.  Will “Echo” die?  And from what she learns about Caroline, does she want to go back to being that person?  Paul, who has fallen in love with this maddening but indomitable woman, asks how she knows that she hasn’t been Caroline all along, but Echo is unsure, and her inner turmoil puts a distance between them that Paul cannot bridge.

Second, Echo discovers that she has a very rare ability: like Alpha, she can hold multiple imprints at once, but unlike Alpha, she can control and summon them at will.  This makes her an enormous asset, but it further complicates the question of who, in fact, she is.

It’s a lot to play with, and Whedon’s questions are far more satisfying than his answers.  In fairness, he reportedly had a five-year story arc planned, only to be informed in the middle of production that he would only get two.  But while I can look past the fact that season two is rushed, I can’t look past how much of it is wrong.

I will now skip over the reveal of Rossum’s mysterious founder/evil genius, as it is so clumsy, so unnecessary, and so damaging to what has gone before that I am pretending it didn’t happen.

But take the Attic.  It’s a fantastic concept: the place where “broken” dolls are sent.  Topher compares it at one point to the feeling you get when a word is just on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite articulate it - but always, with every single thought.  As a threat hanging over Echo’s head, and as a philosophical vision of hell, it’s tremendously effective, but sooner or later, logic begins to intrude.  It does seem needlessly complex and expensive to store all of these Actives, maintaining life support and the minimal level of consciousness to create the horror.  Ah, but then Echo is sent there, and she discovers that the Attic is actually Rossum’s mainframe computer.  All of those brains, trapped in infinite loops as they struggle to escape their worst nightmares, are the processing units.  I rejoiced, because that fit the tone of the show, set a new problem, and even gave a nice little grace note to a supporting character who had been sent to the Attic in season one.

And then, two episodes later, Echo blows up Rossum’s mainframe without, apparently, a second thought.  I’m all for saving the world, but at a bare minimum, collateral damage should be acknowledged, even if there is no time to address all of the philosophical issues involved.

Finally, let us take Paul’s death.  The second one, that is.  (I did mention that there would be spoilers, right?)  I long one day to write a character death as sudden and as piercing as this one.  Quite simply, he is there and then he is gone, and Echo, with a hundred personalities in her head, finds herself utterly alone.  Magnificent.

Or it would be, if that was where they had left it.  Earlier in the season, Paul has been “mapped” for an imprint, which winds up saving his life when Alpha destroys his mind the first time.  But there can be no reconstruction from a bullet in the head, so all Echo can do is take the imprint herself, finally uniting their minds.  “You did say,” she reminds him, “that you wanted me to let you in.”

Now, let me be clear: this plays.  Chokes me up every time.  But if the soul is something that cannot be wiped away, then neither can it be imprinted.  Echo has, in essence, become the Dollhouse’s last client.  She has chosen her fantasy.

It is a fantasy that strikes a deep chord.  Love, after all, desires more than proximity.  It desires union.  In the world of Dollhouse, where death is the end, such union can only ever be an illusion.  Hence, we are asked to rejoice with Echo because she has found and settled for the most she can get.

But I do not rejoice, because she shouldn’t settle.  I believe that the deepest longings of our hearts can be satisfied, were created to be satisfied.  And this ending is wrong precisely because it comes so close to being right.  It is a distorted echo of the Beatific Vision.