Dollhouse and the Twilight of the Paranoid Aesthetic
On the recommendation of Matt Feeney and thanks to the consumerist magic of the iTunes Music Store, we watched the first season of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s series about a service that brainwashes and reprograms people for custom rentals. I have to register my near-total satisfaction with the show, which does exactly what I want pulp science fiction to do: ruminate on technology and the human condition between bone-crunching elbow strikes to the back of the neck.
For those who haven’t been watching, the protagonists of the show are “actives,” subjects whose identities are warehoused on hard drives while their bodies serve as hosts for customized personae. For an action series on network television (Fox, no less), the show does an admirable job of exploring the moral implications of engineered consciousness, both for the clients and for the actives themselves.
One axis along which I (a non-enthusiast) situate polemical science fiction runs between “progressive” works and “reactionary” ones. A progressive work is intended to help us reshape our moral intuitions and judgment to keep up with changing technological circumstances. It encourages us to make room in our hearts for robots with feelings, or prepares us to suck up to wise, benevolent space aliens. Reactionary sci-fi, on the other hand, seeks to shore up our preexisting moral commitments in the face of technologically-induced stress. It braces us for, say, blowing sympathetic humanoid robots out of the fracking airlock.
In the case of Dollhouse, which is a more humane example of reactionary sci-fi, the technological threat is the commercial engineering of consciousness and memory. Given my own inclinations, I was surprised and gratified to see Dollhouse come down so squarely on the reactionary side (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything, but would-be viewer beware from here on). The division of the person into mind and body, even on putatively voluntary terms and for benign results, is rendered as an abomination and a betrayal of the self. The show suggests, rather naively, that the conscience abides in some deep immutable core of the personality. There’s no case made for technology-as-neutral-instrument, either: “pure” scientific curiosity is as culpable as venal corporate self-interest in creating a technology that human moral sensibilities are left utterly unable to reckon with.
The technological dilemma feels relevant and ominous, but there’s a whiff of obsolescence to the implied power structures of the show, which brings us to my larger point. Among the many victims of the financial crisis is the paranoid aesthetic. The half-assed self-dealing of bankers, the misbegotten wars of the politicians, the pratfalls of our corporate titans; all of it looks way too boneheaded to be deliberate at even the deepest, most obscure level. The System looks less like the work of shadowy Illuminati and more like the emergent results of broadly distributed mediocrity. Thomas Pynchon never seemed so very square.
As someone who enjoyed Pynchon, DeLillo, and the X-Files very much, thank you, this seems like a cultural deprivation. Recreational paranoia once offered to disaffected slackers — the great grandsons of Melville’s sunken-eyed young Platonist — a way to sniff out what Pynchon called “the hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” [that’s my emphasis, James] in kitsch, tragedy, and the newspaper chess puzzles alike. Today, the die-hard aesthetic paranoid might cling to the hope that They are playing such a deep game that Their interests are cleverly obscured in the noise of abject incompetence, but the larger audience has lost its faith in grand conspiracy. Small wonder that the best thrillers recently have been the Bourne series, in which government skulduggery results from a vicious cycle of ass-covering and bureaucratic inertia. Pity the screenwriter who has to cultivate a backstory in such barren soil.
So you’re looking for a Philip K. Dick for the age of Iraq and the Great Mortgage Meltdown? Wasn’t one PKD enough?
Here’s a question: how would you classify John Varley? The Varley of the early short stories specifically.
— Noah Millman · May 12, 02:44 AM · #
John who? When I say I’m a non-enthusiast, I mean it. I know exactly Philip K. Dick about sci-fi.
The problem here is that I know as much about sci-fi as, like, a Wall Street dude would know about kids’ movies. No! Wait! Crap! I mean, I’m as ignorant of science fiction as some quant finance guy is about Canadian performances of Shakesp… Damn!
— Matt Frost · May 12, 02:58 AM · #
No world in which the gulf of Tonkin happened is a world in which we can ever feel that conspiracy theorizing is quaint. I’m naturally adverse to conspiracy theories, myself. But people conspire; every tinfoil hat stereotype exists in tension with the fact that seriously twisted stuff has been perpetuated by people conspiring. Gary Webb’s life was ruined by being portrayed as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and yes, he made some unsubstantiated claims. But the CIA really did deepen and widen the epidemic of crack cocaine in America, and though there’s no reason to think that it was their intent, there’s every reason to think that they were aware of it but indifferent enough to be culpable.
And, you know, there’s the most basic application of this stuff, which is elementary (and approved) enough to not be called conspiracy at all: got money, got power, use both to keep anyone else from getting them. Repeat. That’s the elementary transaction of human power politics, and it’s not going anywhere.
— Freddie · May 12, 03:07 AM · #
But that’s just what I’m Tonkin’ about, Freddie. That world, in which guys with buzz cuts and tie bars called the shots behind the scenes, seems lost forever as a popular trope.
— Matt Frost · May 12, 03:10 AM · #
the blog is eating my comments. oh well.
It’s not his best work, but I think maybe William Gibson’s recent novel Spook Country is sort of what you’re looking for, maybe?
— joseph fm · May 12, 06:15 AM · #
Okay that worked! Anyway, the other thing I was saying was, who needs grand conspiracies when you have emergent psychosocial demons?
Philip K. Dick’s best stuff, after all, was written once he started going deeper, into how the real conspiracy was going on at the metaphysical and spiritual level. That consensus reality is in fact the fabrication, and that none of us creating it have any clue what we are doing, and so we have to keep tearing everything down to get at our humanity, but instead we build more and more layers of mediation upon mediation.
But unfortunately almost no one ever does that, aside from a select few like Dick and Satoshi Kon.
— joseph fm · May 12, 06:22 AM · #
I thought Dollhouse WAS perfect. Ima stone otaku of Joss, and Firefly was my greatest good.
The base question of Dollhouse is the same as the base question of near-perfect series, BSG.
Take it away, Dr. Crick—
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
— matoko_chan · May 12, 12:32 PM · #
IOW……what does it mean to be human?
— matoko_chan · May 12, 12:34 PM · #
I think there’s room for grand conspiracy in Dollhouse still. (Spoilers ahoy up through season 1):
We don’t know who’s running the Dollhouses, how many of the main characters remain to be revealed as dolls, or how deep the Dollhouses are linked into US government power. Whedon being Whedon, when we finally meet the person running the system, he or she will turn out to be a wisecracking but ironically bland font of evil, but who and why remain to be revealed.
Seriously – “They’ve got the FBI under their thumb, they can erase and rewrite our memories, and we don’t even know who they are“ isn’t grand enough conspiracy for you?
p.s.: Matoko – what are you not stone otaku for?
— J Mann · May 12, 01:18 PM · #
I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like a naturalized version of Dark City.
— Sargent · May 12, 01:23 PM · #
J Mann: I don’t think Matt was lamenting a lack of conspiracy in Dollhouse. I took his point to be quite the opposite: Dollhouse has a very conspiratorial aesthetic — portraying some of it, hinting at much broader things — but that kind of thing has begun to seem quite dated in a world where the centers of power appear generally incompetent, not even up to their basic tasks, let alone managing some kind of quiet, extensive conspiracy.
— Christopher M · May 12, 01:38 PM · #
You know he has another one coming in August, right? Presumably a “small” like Vineland not a “big” like Against the Day.
— Sanjay · May 12, 01:59 PM · #
Joseph fm: I like your gloss on PKD. And yeah, what Christopher M said.
— Matt Frost · May 12, 02:37 PM · #
p.s.: Matoko – what are you not stone otaku for?
— J Mann · May 12, 09:18 AM · #
Liars, hypocrites, and whited sepulchres
Stupidity
Torture, christianists, IDT, slavery, the Bad Shepherd, tyrants , mad shamans , pederasts, rapists, and missionaries.
Shall I go on?
— matoko_chan · May 12, 03:47 PM · #
Also insane clowns and luddites of every sort, most especially bioluddites.
Is that enough?
— matoko_chan · May 12, 04:39 PM · #
the centers of power appear generally incompetent
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t. Do we really want to become complacent based on the notion that they’ll always be too incompetent to effectively and illegitimately pursue their own gain? I find the idea that the financial crisis has somehow made the possibility of powerful people conspiring really naive.
— Freddie · May 12, 05:47 PM · #
This has nothing to do with Dollhouse, David Simon’s version of the paranoid aesthetic, seems to work post-fin crisis.
— gobluemich · May 12, 07:36 PM · #
gobluemich: I totally agree. We will always have Clay Davises and even Dick Cheneys.
— Matt Frost · May 12, 08:21 PM · #
I too liked Dollhouse. However, if you’re interested in science fiction for the post-Iraq/Mortgage Meltdown Age, as Noah put it, I highly recommend the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime series. They actually are exploring the implications of insurgency, political ideology, and fourth generation warfare as they relate to social change.
— James F. Elliott · May 12, 09:44 PM · #
haha
good one James…..do you know where my name comes from?
Major Motoko Kusanagi: You talk about redefining my identity. I want a guarantee that I can still be myself.
Puppet Master: There isn’t one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.
— matoko_chan · May 12, 10:09 PM · #
Wow! This is my Favorite Combox Evah. Freddie foreshadowing skypetalk about the Empire of Conspiracy! Frost afire with puns! Spoilers ahoy! Matoko in a face-full-of-Faygo boutonniere gag!
That’s the thing about paranoids, Matt: by definition, you never can get more than a sense that they’re out to get you. Once you’re sure, it ain’t paranoia.
— James · May 12, 10:45 PM · #
“…you never can get more than a sense that they’re out to get you. Once you’re sure, it ain’t paranoia.”
And once they take the “sense” away from you, you’re likewise stuck with plain old suspicion.
— Matt Frost · May 12, 11:33 PM · #
Should I have followed X-Files to the end? I think I dropped off right after the first movie came out.
— rortybomb · May 13, 03:58 AM · #
rortybomb: No, that was good timing on your part.
— Matt Frost · May 13, 01:05 PM · #