Otterday, and Open Thread (now Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse discussion)

Thanks for the links lauredhel. As much as I dislike the show, I was actually kind of impressed by the homage to A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen.

Here’s a post on the subject from Racialicious.

I am a fan of A Doll’s House, HHL. ‘A dolly and a dolly’s bed for Emmy. Nothing expensive; they’ll soon be broken, anyway.’ Oh, the sweet, sweet parallel. Doesn’t ’squirrelkin’ just make you see red? Not as much as ‘Aha! Little Miss Tarantella still? More delicious than ever.’ The possessive creep.

Do carry on.

Chally’s last blog post..In which I rant about toilets

I haven’t watched it yet, but what WP’s saying makes total sense to me. I think JW is clever enough that there’s no way you’re going to be able to tell where he’s going with the series from a single episode.

To change the topic wildly:

It is the anniversary of the birth of The Bearded One and I shall cook for him of the Sticky Date Pudding. Seeing as how I’ve never eaten/made this before, anyone have any suggestions? If not I’m going with Nigella Lawson’s recipe, which I have faith in, but anyone got any total MUST TRY recipes?

fuckpoliteness’s last blog post..Ok, you can now comment without a WordPress Login

I just have to say (no, I still haven’t gotten around to watching it as my sick mum has commandeered the telly) that I would think that anyone in film and television who knows anything about gender issues would have addressed the issue of the male gaze by now, or at least noted it. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is the definitive base of feminist film theory.

If this is Whedon’s stab at replying to Laura Mulvey, u r doin it rong.

Also, wouldn’t Joss be a powerful enough figure by now (people will watch something just because it’s got his name attached) that he’d be given more leeway in terms of representing women than most other people?

“If he’s doing it because it makes money, then he’s doing it because it makes money. ”

Perhaps he’s doing it because that way it has an audience.

“(people will watch something just because it’s got his name attached)”

Not enough people, I wouldn’t have thought. I don’t believe any of his shows have rated hugely well – thus the cancelling of firefly.

Just finished, and my comments still stand on male gaze.

I enjoyed it on a conceptual level–as in, I thought it was interesting–but felt it was handled haphazardly and that the writing and acting was subpar. Any meaning I might have got out of the ideas was lost in that and the fact that the narrative plots were a distraction. Not to mention the fact that I had stereotypical tropes thrown at me right left and center (the frigid victim of abuse; the cop-types who can’t cope with letting things go; the sick serial killer who liked little girls; the hardass bitch in charge; the curious naive ‘doll’…and of course, the ever-present Joss stand-in…more to say about that later). And the whole Asian motif thing bugged me again.

I want to know more, but I don’t know how much of it I can stand to plow through before we actually get decent information. I can think of a long list of improvements, and it’s not up to the level of writing one expects from Whedon…like he can only write well if he’s being a smartass. It reminded me of RTD and Doctor Who, like someone out of their element.

If I recall correctly, they are on the DVD commentary for Buffy. I don’t current own the Buffy DVDs (weo!) so I can’t check.

Ah, here’s something.

If you go down to Writing and Acting there’s a more accurate description of what he said. (I think he actually describes her as more earthy at some point in the commentary, but here it describes her as more “voluptuous” than he originally wanted. It really disturbed me when I heard that comment.)

Mmm. To me there seems to be an intriguing slippage between Joss and his work. There’s definitely connections, don’t get me wrong, the author might be dead but that didn’t mean s/he didn’t write the text. But (and this is partly my tiredness which seems to be making me blurry) there are a couple of points where the claim is being made that Joss’s extra-textual claims about the hotness of women who aren’t objects is being assumed to equate with the women he ‘chooses’ (scare quotes coz it’s not just up to him: audience, networks, cultural logics all play a role here) to depict in his shows. The claims about kickarse women being hot I always read as a recommendation to other straight men: ‘look guys, it’s not emasculating to like women as women, rather than only as objects. In fact, when you approach women as agents with thoughts of their own, they only get more attractive’. Maybe I’m too positive, but it’s a plausible reading as well. I’m not sure we should be assuming that Joss is making *his* ideal shows, either (and that’s not to reduce his responsibility, just to acknowledge the complexity of influences on his works).

On the other hand, the choices of actresses… yes, of course, totally problematic, especially in relation to race. Some have let him get away with that on the basis of having had the Kaylee actress put on weight. I am not impressed with that argument. And I’m not willing to exempt him from responsibility for the preponderance of white, thin, athletic able-bodied girls on screen on the basis of the list of other influences above. But at the same time, I’m not willing to think that Joss needs to produce texts I find utterly unproblematic in terms of feminism in order to recognise him and his work as contributing to feminism. (Like I’ve said before (but elsewhere), I don’t think this is a zero sum game: there are feminist threads and non- and, yes, even anti- feminist threads in his work. These all co-exist, and I want to be able to negotiate with all of them, not with only one facet, and certainly not by playing some equation game where the feminism and anti-feminism of his texts cancel each other out. To me, this underestimates the complexity of (various) readers, and their readings). I’m not invested in declaring feminist heroes, though, so that’s not what I’m doing. And as good/practiced as I am at critique, I am not sure what an ideal or pure feminist text looks like; I don’t think we can know what that is, not from here.

As far as the not objectifying quite so lovingly, well… yeah, maybe, that’s one way to go, although I’m not sure what that would look like. And for a show that, to me, seems to be trying to get people to invest in that objectification in order for them to be troubled by it—what you’re calling remedial feminism—yeah, using these tried and true, recognisable techniques is going to be the way to go, and it’s also going to sell it to the networks. I guess I don’t think that engaging in remedial feminism is anti-feminist, or only anti-feminist. And I do appreciate someone who is willing to use pop culture to make feminist issues the audience might think don’t affect them occur (even only for some) as part of their experience of the text (a kind of pedagogy that occurs narratively rather than rationally, as it does in the classroom). It’s a pretty intimate thing.

Well I’m really enjoying the discussion and that was only three paragraphs! In some ways I enjoy good sci fi critique better than the sci fi itself.

I can haz weekly Dollhouse dissection plz?

Helen- oh great now I really want to hit something… nothing makes me angrier then those piles of filth being gleeful about people suffering.
I really need to vent on something >_<

I think a lot of folks have something very invested in Joss = Feminist. It’s *nice* to have Joss being all “I’m a feminist, love me!” because it’s nice to have someone who it feels is “on our side” in television. That there is so much praise for Joss’ feminist cred in various circles, but no equally lavish, consistent, and squee-type praise for any other (female) Hollywood feminist, makes me think part of what makes Joss awesome to a lot of folks is that he’s a man who does Feminist-Friendly stuffs.

So, talking bluntly about how Echo didn’t really consent in the first place, and can’t withdraw consent at any point, makes things uncomfortable – especially when sex gets involved.

I’m just speculating. I know I didn’t really like the pilot, if it were made by anyone else I wouldn’t have sought it out, and I certainly wouldn’t be wondering what tomorrow’s episode will bring. It’s not like I think I’m immune from “Joss Fangirling”, and a lot of it is because I think his characters, and he himself, has a bit of feminist cred. Although I do think there’s an influence of “And he’s a GUY!”

That’s totally bizarre, if you ask me…

There is a difference between the ‘Whedonettes’ (’scuse me, threw up a lil in my mouth just then) and Echo. With that much, I agree. Buffy got ‘chosen’, River got sliced and diced, Cordelia got visions from a kiss. These are all depicted as either things that were done to them and are wrong, like with River, or things that kinda… just happened. With Echo, what’s different is that she participates actively in the *discussion* about whether these things should happen to her – and the upshot of this is that we know that she’s pretty obviously *not* consenting (this differs to the other Whedon women). In other words, in Dollhouse, the ‘thing done to the woman’ is situated as something proximate to other forms of consent (i.e., because there’s contract signing etc). This is kinda what I was talking about above: when we think of consent as like a contract, we run into all kinds of troubles, but contemporary culture can’t seem to imagine much beyond economic forms of relating to each other. What Echo’s resistance to signing the contract says to me is that contract and consent CANNOT be equated; indeed, these are the grounds upon which her all-too-literal objectification (the rendering of her as an object) is made troubling: even if she signed a contract, is that consent? It’s almost like a making-live of your claim above that consent is only consent if it can be withdrawn, and that it is precisely that capacity which is removed from Echo; and that fact is clearly the site of anxiety we’re meant to feel along with her ‘minder’ (I keep forgetting his name). And what is interesting about that, in turn, is that a world which objectifies women is not one to which women consent; that to me is what’s up for interrogation, and it’s what I think is promised by the series (with its already-existing ambivalence). And in addition to that, it asks how someone who has been reduced to an object can consent, and thus forces recognition that objectification, including the objectification of women, is fundamentally unethical for that reason. In other words, Echo’s position is, in some sense, the everywoman position; so as the ethics of what has happened to her continues to be queried, so does the misogyny of our world.

As for why feminist readers are smoothing over this troublingness… I am surprised and taken aback, I’ll be honest. I suspect, though, that this is where the real problem with the feminist cookies for Joss comes in: where people attempt to make Joss always-and-everywhere *depicting* good feminism. He’s not, and he’s not doing that because a simple and straightforward depiction of women who don’t need to have struggled with misogyny (so, for example, if Echo became herself again after each ‘wiping’, and was asked for consent prior to every ‘engagement’ (although even that’s problematic itself, of course)) doesn’t really have a hope in hell of demonstrating the *problems* with misogyny. He is perfectly aware that story requires conflict; the conflict set up here is precisely Echo’s struggle against objectification, where her lack of consent appears not to matter. To me, that centres her struggle as heroic in the narrative, and situates the objectification as the big bad; therein lies in the feminism. This to me is what seems to happen with Joss: people switch off their critical brains, and miss the real point of the story. I can’t switch off my critical brain, and nor would I want to. Besides; Joss believes his audience has critical brains. I just hope they are better engaged as the story unfolds (which I suspect they will be).

I have to say I’m interested in the whole ‘wiping’ thing. I do think it has the possibility of interrogating our receieved notions of selfhood: that it’s a matter of essence. And to ask whether consent is too fundamentally bound up with a liberal, humanist, economic sense of subjectivity (which has traditionally been imagined through the universalisation of male subjectivity) to do justice to those whose subjectivity deviates from that, and whose consent is, on those grounds, denied. That’s my hope. It might be futile, but fingers crossed…

The lack of good Joss-type dialog may be the main reason I found the first episode very dull.

Oh, look, these are my thoughts about the ideas at work; it’s not all utterly present in the first ep. But given it’s a first ep… well, I personally think that JW is doing what most creators do at the beginning of the story: getting in the biggest audience. And he’s doing that by investing people in some pretty problematic stuff, but stuff that they’re used to being invested in, so it’s effective. I do think it’s in order to make a bigger point, which of course *can* only be made through the unfolding over a season (the whole lot just couldn’t be in the whole ep; to me this is one of the interesting things about critique of current TV series: it’s a different dynamic to when you know the entire narrative, and is why I’m arguing against people giving up on Dollhouse already/suggesting it’s utterly unfeminist and uninteresting in terms of feminism). My point is basically that getting people to invest in a series on the grounds of, say, objectification, is problematic, but that’s not a simple matter/not the only thing going on, if the series, as it plays out (and there are more than a few suggestions that it will), is precisely designed to query the ethics of that objectification. That, to me, like I tried to say above, looks like a very effective use of TV as a pedagogical tool: it means that when the ‘wiping’ of Echo (was she Caroline before? Did I miss the name, or is that spoilery stuff that made it onto other sites?) is gradually opened out as thoroughly problematic, so too is the investment that all of those audience members had in it in the first place. That’s an intimate challenge, and one, I would suggest, which is probably way more effective than rational discussion (if only because desire is always and everywhere characterised as irrational, and when objectification is made equivalent to desire… [shrug] people exempt it from rational challenge a lot of the time, usually by reference to some caveman we apparently know all about). That’s why I like what JW does with TV, turning it pedagogical without being lecture-y. In other words, he doesn’t expect his audience to have my critical reading skills, I don’t think; because he’s going to be unfolding the kinds of concerns and questions I’ve sketched above THROUGH the narrative, and through the investments we have in individual characters (e.g. investing in Ballard’s concerns about Echo, investing in the teensy bits of Echo’s uncertainty about her wiped state (like the ouchy leg), and through a slow unpicking of the ‘likeable’ Topher’s lack of ethics (I don’t find him likeable, but I can see why others do, and I think he’s designed that way) through Langdon’s anxiety about them (I *really* don’t think that Topher is Joss; nor that Wash ever was. People are weird about wanting to find the author in the text). To prove that something is problematic, you need to engage with it. But of course that will take time to occur.

And that’s why I’ve been insistent in this thread (sorry if I was overly so; I’ve been more than a little anxious about that)… I want to point out the promise I think the show has. It might not pan out, and if it doesn’t, I’ll be more unhappy than most. But if it does, I think we’re in for some pretty interesting stuff.

I have nothing of substance to contribute to this discussion except to say how much I’m enjoying it and to thank you all for sharing your thoughts.

I watched the ep and wasn’t thrilled, mostly because of the already mentioned woodenness and lack of scintillating dialogue, but I plan on sticking with it to see where it goes.

WP I hope you do make a weekly feature of Dollhouse dissection, if you do I’ll be there reading for sure!

WP, I’ve met a lot of Browncoats that’s for sure :) When/where did we meet? (Oh gawd, it wasn’t one of those times I was making theatres full of people sing the Firefly theme song was it?)