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 Joss Whedon, after a brief tug-of-war with FOX network executives over the direction of the series, 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 that he has created.
“Man on the Street,” meanwhile, 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 such a person 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.”
Everyone has fantasies deep inside them that they might never feel comfortable sharing with others. 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 come in 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 hires 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. Especially when the memories are subsequently erased afterwards.
“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 one’s control. The Dollhouse, however, offers the opportunity to experience many of the dreams that are inevitably left 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 enlisted into the service 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.
Anthony Letizia (January 25, 2010)
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