How I Learned to Kill Robots

While Fox is touting Friday nights as hot hot chicks with guns, the geek DVR block is showing itself to be a contrast in women's stories on TV. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been doing by far the better job, and the last three episodes have been incredible. Dollhouse has . Since these shows started airing together, I've been thinking about an interview with playwright Paula Vogel that I read years ago:

[Arthur Holmberg]: [How I Learned to Drive] dramatizes in a disturbing way how we receive great harm from the people who love us.

[Paula Vogel]: I would reverse that. I would say that we can receive great love from the people who harm us.

AH: Why is it significant to reverse it?

PV: We are now living in a culture of victimization, and great harm can be inflicted by well-intentioned therapists, social workers, and talk show hosts who encourage people to dwell in their identity as victim. Without denying or forgetting the original pain, I wanted to write about the great gifts that can also be inside that box of abuse. My play dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us.

AH: So what does Li'l Bit receive?

PV: She received the gift of how to survive.

Which, I think, stands without comment.

That's the part I remembered, but this part had something to say about both series as well:

AH: In Drive, Li'l Bit looks at her painful memories, processes the experiences, and then moves on. Why is it important to forgive the harm?

PV: Many people stay rooted in anger against transgressions that occurred in childhood, and this rage will be directed to other people in their adult lives and toward themselves. Whether we call it forgiveness or understanding, there comes a moment when the past has to be processed, and we have to find some control. There are two forgivenesses in the play. One forgiveness for Peck, but the most crucial forgiveness would be Li'l Bit's forgiving Li'l Bit. Li'l Bit as an adult looking at and understanding her complicity . . .

AH: her destructiveness.

( Spoilers for Sarah Connor Chronicles )

[AH:] You once said that it was important to give the audience a catharsis.

PV: Catharsis purges the pity and the terror and enables the audience to transcend them. So you have her memories of the final confrontation with Peck in the hotel room and afterwards the flashback to the first driving lesson. And then the last scene, which brings us up to the present. This is a movement forward. For me, purgation means a forward movement.

In a talk that Vogel gave at UCSB, she elaborated on this. Talking about her play Hot 'n Throbbing, she said had been considering revising the play. As it stood, she said, the play was (or was almost) an abuse on the audience, not because it dealt with so many dark, dangerous, and harmful themes and images, but because it did so while denying the audience a catharsis.

I think this applies especially to Dollhouse, which has been very heavy on the dark and disturbing and very light on the catharsis. ( Spoilers for Dollhouse )

On the plus side, the two major locations shown in Friday's Dollhouse were walking distance from my house, which was fun. ojouchan (who doesn't watch the show, but is often in the room when I do) was impressed at the way the art department did up the Avalon.

SatNYTX: 18:30.