tablesaw | Welcom to the Vidhouse

giandujakiss spurred a lot of new analysis of Dollhouse this week. There was a lot of discussion (some a bit . . . oh, let's just say questionable) at Whedonesque. The Angry Black Woman rants about people who lecture her for not understanding the subtlety of Dollhouse while they resolutely ignore the supertlety of the same. Then Shanna Palma at FeministSF—The Blog discusses how watching Dollhouse demands that the viewer do much interpretive work because the show itself isn't doing enough to question what's happening.

There are more links I've seen, but I can't find them right now. Still, that's a lot of linkage to be spurred by a vid.

"It Depends on What You Pay" is a short video made by

giandujakiss editing together footage from Dollhouse to the song "It Depends on What You Pay" from The Fantasticks. I know there are musical-theatre fans reading who already know where this is going. Giandujakiss hints at it:

The original production of The Fantasticks ran continuously for 42 years, making it the world's longest running musical. By 1990, however, for reasons that will be obvious when you see the vid, It Depends On What You Pay had been largely excised from the show. Recent productions of The Fantasticks either include the song with a different set of lyrics, or delete it entirely and substitute a new song in its place.

You can download the vid at her post, or you can stream it (embedded under this cut.

A little after seeing the vid and reading the discussion, I was searching through FeministSF—The Blog for something unrelated. I came across a series of posts from previous years involving Dollhouse and the Frank Miller Test. In case you don't know about the Frank Miller Test:

It began here. It refers to the original Miller Test and also to the Shortpacked take on Frank Miller. It is applied to male sci-fi and fantasy writers, and it goes like this:

If the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.

Failure is an indication that the writer is suffering from a debilitating obsession with whores, and may be assuming that all women can be represented by sex workers.

Oh, those posts took me back, back to when it seemed like the weirdness of the Dollhouse would be based on the strange issues and conflicting views (even within feminism) of prostitution and sex workers, the halcyon days before we realized that every doll—who we are often told are total willing—has undergone, at the very "least," extreme coercion to gain their "consent." And as far as we can tell, at least one doll was abducted (or should I say . . . never mind) entirely against her will.

Back when I first posted about Dollhouse, I focused a lot on the first scene of the new pilot. Even back then, I felt, instinctively, that they way the show was going was that Caroline was not coerced or trapped into become a doll. At this point in the series, as far as I can tell, the only way for this story to work as "empowering" is if Caroline did actually enter the Dollhouse willingly, actively, with a plan—or even just the intent—to destroy it. It doesn't have to be a good plan; I don't expect (or want) Caroline to reveal the entire season to have been an elaborate Xanatos Gambit (or, more likely, a high-stakes game of Xanatos Roulette). Heroes do stupid things all the time. But what makes them heroes is that they choose to do those things.

And Whedon's heroines have an unfortunate history of being Chosen more often than they choose.

Welcom to the Vidhouse

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