The Ages of Dollhouse: Autobiography through Whedon

Sigrid Ellis earns her living as an air traffic controller. She writes about comics at Fantastic Fangirls and about everything else at her blog, Thinking Too Much. Her short story, “No Return Address,” was published in Strange Horizons in 2010. She and her partner raise and homeschool their two children in Saint Paul, MN.

At different points in my life I have wanted to be, or wanted to date, most of the characters of Dollhouse. They embody the fantasies of power I have held throughout my life.

When I was nine years old I wanted to be Victor. Dollhouse wasn’t on the air but had I known of him at the time, Victor is who I would have wanted to be. My fantasies were of a direct and physical competence. My best friend and I made elaborate plans to live our adult lives on a ranch in Montana, where we would raise horses and dogs and be entirely self-sufficient. We would train all our own animals, raise most of our own food. We would survive nuclear war there, and nuclear winter. Or, if the Soviets invaded instead of nuking us, we would defend our ranch with profligate use of firepower. We would shoot well, make our own ammunition, and be unafraid to bury the enemy dead.

Victor captures my nine-year-old goals and fantasies. He is an expert at weapons and a natural leader (at least, his imprints are). In the paradigm of the Dollhouse, he can be good at anything chosen for him. Victor’s skills and talents are, in the first season, largely a lie. But it’s not his skill set that I wanted to be, to have, at age nine. It’s his nature. Victor is stalwart, Victor is loyal. Victor embodies romantic and selfless love.

Victor is more romantic than sexual or sexualized, which appealed to my childhood self. Even in Season One’s “A Spy in the House of Love,” Victor’s sexual engagement is extremely romantic, full of long talks, playful banter, fencing – fencing, for goodness’ sake! – and British accents. (British accents being exotic, sophisticated, and immeasurably adult to Sigrid, age nine.) Victor’s love for his fellow doll Sierra is nearly chaste, clean and pure. His feelings for her are largely structured in an enabling manner. Victor wants to see Sierra get what she wants more than he desires anything for his own needs or goals. When I was nine, I thought this was the pinnacle of human emotion. To want nothing for one’s self, but to merely strive to make others happy. I also wanted to be Galahad when I grew up. The best knight in the world, the one whose purity makes him holy. Not the leader, not the best at straight-up combat, but the one whose will cannot be shaken by doubt or fear.

When I was 13, I wanted to be Topher Brink. I still wanted power and control; that hadn’t changed since age nine. But by 13, it wasn’t good enough to have power and autonomy, out on my isolated ranch with my dogs.

I wanted other people to know just how good, how powerful, I was. I wanted to grind the faces of the kids who teased me in junior high into the dirt. I wanted to see their pain, wanted them to cower. I wanted the people of the world, and especially my junior high school classmates, to know how thoroughly I had bested them through science, intellect and wit. Lacking physical and social skills, I wanted my brilliance to win. To win everything.

If I had been able to control the kids around me as Topher does the Dolls, I would have. I would have blasted new personalities into the heads of people I feared and hated. New, weak personalities. Like Topher, and unlike the clients of the Dollhouse, at age 13 I would not have gone in for sexual degradation. I would have done something far more insidious. I would have made everyone like the things I liked: Max Headroom, Star Wars, Stephen King and Uncanny X-Men. They would not have known as much as I did about those topics, of course, but enough to appreciate how much I knew. In eighth grade my English class was required to write a radio play. I wrote about four runaway teenage kids with elemental-based superpowers who were captured by an evil school-slash-government-agency, from which they then escaped. If I could have given my classmates new personalities, they all would have liked my radio play and performed it in front of the class with enthusiasm. Like Topher in Season One’s “Haunted,” I would have used my genius and power to make people into my friends.

I don’t think Topher is a sociopath. I think Topher is an incredibly selfish being. He is someone for whom the playing field is so uneven, so not-level, that he tries to make every interaction a contest he can win. For Topher, everything is about how smart he can be. When confronted with physical threats and violence, Topher is still plotting how he can be smarter than the person attacking him. When his genius can’t save him, Topher’s got no other course of action.

Topher wants the world to be right for him. He wants what he wants. Yet, when that expands to include the happiness of other people, Topher participates in plots that do not meet his short-term goals of safety, acclaim and comfort. They meet his longer-term goals of safety for himself and others and comfort for everyone he reluctantly cares about. When I was 13, I thought the whole world could go hang – except for the people I loved.

I was Paul Ballard when I was 15. More of Victor’s white-knight tendencies had stuck with me through junior high school’s Topher years than I’d thought. I loved my friends in high school, and desperately wanted to save them. Save them from pain, from stress, from their parents, from the cruelties of high school romance, from their internally generated standards of failure. From the system, from the school. From themselves. I was utterly certain that I knew what was best for them. I knew how to save them all, if only they would let me.

As with Paul Ballard, my rescue fantasies were all about myself and had oh-so-very-little to do with the objects of said fantasy. Yes, it would have been nice if my friends stopped expressing their stress in complex and counter-productive ways. But my attempts at mothering and caring for my friends were always about my own feelings of powerlessness. I was overwhelmed and stressed, finding my own way through webs of relationships and expectation. How much easier for me, for Paul, to simply pick a goal and work towards it. Whether the object of the attention wanted it or not.

Paul Ballard is presented in the early episodes of Season One as heroic. Sort of. He’s the hero red-herring. He does and says all the typically heroic things. That it’s not right to enslave people. That a person should not have their body used without their permission. That stealing someone’s life is wrong. But Ballard acts as though the Dollhouse story is about him, not the Dolls.

His stated goal is to “bring down the Dollhouse,” to defeat a worthy villain and thus make himself great. He takes the machinations of the Dollhouse personally, welcomes the attacks. The resistance of the Dollhouse to Ballard’s probing validates him. It means he’s on the right track, it means he is powerful, that his actions have weight and authority. Ballard needs to be a threat to someone – anyone – in order to not feel like a victim himself. This is clear to the other characters on the show. From Ballard’s FBI peers, to Adele DeWitt, to Echo herself – everyone can tell that Ballard’s quest to destroy the Dollhouse is about Ballard.

In college I wanted to be Echo, sort of. Or maybe date her. Or, perhaps, be her friend? Rescue her? During college I wanted such contradictory things.

I wanted to be completely autonomous, without needing anyone. Some days I went through my life callously careless of the people with whom I had connections – much like Echo’s original personality, Caroline. She’s not a very nice person. When I watched the show, I was pleased to see that. I like Echo – I like her stubborn insistence on remaining who she is, regardless of how she came to be that person. I didn’t want to see Echo vanish, lost to Caroline’s prior claims. Caroline will cast aside people who don’t serve her goals, even if she likes or loves them. Caroline uses people in the service of that which she deems most important. Caroline is a lot like Paul Ballard that way; I expect they wouldn’t have gotten along at all.

But I also wanted to make connections with people. In spite of who I was, who they were, and the fact that all of us used each other to greater or lesser degrees. Used each other to experiment on, to find out how this whole “being an adult and having relationships” thing worked. I often didn’t know who I’d be talking to, the next time I saw my friends. Would they be kind? Ingratiating? Dismissive? Would I be on the inside of the group conversation or the outside? It wasn’t that my friends were particularly rotten people. We were all kind or cruel to each other in the same ways, to the same degree as most everyone is in college. I spent too much time and energy pretending I knew who I was to notice that everyone else was wearing masks. Yet, like Echo and Victor and Sierra, some things would hold through. I still have friendships from that time in my life. The three Dolls learned to like and trust each other despite all their masks and false personalities. True identity glimmered through the erasures and imprints.

When I was in college, I craved to be special. (Who am I kidding? I wanted to be special most of my life. Now I have kids, though, and the world no longer revolves around me.) But when I was in college I no longer wanted to be Topher, with his arrogance and demand for recognition. Nor did I want to be Paul, precisely. I still wanted to rescue people, but not for the power it granted me. Like Echo, I wanted to rescue people because I wanted to remake the world. From a geeky kid who wanted to run away from the world, to a young adolescent wanting to force the world to acknowledge me, to a high school kid wanting to be the center of my friends’ lives, I had managed to progress to some sort of sense of universal justice. I wanted the world to conform to the principles I thought best. Personal freedom, freedom from coercion, ownership of one’s body and sexuality. A very American, middle class, privileged view of social justice – but still, social justice. In college I signed petitions, I attended a few rallies. I spent a lot of time talking to my friends about how we obviously knew the answers to the world’s ills. I was never quite an activist. I admired the people who were. Particularly the women I had crushes on, with their passion and energy. But I never managed to commit to anything.

These days, I identify with Adele DeWitt. Of all the characters on Dollhouse, she seems the most adult. Adele accepts her actions and their consequences. She apologizes when she is wrong. She stands her ground when she is right. She changes her mind and her plans when a convincing argument is made that she should do so. Adele can be wrong, and she does harm in the world. But she also has a code of ethics that leads her to use her power in the Rossum Corporation for the greater good.

None of which is why I respect her the most. I respect Adele DeWitt because she lies to herself least of all the characters on the show. Adele knows why she participates in the Dollhouse. And as those original and compelling reasons are eroded away, Adele changes her position to remain in congruence with her internally generated sense of right and wrong action. She remains true to herself in a world and on a show dedicated to the idea that everyone and everything is false. That character is for sale, that anyone and anything can be bought. Adele doesn’t pretend, like Ballard, that she can’t be bought. He knows she can be; knows she has been. But she also has the strength to walk away when the cost is too dear. This ability to navigate a complex and ambiguous world while remaining true to one’s self is what I most admire. I hope that I have some of it. I also hope to never be in a position like Adele’s in which I have to find out.

I still find Victor and Sierra’s relationship sweet. (This is made easy by incredibly good acting on the part of Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman.) But I can see the problems with it. When Victor and Sierra leave the Dollhouse and return to their identities as Tony and Priya, they don’t know each other. Not really. I’ve dated enough, had enough relationships, to understand that falling in love isn’t love. That love is hard work, and that as much as you like and respect someone, you may not be the right person to date them. I was pleased beyond measure to see that Priya and Tony had broken up in the future of “Epitaph Two: Return.” And I was more pleased to see that they still obviously cared for each other. Respected each other. Loved each other. They just hadn’t been able to move through the world as partners – though perhaps, after the world-wipe, they might be able to. People grow and change. It’s a truth that the Dollhouse’s imprint process attempted to deny. The imprint kept the Dolls unchanged, unable to learn. But Priya and Tony had a chance to live in the world. I hoped, at the end of the last episode, that they had grown enough to be good for each other. To see each other as the people they really are.

I love watching Topher on the screen. He’s the frenetic, arrogant sort of geek around whom I still spend a lot of my social time. The one who professes not to care about having been picked on in third grade, but who manages to make every possible interaction a contest. Who is smarter? Who is more right? Who wins a fight held 25 years ago in a playground far, far away? I no longer share those views, but I understand them. A great part of the glee I have in watching Topher is seeing those playground fantasies of power and prestige come true. But I no longer believe that my self-worth comes from the accolades awarded by others. My power and autonomy are not prizes handed out by an admiring crowd. They are built by my own actions, whether those actions are public or private.

Watching Paul Ballard these days makes me wince as I remember my own past actions. I find him so creepy, so manipulative, so blind to anyone else. Watching him try to rescue Caroline makes me want to call up all my high school friends and apologize for not truly seeing them. There are many levels of evil in Dollhouse. There’s Topher’s power-mad evil, using people as components in his power fantasy, but Topher never believes he’s doing it for the Dolls’ own good. There’s Adele’s evil, as pimp and madam and broker in human beings, but she also doesn’t think the whole thing is in the Dolls’ best interest. She thinks it probably doesn’t hurt them too much, but Adele points out that the Dolls are paid for their loss. Paid for the loss of their time and autonomy. It’s a deal in which everyone gets something, but it’s not altruism.

Ballard thinks he’s an altruist. He thinks everyone should be pleased at the way he’s putting himself on the line, risking it all for people he doesn’t know. He thinks if he rescues Caroline, his life will be worth something. It’s a pervasive and almost-impossible-to-root-out form of insecurity, the feeling that one isn’t worthwhile unless and until someone else owes one something. But Ballard doesn’t realize that making people indebted to you is not the same as having their respect, in much the same way that Topher doesn’t understand that humiliating people with your skills doesn’t make them respect you. Rescuing someone, the way Ballard intends to, doesn’t make the object of the rescue any stronger. It doesn’t make them autonomous. It merely trades one form of dependence for another. If Ballard had actually broken Caroline free of the Dollhouse, how could she have ever balanced the debt between her and Ballard? Would she have thanked him at all? From what we know of Caroline, I rather suspect she wouldn’t.

Watching Dollhouse, Echo was my least favorite part of the show. As much as I disliked Ballard, I still found his character engaging and interesting. Echo was... neither of those things, to me. Part of that disinterest on my part was due to the nature of the show’s premise – it’s hard to like a character whose principle trait is that she has no personality. But part of my lack of caring was due to my own experience of the world. I’m 37 years old as I write this. I have a better, though still imperfect, understanding of personal relationships than I did when I was younger. I no longer think I’m the center of the universe, nor do I want to be. And I know, now, that I can’t rescue anyone.

I rooted for Echo to get all the Dolls out of the Dollhouse. I loved the Season One episode, “Needs,” in which Echo gets to succeed at this goal and save everyone. Yet I applauded the fact that the whole thing was a huge trick. Yes, I thought. It’s not that easy. You never actually get to save anyone.

In everyday life, the lives lived by the majority of people who watched Dollhouse, most people are not enslaved. We’re not being trafficked to rapists. We’re not coerced into selling our bodies to avoid a prison sentence. For most of us, most of our problems are both solvable (with effort and sacrifice) and of our own making. Our problems are real, they are difficult and painful. But they are not problems from which we can be rescued. We can be helped, certainly. But no one can swoop in and make everything better for us. To do so trades our autonomy and power for the temporary and illusory relief of not thinking about the problem. Our lives get better when we take steps. When we leave the emotionally abusive partner, even though we’re scared of what happens next. When we get a second job to cover the tuition, and stop smoking so much pot. When we ask a coworker for help and get rides to and from work for a few weeks. When our power is taken away from us, we have to take it back. Autonomy is not a gift. It cannot be a gift.

Rescue is a gift one can only give to one’s self.

I love this fact about Dollhouse. I love that the attempts to rescue people fail so miserably. Ballard’s multiple attempts to rescue Mellie fail. She remains part of the Rossum web. Echo’s effort to free the Dolls in “Needs”? A huge trick, and a failure. Alpha’s attempts to free Whiskey, and Echo? Failures. As for the attempts by the characters to improve their lives or save themselves? Just like in real life, the results are mixed. Whiskey’s fate was a shock to me. I had been so pleased when she walked away from the Dollhouse. I was happy when she was living with Boyd in an apparently consensual relationship between free adults. And there she is in Season Two’s “Getting Closer,” a puppet and tool and slave all along. And Topher finds madness and death. But Priya and Tony make lives – not the lives they would have chosen had the world remained sane, but lives built of their will and their hands.

I have always loved and identified with fantasies of power, in different ways at different times in my life, as my needs, fears, and desires have changed. Dollhouse, with its story of overt slavery, coded and overt rape, economic coercion and devaluation of human life, is a platform designed specifically to discuss the human craving for control of self. The show presents us with an absolute imbalance of power. The Dolls are people so powerless they no longer have their own names. And their abusers are a secret society of the world’s most powerful elite, untouchable by any means. Yet the story told in this setting is one of reclamation of identity, a story of people regaining their autonomy and finding their responsibility to humanity. Our gang of Dolls and Dollmakers, slaves and owners, pimps and whores, the cast-aside and forgotten, the broken and abused – and the bought collaborators who abused them – these people conspire to make their own freedom. They drag themselves into autonomy and power. They save themselves, and in doing so save the world.