Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » Dollhouse: Man on the Street

Mar

2009

Dollhouse: Man on the Street

Posted on 15:17, March 27th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Because of my trip to New York and the Scholastic keeping me variously occupied while there, I didn’t get around to seeing Man on the Street until today. I wish that today I had been watching it for the second time. This was the episode that, in my prior ambivalence, I had been hoping for.

The frame of the news-magazine-style report portraying the Dollhouse as an urban legend and asking the “man on the street” for opinions performs a number of important functions. Most obviously, it allows for the functioning of the Dollhouse to be directly called slavery and human trafficking. The less enlightened commenters provide a less-than-flattering mirror for those viewers who might see the Dollhouse as a desirable fantasy. For those aware of the issue of infotainment, the report also provides a parallel to the series itself with the story of the Dollhouse, a story of exploitation, being used for entertainment purposes. The viewers are then, in some sense, implicated. The final word, from an academic, becomes especially chilling after we have watched an episode indicating throughout that the Dollhouse organization’s operations are far more extensive, and perhaps even more sinister, than previous episodes have indicated.

In between these snippets of a report, we finally get recognition of the extent to which Agent Ballard’s storyline has been cliché. As much as we may dislike Joel Mynor, the version of Agent Ballard’s efforts that he narrates, the rescue fantasy, is a fair characterization, even if we accept that Agent Ballard has no interest in it becoming romantic. This is echoed when Mellie (whom we eventually find out is not exactly as she seems, a fact which deeply complicates the relationship between her and the agent) finally gets some backbone and tells him not to think of Caroline and kiss her.

Joel Mynor is, of course, as Agent Ballard tells him, a predator. One of the reasons this is the episode I have been hoping for is that it makes the issue of rape explicit. When Sierra’s handler is caught out as the one who has raped her (an aspect of the story which as Maia of Alas points out makes clear that rape is about power rather than sex), he makes a direct comparison to the normal operations of the Dollhouse which Ms. DeWitt has to admit is valid (though not really the point to her mind).

Notice that we now have two important points made by two problematic and predatory men. This shows that evil, or at least immoral action, does not come from an inability to intellectually comprehend a situation. It would still be problematic if these were the only characters shown to have such a grasp on the functioning of the world, but in the end we get Echo saying significantly that “it isn’t over”. Even with all the technology and circumstances arrayed against her, she is able to think.

This episode also gives us two fight scenes that subvert clichés. The first is the fight between Echo and Agent Ballard, an apparently climactic battle through a Chinese restaurant’s kitchen and out into an alleyway, which is interrupted by an apparently intentionally introduced glitch in Echo’s programming. Then there is what looks to be the planned rape and murder of Mellie–until Mellie gets a phone call from Ms. DeWitt and fights back effectively. [Edit: as mzbitca points out, this sort of reversal "is vintage Whedon".]