Notes on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse Part II: Briar Rose

As I assured everyone, I am back to write a followup to my earlier Dollhouse post. Here I intend to use the the penultimate episode of the series, Briar Rose, to flesh out the points I made at the end of the previous post. I originally intended to write about the season finale as well, but I've decided that these two episodes deserved individual attention. So look for a third segment at some point.

Briar Rose is arguably the best episode of the series. This episode sees Echo working as some sort of volunteer, under the name Susan, at what is presumably a governmental child care services facility. We first encounter Echo reading the story of Briar Rose, which you may know as Sleeping Beauty, to a group of children. Her reading is interrupted by what we learn later is a very troubled child, coincidentally also named Susan, who complains that the story is crap. It doesn't sit well with little Susan that Briar Rose is saved from by a Prince on the last Day of her hundred year curse. If one more day had passed she would have woken without assistance, however the Prince's arrival denies Briar Rose the satisfaction of self-redemption. As she levels her complaints, she steadily becomes more agitated until finally she snatches the book from Echo's hands and destroys it.

Echo later tells an administrator that she expected such a thing would happen and in fact, had purposefully chose the story to ferret Susan out as it had always bothered her as well. Echo is informed that Susan's mom died from an overdose. As a result Susan was left in the care of her mother's boyfriend/pimp,who thought he could use her to make money when she got older. Turns out he didn't need to wait.

Echo assures Susan that she need feel no shame in her inability to save herself, confiding her own tragedies to Susan, attesting that she herself could not have run away. Echo then tells her to reread the story as Briar actually saving herself. For a hundred years she was dreaming of escape . The prince is her dream, she made him.

Cut to Topher, who explains that Echo is actually imprinted with Susan's brain template but with the modifications of a person who grew up to be a well-adjusted adult. Thus, Echo can get through to Susan, as well as give her hope that she can grow up to be a healthy person. Topher explains that Dewitt needed little convincing to do this pro bono because, "Everyone wants to be righteous when they can afford it."

This is a recurring motif of the series, the moral ambiguity of the Dollhouse organization. Yes, they are funded by a shady corporation- but that corporation has lead to research that can quantifiably improve the quality of life of human beings. All of the agents have presumably contractually agreed to join the organization, and will be fiscally rewarded for doing so, however Sierra's circumstance, though not completely explained, seems to contradict this, as it alluded that a previous boyfriend sold her off because she would not sleep with him. And now we learn that the Dollhouse engages in pro bono work. Through these contradictions, the show seems to be asking us whether our moral categories are unsuited to judge the unprecedented transformations that humanity is undergoing as a result of technology and scientific knowledge.

These scenes where Echo interacts with Susan consists of about the first 12 minutes of the show. I focused on them because after Echo leaves, Susan begins rereading Briar Rose, the events of which parallel the rest of the events of the show. Enter Paul Ballard, whose plan to rescue Echo kicks into full gear in this episode. After some detective work, he comes to the conclusion that the Dollhouse must be a self-sufficient underground facility. He then conscripts a man by the name of Steven Kepler, against his will, to help him break into the Dollhouse. Kepler worked as an environmental systems consultant for the Building that Ballard believes to be underneath. This consultant specializes in buildings that recycle their own air/power/ water; closed systems that can remain off the grid.

Steven Kepler turns out to be a screwball pot-growing ecological New Ager. Throughout the episodes he spews one-liners like: "You know, I care about my carbon footprint, but most people out there are making carbon snow angels!" and "You know what I think? I think that once we die out - a couple hundred years - Earth is gonna have a people day. You know, to remember us. One day a year she is gonna laugh and laugh and shake our bones".

I really like the pairing of Ballard and Kepler. Ballard is the obstinate moralist who unreservedly believes that it is impossible to wipe a human's soul; underneath all of the brainwashing, these people are still who they are. His ethical universe is slowly crumbling throughout the series, not only because of constant reinforcement of the pervasiveness of the Dollhouse technology, but the revelation that the moral cosmology that these technologies have ushered in are not relegated to specifics hubs, but have always overlapped with his world. On the other hand, Kepler is a man of the future, a scientist, who understands perfectly how he relates to nature. When I watch him on screen, I can't help but think of Zizek's comment about ecology being the new opium of the masses. When we talk about Marx's famous saying, opium of the masses, we should not ignore the statement that immediately precedes it:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses.

Ballard and Kepler are two sides of the same coin. With Ballard, we have a man who is hopelessly holding on to the world he knows. However, as an FBI agent he is an agent that advances the destruction of that world by protecting the interest of the establishment - an establishment which is creating the new conditions of reality. Kepler is a man of the future, but through his ecological obsession he shows that he is also trying to find a moral anchor in the vast changes facing humanity.

After they have broken into the Dollhouse, Ballard and Kepler have the following conversation:

Ballard: This is a bad place.

Kepler: Bad people maybe. Good place. This is the future: the machine feeds them what they need. The machines takes away what it needs. A closed system. The earth is not harmed. We're all just cells in a body.

Ballard: Cells in a body? That's the future? We're all functional, interchangeable...?

Kepler (reproachfully scoffs): We already are, man. What, you didn't know that? I was trying to tell you. We're all just atoms in the big continuous universe and the best..the best we can do is try not to kill it from the inside.

Ballard: No, there's more we can do.

This conversation is really exemplary of the anxiety revolving around the loss of humanity that a lot science fiction explores. In the previous post, my first point was that one of the most common arguments against communism is that it goes against human nature, and thus would require some sort of repressive mechanism. I wrote that the proper response acknowledges that communism does go against human nature. Human nature is a historically conditioned state; communism doesn't merely recreate the conditions of society, it recreates the person. I am an Enlightenment man, I fundamentally believe in its project of Liberty and equality. I agree with Zizek when he states that only an idiot would disagree that Capitalism for the most part has been the agent of democracy, which is why many have believed Liberal-Capitalism to be the end of history. However, we find our selves on the precipice of a terrifying new age of capitalism, the end of the Fukuyama Liberal Utopia. This capitalism is best exemplified by the Chinese system.

So why is communism still a good alternative? I think it is the only alternative. As Zizek reminds us, in the next hundred years we will be confronted with issues like genetics, cloning, ecological disasters, market regulations, etc. - issues that should belong to the domain of the 'common' but the common is the pre-alienated existence of what we know as the public, the domain that affects humanity in general. The problem is that humanity in general is an abstraction. My interest in Marxism is that it resolves this contradiction. It takes the ideals of liberalism, fraternity, democracy, equality, and liberty (which as most minorities know, being equal in liberalism mean nothing), and presents a vision of them as concrete reality. However, this resolution requires us to abandon our understanding of what it means to be human.

Ballard and Kepler offer two defenses of Capitalism. Historical Change will destroy your way of life, you must oppose it! Historical Change is inevitable and we have no part to play in it, so we might as well devote our self to some depoliticized activity that causes some good. All the while capitalism, science and technology, being the products of instrumental knowledge cultivated by capitalism, are themselves the agents of these changes.

The episode ends with the revelation that Kepler is actually Alpha. Alpha tells Echo, "I promised I would rescue you." Now if we view this in the light of Echo telling Susan to realize that she created the prince by dreaming him, then the allusion here obviously is that what has just occurred is a nightmare. By stripping ourselves of political agency in these historical upheavals, we are doomed to capitalism keeping its promise of salvation.

We have the option of finding a way of taking the historical contingencies presented to us by capitalism (technology, science, ecology, genetics, economy etc.) to lay the path to the inevitably of communist society or follow capitalism on its path to authoritarianism.

Like always please leave us your thoughts.