They're All Going to Laugh at You: On Three Versions of Much Ado About Nothing

People my age, I think, can for the most part be divided into two groups--those whose first encounter with William Shakespeare the playwright (as opposed to William Shakespeare the cultural icon and creator of such linguistic commonplaces as "To be or not to be") came from Baz Luhrman's 1996 Romeo + Juliet, and those for whom it was Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing.  I'm in the latter group, and--all due respect to Luhrman--I can't imagine a better introduction.  Branagh's sun-dappled, cheerful film, in which he and his then-wife Emma Thompson headline as the argumentative lovers Benedick and Beatrice, is not only a top-notch adaptation of an excellent play, but it has a lightness and an effortlessness that cut through a young person's (or even a not-so-young person's) conception of Shakespeare as serious or difficult.  It's full of song and dance and beautiful scenery which, far from distracting from the archaic language, only enhance it, and help to bring the play's emotions--its humor, its romance, its tragedy--across to the audience.

Excellent as Branagh's film is, one of the results of that excellence--as well as the fact that until earlier this year, his was the only version of Much Ado About Nothing available to a wide audience (unless you count the 2005 modern language version, part of the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told project, starring Damian Lewis, Sarah Parish, and Billie Piper as Hero)--is that for many people my age, and especially those who don't have ready access to theatrical productions of Shakespeare, it has come to seem not only definitive, but like the only "correct" way to stage the play.  It certainly helps that unlike Luhrman's irreverent adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which rubs the audience's face in how unconventional its take on its source material is, Branagh's film strives for a feeling of accuracy.  Its setting, like the play's, is a villa in rural Italy, and though its period is deliberately vague, it feels at least roughly contemporary to the play's early 17th century publication date.  In addition, as much as Branagh takes advantage of the cinematic medium, with long tracking shots, multiple exterior locations, and an emphasis on period detail, his Much Ado is a very theatrical film--most of the cast play their big speeches to the back benches, and the film has no compunction about letting its actors squarely address the fourth wall, like a stage actor soliloquizing to an audience.

This perception, however, obscures the many choices Branagh made in adapting Much Ado About Nothing, and thus the possibility that other choices might bring out nuances he'd missed or chosen not to emphasize.  A quick glance through the play's original text, for example, reveals that as well as cutting the play down to suit his two hour running time, Branagh thinned the text out, removing, in some scenes, every other sentence or half sentence.  Take this scene, from early in the play.  The bolded lines are the ones that appear in Branagh's version:

Beatrice: I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?
Messenger: I know none of that name, lady: there was none such in the army of any sort.
Leonato: What is he that you ask for, niece?
Hero: My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua.
Messenger: O, he's returned; and as pleasant as ever he was.
Beatrice: He set up his bills here in Messina and challenged Cupid at the flight; and my uncle's fool, reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid, and challenged him at the bird-bolt. I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? for indeed I promised to eat all of his killing.
Leonato: Faith, niece, you tax Signior Benedick too much; but he'll be meet with you, I doubt it not.
Messenger: He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.
Beatrice: You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it: he is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an excellent stomach.
Messenger: And a good soldier too, lady.
Beatrice: And a good soldier to a lady: but what is he to a lord?
Messenger: A lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuffed with all honourable virtues.
Beatrice: It is so, indeed; he is no less than a stuffed man: but for the stuffing,--well, we are all mortal.

This has the effect of slowing the pace of the dialogue down, making it easier for the audience to follow along and for the actors to deliver their lines (of the cast, Branagh is nearly the only one who is expected to manage a full Shakespearean gallop).  And it leaves room in the film for wordless scenes, such as the long, delightful opening sequence in which Don Pedro's men and the women of Leonato's household bathe and dress before their first meeting, without making its running time unwieldy.  It's a perfectly valid choice, and one that pays great dividends in the film, but it is a choice, and the aura that has attached to Branagh's film obscures that fact.

It's easy, therefore, to see how a new film version of Much Ado About Nothing would seem refreshing, even revolutionary, simply for drawing attention to the fact that there are other choices that might be made when adapting the play.  All the more so when that version is Joss Whedon's, which seems almost to have been designed as the antithesis of Branagh's film.  As has been widely reported, Whedon shot the film in his own house over twelve days, with a cast made up mostly of his friends and favorite actors.  But as well as being a modern-day, modern dress production, his Much Ado is an understated affair.  Instead of the conscious theatricality of Branagh's version, Whedon reaches for naturalism.  His actors deliver the Shakespearean lines as if they were ordinary 21st century dialogue, underplaying the comedy so that it sounds like conversational banter, not a stream of zingers.  No one here addresses the screen; when characters soliloquize, they do so while moving in and out of the frame, engaged in some mundane activity, as if to indicate that they are thinking out loud--Benedick (Alexis Denisof), for example, muses about the hurtful words hurled at him by Amy Acker's Beatrice while gathering glasses and empty drink bottles left over from a party.  Whedon finds ways to downplay even the biggest, most theatrical moments in these soliloquies.  "I will be horribly in love with her!" Benedick shouts, arms outstretched into the air, after he overhears the "news" that Beatrice loves him, but Whedon shoots him from behind and from far away, as if to undermine the grand gesture.

The problem with this choice is that it very quickly comes to seem like a way of avoiding all other choices.  Whedon's direction, which often feels like just a bunch of people talking, seems less like an attempt to stage the play as naturalistically as possible, and more as if he hadn't bothered to do any of the actual work of adapting the play and making it his own--as if he doesn't know what he wants his Much Ado About Nothing to be.  One gets the impression that he has simply thrown a bunch of talented actors in front of a camera and had them recite their lines in the belief that somehow a coherent work will emerge.  The result is a film that is extremely variable, depending on the actors on screen and the emotional tenor of the scene.  Dramatic scenes in which the actors pull out all the stops work best--Fran Krantz's Claudio ranting at Hero (Jillian Morgese) about her alleged infidelity, Clark Gregg's Leonato attacking Hero for her disgrace, Beatrice's tirade as she tries to convince Benedick to challenge Claudio to a duel over Hero's honor.  The humor, meanwhile, almost invariably falls flat, Whedon having done little work to translate the broad, energetic, consciously artificial comedy of the original play into the more low-key tone of his film (on the rare occasions that he plumps for slapstick, the shift in tone is jarring; when Beatrice overhears Hero and Margaret discussing Benedick's feeling for her, she's so surprised that she falls down a flight of stairs, but the film has been so naturalistic up to this point that this isn't funny so much as scary and unpleasant to watch).  Rather than being understated, Whedon's film comes to feel underpowered.

There's a tendency, when talking about Much Ado About Nothing, to concentrate on the warring lovers aspect, the story of two people who fight and fight until they finally realize that they're in love (I did so just a few months ago when I noted the similarities between Benedick and Beatrice and Pride and Prejudice's Darcy and Elizabeth).  While that's obviously an important part of the play and a major reason for its enduring appeal, to concentrate on it exclusively (as Whedon does) is to miss out on some of Much Ado's vital components, chief among them the importance of embarrassment to the play's story.  Like many Shakespearean comedies, Much Ado About Nothing's plot hinges on miscommunication--both of the couples at the center of its story would never have found themselves at the crisis the play depicts if they'd been willing to talk to each other.  And also like many other comedies, the play's story is driven by false identity--Hero is courted by Don Pedro pretending to be Claudio, and undone by Margaret pretending to be Hero; "what a Hero hadst thou been if half thy outward graces had been placed about thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart," Claudio laments at her at their abortive wedding, having been gulled into believing a false persona concocted by Don John, who has previously railed at being made to hide his true identity as "a plain-dealing villain"; the happy ending is achieved when Hero pretends to be her own cousin, and when the truth is revealed she calls Claudio "my other husband."

But what, to my admittedly far from comprehensive knowledge, feels unique to this play is the way that the false identities within it are often something that the characters construct for themselves.  Much Ado About Nothing is a play full of people projecting a certain face to the world, obsessed by how the world sees them, and terrified of being found out.  Claudio and Don Pedro publicly humiliate Hero because her alleged infidelity shames them--"I stand dishonour'd, that have gone about to link my dear friend to a common stale," is Don Pedro's explanation for standing idly by as Claudio destroys Hero's reputation.  Leonato, believing that his daughter has shamed him, imagines having taken in an orphan to raise "Who smirch'd thus and mired with infamy, I might have said 'No part of it is mine; this shame derives itself from unknown loins'." Dogberry is so anxious for his reputation and social standing that even after hearing the full litany of Borachio's crimes, the crime he fixates on is Conrad calling him an ass.

The characters who most embody this terror of embarrassment, however, are Benedick and Beatrice.  Both perform roles on the very margin of acceptable behavior (where acceptable means, among other things, acceptable for their gender).  Benedick is a jokester, but if people started laughing at him instead of with him, he'd be a clown; Beatrice is a wit, but all it takes is a few too-tart jokes for her to be branded a shrew.  They are thus both frantically aware of the danger posed to them by embarrassment, of losing control of the face they present to the world and being seen not as they would like to be seen--cool, detached, unfussed by silly emotions--but as they secretly fear they really are.  Their masked encounter at the revel leaves them both (Benedick in particular) so rattled because in it they hear the things they fear most from the person they secretly want.

When Don Pedro hatches his plan to make Benedick and Beatrice fall in love with each other, he uses these very fears to pierce their defenses, and paints a picture in which both are terrified of embarrassment but eager to inflict it on others.  Benedick, he announces, "would make but a sport of it and torment the poor lady worse" if he found out about Beatrice's feelings for him, and Hero and Ursula, coached by him, agree that "it were not good [Beatrice] knew [Benedick's] love, lest she make sport at it."  Though he speaks as if he expects Benedick and Beatrice to be so ruled by their fear of embarrassment that it will override all other desires ("I measure him," he quotes the fictional Beatrice, "by my own spirit; for I should flout him, if he writ to me; yea, though I love him, I should") Don Pedro clearly expects the "revelation" that Benedick and Beatrice love each other to soothe the sting of his words, and so it does.  Knowing that they are loved, for all their foibles and weaknesses, gives Benedick and Beatrice the courage to be vulnerable--"I do love nothing in the world so well as you; is not that strange?" is Benedick's bewildered, self-deprecating declaration to Beatrice--and to put aside the masks with which they've staved off embarrassment, letting themselves be seen.

"Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?" Benedick asks before he and Beatrice confess their love.  "All this while" can be taken to mean the duration of Claudio's refusal and accusation of Hero, which immediately precedes this scene (Whedon, meanwhile, takes the question literally, and inserts a gap of time between the two scenes for Beatrice to have wept in).  But I prefer to think that the question is more symbolic, that it represents Benedick's realization that Beatrice is more than just "Lady Disdain," but a person, who is sometimes sad.  And though Benedick's love doesn't magically make that sadness disappear, it does give Beatrice a safe space to be sad in, as when she admits, in her next meeting with Benedick, to being "very ill" over Hero's misfortune.

Even after they learn how to be honest with one another, however, the play doesn't let up on subjecting Benedick and Beatrice to embarrassment.  It is almost astonishing, reading the original text, how often and at what wildly inappropriate times Don Pedro and Claudio tease Benedick about his romance with Beatrice--immediately after they learn of Hero's "death," or just before Claudio's punishment marriage to, as he believes, Leonato's niece.  And though they can admit their love to one another in private, it takes some prodding for Benedick and Beatrice to admit it in public in the play's final scene (in fact they never entirely do--their final word on the matter is that they are getting married out of mutual pity), and its conclusion seems to be less that the two of them can hold their heads up high, and more that in the end, embarrassment doesn't matter--"a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour.  Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram?" is Benedick's response to Don Pedro's final jab at him.  In the end, Much Ado About Nothing is a play about people who are terrified of being seen for the weak, silly people they really are, only to discover that it's actually wonderful.

With a few minor (and not very successful) exceptions, embarrassment is almost absent from the main storyline of Whedon's Much Ado.  One doesn't get the sense that its characters are particularly frantic for their image, nor is it ever in much danger--as if the characters' desperation to be cool had rubbed off on their director (I'm almost inclined to suggest that the reason Whedon's Much Ado isn't funny is that he can't bear for his characters to be laughed at).  One sees this especially in the case of Benedick.  In Branagh's film, Benedick is deliberately emasculated.  Branagh's performance is shouty and high-strung, his voice frequently rising to a high pitch.  The other male characters treat him with indulgence and bemusement--when Beatrice observes that "nobody marks [Benedick]" it's after we've seen him desperately trying to hold Don Pedro's attention with one more joke.  In Whedon's film, it's Benedick who gets to be indulgent and bemused.  Denisof plays him as smug and sarcastic, blithely drawling his pronouncements about the silliness of everyone around him from a position of utmost confidence and security (one hardly knows where to look when this self-satisfied Benedick describes himself as "merry"--it's hard to imagine a more joyless version of the character).

It's a choice that robs the audience of the shock (and satisfaction) of seeing the clownish Benedick show his mettle when he castigates Claudio and Don Pedro for humiliating Hero, but it also robs the character of much of his depth--this Benedick starts the play a cool guy, and ends it a cool guy with a wife.  In Whedon's version of the story, Benedick is a player who can't commit, a point Whedon drives home with a wordless prequel scene in which we see Benedick slipping out of a sleeping Beatrice's bedroom after a one-night stand.  This is not an unreasonable interpretation--it has some grounding in Benedick's speeches against marriage at the beginning of the play.  But it's not a very original or, to my mind, interesting one, and it isn't served well by the film and its modern-day setting.  While a modern-day Benedick can love 'em and leave 'em, the text's Benedick can't (or at least, not women of Beatrice's class), and indeed the Benedick of the play isn't just anti-marriage, but anti-love and even anti-women.  The film does little to resolve this incongruity, or indeed to sell Benedick's swift turnaround on love and marriage as soon as he hears that Beatrice loves him.  It is as if we were expected to employ romantic comedy logic--obviously the commitment-phobic man will pop the question by the final scene--without wondering whether either the text or the adaptation support it.

Just about the only character whom the film is genuinely happy to see embarrassed is Dogberry, which is why Nathan Fillion's performance in the role is a rare instance in which the film's understatedness doesn't rob it of all power.  Especially in contrast to Michael Keaton's cartoonish take on the role in Branagh's film, Fillion's performance is sedate, and yet he manages to make Dogberry both ridiculous and moving.  He plays Dogberry like someone aping the tough-as-nails, unflappable cops he's seen on TV, but every time the script in his head is interrupted by reality, we can see how thin his skin really is.  His reading of "Does thou not suspect my place?  dost thou not suspect my years?" in response to Conrad calling him an ass is both a tiny masterclass in wringing a laugh out of understatement and genuinely heartbreaking for what it tells us about how Dogberry wishes to be seen.  But it only works because unlike the rest of the cast, Dogberry's self-importance is allowed to seem ridiculous and unjustified.

Part of the reason that I'm so down on Whedon's film, and unimpressed by the way it questions the assumptions of Branagh's version, is that by the time I got around to watching it I had already seen the National Theater's 2011 production of the play.  Directed by Josie Rourke and starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate, this production not only showed me a way to stage the play that is completely distinct from Branagh's, but managed to make the play its own in a way that Whedon never did.  (I wasn't able to see the play live, but a recording is available from Digital Theatre.)  Rourke has some advantages over Branagh and Whedon--unlike them, she isn't bound by a feature-length running time, and she doesn't need to make excuses for (or eliminate) theatrical devices like the actors addressing the audience.  Most importantly, she has a cast who can handle the Shakespearean language in full, without resorting to Branagh's cuts.  In Whedon's film, being able to nonchalantly rattle off a mouthful of Shakespeare is an accomplishment in itself, but Rourke's cast act the lines, which can sometimes mean not behaving as if this archaic language is no big thing, but stressing and even shouting it.  Rourke modernizes the language not by underplaying, as Whedon does, but by pouring the characters' modern emotions through it, and allowing her actors to play with their lines to suit their conception of their characters.  "Love me!  Why, it must be requited," Benedick announces in the original text when he hears about Beatrice's feelings for him, but Tennant, who plays Benedick as even more of a clown than Branagh did, changes the emphasis.  "Love me?!" he exclaims; then, softly, bewildered: "Why?"

But if Rourke has certain advantages in staging Much Ado About Nothing, she also sets herself a greater challenge.  Where Branagh and Whedon split the play's tone between its comedic and dramatic scenes, Rourke reaches for both reactions at once.  That's not to say that her Much Ado can't be purely funny--the twin revelation scenes, in which Benedick and Beatrice learn of each other's feelings, are breathtakingly hilarious.  But Rourke knows that embarrassment is both terrible and funny, and so she frequently injects humor into the play's most serious scenes, and tragedy into its funniest.  Benedick and Beatrice's sniping has a real edge in this version, often teetering just on the brink of genuine nastiness.  Later, when they confess their love to each other, they can't keep a straight face, breaking out in hysterical laughter at what they're saying.  Don John, a character whose thinness Branagh and Whedon both try, unsuccessfully, to counteract by portraying him as suave and smooth-talking, is brought to life by Rourke's decision to make him a sniveling weirdo, whose awkwardness would be pitiable if it didn't conceal such relentless cruelty.  In an early scene, flush with confidence over Borachio and Conrad's promise to aid in his mischief-making, an almost-giggling Don John (Elliot Levey) announces (in a line that Branagh and Whedon both omit): "Would the cook were of my mind!"  Rourke has her actors hold for a moment on Don John's conviction that he has made a clever joke, and Borachio and Conrad's disgust and exasperation with him.

The bulk of this tonal ambiguity, however, falls on Tate's shoulders, and she has what it arguably the production's most difficult, occasionally thankless task.  If I'm underwhelmed by the always-excellent Acker as Whedon's Beatrice, it's because Tate's performance has helped me see how much easier (certainly for an actress of Acker's range and abilities) Whedon's complimentary take on Beatrice, as someone who runs the gamut from brittle wit to righteous indignation, is when compared to Tate's frequently unattractive turn.  She plays Beatrice as someone who can be strident and unkind as often as she is funny and morally trenchant.  In a scene before the masked revel (again, drastically reduced in both film versions) Beatrice and Leonato trade barbs about her unwillingness to marry while Hero and her mother listen, and as Beatrice warms to her subject her family goes from amused to indulgent to sullen, wordlessly conveying that this is an old, familiar argument.  Though we may sympathize with Beatrice's clear-sighted take on the marriage market that her cousin is being launched into, it's easy to see how her harping on the subject could easily become aggravating.

The same might be said of the strong slapstick component of Tate's performance, the gurning and braying familiar from her work on Doctor Who, which might put some viewers off.  But again, Rourke uses this as much for pathos as for humor.  When Don Pedro proposes to Beatrice in Branagh's film, it's a sweet, tender moment of connection.  Rourke, using Tate's comedy, turns it into a tiny tragedy--Don Pedro's (Adam James) proposal is genuine, a brief moment of vulnerability from a character who spends the rest of the play acting blithely superior to everyone around him.  But a distracted Beatrice takes it as a joke, and answers with a broad laugh, mortifying the prince and, when she realizes what she's done, herself.  To try to salvage the situation, she retreats further into broad comedy, trying to pretend that she and Don Pedro were just joshing around, but the awkwardness of her delivery, and Don Pedro's difficulty in getting over his disappointment and joining in, make the scene heartbreaking.

In this scene and several others in Rourke's production, Don Pedro emerges as a person in his own right, not just someone who moves the plot along.  James gives him flaws--when the truth about Hero's false accusation comes out, he distances himself from Claudio in disgust as if he had nothing to do with humiliating her--but also a haunting undertone of loneliness which the play, of course, leaves unsolved (in both Rourke and Branagh's versions, Don John ends the play standing apart from the rest of the cast's dancing).  In fact, for all that Tennant and Tate are both wonderful, perhaps the most astonishing thing about Rourke's production is that it doesn't allow Benedick and Beatrice to dominate the play, and makes complex people out of all of the major characters--this is the only version of the play I've seen that makes Claudio's penance of being made to marry Leonato's niece seem like an actual punishment, with Tom Bateman conveying his grief at what should have been a joyous occasion being made into something bitter, a lifelong reminder of his greatest mistake.

Aside from Don Pedro, the character who most benefits from this generosity is Hero (Sarah Macrae).  Branagh and Whedon both portray Hero as childlike, someone who is acted upon but who seems to have little personality of her own (it certainly doesn't help that they both cut the bulk of Hero's lines).  But Hero the person, not the object of others' affections and schemes, has an important role in the play.  She is the only person in it who presents herself to the world as she is, and doesn't try to tailor anyone's perception of her (which does her no good when a false face is imposed on her).  When Claudio charges her by her name to answer truthfully his "when did you stop beating your wife"-style question about the identity of the man she slept with, she answers "Is it not Hero?  Who can blot that name with any just reproach?"  That strength and self-knowledge are missing from Branagh and Whedon's Heros, but Rourke restores them, first by casting the tall, athletic-looking Macrae (necessitating a change in Benedick's description of Hero, which is here "Leonato's long daughter"), and then by having her play Hero as confident and self-possessed.  In the wedding scene, in which both Morgese and Kate Beckinsale dissolve into sobs, Macrae is tearful but defiant.  It is she who argues with her father over her innocence, demanding that he recognize it rather than waiting in despair for him to bestow his compassion.  It's a performance that does a great deal to make Hero's forgiveness of (and marriage to) Claudio at the end of the play seem like a genuine choice, rather than a lack of options.  (Another important choice is a wordless scene of reconciliation between Hero and Margaret after the truth has come out, reminding us that their friendship has also been damaged along with Hero and Claudio's relationship.)

In praising Rourke's production so highly, I'm aware that I'm in danger of falling into the same trap that I decried where Branagh's film was concerned, of treating one version of the play as definitive, and being over-prescriptive about how the play ought to be staged.  One of the reasons that Shakespeare's work has survived for so long is its versatility, the way that different adapters over the centuries that separate us from him have taken his words and stories and poured them into new molds (as a perfect metaphor for this, one need only look at the very different melodies to which Branagh, Whedon and Rourke's composers have set the play's central song, "Sigh No More").  The fact that I take embarrassment to be the most important aspect of Much Ado About Nothing's story doesn't mean that someone else couldn't find an equal, and equally resonant, reading of the play that is completely different (for that matter, the strong feminist component of Rourke's production is surely not, or at least not entirely, something that she found waiting for her in the play).  A good adaptation isn't (or shouldn't be) one that conforms to your expectations, but one that can convince of its take on the play.  Rourke's adaptation of Much Ado is sublime because it opened the play up for me, and taught me to enjoy it in a new and delightful way.  Whedon's, meanwhile, leaves me dubious that he even has a concrete idea of what the play is.  The value in Whedon's Much Ado, it seems to me, is that it will remind people who, like myself, don't have regular access to production of Shakespeare's plays that there is more than one way of staging him.  But I hope that some of those people will keep looking, and find productions like Rourke's, which also have something to say.

REVIEW: The Avengers

My review of The Avengers appears today at Strange Horizons.  Short version: I enjoyed the film, but not nearly as much as so many other have done, and certainly not to a degree that makes its phenomenal box office success understandable to me.  As impressive as it is in its ability to tie together characters and plot points from five previous movies, I can't help but think that The Avengers also lays out very clearly why the Marvel movie franchise is fundamentally flawed.

The Cabin in the Woods

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time you've probably noticed that I don't have much use for spoiler warnings, or for the primacy that spoilers have gained in the discourse about popular culture.  The conversations I want to have, the ones that seem interesting and worth having, are precisely the ones that don't allow for the self-censorship of spoiler mania, and the truth is that I don't believe that a truly worthwhile work is one that can be "spoiled" simply by knowing what happens next.  So when I say that Drew Goddard's horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods (written by Goddard and Joss Whedon), is the sort of film that rewards unspoiled viewing, that probably seems entirely different to viewers who know its secrets, and that may, in fact, only be worth watching if you're ignorant of its central twist, I'm not being entirely complimentary.  Cabin is a funny, clever, well-made film, extremely effective in its scary scenes and an enjoyable viewing experience all around, but it is also rather hollow.  That's a direct result of binding the film's affect so inextricably with its central twist--a choice that is disappointing not only because of what it makes of the film, but because it leaves unexplored all of that twist's more intriguing implications.

Before I get any further I should probably acknowledge that my use of the word "twist" here is somewhat questionable.  Inasmuch as The Cabin in the Woods has a twist, it is not only announced in the film's trailers, but in its opening minutes.  Before we're even introduced to our cabal of doomed young people as they blithely prepare for their fateful trip to the titular cabin--bubbly pre-med student Jules (Anna Hutchinson), her earnest boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth), her best friend Dana (Kristen Connolly), Curt's friend Holden (Jesse Williams), who has been invited as a fix-up for Dana, and pothead clown Marty (Fran Kranz)--we meet the people who are planning their cliché-ridden doom, Hadley (Bradley Whitford), Sitterson (Richard Jenkins), and Lin (Amy Acker), who from a hi-tech underground facility are monitoring every centimeter of the cabin and its grounds, the better to usher the campers to their deaths.  Even the purpose of that carefully orchestrated massacre has already been made clear in the film's opening credits, which depict scenes of human sacrifice.  Ten minutes into the film's run, then, the only question that remains--the one whose answer I am calling the film's twist--is really more of a missing puzzle piece: who are these kids being sacrificed to, and why?  Nevertheless, once you know the answer to that question, The Cabin in the Woods becomes a completely different story, and to watch the film knowing that it is that story would, I think, be a supremely unsatisfying experience, because just where you'd expect that story to start is where The Cabin in the Woods chooses to stop.

The film instead puts its eggs in the metafiction basket, revealing that the tropes of American horror films (and of those from other countries, as sites in places like Sweden, Japan, or Spain, where other scenarios are being run, are mentioned) are integral components of the sacrifice ritual.  These tropes are painstakingly recreated by the behind the scenes crew, who tamper not only with the campers' circumstances but with their body chemistry.  Jules has been designated the scenario's bimbo, so Lin has introduced a substance that impairs cognitive function into the dye with which she's recently colored her hair blonde.  Like most of Cabin in the Wood's jokes, however, the film hammers this one in--"dumb blonde, huh?" Hadley says admiringly.  Other jokes, such as Marty's genre-savviness and the frustrations it causes Hadley and Sitterson, or a scene in which Mordecai, the creepy hillbilly who menaces the campers on their way to the cabin, calls the control room to deliver overheated, foreboding oratory only to complain because he's been placed on speakerphone, are initially quite funny but go on for too long, while others take forever to build up--throughout the film the bunker crew refer to Dana as The Virgin even though we know she's had an affair with one of her professors--only to deliver a faint payoff--"We work with what we're given" is Sigourney Weaver's senior director's response to Dana's wordless query at her designation.  In the aggregate, The Cabin in the Woods is a funny film, but its individual jokes are strained, trying too hard to make up for the absence of truly excellent wit.  Though a few come close (the speakerphone scene is my favorite) there isn't a single gag that truly lingers and elicits laughter on the way out of the movie theater.

Even more frustrating is the way the film points out the shallowness of horror tropes, but refuses to replace them with anything deeper.  The five campers have been designated with roles that both correspond to character types found in horror films and are, in the film's universe, components of the ritual.  The more we see of the kids, however, the less those roles seem to suit them.  Dana and Jules have been dubbed, respectively, the Virgin and the Whore, but so far as we can tell both girls are sexually active and neither is very promiscuous--they could just as easily have been given each other's parts.  By the same token, Curt is the Athlete and Holden is the Scholar, even though Curt, as well as being an athelete, is a sociology major on a full academic scholarship, and Holden, as well as being a scholar, is the new star of the football team.  This, however, is as far as the film's characterization goes--it establishes that its characters are not the reductive stereotypes to which they've been assigned, but it tells us nothing about who they are, and doesn't even attempt to make actual people out of them.  It even seems pleased to make use of those stereotypes when they suit its purposes--Marty fits his role, the Fool, to a T, both in the sense that he is a buffoon and in the sense that he sees more than the others, noticing the joints and seams in the scenario and finding his way backstage.

"She's got so much heart," Hadley says of Dana as he watches her struggle for her life against the monsters he's unleashed on her, explaining why, despite the jaded cynicism he's evinced towards his awful job since the beginning of the film, he finds himself rooting for her.  This, however, feels like the film telling us how we should feel rather than an accurate description of Dana, who though suitably appealing does little to set herself apart from the million Final Girls who have come before her.  Inasmuch as she has heart, it's because her role--her role in The Cabin in the Woods, that is, not the scenario-within-the-film--requires her to.  The film may very well be commenting on this fact--Hadley's moment of sentiment is interrupted and replaced by his typical cynicism when his colleagues arrive with alcohol to celebrate the sacrifice's success--but that still leaves us with a protagonist who can't manage to escape or transcend her type despite being in a story that is all about pointing out that that type exists.

The problem, I think, is that Dana shouldn't be the protagonist, and The Cabin in the Woods comes close to reaching this conclusion itself before shaking it off and settling into a story that, for all its quirks, runs along very familiar grooves.  In the first half of the film, we can't help but root for the campers and feel anger towards the bunker crew.  Knowing that someone within the story--someone not monstrous but ordinary and familiar--is orchestrating the kids' gruesome deaths gives those deaths an extra, fresh layer of horror that cuts through the hoariness of the story, and makes the backstage characters' jadedness, and even glee, at their actions seem terribly cruel.  Around the time that Dana and Marty find their way into the bunker, however, we get our missing puzzle piece and learn the reason that they and their friends are being sacrificed.  Which turns out to be the reason for every human sacrifice--to appease the gods and prevent the end of the world.  All over the world facilities like the one we've been watching have been reenacting rituals from their cultures, trying to stave off the Old Ones' awakening, but this year all but the American scenario have failed--the fate of the world depends on Marty and Dana dying (actually just Marty, since as the Virgin Dana may survive so long as she suffers).

Since we're constantly ahead of the campers in our understanding of their story--first knowing that they are in a horror story scenario, then realizing the reason for that scenario before they do--it's hard not to feel unreasonably angry at Marty and Dana's determination to survive, and at the things they do to achieve that end.  When Dana releases all of the nightmare creatures stored in the bunker (a component of the ritual is that each group of campers chooses, through its actions, which monster will hunt them, and there is a wide selection to choose from) and sics them on the staff, the result is one of the film's most bloody, and weirdly exhilarating, sequences, as wave after wave of increasingly bizarre monsters are unleashed to deal imaginative deaths to office workers, maintenance personnel, and HR bigwigs.  But knowing what we do, it's also an almost villainous act--Dana's actions not only lead to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unnecessary deaths, they also hasten the end of the world.

There is, yet again, a sense that The Cabin in the Woods is aware of this, and that if only the film had leaned a little bit further into this reading the result might have a much more interesting story.  After all, it's almost possible to read the film as Hadley, Sitterson, and Lin's story, a horror narrative of a different but no less compelling type.  The speakerphone scene is played for laughs, but Mordecai's dire warnings of looming disaster are aimed as much at his colleagues as they are at the campers, and they go unheeded.  The backstage plot could have been a horror story about hubris, about the arrogance of people whose power over the circumstances of other people's lives has blinded them to their own vulnerability and lack of control.  In broad strokes, this is what happens, but the final act of the film is too brisk, too preoccupied with inventive slaughter, and still too invested in Dana and Marty as protagonists while relegating Hadley, Sitterson, and Lin to comic relief (and then canon fodder) to work as their story.  Though interesting hints are raised that something more is going on behind the scenes--several near-misses before the true disaster are blamed on orders from upstairs, and someone appears to be sabotaging at least the American scenario and possibly the others as well--and though a few lines towards the end of the film, and Marty and Dana's uncaring nihilism when the purpose of the sacrifice required of them finally sinks in, suggest a theme of inter-generational strife, neither of these ideas are developed.  If The Cabin in the Woods is intended as a story in which the scenario operators are the protagonists and Marty and Dana are the villains, it is a rather shapeless one.  And more's the pity, as far as I'm concerned.

There is, quite obviously, a very large component here of blaming The Cabin in the Woods for not being the film I wanted it to be.  Goddard and Whedon set out to make a metafictional horror comedy that comments on the genre's tropes by employing them, and in this they succeeded.  (It should also be said that I might have been more appreciative of this success as its own accomplishment if I were a bigger fan of horror films.)  Much as I try to stop myself from chiding them for being short on ambition, though, I can't help but dwell on how much potential lay in their premise--a secret organization dedicated to defending the earth from ancient, evil gods with a menagerie of magical nightmare creatures at their disposal, who lure a bunch of kids to a secluded location to become part of their sacrifice ritual only for the kids to turn the tables, and the aforementioned menagerie of monsters, on them.  Once you know The Cabin in the Woods's twist it's impossible not to think of the film like this, and to have used this rich vein of story for little more than a metafictional gag seems like a criminal waste.  I wanted more time in the facility, more interactions between the campers and the bunker crew, more information about the organization running this show, more questioning of Marty and Dana's choices.  (Of course, maybe I'm only saying this because "underground facility that is also a wacky, surreal workplace and has become overrun by horrors while a menacing female voice booms on the PA" puts me in mind of Portal, which does a better job of blending humor and menace than The Cabin in the Woods and even feels like a more compelling story.)  The Cabin in the Woods is a funny, clever film, but it isn't nearly funny enough, or nearly clever enough, to make up for the loss of that story.

Heroes and Villains: Dollhouse Thoughts

Dollhouse in its second season was not at all the same show it was in its first.  As far as the internet is concerned--or at least that infinitesimal portion that watched the show to its end--this is very much a good thing, and there's no denying that from a technical standpoint the show was massively improved.  The first season's tedious and contrived personality of the week stories quickly gave way to major upheavals in the show's premise as it raced towards the post-apocalyptic future glimpsed in the tantalizing, unaired first season finale "Epitaph One."  Still, I find myself missing first season Dollhouse.  I didn't like that show, but I thought it had the potential to tell an interesting SFnal story.  The second season tries to tell that story, but does so in a way that is so rushed, so heavy-handed, and most of all that so thoroughly tramples the creepy ambiguity of the first season's character work, that it hardly seems worth the effort.  The improved plotting--which anyway is well below what I've come to expect from Joss Whedon, and mostly copied, none too elegantly, from better works like The Matrix and The Manchurian Candidate--doesn't do nearly enough, to my mind, to compensate for how thoroughly Dollhouse bungled its central concept.

When I wrote about Dollhouse last summer I quoted Sady Doyle's reading of the show as a metaphor for 'rape culture'--the notion that women are victimized not by evil, sexist individuals but by the culture as a whole, which encourages or forces them into roles defined and limited by their femininity, and treats their bodies as a public commodity (see also Doyle's follow-up post about the second season premiere)--but noted that "Epitaph One" weakened this reading.  How, after all, can one talk about rape culture, or culture of any kind, when civilization itself has been brought to its knees?  Dollhouse's second season bears out this observation.  Though it addresses rape culture--the college professor whose seduction technique involves persuading Echo's imprint that being defined by her sexuality is empowering; the psychiatrist imprinted on Victor who notes that being a doll frees Echo to be both virgin and whore while Adele is forced to renounce both roles; the Priya-centric episode "Belonging"--in the second season this is no longer Dollhouse's point, if it ever was.  Niall Harrison's reading of Dollhouse as a "story about the creation of stories, about the creation of personal identity as a kind of story that we tell (a story that can change or be changed more than we like to allow)" is probably closer to the mark, but as I say in the comments to that post, I like the show he describes better than the show we actually got.  It may be that Dollhouse was intended as a story about the construction and destruction of identity, but in its second season that story is drowned out by the need to sufficiently set up the "Epitaph One" future, and then advance from that future to a too-neat happy ending.

What's lost from Dollhouse once the second season gets into gear is the sense of complicity, the recognition that all of the characters, victims and victimizers, evil and righteous, are part of the system that makes the dollhouse possible--Doyle's rape culture expanded to the commodification of self, regardless of gender.  Dollhouse's first season showed us the rationalizations through which ostensible villains like Topher and Adele tolerated and even justified their monstrous actions, drawing pencil-thin lines between different shades of rape and slavery in order to be able to place themselves on the right side of those lines, while alleged good guys like Ballard and Boyd, who claimed to abhor the dollhouse, ended up enabling and participating in it.  The second season sweeps away this complexity, dividing the cast into heroes and villains (though perhaps the initial failure was in the transition from a story about people who are cogs in the machine to one that has heroes and villains to begin with).  Ballard's obsession with Echo, which the first season painted as disturbing and slightly pathetic, becomes romantic.  Boyd's deluded image of himself as Echo's protector and father figure is given credence by Adele and by Echo herself (and then he turns out to be the Big Bad).  Adele, after a brief but interesting interlude which pointedly questions the ideals she claimed to hold in the first season by having her sell them out to further her ambition and self-preservation, turns out to have been playing a deeper game and becomes the general of the side of light.  Topher gets the closest thing the second season offers to a genuine progression towards moral awareness, but even in his case there are lapses--his self-righteousness when he believes that Adele has sold out to Rossum is never punctured--and most of all I distrust it.  Topher is the type of character Whedon has written many times before, usually as an audience identification character, and as Doyle notes it was one of Dollhouse's main accomplishments in its first season that it made him so thoroughly unlikable.  His woobification in the second season thus feels less like character development and more like the writers working less hard against their ingrained habits.

The second season does build on the first season's character work by focusing more on the dolls, and stressing the fact that, as with Echo and Caroline in the first season, these characters are often more appealing as blank slates than as the flawed people who got themselves in such dire straits to begin with.  I particularly liked the fact that November's original personality, Madeline, was written in such a way that as to recall Mellie, but with a core of hardness--especially her willingness to erase her grief over her daughter's death--that made her humanly unappealing where Mellie was inhumanly sweet.  But as the buildup to the brainapocalypse speeds up, these stories are rushed past the point of comprehensibility.  By the end of the season Madeline is shunted aside in favor of Mellie, whose realization that she is an imprint, acceptance of that fact, and proof-by-suicide of her personhood are so lightning-quick as to be almost unnoticeable (and anyway, both Mellie and Ballard's struggles with their doll state are dwarfed by Claire's similar but more nuanced struggle in the season premiere, which is itself undone by Whiskey's transformation into a plot device in "Getting Closer" and "The Hollow Men").  The Tony-centric "Stop-Loss" takes the character through so many transformations in a single hour--no sooner is he out of the dollhouse than he signs his personhood away to another shady organization, and no sooner has he done that than he's backed out because of his love for Priya--that they become meaningless. 

None of these characters, however, fare quite as badly as the show's ostensible heroine.  There's been a lot of griping about Eliza Dushku's acting ability or lack thereof, and it's true that she isn't the chameleon that Enver Gjokaj, Dichen Lachman, and Amy Acker are, but ultimately I don't think she needed to be.  The writing for Echo should have stressed the core of self that made her so dangerous both to Rossum and to the people who get swept up in her crusade, but instead the writers did a lot of telling and very little showing.  When Echo says that she is all her previous imprints but none of them is her, what does that mean?  When she swallows Caroline's original imprint with nary a ripple (after an entire episode that made so much of the danger of reintegrating them), what are we to make of her?  Dushku may not have Olivia Williams's presence, but in the scenes like Echo's breakdown in "Epitaph Two: The Return" she proves that she can sink her teeth into meaty material, and yet for most of the second season the writers do little more with her than make her into the worst and least interesting kind of superhero--the kind whose awesomeness is expressed by using her McGuffin-derived powers to swat aside the McGuffin-derived hurdles the writers set before her.

A lot of the problems I've complained about here can be blamed on Dollhouse's compressed running time.  Except inasmuch as he made the show he made, and that he made it for Fox, Whedon can't be blamed for having so little space in which to write a satisfying ending to his story, and unlike Firefly, which could be capped with the chapter-ending Serenity while still leaving room for a lot more story, Dollhouse was hobbled by the existence of "Epitaph One."  No ending that didn't address the coming apocalypse would have worked, hence the need to vault over the steps leading to that apocalypse.  Even if we take the second season as nothing but the blueprint to the show Whedon would have written had he been given his leisure, however, I'm not sure I would have cared for that show.  "We split the atom--we make a bomb.  We come up with anything new, the first thing we do is destroy," Ballard tells Victor-as-Lubov early in the first season.  This is true, but the unstated corollary is that for all the piles of science fiction stories about nuclear war bringing about the end of the world, in reality what happened is that the world changed.  Some of those changes were terrible and deadly, but humanity and human civilization marched on (so far, anyway).  This is an overgeneralized distinction, but I think that one of the reasons that written SF is so much better than the filmed kind is that there are more SF authors who get that it's so much more interesting to imagine how technology changes the world than to simply end it (which is why I like to recommend Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon to disappointed Dollhouse viewers).  Last summer, I was so excited by the fact that "Epitaph One" laid out a clear direction for the story Dollhouse wanted to tell that I let myself ignore the clearly spelled out end point of that story, which marked Whedon out as the less interesting kind of science fiction writer.  And once you get to apocalypse, you can really only tell the plucky-band-of-survivors story.  These can be fun in the right hands, but in Dollhouse's case what we got was "Epitaph Two: The Return," a cluttered, perfunctory hour whose indifferent plotting only adds insult to the injury of the reset button ending it tacks on to Dollhouse's story.

In the end, what's worst about Dollhouse's second season is that its final episodes rob the show even of the dubious honor of being an interesting failure.  I don't, ultimately, know what kind of story Whedon was trying to tell with this show--the critique of rape culture, the story about stories, the tale of technology dismantling our understanding of personhood--and I don't know what kind of show he would have come up with in a perfect world in which television auteurs are given free reign to create whatever they like (though his own comments about the changes Fox mandated to the series aren't promising), but if "Epitaph Two: The Return" is any indication of where he wanted to get to, I'm rather glad I was spared the ride. 

Alpha and Omega

Hey, you know what show could really use a bit more online discussion? Dollhouse! "Echo," the original, unaired pilot for Joss Whedon's by no means triumphant return to television, and "Epitaph One," the shelved thirteenth episode of its first season, are now viewable through various and sundry means. Taken together, they paint a very different picture of the show from the one arising from the first season. Not simply because they are both well-written, engaging hours of television--hardly stellar on either count, but certainly head and shoulders above most of the season's conventionally aired episodes--but because they illustrate how wide the gap is between the show Whedon envisioned and tried to create and the show he was allowed to make.

"Echo," which hews closely, but is not identical, to the script leaked soon after the show's television premiere, confirms the suspicion that Fox executives who demanded that Whedon retool it created another "Serenity"/"Train Job" scenario, but in Dollhouse's case the pilot switcheroo (and the reworking of the show itself which apparently accompanied it) had a much more profound effect on the series as a whole. You can work your way back to Whedon's original plans for Firefly simply by unscrambling its episodes, but there is no way that Dollhouse's first season could follow from "Echo" instead of "Ghost." Too much of what was spread out over the entire season was originally condensed into this single hour--Sierra is already an active, Lubov's introduction and the revelation that he is Victor happen in quick succession, Ballard receives Alpha's message about Caroline, then meets and fights with Echo, and is shot for his troubles. This is not an unmitigated good--someone coming to the pilot cold would, I suspect, find it a little too frenetic, and certain characters, Adelle in particular, are lost in the hustle and bustle of moving the plot along--but especially when one considers how glacially the first season advanced towards stories that "Echo" deals with in a single scene, it's hard not to regret the season we might have gotten, which could have taken the story to the next level instead of stretching its first chapter over a dozen hours of television.

"Echo" is also a great deal better than most of the first season at dealing with some of the icky gender issues that Dollhouse has raised, and for whose treatment both the show and Whedon have come under near-constant fire. Sady Doyle, in what is still to my mind the most interesting bit of writing about the show, argues that in Dollhouse Whedon is examining, and dismantling, many of the thoughtless and often paternalistic assumptions that underpinned his previous work, and that the show is a metaphor for the pervasiveness of misogynystic thinking in our culture, of which even the 'strong female characters' of Whedon's previous work are a product. "Echo," even more than the examples she gives, bears this observation out. Its second scene, and our first introduction to Echo (Caroline is almost entirely absent from the pilot, which is frankly all to the good) feels like the dark reflection of Buffy's opening scene, itself famously a skewering of conventions when it reveals that the seemingly helpless girl breaking into the school with her date and starting at noises is actually a predator who devours him once he assures her that they are alone. In "Echo," Echo interferes with a man's attempt to coerce his girlfriend into becoming a party favor for his friends, chases him off contemptuously, and forcefully but not unkindly persuades the intended victim to take control of her life. It's a portrait of feminine strength, and (assuming we'd never seen a promo for the show, heard anything about its premise, or knew that Dushku was its lead) it comes as a shock when we cut away to another engagement and discover that this heroine was simply a figment of someone's imagination, and more of a victim than the girl she rescued.

After "Ghost" aired, I took the concept of the dollhouse as yet another attempt by Whedon to deconstruct prostitution, a la Inara in Firefly, but "Echo" makes it clear that the comparisons others were drawing to River were more apt. Like River, Echo is a superhero whose heroism only becomes possible because of her own destruction, which is instigated without her (in Echo's case, full and uncoerced) consent. But whereas Serenity tries to create a disconnect between the profound violation and mutilation inflicted on River and the abilities that it bestowed upon her, thus allowing us to view her heroism as something inherent to her, for which we can cheer unambiguously, Dollhouse doesn't give us that comforting space. Echo is never shown as a hero without the pilot stressing that that heroism has been achieved by stripping her of her volition. The image of the super-powerful woman is never allowed to distract us from the misogyny of the culture that created her.

"Echo"'s emphasis on free will or its absence has the effect of downplaying the sexual aspect of the dollhouse. My biggest problem with the seemingly endless barrage of criticism directed at Dollhouse for allegedly failing to acknowledge that the dolls are being raped is that it seemed fairly clear to me--especially from those episodes intended to move the overarching story forward like "Man on the Street" or "A Spy in the House of Love"--that in the story Whedon was trying to tell sexual rape was merely a specific instance of the greater act of rape being committed against the actives--the rape of their mind, the complete stripping away of their personality and free will. This is borne out by "Epitaph One," which flashes forward to 2019, a post-apocalyptic future in which doll technology has been weaponized and made wireless. People are stripped of their personalities in the blink of an eye, to become host bodies for the personalities of others, or mindless drones bent on carnage, or simply blank slates, and the characters who discover the dollhouse are darkly amused to learn that "the tech that punk-kicked the ass of mankind was originally designed to create more believable hookers."

This is not to say, however, that the complaints that Dollhouse downplays rape or even uses it for titillation are unfounded. That Whedon's real interest was in telling an SFnal story about the dismantling of the fundamentals of what it means to be human doesn't change the fact that sexual rape is a real thing that happens, and is downplayed, all too often, whereas brainwashing technology isn't, and that using the former as nothing but a prop with which to highlight the awfulness of the latter is problematic to say the least (Doyle's argument that doll technology is a metaphor for misogynistic culture seems weaker in the face of the all-out post-apocalyptic "Epitaph One"). It also doesn't excuse the prurience with which the first season treated Echo's sexual engagements, or the fact that in its standalone episodes in particular the show seemed to be inviting us to tut sanctimoniously over the terrible things being done to Echo while enjoying her sexy shenanigans. Despite "Echo"'s emphasis on depersonalization rather than rape--Echo's engagements in the pilot are functional rather than sexual, and even the date she goes on is primarily intended to give the client someone awesome to show up with at his ex's wedding--it does a better job facing up to the fact that the actives are being raped in a single scene than the first season does in whole episodes, when it shows us Sierra coming back from an engagement, her forehead gashed, her gait unsteady, the shattered expression on her face leaving no question as to what has happened to her. Though it could be argued that this scene is, perhaps intentionally, drawing a distinction between a sexual act which Sierra's imprinted personality clearly didn't want and Echo sleeping with the wedding guest (and though it's more than a little disturbing that Sierra is apparently the go-to character when it comes to rape), this short, wordless scene delivers a more powerful punch than any number of Ballard's lectures.

If "Echo" is the ghost of the show Whedon wanted to write, "Epitaph One" is a glimpse of the story he is trying to get to. Though well done, it is, in itself, not much to get excited over. Its plot feels much like a retread of the mercenary plotline in Whedon's Alien: Resurrection, itself a rehash of many films that came before it, including the original Alien, and which Whedon had already cannibalized when he created Firefly--a rag-tag crew of misfits in an unfriendly future happen upon a piece of extremely dangerous technology and discover that it has been/will be used by the government against its citizens. The episode's opening scenes feel almost like a parody of Mad Max-type films, with the characters spouting dense 'futuristic' jargon at each other--"Green room is open but the party is crashed." "Any wielders?" "Negative. Just butchers and dumb shells, but it's pretty thick."--which only seems more ridiculous when one recalls Whedon's established skill at crafting believable patois. Things settle down a little once the group happens on the dollhouse and the characters are given a little room to stretch out, and the episode has some genuinely surprising twists, but this is still, at its core, a story in which people in a creepy location are picked off one by one by an unseen menace, interspersed with flashbacks to the previous decade that tell us something about the steps that led up to this situation but mostly give us more questions to ponder.

That "Epitaph One" is so striking, then, is mainly to do with the fact that though it is part of the Dollhouse continuity, it also seems to be the beginning of a completely different story, one which shares Dollhouse's premise but uses it for different ends. More than anything else, "Epitaph One"--which ends with the surviving characters leaving the dollhouse, guided by Caroline, to find a way to combat the wiping technology--feels like a pilot for its own show. As Dollhouse's first season finale, it is a profound statement about the story Whedon wants to tell--of the transition from controlled use of doll technology, through greater and greater violations of human agency, and finally to a nightmare realm in which the human consciousness and the human body are distinct, separable entities which one can mix and match. Though it should be noted that the use of flashbacks which reveal the current cast's future has the distinct whiff of Lost about it, and carries the risk of reducing the show's narrative to a quest for the connective tissue between different plot points--how did Claire lose her scars? Why did Victor and Sierra break up? What did Adelle do with Dominic's body?--this is by far a more interesting story than either the personality of the week stories or the season-long investigation which characterized the first season.

We shouldn't, however, be too quick to allow ourselves to be swept up by the double whammy of "Echo" and "Epitaph One." Just as the original pilot casts a light on the compromises Whedon had to make in order to get Dollhouse's first season on the air, the fact that "Epitaph One" was never aired makes it clear that there is serious resistance to the story Whedon wants Dollhouse to be. The finale's title suggests that there will be--or that Whedon planned for there to be--other epitaphs (the tomb is presumably humanity's), possibly revisiting the same characters, possibly flashing forward to other periods. Will they too be quashed? Will "Epitaph One" be cannibalized for scenes and plot points as "Echo" was? How can the second season cater both to viewers who have seen it and those who think of "Omega" as the season finale? It's pretty clear at this point that Dollhouse is by far the strangest, most challenging thing Whedon has ever tried to do, but that ambition doesn't excuse the fact that, whether due to network interference or inability on his part, what he's actually producing is sub-par, and unlikely to get any better, or move towards the strangeness Whedon is after, if Fox has its way. It's hard to believe that Dollhouse will ever be the story Whedon wants it to be, or that it will survive long if it is. Its unaired episodes, which have for the first time piqued my interest in the show, also leave me extremely dubious about its future.

Seasonal News

Right on the heels of this weekend's announcement that Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season comes the sadder but slightly less surprising news that The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been canceled. (Also, Chuck gets a third season, but, you know: formula + the geek equivalent of frat humor + half-naked ladies = not a terrifically long shot.)

This is, of course, very upsetting, but unlike Niall I'm not convinced that, if the decision actually did come down to only one of these two shows, the wrong choice was made. It's true, Sarah Connor is the better show (though this says more about Dollhouse's problems than Sarah Connor's strengths), and you don't need to work very hard to read an uncomfortable statement into the fact that the show about scantily clad, brainwashed sex slaves has been renewed while the one about the difficult warrior woman who only takes off her clothes to treat one of her frequent bullet or stab wounds has been axed. But it seems to me that after two seasons, Sarah Connor has had the chance that Dollhouse has now been given to find both its footing and its audience, and has, for the most part, squandered it. Yes, the second season finale was excellent, and raised the possibility of several very interesting future plotlines--John making his way in a future in which his destiny no longer hangs over him, Sarah and Ellison on the run in the present, Savannah Weaver as an intermediary between the two periods--but it did so by razing the structure of the second season to the ground, and in so doing acknowledged how problematic and, frankly, how boring and listless that season was.

Both Dollhouse and Sarah Connor are shows with interesting concepts and deeply flawed executions, but the creative team in charge of Dollhouse has a proven track record of not only producing excellent shows but of producing excellent shows with deeply flawed first seasons. Whereas when the Sarah Connor writers were given the chance to take their show to the next level, they buried it in the mud, getting mired in navel-gazing and drawn-out, poorly plotted storylines that didn't do nearly enough in terms of character development to justify their running time. If you're going to gamble on either one of these shows making the transition into excellence, it seems to me that Dollhouse is clearly the one to go with.

Of course, in an ideal world I'd have liked to see both shows get the chance to improve, as even deeply flawed SF has become a rare commodity on our screens. And really, the true shame isn't that one of these shows was chosen over the other, but that they both have to scramble to survive while Heroes, whose vaunted return to form fizzled into something only slightly less disappointing than its previous two volumes, has got a seemingly endless lease on life.

More Saturday Afternoon Sci Fi

I'll probably have some more substantial thoughts about Battlestar Galactica in a day or two, but in the meantime it's worth noting that it was a big weekend for science fiction all around, with several interesting developments.

• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter" - a strong conclusion to last week's equally strong episode, which brings the Jesse-Riley storyline to a satisfying close. There are lots of good character scenes, and the flashbacks-to-the-future aboard the doomed Jimmy Carter are tense and quite creepy, and do more than the rest of the season put together to make Jesse sympathetic while stressing that she's caused as much suffering and horror as was caused her. On the other hand, the plotting is still middling-to-poor, most notably in the first and only encounter between John and Jesse, when the two of them have to pause what is otherwise a riveting conversation in order for John to spew exposition, alternately telling us things we've known for ages and retroactively altering the plots of preceding episodes by revealing that he knew about Riley's deception for months. It is also presumably an unintended irony that in an episode that is all about John confronting the burden of leadership and stepping a small way into that role, we learn that this whole tragedy--Riley, the submariners, and perhaps Jesse's deaths, John and Derek's hearbreak, the destruction of the Jimmy Carter, the loss of a potential T-1000 ally (who is presumably Weaver--her comment in the present about humans being a disappointment seems to suggest this)--was caused by an abject failure of leadership on future John's part (as well as, to a lesser extent, Jesse).
  
  Still, on the whole this two-parter was the best story the show has produced in a long time, which perversely enough aggravates me, because it is also the story that's given Sarah the least to do. This after a stultifying sequence of pointless Sarah-centric episodes that did nothing to advance either the plot or my understanding of her character. Is it really too much to a ask that this show's writers come up with interesting and exciting stories for their main character?


• Dollhouse, "Man on the Street" - this was the episode that was supposed to win us all over to the show, and while that would certainly be taking it too far, it's a definite step up in quality. Most notably, the episode moves away from the assignment of the week format that's been so unsatisfactory (though steadily improving) these last few weeks, and instead delivers a heaping plateful of plot and revelations (some--such as the identity of Sierra's abuser--were painfully obvious, while others--such as the truth about Mellie--were predictable but still a lot of fun to have confirmed). After several stories that seemed to be deliberately moving away from the idea of the dollhouse as a high-tech whorehouse, this episode returned to the sexual angle in force, and hammered in the skeeviness of what's being done to the dolls by both their handlers and their clients. I like this approach better, but at the same time it brings us right back to the difficulty that all the preceding episodes have tried, and mostly failed, to get around--that even the richest, most jaded, most particular people would probably be just as happy with a garden variety high-class call girl as they would with a programmable person. Add to this the man on the street interviews, which while not terrifically interesting seemed to be trying to imagine what effect the existence of dolls would have on the world, and it just becomes painfully obvious that Dollhouse should have been an out-and-out, future-set science fiction show about a world in which doll technology is commonly accepted (per the last interview about such technology changing the meaning of what it is to be human), not a crypto-SF present-day story.


• Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II" - it's hard to imagine an episode that would better encapsulate the complete bankruptcy of this show's plotting and character work. The senselessness of last week's setup is compounded this week when Adama and Lee hand over the leadership of the military and civilian portions of the fleet to, respectively (and I'm still chuckling as I write this) Hoshi and Romo Lampkin, just so that the entire main cast can participate in one last huge space battle regardless of how much sense this makes for their respective characters. Of course, it isn't entirely fair to complain about this since, as I've often said in the past, huge space battles are what this show does best, and indeed the attack on the Cylon colony and rescue of Hera is a tense and well-done sequence, but it's a little sad that a show that's prided itself, with however little justification, on its political storylines, sidelines them in its finale first by concentrating on pyrotechnics, and then by dismantling its political system, in an ending so mind-bogglingly dumb, so steeped in airy-fairy New Age bullshit that even though I truly believed that I was long past being angry at this show I barely managed to make it through the (drawn out and tedious) ending segments of the episode. This is not even to mention the present-day coda, which tries to make some gesture towards a sad statement about man's inhumanity to man, but ends up suggesting that what we really should be worrying about in the real world right now is the possibility of a killer robot attack. Good fucking riddance.

What a Difference a Script Makes

Via Micole, what's rumored to be the original script for the Dollhouse pilot.  As several scenes and lines of dialogue within it appeared in the first Dollhouse trailer, I think this is the genuine article.  Unsurprisingly, it's a massive improvement on "Ghost," not only because it dives right into the arc elements of the show, stressing Agent Ballard's investigation of the Dollhouse and Echo's potential awakening, but because it's engaging--unlike the by-the-numbers kidnapping story in "Ghost" the plot here is interesting and entertainingly twisty, taking me by surprise with its turns on several occasions.  The secondary characters--Boyd, Topher, Dr. Saunders--are also more believably sketched and and more intriguing, and there's some interaction between Echo and Ballard.  Perhaps most importantly, the episode suggests believable uses for the actives that go beyond the jumped-up prostitution the show has thus far concentrated on.

As depressing as it is that someone in Fox preferred "Ghost" to this episode, this script gives me hope--that Whedon has a firmer grip on the show than I'd previously dared believe, and that he'll work elements from this script into future episodes.  The second Dollhouse episode was an improvement on the first, if still depressingly self-contained and slow to build up the arc storyline, but both it and this script suggest that the show might soon find its legs.

Saturday Afternoon Sci Fi

What is it with TV scheduling?  It was bad enough that something like half of the shows I follow air new episodes on Monday, but now Friday's become a hot spot as well.  On the other hand, maybe it was a good idea to suddenly supersize the quantity of shows I watch on this night, because quality-wise nobody brought their A-game this week.

• Battlestar Galactica, "No Exit": This episode was trying to be one part "Downloaded" and one part "quick!  There's only six episodes left in the series and we still haven't tied our wildly self-contradictory backstory in a satisfying bow!"  It's kind of a dud on both counts.  I liked seeing Ellen again, and liked even more that in her present incarnation she has both a spine and self-respect, since in the past it's seemed like she could only muster up one at a time.  I also liked that the episode made some vague gestures towards some of the issues I raised in my most recent Galactica post, including the question of ultimate guilt in the ongoing Cylon/human dispute, and one possible reason for the most recent chapter--by which I mean not Cavil's moaning about how horrible it is to be human or how horrible humans are in general, but confirmation, if any was needed, that he's a raging psycho.  Sometimes, 'the guy in charge is a raging psycho' is the most satisfying explanation you can give for atrocious acts.
  
  On the other hand, it was an absurdly talky episode in both its halves--Ellen trying to justify herself to Cavil and Sam recalling his and the other four Earth Cylons' history.  Like the architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded, it smacked of the writers' inability to organically set up their backstory in the body of their ongoing plot, and not a little bit of desperation--of their realization that they had too little time to pay off too many debts of their audience's indulgence, while hastily laying the groundwork for the next chapter in the story.  I was too concerned with the very real possibility that Sam is going to be killed off to make way for a Kara/Lee finale (especially given the rather blatant scene-setting for a Boomer/Tyrol reunion) to pay too much attention to the potted history he was spewing, but what I caught had none of the sizzle of genuinely clever writing.  It was convoluted and obviously straining to tie together too many disparate elements for me to expend much energy trying to follow it.  I'm mostly annoyed by the revelation that there's yet another final Cylon (he's Starbuck's father.  The timeline doesn't work at all but he's Starbuck's father, and for the record we were saying it right after "Maelstrom" aired) though thankfully the number of episodes the writers can draw out the mystery of his identity is severely limited.


• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "The Good Wound": Once again, the show goes for contemplative and moody rather than plotty, and we're long past the point where it can skate by on strong performances and appealing guest characters (especially considering that this episode's empowered-woman-of-the-week was quite flat).  There's constantly a sense on this series that something huge is about to go down--Sarah (or John, or Derek) will find out about Riley and Jesse, Jesse will make an overt move against Cameron, Weaver will tip her hand to either Sarah or Ellison--but every week turns out to be just more buildup.  I sort of liked the use of head!Kyle, and most especially the irony of him being Sarah's voice of reason and compassion when the real Kyle was a violent, damaged fighting machine who made Derek seem well-adjusted in comparison.  It was a nice way of drawing attention to the kind of person Sarah was when she met Kyle and acted as his voice of reason, and how much she's changed (though once again we got this point ten or fifteen episodes ago and it is seriously time to move on to new things).
  
  On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about the episode's deliberate (and rather ham-fisted, since Sarah's never called either Kyle or Derek 'Reese') attempts to merge Kyle and Derek into a single person.  If the point was to get to the final scene where the doctor spills the beans about Kyle being John's father, then it was sadly misjudged, since Derek's known about John for months and we've known that he knows since the end of the first season (in fact until this week I had assumed that Sarah knew that he knew).  What I'm really afraid of, though, is that Derek is being groomed to take Kyle's place emotionally and perhaps even romantically, especially once Jesse is out of the way as she surely will be by the end of the season.  One of the things I've most liked about his character is that there's been zero romantic tension between him and Sarah, and I would hate for that to change.


• Dollhouse, "Ghost": As Niall points out, what's most notable about this episode is its tone, and that tone's departure from the more punchy, more funny kind of writing we've been used to seeing from Joss Whedon.  Unlike Niall, though, I find the tone less successful.  Though "Ghost" is effectively creepy in certain scenes, most of the time it just feels slack.  None of Whedon's series have had especially good pilots, but all of them have been more distinctive than this episode.  I'm hoping that we're seeing another "Train Job" scenario, where a more interesting, better written pilot episode was yanked in exchange for something the network felt would have a better chance of pulling in viewers.  If that's the case then it was, once again, a really stupid move, and also highlights what seems to me like Dollhouse's core conceptual problem (besides, as Niall says, having a main character with no consistent personality).
  
  "Ghost" is a pilot episode for an adventure of the week series about a person who becomes something new and exciting every week, but the creepiness of its premise demands that there be more to the series than that, and I don't doubt that the story Whedon is interested in is more complicated.  The question is, which show will dominate--is Dollhouse a formula series with an overarching mystery storyline, in which case I probably won't bother watching (for one thing, because it'll mean that for all the blatant negative commentary about what's going on in the dollhouse, the chief appeal of the series will be the very thing it sanctimoniously shakes its head at), or is it a creepy, novelistic mystery/thriller that rewards audience loyalty and patience, in which case it'll quickly shed just those viewers this pilot was trying to capture and die a quick death?  Either way, it's frankly a relief to get past the hysteria that's surrounded this series since its announcement--it's misogynistic!  It's being screwed over by Fox!  Let's start a letter-writing campaign before the pilot's even aired!--and talk about the actual series, for however long it lasts.

Little Jayne! With His Little Hat!

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Serenity, Made of LEGO

I mean, really, what else is there to say?

Space-Whore Linkdump

Three excellent discussions of class and gender issues in Firefly, all of which end up, in one way or another, dealing with the character of Inara and her relationship with Mal.

• Maia at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty discusses Firefly's two class-crossing couples, Mal and Inara and Simon and Kaylee, and then veers into a discussion of the mechanics of the Companion guild.


• The Rabbit Hole takes the discussion further and compares the Companions with both Dune's Bene Gesserit and Discworld's Seamstresses.


• Sartorias discusses the ways in which Inara's character fails, particularly her failure to demonstrate self-control and, in general, to act anything like a geisha.

Well, Maybe You Can Take That Part of the Sky (Updated, Now With Quote)

One of the very first coherent thoughts I had about Joss Whedon's television series Firefly was to observe that it took place in a world in which the civil war was actually fought over the issue of states' rights. The desire for freedom, and for the ability to freely govern one's life and decisions, informed many of the show's episodes, and even its theme song yearned for the freedom of the skies after all other freedoms had been lost. Post-war hardship on the one hand, and the restrictive, domineering Alliance on the other, made Firefly's universe one in which genuine choices were becoming a rare commodity.

Serenity, Firefly's feature film continuation (and, possibly, conclusion), expanded on this theme of freedom and choice. The film pits Serenity's crew against the forces of the Alliance, who seek to regain control of River and prevent the dissemination of the truth about their actions on the planet Miranda. The Alliance, the film tells us, had sought to extend its control over its citizens by using mind-altering drugs in order to weed out aggression and criminal tendencies. It's an approach to governance that we would consider monstrous even without being told of its disastrous results--tens of millions dead, further millions transformed into mindless cannibals, and an untold number of victims who have suffered terribly at the hands of these newly-made monsters. The Alliance's crime, we are told by Mal in his St. Crispin's Day speech, is the belief that people can be forced into a new shape, a new form incapable of sin.

Sin is a topic that Serenity returns to often, and one clearly on the minds of its villains. The Operative seeks to bring about a world free of it, and believes that his actions--protecting the Alliance by any means necessary--are the best way to go about achieving this goal. Whedon, in his witty and informative commentary to the film, says (big, huge thanks to commenter D. for tracking down the quote)

...it's about the right to be wrong. It's about the idea that you cannot impose your way of thinking on people, even if your way of thinking is more enlightened and better than theirs. It's just simply not how human beings are. And you take that further and you say the idea of sin is in fact outmoded, is in fact more archaic than anything that Mal believes in. When he says, 'I'm a fan of all seven,' [cut vis effects blather] he's saying that sin is just what people are; it's been codified, it's been given a name, but all of those things we take as faults are also the source of pleasure and decency, and we should perhaps rethink it.

The Alliance's error, then, according to Whedon, is in clinging to a black and white approach to human behavior. By promoting a rigid, near-perfect concept of goodness, the Alliance classifies all citizens incapable of achieving this level of perfection, or unwilling to conform to it, as evil and undesirable. Rather than embracing the broad and ultimately uncontrollable range of human diversity, the Alliance fears it and seeks to limit it. Serenity's crew, in contrast, are a celebration of imperfect, flawed humanity, and through their dangerous choice at the film's end they bring an extra measure of freedom to their entire society.

On its face, Whedon's philosophy seems hard to object to, but there's a flip side to it that neither he nor his characters seem to acknowledge. The plain truth is that sin is not an outmoded concept. Sin exists, and it blights the lives of all of us who wish to live safely and happily. Murder is a sin. Rape is a sin. The strong preying on the weak is a sin, and it is precisely that sin that we would tend to see in a society that was completely free and without control. Civilized society, in its idealized form, exists to protect its weaker members from being preyed upon by the strong. Laws exist to prevent sin and to assure that those who commit it are cast out of the community.

Society is control, and the difference between free and predatory societies is not in the existence of that control but in the ways in which that control is exercised and governed. In a free society, citizens have the right to define, and change the definition of, sin (although it's worth noting that, when left to their own devices, supposedly free societies have defined mixed-race marriages and homosexuality as sins, and failed to recognize the sin of slavery), and to affect the form that punishment for sin takes. In a predatory society, such as the Alliance, citizens have no input into, and very little information about, the actions of their government, which may spy on them, treat them all as criminals or, as we see in Serenity, drug them into submission. It is this dangerous use of control that Mal and his crew rebel against, but they don't seem to recognize the need for another sort of control in order to maintain social order.

The Alliance's failure in the Firefly universe isn't in seeking to act against sin, but in their method and approach to this task. The Alliance sought to make its task easier and, more importantly, finite. They failed to realize that the task of protecting society from the worst impulses of human nature is a neverending one--the watchmen of civilization are never permitted to leave their posts, nor can they allow themselves to act in a sinful manner, lest they become the creatures they were set to watch against (Whedon's earlier television show, Angel, has a similar theme--one that the main character was forced to relearn again and again). As in all human societies, the Firefly universe's attempt at this ideal form is flawed, probably beyond repair. The Alliance needs to be brought down, but something else needs to come in its place in order to exercise, with wisdom and with the consent of its citizens, the kind of control that the Alliance has been abusing.

I'm not at all certain that Whedon understands this half of the equation. I'm absolutely certain that Mal doesn't understand it. Mal's notion of social order largely revolves around a quasi-libertarian fantasy of powerful, moral individuals--such as himself--who help the weak and disenfranchised fight against the strong (and it's worth noting that Mal seems happiest when those predators are in positions of power--it is simpler, after all, to be the plucky underdog). It's an approach reminiscent of the one that soon-to-be-ex PM Harriet Jones accused the Tenth Doctor of in the recent Doctor Who special, "The Christmas Invasion". In the face of his rage at her actions in defense of Earth (actions which may or may not have been moral), Jones reminded the Doctor that Earth couldn't continue to depend on his protection. "You're not always here," she told him, and it does seem to me that the Doctor would rather think of humanity as a relatively helpless species under his protection than as actors in their own right. Similarly, I think Mal would prefer to live in a universe full of heroes and villains rather than in one governed by a system of law.

But the truth is that a just society does much more than simply protect its citizens. It teaches them to think like civilized people. Justice, freedom, equality--these are all fantasies, a blanket pulled over our collective heads to protect us from the nightmare of our feral nature. Living in a society ruled by law teaches us to believe in these lies. They become ingrained in us, and hopefully, when we find ourselves in a situation in which the institutions of society can no longer protect us, that ingrained knowledge will keep us from descending into predatory behavior--as we've seen happen, in third-world countries and in inner cities, when people cease to believe in the possibility of justice. On Serenity, characters like Simon and Inara represent the core planets and the unthinking belief in these lies of justice. Firefly and Serenity show us these characters, particularly Simon, struggling with a world in which their unthinking assumptions no longer hold. They suggest that in order to survive, Simon must shed some of his gentility, learn to fend for himself, and eventually act against the institutions he had been taught to respect, but throughout this journey, Simon refuses to completely let go of his upbringing. Although Kaylee chides him for being prim and proper, Simon clings to the forms of proper etiquette because they mean something to him--a reminder that he is a civilized man. It is the same, hopefully, with the concept of justice. Mal Reynolds believes in justice, or rather he believes that it should exist and is constantly infuriated by its absence, but he has yet to realize that justice is created by people, by teaching them to think justly, and that only a society governed by law can teach them to do so.

There are many, many reasons to wish for a sequel to Serenity (for one thing, I want me some Mal/Inara smoochies), but right now I'd desperately like to see Mal confronted with the inadequacy of his approach to social justice. In a way, Serenity wrapped up the storyline that would probably have made up Firefly's first season--in a compressed, louder, more effects-heavy, less afraid of character death form. At the end of this story, Mal has fought against the Alliance and won, and I think it would have been interesting to see him discover that the peace is so much more dangerous and complicated than the war (I'd also like to see the effect that living outside of constant danger has on the cohesion of Serenity's crew). Mal would be the first to admit that he's an unlikely hero, but I wonder if he's enough of a hero to assume a far more challenging and dangerous mantle--that of a man of law.