Fox Network Dollhouse Show - Hip MKULTRA

[brekin]

'Dollhouse' has personality disorder
New TV drama has strong leading lady but is still a blow to women's lib
By David Zurawik
February 13, 2009

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainme ... 5694.story

Fox has a new and improved dream girl for the Friday-night fantasies of teenage boys, and she arrives tonight wearing a hey-look-me-over, super-short dress - the perfect model of female allure and submission.

Her name is Echo, and she's at the heart of a dark new drama, Dollhouse, created by Joss Whedon, the Hollywood producer who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Sarah Michelle Gellar, once upon a time.

I liked Buffy, and I even learned to find messages of female emancipation in its imitators, like James Cameron's Dark Angel, featuring Jessica Alba.

I mention these shows because Whedon is revisiting that same formula built upon the rock of a hot, young leading lady who can kick butt when she has to. In Dollhouse, she is played by Eliza Dushku (of Buffy and Tru Calling), who has every bit as much pop as Gellar or Alba and should be more than enough to draw some of those advertiser-desired teenage boys to Fox.

Only this time, let's be honest: There is no possibility of reading an overarching message of female empowerment into the leading character - or the series. Based on the first three episodes, made available for preview, what we have here is a 21st-century version of geisha girl-meets-Charlie's Angels, with an unmistakable subtext of the heroine as prostitute always eager to please. So much for TV and women's liberation.

The Dollhouse of the title is a futuristic, high-tech home for young women and men who are called "actives" - individuals who have had their personalities and memories erased so that they can be "imprinted" with an endless variety of new personas.

Who determines what personas they will be imprinted with? The people who run the Dollhouse and rent the actives to wealthy clients who might want a weekend lover, a hunting companion, a hostage negotiator or someone to help with an art heist.

I kid you not - all of those roles are on display in the first three episodes, and they are all played by Dushku's character. But the actives don't just play the role for a given period of time, they actually believe they are the person the client desires once their memory is "wiped" and they are imprinted with the client's specifications. When not hired out and on the clock, as it was, the actives wander around the Dollhouse in a dreamy, spaced-out state of mind until they retire upon command from their minders to bed each night in little pods under the floor.

The only active we care about is Echo, a young woman who appears to have recently graduated from college and somehow wound up in the Dollhouse after trying to find a job that would help her "make a difference" in the world. For all the new personas and memory wipes she has experienced, she still flashes back from time to time on bits of her past.

Will she ever remember who she was and find her way out of the Dollhouse? And what about the mysterious FBI agent who seems to be on her trail, intrigued by what he's heard about the place in which she lives?

There is genuine drama in Dollhouse - or, at least, all-engaging narratives of action-adventure. Whedon is, after all, a first-rate TV storyteller, as Buffy proved on a weekly basis.

But I have to tell you the truth; I find it truly depressing that millions of teenage boys are going to be offered the image of Echo as the perfect woman at a time when many of them do not know any better. It's enough to make me take to my bed - I mean, pod under the floor - hoping for better TV images for the next generation of teenage boys.

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

[marmot]

Fox has a new and improved dream girl for the Friday-night fantasies of teenage boys, and she arrives tonight wearing a hey-look-me-over, super-short dress - the perfect model of female allure and submission.

Seriously, the scene where Echo's walking in her super-short, thin, white, negligee-dress was--by far--my favorite moment in Dollhouse's first episode.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Besides that facts that
> CIA is recruiting women heavily
> but has a big sexual discrimination lawsuit pending by ex-CIA women
> bad press over Valerie Plame's career-turned-political football
> bad press from a woman who quit CIA and wrote a book-soon-to-be-movie
> AND decades of performing Nazi-like experiments on female victims readable online...
> and I already posted about the whistlblower book title with "Echo" in it...

Interesting timing for those NY car fires allegedly with 2 notes mentioning "sex" and "mind control."

I'd like to know how an arsonist leaves a note at the scene of a car fire.
Where do you put it so it doesn't burn up yet is associated with the crime?

And why would police give out these details that would only encourage copy cats and make more crimes which are then even less solvable?

Perhaps some viral marketing at work for 'Dollhouse?'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/nyreg ... .html?_r=1

Officials Investigate String of Car Fires Near Central Park
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: February 18, 2009

Four cars have caught on fire near Central Park in the past two weeks and fire officials are investigating whether the blazes may be related, the authorities said on Wednesday.

Several rambling notes were left at the scenes of two of the fires; among their topics were references to being “sexually disrespected” and complaints about the courts, a law enforcement official said, and more than one used the phrase “mind control.”

[brekin]

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:

Perhaps some viral marketing at work for 'Dollhouse?'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/nyreg ... .html?_r=1

Quote:
Officials Investigate String of Car Fires Near Central Park
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: February 18, 2009

Four cars have caught on fire near Central Park in the past two weeks and fire officials are investigating whether the blazes may be related, the authorities said on Wednesday.

Several rambling notes were left at the scenes of two of the fires; among their topics were references to being “sexually disrespected” and complaints about the courts, a law enforcement official said, and more than one used the phrase “mind control.”

[Penguin]

Leave the message nailed on a tree or taped to a sign, far enough so it wont burn, and sign it "The person who burned the car"? Cops will notice it eventually.

[Joe Hillshoist]

OP ED rules.

I'll second that.

[Penguin]

I wont say that, since I think he already knows. Might get too cocky if I said I like him too.

[beeline]

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20090319_Ellen_Gray_.html

Creator Joss Whedon wants you to see the real 'Dollhouse'By Ellen Gray
Philadelphia Daily News

Daily News TV Critic

DOLLHOUSE. 9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 29.

JOSS WHEDON would like to welcome you to "Dollhouse."

Maybe you came in and had a look around when the show first premiered on Fox in mid-February.

Maybe you didn't. The show's first five weeks have averaged some 4.2 million viewers, which suggests room for improvement, if not grounds for dismissal.

But it's the next couple of episodes, starting with tomorrow's "Man on the Street," that the guy who gave us "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" thinks finally demonstrate where his new show is meant to go.

Obviously, he's hoping you'll want to go there, too.

"All of that brewing that we'd done became soup in that episode," Whedon told reporters in a conference call yesterday. "A lot of tumblers fell into place."

If this were "Buffy," someone other than me - probably the speaker himself - would be pointing out the hopeless mix of metaphors. But "Dollhouse" is not "Buffy," or "Angel" or even "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," to name just three of the projects for which Whedon is rightly revered.

Yep, you'll find a bit more humor in this week's "Dollhouse" - particularly in some of those man-on-the-street interviews - "but the fact of the matter is, this is not a comedy," Whedon said. "If there is a typical Whedon show, this is not [it]. It's not the light-hearted romp that the other shows were."

Do tell.

Eliza Dushku, for those who haven't heard, plays a woman whose memory has been erased, as have the memories of a number of other attractive people with whom she lives in a spalike facility - the Dollhouse - somewhere in Los Angeles. Periodically, each is imprinted with a new personality and leased out to clients with very specific needs.

That the most plausible of those needs happens to be sex was a stumbling block for Fox executives early on, and continues to be for some viewers.

"Some people at the network definitely said, 'Well, wait a minute. This idea we've bought is illegal. And racy. And makes us uncomfortable,' " Whedon said.

For his part, "I thought of [Dushku's character, Echo] as a sort of life coach . . . the sort of person you absolutely need in your life at a certain moment."

Responding to a comment about a scene some found particularly unbelievable, in which Echo's hired to deliver a baby, he said, "I still have no problem with the idea that someone very rich and very far off in the mountains would hire the perfect midwife . . . because you don't want a stinker."

This may be a point on which some of us are simply going to have to agree to disagree.

Whedon's right, though, about the next two episodes, which do indeed indicate a series that, however late, is finding its feet, and more importantly, its heart.

And it's heart, even more than witty banter and pop-culture references, that his fiercest fans have come to expect from Whedon. If "Dollhouse" stands a chance, it'll be because viewers are given a reason to care about people whose personalities aren't their own.

"The emotion of the thing is really why we're there," he said. "It's the only thing that really interests us. If we have to figure out a caper, that's work. but if we have to figure out a way that one of them is in pain, that's fun."

[brekin]

"The emotion of the thing is really why we're there," he said. "It's the only thing that really interests us. If we have to figure out a caper, that's work. but if we have to figure out a way that one of them is in pain, that's fun."

[LilyPatToo]

Don't be too put-off by that comment, brekin--when you're an author writing a thriller-type story, if your characters are not in serious danger and feeling real pain, the reader/viewer is likely to disengage. People watch action/adventure/suspense on TV and movies to experience vicarious danger. They want to be taken through the wringer and have everything that can go possibly go wrong happen to the characters with whom they're identifying. If they don't experience intense emotions, including pain, the reader/viewer will feel cheated. So the people who write Dollhouse will be going out of their way to put Echo or one of her friends into a world of hurt--if they want to get those not-so-great ratings up and stay on the air!

LilyPat

[brekin]

LilyPatToo wrote:

Don't be too put-off by that comment, brekin--when you're an author writing a thriller-type story, if your characters are not in serious danger and feeling real pain, the reader/viewer is likely to disengage. People watch action/adventure/suspense on TV and movies to experience vicarious danger. They want to be taken through the wringer and have everything that can go possibly go wrong happen to the characters with whom they're identifying. If they don't experience intense emotions, including pain, the reader/viewer will feel cheated. So the people who write Dollhouse will be going out of their way to put Echo or one of her friends into a world of hurt--if they want to get those not-so-great ratings up and stay on the air!

LilyPat

I understand the whole need for narrative tension, and even granting him some artistic license it still leaves me with a bad feeling. I myself enjoy a good horror movie now and again for some cheap transcendence, but for me the trials a character is put through are just punishment if they don't learn anything from them or are able to process them.

Since the main characters memories are essentially wiped again and again after they are forced to experience and commit horrendous things (and even I imagine good things) then for me that causes major disengagement. Everything having meaning is dramatic, but without memory or reflection there is no meaning.

Alot of fiction is wish fulfillment, and I'm just put off by the repeated victimization of the unknowing.

[Socrates]

I understand the whole need for narrative tension, and even granting him some artistic license it still leaves me with a bad feeling. I myself enjoy a good horror movie now and again for some cheap transcendence, but for me the trials a character is put through are just punishment if they don't learn anything from them or are able to process them.

Since the main characters memories are essentially wiped again and again after they are forced to experience and commit horrendous things (and even I imagine good things) then for me that causes major disengagement. Everything having meaning is dramatic, but without memory or reflection there is no meaning.

Well, if you've been watching the series (and, as a Joss Whedon fan, I hope that everybody has been) you'll know that the "dolls" do seem to be retaining some memories of their "engagements," which will obviously be a plot point down the road.

[beeline]

The show has been much better in the past few episodes. This week revealed that there is a 'sleeper' agent working inside the Dollhouse, who advised, through Echo, that the FBI agent back off and make it look like the Dollhouse had 'won' by having him suspended.

[LilyPatToo]

I'm so glad to hear that it's improving. I've got the latest 2 episodes backed up on TiVo and I'm dying to watch them, but haven't had time. I remember that in an interview a while back, Joss Whedon said that by the 8th (I think) episode, we'd see what he'd originally wanted to do with the story.

Interference from the network made changes in the first group of episodes necessary, which is a real shame, because the show's ratings were lower than expected and I strongly suspect it was due to that tampering. Let's just hope that it can now make up for lost time and manage to stay on the air. I'm still sorry that His Own Worst Enemy and other shows (like Jericho) that are based on things that we discuss here seem to get cancelled.

LilyPat

[marmot]

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