The Joss Whedon Question

by Linda Holmes

I had very mixed feelings about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse -- which premieres tonight at 9:00 p.m. on Fox -- after listening to the interview about whether it constitutes a misogynist fantasy (it's the story in the box on that page, with the "Anti-Buffy" title).

On one hand, I do understand the concern. On the other, Whedon strikes me as a thoughtful guy, often guilty of various storytelling sins, but unlikely to knowingly play into hatred of women.

Fortunately for me, I know a lot of women writers who have spent a lot of time on pop culture and television, so I threw the question open to some of them. I referred them to the interview piece and asked them three questions: (1) Did the premise of the show strike them as fundamentally sexist? (2) Did the fact that it was Joss Whedon affect their feelings one way or the other? (3) How did it compare to other television and movies, as concerns the creep factor of sexist fantasies and so forth?

Here are some of their responses.

What three writers had to say about feminism and simple good television, after the jump...

Elizabeth Nelson:

At first blush (and having not seen the show), it's hard to say whether the premise is fundamentally sexist. Clearly the show is dealing with themes that are sexist in nature; Whedon appears to admit to this in the interview. He draws clear lines of demarcation between his role as a storyteller and his role as a humanitarian, and really, he isn't beholden to have these two sides of his persona intersect.

The question might not be what Whedon's concerns are as a storyteller or as an activist at the end of the day, but how these forces that drive him are curbed by the industry within which he is working and the company he is keeping. Whedon has already claimed that he's responded to corporate interests insofar as the way the show's narrative is shaped; he's toned down a lot more of the controversial stuff that he initially wanted to deal with baldly. Maybe he's making a comment about artistic integrity, maybe it's an act of preservation for the way the thing is going to look in the final analysis, but the point is, it's still going to air, and it's going to be on Fox, of all networks, which emphatically ain't HBO.

However, a welter of evidence suggests that Whedon is guilty here of the intellectual misdemeanor of wanting it both ways. Having indulged his desire to turn out a titillating, taboo-tweaking, publicity-gathering Fox-style escapism, he now finds this to be at odds with his reputation as a purveyor of positive feminist imagery in media and a supporter of human rights. In the interview, he works creatively to reconcile these disparate ambitions, but not necessarily persuasively.

There is anyway -- at a minimum -- something dissonant and straining (and funny) in his assertion that the premise for Dollhouse is somehow attributable to his honor-bound duty as a storyteller to avoid polemics and "go to the dark place." The implied suggestion that the rational alternative to a turgid feminist polemic is one in which a literally mindless vixen is sold for sex and then hunted for sport -- this feels emblematic of a common false choice in contemporary cultural representations in female sexuality.

I would assert, for instance that one needn't feel like an sexless ascetic and Dworkin-esque anti-porn crusader to be disturbed by the ubiquitous American Apparel ad campaign with its limitless parade of inanely posed Barely Legal rejects on the back of every last "alternative weekly" in America.

Alternatively, the constant mining and foraging for patriarchal text and subtext in media and the workplace -- however appropriate in many instances -- can become oppressive and ultimately inhibit the clear, inalienable right of every man, woman and child to enjoy Rock of Love: Bus. Of course the final jury remains out on Whedon's new show until at least the first several episodes air, and though it is initially difficult to understand how this premise could yield anything much of value to the feminist canon, let alone popular amusements, perhaps his track record is such that it has purchased him an unusual measure of benefit of the doubt.

When I originally read the premise of the show, movies like Blade Runner and Total Recall and even the lesser-celebrated Cherry 2000 came to mind as analogues to the nuts and bolts of the overarching plot. But it also caused me to consider a possible analogy which would represent the sort of best case scenario upside to Whedon's premise: the underappreciated David Lynch film, Fire Walk with Me, his cinematic postscript to the legendary Twin Peaks television show.

Fire Walk with Me is the story of high school student Laura Palmer's last days before she ends up getting brutally murdered by what appears to be some kind of paranormal parasite that may or may not be her father. In the film, Laura's identity is often subsumed by whatever man she is dealing with at the time: her boyfriend, her other boyfriend, her dealer, her father. Each of the men is in one way or another symbolically killing her, stealing her innocence, and stealing her identity, until she is ultimately actually killed. It's an excellent feminist critique that uses a young woman as a blank slate upon which any number of male fantasies can be drawn. One cheerfully hopes that this is what Dollhouse would look like in the final analysis, but right now, I'm skeptical.

Elizabeth Nelson is regular contributor to VH1, the AV Club NYC, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her most recent column on the program STELLA -- hailed by Michael Ian Black as "Intelligent!" and "Difficult to understand!" -- appears here.

Stephanie Lucianovic

When I heard about the new Joss Whedon venture that had ratcheted Whedonites and Buffistas into barely controlled pee-pee dances all over the globe, I rolled my eyes over both the premise and the excessive pre-salivation.

I hate using the word "sexist" because it's overused and shrill, and, actually, it's not so much that I think Dollhouse sounds offensive to women; it's just that I'm sick to death of Whedon's "damaged female" shtick. He's done it and done it to death. It's become boring and unoriginal. Furthermore, he's gone back into his own damaged-female pond and cast Eliza Dushku (who played Faith, the ultimate damaged female, in Buffy) in the starring role! In essence, I'm not so much creeped out as I am totally bored, which is exactly why I deleted it from my TiVo wish list without watching a single episode. (Well, that and the prediction that it was crap because of its Friday night time slot.)

Was that ignorant of me? To judge where I have not seen? Maybe, but I don't have the TV attention span of my youth and I'd rather waste my time on shows that don't bore or annoy me before they can even hit the airwaves.

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic, author of CocktailSmarts and the upcoming VampireSmarts, writes at The Grub Report and blogs for KQED public broadcasting.

Tara Ariano

I don't find the premise fundamentally sexist. In a way, isn't what happens to Echo just a sci-fied version of what happened to Jason Bourne? I guess the idea is that lady operatives can be deployed in different (sexy) ways than dude operatives could (i.e. infiltrating fancy parties the way Sydney Bristow did in every episode of Alias), but I think of Whedon as reflecting what I would assume is probably a fact of real espionage, not creating it.

What I know about Joss Whedon is that he is great at creating butt-kicking female characters, and less great at creating butt-kicking male characters. The clips I've seen of the show featuring the Topher character (Fran Kranz) just reinforce, for me, the fact that Whedon's most believable male characters are reedy, snarky dorks in the Xander mold. A bunch of those being deployed as supersoldiers...I mean, we already have a Chuck.

I haven't seen the entire pilot episode, so I can't really speak to the creep factor, except to say that I probably have a higher tolerance for sci-fi violence than I do for, say, the sort of thing that happened to the George Clooney character in Syriana -- or to the aforementioned Jason Bourne, really. But we'll see how I feel after I've seen more than clips.

Tara Ariano is Senior Editor at Sling.com.