When the death of your civilisation precedes you
So right now my lover is a bit miffed. He took me to see star trek and I hated it pretty hard. This morning when I woke up he left some strategic browser windows open with people justifying the time travel as scientifically plausible. There a a few things I wont watch in movie -rape, torture and time travel. The first two will cause me to avoid an entire film if I have an inkling they'll be present. I'll see a movie with time travel but it has to really, really, really well resolved for me to enjoy it. I simply cannot suspend disbelief for time travel as it is presented in most films, it's like a glitch I have. This movie was no exception.
Forget the self-made impossibility of the time travel plot and I would maybe survive the film if there was anything else going on. Des thinks I was set to dislike it from the get go. I didn't even know there was going to be time travel! I was expecting a really solid character study of kirk and spock -a how they came to be- I'm not even a startrek fan but this would have been interesting. Kirk and Spock are male archetypes (impulsive and animalistic vs rational and emotionally withdrawn) and how they compromise and cooperate is an insight in the workings of a male mind. The actors weren't bad but by golly did they have little to work with. The only female character (apart from a couple of one dimensional doomed mothers) in the film was smart and capable but all she really did to advance the plot was get a rather unlikable version of spock to show humanity by kissing him.
At best the leads were 2 dimensional and the rest of the cast one dimensional which is especially disappointing of the bad guy. No attempt was made to show the irrationality of his vendetta or contrast it with the enterprise crew's way of handling situations. In fact apart from a passing remark and a moment of diplomacy that they were more than happy to let pass so they could wreak some destruction on the baddy there was no evidence of what made star trek a different kind of science fiction from the get go: peaceful discovery of the new. What happened to the ideals? Any day of the week I'd take a cheesy seventh-heaven-in-space episode of one of the franchise over this ....weak themed, lazily written, sequence of nifty special effects.
There's hardly even any space feel sentimental attatchment to the characters because of what else you know of them because from the opening scene this is an alternate universe, a clean slate, a way to do whatever they like with the canon. It was no less cheesy than the old star trek, but tried to be aethetically dark to make it modern and wound up without a heart or soul and on the basis of the plot without much brain either. Nimoys presence felt as though it was meant to lull us into being unbothered by the new -handing over the baton- but it wreaked of money grabbing.It could have been neat and kitchy having him around but he had far too much screen time and importance to the plot so even that element wore out.
But all the boys loved it. So there must be something there I'm not privy to.
I saw the film in a drive in -when did they get so expensive- which had 3 movies playing at once! It was so distracting to have wolverine slashing people in my peripheral that I had to pull the window-shady-thing over it.
"things I have loved I'm allowed to keep. I'll never know if I go to sleep"
Getting to the end of the Dollhouse series took persistence, I had to turn off my cheese aversion and was troubled that it could become 'monster of the week' in a worse way than buffy ever could because if we became comfortable and blase about what was going on it would be a pretty bleak outlook for humanity. At the end of the day I trust Joss Whedon - I'm not rabidly worshipping at his alter but he taught me a lot in my formative years and kept me interested beyond them. So I give him a bit more elastic than I would any other TV writer. Every now and then through the cringing, sighing and giggling I would become really excited and interested with where this show could go.
The finale made it all worth it.
From the get go this was a brave concept. A corporation which hires people out for specific highly skilled jobs by 'imprinting' them with the skills knowledge and personality traits required and then wipes their memory at the end of each job leaving them childlike and largely without will. Not only does the show centre around something abhorrent to ordinary moral standards it makes it as difficult as possible to become attatched to the lead. When she is the wiped Echo she is by definition without character, when she is imprinted as someone else we know that she will be gone by the end of the episode so there's no point investing too much. Then there's Caroline the girl she was before she signed up for this- by the time we meet her we don't know what to think of her-are we angry at her for giving in to this, are we grieving her absence, are we just interested to know how someone get themselves mixed up in this mess?
There are those that condemn the whole show for being unethical. To those people I would ask what is to be gained from stories where bad guys are unethical, good guys are ethical, we know which is which and the right one wins? Comfort. Shows like Dollhouse make us uncomfortable because we know that there are ethical problems at the heart of the premise. If the show ignored these- If it was just a string of missions- echo as a dancer, echo and a stripper, echo with the guy who can't get a date, echo saves the cat from the burning house yay- then there would be a problem but that's not what the show is. I think it's actually one of the most ethical shows on TV because it's very core, and 90% of it's interest is ethical issues. Whether it's just a gut feeling of something being not right or a ful intellectual deconstruction the show encourages us to ask questions about this technology and we find parallels in reality. To say that the show is immoral is so far off the mark it's almost a joke If tv only ever depicted things that the creators believed were morally ideal we would find ouselves watching an array of rainbow utopias with no bearing on the real problems faced in the real world.
Dollhouse is always asking moral questions. Even the plots of the cheesy early episodes served to tease out the ambiguities of the nature of this technology. The show also explores the characters who work for the organisation -what keeps them there what quells their moral concern, what drives them, what happens if they fail? It also follows characters trying to bring it down from within and without and that even their motives and methods are imperfect. From moment to moment we are torn about what we want to happen. Sometimes we are relieved when the dolls are wiped of their experiences, sometimes we want people not to succeed at bringing the whole thing down, sometimes we begin to believe that what they are doing is good-sometimes it is- but we continue to be concerned by the means which are fundamentally unethical by contemporary standards. Politically we understand that the being a doll is a kind of slavery, sometimes a kind of rape and we begin to wonder if it isn't also a kind of murder. We know that the people who signed up for it had a degree of choice in the matter.
The final episode took everything to a new level and opened up a world of directions.
Dollhouse makes us think about the body mind duality and whether it exists, identity, power, service, subversion, passivity vs activism, consent, memory, duty of care and the soul outside of a religious context. There's flat out no other show on tv tackling all those things. That Dollhouse does and that it does so in a novel and difficult way means I would put up with another 5 cheesy episodes if it meant there would be a few more of the stature of Omega.
The concept of Omega as a character could be something quite revolutionary. What would it mean to be this kind of thing, what would it be okay to do and is it more or less human. It reminded me of Human Instrumentality in Neon Genesis Evangelion- where humanity would be smooshed together to try to fill in the gaping holes in each of us in order for heaven to judge us as one. This is many essences, many experience and knowlege databases together in the one body. In alpha it made him an egomaniac convinced he was a god compared to ordinary people and slashing them to bits to prove it. In Omega she is more compassionate and serene than before she expresses that she understands. Exactly what she understands is not clear but that she chooses to return to the dollhouse service implies 2 things most strongly either Caroline (and someone else?) is from the start bringing down or learning about the organisation from the inside and only part way through achieving this or that in the Omega state echo believes that the work of the dollhouse is good work- for society at large or for her own development. That it transcends generally held beliefs about self and what's right. It's dubious that a contract is enough to keep her if she had wanted otherwise with this new heightened awareness.
I feel that Echo could become a Sacred Whore character in a way that Whedon was never able to achieve with Inara in Firefly. This idea would be really interesting in a show that is so troubling for feminists. That their are male and female dolls is of little consequense when historically women have been opressed and kept passive. The issues the show tackles are the key issues in gender studies (power, mind/body, consent, power etc.) I am reminded of a production of Ibsen's A Doll's house where Nora takes everyone out with crazed gunfire instead of simply leaving.
The biggest weakness of the show is probably the acting. It's unfortunate but Eliza Dushku while hardly horrible does miss the mark on a semi regular basis. She's oddly compelling as echo a girl walking around half asleep in some sort of thick liquid but not always in the imprints that come and go week by week. Contrary to popular opinion the actress who portrays Sierra is little better. Victor is exceptional and the trully great performance of the show comes from Alan Tudyk as Alpha which takes it into a whole new league. Perhaps he can give lessons to the rest of the ensemble?
"it's like trying to clean the ocean, what do you think you can drain it? It was poison and dry long before you came"
Abolitionist vs welfarist veganism: Today I learned the difference between these things. Having lived in a vacuum where I was the only vegan I knew I'd never heard the terms before- although I had an awareness that there were folks who were vegan to prevent suffering and folks who felt animals were not for human use at all. I was for the most part in the former category but understanding of the latter. While reading about these things on the interweb I struck on some points that rang true for me:
1. Veganism is a base- a starting point for ethical practice not extremist and certainly not all that I feel I should do.
2. Veganism is not to be venerated- recieving overt praise and respect for being vegan makes me very uncomfortable. From my perspective I couldn't not be vegan- I couldn't believe what I do and not act on it. It's everyday, I am healthy and it's not difficult. It's like being praise for not beating people up in the street.
It also got me thinking about how long it's been since I've really examined this part of my life. It's been well over 5 years and I've not seriously worked through the philosophy behind my decision since making it. It's as natural as sleep-so I'm hardly a soldier for the cause. I've never much wanted to be a soldier for it though. If there's one thing I learned from my christian years it was that a well lived life is the best promotion for your beliefs and preaching is more often than not a deterrent for others or fuel for conflict. Maybe it's a copout though. hmm.
Forget the self-made impossibility of the time travel plot and I would maybe survive the film if there was anything else going on. Des thinks I was set to dislike it from the get go. I didn't even know there was going to be time travel! I was expecting a really solid character study of kirk and spock -a how they came to be- I'm not even a startrek fan but this would have been interesting. Kirk and Spock are male archetypes (impulsive and animalistic vs rational and emotionally withdrawn) and how they compromise and cooperate is an insight in the workings of a male mind. The actors weren't bad but by golly did they have little to work with. The only female character (apart from a couple of one dimensional doomed mothers) in the film was smart and capable but all she really did to advance the plot was get a rather unlikable version of spock to show humanity by kissing him.
At best the leads were 2 dimensional and the rest of the cast one dimensional which is especially disappointing of the bad guy. No attempt was made to show the irrationality of his vendetta or contrast it with the enterprise crew's way of handling situations. In fact apart from a passing remark and a moment of diplomacy that they were more than happy to let pass so they could wreak some destruction on the baddy there was no evidence of what made star trek a different kind of science fiction from the get go: peaceful discovery of the new. What happened to the ideals? Any day of the week I'd take a cheesy seventh-heaven-in-space episode of one of the franchise over this ....weak themed, lazily written, sequence of nifty special effects.
There's hardly even any space feel sentimental attatchment to the characters because of what else you know of them because from the opening scene this is an alternate universe, a clean slate, a way to do whatever they like with the canon. It was no less cheesy than the old star trek, but tried to be aethetically dark to make it modern and wound up without a heart or soul and on the basis of the plot without much brain either. Nimoys presence felt as though it was meant to lull us into being unbothered by the new -handing over the baton- but it wreaked of money grabbing.It could have been neat and kitchy having him around but he had far too much screen time and importance to the plot so even that element wore out.
But all the boys loved it. So there must be something there I'm not privy to.
I saw the film in a drive in -when did they get so expensive- which had 3 movies playing at once! It was so distracting to have wolverine slashing people in my peripheral that I had to pull the window-shady-thing over it.
"things I have loved I'm allowed to keep. I'll never know if I go to sleep"
Getting to the end of the Dollhouse series took persistence, I had to turn off my cheese aversion and was troubled that it could become 'monster of the week' in a worse way than buffy ever could because if we became comfortable and blase about what was going on it would be a pretty bleak outlook for humanity. At the end of the day I trust Joss Whedon - I'm not rabidly worshipping at his alter but he taught me a lot in my formative years and kept me interested beyond them. So I give him a bit more elastic than I would any other TV writer. Every now and then through the cringing, sighing and giggling I would become really excited and interested with where this show could go.
The finale made it all worth it.
From the get go this was a brave concept. A corporation which hires people out for specific highly skilled jobs by 'imprinting' them with the skills knowledge and personality traits required and then wipes their memory at the end of each job leaving them childlike and largely without will. Not only does the show centre around something abhorrent to ordinary moral standards it makes it as difficult as possible to become attatched to the lead. When she is the wiped Echo she is by definition without character, when she is imprinted as someone else we know that she will be gone by the end of the episode so there's no point investing too much. Then there's Caroline the girl she was before she signed up for this- by the time we meet her we don't know what to think of her-are we angry at her for giving in to this, are we grieving her absence, are we just interested to know how someone get themselves mixed up in this mess?
There are those that condemn the whole show for being unethical. To those people I would ask what is to be gained from stories where bad guys are unethical, good guys are ethical, we know which is which and the right one wins? Comfort. Shows like Dollhouse make us uncomfortable because we know that there are ethical problems at the heart of the premise. If the show ignored these- If it was just a string of missions- echo as a dancer, echo and a stripper, echo with the guy who can't get a date, echo saves the cat from the burning house yay- then there would be a problem but that's not what the show is. I think it's actually one of the most ethical shows on TV because it's very core, and 90% of it's interest is ethical issues. Whether it's just a gut feeling of something being not right or a ful intellectual deconstruction the show encourages us to ask questions about this technology and we find parallels in reality. To say that the show is immoral is so far off the mark it's almost a joke If tv only ever depicted things that the creators believed were morally ideal we would find ouselves watching an array of rainbow utopias with no bearing on the real problems faced in the real world.
Dollhouse is always asking moral questions. Even the plots of the cheesy early episodes served to tease out the ambiguities of the nature of this technology. The show also explores the characters who work for the organisation -what keeps them there what quells their moral concern, what drives them, what happens if they fail? It also follows characters trying to bring it down from within and without and that even their motives and methods are imperfect. From moment to moment we are torn about what we want to happen. Sometimes we are relieved when the dolls are wiped of their experiences, sometimes we want people not to succeed at bringing the whole thing down, sometimes we begin to believe that what they are doing is good-sometimes it is- but we continue to be concerned by the means which are fundamentally unethical by contemporary standards. Politically we understand that the being a doll is a kind of slavery, sometimes a kind of rape and we begin to wonder if it isn't also a kind of murder. We know that the people who signed up for it had a degree of choice in the matter.
The final episode took everything to a new level and opened up a world of directions.
Dollhouse makes us think about the body mind duality and whether it exists, identity, power, service, subversion, passivity vs activism, consent, memory, duty of care and the soul outside of a religious context. There's flat out no other show on tv tackling all those things. That Dollhouse does and that it does so in a novel and difficult way means I would put up with another 5 cheesy episodes if it meant there would be a few more of the stature of Omega.
The concept of Omega as a character could be something quite revolutionary. What would it mean to be this kind of thing, what would it be okay to do and is it more or less human. It reminded me of Human Instrumentality in Neon Genesis Evangelion- where humanity would be smooshed together to try to fill in the gaping holes in each of us in order for heaven to judge us as one. This is many essences, many experience and knowlege databases together in the one body. In alpha it made him an egomaniac convinced he was a god compared to ordinary people and slashing them to bits to prove it. In Omega she is more compassionate and serene than before she expresses that she understands. Exactly what she understands is not clear but that she chooses to return to the dollhouse service implies 2 things most strongly either Caroline (and someone else?) is from the start bringing down or learning about the organisation from the inside and only part way through achieving this or that in the Omega state echo believes that the work of the dollhouse is good work- for society at large or for her own development. That it transcends generally held beliefs about self and what's right. It's dubious that a contract is enough to keep her if she had wanted otherwise with this new heightened awareness.
I feel that Echo could become a Sacred Whore character in a way that Whedon was never able to achieve with Inara in Firefly. This idea would be really interesting in a show that is so troubling for feminists. That their are male and female dolls is of little consequense when historically women have been opressed and kept passive. The issues the show tackles are the key issues in gender studies (power, mind/body, consent, power etc.) I am reminded of a production of Ibsen's A Doll's house where Nora takes everyone out with crazed gunfire instead of simply leaving.
The biggest weakness of the show is probably the acting. It's unfortunate but Eliza Dushku while hardly horrible does miss the mark on a semi regular basis. She's oddly compelling as echo a girl walking around half asleep in some sort of thick liquid but not always in the imprints that come and go week by week. Contrary to popular opinion the actress who portrays Sierra is little better. Victor is exceptional and the trully great performance of the show comes from Alan Tudyk as Alpha which takes it into a whole new league. Perhaps he can give lessons to the rest of the ensemble?
"it's like trying to clean the ocean, what do you think you can drain it? It was poison and dry long before you came"
Abolitionist vs welfarist veganism: Today I learned the difference between these things. Having lived in a vacuum where I was the only vegan I knew I'd never heard the terms before- although I had an awareness that there were folks who were vegan to prevent suffering and folks who felt animals were not for human use at all. I was for the most part in the former category but understanding of the latter. While reading about these things on the interweb I struck on some points that rang true for me:
1. Veganism is a base- a starting point for ethical practice not extremist and certainly not all that I feel I should do.
2. Veganism is not to be venerated- recieving overt praise and respect for being vegan makes me very uncomfortable. From my perspective I couldn't not be vegan- I couldn't believe what I do and not act on it. It's everyday, I am healthy and it's not difficult. It's like being praise for not beating people up in the street.
It also got me thinking about how long it's been since I've really examined this part of my life. It's been well over 5 years and I've not seriously worked through the philosophy behind my decision since making it. It's as natural as sleep-so I'm hardly a soldier for the cause. I've never much wanted to be a soldier for it though. If there's one thing I learned from my christian years it was that a well lived life is the best promotion for your beliefs and preaching is more often than not a deterrent for others or fuel for conflict. Maybe it's a copout though. hmm.