Sing Along Et Cetera
Since monkey-junkey recommended it, and since I have a weird affection for Neil Patrick Harris, I finally got around to checking out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. (I had to do it on The Hook's laptop, since my antique iMac can't keep up with the video format they're using, but you're not here to hear about me and my computer woes.)
I'll confess to a certain bias here. Joss Whedon kinda lost me a while back, and now I seem to have a reflexive aversion to checking out any of his new work. Although I try to approach his stuff with an open mind, I can't help being constantly aware of his authorial presence (after all, his distinctive style makes that kind of unavoidable), and so a lot of my reaction depends on whether I feel like he's repeating the patterns that annoyed me in his past work or breaking some new ground. Even more uncharitably, I sometimes feel like Whedon is using his audience for some kind of public psychotherapy, and at the end of the session I want to grade him on whether or not he's making "progress."
But in the case of Dr. Horrible, I'd say the answer is a definite "yes."
It took a while for me to warm up to this one. The idea of a character essentially cos-playing as a supervillain, petitioning for admission into exclusive supervillain clubs, and scheming pathetically to bring down his archnemesis has been mined pretty throughly in stuff like The Venture Bros. What's more, it could easily have veered off into the eye-rolling "Evil characters are evil because they love evil and like to do evil stuff, plus they brag about how evil they are and how much they love evil" territory of a lot of modern entertainment. But I like the way they worked up Dr. Horrible's motives; not just that he wants to impress his neighbor Penny (although that's part of it), not because he loves evil for its own sake, but because his view of the world is so pessimistic and his ability to get what he wants from normal daily life so meager that his fantasy solution is to blow it all up and build a new one.
This is a pretty good read, I think, on the comic-book mindset. Almost invariably, heroes are the ones who preserve the status quo and villains are the ones who want to change it. The reason why the villains are villains, regardless of whatever ultimately noble agenda they're touting, is the ruthless means they resort to. But since the heroes are busy preserving the system and supporting The Man, rather than improving society or addressing the complaints of the villains, it's easy to imagine a minor-league villain like Dr. Horrible seeing himself as a well-intentioned underdog whose idealistic plans are always being thwarted by cheesy, smirking fratboys.
Dr. Horrible's "life sucks" mindset is familiar from Whedon's earlier works, too. Certainly the final seasons of Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were a fun-filled cavalcade of whining about how everyday life is "hell" and "the apocalypse" and a vale of tears and so forth, and how maybe we'd all be better off dead. (See also Connor's breakdown at the end of Angel Season 4 and Willow's world-ending attempt at the end of Buffy Season 6.) Likewise, the idea of the scheming nerd who sits in his mom's basement plotting supervillainy is reminiscent of the junior villains from Buffy Season 6. But up until now, I don't think Whedon ever really connected these two themes together; the "life sucks" line was usually espoused by his heroes, not the villains, and his nerd villains were usually motivated by simple lust and greed rather than apocalyptic angst. (The only counterexample that comes to mind is the Angel episode "Happy Anniversary," written by Whedon's co-creator David Greenwalt, which also prefigures Dr. Horrible's time-freezing ray.)
To me, the specific combination we get in Dr. Horrible seems more right and natural. The hero loves the status quo, which puts him at the pinnacle of society dispensing noogies and wedgies to the uppity nonconformists. The villain is a basement-dwelling nerd who fantasizes about tearing down society because it seems easier than asking a pretty girl out on a date. The third player, their shared love interest Penny, is naive and optimistic and works within the system to do good deeds; of course, Dr. Horrible is deaf to all her treacly sentiments because he's so heavily invested in his own bleak world view. The fact that his stubborn pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy is perfectly appropriate.
So yeah, I think this is a step forward in terms of Whedon's pet themes. Rather than placing it in the whiny mouths of status quo-supporting heroes, he's placed the "life sucks" mantra where it belongs and turned it into the self-reinforcing credo of the embittered loser. If in the end life actually does suck, it's because of the choices that people make and the chances they pass up, not because of some vast cosmic conspiracy. Compared to the rest of the increasingly doomy-and-gloomy entertainment landscape, to which Joss Whedon has contributed more than his share, that almost seems weirdly life-affirming.
As for the songs? I liked the one about the freeze ray, but otherwise I don't think they really grabbed that much on the first hearing. Maybe they'd stick in my head after repeat viewings, but unlike the Buffy musical, I don't think I'm sufficiently invested in Dr. Horrible to rewatch it a bunch of times.
It has to be said, though, that trophy girl Penny gets pretty short shrift in the story. I'm sure that some people will cut Whedon slack based on his accumulated feminist cred, but it seems to be a tough time for female characters in popular entertainment. (So far, I think Iron Man's Pepper Potts is the summer's closest thing to a proactive female hero, which is pretty sad given that she spends most of her time taking memos and tottering around in high heels.)
Still, I'm resistant to the idea that shoddy treatment of women is a cliche unique to comic books. Women in Refrigerators - the tendency to have female characters raped, murdered, or brutalized in order to give their male counterparts some extra motivation - is certainly a blight on the superhero genre. But it's a fixture of TV and movies, too; Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan played the "dead wife" card in two of his previous movies, and the grotesque scene from which the "Women in Refrigerators" cliche gets its name bears an uncanny resemblance to the ending of David Fincher's roughly contemporaneous Seven. Credit where credit is due: In an entertainment landscape that routinely uses female characters as disposable mechanisms to drive the actions of the their male compatriots, comic books are the one medium in which people noticed.
Well, that ended on kind of a downbeat note. Let's liven things up a little with a link to PETA's cute and surprisingly well-informed survey of Top 10 Animal-Friendly Superheroes.
I'll confess to a certain bias here. Joss Whedon kinda lost me a while back, and now I seem to have a reflexive aversion to checking out any of his new work. Although I try to approach his stuff with an open mind, I can't help being constantly aware of his authorial presence (after all, his distinctive style makes that kind of unavoidable), and so a lot of my reaction depends on whether I feel like he's repeating the patterns that annoyed me in his past work or breaking some new ground. Even more uncharitably, I sometimes feel like Whedon is using his audience for some kind of public psychotherapy, and at the end of the session I want to grade him on whether or not he's making "progress."
But in the case of Dr. Horrible, I'd say the answer is a definite "yes."
It took a while for me to warm up to this one. The idea of a character essentially cos-playing as a supervillain, petitioning for admission into exclusive supervillain clubs, and scheming pathetically to bring down his archnemesis has been mined pretty throughly in stuff like The Venture Bros. What's more, it could easily have veered off into the eye-rolling "Evil characters are evil because they love evil and like to do evil stuff, plus they brag about how evil they are and how much they love evil" territory of a lot of modern entertainment. But I like the way they worked up Dr. Horrible's motives; not just that he wants to impress his neighbor Penny (although that's part of it), not because he loves evil for its own sake, but because his view of the world is so pessimistic and his ability to get what he wants from normal daily life so meager that his fantasy solution is to blow it all up and build a new one.
This is a pretty good read, I think, on the comic-book mindset. Almost invariably, heroes are the ones who preserve the status quo and villains are the ones who want to change it. The reason why the villains are villains, regardless of whatever ultimately noble agenda they're touting, is the ruthless means they resort to. But since the heroes are busy preserving the system and supporting The Man, rather than improving society or addressing the complaints of the villains, it's easy to imagine a minor-league villain like Dr. Horrible seeing himself as a well-intentioned underdog whose idealistic plans are always being thwarted by cheesy, smirking fratboys.
Dr. Horrible's "life sucks" mindset is familiar from Whedon's earlier works, too. Certainly the final seasons of Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were a fun-filled cavalcade of whining about how everyday life is "hell" and "the apocalypse" and a vale of tears and so forth, and how maybe we'd all be better off dead. (See also Connor's breakdown at the end of Angel Season 4 and Willow's world-ending attempt at the end of Buffy Season 6.) Likewise, the idea of the scheming nerd who sits in his mom's basement plotting supervillainy is reminiscent of the junior villains from Buffy Season 6. But up until now, I don't think Whedon ever really connected these two themes together; the "life sucks" line was usually espoused by his heroes, not the villains, and his nerd villains were usually motivated by simple lust and greed rather than apocalyptic angst. (The only counterexample that comes to mind is the Angel episode "Happy Anniversary," written by Whedon's co-creator David Greenwalt, which also prefigures Dr. Horrible's time-freezing ray.)
To me, the specific combination we get in Dr. Horrible seems more right and natural. The hero loves the status quo, which puts him at the pinnacle of society dispensing noogies and wedgies to the uppity nonconformists. The villain is a basement-dwelling nerd who fantasizes about tearing down society because it seems easier than asking a pretty girl out on a date. The third player, their shared love interest Penny, is naive and optimistic and works within the system to do good deeds; of course, Dr. Horrible is deaf to all her treacly sentiments because he's so heavily invested in his own bleak world view. The fact that his stubborn pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy is perfectly appropriate.
So yeah, I think this is a step forward in terms of Whedon's pet themes. Rather than placing it in the whiny mouths of status quo-supporting heroes, he's placed the "life sucks" mantra where it belongs and turned it into the self-reinforcing credo of the embittered loser. If in the end life actually does suck, it's because of the choices that people make and the chances they pass up, not because of some vast cosmic conspiracy. Compared to the rest of the increasingly doomy-and-gloomy entertainment landscape, to which Joss Whedon has contributed more than his share, that almost seems weirdly life-affirming.
As for the songs? I liked the one about the freeze ray, but otherwise I don't think they really grabbed that much on the first hearing. Maybe they'd stick in my head after repeat viewings, but unlike the Buffy musical, I don't think I'm sufficiently invested in Dr. Horrible to rewatch it a bunch of times.
It has to be said, though, that trophy girl Penny gets pretty short shrift in the story. I'm sure that some people will cut Whedon slack based on his accumulated feminist cred, but it seems to be a tough time for female characters in popular entertainment. (So far, I think Iron Man's Pepper Potts is the summer's closest thing to a proactive female hero, which is pretty sad given that she spends most of her time taking memos and tottering around in high heels.)
Still, I'm resistant to the idea that shoddy treatment of women is a cliche unique to comic books. Women in Refrigerators - the tendency to have female characters raped, murdered, or brutalized in order to give their male counterparts some extra motivation - is certainly a blight on the superhero genre. But it's a fixture of TV and movies, too; Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan played the "dead wife" card in two of his previous movies, and the grotesque scene from which the "Women in Refrigerators" cliche gets its name bears an uncanny resemblance to the ending of David Fincher's roughly contemporaneous Seven. Credit where credit is due: In an entertainment landscape that routinely uses female characters as disposable mechanisms to drive the actions of the their male compatriots, comic books are the one medium in which people noticed.
Well, that ended on kind of a downbeat note. Let's liven things up a little with a link to PETA's cute and surprisingly well-informed survey of Top 10 Animal-Friendly Superheroes.