Pocochina's Weblog

Dollhouse – Instinct

pocochina — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:53:19 +0000

ON last week’s episode of Dollhouse, Topher enhanced an imprint in order to trigger lactation. This is used in an engagement where Echo is imprinted to be a man’s dead wife because he blames his baby for his wife’s death. The husband had considered adoption, but decided to try the DH first. Echo, convinced he is trying to kill her, attempts to leave but is thwarted by the Dollhouse. They bring her back and wipe her, but it doesn’t work, so she fakes a successful wipe and goes after the child armed with a knife. Within the Dollhouse, we meet with post-DH Madeleine, who tells Paul about the reason she entered the Dollhouse and how she’s been feeling since.

I really did have a visceral response to the engagement itself. Making someone artificially bond with a baby seems so awful to me – even though people bond beautifully with children that aren’t biologically theirs, and even though we know the DH deals in created love, somehow faking parental love skeeves me out.

You know, it’s really a shame about the sexist and essentialist “breast feeding makes the ladiez all loopy” last ten minutes, because in the first half hour, we’re looking at one of the best metaphors for the feminine mystique I’ve ever seen in popular culture. Echo is nobody as far as the client is concerned, a blank head on a hot body, he rents her out, and manipulates her body and brain to make her a happy wife and mommy. He creates a scenario where she’s dependent emotionally and psychologically on him. Her friend has been through the same thing, and her font of wisdom is to tell her to suck it up and smile. And when she gets terrified and bails, with every reason to do so, she’s only important until there’s even a hint that the baby is in danger, in which case her husband’s word becomes sacrosanct and she becomes stigmatized as delusional.

As ever, it’s interesting to wonder how much of Echo’s experience here is the effect of the experimentation, how much of it is Caroline, and how much of it is the composite event. Because any one of those could be causing this. It’s possible that Sierra or Tango could have had this particular imprint and not had the maternal instinct awakened – it seems perfectly calibrated to Caroline’s zeal for protecting the helpless. You’d think after Alpha-Kroft they wouldn’t stray too close to original personalities, bu this almost seems like Topher trying to prove to himself that the original personality doesn’t matter and he can do whatever he wants.

Interesting to see Adele with Madeleine – of course she always has an agenda, and it’s fun to see Madeleine call her out, but I think her interest is the same as the one she told us about last week- research. Topher is relatively new to the DH, she’s probably one of the first to be let go with his new processes, or the first sleeper to be let go. Or the first let go at all b/c of ballard, could still be that the rest of them are all languishing in the attic.

This could be interesting if they’re really going to stay faithful to this character. madeleine is really different than the madeleine we saw in Needs. back in 1.08, amnesiac Madeleine panics unashamedly, and frankly calls what she’s doing a “defense mechanism,” suggesting psych training. that means that not only is she an educated person with prospects, but she, probably better than any of the other actives, had some idea of what she was signing up for. Now that she’s awake, if something does go wrong, she’ll know exactly what it is and not be able to do anything about it. Chilling. she’s the one of the reawakened Actives to smirk and unabashedly get into the unisex showers. doesn’t really square with the woman we see here. her taste is expensive, which is maybe to be expected now that she has money to spare, but her diction is impressive, she sounds thoughtful and though not upper class, very well educated (which she didn’t back in Needs, IIRC, she just sounded standard american then), and she’s still forthright, but calm enough to face down and decipher Adelle, which is no joke. none of the other actives, that we know of, are demonstrably different from themselves – Victor doesn’t know what happened in the military, but he acts like a soldier; Priya doesn’t know she was sold but she has an instinct to run; Caroline doesn’t remember her boyfriend or rossum but is instinctively terrified of losing her self. granted, the shock and utter weirdness of the siuation in Needs surely explains some of it, but not enough for my satisfaction. and really not enough to explain the CHANGE IN WARDROBE, OMG, SO MUCH BETTER. (the woman who chose that awful floral smock is not the same as the classy, neutral color, figure flattering lady we see in front of us. we saw this person being able to choose anything she wanted twice, and it was two totally different things.) “You’re happy?”/”I’m not sad.” There isn’t the agony over her daughter, but there isn’t the unselfconscious sense of mischief we got from November in Needs.

i go to sleep for five years, i wake up without pain…that is not how grief works, she should have woken up still freaked. Especially since Madeleine told us at the end of Omega that it didn’t feel like any time had passed. After all that happened to November, she wouldn’t wake up feeling like she’d even had a good night’s sleep, she would wake up, get her bearings in the chair, and have to remember what happened to Katie, those awful couple of minutes every morning of grief. She should not be okay. Not by a long shot.
It took reading meloukhia’s excellent review (hey you guys! read Meloukhia’s reviews! Also her blog, which is smart and fun) to remind me of the intentional contrast of Echo, the imprinted mother, with Madeleine, the wiped mother. But I’m going to go in a different direction from her take on it (that the writers dropped the ball, and in an insulting way no less) and say that I think this is another huge goddamn red flag that something is up with Madeleine-November. I mean, what did we gain from her showing up, besides lots of squealing that Miracle is back? Paul offered Echo the choice of a clean wipe, and, uh….in case we forgot, Adelle got a haircut? I don’t buy it. We certainly didn’t get closure for Paul on the Mellie issue, and they certainly didn’t need to bring back a former Active just to say “look, a normal person!” They didn’t need Madeleine to bring us back to drama in the DH to break up the meh-ness of the assignment – there’s always something going wrong in the DH. We have “some things can’t be erased! Like parenthood!” happening within minutes of “la la la, my kid died HORRIBLY and to me it feels like five minutes ago, but hey handsome feller, check out my NEW BLAZER!” That would only be oversight on a fundamentally shallow show, and I don’t think there are a lot of us who really think taht DH is that. The show is quite loudly telling us that Something Is Wrong with Madeleine.
The rest of the Dollhouse were pretty interesting tonight, too. Not enough Adelle, but interestingly, this i the second time in a row we’ve seen her get personally invested in someone’s relationship, in this case, the client’ with the son. Unlinke the Mellie confrontation during Vows – hm, is that why Adelle involved herself personally in getting Mellie back? Maybe when she was masking her Sekrit Plan to Paul in episode one, she was telling us her plan for him – she wants to find out if genuine love can exist between an active with the real personality and a past client. NOW WHY WOULD SHE WANT TO KNOW THAT. I like it.
The Ballard/Topher dynamic is much more enjoyable than the Boyd/Topher dynamic. Ballard is learning how Topher thinks and what he can do, and since he’s committed and tweaked his moral compass a bit (protect the girl right now, rather than save her forever) he can go with it. The absence of Boyd is, as far as I am concerned, a serious plus for this episode, about as much as the further development of Ballard.

however, in his quest for knowledge, we see paul making a huge mistake – he forgets that you can’t trust the DH. it seems like he wants so badly for Madeleine not to have been victimized – because then of course he’s not a predator – that he totally overlooks the possibility that she’s not okay, that there’s been some alteration to Madeleine, that she could start glitching any day now.

Since when is “finding us” the same as “bringing down the dollhouse”? Hey, Paul, it’s not! Even when he’s trying to be selfless – and yes, he’s being foolish and not considering all possibilities, but he’s listening and learning and not making decisions for her, which for Paul is an improvement even though I devoutly hope it’s not the end of the road – he’s still being selfish and reflecting his own desires onto her. She could just want to get herself and her friends the hell out of there and not care what happened to them, but he assumes his goals are the same as hers. He’s correct in this instance, but it’s still a huge unwarranted presumption, and he can’t afford to operate without making that distinction.

“You’re not real.” I would be a little more tactful to the lady with the KNIFE and my BABY. As in, I would lie. But it’s a nice bookend to Lars’ “you’re not real” back in Omega. As is Echo, having escaped from the chair and holding a knife. It is really, really a shame about the f-ed up metaphor. Because this is really creepy, intriguing framing, with the Echo-Alpha parallels continuing even after she’s tried to throw him out of her head.

I enjoy Paul (as a character, he is still a creeper) better in this episode than I have…probably ever, but definitely since the first few episodes. He’s treating the chair like he treated the Dollhouse and the leads about Caroline – with this horrified fascination that’s going to bring him down. You can see from the moment the camera hits him that he wants to get in himself “just to understand.” He’s trying to learn. He wants to understand. his conversation with Madeleine is respectful – he wants to learn about her, and he listens, and he processes that to try as best he can to give echo a choice. he sits in the chair. he talks to topher. explain it to me. This man I can buy as not just an investigator, but a good one, the one that almost got to the Dollhouse and had to be stopped by Dominic.

It’s not a coincidence that we see him talking to topher at the beginning. And how much fun to see Topher and Ballard talk shop. Less fun that “shop” is Echo, is a girl to be saved to ballard, and a lab rat to topher – she’s all they have in common and they’re treating her like clients, celebrating that which isn’t uniquely her. topher’s just learned that too much knowledge can be dangerous, and now paul, seeking knowledge goes further down the rabbit hole. saunders-whiskey and november-madeleine are crossing each other on one set of paths, and topher and ballard are crossing each other on another.

The comparisons between the episode in and out of the Dollhouse of course make great sense, but there’s also a lot to be learned when comparing to last week’s episode, where Whiskey chose to be her programmed self (at least for now) and we think Madeleine, through Ballard’s choice, seems to be herself, but we have good reason to doubt her.
i know it’s the most obvious route, but i’m just dying for the blank Alpha-style package for Perrin to be from Saunders. It would be a nice echo (HAHA GEDDIT?) of Alpha’s impact on her life to have her behaving like him, though obviously sans violent sociopathy, and would really bring the soft psychology of the show home. This wouldn’t be some prgramming error, this would be a person cracking under the weight of an identity nightmare – or OMG, choosing a side and creating alliances not with the dollhouse - which is far more interesting. As for the senator himself, this is a revenge thing, I trust this senator way more than I ever trusted Ballard. It’s not all idealism with him. Ballard wanted to Show that Might Makes Right. The Senator wants to bring someone down, and I like that. I know we’re supposed to think the source at the NSA was Dom, but that’s exactly the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing.

so, okay. i enjoyed most of the episode while i was watching it – i am not crazy about contrived suspense, even if done well, like it was here – t’s too obvious and uncomfortable wht’s going on in the engagement. i don’t like it and i don’t like watching it. it’s well done enough to know that we’re feeling her fear even though we know it’s futile. I have to say, I loved Emily’s reaction to the creepy black man and the huge man following her. Because those things are scary. It’s something that a normal active shouldn’t have ever picked up on.But reflecting on it, the section in the DH was telling us a lot and setting up some interesting relationships. This episode isn’t filler, by a long shot, like 4 and 10, it’s more a layer that will give us some interesting things to chew on in the next few episodes.

Deep Thoughts

It says something nice about Topher’s chairside manner that he speaks to Madeleine in pretty much the same way as he speaks to the Dolls and the personalities he’s created. Something nice, or it’s another hint.
Dear Topher: I am practically lactating looking at that baby. It can’t have been that hard.
Feelings on how there hasn’t been any “prviously on DH?” It looks like the writers got a little more dependent on those extra seven minutes than they said they did, because these episodes are pretty layered and based on things that came before, they’re going to have to start giving up those couple of minutes soon.
One more time, folks, they learned how to dress Miracle! It’s a….wonderful and surprising event we never expected! Here’s to having size 6’s and 8’s on the teevee…um…for body diversity!
“Instinct” does not take one from thinking cars are voice controlled to knowing how to drive.
Professor Brink, I have a question. Aren’t glands controlled by the brain? In which case, you just did what you always do? I kind of think making Echo visually impaired or blind is more of what they’re boasting about now. But seriously folks, anyone who can explain that to me gets a cookie.
Neat call-back to Stage Fright, with Sierra in the field as her second.

pocochina — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:01:01 +0000

K. I had no stake in the NOW election. I had no preference for one candidate or sslate over another. I have no bones to pick or excessive wild love for any supporters of either candidate. That said, I do have a stake in the state of political feminism in the US, and an even bigger iinteres in my own ego and my growing annoyance with the Third Wave. So.

This whole nonsense started in teh run0up to the election. A writer at Salon’s Broadsheet, I shit you not, suggested that Lyles was the better candidate because NOW’s website isn’t cute enough for her. Lest you think this is a total non-sequitur, a Mad Libs approach to journalism, written in a glamorous haze of booze and pills, fret not. See, the website content and design are strictuly and directly under the control of the president of a large organization, which means the exact sill set of the president of NO will dictate the website’s layout and content. Likewise, it is a given that knowledge and ability regarding website layout are directly inversely correlated with age. Both of these assumptions are flagrantly stupid, one is deeply bigoted in that it projects its own level of stupidity onto older women strictly because they are older, and the assumption that the reader (that’s us!) will share that stupidity and bigotry is shocking.

If only the Salon stupidity were happening in a vacuum, it’d be pretty easy to dismiss. But no. I really hope y’all were spared the excreable AP article interviewing, among other pretty, well known, media friendly feminists, Jessica Valenti. Jessica (paraphrased and then quoted by AP, so hopefully this isn’t what she meant) “says her contemporaries would be far more excited if Lyles triumphs over O’Neill.” Will we? She helpfully explains why we – that “we,” beloved f-list, includes me and most of you – feel that way in the following paragraphs. Some people think NOW is 70s feminism, which is self-evidently “white middle-class feminism.” Way to erase huge numbers of 70s feminists who don’t fit that description – all in the name of inclusion! – while perpetuating a myth about feminism. Give us what we want, older feminists, or we’ll trash-talk you and crap on your achievements, which directly benefit us, if we even deign to acknowledge you existed in the first place! I am not against historical honesty about feminism, or against critique where critique is relevant and warranted. On the contrary, I support it wholeheartedly. What I am against is the use of harmful, broad-brush stereotyping in the interests of a personal campaign. There’s a huge difference between “I feel X Candidate cares deeply about and is most qualified to address the interests of my group” and “MY GROUP THINKS that HER GROUP SUX. Isn’t it great that my group reinforces your existing perception of her group? Isn’t it just self-evident that her group sux?” This is the languge of the backlash – older feminists are self-evidently wrong and embarrassing, and even if they aren’t, that perception isn’t worth challenging, not even among ourselves.

She then goes on to blithely assert that we Awesome Young Things are more interested in smaller, youth led groups (because what, once the director of an org hits middle age, her employees spontaneously reproduce until they become large national groups?), implying that NOW, by its definition a national organization, whwich has always had a broad advocacy agenda, should have more in common with small, targeted, shoetring-operations because those organizations are inherently better and appela more to youth. this strikes me as a classic case of shooting the messenger, of blamming the doctor for your cold. NOW is a political, broad based or ganization focused on the most basic of feminist battles because those bttles haven’t been won yet. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for smaller organizations – there’s not moral infereioroty or superiority in specilaization or general practice because we need both, despearately. It means tht a ntional organization election is about a large national organization. Do young feminists not feel like making that distinction? Do our respect and support bottom out so quickly that we get support fatigue after expressing enthusiasm for one organization alone?

It’s a bit misleading of Young Feminists (TM) to tell us tht our youth shsould be a ticket to anything . Not just becuse it’s ageist, though that should be reason enough, but also because most of us won’t be media feminists, pro athletes, or presidential candidates. Youth isn’t a career bonus for most of uss because we’ll have more experience and expertise when ere older, not now tht e’re younger. Trusts me, I get how frustrating this is. I’l be looking for aob next year and curing all those more experienced wowmen ahead of me for every position. It’s tough enough to get wommen’s expertise recognized, ever. Older wome are mos who fce enough crap in the workplace, here they still need to ork tice as hard to be considered half as good and not get paid as much.

e need to start recognizing youth privilege. Where you at least have a prayer of having clothing and media reflect your attractiveness. here you’re a valued marketing demographic, and thus, worth attention in the mainstream culture. You don’t have to think something is good or just to gain privilege from it. Where you don’t yet, in many cases, make less money than your male peers. Where you’re of childbearing age, which sucks in our culture, but at least organized feminism is spending a huge amount of its time protecting your rights through this time (even as you malign its myopic fixation on reproductive rights). My nae is P, and I have cis, het, middle-class, well-educated, and youth privileges.

Much was made of Lyles’ race, conflated with her youth. I really recommend checking in with BA on this one – if you assume that this generation of feminists of color are the only feminists of color, or the only ones that matter, enough that you can and should entirely ignore the history of NOW and the feminist movement, you’re saying those other WOC don’t matter. You’re erasing them in the name of speaking for them, and in order to support your own ageism. It’s appalling, and it’s factually wrong. It perpetuates the myths – rooted somewhat in history and also in misogynist anti-feminist propaganda – that feminism is a white women’s country club. It also strikes me as deeply appropriative to pretend that young white folks invented inclusiveness.

I really wanted to ignore the whole “2008 Primary II” vibe everyone kept drawing, based solely on the fact that Lyles is Young, Black, and Hip while O’Neill is an Old White Harpy, but it’s too fucking insulting to Lyles to let it pass. For the hundred thousandth fucking time, there were substantive differences during the primary, often on feminist issues. Just because they ere sometimes nuanced and even once in a while required a shred of actual critical thought – apparently we’d rather you kids not try this at home – does not mean they weren’t there. This really was a conflict of style, and while style matters sometimes, it’s shallow-minded and ultimately harmful to conflate it with substance. Not to mention, it’s extraordinarily reductive and offensive to boil Lyles down to her racial identity, pretending her Blackness erases her gender, particularly in order to compare her to someone who fails on feminist and LGBTQ issues.

Being young isn’t an automatic merit unless we’re going to get in the habit of attributing merit to characteristics people don’t choose. It’s not even a “respect your elders” thing, not that that’s inherently bad. It’s a “refrain from attributing merit based on inherent and unchosen personal attributes” thing. Aren’t we against arbitrarily privileging some people over others? Even when those privileges are temporarily useful to us? And I do mean temporarily, because I devoutly hope that we Awesome Young Things will eventually be middle aged and old. And since I don’t reasonably foresee, barring (more severe) mental illness, losing the ability to engage with the outside world, but rather collecting more experience and knowledge, I choose to extend that hope and respect to omen who want the same things I do.

I feel like this ageism is conscious stereotype-defying to the point of stereotype-reinforcing. We spend an awful lot of time bending over backwards to show that we’re not, really, really not the stereotype of feminism! The age one showing up here is particularly pernicious because it’s not just meant to put us on the defensive, it’s meant to try to get us to reject our brightest, most experienced activists who (by virtue of already not soothing the kyriarchy with their mere appearances and collective fecundity) have less to lose and more to gain. So when we perpetuate the idea that feminism is (a) largely older women and (b) shouldn’t be, we’re actively helping the backlash along. I’d rather not.

There’s a pernicious “us versus them” vibe to the reporting of this whole thing, too. For instance, the bizarre allegation that “Palin people” somehow infiltrated NOW and lined up, zombie-like, behind the anti-Obama seems to be, in fact, bizarre, getting mindless repetition and linkage (most notably from Feministing – twice – and somewhat surprisingly, Shakesville) without, well, substantiation. I was alarmed at first – Palin people? Anti-choicers? in NOW? – but when I kept looking, I could only find the allegation, not the reasons behind it. Did Palin people (notice the failure of the original post to even use the word “supporters” which would imply thought on the part of these sleazy Republican moles) swing the NOW election to a pro-choice, anti-conscience-clause DV survivor? It sounded kind of irrational, but I suppose as long as you put a question mark on it, it’s okay. Maybe there was a bit of unintended conflation on the original author’s part – she talked in the first half of the blog post about her reactions to the outcome of the election, and then in the econd part about conversations she had with people about the inclusion of anti-choice feminists in the organization, making it look that these two things are the same topic when they may not in fact even be. But I couldn’t get my hands on a more detailed report until my favorite phantom feminist (pheminist?) posted her reflections on the NOW conference. Dr. VS isn’t any more an unbiased source than all the Lyles supporters above – she was enthusiastic about her support for O’Neill and explicit bout her reasons for it – but she did have enough respect for her readers to give us details. As I have to admit I was starting to suspect, “Palin people” actually meant “Hillary supporters, Obama critics, and people who were frustrated about sexism against Gov Palin, along with one actual Palin supporter who is a pro-choice feminist Democrat but followed her informed feminist conscience, all rolled into one convenient ball of morally reprehensible female nastiness.” Exaggerations in the wake of disappointment are to be expected, and disappointment in loss is normal. Perpetuating what amounts to character assassination is reprehensible. There was, as far as I can tell (and again, the only detailed description I can find is coming from a pro-O’Neill source), no anti-choice contingency at the NOW convention, and saying otherwise is a laughable effort to beat other feminists with the Roe stick, for electing a pro-choice president of NOW. But, you know, they voted for the old lady, the old white lady, clearly they don’t care what other people think of them, so they must be evil, and we can say what we’d like.

You know what? Those Roberts people sure are sore losers! After all, if Lyles is clearly Obama, her supporters are all Obama-syncophants, and since Obama once failed to criticize John Roberts, all Lyles supporters, by their own logic, LURVE John Roberts. Did Roberts people infiltrate NOW and almost steal the presidency from Terry O’Neill? I have no proof, and in fact only the sketchiest of reasons to even say that, and it’s insulting and highly inflammatory, so I’ll just ASK WHAT YOU FOLKS THINK. ASK ALL OF YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS. Then ask them again, just in case you missed it, to make sure they and you know these folks are OUT THERE TAKIN OVER UR FEMINIZM. If you even have any friends, you grumpy, house-bound, internet-illiterate, Second Wave old Ginsberg-huggers. FEELS TRUTHY TO ME.

I’m being really harsh here, more harsh than I think I’ve ever been on any identified group of feminists. Not because I haven’t had serious disagreements with feminists before, but because I really do think that the enemy is out there, not in here. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves at my feminist peers, that we spend so long eating our own, and then I don’t want to contribute to the problem by criticizing people I respect. But I didn’t bring this bullshit into the public, always salivating over a feminist catfight (which means inevitably that we’re spending that much less time doing untoward things like Challenging Teh Menz) and I feel like by not saying anything, I’m contributing to a problem that’s bothered me for a while and that is directly harming women who I deeply respect. Moreover, I’m fucking insulted. How lazy, uninvolved, and deeply fucking selfish do these self-appointed advocates of young feminists think I am, that I need someone who soothes my fucking ego by being just! like! me! in charge of every fucking thing? How stupid would I have to be to stop caring about contraception and equal pay and pregnancy discrimination just because the head of NOW didn’t meet some arbitrary age barrier? If I were considering membership in NOW but was afraid I wasn’t represented, would I really be so resistant to thorough research that I would look no further than the president, and ignore the diversity of the people she’s chosen as the most effective and qualified folks to execute her vision? On the one hand, I hate to hold feminists up to a higher standard than everyone else because feminism about equality and all, but on the other hand, being a feminist in a patriarchal society means you have at least some tools and desire to challenge harmful preconceptions. Maybe not stopping at the ones that benefit us personally might not be the worst fucking thing in the world?

It’s the dangers of personalizing somemthing like this, you kno? From all accounts – even the wildly obnoxious ones – the to candidates were pretty much the smame. The two candidates had orked inthe samem position at different times, and emphasized technological outreach. And I have no problem with people who decided to support one andidate over the other, even if it’s for dumb reasons like “this person is my friend.” That’s how small scale politics work, and i don’t think wome are any different than other standard-issue humans in that respect. I am grateful for politcally savvy careerist feminists. I have a problem with people who then decide that their small loyalties are representitive of some Epic Fucking Struggle between good and evil. I then especially care when “evil” becomes either a false allegation (the “antichoice” nonsense) or something that’s FUCKING NOT EVIL (age).

Note: My computer is being slow and I have family in ton this weekend, so I’ll be updating with links and typo checks throughout the night (you guys should see my keyboard, it’s half blank silver squares). In the meantime, the only really comprehenisive coverage I’ve found is at Reclusive Leftist. If anyone knows anything more about the NOW election, I’d really appreciate dropping a link in the comments.

DH – Briar Rose

pocochina — Sat, 02 May 2009 18:31:00 +0000

My God. So I did have my mind duly blown this weekend (the few, the proud, the unspoiled!), and I meant to bang out an essay with Serious Thoughts, but it’s still exams, so I’ve been busy, trying to be my best. (As I write this, I cut myself off almost an hour ago and my sleeping pills are strtingg to kick in, so it’s going to be a sad, sad bullet-list, perhaps with humourous flailings.)

Epic Paul thoughts. More Paul thoughts than EVAH BEFORE, and not justs about what he’ll decide at the end. His serial killer/Perfect Mind wall is so perfect – he’s on the wrong side of the law, and of himself. I’d have hated Paul for dumping Mellie two weeks ago. but this is the right thing. Except it’s selfish – he has no reaon to believe tht they wown’t kill a Doll who fails at her mission. I don’t think you can kill the Doll personalities per se, but you can kill the body the personality is in, and the person who actually owns that body. “You need to make ssure you’er laying the blamme where it deserves to be” – Paul isn’t a DH client the way he waants to blame himself for being. (There’s an argument about whether Paul was raping Mellie the same as any other Dollhouse client – this is one argument about the show that I’m going to say is murky, and the most disturbing of all in a lot of ways. Paul has every reason to believe November when she tells him the DH will kill him if they don’t maintain the illusion. If you were to apply ordinary crimina law – if this were the crime that took the DH down – this would be sexual assault by the House, or maybe the informant, on both Mellie and Paul. Doing something under threat of your life and other people’s in’t choosing to do it the way the folks who seek out the DH do, legally or morally. But Paul’s intentions are totally different – he’s using the threat as a wa to justify using Mellie. Doesn’t erase the crime of the Dollhouse in any way, but it does make him a quintessential Dollhouse client in one way – she has a thing he needs, and he can’t get it from anyone else. But Paul’s black-and-white thinking, which has probably kept him from becoming a bad guy in any number of situations, is a real liability to him here.
Both a nice diversion (from Victor, the eventual victim) and a great way to set up the creeping doom in what could’ve been a silly episode - Mellie’s “can’t yo usee this is killing me” freaked me out well before we see her crying on the bridge (and I loved that trick trick, going straight from Mellie crying on the bridge to insane unstable Paul about to go under one) to Sierra getting sent to be a pawn in Alpha’s game.
As furious as I am at him for being more worried about Caroline than Mellie, I’m glad they at least made it make sense – this is Alpha’s doing. And it’s deeply disturbing that you don’t need to hop into the chair for the Dollhouse to control your actions and feelings.
WASH! WASH WASH WASH.
“You’re not weak if someone helps you.” This is great message, and it’s something that’s going to be really important if we’re going to have this story without some serious victim-blaming.
I’m torn about this “rogue good guy uses cop skills to operate beyond those pesky orders.” Because while it fits ithin the story – everyone is corruptible, and lots of people together are exponentially corruptible – as a law student it makes my skin crawl. There’s a reason we didn’t stay the wild wild west, and its because of all the dying. But Paul’s good guy status is spretty compromised right now (as is his sane guy status) so it makes a little more sense. I totally missed the (in retrospect obvious) reveal largely because I was focusing on gray-and-crazy Paul, who’s not a red herring – he really is losing his sanity and moral center – but is the perfect distraction.
“Paul using the dEA off-duty, the DH using the FBI to find their own fuckups – authority will always be misused, not just by the Dollhouse.
Was making Caroline special from all the other dolls jjust a way to make Paul a fucking idiot? It works, it justs doesn’t make sense with the guy ten episodes ago who clung onto the stupid case because he knew it would be wrong to give up. It does, however, make sense with Alpha, who knows how to push anyone’s buttons
This is Topher as victim three episodes in the last four – Echo shooting at him, Dom hoving hi into the chair, and no Paul taering him. God, he’s helpless
DONT YOU HURT DR FRED PAUL. I love that, the creepy horror movie shot of the small lady, but it’s not the Evol Serial Killer’s POV, it’s the FBI. Until you find out it is the Evol, or at least Ax Crazy, Serial Killer’s POV.
Topher even looks like this guy a little. Give him a proble, and he’s into solving it; give him a cool new toy, he’l play ith it; take him out of his element, he’s totally fucked.
How does he know Echo isn’t a sleeper? For tht matter, we don’t know Echo isn’t a sleeper, though the fac thaat she keeps getting imprinted with useful combat skillz suggests that she isn’t.
I want to see Boyd and Paul whale on each other for a while. I don’t even care who wins. They both need to be hit a lot.
The perfect distraction. Oh, Alpha. Oh God.
That was perfect casting and perfect acting for Alpha. Both becauses I sw Alan Tudyk and thought “Wash! Crazy weed guy! Hee!” but also because he was so perfect and vulnerable and nutty. That’s exactly what Dude Who Got Killed was like. Reality is misleading.
wow. sos the little girl who is daaged – by someone ho piped her out – is carrying around knives nd echo tells her to think of herself as the prince. how did topher get a brain scan of the little girl? they must have access to a hospital somewhere.
this is delicious. paul’s greyness really is there. it’s a red herring, but it’s not just a red herring.
i really like ho hard theyr’e tackling the self-reliance orthodoxy that i was going to be nervous about (becuse, after all, it would have to be something deeply essentialist – some people justs don’t deserve saving) – Good Susan explains that if you’re victim it’s not your fucking fault – but all saveage has ome from dubious or downriht evil quarters. Paul is totally unstable. Good Susan is a fake. Alpha is Alpha. Mellie didn’t ssave herself back in Man on the Street, her erassure of self at the hands of the Dollhouse did.
from Alpha to the Prince to Ballard; fromm the King and Queen (who were intermediaaries who helped cause the problem) to Ivy and Topher.
who caught the wedding ring on November’s handler? how do you join the Dollhouse and have a spouse?
VICTOR BETTER NOT DIE. We only see the cuts on Victor’s face, not the chest and shoulder large veins that we saw in the autopsy room, so I’m holding out hope. He’s not bleeding much at all, come to think of it. There’s two moments I scanned back and watched a couple of times, one being the Alpha reveal and the other being Enver playing Dominic. Does Alpha know Dom was Attic’d and wants to freak them out? And also, ENVER WHERE YOUR FAN CLUB AT? I wish to join. Victor is an amazing actor – it’s hard enough to create a character, but to convince us he’s a character we know, and who he looks nothing like? Very impressive. At first I was wondering why, the whole thing seemed enjoyable but unnecessary, but on second watch (a) it’s a reminder that tough the Dominic disk contains several gigabytes of douchenozzle, he was right about Alpha and (maybe, we don’t know yet) Echo, (b) it’s a two-parter; the ability to resurrect Dom into a Doll could be useful and could be catastrophic and (c) that skin-crawly feeling when you wonder what Adele was thinking when she leaned so close to Dom-in-Victor.
Alpha is such a great villain because he’s not just created by the DH, he’s the logical extension of it. he is as cold as ice – he should be freaking out being back in the dollhouse. i wonder if they found themselves a sociopath, or if they made him that way
Also, his plan is great. Get a chip in the chair. Alpha could be the source of all Echo’s consciousness – I really, really hope that doesn’t happen (because it would mean being Irresistably Sexy to the Knife Wielding Lunatic is what gives her a soul – not cool). Make Paul as obsessed with Caroline as he is, build a loose cannon with a gun and combat training let the Dollhouse get him fired, then freak him the hell out with Mellie. get twitchy so the face hiding isn’t suspicious.
“they’re not people”/”i’m not good with that sentence, either” Alpha’s goal doesn’t need to be bringing down the Dollhouse (getting Echo and some sadistic kicks might well be enough for him) but he could just as well be a sociopathic renegade doing what Paul thinks he’s doing.
who did Alpha imprint her with? did he make her composite too? then they’re both mega-doms, how’s that going to work?
Stupid Pills, I swear to God. In the lasagne. Stupid lasagne. What, he was going to shoot his way out of the Dollhouse with a revolver? Is he suicidal? Packing his things, saying goodbye to Mellie, and going underequipped on an insane mission. And he’s fucked up his life and is about to get an offer he really can’t refuse. Hey, crazy guy who’s gonna get everyone killed! You justs called out the moral bullshit! Too bad you’re the crzy guy who’s onna get everyone killed.
Um. “Whiskey” is in the NATO alphabet. Which Dominic yells when Saunders comes at him. “He wants a drink instead”? That’s an awkward, not-funny, not-useful line. And we didn’t see her react to the drugs in Echoes, though she rationally should’ve been the first person on the scene, especially because she never leaves. Is this what’s ahead for now-damaged Victor? Topher’s not looking too good and we know he’s made a personality not unlike himself and left it lying around. On the other hand, Dominic in Victor freaks Topher the hell out, but Topher knew Saunders in the Target flashback, and he seems perfectly comfy with Dr. Whiskey Saunders. So what gives?
Ah, Boyd. Boyd is the only security person walking around? Like I aid. Not good at his job. “They’d hunt you down?” No, big guy, you’d hunt them down. It’s your job. He thinks security = protection. Boyd is getting swallowed alaready – he’s acting as if you can actually consent to what they do, already making Topher’s rationalizations. He refers to a fellow cop’s attempt to enforce the law as a crime.
there are so many awesome potential outcomes. Echo and Alpha go apeshit together? or do they both get caught and wiped AND THEN WE GET WASH FOREVER? Ballard becomes a Doll. Ballard becomes a Doll and Loomis goes after him (this would let us see more of Loomis which would be AWESOME.)

Miscellaneous thoughts

The Briar Rose mission felt like a Saunders thing. Well done, Topher. And then. It’s a quiet night.” Oh, Topher. I was all hating you less for a few minutes there.
It’s not an unsafe assumption that Alpha’s handler is dead – but at the same time, we don’t know what stuck and what didn’t – “every personality” could mean including the Doll self, with the trust imprint.
this is probably the nearest DH to the global headquarters – there aren’t any megatropolises between LA and Tucson.
yet another pointless assignment for sierra – yeah, she confirms it was alpha, but she’ sent on alpha’s wild goose chase instead of dominic’s.
You know, they did give Alpha knife skills and shit, but how could they possibly fail to shoot him? Unless he got Titanium Supplements in his treatments, I’m pretty sure that’d work.

Deep Thoughts

Said by a ridiculous person on a post at nnaylime’s LJ: If it’s Wash I shall stop being scared of Alpha so I can laugh and laugh and laugh. Joke’s on you, uh, ridiculous person! Though, in a ridiculous way, he was my first Jossverse guess. WHICH MEANS I SO CALLED IT SHUT UP.
I even had stuff wrong from within the episode. My first “plot related thoughts” were, “hi homeless guy. This never ends well for you.”
How much fun do you think kEliza had being Cool Babysitter for a day?
WasAlan Tudyk always jaw droppingly hot?
Creepy as the Dollhouse normally is, when you spend days at a time on a cmpus of peple with that same expression on their faces, it’s totally fucked. Did I fall asleep?

Dollhouse – Needs

pocochina — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:35:25 +0000

I’m a woman! I have needs! Some of which involve not cracking open the outlining just yet.
first shot blondie and DeWitt, then Sierra and Victor, then Ninja Mellie. Will this be another Echo less than necesary story?
Echo and Paul! Ooooh, is this the personality coming through? is she yet again a sex worker? Ohmygod they sent her after him. No, this must be a dream. Yawn! No way dreams mean anything in a JW show. Maybe Ballard will walk around naked all the time now that he has no job. I’d be okay with that. “I have a thing she needs” is pretty hilarious; awkward enough to be Mal-worthy, even. Is “how did they know what we shared” Paul working out that the hit man might not necessarily have been after him? Neat look at the inside of Paul’s head – the sexual aspects of the DH are really what freak him out and fascinate him, and Mellie standing there reminds us that he’s unwittingly been a part of that part of it he loathes so much.
Good morning, Angels! Good morning, Adele!
Aw, I like that little smile between Echo and November.
Neat reminder right there at the beginning of Topher’s constant insistence that he’s not responsible; it’s not his fault, he has a Perfectly Good Explanation – maybe he has more of a conscience than he thinks. What’s creepy about Reed is that he’s totally right. Morally, he’s wrong. But they genuinely don’t know if Echo’s about to Alpha out (and, if we get the full five seasons, I suspect she will someday). And they’re now admitting Alpha is alive. Oh lord. Fucking with the DH software? HOW COULD THIS GO WRONG. Topher has them all on the same dose of sedatives and antipsychotics? This is not good. This I really, really know. Why is Topher even doing the medications and not Saunders? The DH has an interesting division of labor for an organization that has a doctor and a geeky tech boy. Saunders, I love you right now. That delicious, nasty “to our pets” is perfect. I’m surprised at the amount of dissent Boyd and Saunders feel okay expressing. Ivy continues to be mysteriously not there – so if Paul’s mysterious contact knows about the meeting, it’s not Ivy.
This is the first time we’ve seen female handlers. In general, a cool little look at the “behind the scenes” for the DH, especially giving us the perspective that really, it’s been at most a couple of months since Alpha. We assume the strangeness is restricted to the star and her nearest circle, but really, DeWitt is right, the whole house is out of balance. Sierra (and, hence, Victor) wouldn’t be out of joint if Alpha hadn’t killed the previous handler; November wouldn’t even be back there if Alpha hadn’t given Paul the lead on Caroline’s identity. So how much does Echo’s situation owe to Alpha?
Hi, Caroline! Yes, you really are as totally fucked as you think you are. Whose voice is telling Caroline to wake up? Doesn’t sound like Caroline, DeWitt or Saunders – necessary for the ep to retain its suspense, but a mystery nonetheless. Then again, that doesn’t even need to be Caroline. Or whoever the others were. It turns out that it was, but it’s a plot choice, not an assumption we need to make. Funny that her first thought was “lab rats” – the idea of experimenting on people freaks her out even when she has no reason to think it’s happening to anyone, let alone to her.
So at least one of them might be paranoid or crazy, and thus unable to consent. Sierra wants to run, and her desire to run and theory of a “deranged millionaire serial killer” makes sense by the end of the episode, even if they’re nonsequiturs at the beginning. Victor takes charge. Mellie assumes the best, and both feels as if she should, and knows how to, explain her behavior. She’s emotionally pretty in tune – “I think they like it here.” In fact, it’s not just Caroline that gets personalities which line up with her own in a handful of ways (adventurous, spunky, hotheaded) we’ve seen Secret Agent Victor, and Mellie isn’t all that different from November – sensual, confident, emotionally intelligent. Is this coming from the actors, or is it easier to put certain personalities in certain brains, because the original owners never really leave?
Does the bug in Paul’s apartment do anything besides throw him off the trail that Mellie may actually be a Doll? I suspect that thought has never sunk in on a conscious level.
My first thought on the doctor’s appointment was “Saunders catches on mighty quick to Echo’s new state of affairs” and her first reaction is to hide from the DH, not to do anything. She really does seem to be trying to help Echo get out – gives her the hint about the cameras.
“Men. They had guns. They took me away.” So some of them might have chosen, but not Sierra. How fucked would it be if a wiped Victor personality had been in charge of getting Sierra?
Anyone else notice how we cut from Victor and Sierra being all romantic to Echo and November all huddled together? Actually, there are a few parallels between Echo-November and Victor/Sierra. Not just the hiding in the clothes, but the way Echo and November look at each other in the morning, and Victor and Sierra look for each other at night. Maybe Mellie is right and Paul does have a sexual fascination with Caroline, and this is reminding us of Paul’s inner conflict within the Dollhouse?
Lord, they just put Mellie in the dowdiest dress. The normal sized actress dresses ugly and had a kid – no way anyone young and cute would dare to be less than lithe and sexay. Though, I do like that she’s the one who’s comfortable with the coed shower.
Who did Dominic call if the handlers don’t know she tried to escape? And really, no way laps and tai chi for six months prep anyone to beat the hell out of a handler. It feels weird to say this…but I want Echo to…..not kick ass sometimes. Again, it’s ass-kicking for the sake of ass-kicking, not because it’s consistent with the character or confounding our expectations. No reason she couldn’t have slipped through an empty room and grabbed a gun.
I love that Topher can geek out with a gun pointed at his head. But what the hell possesses him to be honest with her? “It’s like hypnosis.” Or, he could have just told her (possibly truthfully) that he was the only one who could restore her memories and set everyone free instead of giving her the satisfaction of knowing she’d scared him. He’s not good at being challenged, even if the challenge is coming from his overactive imagination (like two episodes ago when he insisted someone else was trying to steal his position).
Oh my God Sierra. And ew, he’s been hiring her. This is exactly what I mean about people who hire the Dolls specifically to get around consent – in Nolan’s case the lack of consent is a turn-on (“this’ll make it better”).
Caroline is dumb! You can’t make a difference just throwing yourself onto a sword. ‘Course, killing or wiping Topher would be the worst thing she could do – but getting in the chair for her memories alone is just as dumb. So really, finding Topher alone was a no-win situation, even more than breaking into Rossum. So she’s been prone to this for a while. As far as she knows he’s the only one who can fix her brain. Shooting the chair? Even dumber.
“We give them what they need.” Oh, Saunders. Oooh, and she’s the one to stem the awareness. And am I wrong, or did Saunders say she timed the sedative properly? Again. She seems to know more than Topher about psychology and psychiatry, so why is he handling the personalities and prescriptions? Saunders seems to think that she’s really saving them – and she probably is.
And Caroline is just as selfish as I thought she was. She knew who Paul was – that means she knew she had help, and had plenty of reason to know she’d need it, but she had to be the one to save everyone. She didn’t need everyone else to be free, she needed to be the one who did it. Not that Paul actually could have helped against an army of handlers and Blondie’s security guys, but she must know she can’t, either. And she sets up the worst possible outcome for the other Actives – out there without their memories or personalities, or the protection of the DH.
This episode does even more to blur the line between the Actives and their real personalities. The most pressing need can belong to the Active construct (Victor), the person before the construct (November and Sierra), or some combination thereof (who knows what Echo’s need would have been if she didn’t try to free everyone? The mountain house – maybe it’s her boyfriend’s place?). And it doesn’t look like Mike is a priority case, he just happened to be sharing a pod with them. That, combined with his odd paranoia, makes it seem like he was just healthy, attractive, and not putting up much of a fight, so they nabbed him.
Odd, too, Victor’s need isn’t just to get the girl. It’s to help Sierra as much as – no more – than just to get with her. He doesn’t just need closure, he needs her to have closure. Funny, usually the pretty girl is the one doing everything for lurve. In fact, the whole group is a gender inversion – how often do you see three women with vague and intense emotional desires, from revenge to justice to grief, with one man in love? And Sierra doesn’t just find closure when she confronts Nolan, she needs to choose to trust again, though her love is subsumed (to Saunders and Boyd) under her need for vengeance. How sad is it that we see them go to bed without Victor and Sierra looking at each other?
Funny that DeWitt didn’t even tell Topher what she was doing – he sounds surprised. I get not sharing with the handlers, but all DeWitt was doing here as putting Topher in danger (it’s not like he’d have put up a significant barrier to their escape in any place). It’s like DeWitt wanted to tell Caroline what she was doing. DeWitt seems to love challenging the Actives in any capacity – her face looks almost exactly like it does when she watched Mellie kill Hearn. Experimentation Topher and Saunders don’t know about? She also seems to be a little bit of a thrill-seeker, to set up this particular test when they’re playing with the electricity. Dominic hates the uncertainty, but DeWitt seems to need a little bit of it.
Boyd just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t seem to understand that doing the right thing (or what he conceives of the right thing) himself won’t, now or ever, make the Dollhouse a good, safe place. This starts with ep 3 when he won’t hear of someone else taking Echo out, but it really shows up during Man on the Street when he takes action against Hearn without telling DeWitt – he knows she wants the situation dealt with, since she takes action so quickly against Victor and his handler, he knows she’s duplicitious and would’ve gone along with his plan, but he had to be the only one doing the saving, regardless of if it was going to actually make things work out for the people he’s supposed to be helping (sound like anyone else we know?). Now we see him ragging on Saunders for the plan that probably saved Echo (along with Sierra, Victor, and November) from the Attic. He seems to be thinking he’s pissed that she was manipulative (more manipulative than exposing Sierra to another traumatic attempted rape and getting an innocent and confused Victor accused of rape? Questionable) but actually pissed that someone besides him protected Echo and made her happy. Boyd does not come off in a good light here. At least Saunders knows she’s making ethical compromises.
I liked this ep a lot – I was consistently guessing and surprised. I enjoyed the setup of finding out what’s going on in reverse. Nicely set up by The Target (and wasn’t that originally supposed to come later?) Potentially neat parallel between Connell/Alpha and DeWitt/Rossum.
We know more about DeWitt this time too – she’s seriously not fooling herself that she’s protecting people who wanted a break from their lives, or she never would have taken Sierra (unless, of course, Dominic was in charge of getting Sierra in, but I doubt he’s ever gone off on his own until the Echo situation). And we also know Caroline herself didn’t come to the Dollhouse to get away from any particular memories – though some of them, November specifically, may well have. It’s an especially needed jolt for us from last week, when we saw the staff, especially DeWitt and Dominic, being a bit softer and introspective. We know they know they’re wrong, and they’re the coldest bastards they’ve been yet. Dark. I like it. Also a really necessary episode – these actives couldn’t get much more aware without breaking out and ending the storyline. But it leaves us with Echo’s pressing need, whatever it was, unfulfilled.

Deep Thoughts

“I like pancakes.” “We’re all gonna die.” Heh. I’m liking real Victor.
Does Echo think Saunders is a friend and a prisoner because of the scars, because of what she says, or because of some instinct that says Saunders is good?
Who loves that we just heard her talk about her “right to choose”? Love it.
DeWitt and Caroline are totally right about each other – they make shitty decisions for other people.

poor people totally matter, except when they eat shit we don’t like

pocochina — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:48:20 +0000

Before I start, I want to say that generally, I really recommend Redstar’s (a former H1K compatriot) page at change.org, US Poverty. However, she’s taking some light-posting time, and in her sorta-absence, there have been some guest posts from those along the poverty activism spectrum, including a couple of writers on hunger issues. Now, I agree with the guest hunger bloggers that the poor should not have to eat unhealthy or less-healthy food. However, in two articles now, there’ve been some deeply judgmental (and implicitly, though not explicitly, anti-fat) statements about food available to the poor.

Hammond’s article describes a mixed reaction to seeing food bank employees turning away food. A mixed reaction. Now, I shouldn’t say that with such irritation – my reaction was “mixed” too, between fury and disgust. It’s important to remember, when talking about nutrition for the hungry, that not all the world is on a fucking diet. People need a certain caloric intake to live healthily – probably around 2000 calories for an adult, but for the working poor, especially those in jobs like retail or food service, where you’re on your feet all day, it could easily be higher – and, though I’m not a hunger expert, I think it’s probably safe to say that many of those depending on food banks don’t get that. So when we talk approvingly about deciding for the hungry that of course it’s right to substitute an apple which may (around 65 calories) or may not (exactly zero calories) even exist for a cupcake (around 250 calories, less for low-fat or mini cupcakes; more for larger ones) which definitely exists, it’s not just gallingly condescending, it’s deciding for the poor that they don’t need an entire 10% of their daily calorie intake – excuse me, their optimal intake, which they are almost certainly not getting – because we don’t approve of their sugar choices. Aside from which, yes, Virginia, there really is nutrutional value to fat. You need a certain amount of fat.* Those of us who can afford to choose our food without Very Concerned Helpers parceling it out are likely to get enough, and to be able to choose polyunsaturated veggie-based fat, but if you can’t, you can’t. To Hammond’s credit, there’s no explicit fat hate in his writing, but there’s plenty floating free in the comments, and you don’t have to be a friggin’ Conan Doyle creation to figure out what was behind the refusal of the pastries. And there’s absolutely no suggestion of a zero-sum choice given to the food bank workers – it’s not as if they could take, say, 100 items of food and decided that if something had to go, it should be the pastries. They could have taken more food for the hungry, and they chose not to. So Hammond’s rosy visions of of “kids munching on apples and carrots” are, almost assuredly, pipe dreams, gross distortions of the actual picture, which is growing children not munching enough, thus also permanently distorting their body chemistry.

This story goes to the RQ’s point about charity – it fuckin’ doesn’t work for long-term solutions. I’m not saying don’t give to food banks (if you can, totally! Even if it’s the DREADED CUPCAKES), or that it’s wrong somehow for poor people to take advantage of food banks, but that we won’t solve long-term nutritional issues with individual giving and decisions. It takes the power away from the individual person choosing her foods for the day, and puts it in the hands of a person who, likely, has never had to make those particular cost-benefit analyses. It’s not just that it’s offensive to the dignity of individuals, but it’s also perilous because theses decision-makers are a product of our systemically bigoted society. Poverty, hunger, malnourishment and the resulting health problems are structural issues. They require serious, structural solutions based on lots of rational thinkers with serious resources.

However, even when we do move up to large-scale policy changes, we still can’t stay away from condescending judgment about the food choices of the poor. Plotkin’s post, about the expansion in New York and Delaware of the WIC program to include fruits and vegetables, is right on in some instances, and painfully condescending in others. He talks equally approvingly about “adding fruit and vegetables” and “limiting access to high-calorie, high-fat foods such as processed fruit juice and cheese,” and there he loses me. If you’re stretching food stamps to feed an entire family, “high calorie” is not necessarily a bad thing. Again, if this is your only way to get several thousand calories a day on the tightest budget possible, you’re still going to not just want, but need, the option of calorie-dense foods. Aside from his goofy contention that juice is “high fat” (I realize I’ve spent more time than most people ever will searching for meaning in nutritional labels, but really, not a mistake to make if you want to make while establishing your Superior Nutritional Decisionmaker cred), he ignores some basic realities – if a box of macaroni and cheese feeds your kids for 50 cents, it’s still not an unreasonable choice in the face of the Librul Dood Sanctioned apple (a delicious and healthy snack, but no substitute for an actual dinner). Juice, even if undesirably HFCS-y, might be a cheap source of vitamins. Sugar can calm down kids with ADHD – valuable enough for any parent with a child who experiences ADHD, but maybe the only relief for a kid whose family Then, as in the previous article and comments, there’s some very concerned lecturing about how the poor folks need a nice white dude to teach them how to eat properly. The fact is, until a substantive amount of nutritious food is genuinely affordable, these musings about what the poor should and shouldn’t eat aren’t going to amount to more than privileged moralizing. He also buys into the panic-mongering about weight. For the hundred thousandth fucking time, weight and health are not synonymous. Even if they were, the article buys into the idea that poor kids’ weight and health is due just to the damn cheese and juice is simplistic and self-serving. Quoth Kate:

Poor people are a lot more likely to go through cycles of eating too few calories followed by bingeing — which, when it’s known as “dieting,” instead of “only being able to afford enough food sometimes” — has indeed been shown to make people fatter in the long run;

Plenty of poor people are getting at least the recommended amount of daily exercise at their jobs, but show up as “sedentary” in surveys that ask about how much people work out in their leisure time — i.e., the kind of time that someone working 2 or 3 physically demanding jobs probably doesn’t have;

In this country, African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately poor, and they also happen to be genetically predisposed to having higher weights than white people.

If you aren’t thinking about those three factors when you think about poverty and fatness — not to mention rigorously asking yourself what else you might be forgetting — you can fuck right off, as far as I’m concerned. But having said that, of course I’m all for making nutritious food and safe exercise opportunities more available to poor people — not to mention, oh, the time to cook fresh foods and exercise (outside of work) that comes with making a living wage while working a reasonable number of hours.

Not to mention the utter cruelty of this to children growing up already pre-disposed to eating disorders. Contrary to popular opinion, and certainly to the ignorance of the bloggers in question, the girl-children growing up in poverty are still susceptible to eating disorders, and almost definitely do not have access to the mental health resources needed to overcome an ED. How cruel it is to reinforce unhealthy good food/bad food dichotomies with the stamp of the fucking government, and how thoughtless to praise such an action without even considering this near-guaranteed consequence.

In other words, adding fruit, veggie, whole grain, and soy choices to food assistance programs is surely necessary to making those nutritional benefits available to the poor, but it’s not close to sufficient. It’s not an equal swap between three apples and one pound of pasta, even though they’ll both cost roughly the same thing. And making food available to the poor isn’t an either-or, where we get to sit down and decide what they should and shouldn’t eat, so we don’t have to think about poor people daring to eat food of which we disapprove. There should be more food available to the poor. Food and poverty is complicated, I’ll give the bloggers that, and everyone deserves all the healthy food they need, and the choice between different degrees of healthy and unhealthy food. We as a country need to do a lot better on affordable nutrition and adequate living standard for everyone. What poor folks don’t deserve is more insult to their dignity and decision making skills by their supposed allies.

I’ll never forget when #8, in going over my diet for potential sleep problem triggers, told me I probably wasn’t getting enough fat and should eat more potatoes. I think I stared at her cross-eyed for a few seconds before I started having dreamy fantasies about the french fries I was going to start eating again. Didn’t help the sleep like they were supposed to, but on the other hand….mmm, fries. Clearly these men do not approve of #8 and her evil quest to help people sleep.

Dollhouse – True Believer

pocochina — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 04:40:45 +0000

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that’s a lot from previous personalities on the “previously on.” To give us an idea of Echo on the job? I like Adele’s voiceover better.
This person seems to be a longstanding client who understands the dollhouse. Hey, buddy, “family values” and “women’s issues” don’t jibe, ever. And he’s… a fed? A federal prosecutor? No, a SENATOR. From Arizona? Heh. So the Dollhouse is at least a regional operation (at least this dollhouse is, there could be more), and at least some influential people know about it. And of course they can utterly destroy him if he speaks up – they can just whip up a sex worker with an embarassing story. So is Ballard right in the pilot that someone important is keeping him away from it, or is he stymied by actives and not doing a very good job? I suppose a bit of both.
Dr Fred! Yay! Surgery? WTF? I’d thought the personality would be blind, not Echo herself. I wonder if they put the visual impairment into the personality as well? I guess they’d have to, for her to have the childhood backstory.
Is Helo setting someone up with drugs? Federal agents know better than to tell people where to bring “the drugs.” They’ll either say “it” or “the vicoden” or “the sweet, sweet seeds of the flowers of the Lord” or something. Mellie a) has serious boobs and b) is awfully curious.
Aww Victor! Is it wrong that I just think it’s kind of sweet? How has this not happened before? Topher can short circuit physiological reactions to sexual stimuli? (/Brennan.) My point being, that’s not something that happens from memory or personality. Love is complicated, but erections come from the bison part of the brain. Now if Sierra wasn’t his type (if we even have innate types) but he was socialized into thinking she was sexy, that could be different. And why, why are we conflating “sexuality” with “erections”? Oh, right, Topher.
Dr. Fred is just too precious. Sure, we pull people off the street and erase their free will, but nobody here would do anything so evil as to ignore a health and safety memo! Land sakes! I am so deeply intrigued by what her motivations are. She does treat the Dolls ethically and seems like a competent doctor, and with at least some grasp on psychiatry. Does she have some personal reason to want to be able to experiment on people? Speaking of, I wonder if the Dollhouse is at the cutting edge of most experimental surgery?
Repeated imprints are a thing? If it sinks in to the Doll persona, does it impact the person once memory is restored? I mean, common experiences, if not actual personae. Kinda goes back to what we were talking about with last week’s ep – but then, this is as much conjecture as anything Topher says or does, since we figure out that it’s Sierra.
Topher has masculinity issues like whoa. He can fuck with people’s minds but not look at a woody? The appeal of science does not go as far as FEAR OF COCK. You can just see Dr. Fred having a woman-thought about how Topher needs to stop being a man-child. I wonder if or how it influences his creation of the personalities, if not his treatment of the actives.
Why does Blondie have the right to deny extraction? And Boyd can read people, he should have known to call DeWitt directly. Boyd is loving being around other cops again. In fact, it generally looks like Boyd read the script/took some stupid pills this week. I wonder if he knows what they did to her; if he did he should be a lot more worried knowing what could happen. And when he carries her out,Langdon should be avoiding the cameras. Maybe Caroline can disappear, but a fifty year old cop, not so much.
How interesting is the Blondie-Madam dynamic? I feel like they’re not “good versus evil” – they’re both amoral, but one is bloodthirsty. They’re both pretty pragmatic about opposite things. And he really does screw with her, both denying extraction (which DeWitt would never do) and going out there without permission. Plus the attempted murder. I’d say that he was just a cold dude in it for some money, and maybe it started out that way, but he’s really enjoying his power and not fond of the Dolls. It’s just plausible enough that he’s actually worried about the Alpha-like signs, but I doubt it, and so does DeWitt.
The candlestick was cool. The second slap was ass-kicking for the sake of ass-kicking. Gratuitous ass-kicking. This is the difference between a strong woman character and Girl Power (TM). One uses violence as the character would see necessary or desirable; the other just starts whaling on people regardless of logic or inclination. Unless this is Caroline coming through and she’s a brawler.
So did they take the thing out before the wipe? How could they have talked Esther onto the table? Is the equipment still rattling around in there? Because, I’m no Dr. Fred, but that could probably end badly.
DeWitt’s creepy fixation on “purity” is, well, creepy. It feels out of character, too, unless her concept of herself as the Dollhouse matron-in-chief is a lot more powerful and personalized than we thought. It’s the writers going “DO YOU GET IT!? SHE’S LIKE THE CULT LEADER. NO FREE WILL. OOGA OOGA.” Yes. We got it. Cults bad. Your audience is not actually comprised of Dolls. Maybe it’s more of the caretaking stuff – she has to conceptualize the dolls as children? And what’s the difference between a wipe and a scrub?
Have the last couple of episodes been underwhelming to anyone else? Not bad tv at all, just less fun than I’m expecting. I suppose I’m building it up in my mind because I’m not used to watching TV shows in real time (I tend to wait until they’ve been canceled for a while and then get worked up, and of course I had an extra couple of weeks to look forward to these) but I loved ep 3 and have only liked the last two. A little birdie told me that Man on the Street was a Joss episode, though…

Deep Thoughts

I thought the cult was a bunch of damn LaRouchers.
Why don’t they FINGERPRINT it instead of playing it? Paul you are a fuck up because you TAMPER WITH EVIDENCE.
Why does she have perfect hair after every wipe?
Who the hell does Topher talk to on the phone from the Dollhouse? I suppose it must be Ivy.
Was Esther flirting with Sister Annabelle? I choose to believe she was.
Between the Dollhouse patron senator, the clueless FBI and the corrupt, clueless ATF, looks like gub’mint is still gettin’ in a man’s way.
Someone please tell me the real ATF knows how to search for a trip wire. Lie to me.
Really, with the shoes, enough is enough. There is absolutely no reason for the heels here.

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pocochina — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:29:10 +0000

The Arizona House is right.

It’s absolutely impossible that women in Arizona know the outcomes of their reproductive decisions.

For instance, do they know that their salaries are likely to decrease when they become mothers? You know, if they keep their jobs at all. Or that they will be pressured to breastfeed, without regard for the impact on their jobs or quality of live, and without proof of the benefits to their children? That giving birth could – gasp! – change their bodies permanently? And that if part of that change is a slight uptick in body weight – well, forget about it. Do they have ANY IDEA about the impact motherhood will have on their SEXAYNESS?

Do they know that if their child has a particular type of disability, they’ll be shamed for leaving an “unfortunate” child in someone else’s care while they pursue a career?

Do they know their chances of acquiring powerful jobs will drop, while their risk of being murdered by their partner will skyrocket if they choose to continue a pregnancy?

That if they get to the end of their pregnancies and shit goes wrong, the Supreme Court of the United States and the US Congress have decided that her health doesn’t mean shit? That because of their meddling asses, if she does need to terminate a wanted pregnancy, her doctor will have to run the risk of performing a lethal injection inside her uterus?

Do they know just how painful it is for many birth mothers to have chosen adoption?

That while they may be entitled to child support, it’s going to be awfully difficult to get?

And this is just the tip of the iceburg on the shit these women don’t know! See, I, in my non-pregnant all-powerful wisdom, clearly have Google skills beyond anything they could POSSIBLY FATHOM. Silly wimminz. Can’t be trusted to make these choices for themselves.

See, I am all for nonjudgmental, balanced, respectful maternal and parental counseling when a woman (with or without her partner) is deciding whether to continue a pregnancy. I think it’s an important reproductive justice issue to support pregnant women, and if the private sector sucks at it, then the public sector should be able to jump in – I’m a dirty pinko hippie like that. But, if this move were actually about giving women information – not feelings, but cold and all too hard facts measuring the legal, social, and economic impact of pregnancy and motherhood – his list would look a lot more like mine than like his. I suspect that’s why it will never happen. Because I don’t believe for a moment they actually think these little lecture sessions will actually decrease abortions. I think that what this is really about is shaming women, and in the same stroke, allowing these legislatures to ignore the very real problems of pregnancy and motherhood. Being a mother is, I am assured, a wonderful, enriching, empowering experience for many women. But as a sociological phenomenon, being a mother in our society totally whomps – not because motherhood is bad, but because every policy choice these fuckers make is one to make life more difficult for mothers.

Dollhouse – The Target

pocochina — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 04:31:15 +0000

I like that they’re going with the “previously, on Dollhouse‘ rather than trying to contain the whole world in a short synopsis at the beginning, simply because we don’t have that kind of mission statement (yet?); that said, it’s too long, there’s a lot we don’t need in there.
JESUS CHRIST! Oh, it’s a flashback. Three months, that’s not long at all. Turns out Alpha’s a composite who malfunctioned. Though it doesn’t confirm my “prototype” theory. It’s hard seeing the dolls scared. Like sad puppies. And “they won’t wake up.” Jesus Christ alive, Eliza D is thin, remember when she was hot because she looked so strong and healthy? The nudity in that shot is gratuitous – she’s vulnerable, dude, we get it, but the blood and those huge trusting eyes convey that just fine. Odd that among ll the bodies I was still thinking ALPHA SLICED UP DR. FRED! You suck, Alpha, I hate you! In seriousness, I really thought that was going to be a mystery for a while. But, if they want to make Alpha really unsympathetic, IT WORKED.
“Guns. Can I have one.” Heh. I still don’t like you, Topher, but heh. He’s an amoral nerd, but not a wimpy or panicky one.
This episode feels more pilot-y, except for the total lack of Sierra, who I kind of like. And it’s kind of heavy-handed, but I like the repetition of the ‘did I fall asleep’ convo. Well, i did the first time, now enough’s enough, and it’s t the point where it’s goging to be weird if she stops saying it, and annoying if she keeps saying it. Maybe we’ll stop needing to see every programming and wipe soon.
“What we offer is truth.” Interesting. I mean, I suppose they are, but by stripping away complexity, rather than through honesty. Also kind of heavy-handed. This show is starting to feel like a big experiment into “how much philosphy can we pound into their heads in 45 minutes?”
the idea of a security deposit sounds creepy, like htey’re just putting a price on safety – which in a sense they are – but it also seems like the best and only way to control their clientele, too; it’s not like they could sue or report the person.
Are we always going to start out with sex work or sex work parallels? See, the first time it makes sense. The second time, it’s, again, gratuitous, and it feels a little like they’re out of ideas already, which I surely HOPE AND BELIEVE is not the case.
“My brother’s gonna kill you!” Confident and trusting. The rented-for-sex personalities aren’t that different from the mind-wiped Dolls. They’re the dolls with added skills.
Hi, Helo! I mean, Robert. Hey, why don’t we menacingly threaten each other in gravelly voices? Oh, and they’re at last week’s crime scene. Nifty use of the first ep, and it really gives us the sense that he’s right behind them with no clues, and it’s been like this for a while. How would they have a profile on Dollhouse clients? Oh, and they’re assuming it’s just a service for johns. And who the hell is the Russian guy? I was thinking he would’ve been an Active, who of course woudln’t know anything when questioned, but why would a Doll have a cell phone?
I keep saying “sex work” but I should really be saying sommething lot harsher. “Rape” doesn’t feel right since it is hat the personality wants, but at the sme time, it’s not te personlity, it’s Echo, who will be having the non-consensual sex. I wonder if there are mandatory blood tests for their clients, or do they just keep the Actives on antibiotics and ARVs?
“pretty lady” prints – hey, there’s a thought, have they wiped out the Doll’s prints? Then there’s permanent change, which could be an interesting contrast with Madam DeWitt’s contention that actions don’t have consequences for the Actives.
OHMIGOD he’s hunting her. so he really did just buy her life. I wonder if he let the madam in on that? And he’s a serial killer – he’s brought other girls out there.
Oh, and Langdon was hired because of Alpha. Was he a forensic expert at some point? Because his analysis is pretty good, and really fast. I know they’re trying to get stuff out there quickly, but Dr. Fred is on hand for that. And was he imprinted with some Navy Seal shit? Because he’s pretty hardcore in the van there.
Why didn’t he kill Echo? Good question, yo. Maybe he recognized her from before? Couldn’t kill a fellow Doll? Come to think of it, why didn’t he kill Dr. Fred? Maybe he has special plans for her like he does for Echo? He’s weirdly more hostile towards innocents than people responsible – he slaughtered Actives and protectors, but he left the doctor, programmer (who actually is resopnsible for him), and the one with flashes of consciousness. Was he trying to keep them alive to toy with them more? He’s not just a fighter, he’s a total sadist.
‘Echo will always trust you.’ Wow. So we’re into what is identity, what is truth, and what is trust. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so explicit about what it’s asking us to consider. I don’t know that we even needed the trust scenes, even when we see it break later.
She hallucinates herself, that’s a nice touch. Overall, this is a decent format for the show. We get a clientof the week and the story is about establishing the overarching plot in the dollhouse. Echo is almost the least important person here for the first forty minutes.
Boyd is good at dealing with a confused doll, unlike the staff that have been around longer (Dr. Fred and Topher). “We met a while back.” It’s a good answer. He’s used to real people, so he’s better, or he’s just different and more caring. He does make the same conflation between deservingness and morality (“he was a good man”/”not good enough”) that Connell does, which is really disquieting.
Good thing she happened to get perfect markswomanship! Though, that is a skill that would go well with the other skills, it’s not totally nonsensical.
I don’t like when people hesitate when they should shoot. You should kill him nowish. I would rather have four more minutes of character-building than Dramatic Tension. If the story’s exciting enough – and overall, this was – it’s not necessary.
This asshole is the creepiest villain they’ve ever come up with. Holy shit. And of course his motivation is….dun dun DUHN….DADDY ISSUES!
It’s kind of a relief their background checks failed – they didn’t just send her out all que sera, sera – but at the same time, it means we can never trust their screening process. Would it’ve been more fun for that revelation to wait?
CONNELL WAS ALPHA?! No, an Alpha henchman. I thought about it, and then I said, no, that’s too farfetched and they would recognize him! No, that’d be too easy, as he’s dead. the fixation just doesn’t make sense, though.
Who is Blondie? Last episode he was some boardroom type and now he’s a bloodthirsty (he hints at wanting two specific kill orders within twenty minutes) badass with command of a bunch of guys with assault weapons? Speaking of. Are they all Dolls, too? Seems weird that people unscrupulous enough to kill for an immoral corporate venture are suddenly the types to be trusted with big, juicy secrets like said corporate ventures – makes more sense they’re all wiped and prorammed to follow instructions. Then, though, we get two classes of Dolls – the cannnon fodder, who live somewhere else, and the pretty ones, who get to sleep in the shiny bed-holes.

Other thoughts:

Of course what makes First Date guy unappealing is that he’s a FATTIE!
What makes Echo so much more frequently requested? Because she’s pretty? Because theoretically, it shouldn’t matter. There’s an actual spark of personality there?
Kinda problematic that they program male assassins and female prostitutes.

She’s in Trouble: Pregnancy on Angel

pocochina — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 09:57:54 +0000

It’s SF week here at Pocochina’s House of Fun! For pixxelpuss – she knows why. Contains spoliers for Buffy and Angel, Buffy s 2 and Angel s 5 (though I’m pretty sure I was the last person in the world to need that warning).

This essay will explore what’s probably the one thing that keeps me from entirely loving the Angel series on a par with my other favorite TV shows – its use of pregnancy. Out of our major female characters (as in, women who appear in more than a handful of episodes – so this excludes Gwen, Dru, and Nina, but includes recurring characters like Lilah and Darla) three out of seven* die from pregnancies; a fourth dies at the hand of a Crazy Pregnant Lady. Moreover, pregnancy is frequently portrayed as an undesirable consequence of independent behavior by women. As shown in Angel’s treatment of the pregnant Darla, pregnancy

Cordelia

Cordelia holds a Buffy/Angel – if not an all television ever – record of three metaphorical or actual pregnancies in the run of the show. (For those doing the math, she was on Angel for four seasons; that’s once a season). None of these pregnancies are her choice, and the last one eventually kills her.

The first two – in Expecting (s 1) and Epiphany (s 2) – are remarkably similar. Cordelia gets implanted with Demon Seed, is scared and miserable, and is saved within one episode through the combined efforts of herself and the team. Both are pre-Fred, so all external saveage comes from the male protagonists. The two episodes aren’t shown to have made her any different – in fact, for someone not at all inclined to suffer past indignities in silence, Cordelia’s remarkably tight-lipped about these experiences, as if she’s ashamed of them. One of the only times, if not the only time, Cordelia mentions either pregnancy post-episode is in the course of an unbelievably stupid moment of Feminine Bonding, where she sits down alone and unguarded next to an extremely powerful Darla, who Cordelia associates with harmlessness because Darla’s pregnancy makes her look “like a mother.”

Most frustratingly, though, are that Cordelia’s pregnancies are consequences of her own ”bad” behavior. In Expecting, Cordelia leaves the company of her trustworthy male (and, conveniently, desexualized by her friend’s assumption that they’re gay) co-workers to go out in the company of Known Fornicators. She sleeps with a man we are led to assume she has met, at most, once or twice (and it’s implied from her babbles to Wes and Angel that she considers the event to be the loss of her virginity, which has been known to carry some weight for the women in Angel’s life) and wakes up terrifyingly pregnant. Though Cordelia hasn’t done anything morally wrong - and to the credit of the character and the episode, Wesley’s concerned, deeply genuine “you are not being punished” makes this clear – she and her friends still become pregnant and nearly die of casual sex.

Likewise, Cordelia’s downfall in Epiphany isn’t that she falls into the hands of evil demons, it’s that she went to a stranger’s house alone at night, without a male chaperone, which of course women in particular are told not to do. It’s not unlikely for Angel characters to find themselves in life-threatening situations because they have acted foolishly; however, such actions usually lead to direct physical combat. When Gunn or Angel do something like this, they end up in a physical altercation; when Cordelia does so, she’s held down and forcibly implanted with demon seed. The flaw is the same, but the fallout is explicitly gendered.

Once, twice, three times a fecund little Seer, Cordelia’s third pregnancy is her last. Carrying Jasmine wildly alters Cordelia’s personality – subsumes her soul, in Angelverse terms – and changes her from good to viciously evil. It’ s unclear (to me, at least) how much of Cordelia’s behavior before the pregnancy is possession by Jasmine, or when the switch from Cordelia to Jasmine occurs, but it’s undeniable that by the time we know she’s pregnant, she’s acting wholly on Jasmine’s behalf. Cordelia’s pregnancy is disasterous for all of L.A., but it’s shown as particularly dangerous for other women, particularly non-fertile women – IIRC, the only characters we see pregnant Cordelia kill are the virgin (which of course means “girl virgin”) sacrifice and Lilah – the consummate high-powerd career woman who ends up being one of our very few nulligravous woman characters, and it’ s only by sheer dumb luck that she doesn’t succeed in killing out lesbian Willow. Whether purposeful or not, Cordelia/Jasmine comes across as having something against non-procreating women – are women more dangerous to each other? to Jasmine’s planned New World? It’s tough to tell. Of all the mystical pregnancies Angel depicts, I think that this is perhaps the least problematic. Though the storyline is dark, and changes the charcter of Cordelia irrevocably, it adequately shows that the pregnancy was not her choice, connects that lack of free will to Jasmine’s overall controlling manner, and explicitly explains the changes in Cordelia’s character within the plot.

Darla

I do not in any way pretend to be objective about Darla’s pregnancy and death – she is hands down my favorite Angel character, and many of the reasons I like her are characteristics which make pregnancy and motherhood undesirable for her, souled or unsouled. In theory, I don’t have a problem with the idea of a dramatic vampire pregnancy and birth, and if it should be anyone, it should be Darla, Angel’s only mother figure. However, as played out, the storyline of Darla’s pregnancy and death uncritically builds upon several sexist cultural tropes about pregnancy and motherhood – that “it’s different when it’s yours” and “having a baby changes you”; that a fetus is a human child; that treatment of a pregnant woman should depend upon male evaluation of her moral character and behavior; and that everyone involved (which should be a number of people beyond the pregnant woman herself) should uncritically accept that the fetus is more important than the woman carrying it.

Discussion of the sexual encounter which resulted in Darla’s pregnancy shows a remarkable paradigm shift from the actual sexual encounter. During the sex scene and immediately after, Darla and Angel act in what the audience assumes is an old pattern for them, with equal sexual aggressiveness, a mutual desire for gratification, and dual agendas. This makes sense for them because as far as we know, there aren’t negative consequences for sex between vampires, it’s simply one of the fun ways to pass eternal life, and in the specific context, they both want the same goal – for Angel to lose his soul. However, once Darla shows up pregnant, it’s shifted to a familiar, loathsome construct of sexual behaviors, where the woman is a passive victim and the man is a sexually voracious user of women, as if the fact of pregnancy renders women unable to desire and enjoy sex. This is inconsistent with the character of Darla, who loves all pleasures rough and sensual, and with the overall world, where women good and evil alike enjoy relationships and sex. In Angel’s world, pregnancy changes all that.

The attribution of Darla’s sudden love of her parasite, along with her sudden remorse for her misdeeds and desire to do something good, with the existence of a soul in her body simply doesn’t hold because we’ve seen souled Darla before, once before the Master turns her for the first time, and again in early S 2 when she’s raised by W&H. And both times, she chooses her own survival over everything else. The first time she has no way of choosing her fate once the Master decides to make her, but the second time around – with all of her memories, knowing she will commit thousands more murders, with eyes wide open – Darla sets out to become a vampire again. She will survive at all costs. So her self-sacrifice isn’t in character with souled Darla. It’s a direct outgrowth of the experience of being pregnant. In Angel, expecting a baby – even one you can’t have and don’t want – makes you want to give up your identity and life. As a Darla fan, I can mentally reconcile this with her character with the reasoned guess that Jasmine is actually pulling Darla’s strings same as everyone else’s – but nobody ever mentions the possibility, because that would distract from the Very Important Father-Son Issues going on! (And Jasmine would have needed Darla dead – Angel might want to be fooled with world peace, but Darla wouldn’t be having it. And it would’ve been easy enough for us to hear about – can’t you see Lilah in Home needling Angel with just how much he owes to Jasmine? It would be killer, and so very Lilah, but it would destroy Angel’s romantic idea of Darla’s redemption, and we can’t have that.)

Angel’s treatment of Darla is, to me, the most horrifying part of the three-episode arc. When she first appears, he accuses her of lying, then of hysteria – classic sexist ways to discredit women. He denies having slept with her. He smirks at the Furies’ lascivious attentions during Darla’s panicked encounter with Lorne. It’s rare for us to see Angel so selfishly distracted from someone with a terrible problem – Darla, however, is evil and doesn’t count. Once we move to the arcade, Darla’s feelings become clear. Darla, the consummate hard-edged survivor, would rather die than carry the pregnancy, but Angel has realized (because the man knows more about the pregnancy than the woman carrying it!) that “our baby” (where before, when it was evil, it was “what Darla is carrying”) has a soul – therefore his attitude towards Darla changes completely. He acts as if he is protecting her; we know he is protecting the fetus.

Instead, he takes her home and feeds her pig’s blood, with a concerned lecture on how she needs to keep herself nourished. Except, he’s just handed her pig’s blood, knowing she’s craving some oven-fresh human. Now, as anyone who knows anything about pregnancy is aware, pregnancy cravings are not women off their diets gone wild. They are the body’s (rough, imperfect, yet well-known) way of telling the woman what nutrition she needs. Darla’s revulsion towards Angel’s offer of pig’s blood is surely related to the offense to her vampire dignity, but it could just as easily be making her nauseous. Angel is starving her, offering her insults and illness in place of nutrition, and forcing her to carry a pregnancy which makes her miserable. She’s told him how much pain she’s in (“you might have the face, but you don’t know the hunger! It pounds…”) but he completely ignores her misery in favor of his own desires. He’s quite literally torturing her – and no one calls him on it. Now, Angel would be well within his moral rights to kill her if he could – she’s deeply dangerous. Likewise, he’d be within his rights to protect and actually care for her, because as strong and dangerous as she is, she needs help. What Angel does is to decide what is going to happen to Darla’s body and unlife based on his wants, over her expressed wishes. Keeping her undead but starved harms her, and strengthens her desire to escape and snack on some more kiddies. Oh, he could go out and find some corpses, or some rejected blood from a blood bank, or hell, bust one of his own veins and feed her – but that would mean Darla wasn’t living by his moral code, and Angel simply can’t countenance that.

Quickening gives us some creepy plot points which are bizarrely reminiscent of anti-choice propaganda. Darla’s first sign of relenting towards her “parasite” comes when Wesley shows her the ultrasound. Compare with Cordelia in Expecting (her shift from eagerly taking risks which might kill the demon spawn to her plaintive “are they healthy?” comes during the ultrasound). And now compare with this. The assumption in the series, unsettlingly similar to the assumption of anti-choice legislators, is that women can’t understand a pregnancy which has taken over their bodies until they see it, at which point, they’ll appreciate it as much as THE FATHER thinks they should. Wesley, who is a rock of respect and nonjudgmental support towards pregnant women throughout the series, is played for laughs – he’s too weak to deal with those problem women! – while Angel, who acts on his desires regardless of what the women in question want, gets to be a swaggering hero, implying that men who are supportive of women’s desires are weak, while those who make decisions for women about their bodies are masculine and admirable. Fred, the uber-rational and sex-positive scientist, actually utters the phrase “unborn child.” We cut back and forth between Holtz, W&H, the vamp cult, and Our Heroes, giving us the impression that it’s the Motley Crew against all of these forces who want to control and take Darla’s unlife for their own purposes, but I don’t see any suggestion of the fact that Angel is doing the exact same thing, down to forbidding her (with her super-super-strength) from protecting herself from those forces.

Darla’s death plays upon the concept of pregnancy-as-punishment. When Darla attempts to eat Cordelia, Angel’s first thought is of Cordelia – which is reasonable, as Cordelia’s clearly the weaker of the two – but he doesn’t put the pregnancy together with the starvation and unreasonable behavior to find the most rational explanation of the event, but simply swears vengeance and sets off to murder Darla. Though souled non-pregnant Darla has recognized she’s done bad things, it’s pregnant-and-suicidal Darla who expresses regret for her vampirish ways. And Darla doesn’t deserve female companionship and sympathy – only Wesley’s professional politeness and Angel’s judgmental overriding of her decisions – until after she experiences that regret. Cordelia hates her and even punches her; Fred is terrified and happy to stay away, but once she’s sorry, she’s allowed to be around other women. (This is the SOP of pregnancies on Angel – during Cordelia’s first two experiences carrying demon spawn, and later when Fred gives way to Illyria, all other major cast members are male.) She’s carrying a pregnancy because of sex with Angel, and suddenly she’s feeling Angel’s guilt and pain – she’s more important to his life than ever before, so she has to bend and become more like him than ever before.

The show is Angel’s, and it makes sense that the most important aspect of the story of Darla’s pregnancy is about its impact on Angel. However, it is the impact of the pregnancy on Darla, and what it reveals about Angel and the other characters, which is deeply problematic, and out of joint with our previous experience of the show.

Fred

Unlike all other metaphorical/mystery pregnancies on the show, Fred’s pregnancy and death is human murder by mystical means. The only moral responsibility for Fred’s death lies with Knox, who chose to infect her with Illyria knowing the consequences and without Fred’s consent (without Illyria’s consent either, but I think we can safely assume Illyria neither would nor did complain on moral grounds). Fred’s situation bears an uncomfortable likeness to some all-too-familiar real world ones: she’s expecting and ill, and on a very serious timeline, due to someone else’s imposition on her body. That someone else claims to be honoring her feminine wonderfulness, but in fact is killing her from a distance. Now, how could that possibly have been topical at time of production? But the characters don’t seem to draw that connection – once Wes kills Knox, he’s the only one to point out that Illyria didn’t kill Fred, Knox did, and at this point Wesley is drunk and clinging to his sanity, therefore not to be taken seriously by the other characters.

In comparison to the other mystical pregnancies, and comparing Fred to Darla and Cordelia, there are other disquieting implications. Unlike two of Cordelia’s pregnancies – and arguably, all three – along with Darla’s, there is no sexual aspect to Fred’s metaphorical conception of Illyria. This could relate to any of a small handful of distinguishing characteristics of Fred’s story. The first is her victimhood – Knox’s acknowledged guilt works to absolve Fred. This could associate sin and sex in an undesirable fashion. The second relates to the infantilization of Fred during her death scene – while Cordelia/Jasmine and Darla die quietly, Fred dies slowly, with Wesley reading her bedtime stories, further connecting the lack of a sexual component to innocence. Fred isn’t any less of a sexual creature than the other female characters – we’ve known her to have at least three boyfriends. Perhaps Fred is different because she’s always, unlike Cordelia or Darla, been sympathetic; perhaps it’s because of the youth we’re supposed to attribute to her (though she’s certainly older than Cordelia), but either way, her goodness insulates her from sexualized fault for her fate – good girls might, but they won’t be punished for it.

Like Cordelia’s pregnancy with Jasmine, this is a story that, with some tweaking and by itself, I could have enjoyed; however, at this point, we’ve lost a beloved female character two seasons in a row to forced pregnancy. Three times is indeed Enemy Action, and it simply feels like too many.

Conclusion

Pregnancy on Angel is a difficult and frequently mishandled topic. Though one or two of the above metaphorical/mystical pregnancies could have co-existed on one series unproblematically, the use of one every single season without examination of the gendered assumptions underlying such a storyline harms the series, which is otherwise conscious of its powerful use of metaphor and inversion of cultural expectations. It is disappointing because Angel, not much less than its famous parent show, otherwise portrays strong, interesting, and multi-dimensional female characters – it is difficult to watch them almost inevitably doomed to an overplayed and explicitly feminine fate.

*Cordelia, Fred, Lilah, Darla, Illyria, Jasmine, and Harmony. This is a generous standard, as Illyria and Jasmine are non-human entities whose female forms are probably chosen for convenience and infertile, and who only appear in less than half a season each.

Sigh.

pocochina — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:40:42 +0000

[Okay. I started this post yesterday, before the vote, so if there are any tense mistakes or predictions, oops, sorry.]

So. Stimulus package. No Republicans voted for it, still passed. Remember this, for the part where Obama and Waxman blatantly sell out women’s health for absolutely no payoff from the Republicans.

Yes, Virginia, reproductive health care is inherent to economic stimulus. It’s important as a microcosm of the way way that health care reform will be good for the economy – with fewer fixed costs, people can spend more freely. As lots of others have pointed out, it’s a demand-side industry, and this would improve income for health care workers. The provision would have simply helped cash-strapped state governments to do what they are already doing, rather than forcing them to reallocate funds from other necessary projects. Removing the provision is bad policy. Most importantly, though, allowing women to prevent and terminate pregnancies is critical to women’s economic situation. It’s what lets us go to school, keep our jobs, and not end up dead in an alley. I’m disgusted by the presumption that because women need something, it’s got nothing to do with economics. Women earn money, children cost money, and low-income women are particularly vulnerable to the fallout from an unwanted pregnancy. It’s about dignity and human rights, but those things aren’t separate from economics. This is about the ability the majority of people living in poverty to participate in the economy.

It’s also critically important to see that this isn’t just something that came out of the blue and steamrollered Obama. He called Waxman and said “pull the funding.” There’s a lot going on there. First of all, it’s not exactly accurate to frame that as Republicans doing something wrong. Yes, the Republicans manipulated and whined, but Obama is a grown goddamn man who made the decision to respond in the way he did. And really? Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, anti-woman bigots gotta piss and moan, and there was no way to fail to see Boehner’s pearl-clutching from a mile off. The bill wasn’t just the place to put the funding because it’s important economically, it was the best way to ensure its passage without allowing an enormous misogyny-fest on a separate funding bill. What, were that many Republicans really going to vote against an economic stimulus bill during a recess bagel over goddamn condoms? And if they did, they’d have to pay the piper in two years, making it that much easier to chip away a few more seats. That matters not just in terms of raw numbers in Congress, but for women’s health specifically – raising the penalty for being a curmudeonly woman-hater might eventually lead to fewer curmudgeonly woman-haters in positions of power. Which, for a super-feminist, should be a goal which is actively pursued, not whipped out when it’s convenient.

Remember, there’s a Democratic majority. By a lot. That win in November wasn’t just Obama’s big win, it was a huge increase in not one but two legislative Democratic majorities. The stimulus passed even without all the Republicans and eleven Democrats. Losing more than that would mean that the problem isn’t actually the contraceptive provisions, they’re just an expendable addition.

No. The only rational explanation for the behavior here is two-fold that women’s health, livelihoods, and lives are something extra, and less important than having the chance of a show of bipartisanship. There are 255 Democrats sitting in the House, and 178 Republicans. That means Obama could have lost sixty Democrats, all the Republicans, and still gotten the stimulus bill through handily. Just in case I have suddenly contracted acute subtlety: the choice was not “ditch the family planning bill or lose the stimulus.” It was “have the chance for the appearance of bipartisanship, or have family planning for poor women,” and this White House made its choice.

Oooooh, but it’s not that simple, I hear you saying. No, no it’s certainly not. It’ s a multi-billion dollar stimulus package, with tons of different provisions. But I certainly don’t recall any other provisions of the bill receiving this kind of negative attention from Republicans or the media, and I certainly don’t recall the White House publicly bending over backwards to accomodate the Republicans on any other provision of the bill. Remember that plucky “I won” spirit for all the other important stuff? Funny, how it vanished as soon as it was time to lighten the health care burden on poor women.

This is a terrible framework for any real progress on reproductive justice. Even if there was a real concern that the RH provisions could sink the stimulus bill – which would’ve turned out to be ill-founded – the immediate and public concession on women’s health continued to show the country and the world that women’s health is always assumed to be negotiable and contentious. No, it’s not the same as Chris Matthews’ ridiculous statement that somehow allowing people reproductive choice is the same thing as taking reproductive choice away from people, but it does allow that bullshit to pass and continue without comment. This crap needs to be challenged. Caving in on it under the slightest pressure isn’t challenging it, it’s legitimizing it.