Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
38 Fall 2009 the peculiar fate of actors living in LA. When not on assignment, the dolls, who are uniformly fit and attractive, spend their time doing yoga, swimming, sleeping, and eating five star food — presumably with vegan and raw options. "It's important to exercise," they murmur like Stepford wives. "I try to be my best." This almost literally mindless maintenance of happy leisure — the ideal of SoCal's hedonic "good life" — is then contrasted with the caricatured and often highly skilled roles these hardbody blank slates are episodically compelled to perform. The dollhouse can be seen as a Hollywood house of mirrors. In one show, we even glimpse the operation's enormous costume room, a museum of fabricated identities that would be far more familiar to the actors on the show than to the vast majority of the punters watching the thing on TV. On a deeper level, the business of the dollhouse — which one staff member sardonically describes as being "pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way" — simply literalizes aspects of human power relationships that all of us are already familiar with in the mundane, not-quite-Sci-Fi world that we already live in, and that the show itself often self-consciously references. Lovers use one another to sustain fantasies of dominance and submission, cult leaders enslave believers, military organizations treat soldiers as pawns, and even the most successful pop music diva is — as one character proclaims — "a factory girl." All of us are dolls sometimes, and dollhouse engineers other times. Cleverly, Dollhouse incarnates this fundamental split between masters and slaves in the panopticon-inspired architecture of the dollhouse set itself, which places the employees who run the show on a balcony that looks down onto the dolls flexing their muscles or sleeping below. The space has an open, airy feel, with few locked doors, and this deceptive informality disguises an invisible architecture of control. The uncanniness of invisible control systems — whether in fictions of real life — helps motivate the paranoia that runs through the show. This stretches from the "gigantic multipronged conspiracy" of the international dollhouse organization itself — captured in one episode in the classic image of a wall covered with an octopus of documents, thumbtacks, and linking strings—to the fact that, in a BSG -like twist, we don't always know which new characters we meet are actually dolls on assignment. Occasionally, these paradoxes take us into pure Philip K. Dick territory, particularly towards the end of the first season, when — spoiler alert — the cop pursuing the organization not only discovers that his lover is a doll, but watches her concocted personality get momentarily over-ridden by a more mysterious persona whose covert messages seemingly come from an unknown mole inside the organization.