Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
39 www.hplusmagazine.com Shadowy international conspiracies are the bread-and-butter of thrillers these days, but the undertow of suspicion that runs through Dollhouse ultimately turns on a premise that hits pretty close to home: the possibility that you yourself, dear TV fan, are more of a construct than you suppose. In one episode, a number of random people on the street are asked for their opinions about the dollhouse, which many discount as an urban legend. One complains that the organization, if it exists, takes away "everything that makes you more than a cluster of neurons." But isn't this the big question: what if we are just a cluster of neurons? And what does that possibility do to our understanding of morality and choice, fantasy and personality? While Dollhouse mostly hints at the darker dimension of the neuron cluster, it also hints at some of the upside — not least of which is the functional immortality that might come with replicating that pattern of neurons, a revolutionary possibility that the show flirts with but, lamely, only barely explores. Many of the missions the dolls undertake also heal far more than they harm, and there are hints as well that the organization itself is not as nefarious as it first appears. Even the dolls are not totally mindless slaves — as the season progresses, a few begin to exhibit behaviors that go beyond their programs, some of which reflect deeply hard-wired traces of their original personalities and more interesting ones that suggest budding forms of self-consciousness and moral agency. In one episode, the doll Echo is hired out as an art thief, and has an encounter with a Picasso painting whose cubist portraiture she interprets as signs of a broken self. But Picasso's fractured perspectives could equally be seen as an attempt to expand beyond the conventional self and its "single vision" into a wider embrace and affirmation of the many identities that potentially flow through us — a flow that may soon become something more like a tsunami. Erik Davis regularly posts to www.techgnosis.com. His most recent book was The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape.