"Nothing is what it appears to be."

These are the first lines of the pilot of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, the sixth episode of which will largely be ignored tonight, what with Battlestar Galactica ending and stuff, but Alyssa's written an interesting and thoughtful critique of the show for the Atlantic Monthly's website. (Awesomely, she interviews Whedon, who sounds exactly like Joss Whedon, which, as I already noted in this sentence, is awesome.)

Thus far, five episodes into the series, escapism has dominated the plotlines. In the premiere, Echo spent a hot weekend racing motorcycles, dancing, and having sex with a good-looking young man who treats her like a treasured girlfriend. In the second episode, she went rock-climbing and hunting with another hunk, who turned out to have a Most Dangerous Game fantasy. That’s a step closer to the risks of violence and coercion in human trafficking and sex work, but it’s not exactly realistic. And in the fourth episode, Echo pretended to be an abused prostitute to gain access to a vault full of valuable art she intends to steal. There’s something disturbing about using sympathy for victims of sexual violence to commit crimes, but the episode doesn’t explore whether we ought to be disgusted with someone—Echo’s client? Her handlers? Echo herself?—for designing and carrying out the con. There is no hint of the grubby realities of human trafficking, or of the intriguing alliance between feminism and evangelical Christianity that drives a great deal of anti-trafficking work in both the government and non-profit sectors.

Dollhouse could be a fascinating exploration of prostitution if Echo was able to consent, if she had a decision-making process we could assess and evaluate. And sex has been so large a part of Dollhouse that it threatens to drown out other facets of what once made Echo a person.

I share some of Alyssa's concerns regarding the sexual politics of how Dollhouse represents bodies which are, essentially, trafficked. Particularly in the non-Whedon-penned episodes, there's a very thin line between the revulsion and discomfort we're supposed to feel at the utter commodification not just of the "actives'" labor, or their bodies, but of their very identities, what someone more schooled in late twentieth century philosophical traditions than I would probably caution me against calling their "being." Alyssa's conversation with Whedon highlights these tensions to great effect. That said, I also want to map out some quick points of disagreement.

First, Alyssa says that Whedon and Tim Minear's Firefly " lacks a central conceit that ties it to contemporary American problems." I disagree with this. Firefly, produced in 2001 and 2002 and aired intermittently if at all over the course of 2002 before an abrupt and unjustified cancellation, was a space western, yes, but one which focused heavily (the 2005 follow up film Serenity even more so) on (inter)global corporate capitalism, on empire, on war, on piracy and margins and core-periphery post-wallersteinian world(s)-systems. Through subtle allegory, I want to argue that Firefly spoke and speaks directly to conversations about trade and development, rogue states and corporate power, the rule of experts and the tasking of bodies, which dominated political discourse in the decade before it aired, which recur in Dollhouse, and which remain deeply relevant seven years on.

This may seem like a nitpick, but I hope it also points us at a different way of reading Whedon, taking into account the warning that Olivia Williams' Adelle DeWitt, the Dollhouse's CEO, offers Caroline/Echo/Dushku in the series' opening moments. Alyssa is right to point toward the ways in which Dollhouse fails as an allegory for human trafficking, an important and deeply problematic form of labor arbitrage and migration in 21st century securitized global regimes of trade and work. But I want to argue that we also need to think about what it would mean to take Whedon at his word that he does not intend Dollhouse to be a show about trafficking, that trafficking operates in the show as a red herring for Agent Ballard to pursue in his attempt to discover the "real truth," something which is perhaps more sinister than and certainly altogether different than trafficking (a displacement Alyssa rightly identifies as uncomfortable) or which at least can not be easily represented and allegorized only under the sign of the human trafficking industry. That is not to say that I think it is wrong to consider the trafficking parallels, as Alyssa does very well, and to which Whedon himself admits, but, in light of the more tenuous, subtle ways in which Whedon and company have mobilized allegory in the past - i.e, not in the ripped from the headlines style of Battlestar Galactica (suicide bombers and cylon torture, etc) but instead through setting and how broader questions are framed, a more subtle and sometimes more effective symbolic politics than the law and order spin-off Whedon references in Alyssa's article.

I want, then, to suggest that we try, and hope that the show's writers will invite us (as they did in the pilot but not much since then), to read Dollhouse for the questions it raises about the gendering of digital virtualities, the commodification of life, the sexual politics of subject formation. What work does Whedon want mindwiping to do? What about it interests him as a story to tell, as, presumably, a metaphor for some contemporary cultural or social phenomena? What does this show, with its mindwiped pleasure dolls and action heroes, have to say about labor and knowledge, about how the corporation and the body and the computer are articulated together? And there are the broader questions of what Whedon et al want to achieve by destabilizing selfhood, placing us in a world where identities are in flux, cannot be trusted, are constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed in the most literal of ways. (And then of course, there's the theme, common to so much of Whedon's work, and which I am fascinated by, of the perverse politics of geek masculinities, feminized bodies as action figures, etc.) What if what's radical and important about Dollhouse is how compromised, how impossible "the real girl" is to recover? Wouldn't this radically decenter the kinds of privileged first world femininities Whedon's been criticized for reproducing and valorizing at the expense of, say, Kendra the short-lived mimetic Jamaican Vampire Slayer? I'm sure someone more versed in gender theory than I could rip me to shreds right now, and I have a lot of work I need to do (not sure when I'll even be able to watch either the dollhouse episode or the BSG finale,) but I'll end by saying that I think Alyssa has done us an enormous service by critically engaging Whedon's latest work, and I look forward to seeing what happens both with the series and with the critical dialogue which surrounds it.

EDIT: Further troubling any attempt to define "the real girl," for me, is the extent to which the show, at least in the pilot, frames itself as a direct critique of reality tv - the dollhouse itself as something like a combination of the real world house, with jobs assigned depending on the producers' whims, and the big brother house with constant surveillance and intrigue, etc. The reason the real echo is so elusive is that representations of reality are precisely what the show is trying to tackle.

Further thoughts on Watchmen

I read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen for the first time when I was 15, in the summer of 1996, a decade after the 12 issues of the series were originally published. I found its admixture of superhero deconstruction, social critique of U.S. power in the late cold war, and interrogation of the meaning and history of the comic book fascinating, moreso than any other comic i'd read, and from the first comic i'd ever bought, an noirish John Byrne/Jim Aparo issue of Batman involving the murder of costumed impersonators, I'd read superhero and "nonsuperhero" comics voraciously throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. I have read Watchmen again several times in the last 13 years, so much so that my old trade paperback visibly demonstrates its wear. These subsequent readings have impressed upon me the work's concern with the parameters and implications of its genre and the narrative possibilities and politics therein, the interspersed panels from the black freighter story, the tijuana bibles, the flashbacks to the golden and silver ages (employed even more dramatically, perhaps, in Moore's noteworthy deconstruction of Rob Liefeld's odious Supreme years later) and the textual prefaces to each chapter (Hollis Mason, the physicist who writes about Dr. Manhattan, the interview with Adrian Veidt, etc.) Watchmen is a book about reading, about what it means to read, about what it means to read (superhero) comics. It is a comic book about comic books, a comic book about being a comic book about comic book about comic books.

And it is masterfully told - Moore and Gibbons both employ and exceed genre conventions, introducing, along with their now-compromised contemporary Frank Miller new "cinematic" narrative forms, but also playing, subversively, with the temporality and spatiality of the comic panel, the spatial and temporal organization of the page. One issue is entirely symmetrical to itself. Another plays with time in sophisticated and unprecedented ways for comic storytelling. Watchmen is Moore's magnum opus, still one of the most thoughtful accounts of what comics are, what it is they do, and how the superhero functions ideologically in 20th century U.S. culture. We get nerd masculinities and sexual (and commodity) fetishization, fascist revanchism and/as Randian objectivism (never unproblematized, never romantically embraced), cold war nuclear post-humanism planner states and Richard Nixon.

Zack Snyder's film abandons most of these things. Its social critique is far less complex, the intertextual metacritique gone altogether. Each panel becomes three minutes of bloody, aestheticized gore. Rohrshach's fascism becomes the director's and the viewers'. The adulteration of the film's politics is dramatic and has real consequences for how we must understand its project. The characters in the film are not archetypes to be critiqued and deconstructed and poked and prodded but rather static, commodified objects of the Warner Brothers gaze, not multivalent and ambiguous echoes of obvious tropes to be picked apart and read politically but instead crude exemplars of exactly the sort of mawkish, reactionary frames which the comic tears apart. This is Watchmen as Rob Liefeld himself would have staged it, watchmen as celebration of the grim and gritty, Watchmen as blooddarkstabstrikeforce ascendant, Watchmen as something which can be read as and only as clumsy noir. The extended and aestheticized violence is important here. We celebrate blood seeping under doorways and oil burning the skin of prison inmates rather than recoil at them, or recoil at our excitement, as occurs at least in my reading of the original material. Snyder's Watchmen operates as a justification for fascist superheroics rather than a critique of them.

Except for the Tijuana bible scene which makes no sense absent its place in the original text, the comic book is largely absent here as it has been for so many of the recent wave of superhero films, which i have discussed elsewhere on this blog. But Snyder's film does not engage this wave of films critically, as some critics suggested - rather it functions parasitically, proceeding from the assumption that dark sells more tickets to transform perhaps the most nuanced and intentionally ambiguous superhero comic ever into an empty, vacuous, univocal testament to the politics of a Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter. The directing deals poorly with Moore's dialogue and the "new stuff" is too horrendous to merit the designation 'risible.' But if anything the film's failure proves Moore's contention that his work is "unfilmable" to be an insightful claim, cognizant of the very different narrative structures employed in comics and on film, that adaptation is a political process, and that while 300 was fascist garbage in the original Frank Miller graphic novel, Zack Snyder's notion of how to do Watchmen "right" says more about the director than about the work.

More on this later, maybe, though i'll be spending the entirety of my "break" writing, with hopefully some grading thrown in as well. Ugh.

EDIT More on Moore, and the great Grant Morrison on what comics (can) mean.

Resist, Occupy, Grade Papers

Today somewhere between 70 and 100 NYU graduate employees occupied the cavernous lobby of Elmer Holmes Bobst Panopticon for an hour and, wearing our "GSOC Is Here To Stay" t-shirts and a panoply of awesome signs created in a frenzy of creativity and unintentionally-inhaled marker fumes, graded, read, and otherwise made visible some of the many forms of the labor the university administration's been trying to occlude and obfuscate for so many years.

After a vicious anti-union campaign, after everything the bush administration could throw at us, we're not only still here, we're growing every day. Today's action sent a clear message to President Sexton and his "University Leadership Team," (Beckman, fresh from his 'mountainous region,' was wearing a puce fleece vest and looking about nervously) that we aren't going away, that we're in this for the long haul, that they might as well negotiate because none of the many ways they've tried to destroy our union have been successful and none will be.

I like actions - like one which took place six years ago last week - that combine the performative, the disruptive, and the practical (that is, the committee-building,) this action worked because it did this well. I'm excited for the next steps.

Oh, by the way, Watchmen (the movie) was atrocious, poorly directed, politically lobotomized, an utter failure at capturing or gesturing towards the comic's complex intertextualities and deconstructionist position. Indeed this was an over the top, milleresque, grim and gritty orgy of hypermasculinity and fascist aesthetics, exactly the sort of thing that Watchmen parodized and critiqued and which only Rob Leifeld ever thought it actually stood for. Alan Moore should be very glad his name was nowhere on this thing. I want my twelve fifty back.

Much to blog about - Obama's appointment of Brown Decision dissenter Wilma Liebman to the chair position of the NLRB, power struggles in the two most dynamic labor unions in the U.S., and much less important, the conclusion of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, but i don't really have time to write about any of these things right now and instead i will leave you with a list of songs randomly compiled by my ipod.

The temptations - "since i lost my baby"

woody guthrie - "talking fishing blues"

NaS - "Project Roach (ft Last Poets)"

Sleater-Kinney - "I wanna be your Joey Ramone"

The pioneers - "long shot" (not to be confused with their "long shot kick de bucket," which is a different song with the same chord progression.)

Madness - "My Girl"

Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop/That Thing"

Helium - "All the X's Have Wings"

Destroyer - "Certain Things You Ought To Know"

Refused "New Noise"

good smattering of mid 90s post riot grrrl, 70's "skinhead reggae" and white british appropriations thereof, and, uh, swedish anarchist post-hardcore?

This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.

Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.

I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.

Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.

Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)

At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.

Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.

EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer

Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.

Charlie Parker - Donna Lee

Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school

Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?

Darkness - Gamith

Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.

Specials - Blank Expression.

De la Soul - Supa Emcees

The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.