Dollhouse is the New Buffy

Joss Whedon’s newest creation, Dollhouse, is a fantastical world of beautiful people that are wiped clean of their personalities only to be imprinted with new ones to accomplish missions for the rich and powerful. It’s as bad ass as Buffy, The Vampire Slayer without the vampires but other blood sucking soulless creatures: dirty politicians, corporate heads, and other well-connected thieves instead.

The writing is imaginative, fresh, and well adapted to appeal to the late twenties to early thirties demographic that watched Whedon’s Buffy. He even brought Eliza Dushku as the head doll, Echo. The characters are written with dimension and the actors deliver convincing performances, which is necessary due to the range in personalities they must portray in each episode.

In response to the recent web buzz that this show is anti-feminist: I beg to differ. Whedon brought us a strong female character, Buffy, and surely does not disappoint in his new show. If you look close enough you will find similarities between Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Whedon’s Dollhouse. Nora, the protagonist of Ibsen’s play, must conform herself to act as a simple childlike wife, while she is secretly hiding her talents and abilities for the sake of her husband. In a similar kind of fashion, Whedon’s Echo must enter a childlike state after every mission and her exceptional abilities as a doll are often viewed as problematic for the male Dollhouse officials. There are more similarities, but I refrain from going into detailed analysis since this is not the point of this blog post. Whedon’s talent for weaving feminist threads into his writing is genius, but it also takes careful analysis of Dollhouse’s storylines to realize it.

I have great expectations for this show and am delighted that Whedon has brought us another phenomenal female character, Echo. Dewitt, the head official of the Dollhouse, also delivers as a steely leader without being stereotypically catty, which is how female bosses are usually depicted.

I have only seen five episodes so far, but I suspect that Whedon has plans for Echo’s character to grow, find the same kind of self discovery as Ibsen’s Nora, and to shatter traditional gender assumptions of strength and power.