Dollhouse ideology

I've been watching the television series Dollhouse recently. I had been wondering whether to watch it because the pictures from the series advertising it tend to be of eye-candy and hint at violence: I have a bit of an allergic reaction to such presentations as they often go with superficial: maxing out the exciting visual and emotional impact but having little to say (except: "give us money"). However, I think that it is actually more interesting than the eye-candy image gives me to infer. Kudos to Joss Whedon for producing something a bit more intelligent and raising some interesting issues about being human: what makes us  'us'. Its premise is a bit like an updated and reworked Joe 90.

In Episode 6 they intercut a series of vox pops from a news programme about the urban legend of the Dollhouse. One of them has an interviewee saying something like "... if they could do something like this, it's the end of the human race". I found myself being annoyed with this. Why? Because it cleverly hides the fact that in the situation being portrayed, where in the scenario projected by the interviewee (some kind of university lecturer) human beings are enslaved by being made into a sort of robots. The doomsday scenario misses the fact that in such a world there would be a whole class of people who would not be subject to such control: those rich and powerful enough to maintain the system because they would want its services. In other words, this little comment on such a world elides the humans who control it and in doing so, hides from view the real problem.

Just like real life.  This is a little mirror on the West: the haves' string pulling and circumvention and the exploitation of the rest is being covered up: attention is redirected (often very successfully) so that 'we' rarely if ever become aware of where power lies and how it is being further accumulated. This musing comes hard on the heels of reading a recent piece in the Guardian by Owen Jones making a closely related set of points. So Dollhouse, interestingly, gets close to making such a point but then ends up, apparently (at least at this point) colluding with the concealment of privilege.

PS. After having seen the whole of the 2 series ... in fact towards the end of the series we get to understand that the scenario I come to in response to the university lecturer's vox pop is precisely the case: the rich get to reap the rewards whilst preying on the rest of the population. Just thought I should mention that for the sake of letting it be known that Joss Whedon  and/or Eliza Dushku did seem to have that perspective in view in realising the series. Kudos that they got it past Fox! But, hey, it took them two seasons to rumble it! -At least I assume the hasty-feeling ending at end of season 2 was because it got cancelled. I gather that the original idea was for a 5-year story arc.