Evil in the Whedonverse: Epitaph One

've just seen Epitaph One (unaired episode of Dollhouse, on the DVD, and available by bittorrent). Excellent acting, excellent scripting, brilliant all round, oh man, oh my oh my. And terrifying too; dystopian in the extreme, bleak bleak bleak. One thing that worries me is that I don't see, if this is "the future", how he can get out of this now; how he can give us another ending. The old dream ending? Alternate universe? This is what COULD happen if we all don't make GOOD CHOICES, kids?

Are we watching an Angelverse - all go down fighting, evil triumphs, it's night, it's raining, we're in an alleyway, Wes is dead, Gunn is dying, only the demons can survive in this universe - or a Buffyverse - we destroyed the town in order to save it, but we DID save it, only - and all - the demons are dead, now we can all patch ourselves up and get on with our lives, sun shines, we're on the road away from the Hellmouth and we've even got a bus? ON the basis of Epitaph One, we're definitely in an Angelverse. If that's how it's going to go, though, not sure how much I want to keep watching - except I'm riveted. of course. But one thing that does keep us riveted is hoping that there is a way the characters can escape their almost certain fates; if we knew for sure they were all doomed we wouldn't be so spellbound. So I'll be interested to see how Joss springs us out of Epitaph One, or makes us question it as the Only Possible Future, Because otherwise it's going to be difficult to carry on with the series; we need suspense.

But what I wanted to talk about mostly was Whedon's idea of evil, which is beginning to become steadily clearer and I think it's always the same sort of thing.

In Sunnydale, we have vampires and demons; in Angelverse, we have demons and a few vampires and Wolfram and Hart;

in Serenity we have Reavers, created by the establishment in an effort to make everything better;

in Dollhouse we have an evil establishment with tenttacles everywhere, absolute power producing absolute evil, a slave economy, and - in Epitaph One - vampires, demons, humans, and a new category, blank slates.

The "butchers" of Epitaph One are the Reavers of Serenity or the demons - some demons; the full-blood demons especially - in the Buffy/Angelverse. All the butcher/reaver humanity has been completely destroyed by the actions of an Establishment that used them for its own purposes without much caring about the effect on the individual - or even realising this would be the effect; children, playing with matches, as "Caroline" says in Epitaph One. Their behavioural characteristics - wanton violence, cruelty, vandalism, etc - is like demons in Sunnydale, and many demons in Angel. I think Joss Whedon has never really wanted us to think of demons as good; attractive, possessing many appealing human characteristics, but in the end, they're bad.

The "actuals" in Epitaph One - humans who have not had their souls erased, are still the people they were born as - are human beings.

Then we have the "imprints", who are vampires, kinda (original soul is destroyed, imprinted with someone else's personality)

And finally we have the new category, the "dumbshows", who are the dolls, in Dollhouse; the original personality has been erased, and basic functions still exist, but they're blank slates. They don't exist in Buffy or Angel.

So I think Joss Whedon is meditating on evil, or showing us the faces of evil, but the mechanisms used to produce it are changing. In Buffy/Angel, it was supernatural - demons were demonic, and some demons can take over your body and make you demonic, and you can get away with it because there is a structure of powerful demonic beings in places of power who will use agencies like Wolfram and Hart to protect you if you're useful enough to them.

In Serenity, an evil - control-freak - military industrial government complex tries to pacify an entire world and has unintentional side effects of creating demons by putting stuff in the drinking water (or the air, or whatever it was). The consequences were not intended but the mechanism was entirely human and certainly intentional. They just didn't realise what it would do. And they hid it, lied about it to everyone "for their own good", and were generally secretive; always a bad idea, in the Jossverse; and marks you as a bad guy.

And in Epitaph One, an entirely self-serving for-profit organization comes up with a cool new technology with some highly exploitable ramifications; but like the stuff in the water supply in Serenity, the technology gets out of control with disastrous results. But these results actually were foreseeable. So more and more, the responsibility for evil is becoming human, in the Jossverse; it's becoming our fault. We can't blame the demons or the side effects. We can blame people in positions of power, for sure; but they are people, not demons.

Which makes his new take on evil spectacularly scary because it is so much likelier to happen. It's so much closer to the real world.

I think the Buffy and Angelverse were metaphorical, and cautionary tales. But I'm not so sure the Dollhouse is a metaphor. I think he's saying, this is REAL, folks; this is HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU. Maybe not this specific thing, but somewhere, right now, is the technology that's going to destroy us, and it's not even going to be very long from now.

Bechdel-Wallace testing a random children's series: Bugs Bunny

Since the children just spent all afternoon watching old Looney Tunes, I think I'm in a position to say that Bugs Bunny - and the other Looney Tunes - do not pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, in toto. At least none of the 50 or so episodes on that 4 disk set has a single scene in even one episode in which two female characters talk to each other about anything at all, let alone about something other than a man.

Perhaps someone else can correct me on this. I didn't see any. Of course there is some question about the gender of a collection of cartoon animals. When my daughter was small she believed without questioning it that all of the characters who were not specifically gendered as male or female - that is, most of them, in animated cartoon animals - were female. She believed Bugs Bunny was female. It broke my heart to think how soon she was going to discover that unless a character is specifically gendered female, it is male.

So every character that does anything fun or intelligent? Male.

And then you consider the roles of the few female characters in Bugs Bunny, with the sole exception of Granny; lipstick-wearing sexual distractions. That's what my poor wee girl one day had to realise was the only available role for her. And it's what my poor wee boy was trained to believe was all girls were good for, too.

Kinda robs me of some of the innocent pleasure of Bugs Bunny cartoons. However, they are still pretty funny.

Pride and Glory, Edward Norton, Colin Farrell, John Voight

Bechdel-Wallace test: fails, of course

I was talked into seeing this. A truly dreadful movie. Sure, artily shot, good performances, nice attention paid to interiors, actual Spanish-speaking Latino actors, etc etc, and I went because Ed Norton was in it. But didn't realise till I got to the theatre that it was one of these Irish-cop-family-New-York-corruption-in-the-police-force-will-our-hero-choose-family-or-justice crapfests, I mean, let's just phone the plot in from here shall we?

Oh, and there were a couple of women in it. One was Jennifer Ehle, head shaved, playing the Madonna Wife and Mother Dying of Cancer. Does she matter at all? Of course not; her function is solely to put extra pressure on one of the good guys (protagonist's brother, her husband).

And then there's the pretty-wife-with-corrupt-husband-who-loves-her so we're supposed to believe he's actually a not entirely bad guy. He's doing it all For Her And The Kids, you see. Not that he's asked them if they WANT him to be, you know, dealing drugs and killing people For Them. Still, we're supposed to believe that anyone who loves his family can't be an all bad guy. To which one might well respond "don't even evil men love their children?" It's not a sign of virtue. It doesn't make him likeable or even interesting.

As a rule of thumb: movies about Irish cops in corrupt New York police departments are not going to be about women. Women will be used only to bolster the pretense that the male protagonists have ever had a relationship that mattered with anyone but other men. In this film, there are no relationships that matter, except relations between, and with, men. A typical Hollywood cop movie, in short.

Is there a single scene where two women talk to each other about something other than a man?

Yeah right. That is to say, of course not.

IMDB entry:

Godzilla

I just watched the 1998 Godzilla with the kids. I am now torn between a desire to never think about the movie again - how could they saddle Jean Reno with such lousy lines? - and a desire to write fanfic in which the lady paleontologist gets the cute scientist, instead of the brainless bimbo blonde babe who ditched him 8 years ago without even a courtesy phone call, after 4 years together and a marriage proposal which I gather she skipped town rather than bother to answer, and betrays him within seconds of meeting him again, while whining, blinking her big round blue eyes (her only discernible facial expression) and I swear, twisting her ankle and falling while GODZILLA is after them. I mean GODZILLA - who writes this crap? I really want to know who got paid for it, and I hope they donated it to charity and are doing penance now.

The paleontologist was, one gathers, disqualified from nailing the cute scientist only because a) she had a big nose and b) she was willing to come straight out and say she thought he was cute, but obviously straightforwardness or honesty were not pluses in this guy's book. Or maybe we're supposed to grasp automatically that women with long noses aren't supposed to come on to people. Because, I mean, PLEASE, aren't they supposed to just automatically know that if you have a long nose it doesn't matter if you're brilliant, hard-working, and a person of good character - being a cute blonde bimbo is just naturally going to trump all that?

I am dissuaded from writing the fanfic though because frankly the paleontologist deserves better than Matthew Broderick. Though it's fairly clear that even Matt Broderick's wimpy character is going to dump the bimbo by tomorrow morning, possibly after a post-Godzilla boink or three. Leaving her something else to widen her big round blue eyes in distress over.

I am really not surprised that that actress, whoever she was, has not been seen in a big-screen film since.

Joss and the Bechdel Measure

I just got my nine-year-old daughter to watch Joss Whedon's Equality Now award acceptance speech. We were talking about why she hadn't wanted to watch "Meet the Robinsons", which was actually pretty good, but why she and the friends who were sleeping over had preferred to watch "Legally Blonde", which is so-so but she loves it. And I had just run - again - across the "Bechdel Measure", which we were applying to kid's films. To pass the "Bechdel Measure" a film must have

1. At least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something other than a man.

And if you think it's hard to find films for grown ups that pass that test, try kid's films! Just to mention kid's films I really enjoyed:

• Toy Story
• Toy Story 2 - well, unless you count the dance between the little cowgirl doll and her female owner, until the female owner grew up, discovered boys, and put the little doll out in the recycling ...
• Monsters Inc - and I loved this film!
• Meet the Robinsons - which I just rented last night and quite enjoyed
• Finding Nemo - Mom gratuitously killed in the first 30 seconds; whole film is about a boy and his dad, and every helper figure he meets is also male, with the sole exception of Dory, a substitute mom-figure. Who never talks to or indeed meets another female...
• Happy Feet - buddy story, 3 guys, a couple of girl penguins sure but they never talk to each other, one is a mom and one is a girlfriend for the lead penguin
• Star Wars, all six parts - and the last 3 don't even have a pretense of a strong female character ...
• Any Miyazaki movie - in strong contrast to the above, they all seem to think that what female character do matters! Even when there aren't any boys in the room! As frequently happens! No wonder my daughter likes them. No wonder I do. And my son does too.

Most of these films don't even have 2 female characters. So by those standards "Legally Blonde" may be a so-so film but it's way ahead on the Bechdel Scale.
I want to start a "Bechdel measure" category on IMDB.
But meanwhile, and to come back to Joss: no wonder we love him. We're actually in his stories. Everything he does passes the Bechdel Measure. So I can't wait to dig out my Buffy disks to start watching them again once this reno is finally done - with my daughter this time.
In the meantime she wants to start fundraising to send athletic equipment to girls in Afghanistan. Well, I suggested doing something like that. But I'm happy to help her out with it. Obviously. And maybe adding Bechdel Measure Ratings to the IMDB listings.

Related articles

• The Avengers Didn't Pass the Bechdel Test. Oh well!

  ---

$27 + drinks and popcorn that i'm not going to have to waste

Seinfeld regenders an entire species

Because, you know, you can't admit that pretty much ALL the work in a hive is done by the female bees. That would emasculate the 6 year olds watching the movie?

Or, wait, it would only emasculate the MALE 6 year olds, which would only be half of ... right, right, but they're the half that COUNTS. The opinions of the little ovary-bearers doesn't matter. I always forget.

Apparently telling the little boys the truth about the bees would emasculate them - so let's by all means lie to keep them happy. Because even the tiny little male egos of 6 year olds aren't equipped to handle the truth. And as for the girls in the audience - well, it's not like they matter but if they did, how is there a downside to telling that in the entire universe, girls are never anything but mommies and sex toys? That's the lie that Made Our Culture Great.

Well, fuck, when did I ever think Jerry Seinfeld was anything approaching a feminist. And at least I now know not to waste money on this dog even as a renter.

Pandagon cites the "Bechdel Movie Measure" which I love and had not thought to apply to children's movies, but I certainly should. No movie passes the Bechdel Movie Measure does not do the following three things:

1. There must be at least two women in the film
   
2. Who talk TO EACH OTHER
   
3. About something other than a man.

Seems simple enough. Now try to think of a kid's movie (substitute "male/female" for "man/woman") that passes that rule.

Keep thinking ...

incredible concert

If you ever have a chance to hear the "Ensemble Clement Janequin", with Dominique Visse, director and countertenor, go! It was amazing. Five guys sing, and one accompanies with lute or guitar, and they can do absolutely anything with their voices; renaissance French repertoire, everything across the whole range. Though they all have excellent voices, Dominique Visse' is simply magical. And they were enjoying themselves so much! And the net effect was incredible. I mean, I am incoherent and babbling with praise. I nearly wept.

Here's a sample from the Harmonia Mundi website: La Chasse (mp3)

The lute player is no slouch either, I should add.

The whole audience leaped to their feet in an instant standing ovation immediately after they were done; I've never seen an early music audience do that.