The Art of Reviewing Special Edition(TM): The 20 Minute “Avatar” Review

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

If you haven’t seen it already, it’s making the rounds on Ye Olde Nettertubes.  It’s a twenty-minute review of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar.

Here’s the review, in two parts:

***

COMMENTARY

This review is a bit long and a bit cynical, but it makes a number of valid points.  It is an artful combination of pop culture references, snark, and erudition.  The description of audience manipulation on the part of the filmmakers illustrates the power and seduction of the medium.  Making an analogy between Avatar and the Garbage Pail Kids Movie (Rod Amateau, 1987) shows a stroke of demented genius.

While I have not seen the film, I have seen Dances With Wolves, Titanic, and Aliens. I’ll probably see it once it is released on DVD and enters my Netflix cue.

In our media-saturated culture, one has to be aware of how audience manipulation works.  Every work — book, TV show, film, etc. — draws us into a world that is not our own.  Avatar, with its blue color, sexy panther-monkey aliens, and CGI, opts for the easy path.  The easy route includes villains too easy to hate and an alien culture too beautifully perfect. The film’s 18th century caricature of the military mirrors its 18th century caricature of “the noble savage.”  Add the tacked-on topicality (“Did he just say ‘Shock and awe’?”) and NSFW eroticism of the Na’vi and the result is boffo box office, despite the sheer obviousness of its crapulence.  Hence why the reviewer dubbed it an “effective movie” but not a “great movie.”  Akin to the difference between Dick Van Patton and General Patton.

The Art of Reviewing: Nathan Rabin

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

Noted Nathan Rabin impressionist David Cross.

Nathan Rabin is the hip hop music reviewer for the AV Club.  He hails from Chicago and calls himself “the world’s most secular Jew.”  His other noteworthy contributions to pop culture criticism include “Nashville or Bust,” a long-term series exploring country music, and “My Year of Flops.”  With the latter, Rabin watches movies that have flopped at the box office.  Like an alchemist, he takes the mundane topic of cinematic failure and spins it into pop culture gold.

The AV Club possesses many reviewers, each armed with encyclopedic knowledge and attitude to spare.  Rabin stands out as a reviewer with a signature style.  “My Year of Flops” embodies that style.

“My Year of Flops” also carves out a new territory in the field of film criticism.  Beneath the overlong essays, laden with sarcasm and dick jokes, is a meticulous examination of the aesthetics of failure.  Rabin explains:

On Jan. 25, 2007, I began an online blog project called “My Year Of Flops.” I had a simple goal: to lay down the foundation for a series of lucrative PowerPoint presentations that would show small-business groups how life lessons from failed films could help them maximize efficiency, exploit multiple ancillary revenue streams, and explosify profits. To qualify for My Year Of Flops, a film had to meet four unyielding/slippery criteria: It had to be a critical and commercial failure upon its release. (Domestically, at least.) It had to have, at best, a marginal cult following. Lastly, it had to facilitate an endless procession of bad jokes, facile observations, and labored one-liners.

(from Pee-Drinking Man-Fish I Have Known: My Year Of Flops, The Year In Review, January 23, 2008)

Rabin divides the films into three categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success.

Cameron Crowe fail.

As overly earnest protagonists played by callow Lord Of The Rings cast members will happily inform you, Failures are simply the non-presence of success. Fiascos, meanwhile, find a strange glory in failure. At the very tip top of the rating scale, meanwhile, are Secret Successes, legitimately good movies ripe for critical reevaluation.

(from Pee-Drinking Man-Fish)

The overly earnest protagonist (Orlando Bloom) is from cinematic failure Elizabethtown.  Elizabethtown is the first flop he reviewed, calling it “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy.”

Rabin’s archaeological excavation of cinematic commercial failure makes for entertaining reading.  It’s a wonderful guide to lesser-known films and a look into aesthetic masochism.  At over a hundred entries, “My Year of Flops” contains numerous gems.  Reading like a Bizarro World Pauline Kael, the reader comes across misunderstood classics (Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate) and cinematic atrocities (Bratz: The Movie, Mac and Me), and incomprehensible train wrecks / works of genius (Southland Tales).  The style of the essays is reminiscent of Cintra Wilson, fashion reporter for the New York Times, a finely balanced mixture of erudition, humor, and style.  Here is a random assortment of passages:

The girls’ bond and commitment to subverting the dominant paradigm threatens the school’s most popular and ruthless student, a pretty blonde tyrant that Chelsea Staub plays as a cross between Josef Stalin, Paris Hilton, and Tracy Flick from Election. Staub’s father, incidentally, is played by Jon Voight, though to be fair, he probably only took the role to pay back Bratz producer Steven Paul for giving Voight his career-making role in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, as an ascot-wearing, smoking-jacket-and-Hitler-mustache-sporting German businessman engaged in a decades-long, multi-continent struggle with a super-scamp who travels around in a flying car and never ages. Voight is, after all, loyal. And completely insane. (For further proof, check him out in David Zucker’s far-right-wing Christmas Carol spoof An American Carol. On second thought, don’t. You’d only be encouraging him.)

(from “My Year Of Flops Totally Tween Case File #118: Bratz: The Movie”)

It’s not hard to see why Scenes At A Mall failed. Its characters aren’t particularly likeable and it’s hard to muster up sympathy for pampered adulterers. Scenes also falls victim to the Parental-Sex Rule. Unless you’re a 17-year-old newly adopted by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, nobody wants to imagine their parents having sex.

( from “My Year Of Flops Case File # 57 Scenes From A Mall”)

From a creative standpoint, funding a movie like Heaven’s Gate was risky. From a financial standpoint, it was fucking insane.

But I imagine that if you went to a mall and asked people whether they’d rather see a violent, depressing, visually sumptuous, nearly four-hour-long Western about a class war between ranchers and immigrants in 19th century Wyoming from the creator of The Deer Hunter or a comedy about a robot that runs for President, 99% of the respondents would opt for the comedy. I suspect that even if you limited the polling sample to Cimino’s immediate family, the results would be the same.

(from “My Year Of Flops Case File #81 Heaven’s Gate ”)

Ah, but I haven’t even gotten to the whole bit about the stone-levitating lizard-man mystic guru. After his parents are brutally murdered, Prinze Jr. becomes a protégé of a Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced mystic capable of making rocks float in the air. Yes, making rocks float in the air. Duncan’s road-show Yoda spends much of the film explaining to his protégé that he must become one with the stones and attain a curious stone/hand/spirit communion if he wants to maximize his spirit force. Suddenly that whole foolishness about midi-chlorians in The Phantom Menace doesn’t seem quite so stupid.

(from “Floppiest Flop Case File # 126 Delgo”)

Rabin’s ongoing investigation into the cinema of failure brings to mind Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Both use comedy as an entry point to question, skewer, or praise “cheesy movies.”  And that is a Secret Success.

I Think, Therefore Who Am I?: Memoir of a Psychedelic Year, by Peter Weissman

In the film The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999), the record producer Terry Valentine offers his girlfriend an evocative speech describing the Sixties.

“Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before?  A place that maybe only exists in your imagination?  Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up.  When you were there, though, you knew the language.  You knew your way around.  That was the sixties.”

After a pause, he continues.  “No.  It wasn’t that either.  It was just ‘66 and early ‘67.  That’s all there was.”  Peter Weissman’s memoir I Think, Therefore Who Am I?: Memoir of a Psychedelic Year examines 1967.  Terry Valentine’s speech from The Limey shows how the recording industry has commodified and mythologized the decade to an eager consumer base.  The Sixties remains the popular decade to mythologize, at least among the political Left and rock fans.  On the other hand, the Right readily mythologizes the Fifties with its philosophy of conformity, white privilege, and rabid anti-Communism.

I Think, Therefore Who Am I? demythologizes the decade by taking a detailed look at one year.  The year 1967 represents a utopian vision to those that never experienced it.  The following year, 1968, ushers in feelings of pessimism, civil unrest in major US cities, and military atrocities in Vietnam.

Weissman’s memoir tells the story of one man and his quest for enlightenment.  He encounters visionaries, drug dealers, and other characters in his daily wanderings in New York City.  He travels to California to experience the Haight-Ashbury scene.

Written in a youthful pretentious style, Weissman captures what it’s like to be young and idealistic.  The youthful style works in its favor, since it draws in the reader.  “At the edge of the Platonic huddle now, a joint was thrust in my direction, brusquely welcoming me to the order of the stoned disciples of the weed.”  He reminds the reader the possibilities and fears one encounters before one settles into middle age.

Reminiscent of Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, the memoir follows an individual through the bad trips, betrayals, adventures, and enlightenment in a year overdetermined by mythologizers and promoters.  While Wiseguy follows the life story of a foot soldier in a criminal syndicate, Peter Weissman’s memoir shows how one still had to hustle and struggle to stay afloat.  The Sixties had great music and charismatic personalities, but one still had to buy food and find a pad where one could spend the night.  Weissman tells of these daily experiences, the good and the bad.

My only pet peeve relates to the book’s production, not the content.  The publisher, Xlibris, has a paperback version of the book.  Unfortunately, the paperback’s front and back covers curled.  In my correspondence with the author, Weissman assured me this problem was not seen in the hardcover version of the book.

I Think Therefore, Who Am I? is recommended to anyone curious about the Sixties.  The unique perspective, focusing only on one year, offers a nice change from the memoirs flooding bookstores.

Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes by Will Self

A Review with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

1. A Culinary Introduction

Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes by Will Self explores and revels in decay and degeneration, gushing with bile and blood.  The quartet of interconnected short stories focus on the liver, a bodily organ with interconnected lobes.

The liver functions by processing toxins and connects to the gall bladder.  People also consume liver as a delicacy.  The dish “liver and onions” is a classic in American cuisine.  I have eaten deer liver with onions and I enjoy the taste.  Prior to preparing it, I divided the sizable organ into four sections.  After placing the remainder in the freezer for safekeeping, I washed my fingers, coated in maroon-colored blood.  I’ve also had duck liver.  It was not foie gras, but still silky and delicious.  Unlike the dark deer liver, the duck liver looked taupe, a yellowish ivory hue.  Considerably smaller than the deer’s liver, the duck liver only provided for consumption as an appetizer.

Since liver is an organ meat, people have different reactions to it.  Some consider it anathema, taboo, or simply gross.  To others it is a delicacy to worthy of celebration.  Restaurant au Pied de Cochon in Montreal specializes in foie gras dishes, the menu a symphony of culinary excess.  Liver as a delicacy created controversy in the United States with cities, including New York City, placing a ban on the consumption of goose liver.

The liver is an organ.  What we consider meat is actually an animal’s muscle.  Meat, whether it is steak or a chicken drumstick, should be tender and chewy.  Liver, including other organs like kidney, possesses a blocky, chalky texture.

For a bodily organ, the liver unleashes bodily, political, and culinary complications.  Self mines these complications and creates an interconnected work of addiction, destruction, decay, and violence.

2. Pleasures of the Text

Liver has four stories: “Foie Humaine,” “Leberknödel,” “Prometheus,” and “Birdy Num Num.”  The first is a story about alcoholics.  The second follows a cancer patient to Zurich for assisted-suicide.  The third involves an ad man getting his liver sliced out while he’s alive.  The fourth follows a junky into a kaleidoscopic vision of addiction, farce, and disease.

In “Foie Humaine”, the reader is introduced to the Plantation Club.  Occupying the Soho section of London and accessed through Blore Court, the Plantation Club exists, preserved and fossilized, like its denizens.  Steeped in alcohol and oblivion, the club’s nominal gay clientele have degenerated into an asexual amorphous mass.

“No change at all was wrought in this sequestered cell.  To say of any of its members that they were ‘gay’ would be a nonsense, for, while outside Old Compton Street everyone became openly gayer and gayer, inside the club they only grew sadder and sadder.”

Amidst this decay and depression, Val Carmichael, the club’s owner, spikes the barman’s beer with vodka.  In the story, the deterioration of the liver coincides with city’s decomposition.  Buildings and neighborhoods get torn down, only to have newer structures jut from the rubble.  Only the Plantation Club remains the same.

Self lavishes the reader with delicious phraseology and a vocabulary as rich as any foie gras.  The richness elevates the story from a mere tale of sad sacks drinking at the bar.  The ornate writing careens drunkenly from the urbane to the slangy to the outright vulgar.  Val Carmichael’s penchant for giving his patrons ironic appellations includes a Polari term that remains shocking and unprintable.  Although anyone familiar with Sexy Beast will be familiar with the Latinate term for the female anatomy.

In the end, Val Carmichael dies with his liver bloated and cirrhotic.  It is a death not unlike many of his patrons, although the playful Self allows Val an end that transforms the story’s mood and genre.

3. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

“Leberknödel” follows Joyce Beddoes, an aging widow dying of cancer, to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich.  The story’s title is also the German word for lamb’s livers, a dish she consumes after she refuses her treatment.

The story begins with Joyce and her daughter Isobel traveling to Zurich in a plane.  Her body wizened and weakened from the cancer, Joyce finds herself afraid she will die if the plane crashes.  Joyce’s daughter Isobel, an “installation artist” Joyce neither understands nor appreciates, eventually hangs around the Plantation Club with the other artists of questionable repute.

Events become complicated when Joyce’s cancer relapses.  The first complication involves her meeting a nice Catholic couple, although they insist they are not extremists, prior to her relapse.  Joyce enjoys their company, but gets more and more perturbed by the Catholic Church’s desire to determine whether her relapse was a miracle.  Technically.  Joyce, a believer, never enjoyed the “state-assisted piety” of the United Kingdom’s Anglican Church, but the Catholic Church’s activities, a combination of intricate legalisms and public relations, seems off-putting to Joyce.

In the end, after making a life for herself in Zurich, Joyce has to make a choice.  The contract with the euthanasia clinic remains in place.

While the first story mixed the slangy and the ornate, this story interlards the text with Latin phrases and Schweitzerdeutsch, each chapter named after a section of the Catholic Mass.  The story flows to its conclusion, revelatory and powerful, as trenchant as “Foie Humaine” was farcical.

4. You Are All Diseased

The last two stories, “Prometheus” and “Birdy Num Num”, are short and witty.  “Prometheus” follows the eponymous protagonist, a hot shot advertising executive, pitch ideas to Zeus, an entrepreneur selling mineral water.  If the Plantation Club, “an aquarium of absinthe”, like Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, preserved in stasis, then Titan, where Prometheus works, is, to quote the comically oblivious French and Saunders, “Very young and very now.”  Epimetheus, the slower brother of Prometheus, also works at Titan.

All is normal and mundane at Titan, except for the griffon vulture consuming the liver of Prometheus daily.  The tone and genre is superficially “urban fantasy” with mythological figures coexisting with ordinary mortals.  Gods and humans interact with humorous consequences, making the story similar to Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips.  Phillips’s work is closer to Douglas Adams, whereas Self turns the genre on its head with a heavy dose of visceral realism.  Visceral as in viscera.  The griffin vulture wants the liver of Prometheus and it will stop at nothing to attain it.  Prometheus is only happy to oblige, since the act gives him intellectual prowess and professional luck.  The consequences of the liver removal include physical weakness and harrowing pain.  Self makes these all too real.

The comedy continues in “Birdy Num Num,” this time with Billy Chobham and the dissolute junkies hanging around Tony Riley’s Kensington flat.  A disease narrates the last story.  The perspective gives the story a unique feeling, at once omniscient and omnipresent.  Given the setting is London, Tuesday, November 1998, one can easily guess at a possible culprit for the disease.

When high, Billy’s favorite film is the Peter Seller’s film The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968).  The story’s title comes from what Hrundi V. Bakshi says to the bird at the party.  The film plays as an extended slapstick gag.  As the disease states, “Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods.”  The story unfolds into situations more and more comedic.  Billy play Sellers playing Bakshi while the slapstick of the Party, the movie, gets transfigured into the shenanigans of this Kensington flat.  It’s as if “The Masque of the Red Death” was written as a farce and narrated by the plague itself, not just the crimson robed human carrier crashing Prospero’s shindig.

I enjoyed reading Liver.  Akin to discovering a new cuisine, I was initially hesitant.  This is the first work of fiction I have read by Will Self.  The “Psychogeography” columns in the Independent were my first discovery of him as a writer.  To anyone who enjoys wordplay and wit, Liver is highly recommended.  While the interconnections hearken to Dubliners by James Joyce, a more accurate literary analogue would be Anthony Burgess.  Liver, containing bile and blood and excess and disease, offers visions, revelations, and reading at its most joyous.

In re Dollhouse Riffs

“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”

Things get complicated.

Due to the unprecedented awesomeness of Dollhouse, I’ve decided to forgo writing any more Dollhouse Riffs until Season Two concludes.  As you know, dear readers, I avoid writing the usual episode summary.  “This was cool.  This wasn’t cool.”  My essays aim for a more critical and analytical perspective.  Fortunately and unfortunately, the December episodes of Dollhouse have really threw me for a loop.  The reappearance of Alpha, the labyrinthine mindscrew of the Attic (both the episode and as a biotechnological concept), and Adelle’s assembly of a Dollhouse: LA Scooby Gang leave lots for digestion, rumination, and contemplation.

On a related note, I’m also planning to write a longer essay for the Dollhouse Essay Contest. If the essay is not accepted, I’ll post it as a Dollhouse Riff.

Just wanted to keep everyone updated.

Journey to the End of the Night (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

In the black heart of the Great Depression, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler rose to power, Louis-Ferdinand Cèline set the French literary scene afire with Journey to the End of the Night.  By turns darkly comical, hallucinatory, and picaresque, the novel charts the misadventures of Bardamu.  From the trenches of the First World War to French colonial Africa to New York City and Detroit, Bardamu experiences each place with his own jaundiced eyes.  Eventually he returns back to suburban Paris, a small-time doctor working with impoverished patients.  Bardamu is not alone.  His friend, one Robinson, accompanies him as he deals with corrupt colonial officers, sleazy showgirls, and asylum inmates.

Céline would later gain notoriety as a Vichy collaborator, anti-Semite, and Fascist sympathizer.  Journey, his first novel, while not an anti-Semitic work, is a misanthropic work.  Bardamu, a thinly veiled version of Céline, is a pessimist and a nihilist.  The pessimism and nihilism gives the work a comedic edge, similar to the darkly comical work of Bill Hicks.  Unlike Hicks, Céline lacks humanitarianism in this novel.  He can be seen as a cold-eyed Cassandra, only seeing the worse in people, yet Journey also exhibits a Rabelaisian excess and energy.

The Temptation of St. Anthony by Gustave Flaubert

A work of singular genius.  The plot is simple: Anthony, a monk, goes out to the desert to meditate, gets tempted.  But what temptations!  Flaubert pulls out all the stops in a decadent, phantasmagorical, hallucinatory, excessively brilliant novel.  While the book is written like a play, it is clearly a novel, since staging this would be impossible. (Maybe Terry Gilliam or Michel Gondry could film it?)

Our benighted monk gets tempted by all manner of beasts, demons, and sexy ladies, while the reader is treated to a panoply of cults, heresies, and sects, fighting for his attention.

While a literary curiosity at the time, the book went on to influence James Joyce. The “Nighttown” section of Ulysses (corresponding with Circe, shape-changing, and Walpurgisnacht) bears Flaubert’s influence.

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Yuck! Soot, coal, suffering. Rinse, lather, repeat. Even by the standards of Dickens’ classic sentimentality for the underdog, this novel is a dud. Probably not the best introduction to Charles Dickens unless you want your child to enjoy the pleasures of never reading again. This novel makes Zola’s Germinal, also about downtrodden coal miners, seem like a work of candy-colored upbeat positivity.

Dickens’s advice to coal miners getting steamrolled by the Man.

Critical Appraisals: The political economy of the Dark Knight

I have written a lengthy essay on the political economy of the Dark Knight. The essay is at a companion site to the Driftless Area Review called Coffee is for Closers.

Dollhouse Riffs: Riff #7: Dollhouse sent to the Attic

Good bye, Echo.

Sent to the Attic

Echo: Everyone’s unhappy today.

Topher: Somebody put her tiny little thinking cap on!

Spy in the House of Love

The inevitable has occurred.  Dollhouse, the science fiction series masterminded by Joss Whedon, fought against dismal ratings and executive meddling only to finally get canceled after two seasons.  To use the jargon of Adele DeWitt, the series was “sent to the Attic.”

While the Dollhouse cancellation is traumatic for fans, viewers must also take a step back from emotional reaction and explore the possibilities.  The TV landscape and the media landscape are radically different from 2002.  Remember, this is Joss Whedon, the genius behind the Dr. Horrible Sing-a-long Blog.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer lives on as a comic book series (Season Eight); Firefly lives on as a role-playing game; not to mention the myriad other officially sanctioned tie-ins and the productions of fandom.

Unlike 2002, the Internet and the DVD market offer chances for creative reincarnation.  The webisode and the DVD tie-in (as seen with other canceled FOX series like Family Guy and Futurama) can provide venues to explore the Dollverse.  Dollhouse could do very well exploring the world of “Epitaph One” via movie tie-in (a la Serenity) and/or direct-to-DVD series produced on the cheap.  The ascendancy of high-quality digital video cameras, digital editing equipment, and the like, could make episodes on YouTube and/or Hulu a reality.  The entertainment revolution will not be televised.  With all the production and distribution options, why would it need to be?  The Internet, blogging, and fandom can alter elections and legislation actions.  A little know-how can surely keep a nifty action show alive, albeit in different forms.

In the world of toy manufacture, Dollhouse could always create a Dollhouse dollhouse and populate it with action figures.  Unless someone in the fandom beat the toymakers to the punch.

Yes, it is a sad day for Whedon fandom.  Then again, this is not 1954 and one is not under the domination of three networks to provide them with entertainment content.

Too cool and too weird for 2002.

Dollhouse and Firefly: Amputated series

“Off with their heads!”

Red Queen, Alice in Wonderland

Dollhouse and Firefly could be termed “amputated series.”  Firefly canceled after one season, Dollhouse after two.  The narrative arcs cut short before they could become fruitful.

On the one hand, an amputated narrative arc frustrates viewers.  On the other, if we take Firefly as an example, the limited arc presents the viewer with a beautifully self-contained world.  Firefly presented an offbeat, sexy space Western complete with politics, religion, and Chinese dialogue.  The series appeared too weird for a TV audience still reeling from the televised atrocities of 9/11 and the resultant patriotic saber rattling.  In retrospect, Firefly plays like a complementary overture to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.  While the series appear radically different, both contended with authoritarian government power, terrorism, and demonizing the other.

Dollhouse offers a slight variation on the Firefly situation.  It is too early to judge it retrospectively, but the changes occurring in the lives of the characters would have made compelling TV, with the unaired “Epitaph One” floating about as the narrative capstone.  Prior to the network enforced hiatus, the Dollhouse facility appeared on the verge of unraveling.  Dr. Saunders (aka Whiskey, played by Amy Acker) left; Topher (Fran Kranz) developed from a snarky wunderkind to possessing his own story arc; Echo (aka Caroline, played by Eliza Dushku) wrote messages on her sleeping pod; Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) switched “teams” from the FBI to the Dollhouse; and Sierra (Dichen Lachman) and Victor (Enver Gjokaj) came to create their own brand of romance within the tabula rasa of wiped minds and toned bodies in the Dollhouse.  Clearly a lot is going on.

However, as I explained before, this is not 2002 and there are ways to continue these stories.  I hope that Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy Productions will find a way.  Perhaps the FOX network and commercial interruptions was not the best venue to tell the stories of Dollhouse.  In a world of mind wipes, nefarious corporations, and complex storylines, video games and Internet clips could complement more traditional narratives pursued in media like DVD.

You don’t need to be on TV to bring the awesome.

Brilliant but cancelled

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Kurt Vonnegut

In this essay, I did not come to bury Dollhouse, but to praise it.  This is also a call to arms to the fandom and the Whedon production team.  There are different stories and there are different ways to tell those stories.  While a narrative arc has been cut short through the vagaries of commercial television, it can live on, maybe in a venue less dependent on advertising dollars.  Maybe, just maybe, Dollhouse could become like Futurama and Family Guy, getting resurrected on a different network.  With a series premised on implanting a personality into a body, this fate would fit the nature of the show.  If the writers, given the opportunity, could also make FOX executive Rossum Corporation clients.  The potential for metacommentaries on TV production and corporate misbehavior seem limitless.

The Recession has forced everyone to make sacrifices and to become inventive.  I see the cancelling in the same light.  It is unfortunate that the series was canceled, but commercial television is not the only venue to tell these stories.