What in the hell …

So I’m really liking this TV show Dollhouse. There’s all kinds of interesting themes and so on, and I like the fight scenes and suspense and mystery of it too. I really hope it doesn’t get canceled. After watching the season finale tonite my wife and I started talking about how one of the main themes in the show is what it’s appropriate to enter into a contract to sell.

In the show people agree to let this secret outfit rent their bodies for a five year period. During that period the people’s personalities are stored in a computer. They’re told that their bodies will be well cared for, pampered in a spa, fed well, given exercise, etc. For those people it’s like being in a coma, mentally speaking. At the end of the contract they’re supposed to get their bodies back plus a lot of money. What they lose is the time - they’re five years older and they’ve missed five years of the world. What the company gets is use of their bodies. They download new personalities into the bodies for various reasons, all on contract to people who rent the use of the bodies plus the downloaded personalities for whatever reasons - sexual, committing an act of violence, whatever.

So we’ve got a seller of labor power, a buyer of labor power, a buyer of the products and services of that labor power. We’ve also got the labor power in action - the people-plus-downloaded-personalities combination. We don’t hear where the downloadable personalities come from. The show implies sometimes that they’re manufactured and other time that they’re harvested from actual people in various ways, perhaps consensual and perhaps not.

Consent and contract is a theme lurking in the background of the show. With a single exception we never see anyone actually released from/complete their contract, and that only after the company is placed under duress. There’s an accountability issue here, which is that the person who agrees to rent their body to the company effectively disappears, mentally speaking, upon entering into the contract. As such, they have no means of holding the company accountable. The contract is a fiction, in the sense that it is not really an agreement between equals or something mutually binding. Whether or not the contract is fulfilled is entirely at the discretion of the buyer, the company. The company is a clandestine criminal organization, and so its discretion is hardly something a rational seller would trust if they had clear knowledge of the organization. They don’t, though, the sellers don’t have much knowledge of the market they’re entering into. What’s more, the show repeatedly presents evidence that the sellers are under duress, compelled by their life circumstances. They contract under compulsion. And in at least one instance, the show suggests, there was no contract at all, someone was forced into giving their body to the company and having their mind placed in storage. The show also suggests that some characters are never released from their contracts, being warehoused someplace called “The Attic” when things go wrong in some way.

There’s also an implication in the show that the company’s middle management and supervisory personnel are kept in their places in part because they don’t want to be put into the position of the people who’ve signed contracts. In one instance, a character is punished with precisely this, sending disgust and terror through several of the other managerial personnel, even as they participate in administering the punishment.

That stuff all seems to be part of the show’s premise. At least once the contracting people are referred to as slaves, other times they’re compared to murder and kidnap victims. The show over the season complicates the premise, as the people who have rented out their bodies and the personalities that inhabit their bodies begin to act in various ways beyond the company’s plans and predictions.

(Incidentally, if anyone’s interested, the books From Bondage to Contract by Amy Dru Stanley and Public Vows by Nancy Cott are partly about issues of what’s salable and the nature of contract within U.S. history. Stanley’s book is partly about slavery and emancipation and labor contracts. Both books are about visions of what sort of contract marriage is or should be.)

Oh yeah, if you’re into Dollhouse and blogs and whatnot, see the posts on the show by Negatron and by Wildly.