We’re all familiar with discussions of how aspects of past pop culture reflected intrinsic fears in society — that monster movies of the 50’s and 60’s, for example, are a manifestation of fear of nuclear war. With this in mind, it seems to me that Dollhouse and Avatar are both sufficiently different from what has gone before, yet have sufficiently similar themes, that we can start to ponder what is going on here.
I think it’s worth stating, up front, that I think we have to see these both as not simply modernized versions of demonic possession or zombiehood. In these previous genres, the focus is on the body, and on how the body has been “stolen”; in the works I’m discussing, the focus is on the mind, with the body as disposable soma — what appears to matters is that the mind can be poured from one vessel to another, not the vessel in which it happens to reside.
So why should this subject now, in the late 2000s, become a hot topic? One possibility is the issue of “Identity in Cyberspace” (all capitalized), the suggestion that the internet has permeated enough life, and people have had enough experience, both with their fake facebook pages, and with meeting internet dates who were not what they claimed to be, that the fact that we can construct fake digital personae has become mainstream. This, however, strikes me as wrong — the emotional resonances of fake digital IDs and identity theft just don’t match these two works.
Here’s my offering of a possible interpretation. We start with my claim that the last thirty to fifty years have seen economics in the US transformed from a social science, occasionally useful for political purposes, into an all-consuming theology/world-view. No matter what the subject, whether it’s marriage partners, how people choose a church, the meaning of the law, or the point of society, economics has an opinion on the issue, and that opinion is becoming the defining opinion in the US. It is just taken for granted that the right way to view law is through the veil of “law and economics”, that the purpose of politics is to maximize GDP, that success in life is measured by wealth; these are considered such obvious points that they are not part of the debate. Health-care in the US right now is being discussed exclusively in terms of who will pay for private insurance; the idea that insurance should not be run by private corporations, let alone that health should not be run as a for-profit enterprise are just not considered serious viewpoints.
One central tenet of this world-view is that humans are atomized individuals, born into the world as little calculators, and interacting with other humans via contracts which can be broken at any time if there’s any profit to doing so. I have to wonder if Dollhouse and Avatar are reactions against this. Of course, prima facie, they stand precisely in the economics camp. giving us a vision of minds that can be shifted from body to body as convenient, an obvious extrapolation of the atomic individual unconnected to society. But in Dollhouse, the larger story is that the bodies rebel, that even as successive minds are poured into them, they are not empty vessels; and, of course, that minds disconnected from bodies leads, in the end, to disaster. The Avatar story is simpler, much more traditional and less interesting — the Americans are individuals, to the ultimate extent that they’ve developed the technology to pour minds into new bodies, whereas the smurfs are all connected as one happy family. Cameron, however, goes out of his way to emphasize the strength of that connection, so that we don’t just have mysticism about the great world spirit, we see it made concrete via the nerve roots at the end of the smurfs’ pigtails; one could argue that this is done precisely to state that this connection is not just words, it is every bit as real as a fiber-optic cable.
In other words, I see both of these works as pushback against the idea that humans are nothing but individuals, as attempts to assert that it is precisely our ties to each other that make us human.
With only two examples from larger pop culture (certainly I can’t think of any more) it is a bit much to declare a trend. Nevertheless, I do feel there is something here, and if one of my readers ever gets to meet Joss Wheedon or James Cameron, it might be worth asking them their opinion.