Reading Joss Whedon

Adventures in the Moral Imagination: Memory and Identity in Whedon’s Narrative Ethics

312 Adventures in the Moral Imagination Memory and Identity in Whedon’s Narrative Ethics J . D O U G L A S R A B B A N D J . M I C H A E L R I C H A R D S O N Our principal purpose is to show how what we call Joss Whedon’s narrative ethics uses story rather than rules or principles to justify moral judgments or ethical choices. We see the technology of implanted memory used by the Rossum Corporation in Whedon’s Dollhouse as, among other things, a metaphor for narrative applicable throughout Whedon’s creations. Each implanted personality brings with it a life story, invoking Whedon’s narrative ethics. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff, graduate supervisor of Whedonverses writer-producer Jane Espenson, argues that the human brain thinks primarily in terms of cognitive metaphors (see Rabb and Richardson 2009). Relating narrative and cognitive metaphor, Lakoff goes on to explain, “Narratives and melodramas are not mere words and images; they can enter our brains and provide models that we not merely live by, but that define who we are” (2008, 231). There is a sense, then, in which we are all like the Actives created by the Rossum Corporation, constructed through Dollhouse and other narratives. As Harry Lennix, the actor who played Boyd, Echo’s handler, puts it, “I think we’re all in a Dollhouse” (quoted in Wilcox 2010, epigraph). The big reveal in the antepenultimate Dollhouse episode “Getting Closer” is, of course, that Rossum is not the proper name of the corporation’s head or founder, but is “just a name, from a play, actually” (2.11). When Caroline learns this bit of information, she is also told that, “although technically you’re not robots, it seemed to fit.” We think it is significant that Caroline is told this information before she has been turned into Echo. She is not yet an Active or a Doll, much less a robot. The term Rossum comes from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., which first introduced the word robot, from the Moral Imagination ✴ 313 Czech robota, denoting serfdom. R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots (2004; see Koontz 2010). We suggest that the statement—you’re not robots, but the term seemed to fit—is not meant for Caroline alone. In this narrative, all of us are being addressed as dolls, or doll-like creations constructed by a series of narratives, including Whedon’s Dollhouse, thus raising ethical questions concerning authenticity: are we alone scripting our own lives? The various narratives we read often contain, and sometimes even support, conflicting values. Any narrative ethics must give us some way of deciding among these conflicts. We show, through a study of Whedon’s various narratives, how this way of deciding is possible. We like to contrast narrative ethics with both a principlist ethics based on rules and a utilitarian or consequentialist ethics based on the evaluation or optimization of consequences. Principlist and utilitarian ethical theories are sometimes combined in a so-called supreme principle of morality such as, “Everyone ought to follow the optimific principles, because these are the only principles that everyone could rationally will to be universal laws” (Parfit 2011, 1:411). Optimific principles are ones that “would make things go best” (1:410). By appealing to or following such principles, we are said to be making objective rational moral decisions. On the other hand, a narrative ethics relies more on imagination and emotion than on this kind of deductive or calculative reason alone. Nonetheless, narratives can guide our actions and help us decide what kind of persons we really want to be. Whedon presents what we would call narrative arguments against both moral principlism and utilitarianism , the two most prominent ethical theories. Buffy herself is certainly not governed by rules, yet she survives in her very dangerous vocation, unlike Kendra, the rule-bound (principlist) Slayer. As Zoe-Jane Playdon observes, “Kendra is trained: Kendra is killed. Buffy is educated: Buffy survives” (2002, para. 15). Playdon explains the difference between training and education by noting that “the goal of education is ‘transformation,’” whereas training involves the transmission of rules, principles, commands, or “a set of behaviors ” (para. 12). As we will see, stories and narratives themselves can be educational and thus transformative. Buffy does not slavishly follow rules—she does not even have the Slayer’s Handbook—and freely breaks rules when necessary . But when in...