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341 From Old Heresies to Future Paradigms Joss Whedon on Body and Soul G R E G O R Y E R I C K S O N God and Soul In the unaired pilot episode of Dollhouse, Boyd Langton has a conversation with Topher Brink about the ethics of repeatedly wiping and programming their “Actives.” Boyd proposes the idea that the Actives or “Dolls” are perhaps still “people” and questions the morality of “those things we program them to do.” He refutes Topher’s argument that the Actives’ engagements actually provide them heightened life experiences, saying, “There’s nothing real about it. They’re programmed.” Topher responds by listing Boyd’s most embodied habits (“You eat eggs every morning but never at night”), including the ones imposed by popular culture (“Your stomach rumbles every time you drive by a big golden arch”), and concludes, “Everybody’s programmed, Boyd” (“Echo” 1.0). This exchange simultaneously rehearses ancient debates over body and soul, modern philosophical dialogues on essentialism and existentialism, and futuristic anxieties about the posthuman. From Buffy and Angel through Firefly and Dollhouse, Joss Whedon has dramatized the difficulty of understanding the tension between what we do and who we are, between action and being, and between our desire for and suspicion of the “real.” What is the relationship between memory and reality? Creator and created? Flesh and spirit? These tensions —what Scott McLaren refers to as the tension “between the ontological and the existential” (2005, para. 2)—as Whedon repeatedly shows us, raise questions at the core of human self-definition. For theologian Charles Winquist , “we think we know what we mean when we say I and that this I is a person , which, in turn, gives a substantial meaning to the word ‘person’” (1998, 225). This certainty, however, is shadowed by doubt, a doubt that Whedon 342 ✴ Overarching Topics demonstrates by challenging the defined boundaries of the human soul and, by extension, our changing definitions of ourselves. His dramas often focus on human figures who, in one way or another, lose their “soul” as they change from one status to another: human to vampire, human to Reaver, human to Active, human to god. The question of what is lost or gained in each case is directly related to our cultural associations about the human soul. It remains a popular metaphor in our society to equate the lack of a soul with a defective moral conscience, and therefore, when we assume the existence of a soul, we assert the exceptionalism of our “humanity.” To insist that any being (African slave, Islamic terrorist, Cylon) has no soul is to separate “it” from us. A soulless being’s actions do not represent humanity or threaten our conceptions of who we are, and our actions toward them can be justified outside accepted morality codes. On Buffy and Angel, the soul is often connected to a conscience or a state of “goodness.”1 Although the equation of the soul with morality or the good is obviously problematic, Whedon’s most interesting characters, from Spike to Illyria to Topher, both confirm and subvert traditional and essentialist notions of a soul. As J. Renée Cox, among others, points out, characters such as Whistler, Clem, and, most prominently, Spike are examples of “soulless” beings who still make moral choices (2008, 27–29). Although Whedon seems to imply that the human soul may be a necessary if imaginary construct, he also demonstrates its essential instability. By interlacing pagan and Christian ideas of the soul and the body with futuristic technodriven speculation, and by presenting narrative forms that challenge viewers’ sense of identity, linearity, and coherence, Whedon offers a reenvisioning of the soul as a relational concept that is simultaneously physical, spiritual, and technological. A soul, dictionaries tell us, is the “incorporeal essence of a person,” a definition that follows ancient Christian and Greek thinkers. For Plato, the soul “sheds its wings and wanders until it lights on something solid, where it settles and takes on an earthly body” (1997, 524). A familiar Catholic catechism claims “the soul is a living being without a body, having reason and free will.” In both cases, the soul serves as a separate moral command center for the body, yet is still defined in opposition to the body. The uncertainty at the core of the body-soul relationship has historically defined and divided various branches of religion, and the variety of answers to questions of body and soul dominated the development...

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