Review: Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture (Nicole Brending, 2018)

Fig. 1 - Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture (Nicole Brending, 2018).

Although Nicole Brending’s feature animated film originally toured festivals as early as January 2019, Dollhouse’s general release coming in the wake of the #FreeBritney campaign feels somewhat auspicious. The film rides a satirical wave over US celebrity-centric media, focusing on the abuse and exploitation of a child singer, told through the medium of plastic dolls and puppets (Fig. 1). Using puppetry to overtly reference real events in the early parts of the film successfully casts a harsh light on media misogyny and abusive practices in the industry. A second half more directly rooted in fantasy is less effective, though no less clear in its aggression.

The young Junie Spoons (voiced, as with many other characters, by director Brending) is thrown (literally) into stardom, puppeted (again, literally) through her career to the tune of executives, publicists and exploitative family members, before being subject to abuse by partners, paparazzi and fans, and driven into meltdown after meltdown, always on camera. In its visual style, Dollhouse adopts the appearance of American reality-TV features, consisting of connected segments from ‘Behind the Tinsel’ or ‘BTW News,’ acutely compounding its satire into an easily-identifiable grounding. This reality format combines with its essayistic sub-title, and it is here that Dollhouse most overtly foregrounds its ambition, unwinding its thesis as a documentary might, while appearing to construct a narrative a posteriori rather than simply following events as they occur within the plot. The goal here is to make a serious point, without ambiguity, skirting even the edges of what counts as allegory. The film begs to be taken literally, both in its humour and its depiction of events and figures in the media, although this ultimately cheapens the message as the script departs into fantasy during the later sections.

Fig. 2 - The design of faces in Dollhouse.

Throughout the film, Brending’s puppets are mainly static, and their movement about the screen is clumsy. Her gawky, lo-fi animation style is fun and endearing, up to a point. The design of the puppets themselves continue this grotesque skew, compounding beauty and ugliness. Overstated facial features feed into caricature personalities, mostly dependent on flat and problematic stereotypes. Black and asian characters come off particularly poorly: one recurring character is named Shrilanka Lang (also performed by Brending); another, Thadeus Black (voiced by Adam Sly), states he was able to radicalize and sexually groom two university students because “white folks are afraid of seeming racist.” Faces in Dollhouse vary in degrees of Barbie-fication, though smooth features and big eyes correlate directly with their vapidity and tendency towards asinine statements, regardless of the puppet’s context in the film (Fig. 2).

Fig. 3 - Dollhouse.

Visual jokes slip by, and references to puppetry are played flat (one early critic of Junie’s remarks that she ‘can see [her] strings) rather than being given room for real laughs, perhaps so as not to overshadow the abuse dealt out onto Junie, or perhaps to make things all the more squeamish. She is forced, as a child, to sing and perform in a sexually suggestive manner. Spoof music videos are uncannily close, with shots lingering on Junie’s crotch or other body parts. The ensuing media response sees her grilled too, though she’s revealed to be speaking to a script provided by her producer. The juvenile sex scene is presented as a leaked tape, exploding her celebrity status a la Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. Other scenes cast her as an analogue to Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or Miley Cyrus, morphing later still into Patty Hearst and even OJ Simpson. None of it is subtle. The sex scene is barely censored - the lightest of pixelation is applied to an oversized puppet phallus - the result being simultaeneously absurd, pornographic and deeply uncomfortable, especially given that the character is stated to be 12 years old at the time. The roughness of the animation style is all that makes such a scene watchable, a kind of crude humour masking the trauma of the act in a way that would be impossible with real actors. What keeps it going is the barbed treatment of documented events. The puppets work in their semi-humanity, following the world closely enough to force the viewer into reflection. Only two puppets based directly on ‘real’ people appear in the film: Donald and Melania Trump - their presence working to anchor the film firmly in the material present, denying the film a chance to be read as allegory or fantasy.

Fig. 4 - The documentary/interview aesthetic of Dollhouse.

Roughly halfway through, however, Dollhouse departs from reality and shifts into what, at first glance, could be read as commentary on the hounding and fetishisation of transgender women, and further skewering the obsession with bodies in celebrity media coverage. This section however runs overlong and becomes instead an unabashed transphobic polemic. The plot switches focus onto a previously all-but-anonymous male Junie Spoons fan who undergoes surgery to, in the film’s fantasy, legally become Junie Spoons, appropriating the singer’s success and driving ‘cis Junie’ into further obscurity. Again, subtlety is buried under crass imagery of ‘trans Junie,’ sprawled naked on the cover of ‘Entitlement’ magazine, plastic-molded breasts and penis directly exposed to the camera. The film’s fantasy account of gender transition itself eradicates the realities of medical expense under the US system, the severe prejudice trans people face and, most ironically, comes back around to the same obsession with body parts that early scenes work to critique. Against the razor-closeness of its previous satire, the film suffers in breaking from reality. Up to this point, Junie’s experiences had clear, actual counterparts, whereas the points of reference become ever weaker through this latter half.  A direct allusion to Caitlin Jenner’s transition-period interviews is easy to spot, but the implications borne out in Dollhouse are groundless and jarring to the viewer. While the satire of earlier sequences loses weight in drifting further from real events, the ambition remains clear (and frankly malicious) as the bounds of argument grow further and further apart. Brending’s case weakens to the point that a charitable reading might take ‘Trans Junie’ as a parody of transphobic staples, but the text lacks much evidence to support that kind of positive reading. In a film with so little subtlety as this one, to rebuild Trans Junie as a straw man rather than out of plastic would be too obvious a joke to miss.

The sharpness of the attack, and crudeness of the telling speak to a deep anger at the heart of Dollhouse. If the film-maker’s only objective were to express that anger, I’d call it successful, but Brending’s script is too directed for that, too close to material reality. Puppets or not, the closer to reality Dollhouse stays, the harder it strikes. Much of what it depicts is effective because those things, the viewer knows, are actually happening. Where it abstracts it loses those points, drifting into contradiction and settling on threats that, by contrast, simply don’t exist.

**Article published: August 14, 2020**

Biography

Jed Edwards is a writer and editor based in Dundee. His recent work covers clothing design, science fiction and outdoors pursuits, as published by Shellzine.net and Carryology.com, and he is editor for film at DURA-Dundee.org.uk