The Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular is a puppet-animated film about the rise and fall of an American pop singer.
Junie Spoons (Nicole Brending) is a former pop star, a girl who started very young and was finely tuned to becoming one of the most famous singers in the world. She worked hard, climbing her way to the top of the entertainment charts, but at a high price, her life dissected and then exploited in an industry that over-sexualized her and cast her down a spiral of terrible abuse. And then much, much worse.
With Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture writer and director Brending takes a ferocious, no holds barred approach to the dark side of girls in the music business, using puppets to tell the horrid story of a young woman wholly corrupted by monsters looking to make a buck of a talented girl. This is not a children’s film, despite the visual style, though clearly this is the point Brending is making, using toys to tell a highly adult story, one that graphically portrays sex and violence in what feels (unfortunately) very familiar for anyone who followed the rise of such entertainers as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and more.
It’s shot like a documentary looking back at the raucous history of the fictional Spoons, who is molded and shaped, manipulated and commercialized by nearly everyone in her professional life, programming her every step in front of and behind the camera. This means arranging relationships and the very public loss of her virginity to a boy band member, the production of a sex tape, controversial music videos, and so on and so on. This even includes a troubled male fan who undergoes transitional surgery to actually become her, claming in fact that he is the real Spoons. That’s a whole minefield of controversy I’m steering wide of.
In Brending’s world, there are no boundaries, so there are full on erect penises and dismembered vaginas just to name a few. And sure, these are plastic bits on crude, barely articulated puppets, but think of them as entry points (if you’ll forgive the wording) to a film that demands evisceration of the subject matter in a brutal, right in your face manner. This is a filmmaker passionately angry about a system of terrible, systemic menace, taking no chances in delivering what might be a mixed message. Subtlety is wholly and thoroughly banned from her production. Actually, banned is not the right word. Eradicated might be more like it.
I totally get what Brending is doing, especially since it feels almost achingly personal. I can’t say I wasn’t engaged in the ideas, most of which are deservedly sickening to think about. However, the doll puppets, as heavily symbolic as they are, lost most of their impact early on for me, leaving me never truly connected to Junie’s plight. It became less about the tragedy of the story than the art behind how it’s presented.
The smart thing in this though is how Junie’s voice is consistently left out of her own exposé, she of course the puppet of her own life. That’s a visual and narrative that works, yet is eventually, unfortunately weakened by the ‘artificialness’ of the production. Brending’s push to create a plastic, hollow world left me unable to feel as deeply as I might have, despite the genuine contempt the movie raised in me for how women and girls get treated.