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Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Analysis
Having just seen the end of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and having had time enough to think about it...
When I watched the first two acts of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I thought it was a perfect little chunk of formula storytelling - and that was just fine; if you have 45 minutes total, and you have a lot of singing in there, it's hard to get too far away from formula if you still want to have a coherent story.
But then you watch the third act, and you go, "Bwuh?"
And now I think I've figured it out. Here's how it works.
There are two plotlines going on simultaneously. They involve the same characters, the same scenes, the same events - it's not a plot with a subplot attached to it.
Plotline A is about a hapless good guy struggling to make his way in the world - to get the girl of his dreams, to find success in his career of choice. Everything seems to go wrong for him, but his intentions are good and he keeps trying.
Plotline B is about an embittered, entitled guy struggling to make his way in the world - to get the girl of his dreams, to find success in his career of choice. Everything seems to go wrong for him, which only confirms his belief that the world sucks and he should rule over it.
Plotline A is a comedy; plotline B is a tragedy. They exist together in a kind of Schrodinger's Plot. While the plot is still running, you don't know whether the "real" story is A or B, but when you open the box - when the story ends - it has to collapse into either one or the other. If it's Plot A, Dr. Horrible overcomes the dark forces that have tempted him, saves the day, and gets the girl. If it's Plot B, he is destroyed by his own character flaws and loses everything he really wanted.
There are two interesting things about this.
The first is how tension is maintained between Plot A and Plot B. You have some very clear pointers towards Plot A - Billy's generally charming and likeable persona; the singing; and the use of comedic timing. Basically, things go incredibly well at the worst possible time. In the first act, for example, Penny strikes up a conversation with him just as he's distracted by trying to control the remote on the van. Both of these things are exactly what he wants - except that the both go horribly wrong because they happen at the same time. And there are also some clear pointers towards Plot B. Billy is not actually as nice as he thinks he is, and that would be true even if he didn't have a Ph.D. in Horribleness. And, well, there's the fact that he's Dr. Horrible. It's kind of like in "The Thief" or "The Illusionist": he KEEPS TELLING YOU how horrible he is, so why on earth would you be surprised when he actually turns out to be horrible?
I would say the tension completely falls down in the third act, which is why it's not quite as viscerally satisfying - or to be more accurate, the tension falls down at the end of act II, when Dr. Horrible decides to take action that is bad not just in a cartoon-supervillain way, but to kill a human being. And not just for reasons of supervillainy, but because of jealousy and vindictiveness.
The second interesting thing, to me, is that on the surface it doesn't look as if he loses everything he really wanted. After all, he gets into the League of Evil, right? But he loses the girl, and the point is not just that Penny is more important to him than the League of Evil. His big yearning, throughout the storyline, is to be a real man.
His name is Billy. Not William or Will or even Bill, but Billy, which is coded as a really little-boy name. He doesn't have success in his romantic life. He doesn't have success in his career. Actually, he doesn't even have a visible means of financial support. The first thing we see him do is laundry. To put it bluntly, he feels emasculated. (And ray guns are kind of phallic, of course, but we needn't get into that.) And even though he achieves membership in the League of Evil, it only happens because his death ray doesn't work. He kills Penny, and injures Captain Hammer, and survives, only because his death ray fails. And even when he has the chance, he doesn't manage to have the guts to kill Captain Hammer. So by the end of the story, he's failed at everything.
This is also a kind of indictment of masculinity in American culture, isn't it? Violence and manhood are so tied up with one another that the moment when he just might have been redeemed - the moment when he says that he really doesn't want Penny to see him kill Captain Hammer, the moment when he realizes that maybe killing isn't the right thing - is also his failure to live up to the standards of manhood that he has set up for himself, that the culture has set up for him, (and, coincidentally, that the League of Evil has set up for him!) Because manhood - in war movies, in Old Yeller - means being able to kill.
Billy ends up as a kind of pathetic figure. He's not strong enough to choose kindess, compassion, self-sacrifice; and on the other hand he's not strong enough to choose murder, either.
So, um. Joss Whedon sure does like being depressing.
ETA I don't have time to go into this in depth because I'm on my way out the door, but it's interesting to read Captain Hammer's character in the context of a critique of masculinity. He's a caricature of Manhood: strong, virile, effectual, but with no need for things like humility, or compassion, or thinking particularly hard.
And I don't think it necessarily excuses the short shrift given to Penny, but I'm more and more inclined to view Dr. Horrible as a movie about masculinity from a feminist-ish POV.
When I watched the first two acts of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I thought it was a perfect little chunk of formula storytelling - and that was just fine; if you have 45 minutes total, and you have a lot of singing in there, it's hard to get too far away from formula if you still want to have a coherent story.
But then you watch the third act, and you go, "Bwuh?"
And now I think I've figured it out. Here's how it works.
There are two plotlines going on simultaneously. They involve the same characters, the same scenes, the same events - it's not a plot with a subplot attached to it.
Plotline A is about a hapless good guy struggling to make his way in the world - to get the girl of his dreams, to find success in his career of choice. Everything seems to go wrong for him, but his intentions are good and he keeps trying.
Plotline B is about an embittered, entitled guy struggling to make his way in the world - to get the girl of his dreams, to find success in his career of choice. Everything seems to go wrong for him, which only confirms his belief that the world sucks and he should rule over it.
Plotline A is a comedy; plotline B is a tragedy. They exist together in a kind of Schrodinger's Plot. While the plot is still running, you don't know whether the "real" story is A or B, but when you open the box - when the story ends - it has to collapse into either one or the other. If it's Plot A, Dr. Horrible overcomes the dark forces that have tempted him, saves the day, and gets the girl. If it's Plot B, he is destroyed by his own character flaws and loses everything he really wanted.
There are two interesting things about this.
The first is how tension is maintained between Plot A and Plot B. You have some very clear pointers towards Plot A - Billy's generally charming and likeable persona; the singing; and the use of comedic timing. Basically, things go incredibly well at the worst possible time. In the first act, for example, Penny strikes up a conversation with him just as he's distracted by trying to control the remote on the van. Both of these things are exactly what he wants - except that the both go horribly wrong because they happen at the same time. And there are also some clear pointers towards Plot B. Billy is not actually as nice as he thinks he is, and that would be true even if he didn't have a Ph.D. in Horribleness. And, well, there's the fact that he's Dr. Horrible. It's kind of like in "The Thief" or "The Illusionist": he KEEPS TELLING YOU how horrible he is, so why on earth would you be surprised when he actually turns out to be horrible?
I would say the tension completely falls down in the third act, which is why it's not quite as viscerally satisfying - or to be more accurate, the tension falls down at the end of act II, when Dr. Horrible decides to take action that is bad not just in a cartoon-supervillain way, but to kill a human being. And not just for reasons of supervillainy, but because of jealousy and vindictiveness.
The second interesting thing, to me, is that on the surface it doesn't look as if he loses everything he really wanted. After all, he gets into the League of Evil, right? But he loses the girl, and the point is not just that Penny is more important to him than the League of Evil. His big yearning, throughout the storyline, is to be a real man.
His name is Billy. Not William or Will or even Bill, but Billy, which is coded as a really little-boy name. He doesn't have success in his romantic life. He doesn't have success in his career. Actually, he doesn't even have a visible means of financial support. The first thing we see him do is laundry. To put it bluntly, he feels emasculated. (And ray guns are kind of phallic, of course, but we needn't get into that.) And even though he achieves membership in the League of Evil, it only happens because his death ray doesn't work. He kills Penny, and injures Captain Hammer, and survives, only because his death ray fails. And even when he has the chance, he doesn't manage to have the guts to kill Captain Hammer. So by the end of the story, he's failed at everything.
This is also a kind of indictment of masculinity in American culture, isn't it? Violence and manhood are so tied up with one another that the moment when he just might have been redeemed - the moment when he says that he really doesn't want Penny to see him kill Captain Hammer, the moment when he realizes that maybe killing isn't the right thing - is also his failure to live up to the standards of manhood that he has set up for himself, that the culture has set up for him, (and, coincidentally, that the League of Evil has set up for him!) Because manhood - in war movies, in Old Yeller - means being able to kill.
Billy ends up as a kind of pathetic figure. He's not strong enough to choose kindess, compassion, self-sacrifice; and on the other hand he's not strong enough to choose murder, either.
So, um. Joss Whedon sure does like being depressing.
ETA I don't have time to go into this in depth because I'm on my way out the door, but it's interesting to read Captain Hammer's character in the context of a critique of masculinity. He's a caricature of Manhood: strong, virile, effectual, but with no need for things like humility, or compassion, or thinking particularly hard.
And I don't think it necessarily excuses the short shrift given to Penny, but I'm more and more inclined to view Dr. Horrible as a movie about masculinity from a feminist-ish POV.
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For me, I was totally traumatized because I was expecting a happy ending, and it's seriously like a sucker punch to the gut. It depressed me for the rest of the day. But just brace yourself for tragedy and have tissues handy and you'll be fine.
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I didn't really catch the A plot and B plot dynamic, so that was great to read.
The depressing aspect is balanced by the silly, which is something I think Whedon does well, interjecting humor to keep things from being too dark (ie, "War Stories" in Firefly).
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So yeah, excellent reading. Thank you for posting!
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I really think he would have, and that's the saddest part of all. In Part 2, he sings "And Penny will see the evil in me - not a joke, not a dork, not a failure." And I just wanted to SHAKE him, because the one thing Penny (of all people!) is NOT going to be attracted to is EVIL!
But Billy had low self-esteem, and Captain Hammer seemed to have it all, and when Penny initially went for Hammer, it just confirmed Billy's belief that the only way to get everything he wanted was to achieve power and respect - and he thought doing something dramatically evil was the way to achieve that.
I think the big point he was missing was that the reason Penny initially went for Hammer was because he saved her life and then pretended to care about her homeless mission - in other words, she liked Hammer at first NOT because he was strong, but because she thought he was doing good things. Once she got to know him better and realized he was a jerk, she began to stop liking him. In the meantime, she was growing to like Billy more, and when he stopped coming to the laundromat, she missed him. Penny is attracted to the GOODNESS in people, and if Billy had just stayed his sweet shy self and kept buying her frozen yogurt, he would have won her over (IMO).
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...whoa.
Dude.
Your brain makes me all fuzzy warm inside. That sentence just made my day in a geeky, analyzing-the-supervillian-musical-webshow kind of way. =D
Plus, it's so true. I love that split moment when Penny is looking up, and you can almost see her begging Dr. Horrible not to do it, and he repeats his line twice, and he just...can't...do it. It made me, upon first viewing, really think it would end in a great, happy way. But then stupid Captain Hammer has to be the true bully. Ugghhh. Joss Whedon shows make me so happy.
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Another point that occurs to me is that by part 3, Penny was already starting to reject the stereotyped masculinity of Captain Hammer. She was clearly not into him anymore, and was sitting forlornly at the laundromat with two frozen yogurts, looking at the door in hopes that Billy would show up. And then in the middle of Cap's speech, she starts to walk out. If Billy had just stayed Billy, he WOULD have gotten the girl, IMO.
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He could accept Penny's message of hope and be a good guy, loyal and honest and trying to change the world through hope.
Or he could listen to his inner voices of entitlement and anger and turn into the bad guy. When he does he destroys what he cares about, driving himself away from the good emotions he'd originally hoped for. Which is the tragedy of the story.
But beyond the good guy/bad guy dichotomy we don't really get any alternative or novel formulations of masculinity. Penny, the lead female is in a fairly traditional gentle/maternal role throughout. Not that all those expressions of gender aren't common and relevant to the real world, but it's not very progressive.
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(Anonymous) 2008-07-20 07:07 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
Are you stalking me? You'd better not be that redhead from London.
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It's about male gender roles / role models.
Billy wants to be part of the evil league of evil so that he'll be recognized as a real supervillain. He believes that the only way Penny will respect him is for him to become a supervillain. He wants to be recognized as a real supervillain, not by any individual, but by the ELE. In the metaphor, then, he wants to become a man as defined by other men / society. The real point I think the story makes is that there aren't good male role models / gender roles in the mainstream: There wasn't a rejected message of hope- He didn't reject a concept of manhood that embraced hope, loyalty, and honesty: There is no message like that telling him what to become in order to be respected/recognized/gain confidence. There's only the ELE telling him what he needs to do to become a supervillain.
And, of course, Captain Hammer-
He's an unrealistic caricature of the ideal of manliness- and he's also a jerk. In American society today, we still have a view of manliness that is totally unrealistic- the Captain Hammer who is impossibly strong and invulnerable. Act Three is really strong in this regard- Once Captain Hammer feels pain for the first time, he falls apart completely. That is, the American concept of masculinity is ridiculous because it expects men to be invulnerable, and no one is. Captain Hammer also definitely brings up that manliness is violent and brutal.
The fact that Penny is fairly simple as a character I think is just because of the purpose she has in the story - She represents a person who would validate Billy's masculinity, but he mistakenly thinks the only way he can get her respect is by becoming Dr. Horrible.
As a final note for discussion, perhaps there is a significance to the name here, as well? To become Dr. Horrible, Billy has to be horrible. So to be recognized as a man, you have to be horrible?
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Costuming did great! Yellow dress, Blue top, Red belt, White blouse, pale skin, red lipstick.
+ going to go tidy up the city now...
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(Anonymous) 2009-04-09 09:11 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-10-02 02:18 pm (UTC)(link)no subject