Slayage conference

I'm in Vancouver at the Slayage conference. This is the first conference I've ever been to that included a singalong. we ought to include that in our programs.  Many good papers; I especially enjoyed a philosophical one on identity in Dollhouse.  There was also an excellent paper in the same session,by Curry and Velasquez, on how the audience is encouraged to construct Echo as a coherent identity in Dollhouse long before she has her "composite moment" in ep. 12 of season 1, by various framing techniques known in poetry, notably

• things being in the same poem are automatically accepted as belonging together; the reader then tries to figure out how
• presented with separate events / things/ elements the reader will construct a narrative and try to 'tell a story' from them, and link them that way
• material associations - similarities in sound, meter and visuals - will encourage associations in the mind of the reader; they called these "material" because they occur below the level of linguistic meaning.

This made me think about the construction of all character in episodic TV, or indeed in fiction; the author is always encouraging the reader to create a coherent persona for their characters, by inserting very carefully calibrated moments, scenes, and uses of language from which the reader / viewer can construct what will feel like a coherent character.  But the construction is the reader's, not the author's, though the author will have done everything they can to encourage the reader to do that work.  However the author IS assisted by the fact that we are either hard-wired or heavily trained to create coherent character out of disparate hints, in the same way that we are hard-wired (or heavily socialized) to see faces in (for example) clouds, piles of rocks, pictures of pine trees ... so if the hints of coherent character are planted, we will do our best to find them and put them together.  

Of course the job of the writers was particularly tricky in Dollhouse because they had to simultaneously plant the hints of a coherent identity AND construct several completely disparate imprint characters, AND encourage us to believe that there couldn't possibly be a coherent identity underneath because Echo's core identity had been wiped.

That was such an interesting series philosophically; it's a real shame the second season plot arc really didn't work, because that has discouraged people (me at least) from thinking seriously about the series as a work of art.