The Problem with Identity

I’m a big fan of Sci-Fi TV. One of my current favourites is the canceled-but-still-bleeding series Dollhouse. In one of the recent episodes (2×05), there was a good segment that reveals a lot about identity construction (OK, so I think the whole series has been playing with that). So, I posted that clip to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Before getting to the video, I want to frame the scene (which will contain spoilers).

The scene revolves around two characters: Echo (played by Eliza Dushku) and Daniel (Alexis Denisof). Echo is a ‘doll’, a person who ‘willingly’ agreed to become whatever character a person wants. While her ‘real’ name is Caroline, her stable identity as a doll is Echo (all the dolls in this dollhouse are named after the NATO phonetic alphabet); her identity in this episode is Bree.  I put willingly in scare quotes because it was either this or jail — and most of the dolls became dolls because they were either forced into it (e.g. blackmail) or seduced into it while in a moment of weakness. The premise behind the dolls is that when a person signs up, their whole identity is removed and placed in a storage unit (so it’s a fancy hard drive). They are then loaded with custom-made identities when needed, turning them into whatever that identity is, along with the muscle memory and intuition of that persona (e.g. if one is loaded with the identity of a secret ninja assassin, that person not only acts like a secret ninja assassin but also has the ‘whole package’ that someone who was trained for many years as a secret ninja assassin would have). At the end of last season, Echo began to see through the given persona and realise herself in spite of the memory removal processes. Throughout this season, she has been seeing her many personas resurface. It is in this scene (immediately after a strange event that triggered it), where she again realises her composite identity. I believe the best line in the scene is when she says ‘It’s like I can see the seams, how it’s all constructed. I’m not real. I’m not who I think I am’.

Perrin is a US senator trying to expose the dollhouse, however it is revealed that he is a doll (well, a doll version of himself). In the second part of the clip, he begins to experience the same kind of ‘composite event’ that Echo has been experience, but he wants to deny it by saying ‘I know who I am’. But he has doubts: ‘please tell me I know who I am’. As we experience Others more, we are beginning to see that we aren’t who we think we are. Identity is a synthesis of events (both past and future), a simple placeholder — an empty square. To realise this nature of our identity is the beginning of becoming what we are. In other words, identity isn’t a transcendent unity emerging through the past into the present; it is a field of immanence reaching from the unlived future into the past. As a result, it is always fragmentary and incomplete. To identify is to become.