“How Does It Feel to End the World?”: The Dark Ecology of the Dollhouse

Humanity’s response to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene epoch remains deeply divided. We are beset by an inability to generate new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform ourselves and our societies, and hence are unable to confront and resolve both present and coming annihilations. The freeing of imagination required for this confrontation with reality quixotically points us towards the cognitive dissonance facilitated by science fiction, specifically the Whedonverses, which have consistently (though often ambiguously) utilized ecological themes as intrinsic elements of their speculative drama. This chapter argues that in particular, Dollhouse (2009-2010) can be conceptualized as analogous with philosopher Timothy Morton’s theorizations as to artistic representations being potential sites for the opening of ideas of nature to new possibilities, attuning the sensibilities of audiences to forms of representation that contravene the ideological coding of nature as a transcendent principle. Morton maintains that we are immersed in ecological processes so vast in scale that by the time we are aware of them, they have already happened. Congruently, it is ultimately argued that via a Dark Ecological reading, Dollhouse instructs us as to how humans should act in a world that has already ended.