Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, this summer's 45-minute web-serialized musical 'comedy' from Joss Whedon, isn't as rich as the best episodes of his long-form work; for instance, 'Restless' and 'Once More With Feeling,' respectively the dream-sequence and musical episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are on par with Dr Horrible in terms of formal interest, but are enmeshed in seven years of complex narrative continuity that the low-budget one-off tale doesn't have (for better or worse). The advantage of a one-off is the chance to present familiar thematic material - the rush and burden and attractiveness of power, the ongoing victimization of women in men's power struggles, nerdly social difficulty - in stark terms, free of overdetermination and accumulated sympathies. The downside: a 45-minute show with 20 minutes of singing doesn't leave a lot of breathing room.
If you're a hack, that means you sacrifice complexity and just hit your one-two-three Big Points.
If you're Joss Whedon, on the other hand, you draw on whatever terrifying intergalactic power source brought you to this planet in the first place, and work the usual assortment of miracles.
On its own terms Dr Horrible is every bit as impressive as Whedon's other work. It's not as heartbreaking as issue #5 of the new Buffy comic, nor as eerie as 'Restless,' nor as audaciously bleak as the two-part Firefly pilot, but Dr H offers Whedon what looks like his most personal topic and generic framework yet: a young male nerd, smart and talented and genuinely nice but pathologically shy and kind of an overbearing jerk (but an...honest one), who happens also be a comic-book hero, or rather a villain. The quiet nerd falls for the even quieter nerd girl, the mousy do-gooder who predictably falls for the alpha male bane of the titular beta male's existence. It's every comic book geek's nightmare, in the form of a deeply uncomfortable, unquestionably funny story that might not be a comedy at all. Unlike Buffy, which stemmed, I think, from Whedon's bountiful sympathy for a certain kind of fictional character and the young girls doomed in turn to sympathize with her, Dr H seems to deal directly with Whedon's firsthand experiences of sexual not-bliss.
Dr Horrible sets out to be a lot of things - more than you might expect from a low-budget web musical written by three brothers and one wife. It's Whedon's most multifarious short work, and its ending [spoilers ahead] casts Dr H in an uneasy light. Joss Whedon's most easily empathized-with protagonist might be his least sympathetic. Here's a rundown of what's going on in this, the most impressive online film production yet made. Some of these readings contradict one another; that's OK. If you wanna read this text, maybe start like this:
A Mary Sue story about Mary Sue stories. Dr Horrible is a doofus who makes himself into a comic-book villain (in a world complete with superheroes and superbadguys); he works with a vocal coach to get his evil laugh right. 'That's about standards,' he says. He's also close to Joss Whedon's self-description: awkward, smart, exceptionally talented, and shunned by ladies who prefer dimwitted alpha males. He's a lot like the protagonist of the typical 'Mary Sue' fanfic: an original character inserted into the ongoing superhero story, who solves everyone's problems, is smarter and more morally nuanced than everyone else, sees into each villain's neuroses and each hero's unfulfilled needs, and gets the girl...only it doesn't work that way. Few TV personalities have the cult of creator-worship that Joss Whedon does; he knows fans (he is one). Dr Horrible is a meditation on how fucked up and lazy their self-projecting fantasies are.
It's an origin story. Of course the shape of the story is familiar: it's the tale of a man's first confrontation with his nemesis, how he becomes a comic book character. The formative event. Dr Horrible wins this one, against the odds - it's an ascension - but the origin moment of the character is also a defeat. The big deal with Dr Horrible is that he lost someone (Penny is Dr Horrible's Gwen Stacy, if you know what I mean) even as he beat the bad - excuse me, the good guy.
Moreover, this is Captain Hammer's origin story too, for the same reasons - he loses the girl he 'loves,' and is born to new consciousness and so forth. 'With great power comes...' In other words, the animating question under the tale of Dr H is: What is the cost to the 'villain' of being a player in the hero's drama? Does the villain know what he's doing? Of course he does: Whedon is fond of recalling an interview with Willem Defoe, who said that villains and heroes are no different from the actor's point of view. 'Everybody thinks he's righteous.' Dr Horrible is an illustration of that point.
As the lyrics to the closing song points out, Billy gets exactly what he wants.
Authenticity. Double-edged sword here. Billy is a good guy who does bad things, it seems; Captain Hammer appears to be a bad guy who does good things. Whedon's tale poses the question, 'Which is the hero, really? In society's eyes, who's the admirable one here?' Hammer doesn't even stick around to take care of his girlfriend Penny ('Yeah, we totally had sex'); Billy comforts her in her last moments. Of course she believes in Captain Hammer - sucks for Billy!
Here we can point out the obvious: Penny is barely a person in this story. Interesting choice for Whedon. (Don't think eh makes such a choice lightly either - he turned the goddamn X-Men into a war-of-the-women story!) Why's she so content-free? The guys around her make her so. Billy just wants Penny to notice him - not to be with him, really. Because he has no idea what that requires. Whereas at least Cap'n Hammer knows how to show her a good time. He lives in the world of other people. Billy's sentiments are real, as are his resentments; you watch him struggle with them. But he shares them inauthentically - he doesn't have a single moment of conversation with Penny that doesn't rest on a lie. Think about it: the yogurt fake-out, the petition, 'texting,' Gandhi, dissing Hammer, 'I don't love these - see ya'...
...indeed the only honest moment is when he's talking about being a supervillain and how much it would mean to him to make in that way.
The real Billy is nothing more than Dr Horrible. (Know any other superpowered guys named Billy of whom that might be said? C'mon comic book nerd, this one's for you. Shazam!)
Billy is a blogger. Embarrassing. The meta-story of Dr Horrible is about the transformative power of personal media, grassroots technology, and new storytelling channels. The text of Dr Horrible is about a nerdy little shut-in who doesn't know how not to fuck up people's lives. The world is better when he's in his basement. 'There are no villains in this story.' Wrong! There's at least one. And he's the character who most closely resembles the average viewer. Does that seem nasty to you? Could the comic-book creator be cautioning us against simple identification? What a jerk.
Both guys were offered the same choice. 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do / Don't plan the plan if you can't follow through / All that matters (is) taking matters into your own hands.' Both guys respond to the world according to their natures. Captain Hammer's response to the world is...to help it. What's Billy's? This is the protagonist of the fucking story we're talking about, and this isn't one of those implication-free Book Club Suggested Study Questions you don't have to think about it in order to enjoy the story. Billy is...what? He's a bad guy. Why is Joss Whedon making a comic book story about him? Why does he want us to identify with this horrible little fucker? To show us what we're capable of.
Fans. Ask yourself why the three fans, who collect Captain Hammer's hair and wear shirts with his pictures on them, are wearing Dr Horrible shirts at the end of the story. Why would Joss Whedon paint such a hugely unflattering portrait of these media fans? (I mean, by the end of the story they're probably reading his blog.) They want what Billy now has - power. Not goodness, which is what it only looks like Hammer has. (Betcha Hammer wins new, weepier fans once he starts crying to his shrink.) People are drawn to power; Hammer's an alpha male, and he happens to work for good. When we judge him morally we should forget that he's a dickish alpha male and remember that he runs around saving citizens from villains, because he chooses to. Same with Billy: he wants 'anarchy...that I run.' Nasty business. And once he's running it, the fans flock to him. Nasty.
And yet again, with feeling. A side note concerning the music: Dr Horrible is a step ahead of the Buffy musical, 'Once More With Feeling,' both lyrically and musically. The best of the 'OMWF' songs ('Under Your Spell') combines a moving love song with a creepy subtext: Tara sings about being seduced and brought out into the world by love, while under a literal magic spell that erases the memory of fights she's had, so that she's both right about her growth and eerily wrong about what's enabled it. 'OMWF' is all over the map musically, a cheeky pastiche of musical-comedy staples (check out the devilish 'Those Were the Good Old Days' strain in 'What You Feel (Sweet's Song)') with an overall pop-rock feel. That latter feel is where Dr Horrible lives, and the lyrics are more attentive than ever, doing as much work as Joss's Buffy-words while starting from scratch in terms of character. From the opening song's elegant metaphor for romantic desperation to the spot-on mirror lyrics in 'My Eyes' to the hectoring finale and its gut-punch final moment, Whedon really nailed the Dr H tunes. With the exception of Penny's song - easily the weakest of the bunch, its smart 'Everything happens' message notwithstanding - each song in the bunch is a step up from its 'OMWF' predecessors in intensity, formal rigor, and (importantly!) singability.
False consciousness. 'Anyone with half a brain / Can spend their whole life howling in pain / The dark is everywhere and Penny doesn't seem to care / That soon the dark in me is all that will remain,' sings Billy at the top of Act 2. But by the end of that episode he's belting it out: 'Penny will see the evil me / not a joke, not a dork, not a failure.' A 'brand new me,' he says. But then look at where he goes in Act 3: 'No sign of Penny, good / I would give anything / not to have her see...here goes no mercy...' And in the end, it's not like he turns down the Evil League of Evil's invitation - check out the fancy new blood-red threads! He's even got fans for god's sake. From 'Penny doesn't seem to care' to 'Penny will see the evil in me' in one act: which translates to 'This is all your fault.' Preemptively lifting blame, because he doesn't really want to kill Captain Hammer. Golly, he's not even a good villain, and he lies to himself constantly, near as we can tell.
We are that way too.
This fact doesn't make Dr Horrible more sympathetic. It makes us less so.
'I can not believe my eyes.' This is big Penny/Billy duet at the top of the second act, and it's practically each character's mission statement. Each character sees only what he or she wants; the self-deception is absolute (Billy's right that Penny is only treating the symptom of social ills - 'The fish rots from the head!' as he points out - while Penny herself is evidence that Billy's a pessimistic misanthrope in love with his own style). That's how you know they're either perfect for one another or really not. This leads us to the weirdest part...
The only honest character in the whole story is Captain Hammer. 'The day needs my saving expertise / A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.' It does, and one does, so he does. 'When you're the best you can't rest, what's the use.' 'Everyone's a hero in their own way / In their own not-that-heroic way...It's not enough to bash in heads / You've got to bash in minds.' Hell, he even finds it in himself to cheer on plucky homeless types! 'A hero doesn't care if you're a bunch of scary alcoholic bums / Everyone's a hero in their own way.' Shit, that's kind of nice!
Yes, the man's an idiot - 'So you wonder what your part is / 'cause you're homeless and depressed / But home is where the heart is / So your real home's in your chest!' But that's the right kind of idiocy. He's right, after all. Take things at face value and try to help people and you can get away with being an asshole - and as long as 'getting away' isn't your secret goal, maybe that's enough.
Not a bad guideline. But wait, I thought Hammer was the villain hero bad guy good guy wait I don't understand. This is supposed to be simple. Why isn't it simple.