Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”:http://drhorrible.com/ is, let’s face it, touch and go. If you love Joss Wheedon then its hard to ignore it, despite its unevenness and lurking doubts about Neil Patrick Harris’s ability to channel Joss’s dialogue. But if you sit through the first minute or so of the opening monologue you are rewarded with the Freeze Ray Song, which is definitely worth it.

The conceit of Dr. Horrible is pretty straightforward: post-college emo white boys are aspiring supervillains seeking to be included in the Evil League of Evil — sort of a cross between getting made by a mafia family and getting signed to a major label. In the meantime they are crushed out on girls who also secretly think their cute and would go out with them if only they had the nerve to say something to them when they saw them in the laundromat. Its bad guy as good guy, let’s turn this genre upside down and shake it and see what falls out, but in a ‘digital media microformat’ ‘Once More With Feeling’ kinda way.

This mix of romance/superhero show is epitomized in the Freeze Ray song, which combines tropes of supervillain ultraweapons with love song imagery of freezing the perfect moment of intimacy with your beloved so you can experience it forever (I’ll bend the world to our will/and we’ll make time stand still). Its clever and sweet and even a little catchy despite the occasional lyrical misstep (You make me feel/what’s the phrase/like a fool/kinda sick/special needs) and, let’s face it, a melody written for a singer whose range is only a major fourth.

Its not that supervillains have never been examined before, but Joss’s work with them really is interesting. In some way it follows logically from his previous work: Buffy was about a powerful woman with a tremendous destiny who wished she could live an ordinary life. Angel was about powerful people living an ordinary life wishing that they could have a tremendous destiny. In Dr. Horrible supervillains share the same aspirations that superheroes have in other movies: to save the world. But Joss’s insight is that superheroes never actually make the world a better place, they only keep it the same — they work to protect the status quo. Dr. Horrible, in contrast, wants to change the world, to remake it and remove the glaring injustices he sees around him — by putting himself in charge. On this account, supervillains are not bad people, they simply represent the authoritarian urge — the urge to remake with one’s own hand — to fix what is obviously wrong.

On the other hand Captain Hammer, the Dr. Horrible’s nemesis, is a bit of a flop. I get that in Joss’s reverso-world superheroes are smug sadistic assholes, the star quarterback to Dr. Horrible’s science fair nerd. But Nathan Fillion simply doesn’t suit the part, and to be really effective as a character Captain Hammer would have to be sickeningly violent — too brutal for the tone of the show. I think it would have been more effective to play him stupid instead of cruel, as someone who only saw things in black and white and was thus at first more attractive for the love interest than Dr. Horrible, who could then be seen as more nuanced and human.

At any rate, worth watching. And its Joss singing the Bad Horse letters!