image by one2c900d

Lately I’ve been watching a couple of TV shows that explore identity and humanness. What are we? How do our lives and memories shape us? And what does it all mean in terms of changing the world by changing ourselves?

Dollhouse (the new show by my man Joss Whedon) looks into the idea that human consciousness as a computer that can be wiped and programmed at will. In this show, “actives” (the dolls) are wiped clean of personality and memory, then imprinted with new personalities and memories that make them into new people who can fulfill the precise requirements of big-spending clients.

When the actives are on assignment, they seem like whole people with capabilities and life stories and ways of speaking and being that are uniquely their own. But when they are in between jobs, they wander around the Dollhouse like blank slates, not remembering anything about what they’ve done or where they’ve come from, saying nothing more meaningful than “I like pancakes.”

Of course, memory is a tricky thing that no one fully understands yet, not even the puppetmasters who run the Dollhouse, so as the series progresses, I’m sure we’ll see bits of the actives’ old selves in the blank slates which their minds and bodies have become. I’m fascinated by the questions this show raises—are our minds simply computers that have been programmed by the life experiences we’ve had? If so, when you strip away our memories and our conditioning, what’s left?

Working my way through Six Feet Under, which explores similar ideas in a less far-out way, is answering some of those questions. Each of the main characters has loads of fears and neuroses which were ostensibly imprinted on them during their whacked-out childhoods. From the Fisher children, who were raised surrounded by death in a funeral home, to their mother Ruth, who was raised with traditional women’s caretaker conditioning, to Brenda, who was raised, poked, and prodded by narcissistic psychiatrist parents, all of them have “downloaded” some seriously crazy and dysfunctional stuff.

The show is largely about their attempts to break free of these programs as they live their adult lives, and some of them are more successful than others. Nate, the oldest Fisher child, seems to spiral more and more into his most selfish and least lovable traits as the pressures of family and health concerns mount. Middle child David learns to see himself clearly and, as the seasons unwind, he actually overcomes many of the self-imposed limitations he starts the series with. Claire, the baby, is the least attached to her ideas about herself, and so is able to move through new ways of being and thinking and living with more fluidity and reason.

As a woman of roughly the same age, I’m most struck (and horrified, and touched) by the story of Brenda, whose capacity for self-deception and destruction goes far beyond that of any of the other characters. Her childhood was filled with craziness—she was relentlessly studied and written about by psychiatrists—and she learned the art of manipulating situations, both for her own entertainment and as a form of revenge to a world that looked on her as an oddity instead of a person.

As an adult, Brenda’s disconnection from reality shows up in her relationship to love and purpose. Unable to see herself with clarity, she dissolves in one sexual relationship after the next, always putting the hope of love or the fulfillment of craving before the pursuit of meaning. She looks at her lovers as saviors that will deliver her away from herself to the happy life she desires, without ever testing or even recognizing her ability to create it for herself.

Watching Brenda struggle with these mighty forces, my heart breaks for her and for all the women I know—myself included—who have struggled in the exact same way. So many of us do this, playing out old patterns and conditioning over and over again without even seeing what we are doing.

Of course, it’s understandable—for thousands of years, our main way of participating in the world was through our relationships with men. Only in the last few decades have we had other options, and it seems to me that we are not yet sure what to do with our newfound freedoms and responsibilities. Like Brenda, we hop from relationship to relationship, looking for meaning and identity in those we say we love. We learn to manipulate situations instead of facing them head-on. We look like grown women but often act like petulant girls, waiting for a prince on a steed to come and make everything better.

But the truth is that we have reached the point in history when this is no longer possible. We are adults, and as such, we are responsible for ourselves. Though we may struggle with conditioning that tells us we are less than whole, that our true meaning can be found only in relationship, we must recognize these old programs for what they are—leftovers from a past in which we no longer live.

Our identities may seem to be imprinted on us by our upbringing and our culture, but this is true only to the extent that we refuse to exercise our ability to choose something new. We do have the power to choose something new, and, if we are to create something new, we must exercise this power.

Women and men must all fully participate in this creation—we can’t waste any more time playing out these old patterns and tending our little gardens of neuroses. And, as much as we might want to let someone else take care of it, that isn’t an option. There is no one else. We—with all our imperfections and outdated programming—are it. It’s up to us to get over this stuff so we can move into the future.

The last episode of Six Feet Under fast forwards into the future to show the ultimate fate of all the main characters. Brenda’s life ends with her demanding, unstable brother literally boring her to death. As a fiction, this is hilariously poignant, and perfectly in keeping with Brenda’s character. But in reality, I can’t bear the idea of even one more person wasting her life by sublimating it to the small needs of those around her. We have big needs to address. And we are big enough to do it, if we can leave our small ideas of who we are behind us.