The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
We can at least be sure that Joss Whedon is clever. His writing tends to be exceedingly precious and knowingly proud of itself, which is both the source of its largest appeal to people who enjoy that sort of thing and its most irritating aspect to people like me who are sick of simple metahumor that only calls attention to the writer’s awareness of genre conventions rather than actually saying anything about them. The dialogue in the Avengers films is made up almost entirely of this; one of the lines consistently featured in trailers for the first film (and in two different “Funniest Lines” youtube videos I watched) is this exchange:
Captain America: You’re just a man in a suit, take that away, what are you?
Iron Man: Genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist.
This shares a characteristic with the part at the beginning of Age of Ultron in which Baron Von Strucker asks a nameless lackey if they can hold their fortress against the Avengers, and the lackey replies, terrified: “They’re the Avengers!” Whedon’s narratives are constantly winking at themselves like this. The characters are aware of their presence in a film, but in a depressingly nihilistic fashion in which they seem to acknowledge that their only choice is to participate in the action; they must do this, even if, as in the second case, they have the faculty to be aware of their certain death. Both exchanges here read like one person talking to themselves; Whedon’s defining dialogic principle seems to be the experience of obsessing over the coolest thing to say at that party when that douchebag called me a homo in high school. It’s a hallmark of being an adolescent nerd, using one’s creative abilities to constantly imagine a world in which people finally realize you are the coolest (see also: all young adult fantasy, brilliantly parodied by D.C. Pierson in his novel Crap Kingdom). In scripts that Whedon has written but not directed however, he still manages to insinuate this tendency through subtext, on more than one occasion producing films which are bad-faith jokes on the audience.
Consider Alien: Resurrection, Whedon’s third film writing credit. This movie is a sort of practice run at things that would later appear in Firefly (wise-cracking team of space pirates), Cabin in the Woods (insipid attempt at commentary on horror genre), and Avengers (the aforementioned prissy dialogue style, at one point the pirate-team’s scoundrel-alcoholic says “I am not the man with whom to fuck.”) Whedon himself is known to dislike this film, having said of it that:
They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.
I recognize that up to this point I’ve taken a rather uncharitable tone toward Mr. Whedon, but I have a great deal of sympathy for him here. A:R is indeed abominably directed, so much so in fact that I gained a respect for Whedon’s ability to competently direct his own scripts in a fashion conducive to the humor in his writing. Jean-Pierre Jeunet murders every joke in the film by steadfastly avoiding the camera movement and quick editing that would help them to land, and by apparently drugging the entire cast with Quaaludes before shooting.
But the blame is not squarely on Jeunet and the narcotized cast. Resurrection’s plot turns on scientists at the Weyland-Yutani Corp. trying to clone Ripley and thus the xenomorph growing inside her in Alien3. They are unsuccessful after several attempts until they finally produce Ripley 8, an intact (and apparently super-strong) version of her from whom they extract the xenomorph embryo and use it to grow more of them. Ripley 8 looks just like Ripley, but acts nothing like her. The major subtext here is that films have been unsuccessfully trying to clone Ripley since 1979, and even this one will do it incorrectly. In doing this, Whedon managed to write a film that is a joke about how stupid an idea the film itself is. It is an impressive feat that, back in 1997, Joss Whedon managed to write a story that embodied what we would come to call “hipster irony” ten-to-fifteen years later, but being ironically distanced from doing something is still doing it. It’s maybe not as egregious as the embarrassingly prevalent superhero comic “gag” of female characters saying something out loud about how their costumes resemble lingerie and then not doing anything about it, but Resurrection is not comedy nor does it even approach parody.
But Cabin in the Woods tries this out. This film (co-written and directed by Drew Goddard) is a clear attempt at the sort of “generational horror-comedy” that Scream was for the 90s and Shaun of the Dead was for the early 2000s. The critical difference between those films and Cabin is that the former two are loving parodies of a genre executed by people who love and understand them, the latter is a total misreading of the horror genre that, in trying to subvert clichés, makes them worse. Whedon said about the film and its relationship to the genre that
I love being scared. I love that mixture of thrill, of horror, that objectification/identification thing of wanting definitely for the people to be all right but at the same time hoping they’ll go somewhere dark and face something awful. The things that I don’t like are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances
which is particularly bizarre because the film is made up almost entirely of the qualities of which he expresses disapproval. Running through most of the problems with the film would be redundant because Sean Witzke did it perfectly here, but its bad-faith, Hobbesian stupidity demands further explication.
Cabin in the Woods follows a standard setup for slasher films, 5 teenagers go on a weekend trip to a secluded cabin, but its twist is that the cabin is a staging ground for a corporation (headed by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins) that directs the slaughter of teenagers as part of a “blood ritual” that appeases “the Old Gods” and keeps the end of the world from happening. The idea that horror is an innate expression of the darkness in the human subconscious has been around forever, but to my mind is most barely stated in Stephen King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” which is now a classic of introductory cultural studies classes: “[horror movies] lift a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throw a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.” Just substitute “alligators” for “gods.”
The way Cabin goes about investigating this tendency is by continually chastising the audience for watching the thing that is being shown to them repeatedly by the movie; it is the “stop hitting yourself” of films. At one point, Whitford’s character watches a monitor hoping that the character referred to repeatedly as “the whore” will get naked. Another character asks “Does it really matter if we see her…” and Whitford responds “we’re not the only ones watching here,” and Richard Jenkins finishes “Gotta keep the customer satisfied.” When she actually does remove her clothes, you, the viewer, are now Age Of Ultron’s terrified lackey, aware of your fate but unable to do anything about it; guess what, now you’re a voyeur. The Hobbesian “people like horror movies because it placates their innate evil” critique does not work when you are forced to participate in that event. The last 45 minutes of Cabin kills every single character in the movie, generally in a manner as gorily exhibitionist as possible, but, the film says, it’s all your fault because you want to see this, you horror fan, you. Carol Clover wrote in Men Women and Chainsaws, “I […] do not believe that a sadistic voyeurism is the first cause of horror. Nor do I believe that real-life women and feminist politics have been entirely well served by the astonishingly insistent claim that horror’s satisfactions begin and end in sadism (19).” While this sounds like it is in agreement with the above quote from Whedon, he and Goddard wrote a movie that accomplishes the opposite, continually insisting that the problem with horror movies is their sadism while indulging only in that very same sadism with none of the masochistic identification Clover identified as being provided by the slasher structure.
In fact, the film deliberately avoids the structure to its own detriment. Cabin starts off by ostentatiously presenting a few trope subversions: the football player is also smart (communicated by his recommending a book to another character), the mousy girl who will clearly be the film’s Final Girl is not sexually pure. There is also an immediate example of every character being one person when the football player (Chris Hemsworth) and his girlfriend (Anna Hutchison) act out the famous “I learned it from watching you!” anti-drug PSA with the ease of a veteran sketch comedy team. Despite being, to all appearances, run-of-the-mill college students in the 2010s, all of these characters are secretly “Joss Whedon.” This quality is actually less obnoxious in the movie’s most important character, Marty, the stoner of the group. While he is constantly quipping, he at least appears to be the sort of person who would do such a thing. Marty is clearly supposed to be the audience identification character in the film, which has unfortunate consequences for the movie’s attempt at genre critique.
The character is constantly “ranting” about how the cabin is clearly not what it seems; by virtue of being a stoner stereotype we assume he is more pop-culturally savvy or genre aware than the rest of the characters, but the film is inconsistent on this point. Marty is in one scene reading a Little Nemo in Slumberland comic, marking him as a giant nerd, but he also has apparently never seen Hellraiser, which Cabin has multiple direct references to. It features both a puzzle box and an ersatz Pinhead that Marty directly encounters. This is infuriating because neither of these things are really generic enough to be chalked up to archetypal monsters the way that zombies or werewolves can be, they only come from one thing, and the character who continuously points out all of the horror tropes he walks through seems to have no idea what that thing is. Finally, Marty, along with aforementioned mousy girl Dana, survives until the end of the film, where every character (and everyone in the world) dies.
Through the apocalyptic ending, Whedon and Goddard neuter the one integrally feminist quality of the slasher film, the Final Girl. Clover wrote of this type, “She is intelligent, watchful, levelheaded; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the pattern and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation.” All of these things happen in Cabin, but to Marty, not Dana, and neither of them learns to defeat the evil force, the necessary narrative event that make the Final Girl compelling.
The one thing that allows for a complex identificational relationship between viewers and horror films across lines of gender expression is instead replaced with two helpless people that we are apparently supposed to pity but instead, despite the film’s admonishments, really want to see killed because we know the movie will be over when they die. When the last shot of the film reveals that the Old God kept in check by the ritual is clearly a giant human being, Whedon and Goddard instead succeed in removing the single aspect of this film which may have characterized it as thoughtful, rather than being a joyless middle-finger to its audience. I have nothing against feature-length middle-fingers (Joseph Kahn’s Detention does what Cabin is trying to do while being much funnier and stylistically fascinating), but the critical part of doing such a thing is not giving the audience what they want, rather than unabashedly giving them that thing while saying they’re bad for enjoying it.
This is why it’s impossible for me to enjoy Whedon’s work, it isn’t a loving nod or a well-deserved fuck you the way most metafiction is, it’s all just about how knowledgeable the writer is about whatever genre he’s operating in.
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Tim Jones is an English Ph.D student at Louisiana State University with a Master’s degree in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. He is @cutebuttsaga on twitter.
I rather like the Iron Man quip…and I wonder if it was actually written by Joss Whedon. Robert Downey Jr. did a lot of ad libbing of his own dialogue, is my understanding. Good case to be made that he’s a better writer than Whedon is, at least as far as dialogue goes.
Downey’s performance as Iron Man always ends up reminding me of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a really good movie that does a lot of the same stuff Whedon does but is helped largely by being actually funny.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure Whedon doesn’t like horror very much. Buffy started has a subversion of horror cliches much more in the spirit of not giving the viewers what they want: a helpless, victimized girl (at least that’s Whedon’s interpretation of what they want, and that explains his disdain).
It owed its revival as a series to Scream’s success (clever scripts and hipster irony were already big in the 90’s), but even though it used some horror tropes, it was much more in the super hero / action movie tradition.
I don’t remember Cabin in the Woods being particularly goory, by the standards of a horror film, though it’s been a very long time since I saw it so maybe I’m wrong.
I don’t really watch horror films but this is my take on Cabin:
I feel like the scenes at the corporation are not in the same genre as the other scenes, that’s kind of the point/ running joke of the movie, specifically the in-congruently combining two different genres of filmmaking. It’s sort of Network meets Halloween.
Complaining that he’s neutering the “final girl” stuff when she meets the network executives is like complaining that Sports Radio or The Social Network lacked a great Final Girl- it’s not a relevant criteria to evaluate the story. It’s just Whedon not giving you the horror story you apparently want.
It’s a very different film than his Marvel movies, where despite the one liners there’s never any suggestion that it’s anything other than another superhero film for superhero fans.
Avengers is a superhero film that superhero fans love, but it sounds like you are saying that Cabin is a middle finger to horror fandom, in which case the movies are very different.
Tim’s saying though that by dumping the Final Girl, Whedon makes the genre less feminist, not more—which can’t have been his intent.
Cabin is so obsessed with dissecting and explaining “the formula” that I don’t think there’s any way it’s not about that. I get that it’s also functioning as a workplace comedy, but the comedy comes (mostly) from the characters talking about/getting involved how horror stories require certain things to appease the audience/.
I’m saying Cabin is in some ways not even entirely a horror movie, so it doesn’t make sense to evaluate it that way.
Like I said I’m not really a horror movie guy but my understanding is the idea of the final girl is that someone is stalked for the entire movie, and you (or the implied male viewer) relate to the person torturing the final girl and trying to “penetrate her” with his knife until at the end you switch to relating to the final girl. It’s not necessarily all that feminist, but at best a rather mixed message.
Whedon references that in the movie when he has one of the network people say something like “You know, I’m surprised but I suddenly find myself rooting for this girl” the subtext being he was previously rooting for the monster.
The way I recall the film the character’s embrace nonviolence in the end. So Tim is actually in the position of saying the film would be more feminist if the characters embraced violence, which is iffy to me.
So perhaps the film doesn’t agree with Tim that final girls are feminist. Whedon blows the world up rather than deliver the horror movie tropes in the end. Literally, no more horror movies ever, because the world and the film studio that makes the Horror Movies in the world of Cabin in the Woods are destroyed.
Yeah I guess I’d agree its still technically a horror film, just a cross genre film- horror plus workplace comedy or some other mixed classification like that.
Clover argues that you’re actually pretty much identifying with the victims throughout horror. It’s masochistic, not sadistic.
I didn’t get into it here because then this would have been even longer than the several hundred words above the upper limit Noah asked for, but Clover’s writing isn’t without its faults either. It may be due largely to the book being ~20 years old at this point but the feminist-psychoanalytical position it takes completely fails from a non-binary standpoint. She calls the final girl a woman in male drag which has a sort of gross essentialism to it I dislike greatly, as though there are only two things a person can be and any positive action can only ever be male in nature.
That’s interesting. I googled it a bit and wikipedia says Clover didn’t argue that the Final Girl was a feminist trope. Is that correct?
Wikipedia says “However, Clover cautions audiences against seeing “final girls” as products of feminism. Final girls are still seen like the other women who have been killed after taking part in sexual activities by being a part of “the chase”. Clover concludes that the final girl is “an agreed upon fiction [for] male-viewers’ use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies.””
If that’s correct Tim’s argument that final girls are feminist isn’t backed up by Clover. Removing them from the movie therefore doesn’t make it less feminist. it just robs men of a sadomasochistic fantasy.
Yeah I can see even from a cursory look that Clover isn’t the whole story.
Clover neither condemns slashers nor is she really flag-waving for them in that book. Probably the most interesting chapter is the one that isn’t about conventional slashers but about rape-revenge films like I Spit On Your Grave and Ms. 45, where she makes the difficult point that these are practically the only films which force an identification with a rape victim but also can’t really escape being exploitative of it, which is something that translates onto the slasher in a possibly less severe fashion.
The positive reading of the Final Girl is essentially that it’s one of very, very few recurring types of female role that is a) in command of her own story, b) dynamic through her own experience rather than a gift/magic/etc and c) wins, against a generally male (Alien complicates this) figure. Of course, this stuff is still really unstable, because the archetype itself doesn’t inherently carry any kind of positive meaning, you have to make a movie around it that works that way.
It has always confused me that the popular reading of slashers has been that they’re a sort of conservative moral instruction, rather than taking that oppositionally and reading the slasher AS the conservative moralist who wants to kill you for doing “bad” things.
The conservative moralist reading of slashers also doesn’t really work if you watch slashers. People in slashers are punished for having sex…but they’re punished for everything. If you have sex you’re punished, if you don’t have sex you’re punished; if you’re manly you’re punished; if you’re insufficiently manly you’re punished; if you’re a tease you’re punished; if you’re not sufficiently sexual you’re punished. Everybody’s punished; everybody dies. Which, you know, is repulsive and kind of glorious, both.
Admittedly, I kinda hate-read the piece after Jones dismisses bullied nerds as “prissy,” and then ignorantly declares YA fantasy as existing to placate the bruised ego of girl-boy nerds. Which wasn’t the worst way he could have started, but not far from it.
However, when Jones’s critique of Whedon is essentially, “his jokes are clever but empty,” to not discuss Buffy at length is absurd. Buffy is the one time Whedon (of whom I’m neither fan nor hater) had the freedom to do whatever his agenda is. The Avengers gave him more freedom than most of his film projects (obviously excluding Dr. Whatever’s Sing-a-Long and the Shakespeare thing), but the budget and genre force spectacle to dominate every other element of the film.
I also find Whedon mostly insufferable (Firefly was like an advertisement for its own adorableness) but I loved Cabin in the Woods, I think because I agree with Pallas’s point about the movie’s genre crosshatch. For me, the identification character wasn’t one of the teenagers; it was the two corporate workers.
I used to be the guy who denied your grandma’s dialysis coverage. So I have a personal stake in amoral corporate types exploiting others for a debatable greater good. The fact that the movie’s shaggy-dog punchline actually vindicates the company’s seemingly heartless murderousness give the film a moral ambiguity that reflects my own mixed feelings about by 6 years with the insurance mafia.
For me, approaching Cabin in the Woods as pure, or only, feminist/horror critique misses the point, starting with how the film opens with the Corporation/Cult point of view and not the teenagers.
It’s rooted Whedon’s other frequent thematic hobbyhorses besides feminism:
1. problems with corporations, religion, organized groups.
2. youth/progress vs. adulthood/tradition
3. frustration/fondness for the limits of storytelling & genre
4. most of all, appreciation/resentment of the production process which has both enabled and thwarted him.
Cabin in The Woods is, in fact, the closest I think Whedon gets to echoing Community.
The two main corporate characters – Sitterson and Hadley – read both as studio suits and creatives who have become hacks due to giving into the process. That they care more about the office betting pool than any meaning in the ritual is key to why the production flops. Which can be seen as an analogy for the idea even formulaic shows can have heart/intelligence while others are just product. The only way they can make their ritual work is physically dumbing down the characters by pumping chemicals into the environment (the reason Marty disrupts the process is he’s already stoned). Other ritual groups (it is implied) are actually somewhat engaged and better at doing it, although they too are having trouble making it succeed (i.e. the Americanization of foreign film production). [Sitterson and Hadley are also likely Goddard and Whedon mocking their own process of writing this script.]
The cult/corporation has been doing a sacred ritual for so long it has become mundane, which permits violence and cruelty with detachment. There’s no coherent reason for continuing beyond it’s always been done and it’s a living, plus fear of what happens if it stops and the ones who suffer are, of course, the young.
My first take on the hand at the end was that it was Adam Smith’s made visible, then I realized the Ancient Ones are in The Audience. But this didn’t read this as the actual audience, but marketing/sales idea of Audience, the abstraction which provides an excuse for flattening art.
So rather than indicting the audience, one could argue it’s giving the audience an excuse: dumb misogynistic horror isn’t to blame on those watching, but those making sticking to the safest formula that sells.
Thus that scene about getting The Whore naked becomes creative sellouts perpetuating sexism by making excuses about The Masses. Sitterson and Hadley might as well be producing Game of Thrones.
I’d also argue Cabin in the Woods isn’t actually a slasher or monster in the woods horror, but conspiracy horror in which protagonists run up a group and some unleashed force, like The Wicker Man. That variation is far more open to an ending of no survivors or defeat.
This is also implied by Sigourney Weaver’s cameo at the end of the film. It’s probably mostly about who Whedon could get, but Weaver is a quote of a horror/action series in which the real villain is always the corporation and in which the original version of the character kills herself rather than let the corporation perpetuate the horror. Had this been a final girl film, the cameo might have been Jamie Lee Curtis.
In terms of zeitgeist, the film was written in 2009 and released in 2012. To me it somewhat reflects an aging Gen-X response to early Obama era optimism – the youth rebel and destroy the entire current system.
Because it’s horror, and maybe Whedon is secretly kind of a pessimist, the destruction is total, which interestingly echoes Snowpiercer another genrefuck movie overtly about rebelling against The System that posits the end of humanity as victory.
Cabin came out in March 2012, soon after the violent police crackdown that ended the initial phase of Occupy. I’m not saying there was any intentional resonance within the movie at all, but it informed the mindset in which I saw it.
Aaron White’s comment more succinctly identifies a key position in the film I was trying to describe. I think one element working against the film is Whedon’s strong preference for ensemble pieces, which means the focus in this movie is a bit all over the place.
London – I can see where prissy is a word choice that has some negative gendered connotations, I was looking for another way to say “ostentatiously performative of superior intellect in a fashion that feels minor.”
The description of Ya fantasy is surely tossed off, but the reference to Crap Kingdom is because it’s specifically about the ways that the familiar “chosen one” narrative interacts with teenage male adolescence to create a sense of entitlement/superiority that I get from whedon’s work constantly. I make all these high school references because I (like I imagine many readers of this website may have been) was also a bullied nerd, and however innocent I may have been of whatever caused people to insult or hurt me unbidden, I did a lot of shitty/annoying things that people like me learned from modeling their behavior mostly on voraciously consumed popular culture. I was one of those kids who jumped at the chance to performativly explain everything to people as though I was a gatekeeper of true knowledge due to my unique sensibility. Without the benefit of a much more visible and accessible wealth of feminist cultural criticism (probably the best thing about 21st century popular writing) the only thing I learned from movies and tv and books and video games about women was that if you just make dramatic, ridiculous gestures toward them, they will be forced to love you. Not a good way to be a person! Thus, I can’t help but see those things in media like Whedon’s films discussed here and be reminded of a personality configuration that is practically Randian in its assumption of superior understanding and “cool.”
As for not talking about Buffy, I just haven’t seen it and don’t want to. I don’t like Joss Whedon’s work, and I’m not interested in becoming some kind of bizarre spite-expert in it. Someone else can write that.
“Whedon’s defining dialogic principle seems to be the experience of obsessing over the coolest thing to say at that party when that douchebag called me a homo in high school.”
^ This is promising, not just as a takedown, but as a contribution toward getting a better handle on exactly what makes Joss Whedon’s dialogue Joss Whedon’s dialogue. (Like him or not, nobody else sounds quite like him.) Certainly part of it is that his adults always end up revealing that they’ve never really psychologically moved beyond high school – but his actual high schoolers sound distinctive too.
Or maybe it’s that his adults and high schoolers both sound like they’ve never really psychologically moved beyond childhood. (“You’re a dick.”)
Also – The difference Tim Jones points out between Scream on the one hand and Cabin in the Woods on the other raises a possibly interesting question: What does Joss Whedon actually like?
Off hand, I can think of exactly one genre parody that seems genuinely affectionate: The Japanese primary school girls in the same movie who defeat their monster with the power of friendship.
Tim—I, too, come from a background of bullied nerds, although I sought my power-fantasy refuge in role-playing games instead of pop culture. I’m not convinced the nerd-empowerment narrative of, say, Spider-Man (the one comic book I read) or, um, Firefly, is really the source of nerd-boy knowledge mongering. If you’re like me and the knowledge-mongers of my cohort, you were excessively praised for being smart, and didn’t know how to interact with the world outside of that lens. Since that was the analytic framework you used, you stepped up the challenge of its failure with more of the same (Intellectual Nerd Brownbackism). For me, that tendency was established before I got to kindergarten, so blaming it on my media exposure would be faulty—and my family wasn’t following pop nerd culture for me to absorb it second-hand.
I’m not sure where you’re reading Whedon as a purveyor of these dramatic acts towards women. I haven’t seen Cabin in the Woods, so perhaps there is something you didn’t mention that would reinforce the idea that the way rejected boys can get love is via dramatic shows of “true” love (or whatever). If so, would you explain? The message of hyperbolic declarations of love is deeply embedded in non-nerd culture—including cultural products produced by and aimed at women. It’s convenient to blame men for this, since men act out the problematic elements of the fantasy, but isolating it within men or nerd culture strikes me as both inaccurate and unhelpful. Certainly, criticizing it wherever it is found is good. But that means pop songs and RomComs more than anything else. Nolan’s Batman trilogy out-repugnates almost anything in its sick view of masculine power, but if it has a romantic, its the Joker.
Re: YA, the chosen one narrative is frowned upon right now. If you read agent interviews, they are very down on them. Also not so common in YA: boy protagonists. YA has its problems, particularly in the realm of diverse representation, but its problems don’t have much in common with comics and film.
Re: Buffy, I can understand not wanting to watch it if you hate Whedon. I loathe Tarantino. After giving him a second chance with the first few scenes of Inglorious Basterds, I won’t watch any more of his films. But it seems disingenuous to critique an artist without addressing a keystone work.
“be reminded of a personality configuration that is practically Randian in its assumption of superior understanding and ‘cool.'”
Can you expand on how Whedon’s meta-storytelling reflects an Objectivist personality? To me, he’s a populist hammer, doing trope subversion and subtext aimed at a widest reading possible: corporate drones with a warehouse of horror movie references murder college students to appease ancient gods. To me, the mixed reactions of critics is because he’s a clever crowdpleaser – more Capra than Sturges (except in this movie).
The movie itself doesn’t seem Randian: one points is the Final Girl is a process which requires the suffering of many to confer status upon the one. In the end the characters reject this – either everyone gets to live without horror or maybe no one should. That seems more like nihilist collectivism.
Well, he sure hates religion like a good Objectivist.
Graham: Communists also “hate” religion, so it’s not a defining trait.
“Like him or not, nobody else sounds quite like him” I would question this. I find Whedon echoes many (Sorkin, Cody, Lederer, Hughes, his father Tom, his grandfather John). Whedon strikes me as a highly collaborative entity – a third generation television writer, he has a distinct attitude and sometimes style, but his strength, particularly with Mutant Enemy, seems to be getting teams of writers, directors and actors to share it. Cabin, for example, was co-written and directed by Drew Goddard. One might argue the first Avengers movie worked better because he had help co-writing the story.
I hope someone addresses this quirk of Whedon as focal point – for example, when Buffy faltered in later seasons the ire often singled out collaborators (particularly Marti Noxon, and one could wonder at the gender politics of how hard fans were on her) who were equally responsible for its strengths.
Whedon ain’t no communist. (Not even in the anti-authoritarian way he hates religion; authoritarianism is just about the only thing communists don’t hate about religion.)
(continued) Nobody sounds Iike Sorkin either (though of course he has a lot of obvious imitators; which, interestingly, Whedon doesn’t).
As for a possible sexist motivation behind the hostility toward Marti Noxon, I don’t think it was worse than what’s been (rightly!) directed toward Steven Moffat for the later seasons of the new Dr. Who or (less rightly) toward George Lucas for the prequels to his own movie.
” But it seems disingenuous to critique an artist without addressing a keystone work.”
I don’t agree with this. Tim’s seen Avengers, Alien, Cabin in the Woods. That’s plenty with which to form an opinion. It’s certainly kosher to say, well, I don’t agree, because of x y z from Buffy. But I think it’s more productive to have everybody bring their perspective to the conversation, rather than ruling one out on the grounds of insufficient nerd knowledge.
MrFengi, while I know nothing about the Noxon situation, it does seem a fairly strong fan urge to identify an individual as the source of what is lovable about a project and ignore the rest of the collaborators—-until something goes wrong. The same phenomenon happens in sports and music, where gender isn’t necessarily in play. I suspect this comes from our cultural emphasis on individuality and “genius.”
It also probably has some roots in how fans come to see works as their own. Cassandra Claire and Maggie Stiefvater wrote about their conflicted relationship with their fanbases arising from how fans demand ownership of plots, characters, etc., and get angry when the writer chooses to take things in a different direction (http://www.mtv.com/news/2181489/mortal-instruments-cassandra-clare-fandom/). The same kind of psychology can be seen in sports, where fans think of a team as “theirs,” and extend the teams results into their own sense of success and failure.
Less rightly because the prequels weren’t that bad or because Lucas wasn’t that responsible for them?
“But I think it’s more productive to have everybody bring their perspective to the conversation, rather than ruling one out on the grounds of insufficient nerd knowledge.”
Agreed. But this raises another possibly interesting question: Has Whedon changed since Buffy? Or rather, since everybody changes, by how much?
Noah, I’m not against having an opinion on the Avengers, etc., based on seeing them. But when you ignore one of the foundational works (and the most extensive record of their thinking), a broad judgement of the entirety of the works is ungenerous at best. If you were to write a critical assessment of Woody Allen’s films (as opposed to his criminal life), to not watch Manhattan and Annie Hall would be a failure. Maybe you would have brilliant insights into his later works, but you can’t assess his collective works without watching the films that are considered his major works.
@ Noah – Less rightly because they weren’t… well, in some respects they were really bad, but they had their good points too. (The rain and volcano planets are case studies in how to make the sterile perfection of modern CGI evocative by sheer sensory saturation.) It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say he “wasn’t that responsible for them.” What do you mean?
What do you mean?
I was just confused! I hated the first Lucas prequel and never watched the rest of them.
London: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/virtues-know-nothing-criticism
I don’t disagree with that. My point is, admittedly, a minor one: its about limiting the scope of your claims. If you haven’t watched the original trilogy, you shouldn’t make claims about the entirety of the Star Wars series. If you have interesting things to say about how Lucas used CGI in an especially effective way in the later films, that stands on its own.
Giraldi might have had interesting things about particular romance novels, but by not reading many of them, his claims on the genre as a whole went beyond the scope in which he had anything worthwhile to say.
I like that essay, although I’d argue interesting/amusing criticism requires a clear frame of reference and coherently placing the topic within it. Which, I’d argue, is an essential though more subtle expertise.
Personally, I think one could write a rich critique of Whedon based only on responses to his material without seeing any of his work, as long as the author was fully aware of the limits of such an approach.
I think Giraldi’s problem is that he’s a jerk and kind of a misogynist…
“I am not the man with whom to fuck” is a good line. It sounds very much like an R-rated Wodehouse-ism, the fussy “with whom” immediately punctured by “to fuck”.
By the way, I enjoyed your description of the Alien staff as “on quaalude”. This video extract suddenly makes total sense.
Alien Resurrection is an interesting artifact : the meeting of Whedon’s 90s ironic/meta sensibility and Jeunet’s more 80s populist visual poetry. Imagine a collaboration between The Cure and Pavement. Both were important alternative touchstones but actually on the opposite end of that spectrum.
Joss Whedon’s body of work is pretty much a “revenge of the nerd”. I identify with that and haven’t encountered anything of his I didn’t at least mildly enjoy
Slagging the Star Wars prequels (perhaps with an eye towards trying to point out better creative choices that could have salvaged the arc) would be promising fodder for a different roundtable. I certainly have a (very sound, I’m confident) idea there…
I think Whedon very much has in common with Sorkin that his work really begins and ends with the oh-so-clever dialogue – a thing at which both are undeniably masters, BUT — Even more with Whedon than Sorkin, the latter of whom I long ago concluded would rather be Neil Simon than Aaron Sorkin, the flash of the surface can crowd out or overshadow the ideas of the story. -And Sorkin is definitely often very much about grand ideas, even deep ones (maybe), where in Buffy, the Whedon work I know best, there’s plenty of clever thought in the dialogue and the relationships -Whedon is nothing if not an accomplished writer of soap opera- the world-building was pretty crap, and stuff like the moral implications of all that killing and who is fair game to kill are really never dealt with save as fuel for the soap opera moments. (Buffy herself being pretty much the least interesting thing about Buffy.) There’s sharp and wide thinking, you might say, in the writing there, but not so much with the deep at all.
@ Gero – On that note, let us recall the critique of Harvey Pekar: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t7Ktb1D4NFE&t=53m52s
@ BU – At risk of derailing the comment section, I’d say that advice from second parties about how to “salvage” a work usually, at best, may elevate the bad elements to the level of mediocrity, and thus isn’t really worth the effort.
Nobody’s going to remake the prequels, and it depends on the quality of the insights, doesn’t it? It’s only a fun nerd thought exercise, after all.
Central to my thinking on that is to point out that Lucas made Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to make a Flash Gordon film. The rest follows naturally…