Monthly Archives: June 2015

We Can Remember the Dollhouse for You

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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One of the core philosophical mysteries that Philip K Dick lingered over throughout his career was the fragility of identity (and, by extension, reality). In particular, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” twists a very knotty philosophical quandary into one of PKD’s more intense action stories. Typically, PKD is more concerned with perception of reality but “We Can Remember…” focuses more intimately on the mutability of memory and its relationship with identity. The protagonist, one Douglas Quaid, undergoes a procedure to gain a desired false memory, only to stumble onto buried memories that shatter his identity, replacing his mundane life with that of a government assassin.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve ever seen Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and aren’t already acquainted with the plot of PKD’s seminal work, also adapted into film twice now, you’ll be now quite aware that “We Can Remember…” is the foundation upon which the show is based. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a crude summary; a corporation erases people’s identities and replaces them with useful identities until their debts are paid off.

One of the reasons why “We Can Remember…” seemed worthy of modernization as a TV series wasn’t just the possible complexities of a world where identities can be manufactured but the subtle thread of dystopianism, one that predates William Gibson’s corporations-as-gods cyberpunkism. In both Dollhouse and “We Can Remember…”, the powerful corporations responsible for identity manipulation don’t serve as arms of a nameless government but act independently of them and at odds with them, even.

In “We Can Remember…” it’s REKALL, the corporation, who triggers Douglas Quaid’s memories of his job as a government assassin and it’s left to the government to deal with the problem, though it’s again REKALL who provides the final resolution, or at least an intended one. It’s dystopian in the whole sense; Quaid was a government assassin who, had things gone according to plan, would never have awoken to his former identity and it is actually his false identity in denial of this that leads to the central conflict. “Real” Quaid, the government he worked for and REKALL are all complicit.

Dollhouse, on the other hand, is openly anti-corporation and, in its implications, a cautionary tale whose formula is “corporations + technology = bad.” This starts with the implication that Rossum Corporation took an invention intended to alleviate neurological disorders and turned it to arguably nefarious ends, and ends with a near-apocalypse. The depiction of the creators of this technology, as well as most of the technologically-inclined characters, is of sociopaths. Whedon’s Dollhouse has little sympathy for scientists and barely touches on the humanitarian uses of the Dollhouse technology.

On the other hand, in Philip K Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” the existence of mind-altering technology is far more benign and pragmatic than Whedon’s. REKALL runs a business granting people the chance to have memories of experiences they never had or to take on an identity they wish they could be. There’s no apocalyptic endgame and, to that extend, Dick seems to acknowledge the mundanity of postmodern culture in which everything is changing but nothing is different. In fact, he’s not even concerned with it, instead punctuating his tale with a very PKD-ian twist from out of left field. Dick was telling a story and not running a simulation revolving around a theoretical technology, one in which the driving individuals are improbably corrupt, as those in Dollhouse seemed to be.

And therein lies the disconnect of Whedon’s riff on PKD; Philip K Dick was writing Weird science fiction, with a capital “W.” The universe he portrayed in his books, unlike Whedon’s Dollhouse (and, perhaps more tellingly, Firefly), was ultimately an irrational universe. PKD wasn’t really a science fiction author, not in the vein of Asimov or Clarke, but more a postmodern mutation of the old Weird, like Lovecraft for the hard disk era. The relationship between the two is even more stark if you consider Philip K Dick’s overriding affinity for “the beyond” and extrastellar and ungraspable entities. And, really, that’s what drives his dystopias; that what should seem patently absurd and surreal by our standards is rendered mundane by the plastic nature of his realities.

Whedon’s “dystopia” is of an increasingly common and wearying breed; one that doggedly tracks down a line of best fit, averse to outliers and designed not just to suspend disbelief but to lock the viewer into a meticulous and intricate conundrum. And Whedon’s solution to the whole thing is, bizarrely, a sort of anti-science deus ex machine; it turns out the secret to countering the mind-wiping technology is hidden away in a particular character’s DNA.

This last revelation feels like a loose thread that Whedon could’ve malevolently ripped clean from the scrupulously woven fabric of Dollhouse’s reality by implying that perhaps this miracle DNA isn’t of terrestrial origin. It certainly would’ve infused such an appallingly cynical story with some much needed weirdness, the kind of weird that made Philip K Dick’s works compelling.

Jane Austen’s Clark Kent

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“Superman’s powers weren’t unique,” writes Deborah Friedell, “but his schlumpy double identity was,” because “it is the ordinary person, Clark Kent, who is the disguise.”

The assertion is indirectly Brad Ricca’s, whose biography Superboys Friedell was reviewing, but either way, I have to raise my hand from over here in Bath, England where I’m teaching this month, and say, well, actually, no. Jerry Siegel can only claim uniqueness points if you ignore a range of earlier, disguise-reversing characters, including Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel–whose 1934 film incarnation Siegel would have watched before his coincidental stroke of Superman inspiration later the same year.
 

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I’m guessing, however, Jerry didn’t read much by Bath’s most beloved literary daughter, Jane Austen. Which is a shame because she penned the first Clark Kent all the way back in 1817. Austen was more or less on her deathbed at the time, which might explain why she was writing about invalids at a beach resort, and, more sadly, why she never finished.

“Jane Austen left few hints about the direction Sanditon would have taken had her health allowed its completion,” writes Austen expert Mary Jane Curry. “Perhaps future study will suggest why, if Austen family lore is true, Jane Austen called it ‘The Brothers.’” Laurel Ann Nattress thinks the middle of the titular brothers, the very good-looking and lively countenanced Sydney, was “possibly to emerge as the hero.” Maria Grazia agrees (“The male hero seems to be in Jane’s intentions, Sidney Parker”), scolding Juliette Shapiro for her treatment of the character and the subsequent romance (“Rather improbable”) in a completion of Austen’s novel.

Shapiro’s is only one of over a half dozen attempts (including a webseries set in California) to pick up where Austen’s dying hand dropped off. Perhaps so many of them fail because they champion the wrong Mr. Parker. My bets are on Sydney’s kid brother, the mild-mannered Arthur.

He, like his delicately hypochondriac older sisters, has come to Sanditon to convalesce. Charlotte, Austen’s final protagonist, “had considerable curiosity to see Mr. Arthur Parker; and having fancied him a very puny, delicate-looking young man, materially the smallest of a not very robust family, was astonished to find him quite as tall as his brother and a great deal stouter, broad made and lusty, and with no other look of an invalid than a sodden complexion.” That’s a casting call for Christopher Reeve.
 

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Arthur only receives one scene (more than his feckless brother), but it has all the hallmarks of a Kryptonian slumming as a cowardly weakling. His first line is an apology for hogging the seat by the fire. “We should not have had one at home,” said he, “but the sea air is always damp. I am not afraid of anything so much as damp.” Charlotte is fortunate never to know whether air is damp or dry, as it has always some property that is wholesome and invigorating.

“I like the air too, as well as anybody can,” replies Arthur. “I am very fond of standing at an open window when there is no wind. But, unluckily, a damp air does not like me. It gives me the rheumatism.” He is also, he confesses, “very nervous,” an obscure 19th century condition sadly extinct by the time Siegel was writing, or surely Clark would have suffered it too. “To say the truth, nerves are the worst part of my complaints in my opinion.”

Charlotte recommends exercise. “Oh, I am very fond of exercise myself,” he replies, “and I mean to walk a great deal while I am here, if the weather is temperate. I shall be out every morning before breakfast and take several turns upon the Terrace, and you will often see me at Trafalgar House.” But does Arthur really call a walk to Trafalgar House much exercise? “Not as to mere distance, but the hill is so steep! Walking up that hill, in the middle of the day, would throw me into such a perspiration! You would see me all in a bath by the time I got there! I am very subject to perspiration, and there cannot be a surer sign of nervousness.”

Adding to sweat and humidity, Arthur reveals his most feared form of liquid kryptonite. “What!” said he. “Do you venture upon two dishes of strong green tea in one evening? What nerves you must have! Now, if I were to swallow only one such dish, what do you think its effect would be upon me?” Keep him awake perhaps all night? “Oh, if that were all!” he exclaims. “No. It acts on me like poison and would entirely take away the use of my right side before I had swallowed it five minutes. It sounds almost incredible, but it has happened to me so often that I cannot doubt it. The use of my right side is entirely taken away for several hours!”

Is Arthur duping Charlotte the way Clark dupes Lois? Hard to say. It is clear, however, that the man is masking deeper appetites. Although he pretends, “A large dish of rather weak cocoa every evening agrees with me better than anything,” Charlottes observes the drink “came forth in a very fine, dark-coloured stream,” prompting his sisters’ outrage. “Arthur’s somewhat conscious reply of ‘Tis rather stronger than it should be tonight,’ convinced her that Arthur was by no means so fond of being starved as they could desire or as he felt proper himself.” Arthur has a similar weakness for liberally buttered toast, “seizing an odd moment for adding a great dab just before it went into his mouth.” Wine also does him surprising good. “The more wine I drink—in moderation—the better I am.”

Charlotte, demonstrating the sleuthing skills of a top notch girl reporter, notes “Mr. Arthur Parker’s enjoyments in invalidism,” suspecting “him of adopting that line of life principally for the indulgence of an indolent temper, and to be determined on having no disorders but such as called for warm rooms and good nourishment.” Laurel Ann Nattress (did I mention she has a blog on Austen?) thinks the twenty-year-old has been “cosseted” (presumably by his doting sisters) “into believing himself to be of delicate health.”

That’s the interpretation Bryan Singer adopted for his 2006 Superman Returns. The Man of Steel’s bastard son, the five-year-old Jason, appears to be an asthmatic runt—until he throws a piano at the thug menacing his mother, Lois. Was little Jason just jerking everyone around? Hard to say. But his old man certainly was. The best scene from Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill is David Carradine’s superhero monologue:

“When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak… he’s unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.”

Austen is critiquing us too, our laziness and self-serving foibles, but being also a devoted lover of the marriage plot, would she have left poor Arthur to stew in his rather weak brew of humanity? I’m not suggesting the young man was hiding a capital “S” under his shirt, but Austen seems to have hidden something under there. Lois eventually pulled the glasses off Clark. I suspect Charlotte would have done the same with her tall, broad, and lusty invalid.
 

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Utilitarian Review 6/20/15

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Chris Gavaler with a proposal for Joss Whedon’s next project.

Chris Gavaler on Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and superheroes.

Robert Stanley Martin chronicles on sale dates for comics in late 1942 (the first Carl Barks duck tale, and others.)

Our Joss Whedon roundtable continues!

Em Liu on Age of Ultron and the gender binary.

Anne Moore on how Whedon is no longer your best friend.

Philippe Leblanc on Whedon vs. the studio industrial complex.

Lisa Levy on Buffy and making you own family.

Jade Degrio and Desirae Embree on choice and consent in Dollhouse.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Vice I wrote about Orphan Black as soap opera.

At Playboy I wrote about Andrea Dworkin, men’s rights advocate.

At the New Republic I wrote about Goodfellas’ banal take on masculinity.

At Quartz I wrote about

—why making Magneto black is a bad idea.

—Jurassic Park and the genetic abomination of working women.

—not trusting teachers to do their jobs.

At Splice Today I wrote about Sense8 and utopia via television.
 

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Choosing the Dollhouse

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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“We make choices. I’m well aware there are forces beyond our control, even in the face of those forces we make choices.” – Adele, Dollhouse

Given the recent contention surrounding Joss Whedon’s brand of feminism, we immediately wanted to revisit Dollhouse for this roundtable because of how far it takes some of feminism’s central concerns (and also because of how much feminists seem to hate it). We decided to structure our analysis of the show as a dialogue for two reasons. The first was simply to approximate the feeling of an informal roundtable, and the second was to side-step the is-or-isn’t-this-show-feminist quagmire by modeling the ways in which feminism, like popular culture, is dynamic. All it can offer us a place from which to start—not settle—discussion.

Desirae: I suppose I’ll address the is-or-isn’t-Dollhouse-feminist thing by saying that there are many different types of feminisms, and they are all going to have a different take on the show. Dollhouse is fundamentally concerned with philosophical questions relating to freedom, choice, and the self, and different feminisms relate differently to these things. So when people say Dollhouse is a rape fantasy or glorifies sex work, my thing is that perspective specifically comes from liberal feminism, which has to believe in (and so wants to see reflected) this idea that women can be free and empowered with choice. This is why consent is such a huge part of liberal feminist rhetoric. But if you’re dealing with a system of complete control that sort of consent (Yes, I choose my choice) doesn’t make sense anymore because there’s no choice that isn’t coerced in some way. I think that’s the main premise of the show, and it’s exemplified by the Dollhouse itself… but it’s also meant to be a reflection of the world in which we live.
 

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Jade: Yeah, which is why it’s such a cool premise. The fact that in S1 E6, in the beginning stages of developing her own awareness and while imprinted with another consciousness, Echo chooses to complete her engagement after it had been interrupted by Paul’s white-knighting. Echo seems aware that her imprint didn’t experience resolution, and that the romantic engagement hadn’t been executed to completion. Does her choice not matter because Caroline (or her “soul”) isn’t present? I guess that’s a metaphor for intoxication or other forms of out-of-body-ness that liberal feminism would argue cannot be consent. Caroline consented to being a doll; she signed the papers…but liberal feminism wants Caroline’s consent in the moment. S1 E6 is the first moment where Echo asserts her will which forces us to ask, what the threshold that has to be crossed in order for something to count an authentic choice.

In another scene, Paul argues that you can’t erase a person’s soul. He later doubles down on that when he refuses to sleep with Echo because all her actions, desires, and sexuality are programmed. As a result, he thinks she cannot consent. This idea that we are only able to TRULY make a choice if there is a connection between our mind, our body, and our soul speaks to the “ghost of Christianity” that lurks in all Joss’s meditations on “the soul.” It fuels the critiques of Dollhouse as rape fantasy and completely ignores that we are all products of coercion. The systems we live within are deeply ingrained in the very nature of our bodies, minds, and souls, and taken to its most extreme conclusion: all sexuality is rooted in coercion, especially unexamined heterosexuality.

D: Right, and one way of looking at it is, how is our daily reality different from the dolls’? I think I can genuinely choose or consent to certain actions/relationships, but there is a larger structure of systemic coercion that doesn’t allow me the choice to not engage, you know. Adrienne Rich called it “compulsory heterosexuality,” where choosing to opt out isn’t really an available choice. Even if you’re a lesbian, you’re still acting within a system of compulsory heterosexuality. In this scenario, I feel like a doll.

J: I do too. We agreed to keep this focused on S1, but the fact that the first episode of S2 is about a long-term engagement where Echo gets MARRIED could be discussed at length. It’s just wonderful.

D: My body is coerced in various environments and ways, and there’s no way I can consent to some of what I choose to do. Like that is the literal definition of oppression.

J: Right. All the people in the Dollhouse were coerced, even those that chose it. Caroline, Madeline, and others are seen signing contracts and while they do, we hear Adele’s well-crafted explanation of the Dollhouse’s purpose (and its benefits). We’re to believe they understood the terms and accepted them. They’ll wake up in 5 years with a clean slate—selective memories removed, PTSD treated, and free of the guilt that they had before their residency. It isn’t until the S1 E8-where they are allowed to live out their “needs” as a way to correct the glitches each doll is experiencing that we discover that there’s an element of coercion to everyone’s decision to enter the Dollhouse. This exercise relies on the same idea Paul sells later, that you can’t completely remove the fundamental need of the original personality’s soul.

D: Which was itself a thing they were allowed to do by Dr. Saunders and the Dollhouse. There’s no real consent in the Dollhouse, but there’s no real consent anywhere else either. And that’s what the show problematizes, and I also think it’s a thing that a lot of mainstream feminism does not want to have to confront politically. No, your desire isn’t authentic. No, you are not free. But that’s just what it means to be a person in the world.

J: Well, and Priya is really the only character who didn’t consent to entering the Dollhouse. She’s the only one who was trafficked in. Her residency in the Dollhouse is painted very differently than Caroline, Madeline, and Anthony. While you can argue that Adele emotionally manipulated the others into joining, with Priya, it was Adele that was manipulated. Priya is drugged into an altered state and misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, which Topher thinks he could treat through the active architecture.

D: That’s interesting. There are a lot of instance in which people step on the autonomy of others, even if they have good intentions in doing so.

J: Yeah, Echo and Paul are trying to “save” everyone. In S1 E8 in the midst of Caroline’s rebellion against the Dollhouse Adele says to her, “You are free to leave. Who are you to decide for the others?” It’s like liberal feminists or white knights that try to save women from whatever “bad decisions” we make, whether it’s wearing make-up or engaging in sex work… And Adele, Caroline, and Paul are representative of different savior scenarios. Paul takes the patriarchal approach and asserts that there is only one way to be authentic. Adele is the champion of individual choice. She believes in a world where empowered choices can be made freely and she asserts and protects people’s ability to do so. Caroline is an animal rights activist who has good intentions but often can’t see how her actions hurt the people around her. Dollhouse stages these different types of problematic commitments to social justice and challenges us to question the idea that there is One Best Way to address oppression.

D: They all choose for other people; that’s what saviorism is. It’s also what rape is. Back in 2009, i09 ran an article that drew a direct line between rape and the dystopic future the Dollhouse’s technology creates. It’s not an accident that it all started with some savior impulse…
 

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J: Though, we do see instances of authentic and real decisions, like Victor/Anthony and Sierra/Priya. They develop a relationship in the doll state that isn’t consented to, but later Priya falls in love with Anthony. We’re meant to trust in and support their relationship.

D: Yes, but even that one is weird. Doll-state Sierra (who is Not Sierra) doesn’t consent to her relationship with Victor, but that love is cast as being the only authentic one in the show. It’s as though the Truth of their connection transcends the doll state and carries into their original personalities. I think that goes back to the idea of the soul that you keep bringing up. We want to think there are these hard kernels of the self that can survive all the coercion and the ideological programming that structure our daily lives; Victor and Sierra, apparently, have that kind of love. But is it really that different than the relationship between, for example, Adele and Roger (an Active)? Paul and Mellie (an Active)? Paul and Echo (an Active), and then later Echo (who has become a self) and Paul (who becomes an Active)?

J: So here’s a question: once Echo becomes self-aware, does Caroline have the right to essentially kill her by taking her body back? What about active imprints within Echo? What happens to consent then? We are to believe Caroline has that right as the “true owner” of her body. Toward the end of S1 and into S2 as each character becomes self-aware, we see another set of circumstances that pit informed consent against coerced choice, and the ways that the system forces everyone’s hand. This is most clear in Madeline’s case. She is released from her contract because Paul agrees to become Echo’s handler in order to play out his fantasy of “saving” Caroline. (Which is eerily similar to some of the Dollhouse’s clients’ paid engagements.) Later, when Madeline’s freedom is tested, she tells Paul that freedom means the ability to make choices even if they’re the wrong ones, and she asks if she is really free. Paul, who so desperately wants to believe in freedom beyond the Dollhouse, (again!) grants that freedom to her (which speaks to his patriarchal saviorism, he allows the “bad choices” to happen). And of course it’s the “wrong” choice and Madeline ends up back in the Dollhouse, this time as a prisoner—no consent. And then of course, Echo, who is being driven by Caroline’s savior soul, stays to fight. So you’re right, at the end of the day there is no choice that proves to be correct or any less coerced. Whether any of them chooses to stay or go, fight or comply, it’s all equally a matter of acting out what they are programed to do—whether literally by the Dollhouse or figuratively by an inborn sense of ethics, duty, or whatever.
 

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D: One of the ideas we’re touching on too is, what are the limits of capitalism? Can you, for example, sell yourself into slavery? That’s one of the show’s major questions. Is the self a thing that can be bought and sold? If so, who owns it? We were talking the other day about how saying that all choice is coerced can be deployed in super racist ways (see: Meghan Murphy’s take on Laverne Cox’s babely photo spread in Allure). So there is a way in which the conversation needs to be attuned to contemporary and historical differences in raced experience… because there is a difference between “selling oneself,” which is the term liberal feminists often use for sex work, and being sold as chattel by another. Think the difference between Dominatrix Echo and Priya being trafficked into the Dollhouse. In liberal feminist rhetoric, these are the same thing. But in Dollhouse, we are meant to see the difference between Caroline’s choice to become an Active, which was an abdication of responsibility, and Priya’s being trafficked into the Dollhouse, which was a violation of sovereignty. So all of this is to say, in my mind at least, that if all choice is coerced then no one choice can be better or worse than another. But at the same time, just because all choice is coerced doesn’t make all coercion equal. These are distinctions that I think are missing from feminist critiques like Meghan Murphy’s or those that reduce Dollhouse to a rape fantasy.
 

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JD: So, I like the idea of ending this with a quote from Boyd. I feel like it kinda brings everything home.

D: Yes, I agree, especially because of the role that he plays in the show, going from handler to arch villain.

J: If we had more time I’d go into detail about that ep because it’s a mirror of the Dollhouse, but it comes from S1 E5, “True Believer,” which I think is a self-contained examination of the entire premise. “No one asked to be saved—not by you.”

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Jade Degrio works in the fashion industry and is a freelance writer for various online and print publications. She specializes in yelling about things on the internet

Desirae Embree is a PhD student in English at Texas A&M University, where she has figured out how to make watching too much television a (somewhat) respectable profession.

Buffy the Boyfriend Slayer

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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 The most jaw-dropping moment in the lastest installment of the Avengers franchise, The Age of Ultron, was not a fight sequence or a CGI robot or even the relvelation about those creeepy twins. It was the discovery that Hawkeye/Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner) had a family. While the other Avengers made clumsy romantic overtures toward each other—particularly The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson)—Hawkeye had been presiding over an ubertraditional domestic scenario in his other secret life, complete with two towheaded kids and a pregnant wife, Laura Barton, her countenance alternately radiating farmfed good health and requisite worry (the longsuffering Linda Cardellini).
 

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Though the scenes at the Barton homestead are certainly meant to provide peaceful and occasionally comic intervals between the Avengers lengthy and elaborate battles to save the world, they feel tacked on, inauthentic. What I suspect Whedon was attempting with the deepening of Hawkeye’s character was to make him more interesting (since, let’s face it, his powers are sort of underwhelming) and to add another dimension to the franchise. It’s an age old saw that superheroes can’t have so-called normal relationships; the friction between their everyday lives and their secret identities simply do not allow for it. Getting involved with normals—usually women, since most superheroes are men—can compromise their vocation and make them vulnerable on too many fronts. Thus Hawkeye’s family had been kept secret from the Avengers, so that neither friend nor enemy could put them in danger.

This vision of radical solitude, of permanent singlehood, could be seen as progressive: the hero, fighting always for the greater good, is unencumbered by the domestic relationships and mundane activities that traditionally bind people together. Yet even in his early days, Whedon never took that stance. The Avengers, after all, are a mock family of sorts, and in that they are a natural progression from the Scooby gang of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Though the gang coalesced around Buffy and her superpowers, by the end of the series nearly every member of the group had some sort of power, an identity he or she had to hide from the world at large (though Xander’s occasional military knowledge, a residue left in his brain after a Halloween episode where he transformed into a mercenary, was always a little suspect).

Over the seven seasons of Buffy, we watched her struggle with The Big Bad, with her powers, with her vocation, and with her family and friends. We also watched Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles take on and lose several romantic relationships. Though the first few seasons of the series relied on Buffy’s ill-fated romance with the vampire Angel as an analogy of adolescent relationships, the transformation of Angel into a good vampire eliminated much of the tension that fueled their attraction. Buffy’s subsequent relationships, with the buff-but-boring Riley (who turned out to be involved in a nefarious proto-military project), and then with the reluctantly reformed vampire Spike never quite reached the intensity of feeling of that first time with Angel. When the Spike attraction began it was clearly for a bad boy, and definitely had Buffy dealing with the complications of sexual attraction for someone she really didn’t like or trust. It dovetailed quite nicely with her feelings of alienation upon being brought back to life by her friends; exiled, as it turned out, from a place more like heaven than hell.

The other romances we watched play out on Buffy ranged from poignant to the stuff of romantic comedy. Willow’s high school boyfriend Oz, who conveniently turned out to be a werewolf, joined the group without too much hazing. It was rougher when she fell in love with Tara, not only because Tara was a woman but because she was a witch, and the couple’s dabbling in dark magic went from a hobby to a dangerous obsession. Xander’s only real girlfriend after years of an unrequited crush on Buffy, the former vengeance demon Anya, had a harder time assimilating into the Gang, in part because of her rather abrasive personality. And after his girlfriend, a computer teacher at Sunnydale High with gypsy roots, is killed fairly early in the series, we don’t see token adult/sometime watcher/school librarian Giles do very much socializing. In fact, when he leaves to return to his native England it feels appropriate, like he should really stop being an old guy hanging around with a bunch of college kids.

The solidification of the Scooby Gang as a proto-family reached its apotheosis with the arrival of Dawn, Buffy’s younger sister, who suddenly appeared on the show several seasons into its run. What began as a WTF moment slowly unfolded into one of the most complicated relationships on the show, as everyone became protective of Dawn but Buffy retained the resentment that older siblings generally have for younger ones. Don’t touch my stuff. Stop hanging out with my friends. GO AWAY!

Among Buffy stalwarts it’s generally agreed that the scariest episode of the show has nothing to do with the supernatural, and everything to do with domestic life. In “The Body,” Buffy comes home to find her mother, Joyce, is dead. Her death, sudden but of natural causes, cannot be undone by any spells. No magic, no books, no wishes will bring back her mother. In facing the abyss of grief, Buffy, who has already seen so much death, is forced to deal with the most mundane aspects of life: taking care of her sister, getting a job, housekeeping, and muddling through without the person who had always quietly been there for her, even when they had the usual (and unusual, since she is a Slayer) mother-daughter disagreements.
 

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In the final season of Buffy, for reasons too complicated to get into, the Scooby Gang has to mobilize once again to save the world but this time they have another agenda: they must protect all of the potential slayers (the brief backstory here is that when the Slayer dies, a new one is called). Thus Buffy and the Scoobys end up running a kind of a training camp for adolescent girls, many of whom resemble Buffy was before she was annointed: bratty, selfish, mopey, whiny, and scared. It would be an overstatement to claim that in raising up her army Buffy takes on a maternal role, but she does take on the persona of mentor and leader.

And it’s this final incarnation of the Gang, which is a family bound by something stronger than blood and far less sentimental than traditional domesticity, which fights the ultimate battle of Buffy. It is much more satisfying, and progressive than anything Whedon has come up with since: an army of adolescent girls, led by an extraordinary young woman and her friends, who have gradually grown up together and discovered their own distinct powers, bestowed on them in part by fickle gods, but mastered largely through their own maturation and machinations. It is more thrilling, dangerous, and emotionally charged than any Avengers battle could ever be.

Weaponizing Everything

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One of the main strengths I’ve recognized throughout Joss Whedon’s work is his careful crafting of deep, multifaceted characters. He puts enough care and attention into them to ensure they aren’t simple cardboard cut-outs that drive the story along, but persons whose reasoning we can understand. In addition to his complex characters, Whedon focuses on the concept of the family. It’s a recurring theme that, however alienated the characters are when introduced, they’ll inevitably will be drawn into a tight familial group. Case in point, the Scooby gang in Buffy, the crew of the Serenity in Firefly, Angel investigations crew in Angel, the Los Angeles Dollhouse or even, to a lesser extent, the Avengers.

A striking point in Whedon’s work is that these familial groups eventually confront militaristic organizations in one form or another. Some of these organization appear as a benevolent force at first and turn into a tyrannical opponent afterwards, such as the Initiative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some are conventional “villains” from the onset, such as the Alliance in Firefly or the facility operators in Cabin in the Woods. All military industrial organizations we see in Whedon’s work have a clear path: self-destruction. This trajectory is present throughout Whedon’s work; as the military acquires knowledge of powerful artifacts (or powerful persons depending on the genre) they try to weaponize it. Despite the best of intentions at times, the moment the military tries to harness these “powers, they’re propelled onto a collision course with our protagonists. It’s a matter of arrogance; the military sees the potential for power in something and assumes that they are strong and righteous enough to control it, but are ultimately consumed by it. The characters we follow are no less tempted by this thirst for power, but aren’t as misguided by hubris and only resort to wield the artifacts in question as a last resort to avert disaster. In the rare cases where our protagonists yield to those temptations, their punishment is swift and their remorse keeps them from following the military down an ethical slippery slope. This recurring narrative shows a distaste for the hubris of the military organizations and sows the seeds of anti-authoritarian thoughts, but there may be more to it than this.
 

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I wonder if this relationship between his characters and the organizations around them is a reflection of a long running theme of anti-authoritarianism or perhaps, a reflection of Whedon’s troubled relationship with the studios he has worked for. For decades, his battles with studio executives have become well-known and documented. Angel was cancelled over posturing, Firefly was doomed from the start, the networks backed out of the Dollhouse premise and his recent comments about the Marvel Studios fiasco seems to only hint at the contentions between them. As the subtext seeps into the plot, his complicated and tense relationship with his employers is difficult for the audience to ignore. It’s hard to know which came first: is the underlying anti-authoritarian theme the result of studio conflict, or do the studios rush to stifle Whedon’s creativity when it starts to veer towards difficult themes? Whatever the case, this theme is growing more pronounced with every new piece that Whedon produces.

Buffy developed a huge fan following due to the care and attention Whedon put into building an intricate world and multifaceted characters. The studios want to capitalize on this success and rake in the profits, but balk at the time it takes to build the story. They jump at the idea of working with Whedon, giving him some freedom at first, but become increasingly intrusive and controlling, as they have a very strict idea of where and how the story should be told. They call a halt when Whedon veers off the “acceptable” course or takes too long to get somewhere, and this window is getting narrower the longer their partnership lasts. The studios, much like the military organizations, don’t understand what they have and try to exploit it. They try to capitalize on Whedon’s strengths without understanding them for their own purposes (profit, brand recognition) but it is not what Whedon seems to want to do, which is art.

Is Whedon’s negative relationship with the studios the only thing that affects his writing?
Whedon also seems to enjoy working with regular artists and contributors over time and, although this interaction is normal, it reinforces the subtext. Close friends and the family you create are better and stronger than the organizations you associate with, (corporations and the military industrial complex included). Those entities are bound to destroy themselves through their own misdoings and hubris.

These musings bring the slaughter of the white collar drones and the military organization in Cabin in the Woods into a new light. The military may want to do well, but trampling the civilians and treating them as expendable causes their downfall. The small group of survivors, whether considering this movie or Whedon and his close creative partners, band together and fight back, no matter the cost. They lose their life for their freedom in the former; Whedon loses his job for his freedom in the latter.

 

First-Name Basis, or How Joss Whedon Finally Stopped Being Your Friend

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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How do we define “authorship,” anyway? Even in this age of endless reboots, remixes, and universe-building, there’s still some kind of value placed on the idea of originality, as there has been all along. Whether it’s Dickens’ attempts to tighten copyright law in order to shut down rogue performances of his work, JK Rowling’s attempts to shut down publication of a Harry Potter encyclopedia, Warner Bros. forbidding Rocky-Horror-style viewings of “Once More with Feeling…”, or countless post-finale interviews with showrunners offering the “right” interpretation of their show, the relationship between a reader and an author is largely defined by power and anxiety. Sometimes they’re protecting their money, but more often than not, especially in the case of flesh and blood writers like Dickens and Rowling, they’re guarding the sanctity of something more ineffable—something that gets at the etymological root of “authority.”

As auteurs go, Joss Whedon has never overtly demonstrated too much of this kind of anxiety. From the beginning, he’s positioned himself as a fan among many, but a kind of super-fan. He engages in projects that feel like fan fiction, recasting Dracula as a minor player on the Sunnydale scene, rewriting space opera from the position of the colonized in Firefly, continuing the story of Buffy in comic form, and even including his own image in a panel of Buffy’s dream sequence–look at the bottom of the page below. It’s Mary Sue through the looking glass!
 

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Perhaps even more importantly, Whedon’s let fans behind the curtain of the production process, participating in early fan forums such as The Bronze and Whedonesque, and even going so far as to hire fans such as Drew Greenberg and Michelle Trachtenberg in later seasons of Buffy. When “authority” has influenced the direction of a text, Whedon’s always positioned himself as being on the side of fans–Fox stunted his vision of Firefly, Warner Bros. didn’t appreciate him enough to give his actors ER or Friends-level salaries, Fox hamstrung the development of Dollhouse, etc. Even his more recent, high-profile work within the Marvel franchise is so rooted in his own fandom that the difference between “adaptation” and “fanfic” gets hard to parse. It’s no wonder fans refer to him as “Joss”–he spent a lot of time and energy, especially early on, cultivating just that kind of intimacy.

But it’s important to remember that this intimacy was always charged with hostility. Jonathan Levinson on Buffy is probably the best example of this vexed closeness. In “Superstar,” for instance, Jonathan gets the intimacy that being on a first-name basis with Joss Whedon might lead to (included in the credits, influencing the rest of the plot of Season Four), but his desire for too much closeness, too much control, is what turns the other characters away from him at the end of the episode, and lays the framework for his return in Season Six as one of three Bad Fans. It’s common enough to have figures of bad fans in a text serving as negative examples of Reading Gone Wrong–the Trio has good company in Ben Linus on Lost, Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend, Felix Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica, Comic Book Guy and countless others. The thing that’s interesting to me is how, in “Superstar,” Jonathan’s “bad” fandom doesn’t look that different from the “good” fandom that came from all the people Whedon had been palling around with on The Bronze and Whedonesque. This relationship to authorial power–the boss who’s also your buddy–is ultimately unsustainable, and that’s where the vitriol behind the depiction of fans in Season Six of Buffy comes from, I think.

Which brings us to the present day, and Whedon’s decision to quit Twitter. In his recent interview with Buzzfeed, he blows off the idea that feminist blowback to the Black Widow storyline drove him from Twitter. To his credit, he’s pretty blasé about the whole thing, pointing out how much worse it is for women on Twitter than it would ever be for him. What struck me upon reading the interview, though, was how his reasoning had less to do with politics than it did with intimacy. Twitter is an intimate medium, and the intimacy comes with very little effort on either side. For instance: when I was writing my dissertation (which partially focused on Buffy, natch), I was following television writer and producer Jane Espenson on Twitter, and every now and then she’d announce a “writing marathon,” encouraging her followers to tweet how much they’d written. I didn’t mention her on my acknowledgements page or anything, but those goals felt supportive, and kept me on track toward finishing. I was never part of those early Bronze chat rooms, so I’ve always been a little put off by calling Joss Whedon “Joss,” but when I was writing my dissertation, Jane Espenson did feel like “Jane.” Twitter can feel like a place where you’re hanging out with your friends (shades of The Bronze, perhaps), but when it turns, it turns fast and hard.

With a property as big as The Avengers, the intimacy that characterized his early work just isn’t sustainable anymore, and that’s what his retreat from Twitter is about, I think. Like many others, I was pretty put off by the “big reveal” of Natasha Romanova’s sterilization backstory, and especially by her line that infertility made her a “monster.” I found myself making excuses for Whedon in my head, almost right away, since this seemed so different, at first, from choices he’s made in the past (except, of course, for that one episode of Dollhouse). If it were from anyone else, would I have been surprised by such a hacky motivation for a central female character? Getting depth for female characters in summer blockbusters is always tricky, especially for writers working within an established franchise. But because of my love for Buffy (and Angel and Firefly and Dr. Horrible and even Dollhouse) my expectations are higher, and my disappointment proportionally greater. Based on the tone of some of the responses, I’m not alone in my feeling that this cinematic disappointment is more personal than others.

But here’s the bind for Whedon: his “betrayal” isn’t as personal as it feels, because there’s just no way that he would have the same kind of control over the content of something like The Avengers. Nor can he position himself as a creative genius, hemmed in by the forces of an evil corporate Big Bad. He’s too close to this Big Bad, and his position is much more precarious–Dan Harmon and Amy Sherman-Palladino excepted, it’s rare for a showrunner to get booted from the fictional world s/he invented (and Community and Gilmore Girls both serve as cautionary tales for doing so). But The Avengers is different–he could get replaced on this project easily, though, so his old “I’m on your side, it’s the goddamned network fencing me in” approach isn’t available.

Ultimately, Joss Whedon is too close to too much power (without actually wielding that power) to be the Cool Dad anymore, the one who “gets it” but has to exercise authority because he loves you. The project is too big, its influence too far-reaching for him to be able to hang out on message boards and kibitz with fans. Twitter offers the promise of intimacy, but Whedon’s fans have come to expect something that approaches the real thing. And as Cool Dads have learned since time immemorial, the closer you are aligned with the machinery of power, the less possible it is to be everybody’s BFF. Whedon will just have to settle for being one of the richest guys in Hollywood.