The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
_________
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.
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.
I don’t think I’d call Avengers or Avengers 2 anti-authoritarian. They are more about making a more perfect authority.
Stark wants to create an authoritarian robot, it goes wrong, and his effort if sanctified when he completes his “Vision” of the perfect authoritarian robot. And if some innocent civilians are trampled over by Stark in the search of a more perfect superhuman overlord, all is forgiven.
Angel and Buffy also dabbled in becoming authoritarian overlords themselves, when Angel ran that Law firm and Buffy had her slayer army.
Evil military organizations are a pretty basic superhuman trope going back to X-men at least and I find it hard to take the trope seriously as a political statement.
I think both Angel and Buffy walked back on their respective militarisation towards a more manageable family-like assembly of rogues. And Avengers 2 is very ambivalent on Stark’s ambitions, probably setting him up as a villain in the next Captain America movie.
Every week, Buffy would murder a gazillion sentient life forms because a unaccountable military organization called the Watchers told her to. She’s basically Judge Dredd. Whedon might be ambivalent but calling him anti-authoritarian is I think overstating the case.
“Every week, Buffy would murder a gazillion sentient life forms because a unaccountable military organization called the Watchers told her to”
Oh yes, this 10000%.
The whole metaphysics of Buffy — when vampires get made, they lose their soul and therefore their entitlement to moral consideration — seems fine until you watch an episode and think about it for, like, ten seconds. The vampires clearly feel pleasure and pain, clearly still have preferences (albeit with one new preference that trumps the old ones in cases of conflict), and clearly have psychological continuity with their previous living selves (they have the same memories and, to some extent, the same character and beliefs and desires). I don’t care if they’ve lost some invisible magic pixie dust (aka their “soul”) — it’s prima facie wrong to kill them. Buffy is an all-time mass murderer; the murders may or may not be overall justifiable, but they’re murders all the same.
An anti-authoritarian vampire story would probably be something closer to True Blood. They actually state in True Blood that Vampires in groups tend to turn bad (it’s called nesting I think) so the good (or gooder at least) vampires tend to be the loner types following their own moral compass. They’ve also had humans in groups be the villains both in the form of the anti-vampire religious fanatic militia and the storyline where the government is rounding up vampires in concentration camps.
@ Pallas, Jones
Come on, every vampire in Buffy kills at least one person for food on a daily (nightly) basis. And the “soul,” fuzzily defined though it is, isn’t just “magic pixie dust” – all the vampires (except soulful Angel) apparently lack any singificant capacity for empathy for their human prey (and little if any for each other – we can debate what exactly it is that Spike feels for Drusilla in season 2), and don’t have much in the way of impulse control when presented with an opportunity to eat a human. (I don’t count Spike’s journey toward morality in the later season, because the good part of the show – the part that’s the reason why we’re still talking about it – ended long before that started.) (This all doesn’t make the vampires simply analogous to the semi-scientific cliché of the human “psychopath,” because, again, they eat people every day.)
Granted, the “soul” concept is an obvious flimsy excuse by the creators so that their heroes can kill something, but no vampire story is ever going to work in terms of modern liberal morality. True Blood, for example, by making the vampires able to choose not to eat people (though of course they still have to really want to, because otherwise they’re just superman with sunlight replacing the kryptonite), ends up making them an appalling metaphor for minorities, one that implies minorities really are a deadly threat to the majority.
Anyway, vampires don’t exist, so a discussion of the implications of killing them has to identify what they represent: which, when they’re glamorous, as in Buffy (as opposed to simply monstrous, as in Nosferatu), is of course the upper class libertine – less worn down with age than the little people, and unconstrained by morality; and living by sucking everybody else’s blood. I suspect that the tendency since Buffy toward sympathy for the vampires and against their human prey – manifest in how the kind of people who talk about genre fiction on the internet talk, and in the fiction that’s been made (dear God, The Vampire Diaries) – partly reflects the college educated class increasingly seeing themselves as fundamentally superior to the masses, and pitying themselves for how they’re still not quite as unconstrained by the masses as they want to be.
Well, actually with a few notable exceptions, vampires in Buffy are less upper class Anne Rice types and more of the monstruous Nosferatu variety. Those few exceptions (Angel, Darla, Spike…) are the ones we end up liking quite a bit. So the tendency towards sympathy for the bloodsuckers was already well established in Buffy.
They’re all upper class – even the Master, who’s always ugly, is highly well spoken. As for the weekly goons, as Jaime Weinman pointed out a long time ago, in an interesting piece I’ve linked to before on this blog, they’re the cool kids to the main character’s nerds: http://www.salon.com/2003/05/13/spike_buffy/
And yes, the tendency toward sympathy for the vampire was already underway when Buffy was made – and, for that matter, when Interview with the Vampire/i> was written. It’s just advanced a lot further by now.
And let’s be clear, this isn’t confined to vampire stories. HBO’s Rome, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, and so on all invite us to sympathize with the beautiful people, in every sense of the phrase, while they act like monsters.
Maybe in the context of the Buffyverse the Vampires in Buffy need to be killed and genocided, but that doesn’t invalidate my point that Whedon isn’t anti-authoritarian. Showing a military organization killing vampires and depicting it as a good thing is not an anti-authoritarian message.
@ pallas
Yes, the question of authoritarian or anti-authoritarian is another discussion. But Buffy doesn’t kill vampires because the Watcher’s Council tells her to. She invariably regards the Watcher’s Council with suspicion and contempt (and severs ties altogether in season 3), and the show agrees with her.
I would say the vice toward which Whedon tends is not authoritarianism, but libertarianism. (Cue me ranting yet again about the Confederate sympathy in Firefly.) If there’s something that makes me second guess that, it’s the Greatest Generation nostalgia in the Avengers movies – but then, the one part of that that feels really personal, the farm scene, is perfectly in the tradition of the Jeffersonian (I mean that word as a pejorative) “yeoman farmer” ideal.
Graham — oh, totally, the soullessness is just a flimsy excuse (the exact phrase I was thinking of) to cover the way the show tries to (a) give its heroine something to do each week in slaying vampires, while (b) giving us vampires who are psychologically interesting (i.e. not just personality-free killing machines) and (c) not making the viewer feel too squeamish about all that “slaying”, as we would if the vampires are human.
And, of course, the “soulless” vampires are, as you say, unempathetic, even anti-empathetic murderers. A utilitarian calculus might well have Buffy morally justified in slaying them, in order to stop them killing a lot more people. My point was that (1) it’s prima facie wrong to kill them, since they are sentient and rational, and that this is true (2) notwithstanding the dodgy philosophy-of-mind claims about whether they have souls.
…or, let me put it another way. I like to think that it would be wrong to kill people even if dualism turned out to be false. I don’t want the wrongness of murder to hinge on a dubious philosophy of mind.
I forgot to mention Hannibal in my list of shows that love their rich sociopaths. O tempora o mores.
The at least somewhat anti-authoritarian vampire narrative is Twilight, I think. Killing vampires, even vampire murderers,is not an unambiguous moral good in Twilight. Instead,the preferred method of dealing with enemies is compromise and peace, insofar as that’s possible. And vampires in Twilight definitely have moral standing.
@ Noah
I’m not sure that’s exactly a stance on authority, as opposed to simply a stance on violence. I do think Twilight is basically anti-authoritarian, or at least indifferent to authority (the Cullens and Bella won’t obey the Volturi against their conscience, but neither do they object to their rule, per se), but I think Buffy is basically anti-authoritarian too.
In his stories, as a recurring trope, Whedon tends to introduce powerful organizations in a well-meaning or altruistic way, then, as the plot unfolds, he peels back the onion-like layers of the organization to expose the rottenness of the organization’s core.
I think this is because Whedon’s fundamental personal philosophy about organizations (and people) is that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And while I agree that such is frequently the case, it is definitely not always the case.