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.