Whedon’s Binary

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Em Liu

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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In the Joss Whedon Avengers universe, to exist somewhere outside of the gender binary is suspect; to be genderless is monstrous.

Whedon adores the “superheroes can be dangerous” theme. In both Avengers films, the Avengers’ potential danger to society is presented repeatedly. Superpowers, whether innate, learned, or built, are dangerous, and superpowers without proper control are likened to nuclear weapons in the hands of madmen. The control of superpowers is associated with the command and control of gender expression. While the 2012 Avengers film features only one female Avenger, Black Widow, the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron introduces additional team members, revealing a sharp gender distinction.

Summarized by Agent Maria Hill – he’s fast and she’s weird – twin siblings Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are the representative binary in the Whedon Avengers universe. Quicksilver’s superpower is speed: simple, mono-dimensional, active. There is no further revelation or exploration of his powers throughout the course of the film. Scarlet Witch’s power is weird: manipulative, subversive, unpredictable. Wielding sparks of scarlet lightening from her fingertips, she exhibits the ability to control both objects and minds. Her exact powers are never defined, but we learn that she can control the emotions of others and that her own strong emotions activate her most destructive powers. The twins are a traditional gender dichotomy; he is bodily action and she emotional manipulation. Both expressions are conceived of as equally powerful – the difference lies in the approach. Theirs is the traditional superhero’s fate: he meets a hero’s death and she rounds out a heroic team. Channeled in traditionally masculine or feminine ways, superpowers are safe and effective.

In the Whedon Avengers Universe, both exaggerated and mutilated gender is dangerous, whether it’s the inflated maleness of the Hulk or the broken femaleness of Black Widow. Bruce Banner’s angry transformations to the muscular and furious Hulk are an easy metaphor for the worst of the testosterone-fueled violence of masculinity. Banner, who fears and reviles “the other guy,” rejects this aspect of himself as a monster. His über-gender has rendered him incapable of raising a traditional family with the would-be mother of his children, Black Widow, alter ego Natasha Romanov. Romanov herself is played up as overly flirtatious, not to be trusted, and duplicitous. Romanov assures Banner, however, that her indoctrination as an assassin in the Red Room included a traumatic forced sterilization. After the confession of his inability to provide her the stable family life that she (supposedly) desires, she confesses her dark secret of infertility and wonders “who’s the monstrous one now?”

If femininity is emotional power – the power to exploit our attachments to one another, as Scarlet Witch does – then to harm that power hampers the overall humanity of the female person. A woman without the ability to form that most intimate of biological relationships must be lacking her power. A man whose gender is hyper-expressive is (quite literally in the case of Hulk) not fully human either. He lacks the ability to control his power.

Both Hulk and Black Widow are the only superheroes who, once having joined the Avengers, express doubt over their continued ability to play the part of “good guy”. Banner is prone to brooding and insisting that he is simply too dangerous for human interaction or vehicular containment. Romanov expresses her “dream” to actually be an Avenger, even though she is clearly an established member of the group and hardly the only Avenger lacking superhuman powers. With their gender expressions out of whack, Hulk and Black Widow at best can be marginalized members of the team, capable of doing good, but perhaps not to be fully trusted.

If hyper- or mutilated-gender is dangerous, a lack of gender expression is nothing short of monstrous. The most terrifying monster is, of course, that which exhibits an apparently human mind but is somehow less than human. Ultron, who is human intelligence and emotion trapped inside a crumbling, mechanical body, is humanity without physical expression. It has no gendered body – and therefore no power – with which to control the worst aspects of humanity. In a confrontation scene in which Ulysses Klaue dismisses Scarlet Witch and asks to speak instead to the man in charge, Ultron aborts the interrogation and declares: “there is no man in charge.”

The irony is that Ultron is logically the “man” in charge. The character is voiced by male actor James Spader, and we as an audience have a tendency to presume that anthropomorphized non-humans (dogs, toasters, robots, what-have-you) have a default gender of male. Thus, given the presumption of Ultron’s “maleness”, such a statement might normally be interpreted to suggest Ultron’s lack of humanity – i.e., Ultron is a machine, not a human, and therefore there is no (hu)man in charge. However, the juxtaposition of the specificity of the word “man” with Scarlet Witch’s abrupt and sexist dismissal allows for a second interpretation: Ultron denies not only humanity, but with it gender altogether. There is no “man in charge” because a robot is in charge, and, well, machines have no gender.

Vision is the logical counterpoint to Ultron. With a mind similarly born of Tony Stark’s foray into artificial intelligence, but with a human body grown by medical genius Dr. Helen Cho, Vision is Ultron’s foil. Vision is, to be sure, ambiguous, and the ambiguity remains at the end of the film. The character, however, is clearly intended to be Good, and his Goodness is grounded in his full association with humanity, which includes an apparently male gender (indeed, a hetero-normative male gender, as the beginnings of his relationship with Scarlet Witch implies).

In the Whedon Avengers universe, a tightly defined gender binary informs the superhero’s ability to be human, and therefore to be good. Shambolic gender expression limits the superhero’s humanity, resulting in an ambiguous, potentially dangerous figure. To remove gender expression from the equation altogether stumbles upon an uncanny valley in which the human-esque but grotesque terrify and repulse.

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Em Liu is a fiction enthusiast particularly interested in depictions of women and minorities onscreen. She blogs over at FictionDiversity.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @OLiu1230

Taking a Bath with Mary and Jane

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I arrived last weekend in Bath, England, where I am teaching “Writing Bath: Historical, Contemporary, Speculative Fiction,” a creative writing course focused on the multi-genre possibilities of place. Thank you, Advanced Studies in England, for flying me over and lodging me in a 19th century house two blocks from the wonderfully creepy Bath Abbey (the stone angels scaling its sides belong in a Doctor Who episode).

Bath’s most beloved author is Jane Austen, but Mary Shelley ought to be a strong second. She finished Frankenstein while lodging across the courtyard from that same Abbey. Austen’s house is a few blocks north, but she moved out well before the scandal-laden Shelleys moved in. Yet there’s no Mary Shelley tour stop, no building plague–only in part because the building is gone, absorbed into the expanding Pump Room of the Roman Baths. The ASE director seemed a little chagrined, but added, “It’s not really a Frankenstein town though is it?”

My class is tracing both Jane’s and Mary’s literal and literary footsteps. The oddball pairing is especially fun for a superhero buff, since the superhero is its own sutured corpse of a genre. Austen was sketching a version of hypochondriac Clark Kent (more on that next week) while Shelley was penning literature’s first monstrous ubermensch. It would take later writers to weld the opposing impulses, love and horror, into a single cape-flapping creature, but Bath provided the embryonic fluid.

As any self-respecting goth can tell you, the nineteen-year-old Miss Godwin (she and the still inconveniently married Percy Shelley had been an item for a couple of years already) stayed the summer of 1816 at Lord Byron’s Swiss lair. This was The Summer That Never Was, the summer England and New England weathered historic snow and a veil of sulfuric fog from Mount Tombora in Indonesia the year before. In Switzerland, they were telling ghost stories, among other activities.

John Polidori, Byron’s much maligned traveling companion/physician, was the first of the class to publish his ghostly tale. He also gets credit for the first dual identity supervillain, the Byron-inspired aristocrat-vampire, Lord Ruthven. Vampyre: A Tale was a hit in English bookstores, and not just because everyone thought Byron wrote it. Byron, having suffered a bout of creative impotence that summer, put out Manfred instead. His Faustian super-wizard is neither exotically foreign nor ancient, so a prototype for later Doctors Fate and Strange—only with an autobiographical hankering for his sister, the reason Byron fled to the Alps in the first place. Both Tchaikovsky and Schumann wrote music for the three act poem, as did schoolboy Friedrich Nietzsche, who called the renegade sorcerer übermenschlich (supermanlike).

I don’t know if Nietzsche read Frankenstein too, but he should have, since Mary Shelley is first novelist to depict a race of eugenically superior supermen he calls for in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The name of her Faustian mad scientist usually conjuror images a flat-headed Boris Karloff with those c. 1931 electric bolts bulging from his neck. Movie buffs might tack on a corpse-sutured Christopher Lee or, more regrettably, Robert De Niro, but the Shelley original sports no stitches or jigsawed body parts. The guy is a god. Early stage productions draped him in Greek togas, his dark locks aswirl. Sure, his skin is transparent yellow and his face is a fit of twitching muscles, but his “limbs were in proportion” (a big turn-on for early 19^th century readers) and the doctor “had selected his features as beautiful.”

Shelley doesn’t call him a superman because the word wasn’t in circulation yet. Nietzsche borrowed “unbermenschen” from Goethe, who’d coined it for the mad alchemist hero of his own verse play Faust a few years earlier. English translators went with “superhuman” or “demigod,” until George Bernard Shaw gave us the name destined for a cape and tights—though he had Faust’s alter ego, Don Juan, in mind.

After returning to England, Percy’s destitute wife Harriet found herself conveniently drowned in London’s Hyde Park, allowing her adulterous husband to marry his teen mistress around the time he impregnated her again. (Presumably the six-month-old William was present for but not an active participant in the Swiss storytelling adventure.) Jane Austen started work on her last novel the same winter, before stopping in March due to an illness that confined her to bed the following month. Mrs. Shelley finished gestating her first novel in May. Austen died in July at the age of forty-one. Clara Shelley was born in September, six months before Frankenstein was delivered to bookstores. It was a hit, and not just because everyone thought Percy wrote it.

Percy, like Byron, didn’t conceive much during the Summer That Wasn’t. His “Ozymandias” (yes, an Alan Moore influence) appeared between Clara and Frankenstein, but he eventually one-ups Byron with his four act poem Prometheus Unbound. I’m waiting to see what my students will add to that speculative canon. Mary began her novel in June too, not quite two hundred years ago, but close enough.

Punching Your Problems Away

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Cédric Le Merrer

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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Spoiler, but not a big one: Age Of Ultron’s last big action sequence ends with our heroes shooting down drones. Iron Man 3 and Captain America 2 both having ended the same way was kind of a giveaway. Marvel’s last few movies have had an surprising topicality, and this last one is no exception. But Winter Soldier got all the accolades for coming out against the surveillance state while thinkpieces on Ultron were comparatively few.

From both his recent declarations since leaving Marvel and from cursory knowledge of Hollywood, you know that doing Avengers 2 came with a few constraints. One of them was that it had to be bigger than the first one. So instead of New York, this time the whole world is the stage. This, and the growing concern over destruction porn following movies like the first Avengers and the Superman reboot, means that Avengers 2 is surprisingly filled with things like characters concerned with property damage and getting civilian victims out of the way. A subplot mandated by the future Black panther movie also gives us a passage about exploiting foreign countries’ natural resources.

We end up with would be world saviors building killer drones, taking metal from Africa to build super weapons in Asia, plus some resentful American bombings victims in Eastern Europe. Topical! Avengers 2 is a movie about America and its relationship to the world. (note the careful avoidance of the Middle East: Whedon probably knew no big budget movie from Hollywood could treat the region in a tone other than jingoistic). It all gets muddled in the necessities of having ten previous films to follow and just as many sequels to set up, but it’s probably the most explicitly relevant blockbusters of the year, and one of the few overt political statements in Whedon’s oeuvre.

Joss Whedon studied at Wesleyan under Richard Slotkin, who wrote about the myth of the American frontier in books like Regeneration through Violence. In his writing, Whedon hascertainly portrayed more than his share of Americans self actualizing through high-kicks, lasergun shots and mythical hammer blows. As a liberal he seems to struggle with this violence, though. So in Avengers 1 you get super heroes stopping SHIELD from atom bombing New York, and the organisation is purely and simply dismantled in Winter Soldier (Whedon had a nebulous role as supervising writer on all Marvel movies at the time, so I choose to consider “larger events” in these movies as at least partly his doing).

But how do you escape the violent trapping of the American myth? You can’t, Whedon seems to say. Certainly not in big blockbuster about a bunch of super strong guys. So the moral from Avengers 2 may then be “admit you failed and try again”. It’s what Tony Stark does when he builds Vision to save the world after failing to do so with Ultron, and it’s what SHIELD does when it comes back as a big warzone savior in Age Of Ultron. In the end, SHIELD has new soldiers and new Avengers to hit the bad guys with but it’s going to be different this time because they really really mean it.

Firefly is Whedon’s other big political statement. It tells the story of a bunch of rogue space cowboys, in a corner of space far from our own, where humans have had to settle after the destruction of Earth. The protagonists are on the run from the Alliance, a central interplanetary government that emerged from a civil war our heroes were on the losing side of. One of the things Whedon stressed in interviews at the time of the series was that the Alliance was essentially benign (they do end up looking bad in the movie, how much of it was a change of mind on Whedon’s part I don’t know). Our heroes were then rebelling against… what? Organised government? Bureaucracy? The loss of a certain sense of adventure?

The later one seems more likely. Joss Whedon likes comfortable modern life, but he also loves romantic stories of demons and super heroes, living on the frontier, rejuvenating through violence. His Angel is a metaphor for fighting addiction, but on a surface level it’s the story of a knight who cannot stop fighting, again and again, and I’m not convinced the metaphorical level is more important to Whedon than cool swordfights are.

Buffy, for all its reputation as a feminist show, was only so because its protagonist was female. She rarely, if ever, is confronted with outright misogyny. Occasionally she fights a phallic giant snake, but they just as often she battles standing metaphors for various non-gendered teenage fears. She fought a stupid military built demon cyborg that stood for god knows what. She also fought evil itself. Buffy was not so much about fighting patriarchy as she was about fighting for fighting’s sake.

Whedon’s adoption of combat as a value in itself is symptomatic of a post ideological left. You can identify big, systematic problems like America’s capitalistic and military dominance of the world, or patriarchy, or bureaucracy, but you don’t have any big, systematic answer for them like Marxism once provided. All that remains is the will to fight, and the hope of punching the bad guys away (metaphorically). So you tell yourself stories of people who keep punching, no matter what.

The Nerd That Shouted Look At Me At Everyone

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Tim Jones

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.

An Ode to Joss Whedon

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Madeleine Gavaler

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.

It feels creepy to say this about a middle aged man I’ve never met, but Joss Whedon has profoundly changed my life, from providing my role models in the darkest days of middle school to shaping my choice in picking the college where I will be spending the next four years of my life. In preparation for leaving for Wesleyan, I’ve been cleaning out various corners of my bedroom. Of all the toys I’ve accumulated over the past eighteen years, I kept three things: crudely made action figures of Spike, Tara, and Willow.

I first watched Buffy with my family when I was about thirteen and have continued to binge watch it every couple of months since. Without my emotional prejudice I would still think the show is the best ever made, but it is so much more to me than a well-written, intricately plotted masterpiece. Buffy is the first thing I can remember watching with strong and imperfect female characters who were lovable and flawed and who I could always look up to. Watching little blonde Buffy kick ass and defy stereotypes and Willow transform into a more confident and capable version of herself was what got me through my middle school years. On “blonde joke Fridays” I would imagine Buffy Summers kicking my algebra teacher Mr. Almanza in the face, and when my lunch table referred to me as “the ghost” and wouldn’t let me speak, I remembered how ghost Willow saved the day in the Halloween episode.

In this world devoid of Black Widow movies and pay equity, I would like to think that my obsession with Whedonverse characters speaks not only to my geeky antisocial tendencies but to the problems in representation. Buffy Summers is both feminine and a badass.

Tara and Willow are an adorable couple, but they made such an impression on me because they had the first lesbian kiss I can remember seeing.

Angel’s Fred Burkle is undoubtedly an objectively wonderful character, but she is so important to me because she went from being a damsel in distress to running her science laboratory.

Firefly’s Kay Lee is a sweet mechanic with a healthy attitude about sex.

All of these fictional women are so important to me because they’re not just characters in shows I watch, they’re examples of identities that are okay to have. I know this is so cheesy, but the characters Joss wrote validated and still validate my goals and myself.

I spend a fair amount of time on the feminist side of the internet, a place where Joss is not always loved. I think a lot of the criticism about his portrayal of rape and racism and certainly darling Natasha Romanoff’s characterization is valid, and yet I am still full of admiration for this rich white guy. I have my own complaints about his treatment of characters and I’m not blind to his problematic moments, but I will always respect his portrayal of strong female characters.

I no longer need Buffy to beat up my bullies, but I find just as much comfort in Joss’s characters as I enter season four of my life. Whether it is loss of a loved one, starting a new part of your life, heartbreak, or vampire attack, Joss has written a weirdly applicable and comforting story about it. I’ll never understand why season four of Angel happened or why on earth Bruce and Natasha, but I will always be in awe of how one person could create my favorite horror movie, Shakespeare adaptation, musical, and short lived sci-fi Western. I couldn’t be more excited to attend his alma mater, and I hope it’s nothing like UC-Sunnydale and I don’t have a demon roommate.

Why So Serious?

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Kanye’s mocked for taking himself so seriously. Kim is seen as frivolous to a fault. The truth, of course, is each is always both: he is really playful, and she has incredible drive. In deed and word, they are powerful—if not perfect—forces for racial, gender, and LGBT equality. You’ll note that only one half of the couple receives any real recognition for it. It’s not a coincidence that he’s the one with the frowny face.

“Kanye should lighten up” and “I can’t take Kim seriously” sound like different critiques, but they’re both centered on the idea that one must attend to every matter in life with the appropriate degree of gravitas. It’s a value judgment that’s so instinctual and self-evident that it’s easy to mistake for a matter of fact. When our values don’t align with someone else’s, an easy way to diminish or discredit their perspective is to suggest they should be talking about something else. Something more worthy of consideration.

You’d think the world of comics would be sensitive to this brand of condescension since it still has a chip on its shoulder about being Serious Adult Art. But many of the same people who have built their lives around the idea that comics are Very Important see no irony in telling people to lighten up about issues surrounding racism or sexism. Consider this piece on representation in Avengers toys, which was described by one prominent comics critic as an “aggressive article about culture war,” and as “fannish overidentification” by another. Those guys aren’t going to say the author of the article is wrong—heavens no!—but they sure do think it’s odd that anyone would care so hard about something as soulless as corporate merchandise. Around the same time I saw another comics blogger who dedicated three paragraphs of a Very Special Post to her observation that people should talk less about Sansa Stark and more about Boko Haram. Fortunately, she’s doing her part to engage with the problem of rape by directing readers’ donations to…a random Paypal that funds computers for orphans. LOL?

The notion that lowly fandom distracts us from meaningful political engagement is not new, but it seems to me it’s been gaining traction lately, particularly among nerds. Simon Pegg recently criticized science fiction as an opiate of the masses, going so far as to invoke the patron saint of People Who Need You to Know How Hard They Give a Fuck, Jean Baudrillard. “There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election,” Pegg writes. (Cluck cluck!) His point about the monetization of nostalgia wasn’t wrong, but that post was maybe half as smart and humble as he thought it was.

“Talk more about earthquakes, sheeple.” –Baudrillard

Meanwhile Freddie deBoer’s out there pushing his critique of media types who indulge in what he calls “performative love of black culture”—e.g., praise for Beyoncé and The Wire—in lieu of meaningful, challenging political discussions. Beyoncé thinkpieces aren’t going to build a better world is more or less his point, and you could object to it for any number of good reasons. For me, it resonates, though I don’t quite agree. Sure, there’s any number of more pressing matters one could choose to talk about. And yes, there is a certain sameness across publications that makes for an unhealthy critical landscape. I too perceive a flatness in tone…the vague detachment of clever people talking about clever things…the sound of content shedding its skin.

Recently deBoer put forward yet another iteration of his Beyoncé argument, a critique of The Toast that garnered him pushback (especially from women), strong praise (largely from white men), and untold fame and fortune (also, presumably, from white dudes). It was based on “Books That Literally All White Men Own: The Definitive List,” a post written by one of The Toast’s founders, Nicole Cliffe. DeBoer used it to illustrate his longstanding complaint with white media types who are progressive, but not quite political, arguing that her piece is “indicative of a growing exhaustion, with desultory, rote online writing”—much of which functions to make white people feel less white under the guise of promoting equality. He describes the thought process behind that piece and its ilk: “‘Hey, you guys like lists. And you love calling other white people white. Here you go. Eat your slop. Enjoy.’”

Heaven knows there’s plenty of slop out there! But it’s worth noting that deBoer wasn’t the only white guy who had a serious problem with this particular slop; plenty of other dudes hated it too, and his reaction can’t be divorced from that context. Like those other guys, deBoer mistook the post as a failed indictment of white male liberal arts students. But his more serious mistake, to my mind, was writing thousands of words about Nicole Cliffe’s feminism in a post that totally failed to mention Nicole Cliffe or feminism. “We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020,” he wrote, holding up one unnamed woman’s joke as an instrument of the impending apocalypse. “If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.” (my emphasis)

This last bit is an especially curious directive, couched as it is in a post that, for all intents and purposes, conflates Nicole Cliffe with Mallory Ortberg, a joke post with political discourse, and the agenda of a for-profit website with that of the progressive movement, whatever that even is. It’s this third mistake that gets my goat. The Toast is a vital feminist force, not because its content is political, but because it was founded on the radical notion that two women can publish whatever they want—whether it’s about Harry Potter fan fic, fitness, Ayn Rand, or motherhood—and people will read it. They were so successful in that venture that they launched a vertical where Roxane Gay publishes whatever she wants. This vision—an empire of sister sites in a media landscape where networks like the Awl and Gawker dedicate a single site among many to lady stuff—is even more radical than the one on which The Toast itself was founded.

Ronbledore wants YOU to join his feminist army.

The Toast has a strong identity amongst its increasingly indistinguishable brethren, which is not an accident. It’s because the site doesn’t approach feminism as a generic movement. It explores it at the micro level by talking about our public personas and our most secret self-images, our successes and failures, our political stands and our throwaway jokes. It cedes the floor to one voice at a time—an important methodology in a world in which feminism as a movement has historically failed (and is still failing) to accept and celebrate different ways of being a woman. These voices aren’t necessarily as loud as Lindy West’s or Caity Weaver’s or Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s, or as weird as Edith Zimmerman’s or Mallory Ortberg’s. They rarely, if ever, offer takes. Instead, they amble in and out of conversations about identity in a world where there’s a tendency to whittle women down to their best or worst qualities, ignoring any part that’s not convenient or a means to an end. In this context, promoting a spectrum of voices—and making money doing it—is a remarkable political act. Mistaking that for solipsism or putting on a show is a fundamental failure to understand the stakes.

In describing the appeal of Broad City, Amy Poehler once said, “The rule is: specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked.” This is advice worth considering with regard to the urgent work of building a coalition on the left. In my experience (in life and in politics), watered-down beliefs aren’t attractive. Nor is informing people that their interests are insignificant in service of propping up your own. The way to promote engagement and build community is not to ask people to assimilate in the name of the greater good; it is to meet them where they live. To be successful, you have to have the confidence and the conviction to meet them there honestly, as yourself. Incidentally, that’s precisely what Nicole and Mallory have done. Their audience is comprised of people who support the project I just described, not undiscerning fans who “will call anything [they do] a work of genius no matter what,” as deBoer wrote.

For a long time I wondered why deBoer seems to class everything written by media types as political discourse. The answer, it occurs to me, is simple: because that’s what he does. I think that’s cool; sometimes I even think it’s admirable. But promoting progressive unity shouldn’t be about remaking other people in your own image. If there’s any truth to the idea that the left is eating itself, I’m far less suspicious of callout culture and lazy writing than the Serious Men who demand that everyone engage with the issues on their own narrow terms. Meaningful change requires diversity in both background and approach. It requires room to let people pursue their particular preoccupations.

Meanwhile, the notion that we supplant real political engagement with blog slop and mindless entertainment is bunk. There’s not a writer in the history of the Internet who thinks his Beyoncé thinkpiece is going to change the world, nor is there a single nerd who thinks that Sansa Stark is more important than real people. Have a little faith that you’re not the last person on earth with a sense of proportion. Moreover, recognize the power of pop culture to propel political discourse. You can complain all day long about white people’s relationship to The Wire (which, by the way, has officially replaced liking The Wire as white people’s favorite way to distance themselves from whiteness), but the fact that its hero was a black gay vigilante has had a real, if not measurable, impact on the ways in which Americans think about race, justice and masculinity. David Palmer helped get President Obama into office. Almost a decade after his last appearance on 24, the American public still trusts him so much that he’s the face of Allstate Insurance. How crazy is that? If anything we’re desensitized to how crazy that is.

A deep abiding truth I’ve come to understand through the work of Lynda Barry is that identity is not just who we are or what we have. It is also who we can imagine ourselves to be. Stories are not an escape from our real lives; they are part of them. The imaginary past—the stories we read, the dreams we dreamed, the options we considered, and the stuff we dismissed out of hand—runs parallel to every action that’s fully realized. It constitutes an authentic contribution to our lived experience, impacting how we see the world and everyone’s place in it. It also affects how we envision the future—an act of imagination that is central to the liberal agenda.

from What It Is by Lynda Barry

One of the reasons I love the Internet so much is because it’s the natural habitat of writers who convey a strong sense of what their own two eyes see. It also showcases my favorite thing about criticism: how our smartest thoughts can be about stuff that seems stupid or inconsequential. Anything is inherently worthy of conversation. The old dichotomies of high/low, content/ads, IRL/online and art/merchandise are increasingly meaningless, for better and worse. If you want to analyze Internet culture with an eye towards improving it—a project that overlaps with how to promote solidarity on the left in curious ways, as deBoer suggests—you can’t just gaze upon its treasure. You also need to root through its trash. Forget Hazlitt essays and impeccably researched longreads. I’m talking Buzzfeed quizzes and the archives of TMZ. Anything. Everything. All of it. I’ve learned profound truths about this life from reading Gabe Delahaye on bad movies, Samantha Irby on irritable bowel syndrome, Jacob Clifton on Gossip Girl, Michael K on celebrity culture, CNN dot com, troll comments on Youtube, and Rusty’s most odious tabs. One of the wonders of our strange human brains is their capacity to find meaning in viral videos and silly vampire novels. It’s a sad and small-minded mistake to treat that as anything other than an opportunity.
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Follow Kim O’Connor on twitter: @shallowbrigade.

“But They’re Ours”— John Jennings Talks about Black Superheroes

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

John Jennings seems like he’s got superpowers himself, he’s involved in so many projects. He teaches at the University of Buffalo. He’s involved as a curator of the Black Comix Arts Festival. He collaborates with Stacey Robinson on the Black Kirby Project; he’s just co-edited a new book about black identity in comics called The Blacker the Ink, and he’s got about a bazillion other comics projects he’s working on.

And as if that’s enough, he took time out to talk to me about black superheroes, Jack Kirby, Blade, Power Man, and Captain America’s black sidekick (not that one). Our conversation is below—part of HU’s ongoing roundtable on the question of Can There Be a Black Superhero?
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‘Night Boy’ created by ‘Black Kirby’ (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) and Damian (Tan Lee) Duffy

Noah: What do you like about Kirby, and what are you less fond of?

John: I think it’s more liking than disliking. I remember being a kid and not being attracted to the work and all. I felt like he was destroying the characters that I love so much. Because, his work on Captain America, as a kid, it looked blocky and crazy looking and abstract. But for some reason you notice the work and you’re attracted to. And as I got older I started to realize, this guy was actually creating some of the conventions, as far as how superhero comics are done.

And then when we started working on the Black Kirby project, we started to realize how experimental it was. I remember reading this interview about the Black Panther. And he said he felt like his friends who were black should have a black superhero. And he did create a character who was African and not African-American. Instead of creating a black character that would be from his own country. And also the fact that Wakanda doesn’t actually exist.

I thought Don McGregor’s run on Black Panther was in some ways really progressive, and then we turn back to Kirby and it becomes this weird cosmic odyssey thing with this monocole dwarf guy. It’s really strange. It’s this odd thing to happen after a story grounded in progressive ideals. Because McGregor had him fighting the Klan, and he was in Africa helping out his people, which was great. But I think Don McGregor as a writer has always been a lot more connected to the ideas of the black subject.

If you look at something like Sabre. Sabre was centered in a post-Apocalyptic world, and the main character was an African-American man. And he was in an interracial relationship with a beautiful white woman. Most of it was about him trying to protect his family. It’s interesting because the character —he looked like he was loosely based on Jimi Hendrix. He was very swash-buckling, always musket and sword in hand. Had this pirate feel to it. It was a funky book, and this was Don McGregor.

Paul Gulacy and Don McGregor

Yeah, I’ve been trying to read his Power Man. Which, I feel like he’s much more conscious of racial issues. He has a hooded Klan like supervillain attacking a black family who’s trying to move into the suburbs. The writing’s just hard to get through. It’s not written very well.

Right—as far as—that era. If you reread the Essential Power Man, it’s bad.

It’s overwitten and it doesn’t make any sense and the dialogue’s a mess.

Have you seen Jonathan Gayles documentary White Script, Black Supermen? Gayles is a cultural anthropologist. The impetus for him creating the documentary was this one story where Luke Cage tries to get $200 from Doctor Doom. And he was totally disgusted by the fact that this guy was just a hustler. And that was part of the dissonance. You have a black reader, and this is the first African superhero to have his own book. He is also an ex-con. And he is not necessarily really a superhero, he’s a mercenary. And he’s working in the hood primarily, adn his villains aren’t really well thought out.

Steve Engelhart and George Tuska

They didn’t really understand what they were talking about with that particular character.

Race in superhero comics was really strangely handled early on. Because it was directly related to blaxploitation films. Superhero comics are very reactive and they are a business and they see trends and they try to jump on top of them. And that’s pretty much what happened. That’s where you get characters like Shang-Chi, who was pretty much Bruce Lee.

So, I’m wondering, given the inauspicious start with black superheroes, why are black superheroes important. Or why do you still care about them?

It’s interesting, because the superhero as a structure, it’s an old idea. From the 1930s. I think it’s important for people who participate in society to see themselves as a hero of some kind, or to see themselves in a space where they feel that they can connect with popular culture.

Because popular culture is our culture. That’s a lot of times the first time you see or recognize yourself is through the popular media you watch. I know it affected me as a kid coming up, watching pulp fantasy stuff and reading these things.

And honestly there’s a lot of serious issues with superheroes as a genre. It’s hyper-violent, it’s misogynist, it’s just very sexist, it’s kind of homophobic. But it’s ours; it’s our thing. It’s an American construction. And I understand why it exists—and it does mean something when you’re not there. I think that’s the thing; there needs to be representation, as far as a diverse array of representations. And written from the right standpoint as well.

And honestly I think it’s more important to have black creators working than it is to have black superheroes. Because there’s a handful of black writers in the mainstream. One of the most important books —I don’t know if it’s going to get canceled, but the new Ghost Rider book. A Latino character, a Latino superhero, written and drawn by two African-American men. That was unprecedented; I don’t think people really knew that that was happening. And it’s Marvel.

I think there’s something about just how dominant the superhero is right now. As I think it really is as popular as it was in the 30s. It’s just not in the comics.

One of the thing that bothers me, is that people say what kicked off the trend was the X-Men movies. But it was in actuality the Blade film. It was 1999, and that predates the X-Men movie.

How was the Blade film? I haven’t seen that.

Blade is awesome. You know why I like Blade? Because it’s a Blaxploitation movie with vampies.

That sounds pretty good!

It’s a fun movie. I don’t know how much of this is legend and how much is truth, but Wesley Snipes, he wanted to be Black Panther. But they wouldn’t let him do Black Panther, so he was like, what else do you got?

So they gave him a C-level character. No one knew who Blade was. I knew who Blade was because I used to read the reprints, but he was kind of a lame character. He had these green goggles, it was a dumb character.

But he translates really well to the screen. THe’s pretty much a martial artist, and Wesley Snipes is an amazing martial artist, he’s a 5th-degree blackbelt. So he choreographed the entire movie. It looks great. It’s out of control crazy.

My friend Sundiata Cha Jua, a historian, says that after Blade was successful, Marvel began to take over the franchise. When you watch the first film, it’s a very “black” movie. He relies on this serum to prevent him from becoming fully a vampire, he’s a daywalker. And if you look at the first movie, he gets his serum from this Afrocentric incense store. And he’s in a community of black people and they know who he is. And I thought that was really important.

But when it starts making more money—because Blade made a lot of money. They start to dilute his connection to the black community. And they start erasing him from his own movies. And as I recall, I think Wesley Snipes took them to court over the third movie. Because he’s barely in it. It’s Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel because they were trying to create a spin-off to Midnight Suns or something like that.

Or you look at Stan Lee’s movie, his documentary, which I enjoyed. But again they don’t mention Blade as the jump off for the Marvel scene. Or for the Marvel franchise. Stan Lee did not create Blade. Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman created Blade. So it doesn’t make sense for him to be in Stan Lee’s movie. But it’s false to say that the X-Men jumped off this franchise.

I saw a couple of articles, like, hey, don’t forget about the Blade movie.

Is part of the problem with getting more black characters and more black creators is that the superheroes are so centralized in Marvel and DC? There’s so much energy and interest in the big two, that the only way to get a black superhero is to make Captain America black, or something like that.

I have to back up a little. I’m interested in the mainstream characters. As an exercise, I think Black Kirby works because it’s making fun of the superhero genre, and bringing in black power politics. It’s celebrating Kirby but also critiquing him. And it’s interesting as a visual exercise, or as a critical design project. But honestly I don’t have that much interest in mainstream superhero comics as far as black expression. I’m really not satisfied with what I’ve been seeing.

Or the characters who I really like, they screw them up or they do something wrong with them. Like, Mr. Terrific, I love Mr. Terrific, but his book was awful. I think the more interesting things around diversity are happening in the independent black comics scene.

Because it’s not just superheroes. It’s all these different types of genres; there’s action adventure, like Blackjack. There’s stuff like Rigamo, which is magical realism gothic fantasy.

Che Grayson and Sharon De La Cruz

So with mainstream comics there’s issues around nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. So not only do they want to be accepted by the mainstream, but they want to make a monthly comic book. It’s very difficult to do that when you’re flipping burgers or you’re teaching a class here or there trying to make ends meet. It’s a very differnt model. I want to tell them, no, make books about your expeirence, and put them out when you can, because you’re not DC.

It seems like there’s a problem with nostalgia and superheroes for black people, since black experience in the past was often one of oppression.

The 1930s when the superhero were created, the first black characters were extremely racist. You had characters like Whitewash who was Captain America’s sidekick, and his superpower was that he always got captured and had to get rescued. He was in blackface and he had on a zoot suit.

Whitewash Jones was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. His dialogue was often written by Stan Lee

And of course guys like Ebony White from the spirit. They’re based off how the black image had been constructed in minstrelsy and other racist propaganda. Even advertisements and products that were being generated had these extremely derogatory, hyperbolic stereotypes. So illustrators when they draw the pantomime of a black image, they’re drawing from the Jazz Singer directly.

I’m curious about what you think about the fact that one of the things for the superheroes is it’s about law and order.

I think it’s about justice. That’s the thing—my favorite superhero is Daredevil. I totally related to this kid. Because I was bullied, and i was poor, and I thought I was smart—I was pretty smart. I just related to that character, and he was a fighter, and I liked that about the character. More than anything, I just loved the fact that he was too stupid to quit. I loved that. That’s his real superpower, and that’s an interesting life lesson to pick up. Don’t give up. I’ve seen many stories where Daredeivl would have died if he just gave up. But he couldn’t because his father taught him not to. I thought that was awesome.

Yeah there’s this thing about law and order, but they’re vigilantes, and they’re saying, in this resounding voice, I have the power to make things right. A lot of people were really upset when they saw Captain America punching Hitler in the face back in the day. They’re violent characters. And they’re reifications of a particular type of jingoistic urge. But they’re ours and they love them.

I love superheroes. And I hate superheroes at the same time.

I think that most folks who don’t understand how these problems in our society actually manifest think that if I do this “one thing” then the problem is fixed. It’s a very Western way of thinking. We are taught to think about the “object” and not the “system”. So, making one African superhero is awesome but, what about the systemic issues around the disparity in the first place? It’s the same problem with integration in our country historically. Our country would put “minorities” in a white space to prove a point or to illustrate a law. It hardly ever thinks “once they are in this space have we really provided a place where they can grow and flourish”. It needs to have this token example to say ” Yeah. It’s messed up in our country but, look at this ______________. See? We got that issue covered.”

So now. We have a black writer (David Walker) on a black superhero at DC (Cyborg). Let’s see how it pans out. David’s a good friend and great writer. Should be exciting!

Art by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado for the new Cyborg series

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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