Category Archives: Roundtables

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.

Whedon’s Binary

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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.
 

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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.
 

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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.
 

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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

Punching Your Problems Away

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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

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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.
 

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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.
 

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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.