My "Joss Whedon" Piece in Mediaite - The Lost Fragments

Today, Mediaite published my piece titled, "Joss Whedon is Our Master Now," an exploration of why Joss's work resonates so much with his fans. Since it was published, other people have been writing me, sending me clips of articles of Buffy significance, or relating to actors who were part of Whedon's shows. I read about Julie Benz (Darla) appearing soon on "Desperate Housewives."

One of my retweeters, @browncoatsmovie, pointed me to their site for the unauthorized "Serenity/Firefly"fan film (due out in Sept. 2010, with all DVD sales proceeds designated for charities).

One person sent me a link to a story about a PhD student who was regretting her decision to study Buffy for her dissertation - "The Perverse in the Buffyverse: Reading Performative Gender Roles and Their Subversion in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'" [Added Jan 6: Some loyal commenters pointed out that the thesis story was featured on a humor site, so it's probably not true. Although it feels true. And there have been academic conferences on Buffy.]

Check out the Mediaite piece, leave comments, retweet it...whatever you like. But because you're a My Urban Kvetch reader, you get a special bonus: the clipped passages and idea fragments that were cut because of space. Enjoy!

* Joss’s unspoken specialty is women characters – he celebrates the humor and geekiness in women that other men fear to embrace - and this makes him beloved not just by fanboys who might wear “Joss Whedon is my master now” t-shirts, but by the women who see echoes of themselves in Whedon’s women. I know I was supposed to look at the “Sex and the City” characters and say, “I’m a Carrie,” but I really saw myself more as a “Willow” – underestimated, bookish, overlooked, until she battles with herself and emerges as an intuitive, connected woman of power. (Most days, I feel like I’m still waiting for that second part.) 

But the truth is in looking across all the Whedon series, the character I most identify with is whichever is the geekiest: from Giles and Wesley to Willow and Fred, from Wash to Kaylee to Topher. (One of my favorites is from this season of Dollhouse, when Topher imprints his own personality on Victor, essentially creating a clone of himself.) These are my people, the book-and-computer-geek people, who aren’t the suavest of operators, but who keenly observe and understand things before their shinier hero-compatriots do. Their gawky, awkward, unpolished moments emerge as comedic highlights. And we love these characters, perhaps even more than we dare to love ourselves.

*While big-screen Buffy bit the dust, for some miraculous reason, the Chosen-Girl-Fights-Vampires concept got a second chance on television in 1997. The characters deepened weekly, and the ecosystem of support that Buffy has in friends, family and in her watcher, Giles, becomes increasingly important to her survival of both epic battles with evil and high school. In addition to the forces of demonic evil, the characters battled the regular evils of high school: peer pressure, sexual awakening, detention and trying to get your homework done before someone opens the hellmouth. 

To the uninitiated, the hellmouth is the reason Sunnydale is so demonically active: the pocket of evil energy that lives just below the California town is both an excuse for every manner of bad spirit to emerge, but is also a not-so-thinly-veiled metaphor for both the potential for evil in us all, and the uncontrolled geological forces that move beneath the earth, especially in Southern California, threatening to destroy us at any minute. “From beneath us, it devours,” is the perfect expression of everything that lies outside of our range of vision and control – and Buffy teaches us that even though things may look desperate, we have to keep fighting.

Comments

[Mark Davidson]

I think that element of 'family' you mention in the penultimate paragraph is a key one. And perhaps more of an unspoken speciality than his female characters, which I think most fans do associate him with.
The idea of the family unit going beyond blood ties can be seen time and again across all his shows. From the beginning, in Buffy season 1's finale we see that it is her connections to real people that prevents her from succumbing the same fate as numerous slayers before her.
This idea of a loving family-like community sustaining the main characters is key to understanding all of Whedon's shows. Since it is when the main characters choose to separate themselves from those around them, that bad things start to happen.
Even Dollhouse seems to have picked up this theme with the latest episode as see what Adelle really means when she says she "will do anything to protect this house."

Nice article, my only question of interest is what format you think Joss Whedon's work will take over the next decade? Can he really afford to do another network show? Is it time to try his luck with cable? Or will we see more Dr. Horrible-like projects on the internet in the future?

[Scott Ellington]

Although I sympathize with the Wasserman lament, there are several thousand dissertation words latent in "I Only Have Eyes for You" (BtVS 2.19), alone; an episode which embeds a 50year-old script of impossible, requited love in gendered characters, then swaps and switches the sexual externalities while preserving and enriching the meaning of the repeated moment -- a moment which perfectly foreshadows the second season finale.

Topical references (C3PO and Stick-figure Barbie as beautifully derisive descriptions of Wesley and Cordelia, delivered by an early Gunn) simply disguise the extent to which these characters and situations persist in popular consciousness for decades AND in the human condition across centuries, texts and delivery systems.

While a scholarly examination of the progressive/subversive import of Mutant Enemy product can be focussed myopically within a given text or trionically across several Mutant Enemy narratives, the influence of that "small-net" production company on the entire industry is (I think) vastly more interesting. What Alias, LOST, Fringe and Heroes have (arguably) taken from Joss Whedon into their respective closed-storyworlds is about half as intriguing as the quality those popular "big-net" properties leave out; a coherent and recognizable relation to real life.
Mutant Enemy produces narratives that bear very directly and incisively on permanent aspects of our reality, our human condtion, in ways that its imitators don't, yet.

[EstherK]

Very interesting comment, Mark. You're right, of course - even vampires have a family in the Whedonverse, because family - whether birthed, sired or otherwise forged by love and circumstance - is the most intense bond, and in many ways, more of a motivator than morality or fight against evil. Make the mystical key a sister, so the slayer is bound to protect it.

Joss might do very well with cable, the home of envelope-pushing these days. But even cable isn't sure what a hit is, and might prove too restricting for Joss. I guess we'll see. As far as the formats in Joss's future, I'd like to think that some of them, we haven't even met yet. But I think "Dr. Horrible" proved his openness to experimentation with new technologies and venues as Potentials, if you will: he sees them not as threats, but as possibilities, which increasingly will be the name of the game with entertainment as it evolves. 

Thanks for sharing your comments!

[EstherK]

Scott, you said it better than I could ever paraphrase it. And having read some of your blog posts, I bow to your level of detailed analysis. I still love Lost (and you can see my predictions of season 6 based on episode titles here) but I don't relate to it the way I relate to Mutant Enemy productions - regardless of the fact that I am closer in age to Lost's characters and far more likely to crash on a mysterious island than I am to practice witchcraft or fight vampires. Or am I?... Grrr, arrgh, indeed.

[EK]

Umm, just a comment on the Wasserman story. I very much doubt it is true. The Chaser is an Australian satirical comedy troupe.

[Esther]

Interesting, EK (who is not me). I'll have my research department check it out. It may be like one of those Onion stories - so possible that it seems true even though it's not.

[Scott Ellington]

Thanks, EK, for the heads-up on:

"The Chaser is a satirical media empire which rivals Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in all fields except power, influence, popularity and profitability."