The Joss Whedon of it all

No one likes Joss Whedon anymore. Even before the abuse allegations curtailed what was left of his career, my sense of things (unsubstantiated) was that something generational had shifted in the response to his work, between roughly ’05 and ’15.

There was a difference of vibe, between the late-Xers / early millennials who came of age on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and who, for all intents and purposes, treated Whedon as Geek Prime; and the generation behind us, who grew up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and seemed to regard Whedon as a creep who’d all but ruined movie dialogue with his knowing, endlessly-looping self-referentiality. And again, all that before the “creep” part of the thesis was substantiated in the public eye.

After the allegations against Whedon started coming out — I still think this career post-mortem with him is one of the most fascinating things you’ll ever read — the creator formerly eponymously known as “joss” on the Whedonesque message boards (remember those?) basically vanished. Maybe no one would hire him (his last TV project certainly got rid of him in a big hurry, before sinking beneath the waves itself). Maybe he had the good sense to simply recuse himself.

Me, I’d lay good money that neither are true and that he’s out there doing uncredited doctoring on any number of Hollywood scripts, just like he did in the ’90s. No one ever really goes away, not really.

The man has been on my mind lately. It started when I was catching up on Severance last year: even leaving aside the presence of Dichen Lachman in a lynchpin role, the sympathy between the premises of Severance and Whedon’s Dollhouse is not small.

More recently, Whedon’s been on my mind with the story last month that Chloe Zhao (!) and the writers of Poker Face will be attempting a (Whedonless) Buffy the Vampire Slayer sequel series, the first of several mooted continuations of that show that actually seems to have secured Sarah Michelle Gellar’s involvement. And of course, last week, with the awful news about Michelle Trachtenberg.

But no. More accurately, Whedon’s been on my mind since the abuses of Neil Gaiman came to light, which started last summer and hit a miserable peak earlier this year. Gaiman, like Whedon, is one of “those creators” — the kind whose work leaves a lifelong mark on people, gets in their heads, gets in the very architecture of how they think about stories, to say nothing of life itself.

Gaiman isn’t that guy for me, but Whedon certainly is. That latter bit, about the architecture… well, like a lot of the late Gen-Xers mentioned above, I did find the original Whedon trifecta (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly) at such a critical moment in my development as both a media consumer and creator — and at a critical moment in my life, if I’m being honest about it — that Whedon left permanent impressions in the wet cement of how I think about fantasy, pop culture, entertainment, screenwriting, and… uh… the purpose of being alive.

That’s one of Whedon’s two legacies, in my life. The other is the darker one: given his impact on me, Joss Whedon is always going to be the guy my brain instinctively goes to, every time someone new is revealed to be an abusive prick. Whenever whole rafts of my community have to call into question their relationship with the art and the artmaker because the artmaker did something awful, the existential questions that follow come ringing into my head in Joss Whedon’s low, knowingly self-deprecating voice.

Welcome (back) to the Dollhouse

There’s another reason Joss Whedon keeps popping into my head lately: I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time, and Tahmoh Penikett is on the show, which also puts me in mind of Dollhouse, which scooped Penikett up for the male lead, as soon as Battlestar was over.

Dollhouse, for those in need of refresher, was Whedon’s first major project post-trifecta. Buffy, Angel and Firefly were all gone (Whedon had followed the latter with Serenity, a feature-film adaptation that had failed to generate a potential franchise). There was a sense in Hollywood that Whedon was a high-value creator who simply didn’t create high-value projects; Dollhouse, which ran for two shortened seasons and was under threat of cancellation the whole time, did a remarkable job proving them right… at least for a moment or two. An hour after Dollhouse was dusted, Kevin Feige put the pieces together on bringing Whedon into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the second phase (no pun intended) of Whedon’s career formally began. Second, and last.

Dollhouse was a starring project for former vampire slayer Eliza Dushku, in which she played a woman who was indentured to a shadowy organization that could wipe and remake her personality weekly to send her on a variety of assignments. The assignments would range from action-adventure to mystery to “romantic.” Weird, creepy shit.

Naturally, per Severance two decades later, the show began to play more and more with the relationship between the innie and outie personalities of the “dolls,” and the ways in which they inevitably began to fuse, overlap, or work at odds with one another. Over time, this turned Dushku’s “Echo” into a Whedonesque freedom fighter with the wardrobe of a yoga influencer and the martial and mental skills of hundreds of different flavours of asskicker.

Like every show Whedon created (well, almost every show; I think we can exempt Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Dollhouse is a rich text. It rewards close reading. Unlike (nearly) everything else Whedon did, the show is also almost pathologically unlikeable as a piece of entertainment. The series’ consistent ratings troubles can be attributed to its icky premise but also to the basic fact that as a series, it simply isn’t ever charming or fun; as a TV show, Dollhouse isn’t a good hang.

Dig deeper, though, and Dollhouse seems to reveal ugly — or at least, compulsively confessional — things about the mind of its creator, which we can’t help but note became explicit in the allegations that followed. Dollhouse also, unnervingly, has things to say about how men imagine women which remain bracingly self-aware, and only gain traction in light of Whedon’s eventual downfall.

Men (who hate); women

Off the top of my head, I think there are two themes or idea systems that run through pretty much everything Whedon writes, and they mostly* break down along gender lines.

With women characters, who give us the archetype that effectively made Whedon’s career, Whedon recursively creates characters who are coded as sex objects but who have secret storehouses of power that allow them to turn the tables on those who are objectifying them. This, of course, is Buffy; this is River; Echo, on Dollhouse, is so precise a one that she’s nearly a parody of Whedon’s own theme.

Men characters, on the other hand, tend to exemplify a profound belief that once sin is undertaken, it is irreversible, and that the act of attempting to redeem oneself, while fruitless, is itself the only meaningful form of heroic action. This is the core thesis of Angel (and its titular character), but informs Mal and Spike and Bruce and even Dr. Horrible, of the sing-along blog.

*Black Widow, in The Avengers, is the rare Whedon character that fully embodies both threads, struggling vainly against “the red in her ledger” while absolutely dominating the Russian oligarchs who tie her to a chair in a little black dress.

Whedon’s abuses, in light of these themes, are why I keep returning to Dollhouse as an idea set, if an imperfect one. Unsatisfied to merely be a meditation upon Whedon’s art (Dollhouse is certainly that; the metaphorical premise of the “dolls” and the adventure-of-the-week structure of the show are easily legible as analogies for the basic work of writing episodic television in the first place), Dollhouse also seems to want to drill further into Whedon’s core themes than Whedon has ever (consciously) gone before.

It is, after all, a show about personality and the self as programmable objects that may also, be persistent; by (mechanically) separating the body and the mind and then wondering aloud if they can truly be separated, Dollhouse can serve as a mediation between the two core archetypes, all while casting Faith the Vampire Slayer as equal parts sex worker and ninja assassin. It’s nuts. As both a show and an artwork it doesn’t ever, entirely, work. But it’s such a frothy brew of intentional and unintentional ideas that, with Whedon’s career now all but over, I’d nominate Dollhouse as the summary argument.

The series routinely peels apart the patriarchal impulses that create the defenceless cheerleader sex object (the Buffy archetype) in the first place, and in Dollhouse, the whole society and its economic structure are implicated. Not for nothing is the Dollhouse’s “madam” a serene, politically-neutered white woman; the fact that the dolls spend their off-hours wandering around in Lulu Lemon outfits, doing wellness treatments, is also a joke that has aged better than was probably intended.

But the core question of Dollhouse, of course, regards the fundamental remnants of Echo’s core personality, which can’t be entirely scraped away by each mind-wiping procedure. She might be given the mind of an ace hostage negotiator, but her formative trauma as a childhood abductee herself (no really!) begs to peek through and assert itself. The agency of the core persona — which, again, is being scratched all over again and again like a vinyl record in the hands of a particularly destructive child — becomes the central question that Dollhouse just can’t help but keep asking. If Echo’s programming, week after week, is an analogy for character creation and episodic writing, then the core persona implies that there’s something intrinsic to the women Whedon has created that he cannot entirely control.

And if the core persona can be wiped away, deprogrammed, reprogrammed, what then of sin? Are the dolls responsible for things they may have done in lives they don’t remember and which (in this reading) they had no agency over? What does redemption look like, when the abusive act was merely the following of a program? Is this show aspirational, confessional, excusatory, or all three?

There are dark thought experiments galore when one considers the fractured conscience of the writer asking these questions. Dollhouse is a rich text, but a chaotic one; the demands of keeping the show on the air under duress pushed the mission-of-the-week format off the plate in favour of a serialized mythology that overtook the show. If the series had run for five years of 22 episodes apiece, perhaps some of the thematic loose ends would have tied up more coherently; as it stands, the series feels like a boiling stew of its writers’ subconscious: many ideas; few answers. A few images, as always, that are perhaps more revealing than they are meant to be.

The Xander

There is, of course, another recurring archetype in the character sets of Joss Whedon’s writing. I wouldn’t call him a thematic archetype, because he doesn’t tend to carry the weight of any given show or movie’s artistic intentions; but he’s always there, because he’s the Joss Whedon insert character. I am referring, of course, to the Xander.

Xander Harris is Buffy’s platonic male friend, although (in the first three seasons, particulary) he’d sure like it if things were otherwise. He’s essentially Whedon’s answer to the Jimmy Olsen character for this particular superhero story; Xander never gets superpowers or magical abilities or turns out to be a demon or anything else like everyone else on the show. He’s just a regular guy who hangs out with the Slayer, and (charitably) his “regular guy” perspective is the point.

Xander completely, catastrophically sucks. He always has — a creepy, needy, deeply uncomfortable character stuck in the middle of the Slayer action, frequently working against the agency of the series’ principal character — but I feel like public opinion on Xander’s suckitude has been a long time in the catching-up. Some people (most of them women) were onto Xander from the jump; most people (nowadays) will spin off a few hundred words about how problematic Xander “always” was. I’m kind of in the middle, myself; way back in the day, someone told me that the character I most closely resembled on Buffy was Xander, and I was furious, and deeply hurt. But I couldn’t entirely explain to that person why.

The Xander archetype is taken to its most ludicrous extreme on Dollhouse, where the nerdy sidekick character is reconfigured as the techbro wannabe sleazebag who actually performs the mind-reprogramming on the dolls. Topher (!) creates the false personality software and installs it; he spends a lot of time in a single-occupant room with one scantily-clad doll and a dentist’s chair. That Topher eventually goes mad under the crushing burden of the moral realities of what he has been doing to these women is, in hindsight, one of the more painfully naive pieces of writing of the early 21st century (just imagine Elon or Zuck having such a breakdown!), but given that the Xander role is always the Whedon self-insert character, Topher’s breakdown more legible as a continued thematic point. As a whole, I think Dollhouse is a lot about Whedon’s increasingly turbulent feelings about the “strong female characters” he’s been programming and re-programming and, perhaps, secretly enjoying, and the unnerving, growing sense that his sex objects might not be sex objects.

To an extent, I recognize this; the outside-looking-in speculation on what makes the “feminine other” tick, given (presumably) a lifetime of experiencing the impenetrability of same. Queer folk might have an inside track on “I don’t know if I want to fuck you or be you” thinking, but those of us edging closer and closer to the end of the gender binary face similar dilemmas. Of course, what becomes a crisis of meaning to a non-binary person is simply a brick wall to the Xander, never to be overcome; to a Xander, there is both manliness and womanliness, and what’s killing the Xander is is the inaccessibility of both.

The Xander knows how he wants to be regarded, and isn’t, and he’s furious that he doesn’t make the grade. In the Whedon configuration, the Xander character is always staunchly heterosexual while being a frustrated off-model example of heteronormativity; a common principle to all Xanders is that they are, benevolently or otherwise, definitely not “alphas,” and frequently sullen about it. There’s an anxiety here, which perpetually threatens to bloom into toxicity, a gun waiting to go off in every episode of every show Whedon ever wrote. It belies a deeper, dysphoric terror about these impulses. The Xander definitely for sure wants to fuck them, and secretly worries that he might be them.

The art of abusive men

Maybe it’s less useful, at the end of it all, to wonder and worry about what we’re meant to do with the art of abusive men, than to try to inquire honestly about what was appealing about the art in the first place — and use that to inform, rather than take away from, the art.

We all have our own comfort levels with this, and I’m only going to write about mine. Wholesale rejection of toxic behaviour and the work that comes out of it is, of course, perfectly valid. “Separating the art from the artist” is a fine theoretical exercise, I suppose, but feels slightly anti-human to me. Art is always surrounded, and vested fully through, with context and emotion and connectivity and subjectivity. To say that it is not — to say that you can distill all of the above out of art, and still have art — feels, at best, like the silly boys on YouTube who will tell you that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is “objectively” better (than Joss Whedon’s, ha!), and at worst like an effort in psychological dissociation which, if successful, would make me cross to the other sidewalk if I saw you coming on the street.

I also draw my own line in cases where the harmful artist is continuing to actively create harm — J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World brand, for example, which directly funds anti-trans legislation in the U.K.; or (for a non-artist, extremely non-artist actually, example) Elon Musk’s online Nazification project (formerly known as Twitter).

But broadly — and I hope I am not making excuses, or exposing my own self-serving failings — I have an overall belief that human beings, generally, for all of their good attributes, are also wildly inconsistent and broadly flawed. My belief is that a larger number of humanity than any of us would be comfortable with have done at least one thing in their life which, were it to be made known to us, would make us question whether they were ever a “good” person (whatever that means) at all. Or — since all such external projections are really just scrutinies inward anyway — whether we, ourselves, are in our own way deplorable.

Shades of Whedon’s sin premise, here: that once sin is undertaken, it is irreversible, and becomes a permanent stain upon the person. Whedon’s tortured, broody man-heroes (Angel, chief among them) hold their sins in their hands and use them to drive redemptive action, which is an optimistic idea; but most of us just hope the worst thing we ever did is firmly in the past, surrounded by the context that lets us live with it, and that it will never come to light to shame us, constrain us, or condemn us.

As I said: Joss Whedon’s work had a huge impact on me at a time when such impacts were potentially lifelong. It wasn’t just entertainment, or even “pop culture the likes of which I hope I can make someday.” Whedon’s shows contained models of how to think about the world and the people in it which, although (or perhaps, because) they were often elliptical/metaphorical in nature, I still apply broadly.

That kind of impact, I think, is endemic to the art of all the abusive men (and women) whose crimes have lately come to light and where, to those of us who were previously fans, “it hurts.” Gaiman, Cosby, Rowling, Whedon, Michael Jackson… to me and (I think) to many of us, these weren’t just creators of stuff we really enjoyed or obsessed over; they were, to some extent or another, people whose art informed the shaping of us. To query the potential evils that exist within those people — and may have been transmitted through their art — is to question whether we are, ourselves, malformed.

Well, yes. I’ll go first: I am malformed. Per the above, I think we all are; and that, perhaps, it’s less about the art that shapes us than about how and why we let it — what it answered in us, what questions it posed, what balms it provided (or didn’t). The person we were when we met it and let it in. I don’t say any of this to excuse myself or any other person from any cruel behaviours; only to recognize that all of this is the uncomfortable burden of being alive and imperfect in a world that is equally so. That we’re all just moving through time. I think that most of the things that I loved about Joss Whedon’s writing are still things that I love; but also, I can see how flattering, how profoundly self-satisfying to the “awkward nerd who isn’t great talking to girls” it all is, and why that would have unfolded like a magic box for me when I was 20 or 25 or however old I was. I can see how Buffy is both a great character in her own right, and a premise of womanhood that is, by intentional design, appealing to me, then; even if I feel fairly alien to that same premise now.

That Buffy became more than that what might have been intentional, or might have been subject to intentionality by omission, overall doesn’t matter to me. For any plurality of people who might snark at Whedon’s output now, I am still one of those who was here for the net-positive shift in the ways stories were being told, which Whedon was a part of. If some of those changes came from less-than-savoury impulses, well, that’s true of both being human, and being art.

To return, for the last time, to Dollhouse: as a writer, I can see how the idea of having created a tailor-made fantasy character who went on to slip her own bonds and become far bigger, more complex, more real, than anything I could (as her creator) control, would cause a certain kind of person with a certain kind of relationship to women to sit back on his haunches and say, “huh.” And then to start to try to write about it.

For my part, I try not to stop inquiring, and I try not to stop checking the core assumptions that govern my relationship with the thing to begin with. Maybe this is what we do with the art of abusive people: work out the worst possible thing about why it might have appealed to us in the first place, and make that part of the lens through which we view it and move forward. If the art continues to inform where we go from there, then it still has something to give us. If it doesn’t, it can safely be left behind, as the purview of a different moment, a different time, a different person-we-once-were.

The latter is a kind of relief I have known in some of these cases — I never need to read any of the Harry Potter books again in my life, I don’t think; I’ve got those old hardcovers in a box somewhere, more as a memento of a time in my life than of a story — but doesn’t apply to all. I’ll read The Sandman again before I die, and it will be different. I’ll listen to Bad again, and it will be different. I’m halfway through Dollhouse right now, and it’s different. I take great comfort in this. That aliveness, and my aliveness to it, too, is art.