Reading the interview to-day with Joss Whedon in which he finally addressed at length the accusations against him, I couldn't help thinking of the trial of Oscar Wilde. Or the version of it dramatised with Peter Finch in the role as Wilde. Wilde cheated on his wife multiple times, too, after all. And there was a man, so used to his acerbic wit winning him praise, finding his every word sinking his ship further when he's on trial. Away from people with much to gain from understanding or pretending to understand his clever lines, in the courtroom he faced people who gleefully exacted revenge for never getting what the fuss was about this snooty playwright. So you could say of Whedon in the courtroom of public opinion.
He could think of only one way to explain Fisher's motives. “We're talking about a malevolent force,” he said. “We're talking about a bad actor in both senses.”
That's a good line and probably true. But it's also easy for the gallery to seize upon. Stephen Colbert made a joke about Whedon criticising a black man on Martin Luther King Day, as though Whedon had any say about when the article was published. But regardless of how you feel about Whedon or what he did, it's undeniable there are forces arrayed against him even from the text of this article itself. The writer, Lila Shapiro, uses a number of rhetorical strategies to shore up opinion against Whedon. In the first couple paragraphs in which she establishes the breadth of Whedon's fanbase before the scandal, she makes a point of only quoting white men who praised his feminism. A lengthy portion of the article with comments from Rebecca X--formerly known as Rebecca Rand Kirshner, a writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer--Shapiro carefully massages X's conflicted but mostly positive statements to make it seem like X is a woman still just barely emerging from the tyranny of Whedon's gaslighting. Shapiro ends the section with this:
A few days later, she sent me a text. “Joss is a beautiful person,” she wrote. “But you know what,” she added dryly, “I’m actually particularly vulnerable to abusive people.”
Then the paragraph break, insuring what impression we'll be left with.
Now that people routinely cheat their way through humanities courses or rely on the greed of college administrations to hand them easy grades, it's no wonder a writer like Shapiro needn't worry about even transparent methods like this being picked up on.
Shapiro poses an argument about the folly of worshiping great artists as gods. She establishes the following Whedon had among academics by talking about a conference in 2002 in which professors from various fields cosplayed and carried cardboard cutouts of Buffy characters. She talks about three professors there who "would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship." I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a lot of Whedon's work but I'd say his body of work is a ridiculous subject for such a loftily named association. If you're busy studying Joss Whedon instead of Ingmar Bergman or Terry Gilliam, you're way off track.
I say this as I'm hitting a point in my Buffy/Angel rewatch in which the shows are starting to pick up again after a lackluster stretch in season five of Buffy and two of Angel. After Buffy's "The Body", the show finally gets off the soap opera-ish relationship plots while Angel finally ends the silly arc about Angel and his supporting cast shunning each other. I used to say I didn't like "The Body" but in my recent viewing I had to admit it is pretty good. Especially coming as it did at a time when I've been contemplating the deaths of people in my life, watching Buffy deal with her mother's sudden death struck a chord. Whedon's techniques with cutting and sound didn't feel quite so obtrusive. My problem with the episode is that he used that good technique in a way that deliberately separated it from the show's usual supernatural fare. My opinion is that he should took take it all as seriously and maybe he came around to that opinion, too. The weakest part of the episode is when Anya, the thousands of years old vengeance demon turned human, breaks down in grief over Joyce's death. Really, the death of one person, even one she knew, shouldn't have hit her so hard. But that would have forced the story down a different path than Whedon wanted. I do think being a control freak can be a problem when you try to control your own muse.
This article, for as much time as it takes, still doesn't establish Whedon as being truly guilty of anything worse than cheating on his wife. Is he caustic, even rude sometimes? Yeah. Maybe I wouldn't even like being in the room with him. But this revelation doesn't justify his ostracisation from the industry. Nor does it present evidence that he shouldn't be considered a god. The fact that he's not as good a writer as J.R.R. Tolkien or as good a director as Alfred Hitchcock--those things prove he's not a god. People would know that if they actually knew what they were talking about. I mean, name one god who doesn't have worse personality problems than Whedon. Poseidon? Tiw? Jehovah? Maybe Santa Claus. Is that what we're talking about?
Gods aren't made by kindness. Gods are made by their extraordinary abilities and achievements.
I'm less bothered by this on Whedon's behalf than I am on the further implications of just how dumb and petty the general brain is getting.
No comments:
Post a Comment