House of Eratosthenes

You can tell from my meandering narrative that I’m uneasy about picking on poor Joss Whedon, as I did here. I do not know very much about his work. I’ve tried to watch it and I just find it to be a huge bore. I keep trying because I hear Mr. Whedon’s big contribution is the character-driven story; I’m a real big fan of character-driven stories. And then a few minutes into Buffy or Firefly my “it is not built for people like me” detector goes off like crazy, and my eyes won’t focus anymore.

Somewhere around ’97 my “not built for me” detector started chirping more loudly. I was the patriarch of a large household and trips out to the theater were prohibitively expensive…and check your archives. The best year in recent memory for shitty movies was 1997. And so — I started to develop more of an interest in what kind of movie we were going to see.

More than one person has told me that when the kids are with you and the woman is with you, whether you personally enjoy the movie or not is irrelevant. That’s crap. Crap, I say. You know why? One single movie comes out, like for example this one…just one…that tries to entertain the whole family and succeeds at this — that’s all the proof you need. They all can do it if they try. Criminy blazes dutch, making a movie these days costs seven, eight, nine figures. Set aside a couple thousand bucks. Work something into the script for Dad.

Everybody wins! Why not do it? It’s so easy, you’d have to put more effort into not to doing it, than into trying to get it done.

And yet, so many “entertainment” offerings try not. And succeed. From whence comes this juvenile, petulant attitude that you have to bore the shit out of poor ol’ daddy just to entertain the kids? What the hell kind of kids are those?

Anyway, back to the subject at hand…I do not know if Whedon is firmly stuck in the tiresome trope of Doofus Dad. I do not see any sign of it here. But I do see a lot of indicators here. It really doesn’t matter. The issue is whether this stuff is built for me or not, and time after time I find Mr. Whedon’s material is just not built for me. Adding insult to injury, whoever it is he’s trying to entertain, from what I can tell, is laboring under the burden of the above-mentioned pissy petulant anti-white-male attitude. They must place a value on this careful pasturization and cleansing of anything in the material that might please a patriarch.

Someone’s got daddy issues. There’s something ugly, to someone, about being reminded we’re all in the same boat. About them, whoever they may happen to be, grabbing a big ol’ bucket of popcorn and enjoying something with a six-foot straight white male. Something ugly about sharing that much common ground with the wrong demographic, even if it ends up being a positive experience. Must not happen.

Pure bigotry.

A rather far-fetched bit of conjecture for me given how little I know about Whedon. Or at least that’s what I thought…until I saw this. Someone’s mighty displeased with Joss. Some guilty-white-male guy doesn’t think the products are anti-white-male enough.

Joss Whedon is a misogynist homophobe

From the moment its theme in off-tune punk hit the air in 1997, television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer has inspired a fanatical following rivaled only by shows with pointy-eared aliens. The uninitiated see why after just a few episodes. Written and created by Hollywood outsider and relative unknown Joss Whedon, Buffy features a deep, intelligent, character-driven style of writing rarely seen on television. The show tackles dark, heavy themes seemingly without fear, approaching difficult issues in an intricate, innovative way more characteristic of Russian novel than American teledrama. The fan base flocks to the show because of the honest treatment of its recurrent themes—the peril of love, the failure of modern paternalism, the pains of despised childhood, and, more than anything, the untapped power of strong, complex women.
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Yet this great and admirable strength hides Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s greatest weakness. Sure, the Buff’s all bad-ass on the surface, but scrape a few layers below and it soon becomes obvious that the slayer wears no clothes. Despite its Girl Power pretensions, despite all Whedon’s valiant efforts, Buffy is written by a guy, and it shows. The show’s rebellion against the patriarchy is built on a patriarchal foundation that, consciously or not, undermines many of the themes the show wanted us to think we were seeing. As strong as she is, Buffy’s girl power is unplugged time and again by hot guys with weird hair.

Consider Buffy’s overarching mythos. The deal is that into every generation, some mystical and mostly unexplored power calls forth a “slayer,” a young woman who’s [sic] job it is to protect the world from demons and dark things. Once called, the slayer is given great powers—supernatural strength, incredible stealth, and a bitchin’ wardrobe. Buffy suddenly has abs of steel and fists of fury. She’s faster than trains and leaps tall buildings and all that jazz. Buffy has everything mortal men dream of having.

Wow, the progressive is tempted to say. A girl superhero. How totally awesome! But wait. There’s a catch. The first failure of Whedon’s girl power is that Buffy has a watcher. In fact, all slayers everywhere have always had watchers. Slayers tend to be called young and die early, after all, and there’s a lot to learn in their short lives. They need somebody to guide them, to help explain their power, to help them understand just what it is they’re fighting.

This begs the question, though, why she needs to be “watched.” Why a “watcher” and not a “helper” or a “teacher”? And if she has to be watched, why must she be watched by a stuffy white guy like Rupert Giles? In fact, we meet several watchers in the course of the series, and all but three are stuffy, middle-aged white men, the very definition of Western paternalism. The only exceptions are a recurring Indian man who has no lines but looks tough, a snotty Brit woman who turns evil when offered supernatural powers of her own (season 3, “Revelations”), and a scared little blond woman who spends a few minutes trembling under the bemused eyes of the Cheney-like head watcher before being blown to bits (season 7, “Never Leave Me”). [emphasis mine]

Now, I don’t know how prevalent this viewpoint is. But I know for a fact it is out there: You can never marginalize the hated “stuffy white guy” quite enough to make us happy. It’s like some kind of perverted echo of what your momma used to tell you, as if to say: “If you can’t say something nasty (about the stuffy white guy) then don’t say anything at all.” As for prevalence — well, there must be an awful lot. This issue with comedy/drama on the big/little screen, once again, ingratiating itself with the “we don’t want to watch anything daddy might actually like” crowd, just keeps popping up and popping up. It’s at the point now where it’s truly difficult to get away from this stuff, and more than one person has inquired as to why I bother.

I don’t need to justify myself to anyone. And it isn’t that complicated anyway; I just like to have fun as much as the next person. And these little entertainment offerings aren’t fun for me. They aren’t supposed to be. They invite me to identify with characters with whom I’m not supposed to identify; and if I’m somehow able to identify with those characters, the surrounding product will be deemed unfit and the producer will try like the dickens not to make that mistake again.

I just figure I’m not supposed to be watching. Giving the daddy-haters what they want, ya know. If there’s money in my pocket that they end up not getting because of that, well hey. Nothing personal.

[…] A few months back I had expressed some of my regrets about picking on poor Joss Whedon. Whedon has accomplished some amazing things, and it’s a mystery to me why I don’t genuinely like any of them. I know I probably should. He’s got this cool post-apocalyptic world going on full of dusty old used-junk spaceships, interesting characters…I just can’t watch it. Ten minutes of it bores me to tears. And I don’t know why. This is true of all of Whedon’s work that has been brought to my attention. There’s something about it that just puts me in a coma. If I don’t know something came from him, I can figure it out pretty quick, and I don’t consciously know what tips me off. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/12/2007 @ 13:00

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Whedon RevisitedTuesday, February 6th, 2007

Whedon Revisited
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007