Joan the Vampire Slayer
Carpe Spuffy!
By JEFF KORBELIK / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, April 28, 2012 11:45
Joss Whedon (second from left) sits on the set of "The Avengers" with, from left, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans.
A Joss Whedon timeline
When news leaked in April 2010 that Marvel Studios was in final negotiations with Joss Whedon to direct the greatly anticipated superhero movie "The Avengers," reaction was mixed.
Proponents noted his successful TV ventures -- "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" -- and his experience writing comic books. Opponents pointed to his non-successful TV series -- "Firefly" and "Dollhouse" -- and his lack of big-screen experience.
But to those who study and teach Whedon, his selection, which Whedon confirmed three months later at Comic Con, made sense. The film opens in theaters Friday and is expected to be a summer blockbuster.
"In many ways, Whedon is the perfect director for this film, because he comes from both a comic book and superhero background," said Nebraska Wesleyan University history Professor Meghan Winchell. Winchell has taught a course at NWU focusing on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"I am more curious to see if he can manage the massive scale of this film without producing a chaotic mess," Winchell said. "This is a real test for him as a director. Let's hope the Whedon wit and intelligence is visible underneath all of the special effects."
Union College English professor Tanya Cochran, who is a founding board member of the scholarly Whedon Studies Association and has authored several academic papers about him and his works, is curious, too, especially since Whedon will be attempting to appeal to a mainstream rather than a niche audience.
"I'm interested as a scholar to see how it will change his work, to see what direction it might go," Cochran said.
She's been heartened by the trailers, which feature a group of superheroes coming together as a team to defeat a common foe. It's a theme -- team unity -- that Whedon often visits in his works, from Buffy and her "Scoobies" to Capt. Malcolm Reynolds and his renegade crew in "Firefly."
"One of the themes that runs through his work is that the loner hero, at some point, can't go it alone," Cochran said. "There is always some tension between being the sole savior and having to work with others to accomplish a goal.
"I think that's very realistic," she added. "As an individual, there are things we have to face and do for ourselves, but there are times we can't just do it by ourselves."
Winchell agreed.
"'Created family' is one of the most prominent themes in Whedon's work," she said. "Whedon writes for the hero, but the hero cannot prevail without support from friends. He also makes sure that the hero learns this lesson, sometimes the hard way. It is more evidence that Whedon is the right director for "˜The Avengers,' a dysfunctional family of superheroes with super egos."
The movie's release coincides with Titan Books' release of "Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion by PopMatters." The book is a comprehensive survey and analysis of Whedon's career, featuring essays and in-depth interviews with key figures in the "Whedonverse."
Cochran, who has two interviews in the book, said no pop culture figure right now is receiving as much scholarly attention -- and sustaining it -- as Whedon.
"At least right now," she said.
Maybe Matthew Weiner of "Mad Men" or J.J. Abrams of "Lost" eventually may garner a similar kind of attention, especially Weiner, whose AMC drama is intensely scrutinized weekly by television critics and bloggers. Maybe.
So why has Whedon become so attractive to university professors?
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon, second from left, is surrounded by vampires during the taping of the final episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in this 2003 file photo.
"He creates these texts with many layers so that they can be watched and re-watched, read and re-read and lived and re-lived," Cochran said. "There is an intentionality on his part and on the part of his creative team to create a text that draws an intellectual audience that wants to dig deep into themes or into references."
Many of those themes appeal directly to young people, especially those in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," his TV series that ran for seven seasons beginning in 1997. Winchell ran off a list of them:
* What does it mean to be "cool"?
* How do you "fit in" in school?
* High school is hell, and freshman year of college is not much better.
* Your "first time" might be with the one you love, but he might turn into a monster the next day.
"These themes never get old in the classroom," Winchell said.
Cochran said Whedon also has become significant culturally because of his versatility and diversity in the entertainment industry. He is a screenwriter, executive producer, director, comic book writer, occasional composer and entertainment executive, having founded Mutant Enemy Productions and co-created Bellwether Pictures.
"He is demonstrating to both popular audiences and scholarly audiences that he can move between mediums, among mediums and among genres," she said. "Of course, the term 'auteur' has been given to him as a result of that. He's defining himself in many ways very deliberately as a creative figure that deserves this kind of attention."
Whedon was born in June 23, 1964, in New York City. The third of five sons, Whedon is a third-generation TV writer, as are his younger brothers, Jed and Zack. His grandfather, John Whedon, wrote for "The Donna Reed Show" in the 1950s, and his father, Tom Whedon, for "The Electric Company" in the 1970s and "The Golden Girls" in the '80s.
He graduated in 1987 from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. After a move to Los Angeles, he landed his first writing job with the TV series "Roseanne." His early career included co-writing the script for the 1995 animated movie hit, "Toy Story," which earned an Academy Award nomination.
Whedon came into his own in 1997 when he created "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for television. A "Buffy" movie had been made five years earlier from a script he wrote, but he hated it. The filmmakers had turned it into a substanceless comedy.
"The only thing that movie did for his career was garner enough interest to thankfully lead to a TV show," Winchell said.
The series starred newcomer Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, a high school teen who slayed demons, and, with the help of her friends, routinely saved the world. "Buffy" quickly became known for its themes (feminism, spirituality, personal responsibility and more) in addition to its clever and witty dialogue, which often was peppered with pop-culture references.
Whedon's altered usages -- he liked to turn nouns into adjectives by adding the letter "y" to end of words -- and new words became a topic of Robert MacNeil's 2005 documentary and accompanying book for PBS, "Do You Speak American," with an entire section on "Slayer Slang."
Whedon's way with words is what attracted Cochran to "Buffy," who discovered the series in its third season through her graduate-school roommate.
"I was a little sanctimonious about her watching it," Cochran said. "One, it was a teen show. Two, it was about slayers and vampires. It was a pretty crazy thing.
"But the language ... the wit of the language, the intertextual references and extratextual references is what drew me in initially. It was the dialogue."
Director Joss Whedon (left) speaks with Scarlett Johansson, who plays the Black Widow, on the set of "The Avengers."
Then came Whedon's knack for storytelling.
"I'm a really big fan of the idea of symbolic journey," Cochran said. "The idea that through these texts, we viewers are working out our own life challenges and our own complex questions about why we're here, why we exist, what are we expected to do by society, what do we expect of ourselves, what is ethical and unethical behavior and what is moral and immoral. So these texts, regardless of the medium or the genre, they allow us an opportunity to see ourselves."
"Buffy" led to the spin-off TV series "Angel" -- a drama that starred David Boreanaz (now on "Bones") for five seasons as a vampire with a soul -- and two comic book series, "Fray" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"I have high hopes for Whedon's future works, but I suspect that "˜Buffy' is his magnum opus," Winchell said. "Seven seasons of a television show gave him the rare opportunity to tell a complicated, fully developed story over a long period of time."
Winchell said Whedon's influence is seen today on television.
"He will always be credited with helping to make feminism attractive and nonthreatening to a whole generation of viewers," she said. "Much of what we see on TV today goes back to him -- the complicated storytelling in 'Lost," the tough, yet feminine Brenda Lee Johnson on 'The Closer,' 'How I Met Your Mother's' long memory, even the way (actor) Nathan Fillion drops his consonants every once in a while on 'Castle' -- this all started with 'Buffy' and Whedon.
"He took up the challenge that television could be more than serial monotony and viewers more than passive spectators," she added. "Television could be a complex storytelling experience."
But can Whedon work the same kind of magic on the big screen? Time will tell.
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