The Books of My Life: The Existential Joss Whedon

 

One can, I think, distinguish three broad ideal type frames through which academics and intellectuals have interpreted and continue to interpret Joss Whedon's television programmes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. The first such approach, a cultural one, that I think we can isolate by analysing and systematising the hundreds of publications in Whedon Studies since 1997, the year Buffy began, is what might be called the mythological approach. This approach reads Buffy inductively and often through the lens of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung's archetypal approach to myth, and, given its relevance to a fantasy superhero television show like Buffy, through Jung's follower Joseph Campbell's analysis of the universal archetype of the hero's journey. That this inductive approach is relevant to an understanding of the Buffyverse is clear since, as Buffy's creator Joss Whedon has noted on several occasions, the shows writers intentionally created a mythological world with a slayer, the one girl in all the world with the strength to fight vampires and demons, a hellmouth, and various and sundry types of demons, some of whom, like the Master in season one of Buffy, have their own systematised mythology and rituals, for cultural, explanatory, and motivational reasons.

A second approach that can be distinguished in scholarly approaches to the Buffyverse might be called the crystal ball approach. This approach to textual analysis is more deductive than the more inductive mythological approach, regardless of which mythological approach one utilises in order to explore the mythological level of the Buffyverse. Crystal ball textualism is a form of textualism, the analysis of a text, that deductively applies concepts like gender, ethnicity, and class to any "text", including the texts of Joss Whedon, because they are presumed and assumed to be universal and considered to often negatively impact a text, consciously or unconsciously. It is through this emphasis on concious and unconscious representations that crystal ball textualism links up with Freudianism and its later variants and it is because of this coding of a text in either positive or negative terms, depending on how a given text represents and portrays gender, ethnicity, and class, that crystal ball textualism links up with other sometimes if not always normative approaches to a text, such as post-1968 Marxism, feminism and feminist studies, and ethnic and racial studies.

A final approach to Whedon Studies, another cultural approach, might be called the social ethical approach. Like the mythological approach the social ethical mode of analysis is inductive since social ethics, and particularly its existentialist and Christian social ethical forms, have been present, as Joss Whedon has said on several occasions, in the Buffyverse from day one. In the two part "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest", for instance, our hero Buffy the vampire slayer has to make an ethical and moral choice and choose whether to become a slayer once again after the killing of a student by a vampire at Sunnydale High School, or stay retired, as she tells her watcher Giles she is in the first forty or so minutes of the episode. 

There is, by the way, a fourth approach to the texts of the Buffyverse, that of Deborah Thomas, one of the heirs of the Movie school of film criticism, a school that emphasised and emphasises the need for a close analysis of the mise-en-scene of a film in order to isolate a directors signature, in her superb monograph on Buffy entitled "Reading Buffy" in Close-Up 01 (London: Wallflower, 2006). Thomas's close narrative and mise-en-scene analysis of Buffy, however, seems to have had, sadly, only a very limited impact on Whedon Studies scholars who have followed in her wake which is why I don't think it merits inclusion with the mythological, crystal ball, and social ethical approaches to Joss Whedon. Still it is worth noting that David Lavery did engage in a bit of mise-en-scene criticism in his auteurist oriented biography of Joss Whedon, Joss Whedon, a Creative Portrait (London: Tauris, 2014), and most of the essays in Seven Seasons of Buffy (Dallas: Benbella, 2003) and Five Seasons of Angel (Dallas: Benbella, 2004) are focused on the narrative and character arcs of both of those shows.

As its title and subtitle indicates, the book The Existential Joss Whedon: Evil and Human Freedom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Serenity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007) by English Studies scholar J. Michael Richardson and philosphy professor J. Douglas Rabb, approaches Buffy and Angel, and, if in less compass, Firefly and its movie continuation Serenity, in social ethical terms. Like Gregory Stevenson's excellent Televised Morality: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dallas: Hamilton Books, 2003) a text Richardson and Rabb reference on several occasions and disagree with on a few, Richardson and Rabb, rightly in my perspective, place an existentialist social ethics with an emphasis on the freedom of choice, a kind of beloved community, and an exemplary, though hardly infallible, moral guide at the heart of the work of Joss Whedon. Using episodes of Buffy and to a lesser extent Angel, and to an even lesser extent Firefly/Serenity, and case studies of characters in Buffy and Angel like Buffy, Willow, Xander, Faith, and Angel, Richardson and Rabb foreground the free moral choices our heroes sometimes fitfully make--some of them initially make the wrong choices and later make the right choices on their road to redemption--to fight the good fight against the real evil, the real never fully defeated evil, present in the Buffyverse, an ever present and never fully defeated evil that, is an external metaphor for our own internal struggles to make the right choices in our individual and interactional communtarian struggles with the demons and evil within us (a rather Niebuhrian and Yoderian perspective, it seems to me).

As was the case with Stevenson's book on the social ethics of the Buffyverse, I found Richardon's and Rabb's exploration of existentialist beloved community ethics in the work of Joss Whedon superb. It is grounded in sound textual exegesis, reasonable textual interpretations of the shows, and nicely reflects on the often breathtaking television shows Whedon created, shows that make one think not only about their narrative inventiveness, the outstanding acting in them, and their superb often produced on a shoestring mise-en-scene, but also about the non-paternalistic, non-authoritarian, and non-simplistic complex ethical messages Whedon wants use viewers to think about and reflect on. Highly recommended despite my not being sure if Richardson's and Rabb's attempt, drawing on Sartrean scholarship, to ground Whedon's social ethics in an embodied chosen community thus allowing them to escape the bogeyman of relativism--ethical relativism, of course, as opposed to descriptive and empirical relativism, which seems to me unassailable--really matters since humans are simultaneously irrational and rational and particular and global, and engage in all variety of cultural divination practises, some of them seemingly inconsistent with each other, including science and magic, all at the same time. If one prefers their social ethic universal it would seem to make more sense to me to ground them in an intellectual recognition of a common human ontology or a universal human beingness assuming, of course, that we can delineate a common set of criteria by which we can define a human as human or not.